“Ah, yeah. Melissa, come for me.”
His voice was a harsh command that I had no choice but to follow. With one shuddering breath, I closed my eyes and leapt, my walls clenching as he thrust into me over and over again. I reached for him, and his hand found mine, lacing our fingers together as wave after wave rolled through me.
“Fuck,” he groaned, bucking and jerking over me as his cock pulsed inside me.
With each shiver, I died a little more, thinking of how I never wanted it to end…
And how it would end all too soon.
Eight
Melissa
I stared at the ceiling, tracing the shapes of the whorls in the paint with my gaze in the early morning light. I'd long passed the sensations of shock, rounded the corner to terror and swung back around again to anger before finally settling somewhere in the middle.
Because I'd spent the night with Robbie at his bungalow. And closure was the last thing I felt.
It was the exact opposite, in fact. I felt like I'd cut open an old wound with a razor and made it fresh and new again.
Idiot.
I squeezed my eyes closed and ignored my cell phone that had been buzzing on the nightstand for the past twenty minutes.
I'd texted Ashlynn to tell her I wouldn't be home late last night, but she must have been sleeping. Judging by the way my phone was blowing up, she was awake now, and probably ready to kill me.
I rolled gently to my side so as not to wake up Robbie, and peered over at the screen. Text after text rolled by.
Call me.
Call me right now.
If you're with Robbie, I'm going to kill you.
I flopped onto my back again with a sigh and wished I could bury my head in the sand and pretend like none of this had ever happened.
Liar.
Even as the thought entered my mind, my body betrayed me, still humming from his touch, even now, listing toward his side of the bed for one last touch. One last chance to inhale that Robbie scent.
"You up?" he murmured softly.
I nodded wordlessly, not trusting my voice to speak. As much as I wanted to tell myself otherwise, I wouldn't have changed last night for the world. It was one more memory with him that I could cherish and relive and recall when things got too lonely and I missed his face.
"Are you hungry?"
"No."
It was hard to imagine ever wanting to eat again, my stomach felt so wrecked, but even then, it was hard to say no when I knew he was gearing up to make me the one thing he knew how to cook. Robbie's famous toast with butter and strawberry jam. The memory came as they all did, a bittersweet blast from the past that hurt and felt good at the same time, like peeling a sunburn.
"I've got to go. I have plans with Ashlynn today."
I forced myself to swing my legs over the side of the bed. Luckily, I'd had the foresight to throw a T-shirt on in the middle of the night to avoid being naked with him in the harsh light of morning. Unfortunately, the t-shirt I'd grabbed had been his, along with a pair of gym shorts he’d been wearing.
I clutched the shirt more tightly around me as I stood. "I'd rather not put that dress back on but I can get this stuff back to you..." I trailed off.
"Don't worry about it," he said, sitting up against the headboard. His bare chest was mottled with bruises, and his cheek was an ugly shade of red, but there had never been a more beautiful sight than that, and for a second, I just stared at him.
"Yeah, well, we are leaving in two days so we probably won't see you," I muttered, already scurrying toward the door of his room. I bent to scoop up my sandals and turned to face him. "Good luck with everything, Robbie. I hope you get everything you've ever dreamed of."
There was no point in dragging it out. That would be like dying by a hundred, tiny paper cuts instead of by guillotine. Instead, even as he called after me, I made like a ghost and disappeared.
By the time I swung the door open to my own hotel room, I was sobbing uncontrollably. Ashlynn came running out of her bedroom with her holiday fling, Gil, trailing behind looking shell-shocked.
"Wow, uh...should I go?"
Ashlynn spared him a quick smile as I flopped face first onto the couch. "Actually, can you run down and get us a couple iced coffees and breakfast sandwiches? Maybe look at a couple of the shops and come back in an hour for our beach day?"
He nodded and gave her cheek a quick kiss. "You got it."
I didn't unglue my face from the pillow until the door closed and I felt a weight settle next to me on the couch.
"That bad, huh?" she murmured, petting my hair gently.
"Not good," I said with a hiccupping, mirthless laugh.
"You want to talk first or cry some more and then talk?"
I shrugged and sat up, hugging my knees to my chest. "I think I can do both at the same time."
She gave me a sad smile and tucked a lock of my hair behind one ear. "Okay, so spill."
"I went to Robbie's fight last night, and I wasn't going to let him see me so I wore a disguise but he saw me anyway and…"