The Debt 6 (7 page)

Jake was bad news.

Everything had gone wrong for her after she’d met Jake Novak.

Raven kept walking, and then she belatedly realized that Jake had stopped calling her name.
 
It figured, she thought, that he’d given up so quickly.

He couldn’t even be bothered to call her name more than a few times, that was how little she truly meant to him.

Only, a few minutes later, she heard something behind her.
 
It sounded like an animal moving in the brush, and then as she turned, Jake was there, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and he was soaked to the bone again, and the rain started pouring down even harder and thunder crashed above them.

“Leave me alone!” she yelled at him, crying as she said it, because she was angry with herself for being so glad to see him.

“Raven,” he said, holding out his hand.
 
“Come on.”

“No!
 
Fuck you!” she screamed, and then turned and started to run.

Jake ran after her and she tried to run faster but the ground was soft and her feet were slipping and then he’d gotten hold of her around the waist and was hoisting her, pulling her against his body.

“Stop running,” he said.
 
“Just stop.”

Raven tried to get away but he held her tightly.
 
“Why do you treat me like shit?
 
Why?
 
What did I do to make you so mean to me?”

Jake continued to hold her tight.
 
“Come back to the cabin with me.
 
Please.”

“No.
 
I hate you, Jake.
 
I hate you so much.”

His eyes narrowed and she saw that her words had genuinely hurt him.
 
“I don’t blame you for hating me.
 
But come back with me, at least for tonight.
 
If you still want to leave tomorrow morning, I’ll escort you myself.”

“I don’t need an escort, asshole!” she screamed.
 
“I don’t need you!”

He let go of her.
 
“I tried,” he said, sighing, and turning his back to her.

She laughed and threw up her hands.
 
“You call that trying?
 
Are you serious?
 
What a joke.
 
You’re nothing but a quitter!”

He spun around again and his eyes were blazing now.
 
“Don’t test me, Raven,” he said, walking towards her.
 
The rain abated momentarily but he was dripping water down his face and body.
 

“I’m not testing you,” she said.
 
“You’re the one making this impossible and you know it.
 
It’s not my fault.”

They glared at one another for a moment, and then Jake stepped forward and wrapped his hands around the back of her head and pulled her face towards his and kissed her long and hard.
 
His lips were desperate and greedy and Raven felt her will to resist giving way to her intense desire for him.

She moaned in her throat as she allowed her tongue to move, entering his mouth and meeting his tongue, and his hands slid down to her back and then grabbed her buttocks.

He pressed his body against hers.

The rain started up again and became a downpour and she didn’t care.
 
Jake grabbed at her shirt and ripped it off her, exposing her bare skin to the world.
 
Raven took hold of Jake’s shirt and pulled it over his shoulders and then threw it to the side.

She slid her hands up and down his chest, hungry to feel him all over.
 
She leaned down and licked his chest and nipples and then kissed down his flat stomach, tasting salt and water and sweat.
 
She reached his belt line and unbuttoned his jeans and then unzipped them, still kissing.

Jake pressed his hands against her head, grabbing her hair and holding it tightly as she slipped his hard cock out of his boxers and immediately began sucking him, taking him deeply into her mouth.

She’d never wanted something so badly in her life as she wanted Jake Novak at that moment.

Raven sucked him, licked his shaft, and she could tell from his stiffness that he was as turned on and out of his mind as she was.

Jake backed away from her and she looked up at him, not knowing if something had changed, if he was going to tell her to stop.

But then he’d gotten on the ground with her and was pushing her backwards so that she was flat on her back, while he stripped her naked, taking off even her panties.
 
The rain was soaking her naked body and she could feel the dirt and leaves on her back, even in her hair—and she didn’t care at all.

Jake’s wet mouth was between her legs, and she cried out in abandon, her thighs quivering as he slid his tongue into her folds and touched her deepest place.

He sucked on her pussy, his hands controlling her hips, bringing her body towards him, his strong shoulders visibly working as he buried his face between her legs.

She cried out again and again, because he felt so good, and it was all such a release.
 
Jake flicked her swollen clit with his tongue, and then he sucked it, and Raven came with such force that her hips arched up and Jake reached his hands up and slid them to her breasts.

“Fuck me,” she cried out.
 
“Please, please.
 
Please I need you inside me, Jake.”

He hesitated.
 
“Are you sure?”

“I need you.”

And then, it was as if something inside him broke, and she saw it break—the look in his eyes told her that whatever resistance he had to this closeness between them had finally given way.
 
The levee had really broken, and his passion suddenly became that much more intense.
 

He took off his pants and boxers so that he was as naked as she was.

The rain hadn’t stopped, but neither of them seemed to care at all.
 
Their slick bodies needed each other, and Jake’s mouth was on her nipples, sucking and licking and kissing and then his mouth was on hers.

His passion was unbridled, and he inserted his hardness into her, ever so slowly but insistently pushing into her sacred space that had never been filled before.

Raven clutched him to her, as everything inside of her was so filled with heat and warmth and she couldn’t take it.
 

A moment of sharp, piercing pain made her tense up.

