And he showed me, turning over in a quick twist so that I straddled him and he could get at my hips, those long fingers dancing up my back, lifting my shirt, tugging off my shorts and thong until I was in only my bra and Ransom palmed me everywhere.
“I never get tired of tasting you, Aly.” He demonstrated with his lips pulling at my nipple through my bra before he took that off too. He cupped the heavy weight of my breast. “All this smooth, nani skin, damn baby, you taste like cotton candy and you’re just as sweet.”
He could never stand just the feel of me for long. Foreplay was great, but it wasn’t enough and Ransom was an impatient man. A few more strokes of his tongue and teeth up my ribs and his fingers inside me, driving deep, making me fly higher and then those greedy hands went everywhere, grabbing, holding me down onto his dick, him filling me inch by torturous inch. He was so big, the feel of him stretching me, filling me, sliding, making me feel tight everywhere.
“God, baby, I’ll never stop wanting you.” Deeper then, with me squatting over him, me watching his eyes, that lingering worry over his injury distracting me only until he moved me harder, faster until he held my thighs, stretching me further so I’d go deeper. “Not ever.”
“Me…me either…” and I’d meant it. It didn’t matter that I’d soon break his heart. It didn’t matter that I’d sign contracts to buy Leann out by week’s end. It was all impulse. It would all be done with an immediacy even I didn’t understand. I hadn’t told him. I wouldn’t until we were spent and all the tension had left his body. It wouldn’t be forever, I didn’t believe. Just until he left the league. Just until he was safe and I could breathe again. Maybe then, being gone would open his eyes, make him realize that I wasn’t just a body. Maybe then, he’d realize I needed him to see me, all of me. Until that time, we’d be separated by a few more miles. But no matter where I laid my head, or what city got to claim Ransom each night, I’d never stop wanting him. Even if I had to for his own sake, and mine.
“Makamae,” he said, flipping us over so that his hips sped, grip squeezed down on my ass, holding onto me as he chased that orgasm and brought me closer and closer to my own yet again. “You’re mine. Only mine. No one loves you like I do. I won’t let them. They can’t have you.”
My pillow was damp and the heavy scent of sweat collected in the center. My bed shook, the headboard jerking against the plaster walls of my condo when I jerked awake from the dream. It hadn’t been a memory, I didn’t think. Ransom had never made that promise to me. Not then anyway.
I lay back, trying to get my heartbeat to slow, trying to convince myself that the dream had not been real. That wasn’t Ransom’s skin I tasted in my mouth. It wasn’t his fingers that had filled me over and over. Not that night. Not for a long, long time.
Not anymore.
But no matter how often I tried to convince myself of the truth, alone at night in that Elysian Fields condo, sometimes I still felt him. Sometimes it was so real, so potent that I could close my eyes and paint a picture of his body, recalling every detail and know that it would be a perfect copy of the man. I could feel him. Dear God, I could feel every inch of him.
Sometimes it was real.
Sometimes I thought, it always would be.
Make a meal of sorrow.
Chase it down with struggle.
Small bites in sections
Chewing until there is only the smallest hint of bitterness.
Until you barely taste it.
Seven
Fall in Louisiana isn’t remotely cold. It isn’t like Miami, where the heat lingers, stifles, or like Nashville where the cold comes without warning or reason and stings against your skin if you aren’t ready for it. I knew Nashville, missed it. It had been the place where Mom had landed after she left New Orleans, the home I knew with Mom and Mark and Johnny raising me right along with my adopted grandmother Bobby until Kona had found us and we all settled back here in Louisiana.
Louisiana was the only home my kid brother and sister knew. Though Koa and Mack looked so much like they belonged on a surfboard in Maui, living on the beach, absorbing the sun like they did every summer when my folks took a month off to live in Hawaii, Louisiana was still in their veins. It was in mine as well.
And it was still damn warm for September. Around us the wind coming off the lake felt cool, not the frigid bite that brings in the coming cold, but the cool tease of wind that rustles the leaves and rattles the rafters when a storm approaches.
There would be no storm today. Not from the weather anyway. It was Friday at noon, a bye week for CPU, and my parents had kept my siblings from school and invited their friends over for barbeque, beer and the chance to celebrate my father’s birthday and to tell me goodbye before I caught a plane back to Miami that night. Two birds, one stone and a damn good excuse to start the weekend early.