Shadow & Soul (12 page)

Faith looked up at him. He was so strong and broad, so beautiful. His fair hair and beard were close-cropped, not shaved. She missed the smooth cheeks and shaggy mess of pale hair he’d had. The scruff over his head and face now made him look older. Wearier. But he was still so very beautiful. His deep blue eyes were intent, locked on hers.

“Then what do you want, Michael?”

He looked at the floor between them, and Faith got the sense that he was steeling himself. Then he met her eyes again. “You. I want you. We were wrong before, but maybe we can be right now. I love you, Faith. I never stopped. I don’t know how you feel, but—”

She put her hand on his mouth to dam up his words. “I love you, stupid. I never stopped, either.”

His expression showed the perfect relief that Faith felt herself. He put his hands around her face and murmured, “I won’t stop. I’ll never stop.” Then he kissed her, and she leaned in, curving her body to fit with his, moving her tongue with his, holding his head in her hands as he held hers.

Kissing Michael, even after all this time, was perfectly familiar. They understood each other’s bodies, even though they hadn’t had long to be together, and they hadn’t been together in a long time. But he kissed differently now, too. He was more confident—but maybe that was simply a feature of their age. He was thirty-two; she was twenty-seven. They both had more experience. And whatever they might have now, next, it wouldn’t be something they had to keep in the shadows. They needn’t feel guilt or apprehension now.

What had happened before couldn’t happen now. They were safe now.

That realization, and the way it swept her fear right off the edge of her consciousness, sent a fire through Faith’s blood. She grasped Michael more tightly, pulling herself up on him, getting as close as she could. She wrapped her arms around his head, and he groaned and moved his hands to her waist, enclosing her in his arms and standing up straight, lifting her off the floor.

He walked across the room, straight to her bed as if he’d known where it was. When he laid her down on it, his knee on the mattress between her legs, Faith felt a brief flash of memory that, irrationally, brought her fear back.

They’d only ever been on a bed together one time before. The last time. When they’d made at least one terrible mistake.

As that memory dragged its claws over her heart, Faith pulled back with a gasp. She opened her eyes and found Michael looking down at her, his face flushed, his eyes worried. “Faith?”

She shoved the past away. They were safe. “I love you,” she said, to have a reason for having pulled away.

“I love you.” He smiled, and she believed they were safe.

They were both still fully dressed, and that would not do at all. She shrugged out of her leather jacket and pulled her long t-shirt over her head. Michael stayed where he was, looming over her, and watched, his eyes vivid with lust.

She went for her bra, but he put his hand on her chest, splayed so that his thumb and fingers hooked over her collarbones, and held her down. Kneeling, his legs framing one of hers, he hooked the fingers of both hands into the straps of her bra, then slid them down and into the cups until the backs of his fingers brushed her nipples. The touch made her muscles go tight and hard, and she arched up as high as she could, wanting more, wanting him to make her feel everything. A decade’s worth of everything.

His hands went back up the straps to her shoulders and then pulled the stretchy satin down her arms, pulling until the cups folded down, too. And then he bent down and took a desperate nipple into his mouth.

“Oh, fuck, oh fuck,” she breathed, needing to make an utterance but trying to be quiet. Michael had always been quiet when they were like this, silent except for anguished groans when he finished. He’d seemed distracted, almost disturbed, by the sounds she’d made. He’d been her first, and their short time together had built in her a shyness about making noise during sex—but her natural inclination was to vocalize. To this day, she fought those two impulses always.

This time, instead of flinching or even pausing in his attention to her breast, he answered her quiet words with a low groan, and the hand he wasn’t propping himself up with slid down, over her belly, and into her leggings.

Just as his fingers pushed over her pubic bone, he lifted his head abruptly and stared down at her, his fingers moving over her mound, into her folds, exploring. It felt good, so fucking good, and she could feel him feel how wet she was. He was surprised, though, and when his fingers returned to the bare skin over the bone and brushed back and forth, she understood. Feeling breathless and a little shy, she smiled. “I’ve been doing that a while. Everything feels more intense shaved.”