“Are you all right?” he asked, stopping momentarily, his expression one of concern.

She nodded.
 
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
 

The sharp pain faded to a slow, sweet ache.

It overwhelmed her, how good and beautiful and right Jake felt inside of her.

Jake looked into her eyes directly as he penetrated her completely.

She looked up at him and her breath came deep from within her chest, almost as though she couldn’t control her own body anymore.
 
“Oh, Jake,” she whispered.

“Raven,” he whispered back to her.
 
“You feel amazing.”

He closed his eyes and dipped his head, as if he was also being overwhelmed by the sensation their bodies had created in him.
 

Raven felt his manhood sliding almost all the way out and then pressing insistently down, penetrating her flesh once more.
 
As he dug into her, she cried out with pleasure.

It was all so new to her, and yet it all felt completely right, like something she’d experienced in another life and was now reliving it in the present.

Her eyelids fluttered and her eyes rolled back in her head, like she’d just been injected with the world’s strongest drug.
 

And maybe she had.

Jake slowly pulled himself out and then pushed in again, his hips slowly rocking back and forth as he began making love to her with more and more enthusiasm.

Raven wrapped her legs around his naked buttocks, her feet hooking at the ankles as she pulled him against her.
 
She grabbed his ribcage with her hands as Jake kissed her, while he continued to thrust in and out, in and out.

He opened his eyes again and when his eyes locked on hers, Raven felt another shock of recognition.

This is what it feels like when two souls join together.

Emotion threatened to overwhelm her, as the feelings began to build and build inside her trembling, naked body.

The rain was still coming down, but it seemed as though the two of them were in an invisible, protective cocoon.
 
Or, more likely, the heat and passion they’d created were burning the rain off as quickly as it hit their bodies.

Jake’s hands were pressed into the ground as he held himself above
her,
splitting her tightness apart with his large, stiff cock.
 
Everything between them was wet, and hot, and juicy.
 
His flesh stroked her flesh, igniting sensations Raven hadn’t even thought possible.

“I’m going to come,” she warned him.

“I want you to,” he told her, and then his lips were on hers again, and she felt the trembling within her build to a complete frenzy.

It was almost frightening.

What was happening to her body?
 
It was as if she’d been taken over completely by the catharsis of it all, taken over by ecstasy.

She clutched Jake’s back and cried out into his mouth.
 
And then her hips were moving with his, urging him to go faster, pain and pleasure combining as she took him in and in again and again, heating up her most sacred space with a fire that burned her inside and out.

When she came, there was nothing left to give, but she felt Jake giving himself, and he shuddered uncontrollably as everything in him emptied into her and she squeezed tightly, wanting it all.
 

She wanted everything he had to give, and for the first time, he was willing to trust her with it all.

***

They dragged their dirty wet clothes back to the cabin and the two of them rinsed their bodies off in the outdoor shower powered temporarily by the generator, shivering and laughing together as the cold spray of water covered them.

When they were done showering, Jake led Raven inside to the bed and covered both of them with the heavy blankets that smelled like mothballs.
 
It didn’t matter how the blankets smelled, though, Raven thought as she shivered under them with Jake’s warm body encircling hers.

Her held her tightly, his lips nuzzling against the back of her neck.
 
“I’m glad you didn’t run away,” he said, as her shivering subsided.

“I’m glad, too,” she murmured.

There was a comfortable silence, in which Raven could do nothing but smile.

Time seemed to spin out and they lay together, completely at ease.
 
Raven found herself drifting, dozing almost, until he spoke.

“Afghanistan was hell,” Jake said, breaking the silence with this strange announcement.

Raven was startled, but then grabbed his hand and kissed it.
 
“I can’t really imagine it,” she said, just happy he was talking about it, trusting her finally.

“I still can’t really make sense of it,” Jake told her.
 
“You’d think I’d be able to.
 
After all, they all tell me how I thrived there, in the fighting, in the sand and the desert and the madness.
 
They put me in charge of the men because I wasn’t afraid—I was somehow able to think under immense pressure when other guys just pissed themselves.
 
In the center of battle, I was the eye of the storm.
 
That’s what my commanding officers told me, anyway.”

“Wasn’t it true?” she asked, afraid to upset him but wanting to know more.
 
She couldn’t believe he was finally telling her this.
 

“I don’t know what was true about that time in my life,” Jake sighed.
 
“Maybe the guys who pissed themselves were the brave ones.”

She didn’t understand why he would say that.
 
“There’s nothing wrong with being brave,” she told him.
 
“You shouldn’t feel bad about that, Jake.”

“Maybe I just don’t feel the way normal people do,” he told her.

“I don’t believe that,” she replied.
 

“I know that ever since I came home from Afghanistan, I’ve been a different person.
 
If I once was normal, the war fixed that,” he said, chuckling with some bitterness.
 
“I saw my best friends killed.
 
People I’d laughed with, cried with, read their parents’ and girlfriends’ letters, and seconds later they were just gone.
 
Wiped off the face of the planet.”

She swallowed and clutched his hand tighter.
 
“It’s normal to feel sad about that,” she said.