“High.” I pushed at him.
He kept laughing.
“High!” I snapped, pushing harder at him.
He lifted his head, eyes dancing, lines radiating out the sides, creasing, body trembling with the chuckles that still had control over him and there it was again.
Perfection.
Enough!
“Get off me,” I demanded.
“Babe,” he replied.
I listened.
He said nothing else, just rode the wave of his amusement until it naturally died.
Then it hit me. The memory. The memory that there were a variety of occasions where Logan spoke Badass.
There were only a few words in the Vocabulary of Badass but each one had a number of meanings. They included beautiful, Christ, fuck, Jesus, and shit.
But the one used most was babe.
I was out of practice. I had no idea what that particular babe meant.
And I wasn’t going to find out.
“Nothing about this is funny,” I bit out. “Let us not forget, I came to you to tell you what I told you yesterday and in your fancy-ass RV, you humiliated me.”
There was no amusement in his expression when I quit talking.
No.
Instead he shifted over me so he was fully covering me. I was taking a fair amount of his hefty weight, and he lifted his other hand so he could use both of them to hold either side of my head.
In other words, there was no escape.
“Yeah,” he growled. “I did. I did it with intent. I was a dick and I was a dick on purpose. Because what you did to us fuckin’ destroyed me and I never put the pieces back together. But, Millie, I did it for more reasons than that. I did it for self-preservation. I did it ’cause you were back in a way you were back, in my bed, ass in the air for me, takin’ my dick and I felt you, I smelled you, I heard you, and I saw the ink on your back permanently declarin’ you were mine when you made that a lie for reasons I did not get. And all I could think was that I wanted to keep fuckin’ you, listenin’ to how much you loved takin’ me, feelin’ my cock sink inside you, and I wanted that until I stopped breathing. If I had you on your back, woulda seen your face, which would have fucked with me more. I picked the lesser of two evils. So I had to cover that shit on your back so I didn’t let go and let you lead me to the brink again and convince me to jump.”
Oh my God.
“High,” I whispered, and he dragged his thumb along my cheek, pressing it into my bottom lip until it hooked on the edge of my teeth and he moved in so we were so close, I could see nothing but him.
“I’m Logan to you.” His voice scratched out, chafing my skin.
Against his hold on my mouth, I forced out, “I—”
That was all I was able to do.
“You feel sweet. You feel scared. You feel happy. You feel sad. You feel anything you use your name for me. You can call me High. But not times like now. Times like now, I’m Logan.”
I wasn’t entirely certain I understood precisely the different occasions I could use his different names but I felt in his current mood I should agree.
So I said, “Okay.”
He swept his thumb from my mouth to the flesh under my cheek and pressed in lightly.
Then he went on.
“I held you down for that,” he continued to explain. “I held you down, coverin’ that ink. You were not faceless pussy, Millie. You could never be that and you fuckin’ know it. Even if you forgot, what came after woulda told you that shit couldn’t be true.”
“What came after wasn’t much healthier,” I shared hesitantly.
He moved back an inch and tilted his head slightly. “Yeah? You think?”
What?
He didn’t?
“Of course,” I said quietly. “You were there. You have to think the same thing too.”
“Three weeks ago when I didn’t have it all, maybe. Now. Fuck no.”
“It wasn’t healthy, Logan.”
“I couldn’t get enough of you, Millie.”
I drew in a sharp breath.
“Couldn’t get you outta my head. Didn’t rest until I found a new reason to get in your space. Found those reasons, got in your space. If I didn’t give a fuck about you, I wouldn’t have followed you for forty-five fuckin’ minutes, from the second I laid eyes on you at Bill’s rally, and found my shot to get in your face. If you didn’t mean shit to me, I’da seen you and put you out of my head. I didn’t. I got in your face. You kissed me. I fucked you. And I kept comin’ back for more.”
Okay.
Damn.
Okay.
Shit.
That made sense.
“And you,” he continued. “If you didn’t give a shit about me, you moved on, you would not have seen me buyin’ a burrito and come lookin’ for me. You woulda heard what I said, felt what that meant, and went on with your life. You didn’t. You found me. You kissed me. You took my cock. And even with how I took that from you, when I kept comin’ back for more, you kept takin’ it. You didn’t want it, you know you made that clear, I woulda been gone. You did not make that clear. You entered that fucked-up game we were playin’ because you needed what you got, unhealthy or not. Just like me when it comes to you, you’d take what you could get.”
You’d take what you could get.
I would. With Logan, I would.
Until the day I died.
I tried to turn my face away, to get some sort of privacy to process his words, but he put pressure on to keep my focus on him.
“I need you to get off me, Logan,” I whispered.
“You did wrong,” he replied.