Before, she’d been pretty natural, just shaving what showed around her bathing suit and trimming the rest. He returned to her folds and let his fingers move lightly over the bare, delicate skin. His touch made her twitch and gasp.

“So good,” she whispered.

Still without a word, he took his hand away and leaned back. He took hold of her waistband with both hands and pulled, and she lifted her hips to help him.

He pulled her pants and underwear together down her legs, until he got to the boots she was still wearing. Then he stopped and, smiling down at her, lifted her feet onto his thighs and started unlacing her boots. He was yet completely dressed, boots and kutte and everything, but she didn’t protest at all when he pulled her boots off and then rid her of her lace-up leggings and her underwear. All she was wearing now was a bra, scrunched up under her breasts. She reached under her back and unhooked it, then tossed it carelessly away.

Now, she was totally bare, and he was staring down at her like she was an exotic delicacy.

He pulled her to the edge of the bed, knelt on the floor, and fed on her as if she were.

And oh, fuck, he was good at it—better than she remembered. He lifted her legs onto his shoulders and then moved his hands to her breasts so he could pluck and tweak both nipples in time to the rhythm of his lips and tongue.

He went down on her like there was nowhere in the world he’d rather be, and she could think of few places she’d rather have him. The scruff on his face, the buds on his tongue, the heat of his breath, the rough skin of his fingers exciting her excitable nipples—it all made a symphony of sensation that Faith could barely contain.

She wasn’t a prude. She had not been celibate during the past decade, not by any stretch. She enjoyed sex and hadn’t required an emotional connection to enjoy a physical one. But this—he’d been her first and in many ways, both emotional and physical, her best lover. He was better now. It was all better now. It was so good.

So good. So good, Oh, fuck, so good. She pulled her knees up and grabbed his head, holding him to her as she came, curling up around him, trying to be quiet but failing.

He stayed on her, his tongue flicking at her clit until she couldn’t take the intensity for another second. When she pushed his head back, he stood and began, at last, ridding himself of his clothes.

Except for his kutte, which he hooked on the corner post at the foot of her bed, he dropped his clothes wherever they happened to fall.

Damn. He was gorgeous. The same man she loved, but dramatically different, too. He was massive, the muscles on his arms, torso, legs, everywhere, deeply cut. He knelt again on the bed and leaned over her. Then he twitched and sat back, reaching to the floor. Faith didn’t understand at first, but he’d picked his jeans up and was fishing in the pocket.

She made a call. She hoped it was the right call. But she knew he’d tell her if it wasn’t safe. “Michael.”

He stopped and cocked his head. She hadn’t understood before why he was so quiet during sex, and she still didn’t. It was just who he was. She loved his silence for that, if nothing else. She loved knowing that about him, feeling the hominess in that familiar silence now. She stretched out her arm and showed him a small scar. “I have an implant. You don’t need that.”

She’d used an implant for most of the past decade. Michael hadn’t been very good at getting a condom on right from the beginning, and sometimes not at all, though he always pulled out. And she hadn’t been good at stopping him. She’d learned it was better not to have to think about it in the heat of the moment. Because sometimes the moment got too hot to think.

He stared at her for a few seconds, then dropped his jeans. And then he was on top of her, his weight so much more than she remembered. He pulled her leg up to his hip, holding himself with his other hand, guiding himself into her.

He filled her, huge and hot. She felt full in more than just her body. She felt complete. She bent her head back as he pushed deep, unable to stop her cry. “Oh God, Michael!”

When he didn’t move, Faith settled back on the mattress and opened her eyes. He was staring down at her, pain riding his features hard. His cheeks were red. She didn’t understand. “Michael?”

His head fell, sagging from his shoulders. “I…can’t. I can’t.”

The fear she thought she’d swept away came back and leaned in. “You can’t what?”

He shook his head.

Oh, no. This was not all going to fall apart while he was inside her. She lifted his head in her hands and made him face her. His eyes glistened. “You can’t what?”

