“I guess . . . in a general sense, my ideal future is to feel safe in my career and, I guess, in my life. I want my mom to be and feel safe, and if I could help make the city physically safer for others as well, it’d be a dream. That’s the kind of thing I want to write about. But that kind of journalism takes time, and Edge has given me better opportunities than anywhere else. I feel linked to it, somehow. If it grew and I could grow right with it, that’d be a dream, it really would,” I admit.
He comes to sit on the bed and he edges forward, his expression intense. “Like, what would you like to do for the city? What’s your idea?” He tucks my hair back from my forehead with one large hand, searching my face.
“I don’t know. Change doesn’t happen unless there’s a huge collective effort, unless you’re very powerful.”
His lips quirk and his eyes glimmer with a predatory light that never fails to thrill me. “You’re sleeping with a very powerful man.”
I bite my lip. “Yes, yes I am.” I laugh and feel myself blush. He cups my cheek, and once again, I tuck my face into his palm, seeking his touch. “You’re not how I imagined you’d be, and I have a good solid imagination,” I whisper.
“That’s because you’re all good. Terrible things made me.”
“Oh no.” I laugh, but he doesn’t laugh. He’s quiet. “We’re all made of good and terrible things.”
“Are we?” He studies me again. “What do you see in me?”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“I’m a difficult man, I’m not easy to handle—some might argue I refuse to be handled. I’ll never commit to anyone—I never have, and I don’t think I ever could. You don’t want my money, you don’t want to party with me—not the way others want. You almost wouldn’t sleep with me. But then you come to me as if you want my protection, and it makes me want to be that man.”
I stare at him, quiet.
He’s always said I confuse him, and he looks so confused right now, I’m confused by his puzzlement too.
“Malcolm,” I begin, but what can I say? So many truths, and in the end, he’ll think all of them a lie. It breaks me to think about it all of a sudden.
“When my mother was diagnosed . . .” He pauses. “I promised I’d be there for her. By her side. She was given two years. She still had a year and a half left . . .” He pauses again but never takes his eyes off me. “She didn’t want me to know the leukemia came back. And when it was only a matter of hours, my father refused to let anyone tell me. He thought I should be punished for leaving the country for Tahoe’s birthday.” I can feel the blood drain from my face. “So you see? I’m no good with promises. But I’ll take your cause as if it were mine.”
“I’m so sorry. I . . . when my father died, I was too young. But I have nightmares sometimes about the way he died, alone.”
We share a stare.
“She died asking for me.” He looks away, then heads for his phones and other items, his jaw completely flexed.
“She knew you loved her,” I whisper.
“Did she?”
“Women know these things. My mother said . . . she knew even before my father did that he loved her. Women know these things. Your gender wasn’t made for subtleties, you need to be hit in the head with it, and sometimes love just creeps in even when all your doors and windows are shut to it.” He stares, and I add, “Everyone is born with a natural love for their parents.”
“You outgrow that love. There’s no point to love. Truth, loyalty—there’s something that lasts.”
Speechless, I’m not sure if I’m more surprised by the words or the casual tone he used, which only brings home that the sentiment is so completely natural to him.
The fact that he has no trust in love, any kind of love, astounds me.
I drop my face a little to hide the tender emotion I’m sure he’ll be able to see reflected in my eyes. My chest feels suddenly swollen with it.
But we have so many things in common—Saint and I. We love to work. We work hard, squeezing in a little fun but not much else. We’re both proud, maybe closed off. I also thought I didn’t believe in love, not romantic love like Wynn does. So why do I suddenly feel like changing my mind?
I finish dressing, unable to look at him again.
After the “truth and loyalty” comment I’ve gone quiet, very thoughtful because, naturally, I’m questioning what the hell I’m doing with him right now. What do I think will come out of this affair?
I didn’t think, I guess. I only wanted. I wanted, obsessed, and had to have, like a young, reckless girl. Like a girl he brings out, someone I’d never been until now. I’m acutely aware of his effects on this girl as he drives me home.
