Slow Burn (19 page)

He’s so incredibly deep inside me—feels so fucking good—that I don’t even realize my eyes are closed, face angled up to the ceiling, and hands are gripping Becks’s hands, which are still holding on to my hips. The pressure begins to build, spears of white-hot heat shooting sparks up my spine, causing my breathing to quicken but my rhythm to remain even and seductively slow, despite his hands urging otherwise.

I lose myself in the feeling for a moment, letting the current of our union overwhelm me until Becks shocks my head forward when he adds a subtle grind to his hips along with my motion. I look to meet his eyes—lids half-closed as the sublime sensations begin to pull him under.

But when our gazes meet, the intimacy of the moment as we keep moving—our bodies, our thoughts, our souls connecting all at once—is so powerful that we falter for a minute. My body is damp with sweat, and goose bumps threaten, the intensity of the emotion so overwhelming, it drowns me momentarily.

His dick involuntarily pulses within me, causing a sly smirk to shadow his lips. His arrogance is unexpected and sexy as hell. I squeeze around him, and I love the groan my action garners from him. He begins to urge my hips to move again with our linked hands, and I want to keep this steady course, not rush it because damn he feels like fucking Heaven.

So I take control and move our joined hands to his chest so that I can hold them there while gaining some leverage to maneuver my hips in different angles. I lean forward and press my lips to his, slipping my tongue in between. My forward motion exposes more of his dick, from the crest just to the opening of my sex, so that when I slide horizontally, his head hits every damn nerve I possess. I moan, his mouth capturing the sounds he’s coaxing from me, and with each thrust of his hips upward and my push downward, my body jolts with even more awareness, the precipice of bliss that much closer.

I tell myself to take note of everything—the slide of my chest against his, his taste on my tongue, his complete domination of every fucking sensation below my waist, the soft exhale of pleasure he makes when I take him completely inside me. All of these factors help heighten my sensations, push me up and over the edge.

The sex this time is so different from last time between
us. Whereas before it was a discovery of bodies and a proving ground of abilities, this time it is slow and mesmerizing. When my orgasm hits with a violent intensity, I’m not prepared for the breath it steals from me.

Yes, my toes curl and my back arches like normal, but I’m shaken irrevocably as the flash of vulnerability streaks through me. My body is left trembling as the intense sensations of pleasure ricochet back to my core, my heartbeat a thunderous roar in my ears, and my body starving for the air my brain can’t seem to tell my lungs to suck in.

My name falls in a strained exclamation from Becks’s mouth as his hands hold my hips still. He grows iron hard within me, making my body sing with the added pressure, and then he’s lost to his own onslaught of sensations. His body tenses as his hips thrust fervently and his neck arches upward, his fingers digging harder into my skin as a guttural moan fills the silence around us.

I lay my head against his chest and listen to his heart, which I’ve helped send into its current rapid beat, my own feeling like it’s quickening too but for a different reason. I close my eyes as Becks presses a kiss to the top of my head, his fingertips trailing lazy lines up my spine and then back down in a way that gives me goose bumps. We sit there for a few moments, coming down from our orgasmic hazes. He begins to soften so that he slips out of me, and I move so he can clean up, but instead he just wraps his arms around me and holds me against his chest.

“We are,”
he murmurs, repeating the words back to me before emitting a satisfied moan. “We are.”

My breath hitches with his comment, my own response tangled in the confusion in my head. This feels so right with him at the same time that I’m worried I’m only going to cause us pain. But I push the worry from my head because everything will be okay. It has to be.

“’Night, City.”

“’Night.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, both satisfied and scared by the man who’s at fault for breaking the first link in the chain I wrapped around my guarded heart. Whereas I used to use sex to quiet my thoughts, this time it’s had the opposite effect.

My thoughts are screaming so loud now that they can’t be ignored.

The transition between sleep and waking is gentle. I’m in that dreamlike haze where my mind is drifting softly, trying to fall back under the pull of slumber so that I can return to sitting with Lex by the pool, where we were talking. Where we were laughing and I felt closer to her than I had in forever. Every single thing I feared I had forgotten about her—the pitch to her laugh, the line of her posture, the ease of her smile—was there, allowing me to grasp it back and hold on to it a little longer.

