Wreck the Halls

“No, Beat. That’s not how it works.” She wrapped her thighs tightly around his waist, her body shaking with the anticipation of being filled. Feeling that hardness invade her, give her pleasure, use her. Fuck her. “We take care of each other.”

She could see the moment it all clicked for him, a line forming between his brows, his hands pausing in the act of guiding his shaft between her thighs. At the outset of their relationship, he’d kept the blackmail a secret, then the identity of his father. He’d locked her out. The night of the snowball fight, he’d promised to change. He’d felt changed. But he’d fallen back into his old pattern. Refusing the trust, to burden anyone with his problems. After all the progress they’d made, of course this would be a blow to Melody.

Beat’s breath raced in and out as he pressed himself inside of Melody and bucked home—hard—snapping his teeth against the curve of her neck. “I love you so much, Mel. I’ll never lock you out again.”

Her back slid up and down the wall with every thrust, her fingers digging into his shoulders to balance the quickening deep in her sex. “Beat. Beat. Beat.”

“That’s the name of your soulmate.” His mouth found hers and shredded her final thread of rational thought, kissing her like it was the first time. Or last time. She couldn’t be sure; all she knew was that her heart climbed high in her throat and she clung, thighs scrambling higher around his waist. Her tongue tangled with his greedily, her body an inferno for this man she’d become addicted to and robbed of in such a short span of time. “You hear my name in your sleep, Peach, the same way I hear yours.”

“Yes,” she whispered, opening her knees and leaning back slightly, craving the sight of him entering her, thickness into slick, hard into soft, best friend into lover, soulmates blurring into one. “I always will.”

Beat’s eyes flashed. “You always will, because I’ll be in bed beside you, whispering it in your ear, Melody.” He bared his teeth against her mouth. “I’ll be moaning it while I lick between your legs. I’ll call it out loud when I walk through the front door every night.”

Images were bombarding her, reviving the hope that had withered during their separation. She wasn’t quite ready to embrace it, to trust the happiness that came along with it, so she focused on the raw throb that increased with intensity every time his hips punched upward, slamming her buttocks into the wall of the elevator, his beloved fingers leaving bruises where they gripped her thighs and hips.

The words “I love you” were razing the inside of her throat. They wanted to be set loose so badly. She couldn’t yet, though. She couldn’t speak that truth until she could commit to him, to trying again, completely. To do otherwise would be cruel.

Distract yourself.

“Deeper,” she whispered. “Get it deeper.”

He let out a muffled roar into her shoulder, hooked his elbows beneath her knees to draw them higher and dialed the rhythm up to eleven. Based on the way she elevated even farther against the wall, she guessed he was going up on his toes to grind into her. The image of that made her clench uncontrollably, his name turning into a hoarse chant coming from deep, deep in her throat, her thighs starting to quake.

“God, I would love to get you pregnant someday, you know that?” His voice was rich and guttural in her hair, his mouth planting kisses on her hairline, her cheeks. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we talked about having kids. I want to be the man who makes it feel right for you. I want to take the good inside of you and double it.”

“Beat. Please.”

“Am I going too far? Good. Soak me into your bones the way you’re in mine.”

That was it. She lost her footing on the balance beam and went crashing down to the ground without a harness. “I need you so much. I need you so much.”

His sturdy frame started to shake, a choked sound leaving him. “Melody.”

They climaxed like two asteroids colliding in the sky, sending rubble and debris in a hundred directions. She whimpered and tightened her thighs, twisting her fingers in his hair and bearing down, accepting the pleasure for all it was worth, glorying in the flooding sensation he let loose inside of her. She felt the slick wetness that pooled with her own while her soulmate’s body jerked violently against her, moaning brokenly into her neck as if he hadn’t released in a hundred years. It felt the same way for her. Urgent and consuming and mind-blowing.

The orgasm took so much out of her that she collapsed as soon as it ended, her limbs turning to dead weight. But Beat, even in his own state of depletion, compensated to hold her upright, his arms going around her like twin vises. “Shhhh, Melody,” he whispered against her temple, kissed it reverently. “Everything is going to be better now.”

The organ in her chest squeezed painfully.

It would be so simple to stay in those arms forever. To forget the zombielike state he’d left her in after the Today show. She’d been a soaring bird one moment and roadkill the next, and the wound was still too fresh. She hoped she wouldn’t need to nurse it forever, but if that was the case, so be it. Her responsibility was to herself first and she couldn’t let her relationship with Beat heal around her broken bone. She needed to set it first or nothing would ever feel right.

“You’re still leaving, aren’t you?” he said, sounding almost dazed.

After a second, she nodded, holding him tighter. “Christmas Eve is only two days away. I’ll see you then.”

He didn’t seem capable of responding, though it took her several tries to extricate herself from the death grip his arms had around her. Once she accomplished that feat, she pulled her skirt back down. Leaving after what they’d just shared felt extremely wrong, so wrong that she could barely lift her finger to press the button that brought the elevator back to life.

It moved downward sluggishly while her pulse beat seven thousand miles an hour in her chest, her head demanding she do the right thing and go home, get some perspective, while her heart screamed at her to turn and run back into his perfect arms.

In the end, her mind won.

“The crazy thing is . . .” he said behind her, almost to himself. “In the end, it was fine, wasn’t it? I guarded this secret like it would set the world on fire. I don’t know what’s going to happen with my father—maybe it will burn his world down. I don’t know. But . . . it’s out there now. The truth. And everything is still standing. The show goes on. Everything just carries on. She didn’t even look at me any differently than she always has.”

“Love doesn’t come and go that easily, Beat. You need to believe you can lean on it, even when you have to lean really hard.” Melody swallowed the lump in her throat. “I think maybe the people who love us want to be tested and leaned on sometimes, so they can show us how much we mean. Expressing love and trust is a gift to the person who receives it.”

His chest dipped and expanded. “I’ll give those things to you, Melody Gallard. Every day. If you let me back in.”