Thirty-Two
Kyle
As I walked along the edge of the water, the beer tingled and heated my body; my tolerance had been wiped out from my stay in the hospital. In the short time we’d been gone, I’d taken Garin past the eight homes that surrounded the small alcove that I lived on, down to our private beach where there was the most perfect view of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. At night, the massive structure was lit up a bright yellow, filling the dark sky with an almost eerie glow. Between that and the moon reflecting off the water, it gave us just enough light to see where we were walking.
When we reached the end of the beach, I stopped and slid off my flip-flops. And then I took in the whole view, including Garin’s profile, as I dunked my feet in the water.
During my dream about the cell, I hadn’t thought I’d ever see this bridge again, that I’d ever feel the smooth liquid ocean or the rough sand beneath my feet. Even though the prison hadn’t been real, it felt like I was being given a second chance at life.
And I needed to appreciate it.
“Can we stay here for a minute?” I asked.
I waited for him to nod before I squatted down on the sand, slipping my legs out in front of me, digging my fingers into a large mound. Garin stood a few feet away, his profile sharp as he looked out toward the water.
The things I’d learned about him in the cell were just random bits of information. They weren’t real; they definitely weren’t the truth. It was hard to wrap my head around that. Even though I felt like I knew so much, I really knew nothing at all. But I wanted to. I wanted to know everything—what his life was like now, what I had missed in the twelve years that had passed. What was making him so cold beyond the way I had ended our relationship. Nothing I tried had warmed him. But I didn’t deserve his warmth. I wanted it anyway. I wanted so much more than that.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“You.” I slowly looked up from the sand, not realizing he’d been watching me.
The moonlight glinted off the outline of his thick, coarse scruff and his narrowed eyelids. It illuminated his parted lips. I wondered if it showed my guilt, too.
There was so much of it that I’d been hiding. I needed a break from it. I just wanted to feel something other than the constant pain of what I’d seen, of what I’d done.
My mind brought me back to the dream, to the moment when his mouth had been on my body. Those lips, those fingers—they had made me forget. The way he looked at me, the way he kissed me—that had been my relief. I needed that closeness again. I needed to remind him of that moment outside the restroom at the bar.
I needed to make him want me as much as I wanted him.
“Come here.” I held my hand out. “Will you sit?”
He stood, looking down at me while the silence passed between us. He was making me wait, which made me question what he was going to do. That only made the guilt grow.
Why was I doing this to myself?
Why was I craving more when I knew I couldn’t have it, especially when I couldn’t stop lying to him?
I’d come out of the coma, thinking I’d told Garin the truth. In reality, the truth had never been spoken.
I wished it had.
But that would have meant everything that happened in the cell was real. That the truth had been tortured out of me, and somehow my life had been spared.
How could I wish to have gone through all of that?
What was wrong with me?
Garin finally sat down next to me, his shoes pushing across the sand as he stretched out his legs. Now that he was closer, the moonlight showed me more of his face, but I didn’t need additional light to see how beautiful this man was. His face was an image that wouldn’t ever leave my mind. It hadn’t in all these years. But now that he had grown into a man, there was a roughness that came with him, an intensity that burned in his eyes, and the most tantalizing curve in his lips.
I couldn’t hide what it all made me feel.
I turned toward him and crossed my legs. He leaned back a few inches, moonlight flashing across his hands and a breeze passing through the air. It sent me a whiff of his cologne, a scent I’d been devouring the last couple of days. For the briefest of moments, I closed my eyes, imagining those hands on my body, his scent covering me, his mouth moving across my skin.
His lips.
His tongue.
I took a breath, my lungs not filling as easily as they had in the hospital, and I opened my eyes. “While I was in that coma, my mind took me somewhere. It was a place. A dark place…”
He didn’t move. He just stared and listened. His silence was haunting.
“It was a place no one would ever want to visit and no one should ever have to see. But I was there for a reason, and I deserved to be there.”
