Ryland

 

The weekend passed in a cloud-like dream as I nestled my favorite appendage inside of Brighton again and again.

See, I could be romantic?

Under a self-imposed lockdown, we didn’t leave the apartment once. Phones turned off, business neglected, calls unanswered. Nothing else existed. She was back in my arms. In my bed. Back to letting me have my way with her. It was all going swimmingly. 

We hungered for each other. Maddeningly. Obsessively so. But wasn’t that the whole point? Weren’t we all just looking for someone we could fuck until the end of time and chase those euphoric rainbows with?

For me, I had no further to look than the woman cocooned between my legs at present. Her cheek utilized my chest as a pillow without any protest from me. Strawberry gold spilled down her back in tangled curls that my fingers stroked lazily. The lids of her normally waifish eyes were heavy and drowsy under the weight of contentment. The steady thrum of my heartbeat pulsed beneath her, drugging her with its melodic rhythm.

I quietly speculated how long it’d be before she was asleep again. I wouldn’t move. I enjoyed this far too much. Even with a dead arm and a pressing need for sustenance. Now that all was right in my world again, hunger had returned with a ravenous vengeance.

It was a toss-up whether food should be first on the agenda, or another round of marathon fucking. I thought I’d purged it all from my system only twenty minutes ago, but already my cock was stirring again. Briefly, I toyed with the idea of licking rum raisin ice cream off of Brighton’s every curve and valley. Two birds, one stone.

The dilemma was effectively quashed when her fingers traced over the scars on my chest, her brow furrowed. That look meant she was deep in thought, which didn’t bode well for me or my needy cock.

My palms held her against me in a bruising grip, just on the off chance she was rethinking this.

“We need to talk, Ryland.”

I kissed the top of her forehead and smothered my face in her hair. “No, we don’t.”

My lips made a mad dash for her neck, but she stopped me cold.

“I’m serious,” she protested. “You aren’t going to distract me with sex.”

Grabbing her hand, I pressed it against the bulge in my briefs and gave her a boyish grin. “C’mon, let’s get frisky, baby.”

Nothing good could come of talking. I knew this, and yet, she pursed her lips. She usually liked it when I was being smart. Not this time, apparently. Christ, she really wanted to talk.

“What’s the matter?” I sounded more reluctant than a sixty-year-old nun, even to my own ears.

Brighton gave me that look in response. The one that told me to quit feeling sorry for myself and suck it up. So I stroked her back in encouragement even though I only wanted to fuck these thoughts right out of her system, whatever they may be. 

“A lot,” she answered. “We have a lot to talk about. But first I want to start with the car crash.”

My spine compressed, and the aggravation in my tone wasn’t well disguised. “No, Brighton.”

“There are things I need to know,” she insisted. “I can’t move forward until I do.”

The tension in my jaw burned all the way down my throat. Six months ago, I’d have told her it was non-negotiable. But as I’d promised you- and her- I was trying to bend. Being the master of your own universe isn’t an easy habit to break. But as I sought refuge in the depths of her hazel eyes, I recognized the significance of her need for this.

I rubbed the back of my neck. No doubt this was going to hurt like hell. I wished I had some whiskey. What’s more, some rum raisin ice cream. My first plan sounded infinitely better than what she had in mind.

“What do you want to know?”

“Tell me what happened that night,” she said. “How you set it up. How it was supposed to go.”

The rational part of me understood why she was asking, but even now, I pictured her face that night. The blood and the fear. Everything inside of me clammed up, and I felt like a junkie who’d missed his last ten fixes.

“I know it’s hard for you, Ryland.” She cradled my face in her palms. “But I just need to know.”

She wanted to know if I had any idea she was in the car that night. I didn’t. I’d never told her because it was irrelevant. Regardless of my lack of knowledge, there was no justification.

“You knew Brayden would come straight to me,” she pressed. “If he came to California.”

“I did.”

She waited anxiously, and I searched her pretty face with my eyes. I was afraid to tell her these things. Afraid she’d only ever see me as a monster who couldn’t be redeemed. Squeezing her hand in mine, I anchored myself with her warmth as I tripped around the words in my brain.

