Light the Lamp (26 page)

“
Liam?” She was panting, breathless, perfect. One of her hands gripped me by the hair.
 

“
Yes,
älskling
?”
 

“
Will you…” She paused, arching her back further. Her eyes flashed, a darker blue than I’d ever seen them. “Will you rub your jaw on me?”
 

I would walk through fire for her if she asked me to. In answer, I turned my head to graze her nipple with the overgrowth of whiskers lining my jaw.

“
Oh!”
 

Her shout made me think it was too much. Liv had always wanted me clean-shaven. She’d been too sensitive to take the rasp of my facial hair. I tried to pull away, but Noelle held on to my head with both hands, keeping me right where she wanted me, moving me from one breast to the other. In no time, her little mewling sounds intensified to a fever pitch.

“
This is okay?” I said, my voice strangled. “I’m not hurting you?”
 

Her breathing had turned short and harsh, like she was getting close to coming, and I’d barely gotten started. “It’s wonderful,” she said.

I wanted her to climax but not too soon, so I flipped her onto her back and brought myself over her. She opened her thighs and let me settle my hips between them, and she sighed.

“
You like this?” I asked as I kissed the spot on her neck just below her earlobe.
 

“
Mmm-hmm.”
 

“
See? Slow and deliberate can be just as good.” Or better. I forced my attentions away from her hypersensitive areas, exploring every inch of her body. I traced the tops of her shoulders and the line of her collarbone with my fingertips. I kissed the inner bend of her elbows. I used my tongue to blaze a path down her ribs and abdomen to her belly button until she was giggling and squirming. I massaged her feet and calves, working my way up to her thighs, until no part of her body was unfamiliar. None but what her panties kept covered, at least.
 

When I took the waistband between my teeth, my hands teasing her inner thighs, Noelle moaned. I tugged, gently lifting her hips. She put her feet flat against the mattress, her knees bent, and raised up to ease the way for me to remove that last barrier. When I had them down to her ankles, I tossed them aside and nudged her thighs apart. God, but she was beautiful—pink and slick and perfect, with golden curls covering her mound. And she was all mine.

With my fingers, I explored her outer folds and tenderly touched her entrance, all the while watching her eyes. “Tell me if anything hurts,” I said. She nodded, biting down on her lip as I slid a finger inside. She was snug around me—as close-fitting as I remembered from last night—and incredibly responsive. I’d barely touched her when she bit down on her lip, tossing her head back.

I added a second finger, moving them inside her heat and curling them upward to stroke the swollen flesh there. Her hips bucked up toward me. I lowered my head, my tongue seeking and finding the taut, little nub I knew would take her over the edge. I suckled and swirled, my fingers gliding within her liquid heat.

She tightened around me, practically hyperventilating, and she clutched my hair with both hands. “Liam?” My name was a whispered prayer on her lips.

I was fairly certain I knew what she wanted. After a few more flicks of my tongue on her clitoris, I lifted my head and grazed my jawline over her sensitive flesh, careful not to press too hard. My eyes fell to hers as I did it. She started out staring at me, but then her head fell against the pillows and her eyes rolled back into her head, her walls clenching my fingers.

She came with a smile on her face. I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life.

 

I hadn’t understood
what Liam was talking about when he’d insisted I needed to climax, too. Not until then. I’d thought that sex was a little painful, at least the first time, and definitely kind of messy, but overall just a nice, pleasant way to bring two people together.

This wasn’t nice and pleasant. This was euphoric. It was like fireworks exploding under water—something that seemed completely insane and impossible but that, in the end, turned out to be the most mind-blowing reality you could ever dream up.

I felt all ooey-gooey afterward, as if my bones had turned to mush and my brain had gone out the window. I felt sore, too, but I didn’t care about that.

Liam moved up to lie beside me. He rested his head on the same pillow mine was on, drawing me closer to him with one arm around my waist. He kissed me long and slow and deep.

When I felt as though my muscles were functioning properly again, I tried to pull him onto me. He still hadn’t had his climax. I could feel his erection, hot and hard, against my hip.

He wouldn’t budge. “Not tonight,
älskling
.”

Not tonight?
“Why not?”

“
You’re too sore, my love. I don’t want to hurt you.” With his palm and fingertips, he caressed the side of my face. There was such gentleness, an aching sort of tenderness, in every touch he gave me.
 

“
It won’t hurt too much,” I said. I wanted to give him that, if nothing else. We still hadn’t found any other way I could reciprocate his kindness, and I wouldn’t be in his life much longer if we couldn’t.
 

“
I want tonight to be all about you, though, and I don’t want to hurt you at all. I hate that I did last night. I want to take care of you.”
 

That wasn’t news. He’d already made it abundantly clear just how much he wanted to take care of me. I bit down on my tongue to keep from arguing with him because it was becoming obvious that he was no closer to letting me take care of him than he had been before. My complaints seemed to be falling on deaf ears. He claimed to love me, and I didn’t doubt that he cared for me, but he refused to see how unequal our relationship had become.

He drew me even closer to him, nestling my head on his chest and settling my arm over his waist. Then he ran his hands along my arms and back, over and over again, until at last—despite the unease making knots in my chest as I fought with myself about leaving—I fell asleep.

