Page 22 of Edge of Ruin (The Edge Trilogy #3)

“Oh.” She shivered as I licked her there, my hand sliding up between her legs.

“That was a celebratory tattoo. To mark the occasion of getting away from Bri—from that crappy ex that I mentioned before. I called my buddy Rafael on the day that the shit hit the fan, and he whisked me away in his van, which is now my van. Drove me to my first crafts fair, in upstate New York. I had a good day, sold a bunch of stuff. After, we celebrated with buffalo wings and beer and a tattoo. Rafael got a dragon tattooed on his butt that night, if I remember correctly. I was a little more conservative.”

I turned her to face me, my eyes level with the perfect contours and sweet downy hollows of her groin.

Breathing in the hot, heady smell of sex.

My cock ached with eagerness. I placed her hand on my shoulder to steady her and lifted her delicate foot.

She teetered, giggling, as I touched the tattooed images of the crescent moon and star on top of her foot. “And this one?”

“There’s no real story with that one,” she admitted. “I just thought it was pretty.”

“It is,” I said. All of them were. Fit embellishments for her vivid beauty. Even the barbed wire around her wrist had its own poignant grace.

I gazed up at her pink face, her dilated eyes, the whole perfect length of her sweet body. Her pussy, still shiny and flushed, poking proudly out of her labia. “What an incredible view,” I muttered.

I rose to my feet, moving behind her, my cock prodding the back of her thighs, and slid my hands around her waist, sliding one hand down between her legs. The tender seam of her pussy was slick and damp beneath my fingers.

“I want to take you from behind,” I said. “Is that a problem for you?”

A fine tremor went through her, but I couldn’t tell if it was fear or desire. I nuzzled and petted, waiting until she gave me a clearer answer. Several breathless minutes went by as I caressed her. She began to writhe and make keening sounds in her throat as my hands grew bolder.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, finally.

I let go of her, stepped back. “Show me, then.”

She shot a puzzled look over her shoulder. “Show you what?”

“That it’s okay,” I said. And just waited.

It worked again, just as it had before. She thought about it for a moment, her full, rosy lip caught seductively between her teeth.

Then she straightened her spine, tossed her hair back, and sauntered over to my bed. Taking her time. She climbed on, positioning herself on her hands and knees, presenting her perfect ass. She looked back, with that secret, alluring smile, and parted her thighs, undulating. “Convinced?”

I didn’t bother to reply. Seconds later, I was in position, condom in place. My fingers rejoiced at her flawless skin, her lithe muscles, her sweet curves. I teased the secret shadows of her pussy while I kissed the mandala tattoo, playing with her sensitive clit.

She squirmed and moaned and lunged back against me, wet and hot, but I took my own sweet time easing inside her. The tight, hot clutch of her was sweet torture on my cock. She clung to me, her pussy flushed and full. A juicy, suckling kiss.

I let her rock back to take me deeper, a little more with each stroke, until I was buried deep. Then some gasping, panting minutes of stroking and petting, licking her back, working her clit, and she started to make catlike sounds, pressing back. Demanding that I move deeper. Harder.

Yes. Now she was ready.

I thrust, hypnotized by the shiny pink lips of her pussy clinging to my flushed, gleaming shaft.

I withdrew and drove in again, again, seeking the strokes that made her soften and yield and shiver, using that subtle, inner awareness I’d never really brought into focus until I was making love to her.

Now that I’d discovered it, I was strung out on it.

Life was going to be so flat, so flavorless, without her.

That thought stabbed into me like a blade. My hands tightened on her hips. And something inside me cracked wide open.

I lost control. Moved inside her with the energy of a lifetime of unsatisfied need, seeking that blinding moment where I wouldn’t have to think, or fear.

It hit me, and I exploded into blinding nothingness.

When I finally surfaced again, Vivi was wiggling beneath me on the quilt, kicking at my ankles. “Roll over,” she said tartly. “I can’t breathe.”

I rolled over, and she pulled away, sitting up. Her eyes were very wide. “That was, um, intense,” she said, her voice small.

“I’m sorry,” I said, alarmed. “Did I hurt you?”

“A little, but it was really exciting. I came, of course. You always make me come. But you weren’t with me anymore. At the end. I felt, well ... alone.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt her withdrawal like a cold wind. I reached out, but she shrank back, and I let my hand drop.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling helpless.

“I told you. It’s okay. I’m not mad.”

“Wait for me while I go take this thing off, okay?” I asked.

“Okay.” She didn’t move. I waited, watching her until she rolled her eyes and obliged me. She slid between the sheets.

“You won’t go?” I asked. “Promise?”

“No,” she said. “I promise I won’t go.”