My mind was taking me back to the night I had been in Garin’s room, the night Paulie had died, and I was trying to tell him how badly I wanted him. At that time in our lives, I’d always been so honest with him, but telling him how I felt, telling him I wanted more was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. This was even harder.
“You were in that dream, too, Garin. I told you in the hospital that you had protected me, and that’s true, but there’s more. You were there to show me what I could have had, had my life gone differently.” My eyes drifted toward the water; it was easier to look at. “This is going to sound crazy. I shouldn’t even think this, let alone say it…”
“You want to go back to the dream.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. His words only added to the dirtiness of that thought.
“Yes.”
“Tell me why.”
I dug my nails into my palms. Admitting this wasn’t enough of a punishment. I needed more…I needed pain. “Because I could touch you whenever I wanted. I could tell you how I felt. I could feel you, and I didn’t have to let you go. It was just you and me and endless darkness.” Finally, I looked up again, and our eyes locked. “I was given a choice, and this time, I chose you.”
“This time?”
“Yes. This time.” My voice was just above a whisper. “I wanted to before. I wanted it with everything I had. But I couldn’t. I had to leave.”
It felt like I was back in that alley again, cornered by Garin, telling him nothing but lies to protect my brother. But my brother would point a gun at me and pull the trigger as easily as he had pulled it on Paulie.
“Why?”
“I had to.”
“Why, Kyle?”
Here was my chance to tell him the truth. So, why couldn’t I do it? It had taken a dream full of torture—torture I believed to be so real at the time—and the threat on Garin’s life to make me cave last time. What would it take this time?
Anthony holding a gun to my head?
Or worse…Anthony murdering Garin?
Because, once tomorrow morning came, all of that would be possible.
And, if Anthony didn’t kill me, I would go back to being his investment, a way to filter all his cash to make it clean. My payment was an education, a house, and a business. I wasn’t grateful. I was miserable. And I was loyal to a man who didn’t give a shit about me. A man who had sucked out all my happiness to cover all his evil.
“Because I
had
to,” I said.
“And what do you want now?”
Speaking the word that was in my heart would make this so much harder. But how could I hide it? How could I live with more regret?
“You.”
The sound that came from him was a mix between a grunt and a laugh. And then came movement. His knees bent, and his hands moved behind him…even farther away from me.
Was I crazy to want this man? To crave what we had once almost had? To yearn for his coldness because it was better to feel that than nothing at all?
I couldn’t control my hands anymore. I reached forward and wrapped them around his calf. Even though his jeans were thick, the heat from his skin poured through the fabric.
His stare intensified.
I slid my hands up to his knee. “I have so many regrets, Garin. I can’t live with another.”
Everything was so dimly lit, like the cell, and a little chilly from the winter night. But touching him here felt different. The cold was different. The sensation under my fingers was different.
But the pounding in my chest was identical.
“Is this what you want, Kyle?” His hands were suddenly on my throat. His grip was tight. His skin felt like it was scorching mine. “You want to feel me?”
He knelt in front of me, pushing me onto my back. Once I was flat, he hovered over me.
I had a hard time breathing. “Yes,” I finally answered.
“That’s all you want?”
My mind took me back to the hallway outside the restroom, to the cement floor inside the cell when Garin was peeling off my clothes. The dream and my reality were overlapping, and I couldn’t stop it inside my brain. But here, on this beach, it was just us. Nobody walking by on their way to the bathroom, no Breath, no Beard. Just darkness with the feeling of the sand beneath me and the sound of the waves in front of me. His exhales filled me with his scent, his body almost covering me.
“I want more,” I said.
He came a little closer and sucked my bottom lip into his mouth, his teeth grinding into it. He’d done that in the cell. It had felt so good then; it felt even better now. “Can your body take more of a beating? Because I’ll hurt you, Kyle.”
“Hurt me.”
His other hand gripped the top of my tank, both hands now tightening in different spots, my breathing only getting worse. “I don’t know how to be gentle.”
“Then, don’t be,” I panted.
“I’ve wanted to fuck you for so long, to feel your cunt dripping over my cock. I almost want to punish you for making me wait all these years.”
