Page 5 of Professional Liar
The unspoken secrets between us. We didn’t say it. Over the years, we took what we needed from each other and left everything else in the bed when we walked away.
I turned back and let him wrap his arms around me properly. He could fold me into him completely, and it had always been the only place I felt safe.
We were damned. Doomed from the start.
I pulled back enough to look up at him and shook my head.
“I know,” he whispered. Then he let go, clasped my hand in his, and led me to his bed.
His room was dark, but I could see it in my mind from the dozens of times I’d fallen into his sheets. Drunk, high, sober, crying. More times than I could admit to myself.
Four posters of solid dark wood, his bedding in shades of black and charcoal. The best thread count money could buy, even when he wasn’t so high up in his family business.
I let go of his hand and turned my back. He slid the zipper of my dress down, and I stepped out of it. This part felt perfunctory. We’d done it a thousand times. What came next was the opposite.
There was no logic to us. No plan and no homage. We were pure escape.
The games were abandoned now. I wasn’t the mafia princess, and he wasn’t the hired gun working his way up the ranks. Nothing but human flesh against human flesh. Avatars for our release.
He jerked me to face him, his thighs and knees knocking against mine as he walked me backward. When I hit the bed, he pushed down. I reached out for the warmth of him, his bedroom colder than the living room, and my temperature adjusting to my still wet hair.
He stared at me, his eyes hidden in the dark, but I felt his gaze locked on my bare skin. The ripple of bumps along my hard nipples, the scar down the side of my belly from a missed assassination attempt. He lingered, remembering and reacquainting himself with my body.
I sucked in a breath when he dipped his hands inside his pants and jerked them down to kick away. Naked, his hard cock jutted up to bounce against the outline of his abs.
Damn.
They didn’t make men like him on my side of town. Polish and circumstance didn’t hone bodies like blood and sweat.
He stroked his length, a few pulls while he looked me over. “Do you like what you see?” he asked.
My throat locked tight with need, and all I could do was nod and reach for him again. He climbed between my legs, up on his knees, and cupped the back of my thighs to situate them up, my feet flat. I allowed him to move me however he liked.
Time stopped. We weren’t part of this world now.
This was us.
Naked.
Honest to the point of a knife under the ribs.
He scooted forward until my legs rattle against his hip bones. I couldn’t help but sigh as the rain strewn light from the window flickered across his skin. “You’re beautiful.” I whispered.
He didn’t answer, but curled his hand around the outside of my left thigh, a simple touch, an acknowledgement he heard me.
“You didn’t come here for sex,” he said, after we stayed that way, staring at each other a while.
It had been at least a year since I’d been underneath him. A year since I promised I’d give him up. A year since I watched him walk out of my restaurant, the entire family’s unfriendly eyes trained on his back.
“I never come here for sex. It’s often the opposite of why I come here. Money, drugs, booze, to yell at you. Never for sex. Why should this time be any different?”
He dropped his chin, and the light caught the crinkle around his eye for a second. They were closed but soft, like he was praying. “You asked me to marry you, Kat. You can’t do that. Why did you fucking do that?” he whispered.
An answer wasn’t required, but payment would be. A rectification.
In a few words, I’d shifted the paradigm. Maybe this would be the last time we could be us. The world would finally wrench between. And maybe it should.
Our relationship wasn’t healthy, and it certainly never did anything good for either of us. We fought more than we fucked, we argued and threw things. I slapped him more than once. He’d punched walls more than once. We were toxic to each other. And yet, laying here in the dark, underneath him, I shivered, waiting between the seconds until he’d be inside me, finally easing the ache I didn’t know I’d harbored since the last time his hands played my body.
