Blazed (10 page)

I was damned if I was going back down that path.

I MUST HAVE eaten my body weight in garlic bread before Blaze let me leave the table of the pizzeria, feeling sleepy, overstuffed and greasy. As I'd expected, the food was delicious, but there were enough people in that dining room to stop me losing myself in the flavours. It felt like I had a captive audience as ever, watching each bite eagerly with their fingers gripping into the wooden table tops, wondering if this mouthful would make the girl so slight erupt like an emetic volcano. They knew that much was inevitable
— I was positively green when we slumped back out into the big, wide, crowded world.

Blaze had at least had the decency to exercise his pushy concern in a way that didn't make me feel observed. Even though I knew he was considering all the reasons why I might have such a dire appetite and a torso like road kill, his insistence that I ate what he'd served onto my plate was gentle, unlike the army drill
 sergeant attitudes that had been utilised by just about everyone else. What he'd laid out hadn't been excessive, but enough for me to struggle. Like a child, he enticed and bribed me to keep eating until he could tell that it would do more harm than good. I didn't clear the plate, but I'd eaten. That seemed to be good enough for him.

And I'd eaten for no reason other than to wipe the anxiety off his face. I'd never cared before, why did I care now? For him? Not even Hunter's 'encouragement' had worked as well as Blaze's.

A part of me had dared to hope that he was joking about shopping, but the looming buildings of
Oxford Street slipping back into view squashed any of that fruitless optimism right down into the ground. Blaze ignored my audible groan and pulled me into a department store that was too bright and too frantically loud. Finely-polished women wearing too much make-up swirled around us dressed in fine black tunics. As soon as they spotted him, they gushed with almost disgusting streams of salesmanship jargon and far too obvious lust for him. Like I had when Jonathan had joked about roping him into their gay soiree, I began to feel unjustifiably territorial. My grip tightened around our already linked fingers— a way in which Blaze preferred to walk with me. I wouldn't lose him to one of those super sleek jezebels, even if he wasn't really mine to lose.

Our pace didn't slow until we found the women's department, full of svelte housewives and rubbernecking teenagers who pointed and whispered between themselves.
 
Don't worry, they're not interested in you,
 the fat girl whispered next to me, pointing incredulously at scrap of material that barely qualified as a skirt, 
nobody is ever really interested in you.
 My pace stalled, though not enough to deter Blaze from an energised trawl of the shop floor, picking up garments at random and slinging them over the arm that joined with mine. They were all so 
small
 and in sizes that surely wouldn't fit. The styles were all super urbane like the stranger in the suit or daringly low cut and revealing, so far removed from the comfort zone of my linen trousers and work shirts.

After a ten minute surge of power shopping, I found myself shoved into a dressing room. In fact, I found myself shoved into several dressing rooms in several shops that provided less than complimentary lighting and mirror combinations, and pumped loud obnoxious music into the building via loud speakers that always seemed to be right over wherever I stood. Sensory overload.
 

"You know what really frustrates me about you?" Blaze called to me through a curtain that barely covered the gap into the small vestibule with mirrors on all three solid sides. I pulled it across and waved a hand at the outfit I was wearing
— a denim skirt that showed far too much leg and some kind of chiffon sleeveless shirt, both in a minuscule size six. I was being forced to seriously reconsider how I dressed myself. 

"Everything I imagine."
 

"Other than everything." He grinned and gave a thumbs up to the outfit, just as he had for nearly every other outfit he'd forced me to try on. The stack of bags behind his feet was embarrassing, and we'd never stopped to pay for anything. It had all materialised, already packed and ready to walk out with when I re-emerged from the dressing rooms wearing my own trash-sack clothing. I would undoubtedly analyse the hell out the situation at
 
Esme's
 that night. "I never know what you're thinking. You must be a real nightmare to date."

"I thought you had me pegged?" We caught each other in a sceptical eye lock for a moment before I pulled the curtain back across.
"I wouldn't know, I've never dated."

"Never? Why the hell not?"

"I just don't. And nobody has ever tried to convince me to do so." Not that I'd given anyone half the chance. Blaze already knew that I couldn't get attached, and if he hadn't guessed by now that it was nigh on impossible to convince me to change my habits, he'd been walking with his eyes closed.

"You know why that is? Nobody knows where they stand with you. You treat your family like your enemies, your enemies like your friends and your friends like your family. God knows how you treat lovers... Wait, you're a not a vi
—"

Not really caring that I was wearing nothing but my underwear, I whipped the curtain back fast enough to shock him. "No! What do you take me for? I've probably had more sex this year than you have in your lifetime. You'd be hard pushed to find someone I haven't... you know." Embarrassingly, most of the faces I'd seen in that particular shop had been underneath me at some point. In open air, the scathing expressions were all generic and the same. In smaller, more intimate areas, I recognised every single face and they recognised me too.

Blaze's eyes flittered across my mostly naked form for a brief moment, purposely avoiding the scars on my left side, then settled back at my face. "When was the last time you left 
Esme's
 alone?" My mouth twisted ruefully. I couldn't give an accurate answer so I preferred to give none. "The night we met?"

"Esme." His jaw dropped, eyes flooding with the same look I'd seen on Chris' face when I caught him watching lesbian pornography at a LAN party.
 

"You're bisexual?"
 

"No, I'm just not fussy. I don't put any emotional value in sex. It's just something I enjoy and it feels the same whoever does it. Well, better if one of my friends does it because they obviously they know my sweet spots."