I should feel satiated, content, and happy by now. Instead I don’t want to say goodbye, and when he tells Otis to wait for him as he walks me up, I feel frantic that he won’t stay. That I’m not truthful and loyal, and he will soon go away.
“I have work tomorrow,” I say, just to give him an easy out.
“I have work too,” he says, but he keeps following me to the door, waiting behind me as I open.
I shiver when he nibbles the back of my ear, his hand running up my bare arm to caress the shoulder I teased him with hours ago when he picked me up.
“Do you want to come in?”
“Yeah.” He kisses my ear.
I can’t even explain the way my heart unravels in my chest, spreading warmth all over me.
Not wanting to bump into Gina like this, I press my finger to my mouth, hook my little finger in his, and pull him into my bedroom. We shut the door. He looks big and beautiful.
“Sit down,” I gesture toward the bed, my hormones already joining the party.
He starts unbuttoning his shirt as I go and slip into my Wildcat T-shirt. I walk back to my bed. He looks at me with that naughty curve to his lips, and from his expression you’d think I was the sexiest thing to come out of my university. I look down-to-earth, while he looks exquisite, his shirt stretched in all the right places.
Quietly I straddle him and unbutton the rest of his shirt while he eases his hands under my T-shirt, squeezing the flesh of my ass.
“Malcolm, I don’t have condoms. . . .”
He kisses me slowly, deeply, savoring me. “Don’t worry, I got us covered.”
In less than a minute we’re all set, all naked, and I’m pushing him down to my bed, delighted that he lets me straddle him. Run my hands up his massive chest. Watch him watch me move over him. I take him in my body, and my breasts feel heavy with need, tender from his fingers as he caresses them, raises his head and licks and laves the sensitive tips. He sits up with me, then, eye to eye, we move together. He pounds me with his hips, pulling me down harder to meet him. He comes fiercely, my orgasm tearing through me at the same time.
Our breaths come fast. He looks confused, awed, grateful. He wanted to break me, but I could almost see a crack in his huge, huge walls as we made love. Because that’s what it felt like. Strangers who should be fucking somehow ended up giving more and opening up more than planned. Content, I rest against the hard, warm lines of his body for a long time, his hands lazily trailing a path up the line of my spine.
I go out on a limb and whisper, “I like being just like this with you.”
“Do you?” he asks, his look soft and teasing, tender.
I nod.
He pats his chest. “Then come back here.”
I put my hands around his neck and curl into his chest. He smells like safe. Like strength. Like his shirt I now have tucked in my closet. He smells like control and power, and he also smells like sex and connection and happiness to me. I turn the feelings around in my being and then in my head, but I won’t be writing these words on my note cards. These are just mine, and though they’ll leave my mind, the feelings behind them, I know, will stay.
He says, “Hang on,” grabs his phone, then sends off a text. “You okay if I spend the night?”
I smile, nod. “Did you tell
Otis that you are?”
“I did. You sure it’s okay?” His eyes twinkle. “We won’t get much sleep if I stay.”
“Who needs sleep with you in bed?” I grin; then he makes the bed squeak as he rolls to his side to watch his hand caress my abdomen on the way up. I watch my own fingers crawl up his throat, his jaw, and I whisper in his ear, “Help me keep quiet. I don’t want us to make noise.”
He rolls me to my back and sinks his hips between my thighs, his palm spreading over my cheek. He presses his thumb between my lips and strokes it against my tongue so that I can suck it instead of make noise. There’s such raw need in his eyes. Suddenly I’m jealous thinking of him giving this to anyone else. I’m so jealous I can’t claw my way close enough. A moan flows out of my mouth as I press my body upward. “Come closer. Come closer and tell me what you want, say it dirty,” I beg in his ear.
“Tell you?” he says in his quiet voice. “I’m going to show you.”
