Rough Around the Edges (31 page)

“Something else I’ve missed,” he said when she was still and breathless. It was the understatement of the fucking century. Feeling, watching and hearing her totally lose herself because of him … it was the most incredible feeling, pride-fueling and humbling all at once. If she hadn’t returned, if she hadn’t wanted to be with him anymore, would he have been able to bear remembering it and never experiencing it again?

Probably not. If he ever lost her, the best he’d be able to hope for would be that he’d forget it, that the holes in his memory would swallow up the most gratifying moments of his life.

The thought almost made him laugh. Forget how it felt to have her on top of him, her pussy shrinking around his cock as she rode out an orgasm? No way. The way her lips parted as she squeezed her eyes shut, the way her breasts rose and fell with every hard breath – those things were burnt into his memory forever. Which meant that if they ever stopped seeing each other, he’d be like a lost soul trapped in purgatory, tortured by thoughts of a heaven he’d been locked out of.

A tremor raced through her thighs as she opened her eyes and looked directly into his. “Me too.”

It was simple, then – he couldn’t lose her. Not if he wanted to have any semblance of a life.

“You can come again, can’t you?” he asked, slipping a hand between her spread thighs.

She rocked her hips in reply, the quietest of moans escaping her as the head of his dick scraped a place deep inside her.

He was so damn close to coming. Still, the urge to give her a few more moments of ecstasy was more intense than the urge to finish. He wasn’t ready for this to be over.

Erratic tremors made her pussy wrench around his shaft. Were the contractions only a sort of aftershock caused by her first climax, or was she ready again?

After a few moments of wondering, he groaned when she leaned forward, bracing herself with her palms against his chest and digging her nails into his skin. The shift in position sent his cock sliding deeper into her and brought her breasts closer. His mouth watered with the urge to taste their hardened tips, but a shuddering gasp from Ally told him that she was close.

He focused on what he was already doing – fucking her hard from below while rubbing her clit, creating internal and external friction.

Her pussy was already so tight, a sleeve of heat and wetness that surrounded every inch of his hardness. He sensed the moment she began to orgasm again – the increase in pressure was instantly discernible, heaven bearing down on his dick, making every muscle in his body tense up.

She breathed and moaned like she had the first time, sinking her nails so hard into his chest he’d probably have marks there for a day or two, which was fine. No, better than fine – perfect. Just like the way she slumped on top of him when he wrapped an arm around her waist, her body soft in the wake of her second climax.

The position put her breasts flat against his chest, swelling upward between them. Her nipples were pinpricks of heat against his skin, and his heartbeat hammered away against the weight of her body.

His pulse hammered in his groin too, echoing through his cock, which was achingly hard. Her internal muscles had stopped spasming around him, but she was still tight, and he lost himself in the span of one rushed heartbeat, finally overcome.

Holding her close against his chest, he rocked into her, finishing in a few hard strokes, driving himself deeper into her pussy with each one.

The feeling of releasing inside the hot, wet confines of her body was all he could think about – the last few moments of fucking her were so intense that there was no room for anything else inside his mind. Nothing, not a single problem or thought, just mind-numbing pleasure that rushed through every fiber of his being, concentrated in the hard inches that were buried inside her.

Fuck yeah
. The words echoed through his mind and maybe left his lips – he couldn’t even tell whether he’d said them or not.

When he stilled, she rested on top of him for a while. His heartbeat slowed and so did hers, an easing pulse beneath the soft weight of her breasts. Breathing a sigh, she slid off of him to recline at his side.

He lay still and quiet until her stomach growled.

“Hungry?” he asked. It was late – past dinner time. She was probably starving.

“Yeah. I haven’t had dinner yet, have you?”

“No.” Actually, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He must have at some point, but he didn’t want to think back to when – the couple of days he’d spent thinking he’d never see Ally again were a dark corner in his mind that he didn’t want to revisit.

And it didn’t matter, anyway. They could eat now, together.  “Do you want to help me cook?”

She turned to face him, her eyes wide. “Yeah, sure. What do you want to make?”

A feeling of guilty unease pained him for a second as he registered her look of surprise. Was it because he’d asked her to help?

“Some of the ingredients I stocked up on for breakfast a while ago will go bad soon if they’re not used. I was thinking we could dice everything up and throw together some omelets.” Maybe it would be good for both of them if he asked her to help with some things – things they could do together instead of things that left him feeling useless.

“Okay.”

He put on a pair of jeans as she dressed, pulling on her grey sweater last of all. He could still see her nipples through it, and the V-neck revealed a generous hint of cleavage. On a less curvy woman, it would’ve been a modest top, but not on her. Yeah, having her close by in the kitchen wouldn’t be bad at all.

“I can take care of the dicing,” she said when they reached the kitchen. “Where is there a knife I can use?”

He pulled open a drawer below the sink and handed her his kitchen knife handle-first.

“Is this the only one you have?” she asked, looking down at it like she’d never seen anything like it before.