My dreams that night skirted the border of nightmares, at least for me. In them, Liam stood me on a platform and loaded my arms with gifts, but then he turned a crankshaft that raised my platform ever higher. With each turn of the crank, the space I was standing on got smaller and smaller, and he kept tossing more presents up to me until I was balancing on only my toe with more than three times my weight in boxes held aloft. I finally couldn’t stand on the platform any longer, and I fell, landing in his arms. That was how I woke, wrapped up in Liam’s arms as though he’d caught me, our legs tangled together in a mass of limbs.

Liam was already awake, staring at me with troubled eyes. “You had a fitful sleep,
älskling
.” He kissed me on the forehead, one hand smoothing my hair back over my head. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”

I rolled away from him and sat up, searching for my pajama top on the floor. “I’m fine,” I lied.

“
You can tell me.” He sat up and put a hand on my waist.
 

I shrugged away from him, desperate at least for a moment to gather my thoughts before facing him. “There’s nothing to tell.” I grabbed the tank and pulled it over my head before standing up. My panties were near the foot of the bed on the floor. I picked them up and tugged them on before heading into the bathroom and pulling the door closed, needing a bit of separation.

His beleaguered sigh reached my ears through the door.

When I came back out, he’d left my room. I took a moment to rest my forehead on the cool wall, trying to compose myself. I shouldn’t go out with the girls today. Going to the spa wouldn’t solve any of the issues between me and Liam. Besides, I didn’t have any means of paying for this stuff. It wouldn’t be right to let Liam pay for it when I fully intended to leave.

Really, I ought to leave today. Before Rachel came to pick me up.

Staying any longer would just mean I was taking advantage of him, and that was something I wasn’t prepared to do. Not any longer. I’d given him the week that he’d insisted upon, but I couldn’t let this go on. One thing I had never been, and was not prepared to become, was a leech. I would take enough clothes to get me by for a little while and go to the women’s shelter—and then I’d set to work finding a job and making something of myself that I could respect.

Liam wasn’t going to like it, and I knew very well that he would probably argue with me about my decision, but it was
my
decision to make.

And I’d made it.

There wasn’t really any point in waiting around. I took the duffel bag Sara had brought that first night from the closet and started packing the clothes I’d most need while living out of a shelter. I put my purse in the bag, as well, and my public transportation pass. On the bed, I laid out an outfit to put on once I’d talked to Liam and taken a shower.

Should I shower and dress first? He might get so upset that he would ask me to leave right away once I spelled everything out. But no, that wasn’t really like him. The longer he could keep me here, the longer he would think he had the opportunity to change my mind and convince me to stay.

It would be better to just tell him and get that part over with. The shower could help to cleanse all the stress of it away afterward.

I pulled on some pajama shorts in case Babs was up, steeled my spine, and took a breath. Then I picked up my bag and headed out into the living room so I could tell Liam what I’d decided. He was nowhere to be found, though. Of course he wasn’t. That would be too easy, and if I knew anything, it was that nothing about this would be easy.

Babs was in the kitchen making coffee, his brow knit together in a frustrated line. He set the filter in the basket and started measuring out coffee grounds to fill it. “Kally went to shower. He said you’re upset. He thinks you want to leave.”

For Liam to have walked out of my room like that without even saying a word, for him to be in the shower and not where we could talk about it, I knew I had upset him. My chest ached, thinking about how badly I must have hurt him by shutting him out. Some people would think he had deserved it—an eye for an eye—but I wasn’t like that. I hated being the cause of Liam’s pain.

Babs glanced up, his eyes traveling to the bag I’d just set outside my bedroom door. The corners of his mouth twitched. “I see he’s right.”

“
I have to leave,” I croaked out.
 

“
No, you don’t.” His voice had taken on that angry sort of tone he’d had yesterday morning, when he’d been arguing with Liam, and I blanched as a result of it. I wasn’t used to having someone upset with me, but Babs was definitely more than just a little bit annoyed. It seemed as though I was the ignition point behind his irritation. He finished adding grounds finally, having put in probably twice as much as he needed to make reasonably strong pot. “If you leave now, you’re just running away from something you don’t want to face. You can’t do that. You’re better than that. Kally deserves better than that.”
 

I wasn’t sure what he thought I was running away from, but he was wrong. I wasn’t running
from
something; I was running
to
something. To a life where I could look at myself in the mirror and not feel like a parasite. “You don’t know—”

“
There are a hell of a lot of things I don’t know, Ellie.” He turned the coffeemaker on and tossed the measuring scoop into the sink with enough force that it clattered around for a minute before settling. “But I’ll tell you what I do know. I know you’re sleeping with Kally, and you both told me it’s about more than just fucking. I know you have to care about him an awful lot for that to be taking place because you’re not the kind of person who just sleeps with random people for the hell of it. Neither one of you are. I know you deserve to have a man like him in your life, and I know he’s a much happier person with you in his life. I don’t know and I don’t care what makes you think you need to walk away. He doesn’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go. I don’t think you want to go, but you’ve got some crazy idea in your head that’s telling you have to. But that’s wrong. You’d have to be stupid to walk out on him—on this—and you’re not a stupid person. You can’t leave.”
 

“
But I—”
 

“
No. Not today, at least.” Babs crossed into the living room and put his hands on my upper arms. He turned me around and nudged me back toward my bedroom. “Go shower and get dressed. You’re going out with Katie and Rach and Dee and the others, and you’re going to enjoy yourself. When that’s over, you and Kally can talk. I’ll make myself scarce, but you can’t leave like this.” As though to emphasize his point, he grabbed my bag and tossed it on the bed.