Promise (30 page)

“Fuck babe, good girl. Show me how you cum. Let me feel you cum . . .”

My balls are about to explode, but I keep it in check, watching her ride me, grinding down until her body shakes and she floods me with her cum.

I love this angle. Half leaning, half sitting so I have the imperial view and easy access to explore all of her with my hands.

Promise’s hair is tangled over her face, and I’m mesmerized by the sway and movement of her tits. She rocks hard, back and forth, up and down, gasping and moaning until I feel the clutch of her as she goes faster and faster.

The beautiful noise of her climax spins my head and fills the entire room. I let her do as she wishes until her body stops twitching and her raw whimpers turn to fast breaths.

She collapses onto my face, suffocating me in the most delicious way with the soft round curves of her tits. The way she clamps down on my dick has me about to lose it inside her, but I clench my teeth together until her screams soften, and her hips come to rest.

I run my hands up her back and feel her slick sheen of sweat.

“I’m about to explode, babe.” I begin to gently guide her up and off my dick, fighting the primal urge to go deep and hard, to let my seed find that home inside of her. The hunger to fill her gnaws at me, unrelenting.

As soon as the words leave my lips, her thighs grip around my hips, and she begins to dance on me again.

“More . . .” she whispers.

She spreads herself onto my chest as her pussy tightens and strokes me. I hear her little breaths in my ear, and I’m done.

“Babe . . .” My voice cracks as I try to lift her off.

“Cum inside me.” Her whisper comes out painfully, and I feel my world shift.

I’ve never heard anything more beautiful in my life and, with that, my balls seize up. Promise locks her sore, battered pussy around my thick shaft. It's the last thing I remember. Spasms start down in my damn toes and don't stop until I set myself deep and let it all go.

A roar comes out of me, and my body raises up. I clamp my arms around her waist, holding her onto me until cum is dripping out around my dick, and I sink my claws into the soft flesh of her hips.

She’s shaking and moaning, and I know pushing her so deep has to be a new kind of pain, but I am no longer who I was a moment ago. When she let my seed flow inside of her, I became the beast. The one I’d been battling to push away the last two days lest he tear her apart.

My breath sounds ragged as it burns hot against her neck. I fight the urge to bite her but lose. With the last jolt of my release rocking me, I set my teeth into her shoulder. I hear her high pitched yelp as I flip her over onto her back and hold my dick as deep as I can inside the woman that now owns me as much as I own her.

Both of us are panting and slick, the beast in me still foraging to come forward but the gentleman in me knowing she needs something else right now.

My cock doesn’t soften, and in this new position, I begin to stroke slower, whispering things I never believed would come out of me.

“You are beautiful. Tell me, who do you belong to? I need to hear it.”

She arches into me, my hands gripping her hair, forcing her eyes to mine.

There is no way to be closer to her. My eyes on hers, my dick clutched inside her walls, and my soul’s cry that we are no longer separate people.

She stays with me as I rock, her arms latching around my neck. Our bodies know what to do.

“Tell me. Answer me.” My voice deepens, my hands pull at the roots of her hair until her mouth opens.

“
You.
I belong to you.” Her words are magnificent, but the way her eyes do not leave mine is priceless.

I pour everything I can't say into every movement. I was made to be inside of her. Every second, she is more amazing than the last. She takes everything I give and, in return, gives more of herself to me.

No person or possession has belonged to me more than she does right now—and I realize she is both.

I work slowly, then quicken my pace until I feel her tighten. Her body is mine, meshed together with mine, slick, and we move together, harder yet soft at the same time. My eyes watch her face in that glorious moment when what I give her pushes her to the place where there is no time or struggle.

I pull her as tight as possible without breaking her. I feel every wave and shake as she comes. With her noises rising in the room, I try to remember each note and inflection of that music. When my dick holds up the white flag and explodes again, I know I will forever be responsible for her happiness.

For her everything.

It is what I was born to do.

Beckett

Shit.

“Get these on before I lose my fucking mind.” I hold out her scrubs as she wiggles around in her panties and some crazy, white, lace bra that has my dick ready for another bombing run.

“Take them off, put them on . . . you need to decide what you want.” She gives me a playful pout before taking the folded uniform and swishing her fine ass into the attached bath.

Once I get my mind back in check, I look around her room and lay back in amazement at the explosion of colors and images that cover the walls, sit in stacks, and lean against every vertical surface.

“I’m going to guess what you do in your spare time.” I raise my voice so she can hear me over the water running in the sink.

I hear it shut off, and her smile comes into the doorway. “Oh yeah? What is it you think I do?”

Thank Christ she managed to get her scrubs on and give my dick a break. When she smiles, and her eyes trace around the walls, she looks so much like that little girl I saw back in that courtroom ten years ago.

Watching her fiddle with her earring, then glance back in the mirror and touch her hair, it is an exquisitely common moment. Yet, it seems every detail of her movements—the way her skin is pink on her cheeks, the wisp of hair she can’t seem to tame—are show stoppers for me now. For the first time in my life, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I know where I belong. It’s up to me to make sure she feels the same way.

“You’re a storyteller.” I follow the walls around the bedroom. It’s beautiful chaos everywhere I look. “In every one of these paintings, I see a story.”

My heart feels like someone is squeezing. Each pump is hitting my veins hot and hard. Staring at the walls, each canvas looks like a volcano of orange, yellow and red. Every image unique but somehow the same.

