My h*ps stayed aligned with his, but I bent backward until my head and half my back rested on the bed. Jackson leaned with me, curling around my body. His mouth burned a hot path from my collarbone down into the valley between my br**sts. He kept a hand at the small of my back and used it to pull me in every time he surged forward.
He rained kisses down on my chest, and I clutched the back of his head, needing to feel him, to hold him against me.
He trailed up again, flicking his tongue over my collarbone and scraping his teeth against the column of my throat. My skin broke out in goose bumps, and I shuddered in his arms. He placed a kiss on the underside of my jaw, and I dipped my head down to meet his.
His tongue plunged into my mouth, mimicking the deep movement of the rest of his body, and I clung to him as he wrung pleasure from my body with each slow thrust.
“Kelsey,” he whispered.
I had to pry my eyes open, and even then each time his skin slid against mine I had to fight to hold up my eyelids. He pressed his forehead into mine, and rather than falling into his dark eyes, they seemed to pour something into me. Confidence, maybe. Or affection. Whatever it was, I stopped worrying about how this would play out. I stopped thinking of the ways I was inadequate. I stopped everything that didn’t have to do with this moment.
He said, “God, do you have any idea what you do to me? Any idea how long I’ve wanted you?”
I didn’t have any ideas about anything, except that I was so close.
I hooked my hand around his hip, my fingers splaying from his lower back to the curve of the rest of his body. I pressed my fingers into his skin, my fingernails spurring him on.
“Harder,” I begged.
His h*ps pushed forward, and I felt it all the way to my toes.
He slid the arm out from underneath my head and lifted himself up. He kept one knee between mine, and our h*ps fitted together. He used the leg I’d had around his hip to guide me onto my back. Then clutching my leg to his chest, he gave me exactly what I asked for.
His h*ps rolled into mine first, as I adjusted to the new position, then rocked forward harder. On his second thrust, I reached up and pressed my hand flat against the headboard.
His pace shifted from slow and steady to fast and hard and the bed creaked beneath us. I sucked in a breath, holding it as I drew closer and closer, and then I was falling all over again. Falling from that bridge. My heart in my throat. Falling for him. My heart in my hands. Falling apart. Falling together.
Falling into place.
It felt like hours before my heartbeat slowed, and I was strong enough to open my eyes.
When I did, my head was both clouded and clear. I couldn’t have remembered fractions or the state capitols or maybe even my name. Those things had been locked behind a wall of bliss. But Jackson’s face above mine? That was clear, as was the way just the sight of him made my heartbeat pick up again.
He lowered my leg to the outside of his hips, so that he was cradled between my thighs.
He leaned down and teased my tired lips with his own.
He said, “I could watch that a hundred more times. A thousand.”
I scrunched my nose up, certain that I’d probably made some hideous face in the throes of the moment. He smoothed the lines on my forehead with his thumb and said, “ I want to memorize the way your eyes clench shut and you bite down on your lip, so that I can sketch your expression from memory. I want to know the exact angle of the way your neck curves, and how many times your heart beats a minute. I want to know everything.”
I swallowed, my heart speeding up when it should have been slowing down. There were things about myself that even I didn’t want to know, let alone share them with him.
Changing the subject, I asked, “So you don’t regret crossing that line?”
His mouth trailed across my jaw, and he hummed under his breath.
“I can still think of a few other lines I’d like to cross before the night is through.”
He rolled, pulling me on top of him, our bodies still intimately connected. The friction teased my sensitive skin, and I had to steady myself with my hands on his chest.
He traced the curve of my body from my breast to my waist to my hip and said with a wicked grin, “You’re adventurous, right?”
Now, this was the kind of adventure I was always on board for.
Hours stretched into days, and we only left the apartment in Riomaggiore when we had to. We got whatever food and supplies we needed, but we never lasted very long before our tastes turned away from food.
Our seventh day came and went, and neither of us made any move to leave or end our time together. And I began to understand the Via dell’Amore a little more, that chair and all those locks. I realized it wasn’t the lock that mattered so much as the fact that it required a key.
Jackson had found every little sensitive nook that made my toes curl and my eyes roll back in my head. He knew what made me hold my breath and what made me cry out his name. He unlocked my body, and in doing so unlocked doors that held nothing but stale air and bad memories.
If I believed the stories I learned growing up, God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. I wondered if, like me, the eighth day was when he watched it all begin to unravel.
23
I woke, my breaths pushing from my lungs like broken glass. Jackson wasn’t in bed beside me, and I curled into a ball, glad for his absence.
Pieces of my dream were slipping away, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to try to hold on to them to examine or to push them away so I wouldn’t have to.
