Ravaged (Roman Holiday 4)

“I hate you.”

She laughed. “I know. Poor Roman.”

She got more mud and dabbed a spot on each nipple. With a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows, she painted it down his stomach and filled his navel. She reached the button of his jeans and glanced at his face.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Kiss me, and I won’t.”

“No.”

“Kiss me, or I’ll paint my name on your stomach.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I so would.”

He could stop her. He could get out of the water, climb up the bank, walk back to the house.

He could, but he didn’t.

She didn’t paint her name on his stomach, either, because she’d never planned to do that. She did the worst best thing, instead. She unzipped him. Her hand found him hard and aching hot, and she took him in her filth-coated palm as her other hand shoved his jeans and briefs a few inches down his ass to give her better access.

“Jesus, Roman.”

She squeezed, and it hurt. The grit against his tender skin. The revelation that this fault line of his, this weakness, went so much deeper than he’d wanted to acknowledge.

Something wrong with you.

He kissed her.

It was a nightmare.

The worst kind of nightmare, because it was so good, he couldn’t stop.

They rolled. Rolled again. Mud and rushes and water, flesh and tongues and lips and teeth, sucking sounds, silica crunching between his molars when she stroked him harder and he had to clench his jaw. He cupped her breast, full and round in his hand, her nipples tight points that he sucked, twisted, bit. He didn’t know if they were fighting or fucking or what. It was all the same. Rage and pain and ecstasy all mixed together, and he hated the way they mixed, hated the sweet beauty of the ache in his cock, the urgency of his need to get inside her and make her arch up beneath him, make her come until her eyes crossed, make her smile.

The last one worst of all. That he wanted to make her smile.

That he’d wanted to break down that bathroom door and take her out of there, cheer her up, restore her to herself.

He liked her. Because he was weak, and she was alive, her aliveness so deeply rooted that no trauma could kill it, no pain pull it up by the roots and extinguish her. No one could ever hurt her as deeply as he would hurt every day, every minute, if he let himself.

And if he stayed with her, if he allowed her to get at him, get into him, she would make him feel it.

He couldn’t stand it.

But he couldn’t stop, either. He shook his hand in the water to clean it, found her clit with his thumb and stroked. Slicked up her wetness with two fingers over the hood, made her writhe, did it again, and then got distracted when she bit his neck. They were like that—biting teeth, stroking hands, leg over hip over back, pressing together and rolling and dripping on each other. Like mating animals that drew blood until it made them frenzied, fucked hard and made their pleasure audible with screams that sounded like death.

It should’ve been meaningless. Two adults rolling around in the mud, one of them naked, the other one getting there. It should have been seedy and sordid and dirty and wrong, and what messed him up worst of all—what made him thrust against her hip, dip his fingers deeper and search with his thumb for the stroke she liked, the pleasure she wanted—was that it wasn’t any of those things.

It felt good. It felt right.

Her feet pushed at his jeans, shoving them farther down his legs.

“Roman, please,” she said. “Please.”

“Please what?” He kissed the pulse point at her neck. Fisted his hand in her hair, dark yellow at the roots, dirty and tangled.