The Cornerstone (39 page)

“Me? Or somebody?” It wasn’t the kind of question that belonged in the bedroom when light bondage and just the tip were involved, but it was the one I needed answered.

“What? You need me to unburden my heart before you’ll fuck me?” she asked, angling her hips to take me deeper. “You want me to tell you how much I need you and crave you and can’t survive without your gigantic cock?”

“I just want to know whether you want to escape it all with someone, or with me.”

Shannon hummed as my cock slipped out and over her clit. She dropped her head against my shoulder as I positioned myself against her heat, and she whispered, “I’ve only
ever
escaped with you.”

My brain wanted me to slam into her and fuck her until she couldn’t walk right, but some other part reminded me to go slow, to enjoy this. She sank down, and we stayed there, kissing, muscles trembling, whispering about how good it felt until the urge to move was overwhelming.

We rocked together,
slow slow slow
, and my world was this bed, this woman.

“Will. More,” Shannon groaned, clenching around me.

I found a faster rhythm, and brought one hand up to cup her breast and the other to her clit. The early convulsions of her orgasm were like a sexy, tingly embrace from an old friend, one that unwound the tension of space and time and brought it all back to the connection that was deeper than sex, deeper than desire. I felt it in my balls, and then that sensation spiraled up and down my spine, teetering on the edge of explosion. A hard thrust stole a groan from me, and I matched it with a quick slap to her clit.

“Come for me,” I said against her ear. “Let go for me.”

I slapped her again, and her sigh twisted into beautiful, breathy wail. The flood of heat and spasm triggered my orgasm, and I folded Shannon into my arms as I emptied myself into her. We fell to the bed, still panting and moaning, and not wanting to leave her constricted too long, I loosened the knot at her back. Lines and grooves marked her skin, and I dragged my lips over each one. Those kisses told her how much I missed her, how thinking of her got me through the worst of this deployment, and none of the issues in my life were greater than what I felt for her right now, even if my words didn’t.

“Why do you do that?” she asked, her voice heavy with exhaustion as I kissed the indentation between her breasts. “Why do you like tying me up?”

I traced the crossed lines on her chest, and a touch of remorse gathered in my gut. I wanted to mark her in a primal, club-her-over-the-head way but I didn’t want to hurt her. “Because it quiets you down,” I said. “There’s so much in your head, all that noise and stress. Forcing you to obey me turns it off, and I’m selfish. I want you all for myself.”

“Damn,” she murmured. “I was hoping for some story about discovering a rope fetish in your baby SEAL days. Or some
Top Gun
sexytimes with a hot instructor, and instead of fighter jets, it’s knot tying?”

“Yeah, no hot instructors. No sexytimes,” I said.

She dipped her chin down before speaking. “I’m selfish, too. For you.” She hesitated and glanced away, her teeth pressed into her lower lip. “Before me…did you always?”

“No, Shannon,” I said.

“No long, sordid history of breaking hearts and destroying tights?”

“None of that,” I laughed. “You’ve broken hearts, though.”

She shook her head, frowning. “The closest I’ve ever come to such a thing is blocking creepy boys on Internet dating sites.” Her fingers brushed over my shoulder, and her eyes followed the jagged scars. “These are new.”

Nodding, I rolled to my side and pulled Shannon to my chest. I’d ignored the pain in my arm while I was inside her, but now, without the pleasure of her body to drive it away, I was sore. “Not every mission goes to plan.” She opened her mouth to say something but a low rumble from her belly beat her to it. “I made spaghetti.”

“You are too freaking handy, commando,” she said. “Fixing the bathroom sink. Cooking spaghetti. Bondage with tights. Destroying my vagina.”

We ate in bed, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, while watching the last half of the second season of
Game of Thrones
. Everything felt new, different, as if I’d only now—in
this
iteration of us—earned the right to steal tomatoey kisses or rest my hand on her inner thigh while debating plot points.

“We’re going to San Diego,” I said while the next episode launched, “in two weeks.”

“Thanksgiving is in two weeks,” she said. “I have commitments here.”

“We’re going to San Diego.” I tilted her chin up and gazed into her eyes. “I recall you getting out of those commitments just fine last year.”

*

“I’m going to
murder your phone,” I whispered into Shannon’s hair. That buzzing was annoying enough to bruise my brain. “No more phones in the bedroom.”

“Mmm, it’s my alarm,” she mumbled. She twisted away from me to reach for the side table. I caught her around the waist and hauled her back to my side once the noise ceased.

“Sleep, baby,” I said. Her skin was warm beneath my lips, and I wanted to kiss every freckle on her back. “It’s too early.”

“There’s a little something nudging my thigh,” she said.

I shifted, fitting my cock to her backside. “Nothing little here.” My hand slipped up her leg and settled between her hipbones, rocking her against me. “I’m keeping you in this bed all day.”

Shannon reached over and patted my leg. “That’s a really nice idea,” she said.

Her hand ran down my leg, squeezing, and then her nails scratched back up. It was such a simple, unassuming gesture, and yet, it had my body fizzing with awareness. The battle for Shannon’s affection was the hardest I’d ever fought, and it wasn’t over, but it was turning the corner.

“But I have to meet your sister for lunch,” she said with a sigh. “So, if you don’t mind—” She wiggled against my cock, and laughed when I groaned into her back. “—I’ll be going.”

“I do mind,” I said, sliding my hand between her legs. “I’ll call Lo. Explain the circumstances. She’ll understand.”

“I’m in enough trouble with her over skipping lunches.” Shannon arched into me, and fuck…she felt incredible. Hot and precious and mine. All mine. Always mine. “You really should tell her you’re here,” she said, her words breaking as I found the spot that made her mindless.

