Once his slacks were gone, I worked out of my underwear. When my hands moved to my shirt, Canaan stopped me.
“Let me,” he said, a request at the same time it was an order. His hands fell to my hips, pressing against them. “Turn around.”
My body twisted, hugging close to his. I felt his length firm against the flesh of my backside, a fan to the flame that was my need. His fingers curled around the bottom of my shirt, teasing it up my body an inch at a time. His thumbs grazed my nipples as he pulled my shirt over them, sending a tremble down my spine.
One of his hands stayed on my shirt, guiding it over my head, while the other one dropped back to my breast, capturing my nipple between his fingers. He gave it a soft pinch. “Arms up. I need to be inside you—now—but I want to feel your skin against mine when I take you.”
When my backside squirmed against him, he ground himself against me, pinching my nipple harder this time. A cry slipped from me as my shirt sailed across the room.
“Lie down.”
His command caused another tremor. When I angled my body so I could lie down on my back, he stopped me.
“On your stomach,” he instructed, already pressing his weight into me, guiding me down.
I felt my heartbeat between my legs, my body already speeding out of control. The comforter was cool against my skin as I spread my body across it. Behind me, his body was so hot it was almost uncomfortable. His chest spilled across my back as he lowered himself on me, his heavy cock straining against the flesh of my backside. Canaan’s head dropped beside mine, but instead of saying anything, he watched me. His gaze roamed my eyes, my cheeks, my parted lips. Whatever he saw drew a twisted smile, igniting the flame inside his eyes. His mouth drifted to my ear.
“Open your legs for me,” he whispered, his tongue tasting the skin just below my hairline. “Let me in.”
My hand fisted around the pillow I’d reached for, his dark words their own kind of pleasure. He waited for me as I spread my legs, stretching them as wide as I could get them. He waited a minute after that, nothing but the sound of our breaths filling the air.
One of his hands traveled around the slope of my hip, trailed down the bend of my ass, lingered just outside of where I was desperate to feel him. When he finally did touch me, my hips pitched up, pushing against the weight of him.
His groan rumbled against my back as he explored me, lazily fucking me with his fingers. “You want me?” His voice was dark with need, strained from holding back, as his wet fingers drew a slick trail down the inside of my thigh.
I wriggled beneath him, bowing my back as I tried to position him where I needed to feel his body inside me. It didn’t work. He was too strong. His hips dug into my ass, bending me to his will.
“Yes,” I gasped, my other hand winding behind me and fisting into the side of his leg.
“Say it. I want to hear you say it.” He shifted over me until I could feel him getting into position.
My hips arched against him, but he wouldn’t allow it. Not until . . .
“Take me, Canaan,” I breathed, collapsing deeper into the mattress.
His head hovered behind me. “No,” he rasped as my nails dug into his leg. “You know what I want to hear.”
My head lifted from the mattress, just enough I could look back at him. “I want you, Canaan,” I said, meeting his eyes. “I want—”
I didn’t have a chance to finish before he pushed inside. My cry joined with the sounds he made as he buried himself until he could go no deeper. Then he held himself there, his hand shoving beneath my breast until he’d reclaimed my nipple.
“You’re going to come for me like this, Maggie. Just like this.” His words were hot on the back of my neck as he held himself deep inside me, unmoving, his fingers kneading at my nipple in a gentle dance of pain and pleasure.
“Canaan.” His name was muffled from my head being buried in the comforter.
“I want your pleasure to get me off. I want you to want me so fucking badly, you get off just from having me buried inside you.” He stayed a statue as he whispered more filthy things in my ear, only his fingers moving on my nipple until I could feel my orgasm swelling from within.
“Show me how much you want me. Prove to me there’s no one else who can make you feel like I do.” Canaan’s voice was insistent as my body tensed beneath him. “Give me what I want.” His mouth dropped to the back of my neck, sucking at the thin skin so hard it made my body jolt.
“What do you want?” I whimpered, from the pain. From the pleasure. From it all.
“What I’ve always wanted,” he hummed against my bruised flesh. “You.” His teeth nipped me at the same time his fingers flicked my nipple, all of those sensations coming together at the right moment. “Now give it to me.”
My orgasm came hard—the most intense sensation I’d ever felt. It felt like my body was being ripped apart from the inside out, only in the most pleasurable way possible. As my body tightened around him, still deep and unmoving inside, he cursed under his breath.
“That’s it, sugar. Get me off.” His fingers tied into my hair, twisting around it like he was trying to get a good grip. “Fuck me with your body.”
A roar-like sound reverberated in his chest when the crest of my orgasm hit me and I went rigid around him, my head falling back as a shrill cry spilled from my lungs. His hips dug harder into my ass, trying to burrow deeper inside me as his release joined mine.
His hand in my hair pulled at it, tipping my head back until his mouth could descend on mine. “Give me what I want.”
His tongue pushed inside my mouth as he released inside me so powerfully, I could feel it. I could feel him. Everywhere. Anywhere. He was a part of me. The best part. The worst part. The defining part.
