Wounded (26 page)

I cannot stop crying.
 
I have let him down, and I cannot do what so much of me wants to, what I know he wants. “I am sorry, Hunter.” I move to get off the bed, to get away from him, from his disappointment.

“Hey, wait a second,” he says, and does not let me move. “Look at me.”

I lift my face, and his thumb brushes away my tears. He kisses me, and for a moment I am lost once again in the heaven of his kiss. I begin to forget myself, and grow hungry for him, kiss him desperately.
 

He pulls away and meets my eyes. “That’s not the only position, you know.”

“What?” I am not sure what he means at first.

“I mean…look, I’m not trying to rush you or pressure you. If you can’t, if you’re not ready, that’s totally fine—”

I shake my head. “I want to. But…that just was so frightening. There were so many things in my head and heart that I could not breathe. But I do not want to let you down.”

He takes my face and draws me close. He moves me up higher and now I am sitting on top of him, straddling his waist like he is a horse and I am a rider.
 

His eyes blaze. “You could never,
ever
let me down, Rania. If you’re not ready, that’s okay. I want this to be something you want. When you want. How you want.
Only
what
you
want. Do you understand? You can’t and won’t disappoint me. Don’t ever think that.”

“I
do
want this. It is confusing, Hunter. So much of me wants this, wants
you
. But…another part is afraid, and that part feels afraid when you are above me.”

He smiles and rubs my thighs. I sit straighter at his touch. His hands slide up my legs, closer to my core, and my desire burns hot. I can feel the liquid evidence of my need for him heating up within me, filling me.

“I don’t have to be above you,” he says.

“No?”

“No,” he whispers back, smiling.
 

He runs his hands up my torso, fondles my breasts, slips his hands over my shoulders and down my back before sliding his hands beneath my buttocks and lifting me up. I lean forward and brace myself with my hands on his chest. My privates are hovering above his body now. He moves, shifts slightly beneath me, and then I feel the soft, thick tip of his manhood probing at my entrance, just touching, just brushing.

I gasp in a sharp, surprised breath. “Like this?

He rubs his hands in comforting circles on my back. “Just like this, my love.”

My love.
The words hit me deep in my heart, spearing into the most secret places in my soul. I am his love. How can that be? How could I be worth his love?

He waits. Watches me. Hunter never does anything unless he is sure I want it. He is straining, tensed, needing me. I can feel it in him, taste it the air. I kiss him, taste his need on his lips, in his saliva, on his breath, on his tongue.

Does he feel my need? I need him. I want him. But he is not moving, just waiting, and I think he will not do this for me. I must do it.

My throat is clenching tight, so dry, and I am sweating, trembling on him. My thighs are around his hips, and his taut, muscular stomach is beneath my core, and his arms are around me, his hands on me.
 

“Kiss me, so I can do this,” I say.
 

He closes with me slowly, eyes on me until the last moment. I watch his eyes slide shut as our noses nuzzle against each other and our lips touch, and then I am lost, so sweetly lost. I reach between our bodies and grasp his manhood, guide him to my entrance and in, then pause.

He knows the words I need to hear: “I love you, Rania.”

He is inside me. I could burst, split open at the seams, for he fills me completely. He is motionless, his hands on my waist, blue eyes wide, soft, loving, fixed on me in that soul-searching way he has. He is not fully immersed in me, only part of the way. I swallow hard and lean over him, slip my hands beneath his head and clutch his hair, press my lips to his throat.

I am shaking like a scrap of paper in a long wind.
 

I move my hips, withdrawing, and a whimper slides out from my throat. Hunter groans deep in chest and his hands tighten on my waist, but he does nothing to urge me faster or deeper.
 

When he is nearly slipping out of me, I gather a deep breath into my air-starved lungs—making me realize I had been holding my breath—and then I slide down his body, driving him deep, fully into me, exhaling as he impales me.

“God,” Hunter says, but the word is drawn out into many syllables, a groan as long as his exhaled breath, matching mine.

