“When will you be back?” I asked from the doorway as the old man walked to his car. I honestly couldn’t care less how long he stayed away. I had Leo to keep me company, someone who wouldn’t treat me like an object to be given away to whatever man he deemed worthy.

“Don’t worry about that, Lucy,” Delfino said, looking at me over his shoulder. “I may not be back home until after midnight.”

It wasn’t as though Delfino had never stayed out late before. But he’d been out of the house more and more often lately. Something had to be going on—one of his pet projects, if I had to guess.

I saw him out.

“Fuckface is gone again?” Leo asked, wrapping his arms around my waist as I closed the door and secured the deadbolt, despite how futile such a gesture was. Delfino had the key—Delfino had all of the keys. “What’s he up to?”

“No idea,” I muttered, breathing in Leo’s thick, masculine scent—God help and forgive me, I loved every nuance of it.

He smelled a little like oil and black leather with a sharp note of gasoline—even after having been away from his bike for so long, it clung to his skin like it was just another part of him, along with an undertone of grease. Dark currents of very strong coffee taken black, no cream, no sugar; he’d only just had some, and I’d smiled as I placed it in his hands, not because Father wanted me to but because seeing Leo first thing in the morning was the only kind of heaven I ever wanted to know.

There was something otherworldly about his fragrance too—a static charge that excited the atoms around him just a little. On his fingertips, beneath his nails, he carried the distant memory of cigarette smoke, making it hard for me to resist putting them in my mouth to lick them clean and scentless. Leo smelled like bad decisions and rock bottom and tragedy and lessons learned in the worst ways, and when I kissed him, his lips stung like vodka and burned all the way down just the same. It was irresistible.

“But the way he’s acting.,” I continued, a flash of cold concern overcoming the heat starting to flare in my core. “…Lately, he’s not sticking to any pattern. He’s become erratic, but… smug about it. Like he’s dropping breadcrumbs he knows I’ll never pick up on. Hints at a future I’m not sure I ever want to see, let alone be a part of.”

Leo threaded his strong fingers through my hair, followed by a gentle pull which sent a wave of pleasure crashing through me from the top of my head and right down into my hips. I loved the way he pulled on my roots, held them so strongly. Kinky as hair-pulling might sound, it made me feel safe, secure in the knowledge that I was being held by someone who would never truly harm me.

“I won’t let him do anything to you, Lulu,” he whispered in my ear, his hot breath fanning the ember I’d been resisting for day snow. I couldn’t help sucking in my breath, my teeth catching softly on my bottom lip.

“I… I know,” I murmured, looking up into his eyes. Everything I’d ever feared melted away under the scrutiny of his gaze, my heart hammering away the longer I indulged in staring at him. It felt like minutes passed when I knew it had been seconds. He never looked away from me. Each time he held my eyes like this, it was like he was reading me somehow. Like I was an open book and my thoughts, my desires, were little more than ink on a page.

Stop! I demanded of myself, even as my hands slipped down to his sides, fingertips grazing each of his ribs, playing over them reverently like I was caressing the strings of a harp. What if Delfino finds out?

But that thought only made the idea more exciting, just as it had that first night I’d lain with Leo. My palms were sweaty, mouth dry, a kind of nervous elation pulsating through my body. I wanted him so badly, to feel his skin slide wetly, effortlessly against mine. I still felt that draw, that deep, primal bond that could only come with someone who had been your very first, both physically and emotionally.

“We… we should try to behave ourselves,” I said, my voice tremulous and weak as I felt his warmth against my body, the clench of his hands at my waist. I remembered the way those hands held me tight as he rode me to my very first climax with a man. “If Delfino comes back, then we’ll…”

“We’ll what?” he asked, his breath rolling over my skin like a wave of scalding water over a cool, barren beach. “We’ll do something you just might enjoy?”

I tried not to smile, tried not to let the color rise in my cheeks as I thought of all the ways that Leo had made me moan and writhe underneath him that night. I certainly had enjoyed it, more than I’d ever enjoyed anything in my life. And if I was truly honest with myself, I wanted to feel it again.

“But we’ll be found out,” I whimpered, chewing on my bottom lip anxiously. Despite my protests I couldn’t stop myself from pressing against Leo even more, my hands roving over his abs. “Delfino will know.”