I’m not startled or surprised by the fact that I’m pressed up against Becks’s naked body or in his bed. I vaguely remember the feel of his arms carrying me in here from the couch. I note the rise and fall of his chest beneath my hand where it lies over his heart. I’m oddly the most at peace with myself that I have been in a long time, and I snuggle into the feeling as well as into Becks.

My thoughts tumble aimlessly as I will myself to go back to sleep to steal a few more hours ensconced in this feeling of relaxed contentment. But I’m at an awkward angle, my breasts smashed uncomfortably up against Becks’s firm torso. I begin to shift at the same time he turns in his sleep and find myself emitting a muffled cry as he lowers his arm and pinches a part of my breast.

It’s a split second of time. I’m sure thinking about it later I won’t even be able to process how fast the awareness hits me. The pain is quick and fleeting, and when I move in reflex to pull away from where my breast is pinched between the mattress and his back, I become conscious of the fact that I feel something there.

I sit up immediately, my mind fully alert but my subconscious telling me I’m crazy, all while my rational mind runs through a series of thoughts that are far from welcome. My breaths come out in sharp rasps. I tell myself it’s because I’ve moved so quickly, but I know the truth: The fear has taken hold.

I tell myself I was half asleep, my skin really was pinched, and that there’s nothing there to cause pain. No tumor, no cancer, nothing like Lex.

Next I take a calming breath, my fingers already moving toward my left breast. But whereas my routine checks are usually timid and gentle—more afraid of what I’ll find than not knowing what is there—I find myself pressing as hard as I can, being overly thorough. I become frantic in my movements as my mind starts running a million miles an hour. I keep moving in circles with the pads of my three fingers, but as memories and fear and disbelief start to collide, there is no rhyme or reason to my actions. I pull at the tissue, pressing my fingers together on both sides of the stretched skin, causing myself pain as I try to feel any trace of something.

Sitting in Becks’s bed with a stream of moonlight falling over it, I manage to work myself into a frenzy when I should be snuggled up against the handsome man fast asleep beside me—living, feeling, loving. I don’t know how much time passes because I’m so worried, so panicked that a mist of sweat coats my skin, and at some point, I must have started to cry because I taste salt from the tears that leaked out and reached my lips. My hands are trembling, and my mind is chastising me for not being able to re-create the same sensation that I felt moments ago.

Was it just moments ago? All I can think about is the possible parasite beneath my breast that threatens to take the life from me. I just about give up, my breast sore and reddened from my probing and prodding, my nerves so damn frayed that connecting one thought to another is
nearly impossible. I glance at the clock and realize I’ve been at this for a half an hour. I haven’t found anything yet … no lump, no bump, no dimple. I’m just making myself hysterical.

Calm down, Had
. You’re jumping to conclusions. It was nothing. You were asleep and you were thinking of Lex and it was just a pinch.

Quietly I sigh, glancing over at Becks to make sure he’s still asleep. I’ve already lost it once tonight with him, so this is the last thing I need him to see. He’s a patient man, but I think he just might give me the balcony exit if I lose it again.

As my shoulders sag, I tell myself one more time. I’ll examine myself one more time and then be done with it for the early-morning hours. I raise my hand and go through the motions, a slight sense of ease settling over me, when I just about stop and
I feel it
.

I freeze.

My fingers stop moving, the tissue still pinched between them. My eyes widen. My shaky inhale of breath fills the silence of the room.

My body stops, but my mind races as my whole world comes crashing down around me. I raise a trembling hand to stifle the choked sob that never comes. My eyes blur as I shake my head back and forth in shock, images of Lexi colliding against one another in my mind.

Time passes as I sit paralyzed with fear, numb with disbelief, and void of emotion.

Becks shifts in bed, and the movement jolts me to the here and now. I tell myself the lump is tiny, could be fibrous tissue, for all I know, but I don’t believe my own lies. I know it’s something more because I’ve made it a point to know my breasts in and out over the past year. I try to hold on, but I feel like my thoughts are slipping away from me as a false, eerie calm begins to settle over my body.