I smoothed the quilt over her, my face reddening. I was acting like a little kid. Afraid she would disappear like a puff of smoke. Damn. I was a goner.

“The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll come back,” she said, waving for me to go.

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and turned on the cold water. I splashed my face, tried to think clearly, and abandoned the effort, after about five seconds.

All I wanted in the world was to hold her again. Wrap myself around her in a grip that she could not even hope to break.

I wiped off my face and grabbed the little wastebasket from under the sink, since it was stupid to run back and forth every time.

She was still there when I got back. Holding the covers open. I slid into bed and embraced her.

She smiled at me, and something tight and fearful in my chest uncoiled. I resisted the sensation, automatically, and then yielded to it with a shudder of nameless emotion.

I arranged her so that her head was cradled on my shoulder, her arm resting on my chest, her leg flung over mine. I stroked her back, and felt her heart beating under my hand, until she fell asleep.

So soft. I stared at the swirls of red hair tickling my nose, my chin.

Her slender shoulder. I loved her scent, the soft moist bloom of warmth of her breath against my shoulder.

I memorized the curve of her spine. If I concentrated on these details, and thought of nothing else, I could cling to this emotion that was vibrating inside me like a tightly strung instrument.

Part of me wanted to shove it back down into the darkness, but the feeling sang on, a fragile, stubborn thread.

I clung to it, counting the rise and fall of her breaths. Keeping the rest of the universe at bay. Let there be nothing but her, and her breath. In. Out.

Late afternoon eased with the smoothness of a sigh into twilight. I barely noticed the change. I could lie there forever, feeling her heartbeat. Letting that strange feeling vibrate inside me. That faraway, mysterious melody.

Contentment? No. I rejected the word. I was familiar with contentment. I was contented with my house, my work. I counted myself lucky to spend my days with the smell of the earth and rain, the sun, the colors of flowers. That was contentment.

This feeling was new. It was a long, quiet hour before I dared to put a name to it.

It felt almost like happiness.

That scared me. There were pitfalls there, fatal traps.

Behind that word were doors in my mind that had been locked for years.

Like when Randy left, when I was eight. Deborah, who always insisted that I call her Deborah instead of Mom, told me that Randy had to go and find himself.

“I gotta have space,” I remembered him saying, very loudly.

I remembered also thinking that was really dumb.

It was the Oregon desert. There was so much space, it gave me the willies.

But Randy evidently needed more. He took down his teepee, threw it in his truck, and drove away. I remembered standing there, bewildered, while Randy’s truck got smaller. I had wondered sometimes if Randy was my father, but Deborah had been somewhat vague on that point.

Then we’d stayed with Jim and Consuela in the Yakima Valley, until Deborah met Manuel.

We moved into Manuel’s trailer in the peach orchards.

Manuel taught me Spanish, how to fight, how to change the oil in a car.

Then Manuel got in trouble because he didn’t have a green card. He had to go back to Mexico.

After a while, Deborah decided that she had to follow her heart and go to Mexico, too. Which had freaked me right the fuck out.

“You’ll stay with Tavia,” she told me.

“But why can’t I come?”

“Oh, it’s complicated, baby. But I’ll write you letters, and I’ll send for you real soon. You’ll love it with Aunt Tavia. Her commune has lots of kids, and a swimming hole, and a tree house and everything.”

So off I went, to Tavia’s commune, near Olympia.

I got some letters, but they started coming less and less frequently.

I was just starting to get used to the place when Tavia fell in love with Mick, a guy from Oakland, and decided to move down to California to be with him.

But Mick didn’t want me to come. “The family thing is just not my scene,” Mick said firmly.

So off I went to Uncle Freddy’s place in southern Oregon.

And in the meantime, Deborah broke up with Manuel, who was “too enmeshed in his culture,” the letter said.

She had decided to go to India to study yoga with a guru, “to get her head straightened out and recover her sense of self.” Shortly after that, Tavia broke up with Mick, left Oakland, and moved to Los Angeles with a guy named Mike.

I had trouble keeping it all straight. But I had liked the benevolent Uncle Freddy. I had liked the garden, the farm, the mountains. I had almost begun to allow myself to think of the place as home when the bust went down.

That was the time I most hated to remember. I hadn’t thought of it in years.

I stared at the barbed-wire tattoo around Vivi’s slender wrist, tracing it, and suddenly realized that her eyes were open. She was studying me.

She scrambled on top of me, folding her arms over my chest and resting her chin on them. There were questions in her eyes. She wanted to talk.

It terrified me. Too much reality would chase away that feeling I liked so much. But even so, I wanted to know her. Her history, her dreams, her hopes, her plans.

No, on second thought, maybe I didn’t want to know her plans.