Those scars blend seamlessly into the stories written across his body in raging ink, darkly spiraling and swirling designs like spells cast in flesh. They cast a spell on me, winding down his arms and over his chest, darkening his already bronzed skin to a point of sin. There’s a bruise on his shoulder, as if he’d been in some kind of brawl recently, but it only adds to the raw, primitive edge of his feral beauty. He’s breathtaking, with his dark hair falling across his lightning blue eyes, and that pensive blue gaze staring across the water.
Breathtaking, magnificent, and someone I…
I can never have.
Logan? Logan. Like that’s really such a stretch from Landon.
Fuck my life, McKenna Burke is writing a romance novel about me.
Those are my tattoos she’s talking about. Black hair. Blue eyes. Even the bruise that even now makes my shoulder hurt like a motherfucker even though it’s starting to fade into tinges of green and yellow.
It's me. Obviously.
And the girl in this story, the one I flip through, reading about the trademark frames on her face and the day she found this Logan asshole's diary...
I don’t even realize my mouth has been hanging open half the time I’ve been reading until I realize how dry my tongue is. Or how my heart has gone straight to my cock, beating like it's ready to tear through my pants.
I swallow, closing my lips forcefully. My face feels like I just stuck my head in a damn oven, my chest is tight, and my balls burn molten.
I don’t know if I’m so fucking turned on I’m furious about it, or so fucking furious the raw adrenaline of it is getting me up. I don’t know how to feel. Maybe five years ago I’d have found this sweet and funny, but now? After everything?
It’s insane. Confounding. Frustrating. Sexually and mentally.
And, yeah, hot as hell.
How could it ever be anything else? It’s this weird kind of high, not quite an ego rush, but more like this powerful fucking hit of being desired, and it’s just tangling my feelings about that gorgeous human train wreck up even more.
I flip through a few more pages. Her writing gets rougher, and there's a few scrunched, angry lines on the blank side of a page, most of them half-scribbled out. Barely legible.
My eyes drift over it, taking in character names, places, and then a name I finally recognize.
Landon, you're an ass. A lie. A memory. A sin. A yesterday I shouldn't want so badly becoming tomorrow.
You're cruel. You're gorgeous. You're beautiful. If you could pull your head out of your own ass for two seconds, you'd even realize you could still have the world. And the painful truth, the one I'll never tell you to your stuck-up jerk-face, is you could have me.
Because you never lost me with your words. Or your looks – the ones that leave me confused whether you want to fuck me or stab me to death. You lost me because you shut down, closed off, and because you ran. All the things I want so, so badly to do, and never can.
Because here's the truth, you prick. It's not over. It never was. And maybe it never will be.
You've moved on. Still snarly and handsome as ever in your screw-the-whole-world attitude. You're still something, at least. Still a man. Still living.
And me? I'm still this battered, messed up wreck you left behind. Still a girl-shaped ruin, trying to reassemble in a world that ended the day you cursed me to my face. I'm still not over you, you fucking prick, but someday, God willing, I will be.
There are no words.
None, whatsoever, for these piercing angst bomb words. Or for their author.
That gorgeous human train wreck who is, right now, standing over me with her soft eyes wide and her face so brilliantly red she looks like a cherry tomato.
I’m ripped from my absorbed reading by Kenna’s spluttering sound, only for the journal to fly out of my hands a second later. She slams it closed and then hugs it protectively against her chest. “You...you read my book?” she demands. “What the hell?! I never said you could!”
Never said you could read mine either, I almost snap back, but don’t.
Once in a blue moon, I can be a damn adult.
“It’s not bad,” I can’t help mocking, though. “You’ve come a long way from fan fic.”
She scowls at me, and somehow manages to go even redder. I’m almost worried she’s about to pop a vein. “It’s just ideas for the book.”
“Ideas based on me.”
She makes a gargling, bizarre sound that almost makes me laugh. “It’s not based on you!”
“Uh-huh.”
I curl my knuckles against my temple and lean on my elbow, just watching her. Even red down to her collarbone, she’s adorable. Delectable.
She's coming apart in all the best ways a woman can.
Her green eyes wide, her luscious little pink mouth open, her chestnut hair pulled down and wafting around her face in wild, witchy tangles that catch on her glasses and tease at her lips and make me want to brush those teasing tendrils from her face and kiss her and do something about this fucking hard-on that’s getting worse the more she stammers and fumbles and acts exactly like the nerdy little monster I used to adore.
And now hate more than anyone in this world save for one.
I let her dangle for a few moments longer, then say, “It’s fine. Consider us even for that fake girlfriend thing. You bailed me out there, so I’ll let you license my breathtaking, magnificent body in your story.” I can’t help the smirk. “Good thing we’re not fucking for real. I’d get pretty pissed if you called me Logan in bed.”
It’s like the day goes still, a blanket of silence falling over us, while this wavelength yawns between us. This connection made by those words, that possibility I’ve put between us. The idea of us, in bed together.
And I can see it, too – how her flush changes into something breathless and delicate, deep in denial, in how her lashes tremble around her gaping eyes, in how her breath picks up in subtle, shallow puffs past her parted lips, making her throat move in flutters and her chest lift and fall against her loose tank top. Her instinct is an invitation to take those sweet tits in my palms and suck them raw.
She’s thinking it, too.
In her vivid little imagination, she’s seeing exactly what I am.
How she'd look in my bed. Pale against my dark sheets, her shoulders dotted with the little golden freckles she’s started to pick up after just a few days on the beach.
Her glasses tossed aside to leave those clear, vulnerable, sweetly questioning eyes looking up at me with so much trepidation and such complete trust.
That way she has of telling me with a single glance that she sees who I used to be, and not who I really am. Sees someone I can never be again.
But when I think of her naked skin soft and yielding under my palms, when I think of her back arching and her breasts thrusting against my chest as I touch and tease her, kiss and taste her, exploring every inch of her until she’s tossing against her wild mane of chestnut hair, clutching at me...
Fuck. It’s so real I can almost taste her, wet on my tongue.
Drenching herself with the heat and hunger I know I can coax past that shyness...
Yeah.
When I think of that, when I think of what could have been if we’d had normal lives and grown into ourselves side by side, realizing what we’d been ignoring for years...
I almost want to be that man again.
That man I can never be, when if I touch her, if I take her, if I discover for myself just how sweet and tight the depths of her body could be, I know what happens next.
Not think. Not imagine.
Know.
I’ll defile her.
I'll ruin her.
I'll leash her heart and her mind and her sweet, sweet cunt to every piece of me, and I'm a maniac who won't let go.
It’s not like she could ever look at me with that kind of trust for real, anyway, no matter how many little longing glances she throws my way, glances that tell me she expects better from me.
It’s not hard to tell she still fears me as much as she wants me.
She should.