His mouth consumed mine as he took his pleasure from me, our orgasms winding down together, leaving us shaking and spent. His mouth didn’t leave mine for a while, his kisses slowing but never stopping. His tongue tasting instead of assailing. He kept himself inside me, like he was as opposed to the idea of separating as I was.
When he did pull back, his lips followed but lingered a few extra moments. He rolled off of me, the weight of him immediately missed as cool air rushed across my heated skin. Yanking the covers down, he managed to wind them around my body as he wrestled me a bit more vertically onto the bed so I had a pillow beneath my head. Not that it mattered since his arm snaked beneath it right after, rendering the pillow pointless.
He drew himself to me, cradling me so gently, it was difficult to wrap my head around how the same man who could take my body with such possession and force could hold me right after with such tender affection.
The reminders of our love making were everywhere. The ache between my legs, the wet spot on the comforter, the swollen sting of my lips, the taste of him in my mouth. My body was alive again. I hadn’t realized it had gone dormant until now, when I felt it come back to life.
I was lying in the bed I’d shared with him years ago. Inside the apartment we’d called our own for a temporary time. I’d been so scared to think about his place and that time in my life because I’d convinced myself there were too many painful memories. More bad ones than good.
That was wrong though. It wasn’t that the bad memories were so endless or overwhelming—it was that the good ones were. The good memories were the reason I’d stayed away. I’d blocked them from my mind. The good ones.
Because I’d walked away. I’d run away from a good life going through a difficult time, instead of digging in and hunkering down until the storm passed. I’d quit. On him. On us.
Why?
“Canaan?”
His hand stopped moving down my arm. “Yeah?”
“What happened between us?” I sat up on my elbow so I could look down at him. Just like that, the man became the boy I’d married. The boy I would have done anything for. The boy I’d left when he . . . probably never needed me more. “What went wrong?”
There is was. Th
e question. The one I’d been trying to figure out how to phrase for days. What went wrong? All I knew was that something had, and I’d made a choice and would spend the rest of my life living with the consequences of it.
Canaan’s hand lifted to my face and cupped around my cheek. He looked as relieved to hear my question as I was to finally be able to verbalize it. He sat up in the bed, his hand dropping to mine to guide me out with him. “Let me show you.”
“Okay, when I agreed to go out with you in the middle of the night so you could answer my question, this really wasn’t what I had in mind.”
I stared at the dilapidated trailer shining in Canaan’s trucks headlights. It looked like the place had been set on fire a few times, then rolled down a rock quarry a few more times. It wasn’t the kind of place that screamed “All Your Answers Are Waiting Inside.”
Canaan’s door creaked open. “Trust me, I know.” He scooted out of the truck and moved in front of it so the headlights were shining over him.
He waited for me to make my way out of the truck to join him up front. I had literally no idea why we were here or what this had to do with the demise of him and me.
I’d riffled up some old sandals I’d left behind, which Canaan had tucked away in a bin and saved—along with everything else I’d abandoned. Including a pair of shorts that lived up to their name. My T-shirt was almost as long as the shorts’ hem, but at least I was in more clothing than underwear and an old tee. The ground was hard and covered in a fine layer of dry earth that kicked up dust with every step. There was nothing alive or green anywhere around the trailer; all of the vegetation had dried out and died years ago from the looks of it.
“What is this place?” I whispered. This kind of place suggested speaking too loudly might rouse something of an unsavory nature.
“This is where an old friend of mine used to live.”
My nose wrinkled. “Somebody actually lived here?”
Canaan kept staring at the old trailer, seeing things I wasn’t from the looks of it. “Danny McDonald. This was where he used to live.”
“Why am I not surprised?” I muttered as a coyote howled off in the distance. Good timing. “But what does this place have to do with you and me?”
Canaan’s arms folded over his chest as he shifted so he was angled just a bit in front of me. Almost as though he were protecting me from whatever ghosts lurked here.
“Danny used to throw some crazy parties here. And by parties, I mean a lot of heavy drinking, puking, and passing out.” As he spoke, my gaze moved over the collection of bottles littered around the trailer, some still intact, most shattered. “It was his idea of a ‘perk’ for the fighters who’d made him money. Supplying as much booze as we could stomach.”
“What a perk.” My voice came out sounding sharp, bitter.
“I think it was also his way of distracting us from the pain of whatever injuries we’d come out of the ring with so we’d be more apt to crawl back in there when the next fight came up.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, refusing to let my eyes get teary from this place. Danny, and this piece of hell on earth, was not worth my tears. “What a hero.”
Canaan glanced at me, my strained words alerting him that something was wrong. He responded by linking his hand to mine and moving a few steps closer to the trailer, waiting for me to join him with each one.
“I’d had alcohol before coming to one of Danny’s parties here. Hell, I’d been drinking since that party out on the banks the week before our sophomore year.”
“I remember,” I grumbled, one corner of my mouth twitching at the memory. “You were the first to go streaking through the crowd and diving into the water.” My arm nudged him. “For some strange reason, an awful lot of girls were hanging around your locker after that.”
