Page 71 of The Heartbreak Hotel
He groans as I pick up my rhythm, breathless. He’s propped on one elbow above me, his hair falling forward to brush my forehead. I squeeze, gently, and his eyes open, tracking back and forth over mine. “Louisa, are you sure?”
“Henry.” He holds my gaze. “Are you going to make me beg?”
His lips part. “I don’t—”
“Please,” I whisper, stroking him one more time, watching his eyes flutter closed and open again. “Please.”
He lowers onto me, kissing me open-mouthed, one hand reaching down to wrap my leg around his hip. “Off,” I say, nudging at the waistband of his boxers. He pulls away to discard them and, when he comes back, presses the full length of his body against mine.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmurs, kissing along the underside of my jaw. “I have condoms. Lube.”
“Both,” I say, running my fingernails up the length of his back. He’s broad and warm and I never, ever, ever want to stop touching him. “Please.”
I watch him kneel, reaching for a condom on the coffee table and rolling it on. He’s beautiful in the firelight: the long lines of his torso, silver-glinted hair falling into his face. I can barely seethe pink ridge of that scar along his sternum, half-hidden by dark hair. Before I get a good look he’s back, poised over me with his hand between my legs.
“A little cold,” he whispers, spreading me open with lube on his fingers. I wriggle beneath him, and he smiles. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” I pull him down on top of me, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. He kisses the arch of my neck and then props himself onto his elbows, one hand framing my face, his fingers curved over the top of my head.
“Okay?” he asks, quiet and close. Every centimeter of my body is incandescent with longing.
“More than,” I whisper, and Henry moves into me, and I’m done for.
He’s heavy-lidded, after—soft linesof his body on the blankets next to me, dark lashes casting shadows from the fire. He rests one big hand on my stomach. Rooting me down, keeping me close.
“How do you feel?” Henry murmurs, his eyes barely open.
I swallow. I feel hot and spent and tingly. I feel exhausted and high. “Dehydrated.”
Henry smiles, propping himself up to look at me in earnest. He taps my forehead with two fingers. “How do you feel here?”
“Happy,” I say softly. Consumingly so.
Henry dips his chin, kisses me gently. “Yeah.”
He gets up to bring me a glass of water, and when he lowers back to the floor beside me that scar catches in the light. I run my hand over his chest, where his skin is hot and damp with sweat. “What happened here?”
Henry rolls onto his back and I move with him, bracing one arm on the ground and drawing my fingers over the scar. It’s soft and smooth—healed.
He looks down at my fingers, watching them trace his skin. “It’s a tattoo.”
“Really?” I get closer to it—the uneven, pink lines, the pucker marks like there were staples in his skin. “It looks so real.”
“Yeah,” he says on an exhale. I look up at him and he places his hand over mine, hiding the tattoo from both of us. “Molly had this big surgery when she was two.” He says it straight up at the ceiling. “They opened up her whole chest. She was so small.”
I prop myself up taller, rising on my elbow to get a better look at him. There’s a blanket draped over us and it slides with me, pooling at my waist.
“The scar really freaked her out, after,” Henry says. “She’d cry seeing it in the mirror, or feeling it under her clothes.” He tilts his chin, angling his head on the floor to meet my eyes. “I got the tattoo so I’d have a matching one. So she could see that it wasn’t so scary, and as she grew up, she wouldn’t feel different because of it.” He licks his lower lip, lets out a breath. That line, anguished and familiar, cuts between his eyebrows. “But she died a few months after I got it, so I’ll never know if it helped her.”
I move his hand away from the tattoo and press my mouth to it. He inhales under my lips, sharp and surprised.I lost all of it.
“Having you helped her,” I say, looking back up at him with my chin propped on his sternum. How couldn’t it have? Henry’s softness, his patience. I could choke on the feeling rising in my throat, hot and painful as tears. “It’s really beautiful, Henry.”
He swallows, his eyes flickering from me to the ceiling.
“You know what’s sad,” he says, drawing an unsteady breath,“is six years later, my fingers still twitch every time I step into a crosswalk. Reaching for her hand.”
His words land like a burn, tender to the touch. I rest my cheek over his heart—it’s pounding, still. Fast and frantic.