“I forwarded Brayden’s number to my phone before I left that night,” I told her. “Then had maintenance disable the elevator from reaching the top floor and lock the stairwell.”

Her face remained a mask of stoicism as she processed my words. I hadn’t a clue what she was thinking. The sadist in me demanded I put a stop to this bullshit at once. Her mouth had so many other beneficial uses than dredging up the past. It was fear talking, okay? Don’t write me off completely.

“So Brayden wouldn’t be able to contact me,” she reasoned out loud.

I closed my eyes and allowed my head to fall against the headboard. I’d prefer her impassivity over disappointment any day of the week.

“I really did have a business dinner that night,” I explained. “Mick was tracking Brayden through his phone. Neither of us anticipated you’d be there with him.”

“So he didn’t know I was in the car,” Brighton whispered. “Is he the one who ran us off the road?”

“Yes.” I swallowed. “I called Nicole during dinner, and she told me you were in bed asleep. She’d never lied to me before, so I had no reason not to believe it. Then Mick called me an hour later and told me he’d done what I’d asked. I met him there.”

Brighton shook in my arms as all of my vile admissions spewed from my mouth like lava. I couldn’t stop them now. She’d asked for it. I wanted her forgiveness. I needed her to wipe my slate clean and anoint me with her purity again. I clutched her tighter, terrified to let go. She was too small and fragile.

“I had no fucking idea, baby girl,” I choked out my desperation. “I swear I didn’t. I’d never do that to you. You have to believe it.”

“But you’d do it to Brayden,” she answered. “You wanted to.”

“Yes, I wanted to.” There was no point denying it.

“So why didn’t you?”

I opened my eyes and gazed into hers. Even brimming with tears, they were the most exquisite colors I’d ever seen. The sadist in me thought the tears only made them more so. Crystalline blue tinged with balmy gray and honeyed amber. They held an entire landscape within them- where the mountains met the sea in a collision of drizzling rain and thunder. Nothing else in the world rivaled them.  The windows to her soul, they often conveyed her thoughts so openly. But not this time. She was keeping her emotions very close to the vest, and I didn’t like it one bit.

“I don’t know,” I answered finally. Honestly. I didn’t know why I couldn’t pull the trigger that night. “I kept looking at him and thinking about you. About how much it would hurt you.”

“And what if you’d done it?” she asked. “Then what would have happened? What was the plan then?”

“I didn’t have one,” I admitted. Everything I’d planned was only about that moment. The rush I’d feel in those brief few seconds when justice was exacted, and all was right with the world again. I wanted to taste Brayden’s agony. To feel its presence choking the life out of him like I’d felt that night. He was the only one who could pay up. The only one left to settle the score.

“So you weren’t going to try to cover it up?”

I hadn’t a clue why this mattered, but I answered anyway. “No.”

“You would have just gone to prison, lost everything.”

“If that’s what ensued, then yes.”

“I find that hard to believe,” she scoffed. “You’ve built an empire. And you would just let all of that go, just to kill Brayden?”

“My company was built out of necessity,” I replied. “I needed resources to do what I planned. Money, power. It was all a piece of the plan. Not the other way around.”

“So you spent five years working yourself to death, planning all of this… and now you’re ready to let it go?”

Her voice was tinged with doubt. I didn’t blame her. She told me earlier she believed me, but she’d always have her reasons not to trust me. We’d probably come back to this dead horse time and time again.

“I already have let it go.” I grazed her throat with my lips and inhaled her scent tangled with mine. My chest inflated with male pride that she smelled of me. That she looked so beautifully ravaged and thoroughly fucked, by none other than yours truly. It did things to me. And again, the importance of her presence in my life socked me in the gut.

“I’ll spend every day for the rest of my life proving it,” I murmured.

“But why now?” she asked. “You said you decided before you even knew I was pregnant.”

My thumb explored the curve of her pretty pink lips, coveting the tiny hitch in her breath when I touched her this way. “I did it for you,” I said. “I almost lost you. And nothing could ever be worth going through that again.”

She blinked away her tears and nodded in apparent satisfaction as she wrapped her body around me like a vice. “I trust you not to hurt me again, Ryland,” she whispered. “Don’t make me regret that.”