“Only if we tell him,” he said, his hands sliding up underneath my blouse and up my back, goosebumps rising all down my arms as he grasped my shoulder blades and pulled me close. When my body drew up against his, I could feel a growl rumble in his chest. “C’mon, Lu. Stop thinking of what he wants. Tell me what you want. I wanna know.”

“I don’t know,” I moaned, looking up into his eyes as he leaned in and pressed those soft, scorching lips against mine. His heat infused my body and settled between my thighs, followed by a distinct, distantly remembered slickness. “Please don’t ask me that. I can’t… I don’t know.”

There’d been no one else since Leo left me. Delfino had seen to it that I never got physically close to anyone, but there wasn’t even a boy I’d pined for from afar. Even when I tried to forget Leo, there was simply a void I carried around inside me that was shaped like him. No one else had ever fit.

“Yes you do,” he whispered to me, his eyes boring into mine as he began to lift my blouse up, exposing my stomach, gooseflesh rising wherever his skin brushed against mine. “You’ve always known. No matter how hard people have tried to beat it out of you, you’ve never let go of your desires.”

“My desires?” I scoffed, squirming as Leo grazed the heels of his palms down my sides. “I’m not allowed to have those.”

“But you do.” His eyes glinted darkly, embers smoldering. “I know it. You know it. You’ve tried to be good and play the part of the empty vessel, the dutiful daughter, sure. But never ‘cause you wanted to. Only ‘cause you had to. But Delfino’s gone now, Lucy. He’s out the door and a million miles away, for all it matters. It’s just us. You can put your armor down and tell me: what do you want?”

“I…” I began, the rest of the words dying before they could leave my lips. I wanted him. I wanted Leo, and I wanted him more than anything else in the world, but there was something underneath that want, something simmering and urgent. Something that filled me with such yearning it bordered on melancholy—an ache that grew steadily sharper with each passing moment.

“Christ, Leo…” I answered at last. “I want… I want to feel.” And perhaps that would have been enough, for it would have been true, but there was more to it than that. I dragged my lower lip into my mouth and said, “I want to feel safe.”

“Safe,” Leo repeated, the husk of his voice getting lower and harsher as he lifted my shirt up and over my breasts. “I can do that, Lucy. You know I can. Question is… how bad do you want it?” He cocked a brow. “Bad enough to take a risk?” He gathered the fabric and tugged up, placing it under my chin, around my throat. “Bad enough to break the rules?”

This time, I answered him only by lifting my arms above my head. He regarded me a moment—the fire in my eyes, the set of my jaw. And then he pulled my blouse free of my head, bent, and swallowed my gasp with the hard press of his mouth.

I wasn’t sure how we managed to make it up the stairs, the way the both of us were entwined, our hands ranging over one another’s bodies, pressing one another against the walls. I let out a loud, keening cry Leo stifled with another kiss as he slipped beneath the band of my skirt and down between my thighs, feeling for my damp desire. His fingers found my clit, rough pads abrading those nerves so deliciously. It was like he’d never left. It was like our first night together was just the night before. He hadn’t forgotten one damn thing about my body.

I was powerless to resist him. He was like a force of nature. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

By the time we reached Leo’s room, I was panting, my breasts straining, threatening to overflow the cups of my bra. His hot, callused fingers explored between the folds of my wanting sex, and my cheeks flushed as an electric shiver ran from the base of my skull to the bottoms of my feet, my hands scrambling for purchase on something, anything, to keep me from toppling over the edge of what felt like insanity.

My skirt fell from the curve of my hips, leaving me more exposed to a man than I’d been since Leo. I was both embarrassed and elated by the fact that he could see almost all of me, my body laid almost completely bare in front of him for him to devour with his eyes—and perhaps even more than that.

“Lulu,” Leo moaned against my neck as he swept his lips over it. “Goddammit, girl, I’ve missed you.”

“I need you,” I whined in reply, chewing on my bottom lip. “You have no idea what it’s been like. How alone I’ve been… I…”

Before he could answer, I reached around behind me, undoing the clasps of my bra and letting it fall to the floor, panting as the cold air inspired my nipples to attention. Leo pulled back enough to glance down, brows lifted, and wet his lips with a dart of his tongue. I’d never seen a man look so hungry in all my life.

With a shove, he drove the backs of my knees into the edge of his bed and I fell onto the mattress with a delighted shriek. He hushed me with a grin as he crawled over top of me, reminding me that while Delfino wasn’t here to catch us, the neighbors might have something to say about a series of impassioned moans coming from next door.