"The gay couple?" I flushed scarlet. Even Daniel and Jonathan found themselves curious on occasion, and after all Daniel had done for me when I was younger, I was only too happy to offer my 'services'. "The big nerdy guy?"

"Chris," I raised a finger to Blaze's face severely, "would surprise you."

"It's not emotionally significant to you 
at all?
" His baffled eyes darkened and smouldered, shifting into a look that made my insides clench. 
Dear god... Is he turned on? 
"You have sex with your 
friends
, then go on like nothing ever happened? You don't just throw everyone onto the discard heap?"

"There are loopholes..." My voice muted to a whisper, unsure of his reaction. It would have been a great time to call me a whore and leave me stranded, but I didn't think he had it in him to do something like that.

"Loopholes?" His voice took on a low growl that sent a frisson of static through the small space between us. It was the same growl from when he'd unpinned my hair at Hyde Park, and again, I felt like I was about to get eaten alive. "Why the hell didn't you say so before?"

Before I could respond, he grabbed me by the waist and pushed me back into the dressing room until my back crushed against the mirror. His hands moved into my hair and his mouth met mine, teeth clashing at the ferocity with which he kissed me. He ate me like he ate his food
— ravenous and mad for it.

"Looking at you in all those tiny outfits
— Shit!" He ducked down to divest us both of our lower garments, grabbed my legs and pulled them around his waist, impaling me in one swift movement. My fingers clawed into the back of his neck, then grabbed for the indiscreetly left open curtain. My legs tightened around him, pulling him closer to me, and I clung to him while he fucked me until I was rigid. It was the realisation of what I'd wanted for the past nine days and better than the fantasy. My hands slipped under the fabric of his t-shirt to discover whether his body was what I'd imagined.

It was. Toned slabs of hard but not overly pronounced muscle tensing intermittently in my hands as he moved. His back was just as firm, and tightened when I dug my nails into the sinew in response to a particularly tactical thrust. Sweat started to bead on his skin, so he paused to rid himself of his t-shirt.

"Holy shit, Blaze!" I leered appreciatively, tongue trapped between my canines. Seeing it was better than feeling it, all the finely shaped bronze flesh of him, hot and pressed against me. He smirked wolfishly and leaned in to clamp his teeth around my bottom lip.

"Why, Miss White," he purred, flexing back into a steady rhythm, "are you objectifying me?"

"Objectifying the shit out of you. And I don't even know your surname." 

"Vixen."
 

We laughed for a moment before need and lust took over and drove us into a fast, desperate plea to find our release in each other. We mingled together, heavy breathed, in tune, nose to nose, eye to eye and trapped in the moment, until my head fell back against the mirror and my body went lax, awash with satisfaction and a hot blast of relief. And something else. Something stronger than I'd ever felt before. Affection and gratitude
— not for the orgasm but for the man who'd provoked it. For the sheer fact I'd found him.

IN that moment, I felt like I was standing in the middle of a train track staring directly into the rapidly approaching headlights. Something that I'd kept so separate from my emotions for so long had opened a floodgate I'd only ever hoped to be unlocked by one person. I'd fantasised about the same kind of needy, charged sex before, and it had always been a fantasy involving Hunter. That was always how I'd imagined it would be when two kindred spirits opened up to each other intimately. My universe shifted and centred around Blaze, a man I barely knew but knew me better than anyone else. I was cut wide open and weak for him to see, vulnerable and feeling like a liar. 

I didn't delude myself into thinking that he didn't see the cataclysm of emotions that coursed through me as I hung limp against him, desperately trying to gather my scattered wits. Neither would I insult him by denying it if he broached the subject. For the sake of my own sanity, I was prepared to be honest and cut him off completely. He'd been lured in only by the promise of my detachment and I'd failed to provide that
— he'd wanted the connection even less than I had. 

But when I looked up, I could see in his eyes that he was on those train tracks with me. His face said exactly what we were both too afraid to put into words;
 
this wasn't supposed to happen
. After such a short period of association, my confession to being loose and his fucking me senseless had thrown the flame on the kindling we had no idea we'd set out. Lust had become something almost too painful to bear and led us down a path neither of us wanted to tread for any number of reasons. We both had fallen, hard and fast, into a dangerous place that would undoubtedly make us do crazy things to each other. 

When our breathing steadied, we stood in an awkward silence, him still semi-hard inside me and both of us mostly stripped naked. The buzzing voices outside reminded me where we were and pure panic set in. Any normal couple engaging in a danger fuck in a changing room would be big news, but something like this would have me identified. A fast exit was necessary if we stood any chance of escaping without our names sprawled out across gossip columns
— my name well known even if the face wasn't. Like this situation wasn't stressful enough.

Without looking at him, I separated our bodies and grabbed my scruffy shirt from the hook stuck to one of the mirrors. When my arm twisted around him, he caught it by the elbow and squeezed gently. "Emmeline." A silent agreement passed between us that our ugly feelings would go undiscussed but frequently indulged
— the craziness would be allowed to happen even though we'd deny it existed out loud. Whatever it was we thought we felt wouldn't be given a name or taken too seriously. If we talked about it, that made it real. It was enough that we secretly knew it was there, knew that the other was aware, and would consider it a guilty pleasure. 

He burned with covert passion for me, and only me, and I was right there with him. Caught in his flame and scorching, he
 
was
 the distraction I dreamed of. How long that would last remained a mystery, but whether or not it was temporary, there was no way I'd walk away from him with anything less than third degree burns. 

Then all that terror and confusion melted into a drowsiness that made me sag down onto the bench behind me. My eyes grew heavy and battled to stay open as I pulled my shirt back over my arms.