Page 64 of Hold on Tight

He tried to thrust forward but the goddamned socket of his prosthetic leg hit her thigh and stopped him.

No. No, no, no.

I can’t.

It made his head hurt to think it. “Can’t” wasn’t a word he wanted in his vocabulary. It wasn’t a word he’d everhadin his vocabulary.

Fuck the socket, fuck the leg. He’d made it this far, had come up the stairs to do this thing, and he wasn’t going to fail her again.

“Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”

That turned off his brain in a hurry. Got all the blood back where it was supposed to go.

“Jake, you’re killing me. Come on. More. Please.”

He wanted to. He needed to. Somehow. Some way.

He pulled out

She groaned. “Why’d you do that?”

“Turn over.”

“Like this?”

She lay on her stomach on the bed, her knees slightly bent, ass tipped a little so he could see the wetness glistening on her swollen lips.

“Fuck,” he said. He knelt behind her, palmed her ass with both hands, squeezing, then spread her and slid into her folds. The heat alone almost made him lose it.

It wasn’t perfect. The socket still got in his way, but the heat and tightness around his dick was blotting out thought. He pivoted his hips so he could thrust deeper without the prosthesis impeding him. It was awkward, but she couldn’t see him, and that made it tolerable.

He thought of the night he’d done this solo, and how much better this felt, and how much worse. That night there hadn’t been anything but him and his body, however damaged, however unfamiliar. Tonight, there was silicone and titanium and the distance between what he wanted and what he could have. He wanted the curve of her ass slapping against his abs, the give of her flesh as he pressed her hard into the mattress.

Instead he was getting this. This halfway thing. And it sucked, but,fuck, it was working for him anyway. The jiggle of her ass as he thrust, the way her hands gripped the fitted sheet, her fingers white where they dug into the bed. The noises she was making, a cry for each stroke, before he withdrew and stroked again. The way she tilted her hips higher and higher, reaching back for him, ratcheting him up faster than he wanted. Unless he stopped, he was going to come.

He didn’t want it to be over. He wanted to be in her, forgetting himself, forgetting the part of him that wasn’t him, feeling the familiar and unfamiliar sensation of being heated and surrounded and gripped.

But this thing was far beyond his control. The way he felt around her, in her, was way beyond his control. The way he’d felt when he looked up to see her at Discovery Park, the way he’d felt beside her in the Ferris wheel car, the way he’d felt sitting on her couch while she was upstairs tucking Sam in. And then—without meaning to, because he knew that she didn’t do it on purpose, it was just the person she was—she had dismantled him. She had made him talk without trying, the way she used to, the stories pouring out of him, a perfect flow, all those words, all the things he didn’t mean to reveal about himself, the leg, Mike, the wedged knee. And somehow this, this sex with her, was part of what she could make him reveal, part of what she could draw out of him, part of what she could take from him against his will. Only afterward he would find that it hadn’t been against his will at all, that it had been what he needed to give and give up, that it had been everything that was missing.

The feeling that gathered in his chest, in his gut, in his throat, was too much—it couldn’t be held back. Her wet heat, the rub of her mons against his balls each time he entered her, each time he pulled back, a vague but insistent friction.God, he wanted that last inch or two, wanted it like nothing fucking else, but it wasn’t his, not tonight, and instead of taking it and shoving the edge of the socket deep into her flesh, he used his hip to press her down as hard as he could into the mattress, pushed her tight against the resistance, and she arched under him, cried and shook, involuntary squeezes tight around his base until he couldn’t hold out any longer and gave himself up to the sensation, coming in long, draining pulses that were a stew of frustration and triumph.

He became slowly aware of how slick they were with sweat, how hard she was breathing. He extricated himself and rolled off her, staring at the ceiling, trying to catch his breath, trying to get his bearing. Trying to understand the sensation he had that his world had shifted around him, as profoundly and as seismically as it had in the wake of the literal explosion.

“Wow,” she said.

He was drowning in something—gratitude, he thought. As if he’d been waiting all this time, his libido held in suspense, and only now finished what they’d started all those years ago.

He made it into a joke, because that was the only way he could get his head around it. “Whew,” he said. “That was some serious foreplay. Eight years.”

They both laughed.

“It kind of feels like that, right?”

He reached for her hand.

His body was heavy as lead, that post-sex torpor he’d missed like a mo-fo sneaking over him. In a minute or two he’d be asleep, and he didn’t want to be that guy. So he made himself lie on one side, facing her. It was a little awkward, but all the endorphins made everything easier. Maybe next time he’d take the leg off. Get that last inch or two, that sensation of burying himself as deep as it was possible to go into her.

What would she think about that? How would she react to his residual leg, to the scars and lumpiness and just plain not-thereness of it? Not everyone wanted to make love to a one-legged man. Although if anyone would take it in stride, it would be Mira. Nothing got her.

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