The pain in his expression deepened, but he didn’t answer. He wasn’t going to tell her. But she wasn’t going to let him go. She knew one thing he couldn’t do: resist. She flexed her hips, drawing him into her as deeply as she could. His groan overwhelmed her own gasp, and he pleaded, “Faith, I…”

She flexed her hips again. And again. “Shut up, Michael. Shut up and fuck me.” Pulling his head down, she lifted up to meet him, and she kissed him hard, demanding that he finish what they’d started. With a sound of defeat, he did.

At first, he was gentle and slow, careful, like he was still fighting the demon that had come between them, whatever it was. They kept their mouths joined, kissing as he moved inside her and she moved with him.

But then her pleasure kicked into high gear and she began to move to her own rhythm, chasing the ecstasy she knew was headed her way. He sped up, too, keeping up with her. She knew the moment when he lost control—and she thought she knew, too, what he’d meant when he’d said
I can’t
—because he made a sound that could only be called a growl and sat back on his heels, yanking her hips up with him. And then he fucked her harder than she’d ever been fucked before, far harder than he’d ever fucked her, so hard and so fast that she felt jackhammered, and her grunts and cries were broken and syncopated by her bouncing body.

He’d been intense before, but this ferocity shocked her. Yet it didn’t hurt her. She came hard then, and in a totally new way, one she couldn’t describe, like he’d found another spot in her body that could stimulate to climax, something even deeper than a g-spot. Her juices let down in a rush just as he came, groaning as if his release were torture, his fingers digging deeply into her hips, his head thrown back, the muscles and veins in his neck and shoulders bunched and swollen, his skin flushed dark red all the way to his pecs.

When Michael relaxed, he did so completely, collapsing onto her in a heap. Faith wrapped her arms around him and held him, feeling his body shaking. This big, tormented man was so different from the smaller, tormented boy she’d known, but so alike, too, wanting so much to be good, trying so hard, and so much in need, that she felt like she was falling in love all over again.

Slowly, their breathing returned to normal, and he lifted away and looked down at her. “Did I hurt…I’m s—”

She put her hand over his mouth. “Don’t you dare. I’m not hurt. I love you. I loved that. There is nothing here at all to feel bad about. We’re safe now. We’re good.”

Nodding, he kissed her hand. “Okay. Okay. We’re good. Okay.”

He dropped his head and tucked his face against her neck, and she held him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Demon woke on his back, with Sly curled between his knees and Faith leaning over him, running her hands over his chest, making soft swirls and waves of sensation over and over.

He had Faith in his arms.

In his head and his body, he was quiet. He could have wept for the ease he felt, alien to him in its comfort.

Seeing him awake, she smiled down at him and put her hand over his heart. “It’s still there.”

He smiled and combed his hand through her beautiful, dark hair, messy now from their sex. “My heart? Yeah. Waiting for you.”

That made her smile grow, but she shook her head and traced one finger over his skin. “No. Your ink. The one I knew. The kanji. I thought you’d covered it up, like your old club ink, but it’s still in here. Just…tangled up in the rest of the ink now.”

The symbol for strength. He’d gotten it shortly after he’d aged out of foster care. He’d been homeless at the time, but he’d managed to squirrel away the cash for a cheap tat. It had felt important—crucial—to him, at eighteen, to get that ink. Back then sixty bucks had been a whole lot of money. He’d skipped food and shelter to save it. But that kanji had meant everything to him. It seemed stupid now.

Less stupid in this moment, though, with Faith tracing her fingertip over that old ink.

Her hand moved over his chest and traced a scar across his ribs, and another high on his belly. “What happened here?”

Demon put his hand over hers. “Life. Not important.” Not even to Faith would he talk about the club, past or present.

She met his eyes. “Club stuff, huh?”

He shrugged. “Got into some scrapes.”

“What was it like, being a Nomad?”

Feeling some of his peace ebbing away, he sat up against her headboard. “I don’t want to talk about that. I just want…I want…” He was afraid to say. Everything he’d wanted had been lost to him—Faith, his home, his son. But he’d gotten a chance to have it all back—his home, his son, and now, maybe, Faith. The thought that he had traveled that full circle should have brought an even deeper sense of peace, maybe even happiness. But instead, Demon felt a creeping certainty that it was indeed a circle he was on, that he would lose it all again.

