Chaos

“I’m so close,” I beg, and Shawn hikes my knees up to my chest, leaning back before pulling out and pushing back into me agonizingly slowly. His eyes are on mine as every single inch of him sinks deep between my legs, and my eyelids flutter closed as I burn alive beneath him.

The mattress beside me shifts as he lowers to his hands, and his breath is hot on my ear when he says, “Do you know what I remember about our first time?”

Every movement he makes inside me is so controlled, so deliberate, that all I can do is answer with a whimper.

“It didn’t last nearly long enough,” he says.

His lips capture the lobe of my ear in a warm caress that makes my toes curl, his heavy breaths stirring the hair at my temple and making my thighs tighten around him.

“Do you want me to touch you?” he asks, and the way I pulse around him is answer enough. He leans back, wets the pad of his thumb between his lips, and watches me squirm as he lowers it to the ready bud that has me crying out his name. “I want to see that look in your eyes again, Kit. Open your eyes.”

It takes every ounce of strength I have to open my eyes and gaze up at him, but when I do, it takes only seconds.

“Oh my God,” I gasp, my back arching off the bed, my fingers gripping the base of the headboard behind my pillow. Shawn’s calloused thumb traces firm circles, and the image of him stays printed behind my eyelids even when they squeeze shut and my head throws back.

The way his arms are flexing as he reaches down to touch me. The firm muscles in his chest, his stomach. The scruff on his jaw, the brightness of his lips. Those green eyes, and the way they demanded I fall apart beneath him, for him.

The base of my wooden headboard is still biting into the palms of my hands when Shawn lowers back down to a missionary position. He kisses my neck, my jaw, my mouth. He’s unhurried as he moves inside me, firmly enough to keep my orgasm going, going, going.

Eventually, my arms wrap around him, my nails digging into his back as I squeeze him close against my breasts. “I want you,” I breathe against his damp temple. Because God, I haven’t had enough yet. Not even close.

“You have me.”

And when he pulls away and I see the look in his eyes, I believe him.

My hand curls behind the back of his neck and I kiss him—I kiss him like he’s mine. I claim every inch of his lips, of his tongue, playing and sucking and nibbling until his pace becomes a little less sure, a little less controlled. Shawn tries to pull away again—I can tell he’s getting close—but I suck at his tongue in long, seductive strokes that make him moan against my mouth.

And God, that sound. My heart kicks. My back arches. I fall apart again, my knees trembling against his body as mine loses control. I kiss him desperately, and the moans coming from deep inside his chest grow hungrier and wilder until he gives himself to me, his hips jerking within the tight squeeze of my thighs—until neither one of us has anything left to give.

And then, I hold him. I wrap my arms around him and hold him close, brushing my fingers through his damp hair, kissing the side of his face, biting my lip between my teeth when I pulse around him and his body responds. I hold him until he summons the strength to lift himself up and gaze down into my eyes.

He doesn’t say anything, and neither do I. Instead, he lowers his lips to mine, and when he kisses me, softly with absolutely nothing separating us, I know with everything I am that he was right—

Neither of us is half a person. Not anymore.

Chapter Twenty-Three

IT’S WEIRD SEEING my twin with Leti . . . It’s weird seeing my twin with anyone. Under the hazy blue lighting of Mayhem’s main bar, I watch Leti whisper something in Kale’s ear, and I watch Kale smile softly at the reflective black bar top, the back of his shoulder pressed tightly against the front of Leti’s chest.

It’s weird—like seeing a bunny giggle or a puppy with purple eyes—but I can’t stop smiling.

Kale and I worked things out the day after Shawn and I spent countless hours making up for lost time. Everyone in the world tried to contact us that day, but we made the world wait.

The next day was chaos.

Shawn dragged me back to his apartment with him so we could tell Adam, Joel, Rowan, and Dee in person about us being together. Then he told Mike over the phone, with jeers and catcalls flying from the background. I finally understood why he wanted to wait until the tour was over to tell the rest of the band, but even with Adam and Joel behaving like the ten-year-olds they perpetually are, the smile was etched permanently on my face. Shawn told them about me like he was announcing an award he’d won, and the way he held me close, it made me feel like one.

I drove all the way home to talk to my family that same night—sans Shawn, in spite of his protests that we should go together. It was something I needed to do on my own. My talk with Kale was short—an apology from Kale, followed by a hug, an “I forgive you,” and a bone-crunching punch to his arm from me. I gave him a bruise that lasted over a week, a black-and-blue reminder to worry about his own love life from now on.

Shawn was already waiting for me in my loft when I got home late that night, and I told him about the invitation my brothers not-so-kindly extended that he should-slash-better come to our next family dinner. And even though I tried-slash-threw-a-tantrum to dissuade him, Shawn wouldn’t get the hell out of my Jeep that following Sunday, and I had no choice but to bring him along.

We arrived a few hours before dinner, with my brothers immediately suggesting a game of touch football that I knew damn well would involve a hell of a lot more than harmless touching. They had that dark look in their already-dark eyes—the one that told me they remembered every word I’d blurted at the dinner table, and that my explanations about Shawn being a good guy now had fallen on deaf ears.