Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (20 page)

She scrubbed her face and hands with a paper towel and sank back into the cushions again, looking at him. “How’s your thumb?”

He held it up for her inspection. “You’ve cured me.” He cleaned himself up too, and leaned back next to her.

“Thanks for feeding me.”

“Of course.” He picked up her hand and laced each of her fingers through his. He wished he had a stereo to put on some music. He had a radio in the kitchen, but he only listened to it in the morning to get the news. He looked up at her, and she smiled at him. Squeezed his hand. He squeezed hers back.

“My sister isn’t well. Like, really, really not well. I want to move her in with me and she’s not exactly protesting.”

He played with the hair at her temple where it was standing up from static from the cushions. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m tired of looking at people and seeing nothing but their mortality. That’s what I’ve been thinking about, here on your couch while you fuss.”

“Tell me what you mean.”

“When my dad was in the hospital, even before that, all you could see, even in his face, was the cancer. Even when he was still basically himself. When it was at the end, and we were on the hospice floor, we looked at a lot of photo albums together. He wanted
to look at pictures of us as kids, and of my mom. It was impossible to believe that he was the same person in the pictures, even, and all I could think was, ‘He’s dying. This is my dad, dying.’ And I would look at the pictures of Mom, and think ‘She’s dead, she’s already gone, and wherever she is, if she’s anywhere, that’s where he is, even right now.’ ”

He moved closer and put the quilt over both of them.

“Sarah, she’s—not
there
, but she’s not here either. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to bring her back and it seems like everyone has a different idea of that. But I can see where what’s in her face could change, to this other thing. Where she’s gone. There’s being alive. And then there’s living, you know?”

She didn’t cry, but those stripes of red came back across her cheeks, into her temples. “You came here,” he said.

“I came here because when you touch me, you pin me down. You make me feel everything, right where I’m at. And there isn’t anything in your face but me.”

He kissed her forehead. “The things you say, Destiny.”

He kissed her. He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her.

She slid into his lap, and the quilt slid away from their bodies. He let himself touch her how he wanted, resisting nurturing her for now, just taking all of her skin and curves into his hands for himself. Except that the more he took, the more she pushed herself into his hands.

She felt heavy, substantial. He put his hands under her skirt and around her thighs clasped at his hips and squeezed, feeling the muscles give under his fingers. He slid his palms higher, pressing in hard, and curled his fingers around the muscles in her arse, under the lace of her panties. She was warm from her nap under the quilt.

He didn’t wait, or guess. She had come here for something, and he would give it to her.

He took off his shirt, and dumped her back on the sofa. Kicked off his shoes and hiked down his jeans and shorts. Stood in his living room with his nob pointed at Destiny. Started to put his hands on his hips, even, but he caught her grin, that looked very much like the beginning of a laugh, actually, and crossed his arms over his chest instead.

Then she laughed, and he laughed, and he started to feel sort of naked, actually, but it didn’t matter, because she was laughing.

He took a breath and pounced on her, where she was now cross-legged on the
sofa. She choked on her laugh, and he mercilessly wrestled her onto her back. Though she went rather willingly, it seemed.

“What now, Welsh?” Her eyes were back to shining and her lips and cheeks were pink.

He kept on with decisive action, and held her eyes while he undid the little pearl buttons of her blouse. When it was open, he reached around to unfasten her bra, and she grabbed his wrists and brought his hands back to the front and put his fingers on a little fastener at the front of her bra. “Ah. That’s clever, then.”

He tried to work the clasp, but his fingers suddenly felt clumsy, and he had to look away from her eyes, and her gaze was what was keeping him grounded, and the room was rather cold, actually.

“Hefin.”

He smoothed his hand over her breastbone. Over her belly. “Yeah?”

“Come here.” She took his shoulders in her hands and tugged until he arranged his body over hers, and they were face-to-face. Her expression was solemn, but her eyes still shined. “I’d like it if you’d kiss me. Would you like to kiss me, Hefin?”