My breath caught in my throat as he dipped his fingers into the band of my panties, peeling away the soaked fabric from the velvety folds of my pussy. The open air made my hips give an involuntary buck; Leo captured them as they rose, thumbs pressing into the twin pressure points inside my hip bones.

“Don’t stop,” I gasped, but he shook his head at me. My face twisted in confusion. A small pit of dread opened in my stomach. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re moving too fast,” he answered. The low, gravelly timbre of his voice made my hips jump again and he snickered. “Slow it down some.”

I huffed. “You make it sound like I’m some overeager schoolgirl.”

His eyes gleamed. “Well, you’re kind of acting like one.”

“That’s not fair!” I declared, slapping the bed for emphasis. “I want you! It’s been so long!”

“I know,” Leo assured me, lowering my hips, hands on either side of my body now. “So what’s a little longer, huh?”

I opened my mouth to protest, but a frustrated cry quickly turned into a breathy wail as he dipped his head down between my thighs, brushing his tongue up the seam of me.

“We’re not kids anymore, Lu,” he murmured, hooking his arms up under me and reaching around to part me with two fingers. “We shouldn’t fuck like we are. Maybe we don’t have all the time in the world—who knows?—but we’ve got more than a couple minutes. And I intend to take every…”

Here he licked my inner folds, stopping just short of my clit.

“…last…”

Another lick, coaxing my bud from beneath its hood.

“…one of them…”

Now he laid the flat of his tongue against that bundle of nerves, but infuriatingly, denied me the friction I so desired. Looking up at me from beneath his brow, he added with finality, “…for all they’re worth.”

And then he flickered the tip of his tongue over that tortured pleasure center, enfolding it between his lips.

I threw my head back and dug my nails into his scalp. Oh, this thick hair felt so good between my fingers, but what felt even better was the intensity of the sensation his mouth inflicted upon my nethers. I slipped my calves overs his shoulders, lifting my pelvis to saw along his tongue with each of his ravenous strokes. The way he moaned into me, like I was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted… it was all I could do not to give voice to my bliss.

But if I had any hope of doing this with Leo again, I needed to make sure we didn’t get caught. I had to be a good girl for just a while longer. I resigned myself to a soft snarl and closed my eyes, squirming against the steady, staccato rhythm Leo’s tongue beat against me.

He’d learned a few new tricks while he’d been away. Either that, or we’d just never had the opportunity to indulge in each other this way before and now he was pulling out all the stops. The first possibility threatened to make me a little jealous—I had had no one after he left me—but when I glanced down at him I could see this look of… pure worship on his face, clear as day and just as radiant. His slow, even breathing—the precision of his ministrations—this was supplication, an offering.

This was divine servitude.

A thready tingle manifested in the base of my spine, soon thrumming through to my core—pleasant pins and needles, a prelude to an orgasm. These strings grew taut, weaving together in thick braids that made the resonance inside me all the more intense. When Leo slotted two fingers into me, I pulsed around him to draw him in further, down to the knuckles, and his sudden intake of breath told me he could feel it. A full-body shudder rolled through him, and he vibrated against me.

“Close,” I gasped, sinking my teeth into my lip so hard I could taste blood. “Leo… so close…”

In response he surged against me, driving his digits in harder, breaching the barrier keeping me sane. When he curled his fingertips up against my sweet spot, while at the same time sucking tenderly on my clit, I rocked backward to escape the overwhelming pleasure. But Leo wouldn’t let me go. He held me in place, forcing me to endure the sensation, drowning me in inescapable rapture. My nerves sizzled like livewires and I turned my head to bite down on his pillow, stifling the series of harsh groans he pulled from me, getting louder and louder until…

The rubber band within me pulled too tight and snapped, leaving me breathless and star struck.

I bucked into Leo, dragging myself across his mouth, my thighs parted wide around his stubble. He never once came up for air, not even when I ground into him in my quest for satisfaction, or when I snapped my legs shut around his head and squeezed. I’d forgotten what it was like to orgasm at the beck and call of someone else, to put your release in their hands. It was so much more volatile than doing it myself, not just physically, but emotionally too. This was a communal experience. Knowing that he was responsible for it, in part, filled me with gratitude and a sense of closeness. For once, my climax wasn’t a reminder that I was so very alone.

Leo lifted his head at last, coarse facial hair glistening wetly. Prowling over top of me, he bent to take my lips with his. I shuddered at the taste of my own desire, my intimate scent still clinging to him.