He was as gritty as he had been inside the prison, as dirty, as feral. And I was as turned on as I’d ever been. I didn’t want to wait until we got back to my house where there was a cozy bed waiting for us. I wanted him here, on this beach, right now.
“The wait has been my punishment. Give me what I want, Garin.”
I heard the fabric rip as he shredded my tank top right down the center. Then, he unhooked the front clasp of my bra, stripping it off me.
“This body…how did you keep it away from me for so long?”
As I heard his voice from inside the cell, I moaned, “Garin…”
His hands left my body roughly to take off his shirt, yanking it over his head. When they returned, one of them squeezed my nipple while the other held my face still. From the way he was positioned, my arms were pinned down to my sides. I couldn’t drag him closer. I couldn’t use my fingers to emphasize what I wanted. I couldn’t touch him.
“Kiss me,” I demanded.
The moonlight streaked across his face, showing me that his eyes were locked with mine. I felt the need, the desire. And I felt his hesitation, as though he were battling something deep inside the same way I was.
“Kiss me—”
His lips crashed against mine before I even finished speaking, and I moaned again. I had his tongue in my mouth, his scent in my nose, his body on top of me. It caused the deepest, strongest, fiercest throbbing in my clit.
As he adjusted me beneath him, his movements were so rough that I winced. I was sore. My skin hurt. My muscles had ached since the hospital. If he heard me, he didn’t stop. He didn’t lighten up at all.
I didn’t want him to.
I never wanted him to.
“I’ve wanted to fuck you for more than half of my life. Do you know what that kind of want does to you after a while?”
I knew. And I felt it, too.
He shimmied my pants down and unhooked his belt, pulling his jeans just low enough that his cock sprung free. I wasn’t able to see it; I only felt it slap against my pussy. Then, in one swift, furious movement, he was fully inside me.
“Oh my God!” I screamed.
I wasn’t at all prepared for his size, how he filled me completely, how it caused quick flashes of pain. I wasn’t prepared for this level of closeness and how much I would cherish it. I definitely wasn’t prepared for how much power he had and how much he used when he stroked me.
I didn’t tell him to stop.
Garin fucked me like there was an anger inside him. Like his anger made him drive his hips into me, dig his teeth into my flesh, press his fingers into my body. Like he wanted his anger to spill into me.
I would take it. All of it. I deserved it.
And I would enjoy it.
My pussy had finally stretched just enough so that I no longer felt any pain. His hand was off my throat, so I could breathe. I wrapped my legs around his waist. His long, hard, dominant thrusts took over me. He didn’t pull out to the tip; he just went halfway and shoved back in. And it didn’t happen slowly or gently. There was nothing gentle about this.
“Is this what you wanted?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. He just lifted me off the sand and flipped me around, putting me on all fours. Then, he gripped my hips, angling me to his head, as he forced himself back inside.
I tasted sand on my lips as I licked them. “Yes.”
This new position seemed to open me up even more, allowing him in deeper. The pain returned, but it was the good kind—the kind that added to the pleasure. And it caused me to shout even louder.
“Am I going to break you?”
My ribs ached from where the drain had been. My muscles threatened to no longer hold me, but I didn’t want him to stop. I wanted him to know I could handle whatever he wanted to give me.
He didn’t wait for my answer. He just pushed me onto my stomach, taking all the weight away from my limbs, and drove into me with so much power I couldn’t stop screaming.
“Am I going to fucking break you, Kyle?” he growled in my ear.
There was nothing to hold on to. The sand slipped through my fingers. The rocks and shells were too small. All I had was the chilly air, the darkness surrounding us, and the incessant pounding of his massive cock.
“No,” I panted.
“Then, I’m not fucking you hard enough.”
He positioned me just the way he wanted and rocked into me harder than I ever thought I could take. I didn’t need to put my fingers on my clit, rubbing it in circles to make the build start. The friction between us was enough, the added closeness, the way he took command of my body, the feeling of him on me.