Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 84928 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84928 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Unsure how to explain, I let my lips curve up slightly and his did the same. "You feel good, darlin'," he murmured, the rocking becoming more of a movement than before and I felt him press slightly forward every few strokes, but the friction was doing something, was creating a kind of straining need that eased and overpowered the pain. My knees closed around his hips; my hands moved toward his back, digging in again. Another thrust forward and I felt his hips press against mine and he gave me another smile. Mine matched his when I realized he was fully inside me, the feeling something I couldn't quite describe, like a foreign fullness that my body had ached for all along without me realizing it, like my body had been waiting for it. My legs wrapped around his hips, driving him a little deeper on a throaty gasp.
"Johnnie," I whimpered, knowing he knew what I needed, knowing he was waiting for permission to give it to me.
His lips claimed mine and he gave it to me. It was slow at first, mindful of the soreness, increasing only when my hips ground into him, begging for more. He released my lips, watching my face as his hand slipped between us again, moving over my overly sensitive clit and I felt my sex clench around him. "Come for me, Amy," he demanded, his body tense with the need for his own release. I wasn't sure I could, but then his finger swiped again and the tightening threatened painful as his hips rocked again and I... crashed. My entire body spasmed at impact, my sex convulsing on a wave of pleasure that felt intensified by the fullness there.
"John... nie..." I choked out my fingers raking into the skin of his back.
He made a sort of growling noise, thrusting through, his finger just as unrelenting until my body collapsed back onto the mattress and he buried deep, his face pressing into my neck, and groaned out my name as he came. His weight came down on me for a long minute as his strength slowly seeped back through his system. His lips kissed my neck as he slowly lifted up, his finger moving across my cheek. My heavy eyes fluttered open to find him looking down at me with a gaze that held a weight I didn't understand. "Baby..." he said, his voice filled with something that was akin to wonder.
That was when I felt it break- the little piece of a guard I had left. It simply shattered. I felt a tear slip out of my eye, moving down my temple toward my hairline. Johnnie's hand moved upward and brushed it away. "Sad tear or happy tear?" he asked, maybe struggling to understand my emotions as much as I was.
"I don't know," I answered honestly and his face softened as he slowly moved out of me, giving me an apologetic look when I tensed. He moved away for the barest of minutes, disposing of the condom before he moved into the bed beside me, rolling onto his back and pulling me until I was resting across his chest, my head tucked under his chin. One of his hands went heavy across my hips, the other moved up to stroke softly through my hair.
"Know what I do know, angel?" he asked softly and went on when I shook my head. "I know that that was the most meaningful sex I've ever had."
Meaningful.
That word held a lot of weight.
It was meaningful. It meant something to him.
It meant something to me too, but that was to be expected.
It meant even more to me that it meant something to him.
Maybe it was worth the shock of my shields crumbling to feel how I did right that moment: content, safe, borderline happy, maybe a little... cherished.
"You okay?" he asked, and if I wasn't mistaken, there was a trace of worry there.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat and kissed his chest. "Yes."
"Hurt," he observed.
"Yes," I agreed because, well, it did.
"Still perfect."
"Yes," I agreed again because, well, it was.
"You don't regret it?" he asked and the worry was there again.
Hearing it, hearing a man like Johnnie say it, someone as laid back and carefree as him sound worried, it made me want to ease it. I pushed up on his chest, my hair falling like a curtain until his hands moved out to stroke it behind my ears. "I'll never regret that," I said in a voice that was mine, but wasn't. It was sweeter, more vulnerable.
The tension slipped from his face and he gave me a very Johnnie grin. "She can cook," he said, talking to the ceiling. "She can bake. She can look at all this," he said, gesturing toward his body, "and say, 'eh, don't see what the big deal is'. She can be hard and prickly and soft and sweet and she can love me like that... fuck..." he finished his little speech, shaking his head.
Something deep inside me violently tensed at the word love, like it was fighting against it, like it was trying to deny the very existence of the word.
He didn't mean it like that. He would never mean it like that.
"Uh oh," Johnnie said, his hand going up to press into the lines between my brows. "She's thinking again."
I huffed out an airy laugh that wasn't really a laugh. "I do that sometimes."
"Well knock it off," he said teasingly, lifting his brows at me.
This time, the laugh was a laugh and I lowered myself down on his chest, my ear right above the steady thumping of his heart.
The silence stretched for a long time, his hands sifting through my hair tirelessly, my body relaxing into the sensation. "Tell me about your parents," he said softly a while later, the question making me jerk in his arm, but he held me against him. "Angel, I'm already in. Stop trying so hard to keep me away."
I felt my breath hiss out, the urge to tell him stronger than anything I had felt in a long time. And he was right; he was in, in every way imaginable. What more damage could it cause by sharing? "My mom wasn't always a drunk," I started easily, the moment she picked up a bottle with the intention to drown something in it being the springboard for most of my life story. "Up until I was six, she was just a normal mom. She cooked and baked. She helped me with school work. She waited on my dad hand and foot. Then one day, she picked up a bottle. And she didn't put it down except when it was empty. It was gin. That was her drink of choice. Gin straight out of the bottle. I always remember thinking her breath kind of smelled like Christmas... you know... because of the juniper berries," I explained and his hands just kept their stroking. "Anyway. She drank and drank and drank. She forgot to cook and clean and bake and help with homework. And she did nothing but fall at my father's feet and cry." I swallowed hard at the memory that was coming, the bad one, the one that made me never want to feel that way again.