Taking one of her legs, I open it wide, bending it at the knee so I can see her, see her taking me, and go deeper still because I can’t get deep enough with her. I can’t get close enough.
“I’m going to come,” she whispers against my mouth, closing her eyes.
“Look at me. I want to see you. I want to see you come like this.”
She opens her eyes. Her hands are on either side of my face, and I’m fucking her deep, each thrust closer to her center, each thrust cleaving us together, and she doesn’t come like she does when I fuck her hard. This is different, a gradual building of tension, a wave, not a tsunami. I watch her, watch how soft her eyes go, her face, watch her as I feel her squeezing around me. Hear the sigh of her breath. It takes all I have not to come too, not to empty inside her.
Lifting her, I shift our position so I’m sitting against the headboard and she’s straddling my lap. Our eyes lock. I grip her hair, pull her to me, kiss her before shifting on hand to her hip, moving her over me.
She claws my shoulders, and I watch her when I kiss her. I need her like this right now. I need all of her. My cock in her pussy, my tongue in her mouth, my hands on her, holding her tight to me.
Fuck.
I tighten my grip on her hair and drive deeper into her.
I’m rough with her, and when I tug her head back, she cries out, coming again, coming harder than before, milking my dick as I keep her speared, feel her throb, her cunt pulsating around my cock, her breath warm in my mouth.
I watch her as I empty inside her. As I hold her close and just watch her because I can’t stop fucking wanting her.
Rain comes down in sheets outside. Spent, I cradle Helena in the crook of my arm. We’re quiet for a long time as she rests against me. I like it, I like her like this. Like us like this.
“I know why you sleep in my room. Why you shower there. I know it’s that you’re safest from the others there. I know it’s not me.”
She shifts a little to look up at me.
“But you know what you do at night?” I ask.
I look down at her. I don’t know why I’m telling her, but looking at her like this, seeing what I see in her eyes, I have to. I have no choice.
“You curl into me,” I continue. “Always. It’s not that you hold on to me. You don’t. You curl up into my chest, but you don’t quiet until I put my arms around you and cocoon you.”
She smiles, looks away for an instant then turns back to me. “Do you know how creepy that sounds? That you watch me sleep?”
I look at her midnight eyes. “You have the prettiest, saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
At that, she pulls away, but I don’t let her go. I hold tighter, and she buries her face in my shoulder.
“You shouldn’t talk to me like this,” she says.
“Why not?”
She turns her head to meet my eyes. “Because I…” She stops, blinks, scrunches up her forehead, then seems to change her mind. She scoots off my lap and draws the covers up to her chest.
“Because no matter what, Sebastian, you are a Scafoni and I am a Willow. We aren’t friends. We’re enemies. You will destroy me inch by inch, and it’s easier…I have a chance…if I hate you. And this, what just happened, you touching me like that, talking to me like that, like I’m not just the Willow Girl…”
Her lip trembles, and tears fall from her face and one lands on my forearm. I almost look away from her to watch that drop slide over my skin. Almost.
“Like you care,” she says.
It’s quiet again, but something is building inside her. I see it. Feel it.
She shakes her head, slips off the bed and I let her go. She takes the blanket with her, holds it against her chest, hiding herself from me.
“It can’t ever happen again, Sebastian, because I can’t care about you.”15HelenaAfter swearing our conversation wasn’t over, Sebastian left for his meeting.
I’m sitting in the hotel room watching the sun curl around an angry cloud, promising more rain to come.
He’ll be gone for several hours. I’m surprised he left me unsupervised. Even allowed me to go anywhere I like—as long as it’s inside the hotel. Eat something, buy something from the boutique, and just charge it to the room.
Christ, I feel like a child. I don’t even have a dollar to buy myself a cup of coffee.
I look around the large living room and realize there isn’t a telephone in here, not even on the desk. I get up and search the bedroom. There are phone jacks, but no phone. I snort, remembering how on our way up here, we’d passed a housekeeper’s cart. I’d noticed the two telephones with their cords wrapped around them on top of a stack of towels. I’d thought it was strange, but it hadn’t really registered then that he probably had the hotel remove the phones before we arrived.