She shivered at that word. “Please.”
“I like that. Beg for it.”
“Give it to me, please. Deep.”
His back arched and his words devolved to grunts and moans and the odd, “Yeah.” He was lost, helpless, and Laurel lived for these moments.
“Come on. Please.”
He sounded more animal than man, riding on the brink of madness, then all at once, he froze. He rammed so deep, Laurel winced through a cramp. Every muscle in that astounding body clenched, softened, clenched again, and ultimately went still.
She wrapped her arms around him, memorized his weight, the smell of his skin. Never let this moment cease to floor and humble her. Never let this man fail to amaze, and never let her fail to excite him. Never let familiarity curdle to boredom, she prayed.
Let this feel so easy and so wrong and so right, always.
3
Flynn rolled over, drunker than drunk. Drunker than he’d been for real in the better half of a decade. “Fuck, honey.”
Laurel chuckled and he could see the round shape of her cheek where the lamplight hit it. It made him smile in return.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You,” he proclaimed grandly, “can ask me any goddamn thing you want, as long as it doesn’t require me to leave this bed.”
She turned to face him, rubbing his chin with her thumb and seeming to address the spot. “I feel like more and more, when we’re doing the kinky stuff, by the time it’s over, we’re not acting.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Just that by the end, we’re you and me again. I’m not fighting you anymore.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess that’s probably true.” His chest unknotted. He’d worried she’d meant it had gotten too real for her comfort.
“Do you mind that?” she asked. “I can’t figure out if I’m the one who changes things. By the time I’m about to come it’s hard to pretend not to like it, is all.”
“Nah, I don’t mind.”
“You sure?”
He nodded, then caught her lingering thumb between his teeth, biting softly.
“If it seems like I’m just getting lazy,” she said, “tell me. I’ll step it up.”
He let her thumb go. “By the time the role-playing falls apart, I’m already as hot as I’m gonna get. The first half, that’s what matters. The stuff before the actual sex, and the start of the sex. By the time it’s all underway, I’m happy just bein’ bossy.”
“You sure?”
“How many times you gonna ask me that?”
She shrugged, studying his mouth. “I just want to make sure I’m not dropping the ball. Your kink’s important to me.”
“I know it is. And you don’t have anything to worry about. Plus you know me—if there’s something I need, I’ll ask for it.”
“True.” She paused, then smiled.
“What?”
“You know how I can tell you’re not pretending anymore?” she asked. “During the sex?”
“How?”
“You call me ‘honey’, instead of ‘sweetheart’.”
His brows rose. “Do I?”
“Yup.”
“Huh.” He supposed that was true.
“You used to call me ‘sub shop girl’,” she added.
“I did.”
“And ‘kiddo’. Actually, you still call me that.”
“I call every woman who’s younger than me ‘kiddo’. But ‘honey’—that’s all you.”
She didn’t have a pet name for him, he realized. If she called him anything, it was Flynn, or occasionally Michael, but only when she was panting and overwrought, on the cusp of a violent orgasm. She liked his given name, but he preferred his last name. He’d been called that for so many years, it felt right in a way that Michael didn’t. Call him “Michael” and he couldn’t help it—all he heard was his shithead father’s voice, drenched in Four Roses.
His sister called him Mike, which he put up with, having no choice. Looking back, it was her boyfriend, Robbie, who’d taken to calling him Flynn. He’d hero-worshipped the guy, and it was Robbie who’d gotten him into boxing, so no surprise that was the name that made him feel the most empowered, the most worthy of respect. He could’ve so easily been Mike or Mikey, some anonymous hoodlum selling stolen stereos out of the back of a van. Crazy what magic a strong male role model could work for a lost and angry kid.
No matter that you could probably shout the name Flynn into a megaphone from a St. Paddy’s float in South Boston and have twenty people turn their heads. Far as he was concerned, that name was his. Robbie had given it to him. Given him so much and never took…not until he’d taken his own life, and far too young.
He rolled over to face Laurel, admiring the creamy glow of her bare skin, that pretty, flushed face with its sweet and wasted expression. “Christ, I fuckin’ love you.”
She laughed and gave his sweaty hair a limp, lazy pat. “You always say that right after we have the most depraved sex.”