“Please, touch me,” I whisper. “Tell me what you are feeling. Your voice…I want to hear your voice as we make love.”

His hands drift up my sides to caress to my breasts, taking their weight and treasuring their softness. “You feel so good, Rania. Being inside you like this is…it’s fucking heaven, baby.”

I move again, draw my hips high, so only the soft, broad head of his manhood remains in my privates, and then I pause, waiting for him to speak, for I heard him draw breath, heard the scrape of air past his vocal chords. My eyes are shut tight, and every other sense is tightened like a string across a sitar. I can smell him, sweat, faint cologne, deodorant, soap…and me, my scent mixed in with his. His body is beneath me, filling my sense of touch. There is nothing to feel but Hunter, his hands on me, his legs like flesh-covered stone, his manhood within me, his breath on my cheek as he speaks.

“I love this so much. I love your skin.” He moves, just a little, his hips ever so gently drifting up and then back down; the slight motion sends rockets of delight bursting in me, and I let myself slide down so his hips bump mine, driving him deep, deep into me. “I love your eyes. I love your breath on my lips.”

And then I move again. I let myself slide up his length and back down, not just with my hips now, but with all of me, my whole soft body on the hardness of his. He moves with me, just one sweetly slow thrust, and it feels so good I have to claw my fingers into his shoulders and whimper.

“Move with me, Hunter.”

He groans. “Thank fuck. Holding still like this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

He scratches his nails down my back and I shudder, writhing on top of him and driving him deep. A small, fluttering explosion billows through me when he is all the way inside me, and now…

Something breaks open inside me when he begins to move, slow gliding strokes into me. There is no fear anymore, no worry, no memory, nothing but Hunter and the incredible sensations he gives me.
 

“Oh, god, you feel so good, so fucking good.” Hunter’s voice is a low growl in my ear, driving me to move faster.
 

I love that I make him feel good. I want more.
 

I kiss his lips, hungry and needy. Now his thrusting is a little faster, and I match him. I cannot help but move in sync with him. His manhood slides into me, fills me, stretches me, and now I come to a realization.

He does not just fill my body, my womanhood. He fills
me
. My heart, my soul. He fills the horrible emptiness that has gaped inside me all my life. The moment that he slid into me, I knew. It has just taken me this long to understand the strange feeling flowing in my veins in place of blood:
 

Happiness.

I let the tears flow, let myself sob. I never stop moving, and now I take control of the pace, collapsed on top of Hunter, my love, my husband, my fullness, and I move like a madwoman, like a woman possessed. I am sliding and slipping on top of him, driving him into me and pulling up and away until he has almost pulled out of me, and then he is deep again.

 
Our bodies crash together in a perfect symphony, my cries of pleasure growing louder and more desperate, more passionate. Hunter’s voice joins mine, and I love the sound of his voice raised loud in pleasure, ecstasy given to him by me, by my love.

“I love you, Hunter. Please do not stop. Not ever.”

“I won’t, I promise. Never. I’ll love you forever. I’ll make love to you until there’s no me and no you, only us together like this forever.”

“Yes, please! I want that, always. Only us. I love this. I love this.” My words are spoken to the rhythm of our body’s union, crashing together, gliding and sliding away, rhythm like a song, and my thoughts are disjointed poetry, my words are pidgin of English and Arabic, and all I can do is sob above him and move above him and kiss him where my lips drag along his skin and grasp him and claw him.
 

Heat blooms and curls inside me, crushed hotter by Hunter’s body within me, and now the heat is exploding and spreading and my entire body is convulsing and I am curling into a ball on top of him, weeping helplessly. The way he made me come in the past had seemed earth-shaking, more intense than anything I could have imagined. This…this is beyond those orgasms by several degrees of intensity. I come, and I come, and still Hunter is moving into me, becoming desperate himself now, and I can only cling to him as he crashes into me, ungentle and furious, and I would not want him to change it or stop or be gentle.