As an answer, his body relaxed all over and he slid his arms up so he could cradle her face. Kissing Destiny was perfect. She always met him halfway; when they kissed, he’d retreat to breathe, to move over another part of her mouth, and when he came to claim her mouth again, she’d be there.

This kiss started slow, but then the room warmed again, or his body did. Her foot was caressing his calf restlessly, and when he was so breathless that he had to start in on her neck, just to have a warm and fragrant place to inhale and exhale, her hips bumped up and she was cradling his aching and heavy erection through the thin cotton of her skirt.

This time, the clasp opened as easily as if it were enchanted. When he dragged his tongue over her nipple, she tipped her head far back into the cushion and pressed her hips against him harder, gently scratched all over his back and shoulders. He spent a long time kissing and licking and sucking at her breasts, light and easy, some teeth, because when he ever so softly bit her there, right under her nipple where the skin of her breast was so rosy and yielding, she near shouted his name.

He pulled up her skirt, tucked it around her waist. Her panties were pale yellow lace, and he could see her gingery hair through them. He closed his eyes for a minute, but that made the small hold he had on his control less certain because, of course, then his
brain was flooded with how good that had looked—her pale skin inside yellow lace panties and an auburn shadow between her legs.

He opened his eyes to look at her. “If I ask you to keep those on while we …” He looked up at the ceiling like the answer to his paraphilia would be hanging there like a chandelier.

She laughed. Grabbed his face and kissed him, dirty and slow. Then she was terrible, because she reached between her legs and stretched the lace over, revealing just her sex. “Like this?” she whispered.

He kissed her forehead, grabbed her knee. “I’m a pervert,” he whispered back.

“Yeah, you are.” She made it all even worse by stroking him, soft and light in just that way that made him so mad. “I like it.”

“Would you like to …?” He kissed her cheek. The freckles under her right eye, which were denser than the crop under her left.

“Yes. I would like to.”

“Oh.” He sat up on his knees, meaning to reach for his jeans where he’d stuffed the condom box, but forgot what he was doing when he saw her there, laid out, her blouse and bra open, her skirt around her waist, her panties pulled aside. She looked—fantastic. Receptive and beautiful and gorgeously filthy.

“You’re so crazy hot,” she said. She reached up and ran her hand along his thigh.

“What are you doing?”

He thought about it. “Right. Condoms.”

She propped herself up like she would get away. “Do we need to change venue? I can …”

“No. I mean, if you want, we can. But, actually, don’t move. Stay just like that. It’s okay. I actually got some condoms when I picked up the pizza.” Hefin was completely starkers, so there was no hope of hiding the blush he could feel rising somewhere from the middle of his chest and setting his ears on fire.

So he ignored himself, always a good instinct, and leaned over and pulled the crushed box of condoms from his jeans pocket.

Destiny reached for his hand and pulled him back over her. It felt so good to feel her skin against his. So he just put his arms around her and she, thankfully, put her arms around him.

Then he reached around to put his hand around her nape and hold her even closer.
He could feel his heart beating in his chest, slow and glad.

“I want you to know that you’re wonderful, Hefin Thomas.”

He held her tighter.

He wanted her to know all kinds of things. He wanted to know all kinds of things about her. He wanted the world to be impossibly small. So small only the both of them fit inside it. Except. A small world would take the world away from both of them, and Destiny was Destiny because the world and her people existed all around her.

What he really wanted was to see the world with her. He wanted to show her the noodle house where he ate breakfast every morning in Beijing. He wanted to sit in a sailboat with her in the harbor that looked back at his town.

He wanted to walk down the streets of her neighborhood, the one she grew up in, and learn who lives in all the little houses and hear their stories.

He wanted to know what it was to live beside another and still know who you were. He wanted to know who he was, and to know who his beloved was, and still weave his legs in with hers at the end of every day and make love sideways. Facing the other. He wanted the world where that was possible. He wanted the passport.

He wanted.

