Comeback (18 page)

“Oh God.” I dropped the condom and fisted my hands in the sheets, trying not to lose control, not to mention my mind, to the erotic pleasures of her mouth.

She kissed the tip and swirled her tongue around it. I couldn’t help myself; I lifted my head so I could watch her work. Almost as soon as my eyes were on her, her gaze flicked up to meet mine. She opened her mouth to take me in, her hand sliding along my shaft in time with her movements.

With every stroke, the thin grip I had on sanity slipped further and further away until I didn’t have even the faintest hold on it or myself any longer. I loved her mouth and all she was doing with it, but I wanted more. I wanted to be inside her.

“Jessica,” I said.

“Hmm?” She didn’t even take her lips from my cock, sending humming vibrations all through me.

I couldn’t wait much longer. I let go of my grip on the sheets with one hand so I could cup her face, urge her to come up to me. But she didn’t stop what she was doing. It only renewed her vigor.

“I can’t hold on much longer,” I said.

She came up for air. “I just want to make you feel good.” Then she was right back at it, leaving me to find a way to keep myself from coming too soon when she was doing everything possible to accomplish the opposite.

Her hands hadn’t been still for even a moment since she’d started, but when she cupped my balls and gently tugged them, that was the limit of my patience.

I searched the bedding for the condom I’d dropped, finding it near my hip. “I need you,” I rasped. I took Jessica’s face in my hand, more insistently this time, and urged her to move higher up my body.

As soon as she did, I put the condom in place and rolled on top of her, pretty much all in one move, shaking with an intensity I couldn’t control. She opened her thighs and her arms, drawing me down to her, welcoming me.

I kissed her a hell of a lot harder than I should have, but there didn’t seem to be a gentle bone in my body right now. “I need you,” I repeated, my lips still pressed tight to hers. I hadn’t done a very good job of foreplay for her, but she was slick and ready for me when I dipped a hand between her legs.

“I know,” she said. She raised her knees, locking her ankles together behind me.

At every point when I thought I should back off, slow down, take a moment to think about what I was doing before proceeding, she pressed me on. I was inside her, and she was tight around me, squeezing me, holding me close. I thrust hard—too hard. But instead of shouting or cursing at me or telling me to fuck off, she arched up into me and dug her fingernails into my shoulders.

It was hard and fast, a lust-filled frenzy that bordered on violent. I’d never lost control of myself like that, not in bed with a woman. Every time I thought I’d gone too far, that I must have hurt her, she would kiss my neck or say,
Don’t stop
, quietly in my ear, and I would stop thinking about forcing myself to pull away from her.

In no time, I came with a final shout, burying my face in the mattress to try to quiet some of the noise I’d made. My body went limp. I somehow found enough strength to roll off Jessica and bring her along with me, holding her against my side as I tried to remember how to breathe.

She tucked her head into the space between my shoulder and neck, teasing the hair on my chest with her fingers. Our legs were still tangled, our bodies still slick with sweat. After a minute, I eased myself away from her enough that I could look at her. That was when I saw the bite marks I’d left on her right shoulder.

I jerked upright, turning up the lamp.

“What’s wrong?” Jessica asked, her voice still heavy from our pursuits. She sat up, too, with eyes full of concern.

“I hurt you.” I nudged her closer to the light so I could examine the marks, trailing my fingers over them.

She looked down and shook her head. “They’ll fade. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.” I hadn’t broken her skin, but it looked like I might have bitten her hard enough to leave a bruise. The marks were an angry red, bordering on purple, and the skin all around them was puffy. If I’d hurt her enough to leave marks there, where else had I hurt her? And why the hell hadn’t she stopped me?

I scanned her body, trying to see what other damage I’d caused.

“Nicky,” she said quietly, lifting her hand to my chin and trying to get me to look in her eyes.

I hadn’t finished examining her for injuries, though, so I shook her hand away and kept searching for more signs of my brutality. There were faint red marks on her biceps that had the damnable shape of my fingers, but they didn’t look as if they would bruise. At the very least I hoped they wouldn’t. I supposed I would know for certain tomorrow when I could see her in the light of day.

“Nicky, look at me,” she said more insistently.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I demanded. I met her eyes briefly, raising my brows in question, but went right back to checking her body.

She got up, took my arm, and dragged me to the en suite bathroom, flipping on the light with an exasperated sigh. She pointed toward my reflection in one of the angled mirrors. “Look at your back, then, if you’re determined to find all the places we left marks on each other.”

I gave myself a cursory glance, then did a double take. There were definitely red lines streaking across the backs of my shoulders.

“I did that,” she said. “With my fingernails. Are we even?”

“That’s not the same,” I said, sounding sheepish even to myself.

“How is it any different? Yeah, you left some bite marks on me. So what?”

“So I should have been more careful. I shouldn’t have hurt you.” The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt her.

“I’m not fragile, Nicky.” Jessica took my hand, and I instinctively moved closer to her. “You’re not going to break me.”

That much should have been obvious, considering all that she’d told me about the addicts in her life. She hadn’t elaborated on the ways they’d hurt her, but considering I was an addict myself, it wasn’t difficult to use my imagination and come up with a few choice offenses. Yet despite it all, she was still going out of her way to help addicts. She’d made a career of it. Hell, she was here with me now and trying to clean up my messes. That should be proof enough that she wouldn’t break easily.

By rights, I was the one more likely to fall apart. I definitely fit the definition of
fragile
better than she did. But where was the line for her? How could I be sure I didn’t push her over the edge? Everyone had a limit of how much she could take, and it sounded as though Jessica had already experienced more than her fair share.

