Stripped Down

Angel does have a soft side, and it’s for me.

I drift awake hours later. The sheets on Angel’s bed are tangled around our legs, and shadows fill up the bedroom. If I listen carefully, I can hear Angel breathing, a steady in-out close by, but he’s moved away from me. We’re not entwined anymore. Somewhere, not so far away, other people move around the house. Angel’s brothers, probably. Maybe his housekeeper. Being caught by Axel and J.J. would be awkward, but I should get out of here.

Sex isn’t about love. It’s about getting off.

Angel’s even more dangerous than I thought, though, because he’s made me feel emotions I didn’t think I could. He makes me feel more. More passion, more need, more… caring. And that’s a recipe for disaster.

It’s cooler now, the overhead fan beating out a steady stream of cooler air. Or maybe the heat’s gone down in both of us. It doesn’t matter. The part of me that yearns to wear Angel on my body like my own personal fur coat is sated. Or that’s what I tell myself.

Getting up shouldn’t be difficult. I’ve played this game dozens of times before. We’ve had sex and it was great, but it’s still only the bridge to the magic land of Orgasm. Any other, longer term destination is crazy, even if we did talk about relationships, because a man like Angel could swallow me up, and I stand on my own two feet. No exceptions. That’s always been rule numero uno in my playbook. I don’t do keeper men.

Angel may be a possessive bastard and a prick, but he’s got rules of his own. I doubt I’d like his rules now any more than I did at sixteen. He’s black and white, certain his way is right, while I need more gray in my life. I’ve always colored outside the lines other people draw.

I sit up carefully. I’ll find my clothes. I’ll go. I’m sore between my legs, and I’ll remember this afternoon for more reasons than one. Part of me wants to roll over, ride Angel like a cowgirl, and make the evening memorable, too. That part of me is a hussy, and she knows better. The longer I stay, the greater the chance Angel makes me feel something besides an orgasm.

That wonderful, horrible, dangerous something more.

He looks softer asleep, his mouth relaxed, that fierce gaze temporarily shut down. Watching him feels even more intimate than the sex. I don’t think too many people have seen him sleep. When he shifts, I can see the tattoo on his bicep. That ink has a story, I’m sure. It’s part military trident, part something else that looks like curling black script. His eyes open and he meets my gaze.

The thought comes out of nowhere and has to be orgasm-induced. I could love this man.

“Stay,” he says, his fingers curling around my wrist. He’s holding on, and part of me doesn’t like that. Part of me needs to push him away, to make room to run.

Not everything about me is pretty. If he knows, he won’t want me to say.

“Stay,” he repeats and something in my heart breaks open.

This has to end before I get hurt and he needs to know. Once he has the truth, once my secrets are out there, there’s not going to be any question of staying.

Put it out there. “I need to tell you something.”

Angel tugs me down. I should pull away, should put some distance between us. All of his considerable attention is focused on me.

“When I was a girl, my momma did the best she could, but she had times when she fell into a depression and she self-medicated. Drugs, alcohol, men—she used them all.”

Angel’s fingers tug gently through my hair. “Tell me she left you somewhere safe.”

“We lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of Los Angeles.” I don’t need to need to connect the dots for him about the flimsy walls and flimsier doors. There wasn’t much security in a pre-fab.

“Sometimes, she hooked up with a guy for more than a weekend, and then he’d move in or come by more regular.” There’d been a revolving stepdaddy door in our beat up, worn down trailer. We’d only had one bedroom, so when my mom had a guy in her life, I’d slept on the fold-out couch in the tiny living room. Nothing had been able to block out the sounds, though, or the smell of sex. “The guys got darker, kinkier, and at some point she crossed the line between sex games and violence. She sported bruises, and I started leaving the trailer when she came home with one of them.”

“Jesus. Tell me you had somewhere to go.”

My list of options had been short. “I hung out at school, the library, the Catholic church that was open twenty four/seven. It could have been worse. I attended a lot of funeral masses. When I was fifteen, though, she got really bad and she disappeared for a few weeks.”