I’d been twelve again, but in that way that dreams don’t make sense, I was also twenty-two. Mom and Dad were arguing in the kitchen, and Mr. Ames, Dad’s business partner, had come upstairs. He said he was looking for a bathroom, but there were two on the bottom floor. He touched my shoulder. He told me I was soft. And like those animated flip books I played with as a kid, the sheets of my dream began to fan, and it wasn’t Mr. Ames’s hand against me, but the boy I’d lost my virginity to just a year and a half later.
He trailed his fingers to my neck, and then down to my chest. The pages flipped. More hands, a different one on every page. Some looked familiar. Some didn’t. But with each page, the hands swept across my body. The pages flipped and the locations began to change along with the hands—the back of a pickup truck, my freshman dorm, my apartment, a few hostels.
The scene shifted, and it was me and Mr. Ames in all those places, and I screamed and cried long after the dream had shifted on to a new person, a new place. And each hand carved away a part of me, sanded and chiseled until I was hollowed out, a wisp of a girl.
I pulled away, crying, and stumbled from a hostel bed to my parents’ living room couch. This time I was just me, present day, but my parents looked down at me like I was still only four feet tall.
Dad was talking, saying I was blowing things out of proportion. He morphed into Mr. Ames for just as second as he said, “Quit playing the victim.”
Mom asked me questions, asked me how Mr. Ames touched me and where. When I showed them, when I put my hand to my chest . . . I knew what was coming next. I knew the words like they were carved into my skin, like the pulse of my heart beat them out in Morse code.
I waited for them, cringed for them, begged for them because I needed to hear that it didn’t count.
But instead, my world was filled with Hunt, with his all seeing eyes, with his blistering touch, with his consuming kiss and the words, “Tell me this counts.”
His hands, large and callused lay atop my chest where the heart beneath had been sanded down to a tiny thing. In my dream, he held my crumbling body, and he told me that it was okay. His touch was soft and perfect and exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t stop crumbling in his arms, no matter how gentle he was.
That was when the lies I’d built so high that they scraped the sky shattered. Every brick I’d laid between me and that day when I was twelve crumbled as if they were made of something less than sand.
Because it mattered.
Who touches you, whether it’s your skin or your soul, matters.
I sat, huddled alone in bed in that Italian apartment, shaking from a dream that I knew was nothing more than synapses firing in my brain, collecting recent thoughts and putting them together regardless of sense or order. I knew that’s all it was, but things didn’t always have to make sense to be true.
And I could feel every hand that ever touched me, the ones that I’d welcomed along with the one that I didn’t, as if they were bearing down on me, pushing me below the current until I had no choice but to breathe in that shattered glass of truth.
It all counted.
Hunt walked through the door of our poisoned oasis, held up a bag, and said, “I’ve got breakfast.”
It took everything in me not to cry. Because he was perfect. So goddamn perfect. And I was a mess.
“Thanks,” I shrugged, the corners of my lips jumping briefly in a similar motion. “I’m not hungry, though.”
He laid the bag, probably containing some kind of pastry on the bedside table, and toed off his shoes.
Lifting one knee up onto the bed, he smirked, before crawling toward me. “I can think of a few ways to work up your appetite.”
He pushed my tangled hair to the other side of my neck, and lowered his mouth to my shoulder. I closed my eyes thinking he might be just the thing to clear away the cobwebs from all those newly opened doors.
Instead, his kiss was like a puncture wound, and I couldn’t decide which part hurt worse—the beginning or the end, the knife going in or pulling out. His sweet kiss only made me think of all the other kisses I’d given away without a thought. It only made me think of how much I didn’t deserve him. Or rather . . . he didn’t deserve to get stuck with someone like me.
I moved away from him in the guise of facing him instead.
“How long have you been up?”
He settled back against the headboard. “A while.”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
I wished I had never gone to sleep.
“Something like that.”
“More nightmares?”
He took hold of my waist, and pulled me back between his thighs. My back rested against his chest, and he tucked his chin over my shoulder.
“Enough about that. Any thoughts on how you’d like to spend the day, princess?”
The scruff on his jaw grazed my neck, and I shivered.
His hand smoothed up my thigh, and panicked, I said, “Let’s go out.”
He paused for a few seconds, and then wrapped his arms around me in a loose embrace.
“And do what?”
“I thought you were the one with all the plans.”
“Yes, well.” He pulled me close. “I’m easily distracted.”
God, first I can’t get him to make a move, and now he’s full of them.
“What about swimming? There was that swimming hole that the lady at the restaurant mentioned.”
“As if I could say no to you in a bathing suit.”
I donned the same swimsuit I’d worn that night in Budapest. His eyes went dark when he saw me, and he grasped one of the ties hanging off my hip, tugging me forward.
Against my better judgment, I melted into him. His touch was an addiction, and addictions don’t become any less desirable when they’re joined with pain. He kissed me, and his lips were an introduction to light after a life of darkness. The brightness hurt, but not nearly as bad as the thought of a life wasted in the black.