Page 87 of Happy After All

I sink down onto his lap, and I press my hands against the sides of his face, his whiskers sharp against my palms.

Then he’s kissing me. Not tentatively. He gives no quarter, and I’m glad for it. He doesn’t treat me like I’m broken. That is the most beautiful thing of all.

Because I don’t want to feel broken. I don’t want to feel like something less than the woman he wanted before he knew the truth. Something inside me feels like it puts itself back together as he kisses me.

I don’t feel hollow anymore. I don’t feel broken.

Not in every way.

He stands up, taking me with him, and he presses me against the wallpaper. He strips my clothes off, even as he holds me firmly against the wall. My heart feels like it’s going to punch its way through my chest.

I push my hands beneath the hem of his shirt.

There’s an edge to this now.

But it’s a different one. It isn’t the edge of mystery; it isn’t the air of all these unanswered questions. I know the answers. And he knows mine. Whatever he was to his wife, he’s this to me. Whatever I was to Chris, this man still wants me.

That, I find, is even more powerful than mystery.

Everything has been exposed. Everything has been brought out into the light. Here we still are.

I want to be marked with it. I want to be changed by it. I bite his lip, and he growls. His rough hands move to cup my breasts, his thumbs moving over my nipples. I’ve never felt anything like this. This deep, unending need. It’s like being suffocated. Lungs burning with the need to draw breath. That’s how badly I need to come. My body aches with it. I’m suspended on the edge of a knife, and when has it ever been like this? Never.

He lays me down on the bed naked and goes to his knees on the floor. He drags my body to the edge of the mattress and licks me like he’s never tasted anything so sweet.

I am lost in this, in him. Nathan Hart turns edging into an art form. A glorious form of torture that I need to end, but that I also need to continue.

He is taking every thought in my head and unraveling it. He is turning me into a creature of feeling, and not one of words. I find this to be the most freeing thing of all. Because I live my life with such a strong narration. I’m a writer, and I find a way to tell a story all day every day. There is no story here.

There is Nathan, and there is me.

And everything he’s doing to me.

I dig my heels into his back, and he pushes two fingers inside me as he continues to torment me with his wicked mouth.

I let go.

I’m falling, and I don’t even want to catch myself. I shatter then, and he is there.

I push myself off the bed with trembling arms and sink down onto the floor in front of him, undoing the button on his jeans, lowering the zipper.

“My turn,” I say.

I move him onto the bed and then position myself in front of him. I wrap my hand around his cock and lean in, swallowing him. He is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. I’ve never wanted a man more.

Not in spite of everything sharp, hard, and ugly.

Because of it.

This is something beyond reason. Something beyond desire as I previously understood it.

I can do this. I’mgreatat it. I can make him growl. I can make him forget. I can make both of us forget. That there’s anything beyond this room. That there’s anything beyond what we share here. That anything could be more important.

We didn’t ask for the things that happened to us. We didn’t choose it. We can choose this. We can revel in it. Luxuriate in it. So I do.

I move my tongue along the length of his shaft. I take him in deep.

He grips my hair and pulls.

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