I am mesmerized by a huge canvas on the opposite wall from her bed. It has two figures, black faces in shadow with a sky of flames behind.

Another one to the left is a woman lying prone on a bed. The bed is the fire, and her hands are pressed together in prayer. Her face is old, her body young. In the mirror above her bed is a reflection of another black face, featureless but still very much alive. The intensity and sadness send a chill down my spine.

There must be a hundred paintings covering the four walls. Each one has two things in common.

Something is on fire.

And a male figure without a face appears somewhere in each.

My body is thick and weighted down from the crush of what I feel from the paintings. It takes some effort to get to my feet, and I shake my arms out and remember just how fucking happy I am right now. I’ve got the bed made in a flash, my clothes on, and I try not to look at these new flames that surround me.

Promise is pinning her hair up in a bun as she turns to see me watching her, and she grins.

“What do you think?” she asks.

“They’re amazing. All of them. How long have you been painting?”

“I don’t know. Probably since I was twelve or so. But, most of the ones in here are from the last five years. I had to buy all the canvases myself, so probably since I was sixteen. I got a job that year so that I could buy them myself.”

“What was your first job?” I want to know every one of her firsts. Everything about her past.

She chuckles and crinkles her nose, then holds her hand up to her ear like she speaking into a phone. “Hi, this is Carol from Marathon Building Company. I’m calling to talk to you about your need for home improvements or repairs . . .” She finishes the canned speech then changes her tone back to her natural lilt. “It was horrible. I worked in this back room with twenty other girls, all of us repeating the same speech a hundred times a day, getting cursed out and hung up on. My boss’s name was Dottie, and she looked like a cross between Phyllis Diller and Dolly Parton.” Promise clears her throat and pins her eyebrows together, raising a wagging finger in the air. “
God damn it, get back to work! I’m not paying you to sit here and bullshit! If you don’t get on those damn phones, get the hell out!
” Promise smiles. “That was Dottie. But, I liked her. She was authentic.”

“Carol?” I can’t help but pick up on the name.

“Yeah, they made me use a more ‘normal’ name. Didn’t help. I got fired after a month. I moved up to cashier at Jax Car Wash after that.” She finishes with her hair and doesn’t bother to put away her hair brush or the other lotions and potions that fill her bathroom counter.

Just realizing she’s going to work for ten hours has my heart slamming around in my chest. I’m not ready to let her go. Not in any small way.

I stretch and take another look around at the walls of this room where she lays her head every night, and something catches my eye. It’s insignificant among the volume of flaming paint adorning the room. It would have been missed by anyone else. But not me.

It’s a scrap of notebook paper pinned to the wall between two paintings.

The paper’s edges are soft and gray. It’s been folded too many times, and the charcoal pencil lines are fading. My heart skips a beat.

The sketched silhouette is as haunting as it was that day. The words that cover her face pour over me, and the memories of that day tear loose, rising up from a place so deep and painful, I have to blink and look away. I don’t need to be close enough to the small drawing to read the words; I remember them. I wrote them that first day I saw her in the courtroom. The attorney addressed the court with a segment from an interview with Promise’s mother, conducted after Child Protective Services removed Promise and her brother from the apartment where they had been left alone. I wrote down pieces of the painful admission by a woman who did not deserve the title of mother.

“Because I can’t love them.

Because I don’t care enough.

Because he’s more important to me.

Because it’s too much.

I can’t handle her.

I didn’t want him.

I can’t.

I won’t.

I’m done . . .”

I picked out the words that struck the hardest, the words I know must have branded such sorrow into her heart, and I stared at that little girl with white hair and porcelain skin, wondering why the fuck they would let her sit there and hear that shit.

I stared and sketched and then cried when I handed it to her. I covered my face and stuck it in her hand.

Before I walked into my dad’s room at Windfield a week ago and laid my eyes on Promise once again, I’d come to terms with the fact that I would have to settle for second best for the rest of my life. Women came and went. Mostly
went,
either because I told them to or because they caught on damn quick that I could be a distant asshole.

Rebecca was my last attempt. She put up with me for the three months I was home before my last tour, and then realized once I was back in the desert with my brothers, just exactly how empty the space between us had been.

It’s funny how some relationships can be fooled into thinking they are more when the sex is good. That was Rebecca. She fell in love with the way I fucked her, mistaking it for something else. Then, when the fucking ended, the cold light of just how disconnected I could be stared at her and could not be ignored.

She sent me that ten-page letter reciting all my deficiencies when it came to basic human relationships, and I couldn’t argue with one point she’d made. That is who I was. I’d fucked my way through enough women to know that what had happened yesterday and today with Promise wasn’t even close to what I’d done before.

“Ready?” When she smiles, she takes my heart right out of my chest, and I can only hope she can feel how fragile it is in her hands.

“Yep.” I help her slip her jacket over her scrub uniform and set my hand in the small of her back until I get her out the door of the apartment.

I pull her next to me, and we meet our strides down the hall. “So, I know we’ve been otherwise occupied, but I want to talk about last night. I need to know what’s going on. I need to know everything about you, and clearly, whatever I walked in on was pretty important in your life.”

I can feel her tense as we move in silence down the hall, outside and into the truck. She keeps pulling at a loose thread on the collar of that tangerine colored jacket. She coils the black and white striped scarf around her neck as she settles into the passenger seat. I give her the time because I can feel she needs it, but now it’s enough.

“I’m waiting.” I put the Suburban in drive and give her a look that lets her know she needs to start talking