Watching me, his fist slides over the length of his erection until he’s grabbed the base; slowly, he introduces the head into my body. “How dirty?” he coaxes, eyes gleaming in the lamplight. “Rachel?” The desire in his voice excites me even more. “How dirty do you want it? How hard?”
He slides, inch by inch, between my legs, and stops midway. Warm hands take the backs of my knees, and then he spreads my legs over his square shoulders. The move opens me up like a flower, my pussy exposed. His hips settle between my thighs, deeper this time, and he enters me the rest of the way, and I take him with a long, erotic moan, the pressure of his cock entering me robbing me of my breath.
Alight with exquisite pleasure, my body’s throbbing for him. We both begin rocking in unison, seeking the ultimate closeness.
My nails sink into the back of his neck as my legs loosen so he can fold me over and get as deep as possible. His powerful body moves above mine in a ripple of muscles and a flex of hips and arms. God, the friction. The friction brings him balls deep. Every in-stroke brings his body to stimulate my clit. Slowly, but with expert control and powerful thrusts, he moves above me. Inside me.
The pleasure is exquisite torment: my senses attuned to his breath, warmth, weight, I don’t want it to end.
He fucks me hard, every controlled thrust bursting with power, his growls a low vibration in his chest until he has no choice but to duck his head and bury the gruff sounds against my hair, and me, in his throat. We undulate together, straining to get closer, and it feels so good, so right, that instead of slowing down, I let my virgin little bed scream for mercy.
There’s something so intensely good, a fierce connection—invisible but intimate—in waking up to find a man watching you sleep. It’s not the first time I catch Malcolm watching me, but it’s the first time I don’t start. The first time I open my eyes, meet his quiet stare, and feel a pool of heat in my stomach build and build as I slowly start to smile.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” He cups my cheek, and the brush of his thumb over my lips makes me turn my head into the touch and savor it a little. “Hmm,” I say, admiring how adorable he looks recently awake.
We have officially hit the “four” mark in the sex department, and a part of me wonders if this is it.
He looks at me with respect this morning, as if he liked all the sides of myself I showed him yesterday, and I can’t miss that glint in his eye that somehow silently tells me, I know how you like it. Lazily, he asks me about work, specifically he asks me what I’m working on. It’s the second time he’s asked me—the first was at the Tunnel. My heart leaps a little bit, but he’s too relaxed after all the night’s sex to notice.
I turn the topic around with a frown mixed with a smile. “Don’t you have work too? What are you doing in bed with me?”
“Getting hard.”
I laugh.
With a wry smile, he tilts my chin. “I had a good time last night.” He kisses me softly, no tongue, and it feels as intense as if he’d tongued me.
I count down to ten. Then I groan in protest as I wiggle out of his arm. “Be a good boy and wait,” I say. “I don’t want Gina to have a heart attack.”
I kick the sheets off, slip into my terry robe, and pad out into the kitchen to put coffee on. I come back into the room to brush my teeth and wash my face, then I ponder whether I should put on some makeup. I stare at my reflection. I look bare . . . my skin pale, my sad-panda eyes all dark and tired after last night. But my irises are glowing bright and I can’t really keep my lips from curling upward at the corners. I grab a lipstick and a brush, but then stop myself. It’s not like this is going anywhere, is it? It’s not like I want him to fall in love with me—it was just a hookup. So I force myself to drop the brush and to leave the lipstick where it is. Shaking my head at myself, I don’t bother primping when I go back out to check on coffee and then come back to my room with a cup for each of us in my hands.
In true man-form, Sin’s spread on the bed, completely useless and clearly spent from fucking this lady right here. The duvet is at his ankles, every inch of him bare, one muscled arm behind his head, the other stretched out under the pillow I was on. Fucking god, he’s glorious. I want to catalogue every detail of him—I know Gina will want to hear all about it . . . so will Wynn . . . but he’s in my bed, and I don’t even want to share the details about how he looks in it with my internal journalist.
