Page 60 of Freed
He guides me backward until the backs of my knees meet the edge of the bed. I sink onto it almost without realizing, and he follows, standing between my legs, looking down at me with that same devastating stillness. Like this matters. Like I matter. Like he’s about to ruin us both and intends to do it slowly.
“You tell me to stop,” he says, voice darkening, “and I stop.”
A tremor moves through me.
He waits. That waiting nearly undoes me more than his hands.
“I’m not going to stop you,” I whisper.
His eyes burn.
“No,” he says softly. “You’re not.”
He kisses me again, deeper this time, and I feel his hand slide beneath my leggings, over bare skin, slow enough to make me shiver. He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t take. He coaxes. Teases. Learns me all over again with every deliberate touch until my head tips back and my breathing goes ragged as he finally reaches my clit.
“Look at you,” he murmurs, his forehead briefly touching mine. “So angry. So beautiful. And still falling apart for me.”
“I’m not?—”
The protest breaks when his hand moves again, and suddenly words feel impossible. A quiet, humiliating sound escapes me.
His gaze locks onto my face, hungry and intent. “There she is.”
My cheeks burn. “Don’t.”
“Why?” His voice turns silk smooth. Merciless. “Because you don’t want to hear how sweet you sound when you stop fighting me?”
He keeps talking to me like that, low and dark and patient, every word wrapping around the heat building inside me until I don’t know whether I want to kiss him or curse him or both. Maybe both. Probably both.
He tells me to breathe. Tells me to let him have this. Tells me not to hide from him when he can feel exactly what he’s doing to me. And every time I try to gather enough pride to throw one of his own words back at him, his mouth or his hands make a liar out of me.
The worst part is that he knows it.
“You don’t have to be good for me,” he says, mouth at my throat, his hand coaxing me higher, closer to the edge of something shaking and bright. “You just have to let go.”
I’m trembling now.
Not from fear.
From the unbearable pressure of wanting this while still hating him for making me want anything at all.
My fingers bury in his hair. My other hand clutches the sheets hard enough to wrinkle them. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” He lifts his head, and his eyes pin me where I sit. “You can come apart for me and still be furious when it’sover. You can hate me and need this. You can feel all of it, Elizabeth.”
The words crack something open in me. Because that is the truth, isn’t it? It isn’t one thing or the other.
It’s all of it.
Rage and grief and want and memory and hunger, all knotted together so tightly I can’t separate them anymore.
And Lorenzo is right there in the middle of it, looking at me like he sees every piece.
“Let it happen,” he says, almost tenderly now. “I’ve got you.”
That should not be what does it.
But it is.