Into his mouth, I murmured, “I thought… I thought you’d want me to wait.”

His hardness slipped into the crease of my thigh and he pulled back to look down at me. “For what?”

Pink seared my cheeks. “I just figured you’d want me to come while you were inside me.” I looked away from him then, down the lines of his body to the place where we were not yet joined. The path my eyes traveled was soon undertaken by my hands, smoothing the terrain of his flesh.

I heard the grin in his voice, even though I didn’t look up to catch sight of it. “You will,” he said thickly. It sent an anticipatory shiver down my spine.

Leo let out a long breath as my palm came to rest along his shaft, first tentatively, then with a deliberate hunger. The velvet texture gave way beneath my fingers, sliding with my motions as I stroked him from root to crown. A blurt of pre-come met me between my thumb and forefinger on the way up; it reminded me of an important question I hadn’t yet asked.

“Protection?”

Leo shook his head. “Not unless you’ve got something.” I squinted at him and he chuckled sheepishly. “It’s not like that. I had some condoms in my wallet, but it got pretty shredded when I wrecked…”

So there would be nothing between me and Leo—nothing but skin. I took a deep breath and held it a moment, considering what this meant. We’d have to be careful. I wasn’t well-educated on sex, but I knew that much.

“Your ribs,” I said softly. The last thing I wanted was for him to be in pain because of me.

“Fuck ‘em,” he replied with a devastating smile.

We were doing this. Really doing this. Just us—nothing in between. I wet my lips.

“We’ll… we’ll be all right. Won’t we?” I asked him.

“Better than,” he replied. The way he said it, I believed him.

When he aligned with me—when I bracketed his hips with my thighs, and he pressed down into the mattress on his forearms and elbows—when the whole of him was stretched over me, casting shadows that made his eyes burn all the brighter—I felt the faintest flutter of fear. No, fear was too strong a word for it. Apprehension, perhaps. Anticipation. Would it hurt? The first time it had, but not nearly as much as I’d imagined. And what pain there had been, Leo had made worth it by virtue of all the pleasure that came after.

“I got you, Lu,” he whispered to me. And then in one swift thrust, he breached the last of the barriers between us and seated deep inside of me.

A spectacular array of stars burst before my eyes, born of agony and ecstasy both. It really had been a long time, and I was unprepared for the girth Leo’s desire boasted. The burning ache lasted only a moment, though—just until he began to move—at which point I found myself overwhelmed by the fullness, the completion, joining with him in this way brought me.

“That’s…” I fumbled for words, but Leo’s low, skipping groan banished all coherent thought from my brain. “Oh, God…”

I worked my hips with his, creating a tandem effort of perpetual motion. The way he slid into me was so familiar, even after all this time, as if a part of him had never pulled out. There was something different about it too. Maybe it was the fact that we were skin-to-skin that made everything feel like it was cast into sharper relief than before, or maybe it was just the perspective that came with distance and age. Something had changed between us… but I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. It kind of felt like the start of something new.

And after living in the past for so long, stepping over the threshold to the future evoked just as powerful a reaction from me as Leo’s body did.

Hot tears pricked like needles at the corners of my eyes and I threw back my head in an effort to keep them from rolling down my cheeks. Leo’s mouth covered my exposed throat, teeth clasped lightly on either side of it, my pulse fluttering beneath his tongue. I felt like his prey. I felt every bit at the mercy of a predator, a wolf who would protect me rather than feed on me. A man who saw me as precious because of who I was, not who or what I could be for him.

Carding my fingers over his scalp, I grasped a handful of locks at the base of his skull, pulling him up to capture his mouth with mine. If he was going to stake a claim on me like that, then I was going to plant a flag on him too.

One of his hands left the mattress to bury in the thick of my hair, holding my lips against his own. It was like he was having trouble finding the air in the room, save for every breath I exhaled. He breathed me in, and I breathed him, until we filled the other’s lungs.

I lifted my legs higher, cradling his ribs between my knees. That angle had him nearly bottoming out inside of me, and I snuffed a wail against his teeth. The rocking of his hips became frantic, driving into and through me, and with each of his plummeting strokes I felt him fucking me, fucking away the pain and the dirt, fucking away all the bad, fucking away all the years of my life that I’d wasted under this roof, with this man, a songbird trapped in a cage. Oh yes, I knew why the caged bird sings on the grave of dreams, shadow shouting on a nightmare scream…

But with Leo inside of me, none of that mattered. My wings were no longer clipped. With him, I could fly.