My hands shake and my mind tries to process but just keeps coming up empty. I won’t allow it to go where my
biggest fears lies, so I focus instead on right now. On the man beside me. On how I just opened up my heart, invited him in, and told him we are, and then look what happened.

I rise from the bed without thinking of collateral damage or the fallout. Of Becks lying in bed asleep and what to say to him because there is nothing I can say but sorry—and sorry doesn’t cut shit right now. Sorry doesn’t ease the overwhelming sense of disbelief that has struck me. The overused word doesn’t ease the sting of loss, of watching your loved one die, or of leaving someone so they don’t have to go through it and suffer with you.

I keep my eyes averted from him as I pull my clothes on and dress quietly on autopilot, focusing on zippers and buttons, habitual actions. I have to physically think to do each thing, perform each routine movement because when I don’t, I find that I just stand there and stare out the window to the world outside.

Carrying on like everything is fine when it’s clearly not.

Once I’m fully dressed, shoes in my hand so I don’t wake him up with their sound on the floor, my feet are still rooted in place. My chest physically hurts, and my head is pounding. My eyes burn, and my heart feels like it’s being twisted, acid eating holes through the muscle at a menacing pace.

I glance over to Becks and stare at him through the light of the night from beyond the windows. There are so many things I want to say to him, but all I keep thinking is how I jinxed everything. Tonight I went against everything I had promised myself, and look how fate came with a cruel backhand to put me in my proper place.

I should be used to it. Expect it. Right when everything was okay with Rylee and Colton from their hospital stints—just when my closest friend in the whole world was looking toward happily ever after, my sister was staring down a loaded shotgun.

These memories flicker and then flood me—accompanying her to mammograms, then her double mastectomy, brushing
her hair as clumps fell out, her fighting the fight and exhausting all resources—until I feel like I’m suffocating, reaffirming the fact that I can’t do this to Becks. A raw sadness marries with the grief I carry, and I tell him the empty words that I hate more than any others. “I’m sorry.”

The words feel like a noose closing over my neck.

I turn from the room and pad in my bare feet out to the family room, where I realize I don’t have my purse or my keys. I spot his wallet on the coffee table where he left it open when he pulled the condom out earlier and add injury to insult when I pull on the twenty-dollar bill partially exposed from it. I hate doing this, but I don’t have any other option. Just another reason for him to hate me even more. For him to validate his earlier accusation that I’m a coward.

Because if I didn’t acknowledge it before, doing this makes it pretty clear as fucking day that I am.

But I don’t know what else to do right now. I’ll pay him back. I look over my shoulder through the open doorway to where he sleeps peacefully, and then I walk to the front door and slip out to the streets below to hail a cab.

The guilt is heavy and oppressive, dropping through my soul and occupying my thoughts just as handily as the fear sitting in its worn recliner, where the feeling has made itself comfortable over the past six months. All I keep thinking is, he doesn’t deserve this.

Hell, neither do I.

T
he room is cold, and the worn pad on the hospital’s gurney beneath me is anything but comfortable. Hell, if it were a mattress from the Ritz, I wouldn’t think it’s comfortable because I swear to God these cold, clinical walls of the outpatient procedure room suction every ounce of life from me with each passing moment.

The valium I’ve taken slowly kicks in as the nurse makes casual comments here and there, nothing I need to answer—just innocent conversation to fill the silence and pass time. She hums softly to herself now as she lays instruments on the tray beside me with a sterile clink. I can hear my phone buzzing in my purse, which is sitting under the chair across the room, and I swallow over the lump in my throat, hoping it’s not Becks. Again.

It’s amazing how many times someone can try to contact you in a seventy-two-hour period.

His first round of texts started at seven a.m. the morning I left; his messages reflected concern at first and then slowly morphed to frustrated anger the longer I ignored him. My lone response after the first hour passed was lame but honest all at the same time.
I’m sorry. I thought I could do this, but I can’t
was all my text said, and it did nothing to stop the
barrage of his replies. And each alert, each ding, was like adding salt to my open wound because lying to someone else is one thing, but lying to yourself is impossible.