Ashton

When the front door clicks closed and it’s just Dylan and I, everything shifts between us. Our hands still entwined, our eyes locked together, it’s like our song is playing in the background, controlling our every move.

He backs me into the house, to the edge of the stairs, and his hands travel to my waist as he leans in and brushes his nose against mine, slowly moving to caress my cheek and jaw, his warm breath kissing my skin. My hands tangle in his hair—not in rushed need, but to hold him, feel him, embrace the moment.

“This won’t be like last time,” he tells me, lips moving against mine as he speaks. “I need to take my time exploring you, mapping out every scar and freckle, until I mark and memorize every piece of you.

“I’m going to remember what you taste like.” His lips graze my skin until he bites down on my collarbone. “Memorize your silky skin.” One of his hands flattens against my bare midriff. “And make sure that every sound you make while I’m inside of you will be locked away in the back of my mind.”

I gasp when he tugs me into his body, his hard to my soft, a fire engulfing us until we’re burning out of control.

When we ascend the stairs, bodies pressed together, warning bells chime in my head. A guard goes over my heart, ready to cage it behind impenetrable bars.

We’re not made to love each other. We’d be a disaster in the making.

He told me that once, and nothing has changed. This had to be it for us. There’s nothing else left to offer each other, and when this night is over we needed to go our separate ways. Play it off like a lapse in judgement.

Standing outside my bedroom, he presses me against the wall, lips softly brushing against mine from every angle he could taste me in. His hands go to my shirt, slipping underneath it and slowly moving it upward until it’s off. His eyes ravish the sight of my pale pink bra, acting like the simplicity is the sexiest thing he’s seen.

“You’re …” He shakes his head, trying to collect his words. His eyes look into mine, the shade the softest they’ve ever been. I melt into the pools, drown in the feeling, burn by his touch. He dips down, peppering kisses across the tops of my exposed breasts until he reaches around and unhooks my bra, letting it drop on the floor next to us.

“You’re beautiful, Ashton,” he whispers, kissing me with everything he has in him—all the good and bad that he can’t express. His kiss exposes him, shatters his barriers, shows me the type of man he is, not who he wishes he could be. I kiss him with the same fierceness, needing him to see what he does to me even though I try fighting it. Fighting him.

But he is everything.

My air.

My space.

My thoughts.

I would give him every part of me if he’d let me. But every kiss we share is closer to good-bye, every touch a step toward the door, and every whisper a broken fantasy blown away in the wind.

Our tongues dance together as we cling to each other, my fingers pulling at the hem of his shirt until he relents and helps me take it off, our mouths only pulled away from each other for a mere second to let the fabric pass between us until there’s no barriers.

I pull him into my bedroom, and he picks me up, setting me carefully onto the bed, crawling over me until his lips are trailing down my body, between my breasts, tongue running down my stomach until they stop at the waist of my jeans. He slips his finger inside, popping open the button, focus carved onto his face as he unzips them tortuously slow, planting a kiss at the open spot just above my panties.

“Dylan,” I choke out.

“I told you this is different,” he tells me, sounding just as tortured by going this slow. He drags my jeans down my legs, me arching up to help him, and kisses the inside of my thigh as the material slides down.

I bite down hard on my lip, closing my eyes and absorbing every kiss me gives my body. My breath catches when he nuzzles his nose against my panties, biting down on the apex of my thighs.

I grip his shoulder hard, needing to pull him up to me. He chuckles and lets me take control for a short moment, letting me crash my lips against his as I work open his jeans and slide my hands inside, gripping his length.

“You’re not wearing underwear,” I state dumbly, staring at him.

His eyes squeeze closed as I tighten my grip on him just the slightest, running my hand up and down, my thumb teasing the tip.

“Fuck, you need to stop,” he groans, tilting his head back. He jerks his hips forward, letting me take more of him in my hand.

He lets me stroke him a few more times before he pulls my hand away, sliding his jeans off and throwing them behind him onto the floor. His lips go back to mine, teeth biting my bottom lip, hands sliding into my panties and fingers teasing my clit.

I arch into him, groaning as his fingers slide into me, the movements too languid and slow, my chest rising and falling and legs opening for him. His body comes down on mine, erection pressed against my stomach, his fingers picking up pace, causing me to pant and writhe.