A chuckle moved his chest. “That’s because they got a good look at what they were missing out on.” Canaan’s eyes were shining with amusement when he looked at me. “All ten inches of it. Not that I’ve measured or anything.”
I made a fake serious face. “Sure. No guy in the history of ever has taken the few seconds needed to measure his dick.”
He wiped his mouth to hide his smile. “As much as I know you enjoy talking about that part of my anatomy, if we can get back to my story . . .”
My eyes rolled, but I made a show of sealing my lips.
“I might have drank before—I might have even thought I knew what drunk was—but this, this was where I discovered the devil at the bottom of each bottle. This was where I learned how a person drank to forget their problems. This was where I learned there was no pain that couldn’t be drowned with a strong bottle of tequila. Temporarily.” Canaan exhaled, his hand twisting in mine. “This was where my drinking problem started. Right here.” The heel of his boot scuffed at the dry dirt. “This is where I let 80 proof handle my problems for me.”
My throat moved as I took in the scene with new eyes.
“It didn’t work so well.” His shoulder brushed mine. “In case you didn’t know.”
“I was there. For all of it.” My feet shuffled back, away from this place. “I know.”
Canaan backed away with me, step by step, leaving this place together.
“Why did you bring me here? I still don’t understand.”
He walked me to the passenger side and held the door for me as I stepped inside. He examined the trailer for a moment before his eyes moved to mine. They were heavy, like they were carrying a burden. “You will.”
As Canaan moved around the front of the truck, I couldn’t help staring at the trailer. I’d never been here. Other than knowing Danny had taken Canaan under his wing, given him a little training, and worked him into a hell of a lot of fights, that was all I knew, or care to know, about that man.
I’d never known where Canaan went those nights after fights, when he’d come home a couple hours before morning, reeking of sweat and alcohol. My imagination had been enough without needing the specifics. Seeing this place, having a visual to go with those nights the man I loved came home a person I barely recognized, made me angry. The kind of anger that required action of some sort.
I wanted to douse the place in gasoline and set a match to it. I wanted it to burn. I wanted it to be reduced to ashes, much the way Canaan’s and my relationship had been.
“Where are we going now?” I asked when Canaan fired up the engine and backed away from the abandoned trailer.
He pulled out onto the highway, taking us farther out of town. “You’ll see.”
My hands rubbed my arms and legs, like I was trying to rid myself of the filth of that place. “I’m not sure I want to.”
Canaan stayed quiet, taking my hand as we charged deeper into the night. It wasn’t even ten minutes before he slowed the truck, his eyes scanning the side of the road for a turn-off.
The place we were heading now? This one I recognized.
It was a road by the loosest definition. Of course that was the whole point when you were trying to keep a location and the events that took place there a secret from the upstanding people of the surrounding communities. A paved road with a gleaming street sign, a map that led straight to the spot, would have defeated the concept of a clandestine fighting site in the middle of nowhere.
“Why are you taking me here?” I shifted in my seat, sitting up straighter as he finally found the turn-off.
The “road” was even more hard to find now than it had been then, brush and weeds closing in around it so a person wouldn’t have known it was there if they’d never been before.
“Because it’s part of the story,” he replied, easing the truck through the brush and weeds. The potholes felt deep enough to swallow the truck whole.
I couldn’t help scanning the windows, half-expecting any number of threats to come bursting out of the dark. “What story?”
He was quiet—his hands tight around the wheel, his gaze fixed out the windshield. “The one of how I lost myself.”
My ey
es closed. I was not mentally prepared to visit this place again. The few times I had been here had been in the beginning, when Canaan had first started fighting. He’d wanted me to come, said he liked seeing me amongst the crowd when he was inside the ring. He said I was his lucky penny. His rabbit’s foot.
I’d stopped coming after the fight that left him with a concussion that later made him go unconscious. And he’d been the winner of that fight. I couldn’t come to any more after that. Watching the person you loved in pain was worse than experiencing that pain yourself, but watching the person you loved choose that pain . . . there wasn’t a word for the hell that kind of torture was.
“Canaan, I want to leave.” My voice was high, breathless. “I don’t want to be here.”
“No one’s here,” he replied calmly. “This place hasn’t been used in years.”
“Then why are we here?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “I want to go.”
That was when the building came into view up ahead. A giant structure that had once upon a time housed extra hay for the ranchers in town. It was open on either end, covered in metal sheeting from the roof down the sides. The hay had stopped being housed here when we’d still been kids, leaving it abandoned and available for all kinds of mischief. At first, high school kids used to sneak out here and have parties or couples would come out and park. But it hadn’t been long before a kid with too much time and ingenuity came along and decided what the world really needed was one more place where people could win or lose money by betting on a couple of creatures fighting to the close-enough-to-count death.
“I need you to understand what happened, Maggie.” Canaan stopped the truck a ways back from the giant structure. “I wasn’t strong enough to tell you back then, but I am now. You deserve the truth.”
My head shook, wanting to look away from this place but unable to. “I don’t deserve this.”