“Old faithful. Believe it or not I’m not exactly a gourmet chef. I tend to keep my cooking pretty simple.” That was putting it mildly.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a gourmet chef, but I’ve learned a lot about cooking from my mother. Maybe I could make dinner for you sometime.”

He leaned into the open fridge and nodded, selecting certain items from its shelves and cradling them in the crook of his arm. His cast protected his forearm from the chill, but the cold vegetables pressed against his ribs and made his skin break out in gooseflesh. “That would be nice.”

Eager to have the coldness away from his skin, he deposited his finds on the counter – a green pepper, some mushrooms, a bag of shredded cheddar cheese and a tomato, which he dropped. “Damn it.”

 It hit the countertop, probably bruising.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ally said. “We’re going to be dicing it up anyway.”

He put a frying pan on a burner and rubbed the end of a refrigerated stick of butter against its inside surface, coating it.

Ally used his one and only kitchen knife to make quick work of the damaged tomato. “The tomato is ready. Do you have another plate I can use to cut the pepper and mushrooms on?”

“Yeah.” He pulled one from the cupboard beside the fridge and handed it to her.

While she took care of the vegetables, he one-handedly cracked a few eggs over the side of the warming frying pan. Not a single piece of shell fell into the clear whites – apparently, all his practice cooking eggs was good for something.

“You weren’t kidding when you said breakfast foods were your specialty,” Ally said, opening the bag of cheese.

“Not so much my specialty as the only thing I can cook. You’d be good at cracking eggs too if you ate them every day.”

“Okay. So no eggs on the menu for whenever you come over and let me cook for you.”

He shrugged. “I never said I didn’t like them.”

“Still. A little variety may do you good. Are you ready for these?”

With a spatula he’d pulled from a drawer, he whipped the eggs until the whites and yolks merged together, creating a pale yellow canvas for the other ingredients Ally had prepared. “Yeah.”

One by one, he cleared the plates, sliding the vegetables into the pan and topping the whole thing off with a handful of shredded cheddar. Standing there stirring the ingredients in felt oddly right – there was a sense of peace that accompanied the simple task. The calmness was something he usually didn’t feel when he was in his apartment, or anywhere, really.

There was no denying that it was good to have Ally around again. And she hadn’t made a big deal out of his broken wrist or tried to talk him out of cooking, even though his methods were awkward. She seemed to have actually taken what he’d said seriously. Now he wished he’d simply said it instead of blowing up at her.

“Flowers?”

A knot of tension sprang up between his shoulder blades as the single word she’d spoken registered.

She was standing in front of the trashcan, dumping the unusable vegetable scraps.

He kept stirring instead of facing her. “My parents sent them.”

“Oh. Is that your cell phone?”

“They called, too.” For the first time since he’d destroyed his phone, shame burned hot inside him. At the time, his phone had been the least of his worries – he’d known that no one who mattered would call. But now … what if Ally had tried to call him? Had she been forced to come to his apartment because she’d thought he was ignoring her?

Yeah, she had – he remembered now. She’d said she’d texted him.

He couldn’t bring himself to feel sorry. They never would’ve worked things out over the phone – he would’ve ruined it. He was glad she’d shown up, even if that made him a dick.

“I didn’t even realize they knew how to get in touch with you.”

“They have their ways of finding things out. They made some calls, bothered some people from my old unit until they wheedled the information out of them.” The irritation he’d felt when speaking to his mother returned, prickling hot and unwelcome across his skin. As the omelet fried, he looked back with longing on the moment of peace that had surprised him so recently.

“Oh.” She moved slowly, but approached the counter again, standing where she had before.

The weight of her silence was crushing. “Sorry you couldn’t get in touch with me. I was just so pissed that I threw my phone. That was pretty fucking stupid – now I don’t have one.”

“It’s okay.”

More silence. Was there any choice but to explain? “They found out I’m not enlisted anymore.” Instead of looking up from the pan, he gazed intently at the omelet, making sure it didn’t burn. “Wanted me to come back to New York. Like nothing ever even happened.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Between that and the flowers, it was pretty obvious they’re out of their minds.”

Chapter 18

“I guess it is pretty strange to send a guy flowers for his birthday.”

“I’m sure even they didn’t think I wanted flowers. They sent them to let me know that they know my address – where to find me.” Maybe it sounded accusatory, even a little paranoid, but it was just the sort of thing his parents would pull. If they had a message, they always found a way to get it across.

“Did they expect you to pack up and come home?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. They really broke out the heavy artillery – or at least, I’m sure that’s what they thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“Offered me a job. A nicer place to live than anyone really needs. Money. All that shit.” He might as well have been cooking his insides instead of breakfast-for-dinner – every internal organ he possessed was hot with anger. Had they really thought he could be lured in with material possessions?

That stuff had meant something to him at one point, but never as much as it meant to his parents and brother. Now, it meant nothing to him. All the material possessions in the world couldn’t make up for what he lacked as a person.