My lips go down his neck, nipping just over his pulse, tongue running over the salty skin. He hooks his fingers in me, and I know it’s only a matter of time before I’m going to come.

“Dylan, please,” I beg, fingertips digging into his shoulders so hard they’ll leave marks.

“Let go, sweetheart,” he says into the crook of my neck, kissing me until his lips are over mine and containing the orgasm that racks my body. His tongue swirls with mine as he rides out my spasms, his fingers hooking into my panties and sliding them off me.

“I need to touch you,” I tell him, sitting up and kissing him again, hands running down his chest until they’re over his length again.

He flips us over so I’m straddling him, his eyes watching me completely consumed as I stoke him up and down with my hand. His breathing hitches as I pick up the pace, the heat between my legs demanding attention from him.

His fingers dig into the flesh of my hips, riding my hand until his cock twitches in my palm. A bead of precum escapes the head and my eyes flash with an idea that he seems to read on my face.

“As much as I want those pretty lips around my cock, I need to be inside of you,” he gravels.

I reach into the nightstand, pulling out a foil packet and ripping it open. He helps me roll the condom on, our eyes both locked on each other, afraid to look away. Afraid the moment will disappear.

He grips my hips again. “This is about you, sweetheart. Take what you want.”

“I want you,” I breathe, eyes blinking back the emotion that’s building into a typhoon inside of me. He can’t possibly know how much truth is woven in those words.

He uses one hand to brush back fallen hair from my face, his thumb caressing my cheek.

“You’ve got me.”

It’s all I need to hear before lifting my hips up and slowly sliding down onto him, both of us groaning in unison as he fills me.

My movements start off slow, calculated, taking him in and making the moment last as long as I can. He watches me ride him, the pure ecstasy on his face mirrors my own, my toes curling as he shifts up and buries himself deeper.

He curses as he repeats the action, meeting my hips every time I come down. My hands rest on his chest, fingertips curling and tracing the phoenix tattoo that wraps around his left side. I wonder if they’re a promise to himself—that one day he’ll rise from the ashes despite the doubt he puts on himself from ever coming out of the soot.

I move faster, frantically, feeling him catch on and mimic my changing speed. I tilt my head back when his finger brushes my clit, rubbing the pad of his thumb in circles over it until my body threatens to fall apart around him.

Right before I’m about to let loose, he switches us, flipping me onto my back and hovering over me with him still buried in me. His movements are quick, hard, punishing, like he doesn’t want to it to end but knows that it’s inevitable.

We’re inevitable, he told me.

His features are hard, pained as he looks down at me. My hands press behind me against my headboard as it hits the wall with every thrust, my knees tight against either side of his waist as he takes me in the way he needs.

It isn’t just about me anymore. It’s about us.

Always us.

I moan his name the harder he moves, his body crashing into mine, his hands on either side of the bed, gathering the sheets in his palms. My voice becomes a mangled mix of breathy noises, and he groans when I tighten around him, unable to hold back any longer.

When he hooks his arm around my lower back and lifts me up, entering me from a new angle, my body quakes around him, and the dominating look on his face as he slams into me only makes the orgasm blast through me harder, body giving him everything, and taking what he offers all at once.

“Fuck, Ash.” He uses my name like it’s the worst word in the dictionary. A curse. A plague. The ending to him and everything he knew.

And when his release hits him, the pain on his face consumes me, absorbing into me like it’s my own. When his sweaty, breathless body drops next to me on the bed, we stare at each other through hooded eyes, too lost in the moment to make another sound.

We don’t need to talk to know what’s coming next. Neither of us needs to say the words, because just like he promised, he’d branded me. My thoughts, body, and soul, are all his whether he wants to keep them or not.

He has everything but my heart, my heart too frail to be held by anybody yet. We both know that it’ll shatter everything inside of me if I let him have it now. The hope for anything between us will be left tangled in the messy sheets we’re wrapped in.

I would let him have everything else, but never the one thing I know I need to trust myself to give away again.

It’s over ten minutes of us just staring, letting ourselves catch our breaths, before either of us says anything again.

