Page 99 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Catching my wrist, he drags my hand down.
“Clean up what you did.” He growls.
The words slam into me.
Staring at him for half a second, dazed and still trembling, I obey.
Leaning in, I drag my tongue along the slick line of his jaw first, tasting myself there. His breath hitches as I lick the corner of his mouth, then across his lower lip, then the damp sheen on his cheek where my orgasm splashed him. Every pass is slow, intimate enough to feel filthy. Tightening his grasp on my waist while I clean him with my mouth, my gaze meets his. His eyes are already on me, dark, burning…almost disbelieving.
Swallowing, I sink to my knees.
The floor is cool under my legs, the steam wrapping around me, the shower still hissing somewhere just behind him. Uphere, standing over me in his sweats with his chest bare and bruised and his face still damp from me, he looks devastating. Bigger somehow. More dangerous. More vulnerable. My hands go to the waistband of his sweats, fingers trembling with what I’m about to see.
He doesn’t stop me.
He doesn’t move at all as I pull the waistband down slowly.
First the sharp V of his hips appears, then more skin, then the dark ink I’ve only ever glimpsed before. The hidden tattoo at his waist.
My breathing stalls.
It’s a moth.
Not abstract. Not decorative. A moth rendered in dark, delicate detail, wings spread over his lower hip, beautiful, private, and instantly, devastatingly familiar. My fingers go still on the fabric as my pulse turns to static in my ears.
No.
No.
Dragging the sweats lower by instinct, my eyes stay locked on the tattoo, the world narrowing until there is nothing in it but ink and memory. The shape. The wings. The unmistakable echo of another one.
Rose.
My moth.
Parting my mouth, my hands stop just at the base of him, frozen there, not because I don’t want more but because the realization hits me so hard it steals the ground out from under me. Looking up at him, he is already watching me, face unreadable except for the rawness underneath it.
“Y-you,” I whisper.
The word barely makes it out.
His throat moves, but, he doesn’t look away.
“The St. Augustine boy-”
Something in his expression shifts then, not denial, not surprise.
Surrender.
He exhales through his nose, slow and shaking. “I got my own Rose,” he says quietly, “to remember the only person who ever made me feel like I might be worth a damn.”
The bathroom goes silent inside me.
Not literally, the shower is still running, steam still filling the room, our breathing still ragged, but all of it drops behind the force of those words. Staring at him from the floor, one hand stays curled in the waistband of his sweats, the other hovering uselessly at his hip near the moth. My heart pounds so hard it hurts.
The St. Augustine boy.
The one I thought I lost to time and all the wreckage in between.