There wasn’t anything I could say that felt like a good response. Not now. Nothing had made sense for months, not since the moment Emma and the kids had shown up in my driveway and turned my life on its axis.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I finally said.

Jessica put both her arms around my waist and hugged me, her cheek resting against my chest. “You don’t have to have all the answers right now. It’s all right.”

It wasn’t all right, though. Or at least
I
wasn’t all right.

“Come on,” she said, leading me back into my bedroom and turning off the bathroom light. “You should put something on in case the kids get up in the night, and then you should try to sleep.”

“Not until you ice your shoulder.”

She pursed her lips, but she said, “All right.”

I pulled on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt, offering some for her to wear, as well. In all that had happened, I hadn’t thought about the fact that she didn’t have any clothes here other than what she was wearing—and she’d had those same things on for two days straight now. I went to the kitchen and filled a baggie with ice and brought it back, hoping to take care of her at least a little better now than I had up to this point. She wasn’t going to make it easy on me, though. She’d found some witch hazel and cotton balls in my bathroom while I’d been gone, and she made me sit with my back to her on the bed so she could clean the scratches she’d left, while allowing the ice to do its work.

I kept going back to what had just happened between us, trying to sort it out in my mind, to make it all right. I’d never left marks on a woman before, and the fact that she’d done the same to me didn’t ease my conscience in the least. It didn’t matter that it had happened in the heat of the moment. The fact was, I’d completely lost control and had been concerned only with myself. That thought only led to another equally damning one.

“Jessica?”

“Hmm?” She set the bottle of witch hazel on the nightstand, still dabbing at my shoulder.

“Did you come?” I’d been so lost in seeking my own release that I’d had no regard for her at all.

She didn’t answer right away. She kissed the back of my neck, where it joined with my shoulder, and then let my shirt drop back into position. Then she put her arms around my waist and hugged me from behind. It took her so long to respond that I was sure it could only be because she hadn’t had an orgasm and was trying to decide what she should tell me.

“It isn’t important,” she said after an incredibly long silence.

“You didn’t.” If she had come, she would have just said so. I tried to turn around so I could face her, but she wouldn’t let go of her hold on me.

“I told you I wanted to make you feel good. It was about you this time.”

The way I saw it, sex shouldn’t ever be about just one person unless it was masturbation.

“I was an ass,” I said. Because I had been.

“I wanted to give that to you. I wanted to take care of you in the only way I knew how in the moment.”

I put my hands over hers where they were locked at my waist, holding her to me. “That’s what it was to you? A way to take care of me?”

“It’s not
all
it was. But yes, that was definitely part of it.”

“It can’t be all about me.” Whatever we were building here, we needed to be on equal footing or it would never last.

She kissed my back through the fabric of my T-shirt. “It’s okay to let someone else help you sometimes, Nicky. And it’s okay for sex to sometimes be focused on one person, not on both. Someday, I might need you to take care of me in the same way, but tonight you were the one in need.”

“And will you let me take care of you when that time comes?” I asked.

She made a noncommittal sound. “That’s a silly question.”

I didn’t think it was silly at all, but I decided not to argue the point. I was slowly starting to realize that Jessica was always helping someone else in everything she did. Who took care of her? When was she on the receiving end and not giving of herself? I made a mental note to pay more attention to that, to make sure she got as much as she gave.

“Come on,” she said, nudging my shoulder so I would lie down. “You need rest, not to stay up all night talking to me.” She put me to bed, much like we had done with the kids earlier.

“Will you stay?” I asked, only I wasn’t sure if I was asking whether she’d stay with me for the night or if I was asking for something much more.

Something flitted across her face, gone so quickly I thought I might have imagined it. But she pulled back the covers and slipped into the bed next to me, resting her hand on my stomach and her head on my shoulder.

“Yes, I’ll stay,” she said softly.

Sleep eluded me for a long time despite my exhaustion. There was too much racing through my mind. The morning at the beach and the brisk air whipping through Emma’s hair. Holding her hand while her heart stopped beating. Trying to get Elin to let her mother go. Red, swollen bite marks on Jessica’s skin. The sensation of having her in my arms right now.

Everything felt wrong, except for that last part. Nothing made sense in the whole big clusterfuck that my life had become but that.

Yes, I’ll stay.

She’d made me a promise, and I didn’t think she was the kind of person who would lie, but how long would she stay?

THE WEEKEND FLEW
by with a constant influx of people coming and going from Nicky’s house. There wasn’t a chance for him or the kids to get lonely or wallow in thought because they were surrounded by people—typically a large number of them—pretty much all the time. I couldn’t be sure if the guys’ wives and girlfriends had set up a schedule for taking shifts in regard to who would be at the house at any given moment, but whether they had or not, that was how things were playing out. Even though there was a freezer stocked with casseroles, and Lord only knew what else was in the pantry, they cooked and cleaned up, helped with laundry, picked up after the kids, and brought over toys and books and games, not to mention their own children to keep Elin and the boys entertained. Anything I could think of to do, they had already done it before I had the opportunity to get around to it.

Since they had things so well under control at Nicky’s house, I took a little time on Friday afternoon to head over to my apartment and pack up a bag with clothes and other essentials that I’d need while staying with him and the kids for the foreseeable future. Of course, I’d been showering, so I was clean, but there were only so many days in a row I could wear the same clothes, and I’d already passed that limit. They were starting to feel pretty ripe.