I leaned over to look at Shannon. Eyes closed, lips parted, forehead wrinkled. Exactly as I wanted her. “You’d like me to stop? And call my sister? That’s what you want right now, peanut?”

“If you don’t fuck me right now, I’m going to beat you with a dildo,” she said, her fists curling tight around the sheets. “You can call your sister later.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

SHANNON

L
auren and I
started meeting for lunch on Saturday mornings more than two years ago. When we learned a local winemaker offered free samples at the farmers’ market, we added that to the agenda. Basically, we were game for anything that involved weekend day drinking. Andy, on the other hand, was more interested in the fruits and vegetables and other farm goodies. Tiel didn’t seem to appreciate the wine or the goodies.

Sometimes I passed on the market and met them for lunch. Other times, when I was open housing or pretending my best friend’s brother wasn’t quartered in my apartment and conquering my pussy, I skipped altogether. In my mind, my absences in recent months weren’t noteworthy until Andy, Lauren,
and
Tiel all made it clear they wanted to see me today.

And I did miss spending time with them. I didn’t understand how to make friends with adults until Lauren decided to teach me. Shy was the last thing anyone would call me, but after high school and college, it was really difficult to find friends. I wasn’t especially good at it then, but without the structure of schooling to force people into social situations, I was stuck walking up to someone in the coffee shop and saying, “Hey, we ordered the same beverage. Shall we explore other commonalities?”

Growing up with brothers also meant I was less skilled in the area of female bonding, and working in a male-dominated field only compounded that situation. I didn’t have much practice from childhood, either. Things were different when I was little, before my mother died, but there wasn’t room in my life after.

But now I had these ladies, and they were expecting me for lunch. They didn’t know that I had a demanding boy in my bed, and though I was occasionally desperate to unload this story on someone who could tell me what to do with all these wildly contradictory feelings, it was better leaving certain things unsaid.

I wasn’t looking to keep secrets. Yeah, in the beginning, I didn’t see any reason to bother Lauren with this, but that was when it was one night…and then things got messy and complicated, and it ended. And now—whatever this was, wherever we were in this loop of sex and insults and ocean-wide affection that I wasn’t ready to address—I needed more time to make sense of these pieces. Even if I wanted to tell Lauren, why would I drag her into this chaos? There was no golden future for Will and me. This thing wasn’t going to work out. Our lives were rooted on opposite coastlines. And I knew he’d leave again soon. My best guess, based on his complete lack of open communication, was that he’d be heading back to base after San Diego. I could cope with the continuous cycle of deployments and the heart-numbing fear they delivered, but that didn’t change the fact that Will’s life wasn’t in Boston. That wasn’t something I could ask of him, and leaving here wasn’t something I could offer.

We had this morsel of now, and I didn’t want to share it.

I was blow-drying my hair when Will edged into the bathroom. A towel was slung around his hips and beads of water sparkled on his chest, and there was nothing wrong with that picture. Nothing at all.

“There’s someone here for you,” he said.

My eyes traveled the hills and valleys of his abs, and I asked, “Should I interpret that to mean you opened the door like this?”

I gestured toward the towel. It was the biggest one in my linen closet, but it still didn’t cover all that…girth. It peeked open mid-thigh and, if he moved the right way, showed off a bit more.

“It looks like you’re having impure thoughts, peanut.”

Very impure. “No, I’m just wondering why you’re using a hand towel when there are plenty of bath sheets. Is this an illusion to make your dick look bigger? Oh, and don’t talk to strangers when you’re ninety percent nude. My neighbors already give me the side-eye, and now they’re going to think I’m shooting porn in here or keeping a sex slave.”

He rolled his eyes and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “The door?”

I walked past him, patting his damp chest, and eyed the scars on his shoulder. They covered his back and arm, too. I noticed them last night, and they didn’t look any less awful this morning. Long, jagged cuts traversed the rise of his collarbone and down his back, and there were dents and divots where smooth, strong skin once existed. It was worse than the flesh wound, much worse, and I wanted him to tell me what happened.

“We should get some vitamin E on that,” I said, eyeing the raised, red lines that looked recently sutured. He grumbled something about real men not needing vitamin E.

“That’s right,” I said. “They just grab their nut sacks and will themselves back to health. Let me know how that turns out for you.”

When I approached the entryway, I expected to find a delivery requiring my signature or a kid selling Girl Scout cookies. I didn’t expect my future sister-in-law.

“Oh, hi,” I said, shooting a fiery glance at Will. “How are you?”

Tiel looked between me and Will, a goofy grin on her face. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything…”

I pointed at Will. “You mean him? No. Ignore him. He’s not actually here, and therefore you’re not interrupting anything.”

“Right, right,” she said. We all stared at each other for a bizarre moment before Tiel held her hands out as if she finally remembered why she dropped by. “I drank the biggest cappuccino ever and now it’s all in my bladder and since I was in this neighborhood I figured I’d stop in because Sam has me convinced that public restrooms are a breeding ground for all kinds of grossness and they probably are, but seriously, should I just not pee ever? No, that’s ridiculous, so I stopped here. Can I use your bathroom?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said. I gestured toward the hall, glaring at Will’s glistening chest and the towel barely stretching across his thick thighs. His eyes followed Tiel as she darted into the bathroom, pinging back to me in question. “Sam’s fiancée.”

“Isn’t Sam the preppy one?”

“Yes,” I said. “And would it kill you to dry your chest?”

He ignored me. “And that’s his fiancée?”

“Yes,” I repeated, brushing the water away. It was also a fair excuse to fondle him.

“The same one? From last winter?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So everything worked out after the near-death experience,” he said. “He turned out okay, they got back together…the world didn’t end?”

I ran my fingers over the beard that was coming in on his jaw. I couldn’t stop touching him, as if I was starving for the feel of his skin under mine. “Yes, Will. Everyone lived happily ever after.”