Page 59 of Hold on Tight

“God, Jake.”

“Shrapnel.”

In his sleep, he could catalog them, the scars, every one. The ones like polka dots dug into the cap of his shoulder, the ones like claw marks a little lower than his kidney. The single, deep, puckered red gouge on his thigh. When he couldn’t sleep, he fingered them one by one, counting them, ticking them off in his mind, taking a strange comfort from them.

She got up and came toward him.

He couldn’t have said why, but he did not want her to touch the scars. “Don’t.”

She looked startled. His voice had been much harsher than he’d intended, a voice you’d use to call off a focused soldier, not a woman who only wanted to be gentle with you.

“Lie down.” His voice still rough.

She did it, and he saw something on her face that wasn’t fear and wasn’t surprise. She liked the harshness.

Everything that had happened up to this point had been playing. He could see that now. He could see it on her face; he could feel it in the surge of blood that rocked his erection. He got his clothes off fast. He got himself on the couch over her, wearing only his briefs, a thin layer of cotton and a thinner layer of lace between them. She moaned and clutched at him, and he clutched back, kissing her face, kissing her mouth, biting her, licking her, rubbing himself all over her, and she was struggling with his briefs, trying to get him free, and he helped her shove them down. “Condom,” she whimpered. “They’re in the pocket of my pants.”

He levered himself down and grabbed them, but he couldn’t brace himself properly over her so he could get the condom on. He had to stand up.Fucking prosthetic leg. He should take it off. He knew most guys did, when they had sex, so the socket wouldn’t get in the way. But he should have done it sooner. Now it would be a thing. An awkward, weird, moment-killing thing. Better to do the best he could. He rolled the condom down, watching her eyes on his hands.

He wanted to redeem what had happened between them at the lake. He wanted to prove to himself that he could still do what men did.

It was too much pressure to put on anything. A smarter man would have stopped. Would have put some space between his own expectations and what he was about to do. But he wouldn’t. Maybe because she was lying there and looking at him like he was a fucking god, and no one had looked at him like he was anything other than a peculiarity in so long he’d forgotten what it felt like. Or maybe because he liked her so goddamned much. Or because the demand in his body, the tightness of his balls, the roar from his chest down to his knees, was too much to ignore.

He wouldn’t stop. Hecouldn’tstop.

Getting himself back on the couch was awkward. He knelt with his good leg beside her hip and swung his prosthesis over her. He had to brace himself, hard, on his hands, but his body, even broken, remembered the routine. There was still the same magnetic pull, the way her desire tugged on his, the deep need to bury himself in her. She licked her lips and he took the bait, falling into a long, sweet tangle of tongues that wrenched him outside his head, brought him without conscious thought to the brink of her, the tip of his dick pressed to her wetness, as she thrust her hips up at him. The heat between her legs, her curves and swells and generosity all around him, wrapping him, inviting him. The scent of her—rich, salty, primordial—boring down right to the center of his reptile brain. He knew exactly what came next, and he did it, pressing up into her with a long, thick slide that drew a harsh groan of pleasure from her.

She was tight. Hot. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back, her lips parted. She was panting and begging, still, his name, over and over, andplease, and his body responded. The urge to thrust boiled up in him, deeper than brain, deeper than balls, deeper than heart. He withdrew, got ready to plunge again, all the way this time. He wanted to drive into her with all the force he was capable of. He wanted to press her so deep into the couch cushions that they would hold an imprint of her body for days. He wanted every stroke into her to shove her toward the head of the couch—hell, he wanted to inch her up the cushions until she had to brace herself so he didn’t drive her head into the arm of the couch. So she’d be pushing back against his thrusts with equal and opposite force, a primitive balance. He wanted to rut, to rub, to fuck the hell out of her.

His prosthesis slipped between the couch cushions and the back of the couch and wedged there.

He didn’t have enough control or enough mobility to unstick himself. He still had enough leverage to fuck her, but not as deeply, not asthoroughly, as he wanted to.

Instead, he was stuck with the narrow range of motion allowed to him by his wedged knee. And the reality of the knee had also tethered his brain. His mind was stuck in that broken, aching, fucked-up part of him instead of in his dick where it was supposed to be, or inhabiting his body fully as she arched under him and her skin slid, slick with sweat, across the roughness of his chest hair.

He was a piece of silicone and metal and wire buried between two couch cushions.

And he was losing his erection.

Chapter 19

“Don’t run away.”

Jake was struggling back into his clothes. He wouldn’t look at her.

She pulled a fleece throw off the back of the couch and covered herself, sitting up. “I’m serious, Jake. I’m not upset. You warned me. You said yourself, this is how it’s been. And there’s obviously nothing wrong with you physically, so—just—don’t run away. Please.”

“You don’t understand.”

His face was hard, expressionless, as he zipped and buttoned and dragged his T-shirt over his head. When his head reappeared she saw it—the humiliation in his eyes.

“Maybe I don’t. But I want to.”

It had been good, so good. She didn’t have words for how full of him she had felt even when they were just kissing, for how the reality of his cock inside her had pushed that fullness over some edge she’d never even imagined existed. She didn’t have words for the silky slip, the glossy slide of him against her sensitive opening, the heaviness of his weight, the look on his face when he’d finally gotten all the way inside her, prayer and curse, blessing and blasphemy. She didn’t have words for how she’d wanted to receive everything about him, the anger she could see on his face, his need begging in his eyes, the way he braced himself as if he were going to deliver something that was part gift, part mean withholding. She wanted it as rough as he wanted to give it; she wanted it for as long as he could hold out; she wanted it now and then again after the first time. She feared she would never be done wanting it.

“I don’t want to talk. This isn’t some talk-show therapy session about erectile dysfunction. This is my fucking life, okay?”

He said it over his shoulder. He was walking toward the door. He was going to run away and she couldn’t let him. Not again.

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