Destiny wanted to laugh, and though she didn’t think Hefin minded so much how she was prone to giggle over him, she restricted herself to smiling into his neck.

She looked over at the smooshed box of condoms next to her arm and had to breathe through her nose to keep from laughing.

Strawberry
.

She came here to push her worries to the margins of her brain. To stop counting breaths in her head. Instead, she got dinner. Tea with so much sugar she felt she should talk to him about diabetes. That huge, huge space around herself that he expected her to fill with her thoughts and worries, with herself.

The space he made for her was still uncomfortable. She was accustomed to small houses, big families, front stoops, peering neighbors, an older brother and sister who took over conversations, took over everything, and a younger brother who lived in her shadow.

He looked at her with a focus that sharpened all of her blurring edges into something that made her feel—all by herself. Not lonely, though, more like she wasn’t accountable to anyone but herself. Like she could barrel through the world the same way her big brother Sam did, asking forgiveness later instead of ever wasting time on permission.

She was starting to realize there was a lot going on with Hefin. Much more than some sad bastard who got divorced and couldn’t get a job and was going home to mom and dad. In her world, honestly, those things were pretty much par for the course for any man over the age of thirty.

She didn’t have her head completely around it, but it had something to do with why his apartment looked like some kind of sterile model home except for that battered, linoleum-topped kitchen table.

“Hefin?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you always lived here?”

He stilled. But she just squeezed him harder. Now something was starting to come
into focus for her. “This was your place with Jessica, huh?”

“It was.”

“You don’t have to talk about it. I don’t think there’s really any reason to. You know what though?”

“No, I don’t know.”

“I mean, this is rich, coming from me, the woman showing up at your place and talking you out of your clothes, but Jesus Henry, Hefin, I kind of get the sense things were a bit more impossible for you than was exactly fair.”

He stiffened even more, and she smiled. She could
feel
his defense of Jessica rising up from his toes. She rubbed over his shoulders and kissed his neck. Dang, he was the sweetest man.

He huffed around pretending not to be, that forehead wrinkle of his bisecting the middle of his forehead like his thoughts were so heavy they were going to crack his skull right open, but here he was, in the arms of a woman whom he had fed and kissed and touched and gotten all hot and bothered, and he was still looking for a way to defend his ex-wife.

She supposed some women might be bothered by that, but when you grew up getting crazy angry at the same people you would fight to the death over on the playground, the rules were probably a little different.

Lacey had to physically restrain herself from getting back together with her ex even though he was a Pure Organic Grade A Shitheel simply because the news would occasionally get back to her that he defended her honor with his fists after getting drunk at the local bar.

Hefin was a good man, is what Des was thinking. Didn’t mean his wife didn’t deserve to be taken to task, though.

“I just mean, what were you supposed to do, exactly?”

“We could talk about this later.”

She smiled again. “Yeah, okay. Raise up.” She pushed on his shoulders.

He braced himself above her on his forearms, and holy crap, that was hot. She couldn’t look at his forearms straight on without making a mess of her underwear, as it was. She realized she should tell him that, sometime, just to see what he would do—look down at the floor and stammer, probably. Right before he asked her if he could see exactly what she was talking about.

“So.”

He squinted at her. She wiggled up against him. It was insane, but he still had a hard-on. She was going to have to take him to the emergency room if she didn’t do something about it.

So instead of wasting any more breath on talking, she kissed him. She had been thinking, all week, about that moment he had brought her close to his body, their legs woven all together, and then slid inside, full and stretching and so completely hers. Almost like she was inside him, too.

She wanted to feel that again.

He kissed back. Deep and licking, and she could
feel
him cross over the boundary, away from his own thoughts in that kiss. It was almost as satisfying a sensation as feeling that first push inside, when she literally could make him lose his mind.

He used his braced arms to rock his body over hers, just to slide their skin together, then he was holding himself on one arm and using the other to reach between her spread legs and stretch her panties the rest of the way over and glide his big fingers through her.