“What’s that?”
Checking out the goods I carry, he sits up, the muscles of his arms rippling with the move, and smiles at me. When I automatically smile in return, I feel vulnerable, real . . . and human. Why I chose to open up to a guy like him is beyond me. But I feel like my walls are still not erect. I don’t want to put them back up yet.
“Coffee, or me?” I lift the coffee cup and my eyebrow at the same time.
His laugh is soft and raspy as he drags a hand through his rumpled hair, looking even more handsome as he tsks and shakes his head. “You don’t know by now?”
“How greedy you are? You’re right, I do know. I bet you want both.”
He flashes an all-mischief smile as he pats the side of the bed, calling me back to him.
I head over with the coffee, and when he takes his cup, I slide into bed with him. We sip coffee in silence.
Before I’m finished with mine, he takes my cup and sets it on the nightstand closest to him. In one smooth, strong move, he presses me down on the bed and I fall back, breathless as he braces himself above me, his arms long and taut. He takes my fuzzy socks off. His fingers brush my arches, and I can’t hold back a choked little laugh. “Your feet are ticklish, Rachel?” He’s amused. I love how he says Ray-chel.
I nod, growing more and more breathless.
He presses his lips to mine, hard, not forcing me to open up, just soft, warm, demanding lips pressing down. I feel myself yield; and I love how he softens the kiss the moment he feels my resistance vanish. And I love what he’s doing now, giving me some earlobe love, licking me, tugging and kissing my lobe, his breath warm on my ear. “You’re such a man-eater, Rachel. I’m disappointed we didn’t break your bed, though.”
He stands, and he is beautiful and virile and edible as he dresses. “How’s Saturday?” he asks.
“Excuse me?”
“How’s Saturday for you?”
“I, um. For breaking my bed? I might be free Saturday.”
He laughs lazily, completely relaxed this morning, all the tension from last night’s event with his father completely gone. He totally fucked it out of himself. “Pick you up at noon? Wear something comfortable.”
“Wait. What? Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Butterflies in my stomach. Followed by tangled ropes, reminding me I can’t be feeling like this. I’m not a girl anymore, I’m not free to fall for a boy like this. Not this boy. I could not have chosen a worse time, an even worse circumstance, or a more elusive man to fall for. “Sin, no, I just remembered I can’t. I just can’t.”
He studies me; then he nods quietly. “I’ll call you, then.”
“I’ll be busy all week,” I lie.
I need space between us, I need to get back to the groove of work. He stops by the door and I already miss him—the distance between my body and his suddenly too much. God, what’s wrong with me?
A minute later he drives off to his office, I suppose, and when I can’t seem to work, I unhook my phone from the charging outlet, power it on, and, like an addict, already worrying about when her next hit will come . . .
On the other hand, I just moved some things. Saturday is great.
I step into the shower, then check his message when I step out and wrap a towel around myself.
Good
Oh typical. He’s so limited with words! I quickly wrap a towel over my wet hair and text back:
You know, I like words. You can totally use a few more
Good girl
Hahah OK.
I had a good time
Me too. I already miss you
Oh boy. Did I say that? I stress about it. Then before he can answer or feels obligated to say something like that, I quickly text:
Ok, gotta get back to work. XO
I set my phone aside and then take out my notepad, trying to write something, but I find myself doodling his name.
Malcolm Saint
23
STATUS
He changed his status.
He actually changed his Interface, Facebook, and general social media status.
I feel like there should’ve been an alert, something like an earthquake. If my stalking has told me one thing, it’s that he’s never done it before. In a relationship, it says. And considering mine still says I’m single, I wonder if Malcolm is even talking about me.
It’s the weekend after he slept over, Saturday, to be exact, when I text Gina. DID YOU SEE?
She doesn’t answer. I call her cell phone.
“Did you see?”
“Hmm.”
“Where are you?” I demand.
“Rachel, I’m sleeping. I’m next door.”