Rearing back onto his ankles, he dug his fingers into my hip and left a trail of forget-me-not bruises in his wake. Oh, how I loved those marks in my skin—and in a place where Father wouldn’t see. A place I alone would set eyes upon and cherish. With his other hand, he brushed callused fingers into my cleft and pressed. Rubbed. Tapped and circled the thrumming bud, half-hooded like an orchid. His thumb applied the pressure while the rest of his fingers spanned my mound, ensuring I could not draw away.

He had full command of my pussy, inside and out. Heat surged through me at the thought; I spread my legs wider.

“More,” I pleaded. And he delivered, the corners of his mouth quirking up in a grin. He had me exactly where he wanted me, and knew it. I hated myself just a little for how much I enjoyed the cocky glint in his eyes. That arrogant bad-boy gimmick of his had always turned me on, right from the start.

I wasn’t a kid anymore. I should’ve known better. But just because my mind was aware of that fact didn’t mean that my body and heart were—or that they cared. All they wanted was to feel alive in a way only Leo could accomplish. All they wanted was another unbearable orgasm.

I was a bundle of primitive needs in the shape of a girl, and the more Leo touched and teased and thrust into me, the more I felt like I was expanding—like I was an inferno, a back draft rippling through the room, consuming everything, including myself, in my ravening crawl toward conflagration.

How quickly he brought me once more to that point no return. How deftly and skillfully he dangled me from its rocky outcropping, letting the dizzying pressure mount until I was hitching and scratching and begging before he dropped me into the tumultuous waves below. How completely they swallowed me, the riptide of Leo’s cock dragging me to dark, hot, unfathomable depths. And yet as I sank, I also soared, rising on a thermal of champagne ecstasy, all fizzy and rosy and bright. No longer caged, but free. That was the greatest rapture of all.

The ripple and clench of my inner muscles pulled a groan from his chest, and a spasm resonated through him and into me. A few frenetic strokes later, he wrenched free of my still pulsing channel to fist his swollen cock to completion on my stomach. Thick, stark-white ropes spattered across my skin. I’d never actually seen a man come before. The look on his face—the shudder that ran through his forearm and hand—the hard throbbing of his shaft—it was all so… hot.

I expected Leo to crash down next to me, for him to buckle and collapse the way he’d done when we were so much younger. Instead, he rolled his powerful shoulders forward and bent over me, brushing my bitten, puffy lips with his. After such a passionate display, his gentleness moved me. He wasn’t just an animal, rutting to completion. He was tender. Loving. This had meant something to him—maybe as much as it did to me.

“Safe.” He breathed the word into my mouth, trembling. “Do you… feel safe?”

I did. For the first time since Leo left me… I did. The realization was so powerful I couldn’t form the words to answer him. All I could do was cry—no, all I could do was weep. Sobs wracked my body with a magnitude I could not control. When was the last time this happened? When was the last time I was allowed to feel anything but emptiness and despair? And when was the last time I’d been able to let any of that out?

“I’m sorry,” I gasped, clutching at him as I hid my face in his chest. “I’m—I’m so sorry, I don’t… I can’t stop…”

“I got you, Lu,” Leo softly replied, slipping down on an elbow next to me and drawing my quivering frame into his arms. “I got you. You’ll never have to hold back. Not with me.” A rough kiss on my temple. “Not ever again.”

And just like that, everything I had ever felt for Leo Richards came flooding back. All the pain. All the joy. All the bliss and the rage. The resentment and the confusion. The anger and the love. He’d told me not to hold back, hadn’t he? He’d said I wouldn’t have to. Not with him. Could I really believe that? Could I let myself hope it was true?

On the back of a wet, skipping breath, I told him, “I love you.” All the broken parts of me expected him to stiffen in my arms, to retreat from me, to display in actions if not in words all the signs I needed to prove him a liar.

But that didn’t happen. None of it. Instead, he buried his face in the disheveled waves of my hair and murmured, “I love you too, Lu. Always have. Always will.”

That was when I realized I’d lied to Leo before. When he’d asked me if I’d felt safe in that moment with him, I’d said yes. I’d lied to him then, and I’d unwittingly lied to myself too.

Because now, here, in this moment… that was when I truly felt safe. And it was a feeling I promised myself that, this time around, I wasn’t going to let go of.