“Yes, Hunter!” I prop my hands on his chest and move my hips to meet his, and he is driving so deeply into me I think he cannot go deeper, and then he pushes me upright, gently leans me backward, and I lift up with my legs and he drives up with his hips and he is even more completely inside me and I come yet again, and I have an errant, lucid thought. That phrase of his,
to come
in reference to orgasm, it is perfect, so right for the experience of reaching orgasm with the man you love. You are not merely finding a physical release, you are coming into a new realm, coming into heaven, coming into him, becoming him.
 

And then he comes, and I think I have truly lost myself in him. He explodes, and I feel his seed fill me, hot and wet inside me and I love that, too. I love the way he groans wordlessly, almost yelling, plunging hard and hard and hard, and I fall onto him, wrapping my arms around his neck and weeping, weeping onto his shoulder, body-wracking sobs.

We are still now.

“Why are you crying, Rania? Are you okay?”

I gasp, shuddering with aftershocks and receding sobs. “Yes. More than yes.” I lift up and roll over so I am cradled by him, palm his cheek and let him see into my soul through my eyes. “I am crying because that was so wonderful, so good that I do not know the words for it in my language or yours.”

He sighs deeply and lets it out, clutching me close. “For me, too. That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced.”

“Do you remember asking me if I have ever been happy?”

“Yes.”

“I am happy now. You have given me happiness.”

I see his eyes shine and shimmer, and his arms tighten around me and I see a tear streak down his face. “You’ve made me happy, too, Rania, and I didn’t think I could ever be happy again after my parents died.”

“We can be happy together.”

“Yes, please,” he whispers. “I’d like that.”

HUNTER

We sleep after making love, and I wake up with the most raging hard-on of my life. Rania is nestled against me, spooning me, her back to my front, and her ass cradles my achingly hard cock. She is so soft in my arms, so warm, so fragile and small, yet I know she is strong, so unbelievably strong.
 

I don’t care who she has been, what she has been. I know some guys wouldn’t be able to get past the fact that she was a prostitute, but that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is she loves me so completely, and she doesn’t hide it or hold back.
 

I thought I would die of sheer ecstasy when she slid down my body and pushed my cock into her hot, wet pussy. I did die, I think. I died and went to heaven, and to remain still while she found herself, while she learned to let herself feel, that was the hardest thing.
 

Like, ever.

I wanted to plunge into her, hard and wild and desperate, but I couldn’t. And I am so,
so
glad I didn’t. It took an age, it seemed, for her to understand the joy of making love, for her to open up her heart and her mind and her body and let me love her truly, but she did, and she rocked my world.

And now I want to do it again.
 

My palm slides of its own volition up her thigh, then in across her belly, up to her breasts. Dim gray light streams in through the window and gives us a gentle glow of lightening dawn. I cup her breast, gently toy with the nipple. She moans in her sleep, shifts. I slide my hand down between her thighs to the tight triangle and she moves, just a little, loosens her clamped legs.

I’m not sure I should push this, but I can’t help touching her, wanting her. My middle finger reaches the top of her cleft and slides in. Now she is waking up, her eyelids fluttering to grant me glimpses of her chocolate eyes.
 

“Hunter?” Her voice is thick and sleep-muzzy.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re just so sexy when you sleep, I couldn’t help touching you.”
 

She smiles, brushes a stretching hand across her face, groaning as she flexes and tenses her muscles languorously, like a cat. Her breasts arch up and out, and I slide my hands across them, and then, when she is at the peak of her stretch, I lean in to suckle her nipple, flicking it with my tongue.

She moans, an impossibly erotic sound. I snake my fingers down to her slick pussy and slide my fingers into her, sudden and without warning. She giggles and writhes, pulling me over onto her. The sound of her laugh, true, innocent laughter…it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.
 

I’m above her, poised between her thighs, weight on my elbows, lips inches from hers, and her laughter fades. I hadn’t meant to land on top of her; it just accidentally happened. My cock nudges her entrance, and I have to tense every muscle in my body to keep from plunging into her.
 

Her eyes are wide, her laughter gone, but her hands are on my shoulders, still and not trembling. I move to get off her, but she shakes her head.