“What do you want, Michael?”

“I don’t want to talk.”

She stared down at him, her smile gone, but her expression neither angry nor sad. Curious, maybe. Interested. Her eyes were so beautiful, expressive and changeable, almost every color they could be.

Bending toward him, she brushed her lips over his and murmured, “What do you want?”

He cupped her face in his hand. “I want to love you.”

Smiling then, she pressed her lips to his mouth, then his cheek, his jaw, his neck, his shoulder. He took a deep breath and let himself focus on nothing but her loving touch. His cock was full and aching, but he stayed calm and tried to simply feel, to let it happen.

Then she worked her way down his arm, pausing at his elbow to kiss the scars there. She knew what that was, and he tensed. But before he could pull away, before even his chaotic head could try to fuck the moment up, she rolled against him, putting her back against his side as she continued kissing all the way to his hand.

When she began to suck his fingers into her mouth, one at a time, he turned toward her, upsetting Sly, who hissed halfheartedly and then hopped to the floor.

Her nude body was nestled against his as she sucked on his fingers, and he rocked his hips, letting his cock slide against her pretty ass. Sweet Christ, how she felt. With Faith it was more than sex, far more than fucking. It was overwhelmingly physical, and yet that was hardly even the point. Maybe that was what love was, when the physical act was an extension of the connection, not the connection itself. He could have simply lain on this bed in this weird room for his entire life, with Faith in his arms, and done no more than that, and it would have been more erotic and fulfilling than the most athletic sex he’d ever had.

Which wasn’t to say that his physical need wasn’t riding him hard, as he rocked their bodies together and she sucked his thumb as if it were his cock and then moved to his other hand. Looking over her shoulder, he was transfixed by the sight.

She’d never had him in her mouth; he hadn’t wanted to abase her in that way. They hadn’t even had sex in the position they were nearly in now. She had sucked just now on more fingers than he’d need to count the days or nights they’d been physical together before. It had all been new for her, and he hadn’t wanted her to feel like a whore. In those days, with his own weird feelings and beliefs, blow jobs and sex from behind were degradations.

Experience and distance had tempered those oddities in his perception. He hated to admit it, hated to even think it at this moment, but Kota had helped him in that way, too. She had been wild and entirely uninhibited, and she had demanded things of him that he, trying to be someone who could be a partner, had tried to give her. His aversions had abated.

He shoved that bitch out of his head. He wanted no good memories of her. She had tainted all of them. And he was here now with Faith, who deserved all of him, every atom, every thought in his head.

Then she turned her head to kiss his bicep, and she got every single thought. The movement had shifted her thick hair, baring some of her neck. He lifted his hand and brushed it fully away. Behind her ear, about the size of a quarter, was her only ink.

The kanji for strength.

Immediately, entirely, overcome, he laid his head against her, his forehead on that symbol.

She started to turn her head, but stopped and took a breath. “Oh,” she said on the exhale. Then she lifted his hand back to her lips and kissed his knuckles. “I never stopped loving you, Michael. Not for a minute.”

He couldn’t answer. He had no words. All he could do was hold her to him, curl his body around hers, and keep her close.

They were quiet like that for a long time. Demon was submerged in an ocean of love and fear. To have her, now to really have her. There was a future he could almost see, one in which he and Faith and Tucker, and Sly, too, and all the kittens Sly could love, all made a family together. In a house like Bibi and Hoosier’s, maybe. With a yard and a swing set. And a grill. Faith could have her weird sculptures everywhere. He’d build out a garage for her art and his bikes. They could be happy. They could be real. And strong. Tucker could grow up the way a boy should grow up.

But he was afraid, terrified, to let that picture develop in his head. Even if he were given a chance for all of it, it wouldn’t happen. Because he wasn’t that man, the man who could be strong and stable for a family. He knew it. He’d scared his boy twice in the past two days, blowing up in front of him. He would never hurt Tucker, he knew it in his bones, like he knew he’d never hurt Faith, and like he knew that the same did not apply to anyone else on the planet who ended up in his way at the wrong time. He’d never lash out at his boy, he’d never lash out at his love, but he could scare them. He could lose their faith. He would. He had.

