Page 13 of Jagged Line Paradise

“Lonnie.”

I sigh.

His body goes rigid.

He groans.

Warm liquid rushes out across my skin.

An aftershock of pleasure surprises me.

We breathe together for moments that stretch on forever and for no time at all. I feel like he’s just bared his soul to me, and I had no idea how much I wanted that.

“I want this,” I tell him honestly. “I want to be your girl.”

He lifts his head from my shoulder and kisses me with that thick tongue that simply licks the willpower right out of me. “You’ve always been my girl, sunshine.”

Chapter 4

Andrés

SO MAYBE THISplace is paradise after all.

Maybe Lonnie’s been right the whole time.

Maybe she’s an angel and Heaven exists inside her warmth, regardless of whether we’re holding each other in my box of a room in our shitty trailer park.

I love her. I really do. My heart pounds an insistent beat inside my chest to tell her, but fear keeps the words inside me. I could dirty talk the girl off a cliff. I could tell her that I love her cunt, her tits, the feel of her pussy as she comes. But I can’t tell her that I love her heart and soul, and that makes me feel like a coward.

Why is it so easy to slip myfingers inside her, but so damn hard to tell herwhat she really means to me?

I’m lucky she’s still here…lucky I didn’t scare her off when I came on her stomach. I hadn’t planned for any of this to happen tonight, except for the kiss on the bluff. That I had planned—the rest was pleasantly unexpected.

“You okay?” I ask her quietly.

I turn my head to look at her and my eyes skim down the wall against the side of my bed, every inch of the paneling covered with posters of my favorite bands and half-naked women in compromising positions. Lonnie has been in my room plenty of times before, but I somehow feel newly self-conscious for some of the images I’ve been looking at for years. Most of them I pulled from magazines and catalogs that my dad had stuffed under his mattress—he doesn’t bother hiding them anymore.

My eyes catch on a particularly raunchy image at eye-level to Lonnie where she lays beside me. She could reach her arm out to her side and touch it, and that makes me feel something I’m not used to feeling.

I think it might be shame.

I’ve never been ashamed by it before.

I’ve been turned-on by it, but fuck, this feeling sucks. The longer I look at the image, the worse I feel about it. The woman in the picture is all trussed up in rope that’s cleverly wrapped to hide her nipples and pussy—where the line is drawn between erotic and pornographic, I guess—and tears streak down her cheeks in black lines where her heavy eye make-up runs.

Lonnie must notice me staring at it because she turns her head to glance in that direction, then looks back at me, propped up on my elbow beside her.

“Is that really something you like?” she asks. “I mean, have you done that to someone before?” Her eyes are wide, but I don’t think they’re wide with wonder or hope.

I think she’s afraid what my answer will be.

And I’m afraid to give it. But I can’t lie. I’ve never lied to her before—not directly, anyway—and I won’t start now. “Yeah, I’ve tied a girl up before.”

She pushes up from flat on her back to her elbows. “Likethat?Specifically,that?” Her ginger hair whips around her head as she looks dramatically at the poster then back to me.

I smile at the way her hair moves. It’s like a flash fire when she whips it around that way.

“Not specifically that.”

---