“Tell me something you haven’t told anyone else,” I whisper, hand brushing his until he lets me hold it.

He swallows. “That’s a lot to cover.”

“Anything.”

Needing some part of him in exchange for everything I already handed over was the way I was going to justify letting him have me when I promised that I would stay away.

“I’m afraid of storms because my darkest moment happened in one.” His eyes darken, Adam’s apple bobs, and lips purse.

“Tell me about it.”

He peers down at our entwined fingers. “I was sixteen and walking through the rough side of town where I grew up. It was nighttime, I’d missed the bus home, so I had to walk.” His voice cracks, and so does my heart—chips that I thought were mending because of him slowly falling away all over again because of the same man.

“I heard about the people who hung around. The muggings. Assaults. You don’t think anything bad will happen to you until it does. That night, I was jumped. And maybe if I didn’t open my mouth and talk back it wouldn’t have been so bad, but after they were done beating the shit out of me, they stole what little I had, and left me for dead. Bleeding out on the sidewalk.

“It was hours before anybody came looking for me. Both of my parents worked, so when they found out I wasn’t home they searched. Found me unconscious, black and blue, bleeding, broken ribs, broken eye socket, cut lip. I spent a few days in the hospital pretending I didn’t remember what happened, because pretending was better than reliving it. And with the amount of damage those guys had done to me, the doctors didn’t question for a second I had some sort of memory loss. Whether because of the trauma or post-traumatic stress. Nobody asked, and I never told.

“But I remember thinking from that day on that I’d find a way out of that town and become somebody nobody could damage again. If I was going to fuck my life up, it’d be on my own terms. No amount of therapy or counseling could change that. The only thing being forced to talk to somebody got me was a love for music and writing out what I felt— using my anger and pain and putting them to lyrics.”

Tears well in my eyes as he tells me this, heartbreak unlike I’d ever felt before flooding my body.

He swipes away a tear. “I’m not worth crying over, Ashton. Don’t waste those tears on me. That moment defined me and who I am, making me stronger and more determined than I’d ever been.”

But you are worth them, I want to tell him.

“A light in a dark,” I whisper instead.

“Your ex stole my notebook,” he explains quietly, jaw ticking. “Some producer called Tom when Conner Mason tried passing off one of my songs as his. That notebook was the same one I’d gotten in counseling almost eight years ago. Nobody has seen it. Nobody should ever use those songs.”

My jaw drops. “Oh my God. Dylan, I’m—”

“Your little boy toy ratted Conner out once I threatened to sue and end both their careers. They may have a few hit singles out, but there’s a perk to being part of a band like mine. We’re bigger than them, and they know messing with me will get all of us on their bad side.”

I close my eyes, feeling guilt completely take over the euphoria I previously felt. My high dimming until it threatened to turn into a crash like a junkie out of stash.

“It’s my fault,” I tell him.

“It’s theirs,” he argues firmly. He tips my chin up, keeping his touch on my skin. The truth is in his eyes, and I know he means it … that he isn’t angry with me.

I swallow back my argument, too wrapped up in him to try countering. “Thank you. For opening up to me. For letting me open up to you.”

The pain is back in his eyes, washing out the warmth. Instead, I stare at the cool hues and shiver at the change, fear creeping into my conscious.

“I want to know you better,” he admits, stroking his fingers through my hair, the feeling easing my body. “But I want to be known.”

I stare at him, blinking back tears that I wish I was strong enough to fight. “And you can’t have both?”

His movements stop, his hand slowly retracting back to his side. “Not if I want to be the same man.”

“The same man?” I repeat, not grasping what he’s saying.

He averts his eyes, blinking back a look I’ve seen too much. Guilt. And I wait for the final blow, knowing it’s coming.

“I need this feeling I have with you, Ash.” Voice cracking, he finally looks at me, hands trailing over my face, cupping my cheek, eyes searching my features like he’s trying to engrave me into his memory.

Because he’ll never see me like this again.

“But I need my reputation more.”

I blink back tears as I watch him take me in, not sure how I can fight back the tugging in my heart. It hurts—I hurt.

We’re both damaged, afraid, and waiting for the world to do us wrong again. And it’s that cumbersome understanding between us that’s the last thing I see before I fall asleep.