At that moment, gripped by that certainty, he almost ran. His body tensed, ready, and he started to pull his hand from Faith’s hold. But, as if she sensed his turmoil, she took that hand and put it over her breast, and then lifted her arm over her head, making her breast tauten against his palm, the nipple growing hard. She put her hand on his head. “Michael…just love me. Don’t worry so much. Just love me.”

With his eyes closed and his head on her shoulder, he moved his hand, feeling her body respond to his touch. She was so beautiful, sleek and firm. Her ass moved against him, restoring his cock to fullness right away.

He shifted so that the arm under her could take possession of her breast, freeing up his other hand to slide down and between her legs and find her wet, ready heat. She was shaved, her skin smooth and velvety. That had thrown him, at first, last night. What he knew of Faith had been etched into his brain a decade before. There was still so much that was the same that it took a moment for him to accept the differences, to reconcile the present with the past, the reality with the memory.

She moaned quietly and lifted her leg up, setting it back on his hip, opening herself wide to him.

“You want it like this?” he asked, keeping his voice low. The years had tempered his reservations, not eradicated them.

Her body already writhing in time with the movements of his hands, she nodded. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

Shifting their bodies, he slid into her. Earlier, as soon as he’d been inside her, the urge to completely give himself over, to take everything he’d wanted for so long, to
have
her, had been absolutely consuming. He’d been sure,
sure
, he was going to go too hard, be too much for her. He’d known he hadn’t been capable of keeping himself in check. But she’d refused to let him go.

And he
had
lost control. But she’d gone with him. He hadn’t been too much.

This time, he felt calmer, and he even had the luxury to really feel the perfection of their physical connection. He’d been fighting everything so hard before that he’d been locked in his head, resenting his body’s demands. Now, he could feel her, the way he still knew her, the way she molded to him like she was meant for him, inside and out.

He realized that this was the first time, in all the time he’d known her, that he was free to just enjoy her, without guilt, without fighting his nature. He shoved his fear of the future aside as hard as he could. In this present, they could be perfect.

He sped up, moving his hand again between her legs, finding her clit and listening to her responses to understand what she wanted of him. Though noisy sex, grunting like animals, made him uncomfortable, stirring up skittering thoughts and memories, he liked Faith’s quiet, almost shy gasps and whispers. Barely using words, she was telling him what she wanted, that she liked what he was doing. She knew now what she wanted in a way she hadn’t known before. He wanted to give her that.

Her hand moved down from his head and slid between her legs, where his hand, and his cock, both moved with increasing intent. She touched herself with him, and she touched him, sliding her fingers around his cock as he thrust into her.

That felt…holy
fuck
, that felt amazing.

“Oh fuck,” he muttered and then clenched his teeth together to keep his mouth shut.

Looking over her shoulder, she said, “Michael, I like that. Talk to me.”

He shook his head against her shoulder.

“Okay,” she whispered and then rolled onto her stomach. Demon followed her, putting more of his weight on her as he thrust harder, losing his ability to hold back. With Faith’s hand, his hand, and his cock between her legs, and her tight, swollen nipple between his fingers, he thought the climax that was coming for him would run him over.

And then her body clenched and spasmed, and she began to bounce her hips as she milked him. She didn’t cry out, except for a strangled noise in the back of her throat.

He came before she was finished, hating the rutting-beast noise that was forced out of his mouth as his body tensed and he filled her. He kept up his pace until she could complete, too.

When it was over, he lay down with her, turning her to her side so he could stay off of her but still inside her.

“Faith…”

“Don’t apologize,” she sighed, patting his hand where it rested on her belly. “Don’t even try. That was fantastic.”

Lifting onto his elbow, he kissed her cheek. “I wasn’t gonna. I was just gonna say I love you.”

She grinned. “Okay. You can say that.”

“I love you.”

~oOo~

“Am I an asshole if I ask what this is supposed to be?” Demon stared at the tubular hunk of metal. He could make out all sort of things he recognized in it, but he had no idea what they made together. Not what they had been manufactured to make, that was for sure.