“What?” I hastily reached for him, guiding him, sucking in a breath as he entered me.
He palmed my ass with both of his hands and squeezed. “Fucking you.”
The throaty coarseness of his words, his blunt and erotic brutality, sent sharp ripples of sensation to my thighs and twisted deliciously in the dark center of my belly.
“Is that what we’re doing?” I rocked back and forth, taking him within me slowly, his savage, frustrated lust an aphrodisiac. “Fucking?”
“Yes. Oh God, yes. Like two mad animals,” he groaned, his head falling back as I quickened my pace.
“Do you want it rough?” I asked, scratching his bare chest and biting his bottom lip.
His hips jerked in response and he grunted at the sting of my nails. “No.”
He grabbed my wrists, bound them behind my back with one of his powerful hands. The position thrust my chest forward and he took advantage, nipping and sucking the sensitive flesh into his mouth.
“How do you want me?” I panted, struggling to maintain my rhythm. I felt overheated.
“How I want you . . .” he groaned against my naked skin, lifting his hips while endeavoring to guide mine. What his thrusts lacked in finesse he made up for with ruthless control, his thumb moving to stroke my center.
His ragged breath, my hitched sighs, the sound of our bodies meeting and retreating, became a seductive and impassioned symphony of sex. The hot friction of mating quickly built to a crisis. He released my wrists and I immediately pushed my fingers into his hair, wanting him closer, wanting him.
I was on the edge of the chaos of my climax when he stilled my hips and demanded, “Say you belong to me.”
“I belong to you,” I repeated the words mindlessly, shifting restlessly, enamored with the feverish, aching need of release, of being claimed. “I’ve always belonged to you.”
He flicked his thumb and pulsed forward, anchoring me to him and biting the side of my breast. “I love you wildly, madly, completely, Fiona Archer,” he growled, then groaned on a broken breath. “I love you always.”
His words, so desperately spoken, paired with the coarse texture of his beard against my sensitive skin sent me beyond thought, to a place of selfish shamelessness. My body bowed, every cell, every atom magnetized and provoked with frenetic ardor, and I lost control.
Yes.
Oh God.
Please.
Now.
Fuck.
Yes.
Please.
Greg . . .
Slowly, by degrees, the rigidity of my body released, and still he moved. As I rode him I grew languid, rocking, no longer taking. Tenderly, I kissed his jaw and tongued his ear, breathing hotly against his neck and arching into him.
“I love you, Greg Archer.” Our chests brushed and he sucked in a sharp breath, his grip now punishing and needful.
“Fe . . .”
“You belong to me,” I whispered, biting his shoulder and meeting his quickening thrusts.
His eyes closed, his jaw clenched, and his body was hard and taut as he came. I watched, reveling in his surrender to the oblivion of passion.
And his surrender to me.
CHAPTER 12
Dear Wife,
I hope you know that I miss you and that my love for you doesn't stop at the last time you heard from me. Especially when that last time turns from days to weeks and sometimes months.
-Frank
Letter
Serving in Iraq
Married 5 years
14 years ago
Greg
Art exists because situations exist wherein all words are underwhelming.
The words “senseless tragedy” may define a situation, but can never describe with any accuracy or poignancy the truth of raw feeling, emotion, chaos, darkness, anger, and pain.
I’d been up for two hours when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Returning from an early morning run, I’d flipped on the television in my downtown studio apartment.
I lived alone, though reminders of Fiona were everywhere. She’d left a toothbrush in my bathroom, her lotion next to the bed we shared when she was in town. Sometimes I’d smell it and miss her even more acutely, more desperately.
Our separation was supposed to last only a year. Yet stellar career and academic opportunities kept me in Texas and her in Iowa. We made it work, always with the promise of coming together at the end of the academic year. The most time together we’d managed was a full two months last summer. It had been divine. But then I’d been offered a fellowship with Dr. Louisa Franklin’s team in Houston, a pioneer in the field of environmentally friendly oil extraction.
Fiona urged me to take it. It was the smart thing to do. The opportunity was too valuable to pass up. We’d already proven we could handle a long-term separation. We’d been apart more than we’d been together over the last three and a half years.