She obeyed, and he had to close his eyes as he reached into his pocket to grab the condom he’d optimistically stashed there this morning. He needed a moment to collect himself because there was “fast,” and there was “over before it started.”
“Hurry up,” she urged, grabbing the condom and tearing it open. He shoved his pants down. They only made it as far as his knees before she rolled the condom onto his shaft.
“I can’t even believe how much I want you inside me,” she whispered, wonder in her voice.
He’d been going to take his clothes off, too. Surely there was time for that, he’d thought. But he had been wrong. So he did what he had to do, which was to swipe two fingers over her opening to confirm what he suspected. “Oh God, how can you be this wet for me?”
“How can you be this hard for me?” she countered in an almost confrontational tone that somehow made him even harder, which should have been impossible.
The image of her standing there, naked against the door while he was fully clothed with his pants around his knees, was suddenly too much. He took himself in hand and positioned his cock outside her entrance. She moaned and rocked her hips, grabbing at his chest like she was trying to climb up him, inside him. So he pressed his palms flat against the door behind her and slammed the rest of the way inside her, relishing the sharp, satisfied exhalation that resulted.
Then he did it again and again, harder each time, driving her higher and higher up on her tiptoes. And each time he was rewarded with a louder response from Jane.
He hadn’t been lying when he’d said this was going to be quick. He lasted only a few more strokes, but it was okay because by the time he exploded in ecstasy, she was screaming and her pussy was shuddering around him, squeezing out every drop of pleasure from him. His arms, still braced on the wall on either side of her head, shook and his heart felt like it was going to jackhammer out of his chest.
She was panting, too, as she slumped against him like a rag doll.
“Sorry,” he said. She had come, and rather spectacularly, too, but he still felt compelled to apologize for how brief their encounter had been.
A vague scoffing noise emerged from where her head was tucked into the crook of his arm.
Still. He continued to feel the need to throw out an excuse or two. “I guess that’s what happens when you meet a pretty girl after five months of celibacy.” Though he was pretty sure that wasn’t what was going on here. He and Christie had enjoyed themselves plenty when he’d returned from his first deployment, but he’d never had a sexual encounter that had been quite so…intense.
Her head popped up, which was good because after a day tromping around in the heat, he couldn’t smell very good. Her expression was hard to read. It looked like she was contemplating some big problem, trying to solve a riddle, which was impressive because his own brain was still firmly lodged in his pants.
“What’s next?” she said, still with that strange expression on her face.
“I’m thinking shower,” he said, watching her like a hawk to gauge her reaction. He couldn’t articulate why, but it felt like a lot hinged on his answer. “Shower, then slow.”
“Slow?” She sent that single eyebrow up, and he let himself relax a little. It felt like he’d passed a kind of invisible test.
“Yeah.” He leaned in, way in, wanting to recapture the sexually charged aura that had surrounded them all day. He put his nose right against her neck and inhaled the mixture of sunscreen and her. “Nice and slow,” he drawled. “Like we’ve got all night.”
Which they did.
It was a damn good feeling.
“My brother has shampoo and stuff,” Cam said a few minutes later as he shed his clothes in the bathroom and watched the still-naked Jane unload some miniature toiletries from her bag. “And Elise has some girly junk here, too.”
“I know, but I like my stuff,” she said, unwrapping the tiniest bar of soap he’d ever seen. “I brought a toiletries bag to the park because I wasn’t sure if we would be showering there. So since I have it, I might as well use it.”
“All right,” said Cameron, taking the soap and a travel bottle filled with shampoo from her. He lifted the soap to his nose and sniffed. Yep. Ivory. As he’d suspected that first night at the bar when he’d noticed how good she smelled relative to that chick whose name totally escaped him now. He flipped open the lid of the small bottle. “Watermelon,” he said with satisfaction. He’d called that correctly, too.
She shrugged as she tested the temperature of the water. “Elise’s stuff is much nicer than mine,” Jane said. “But I don’t care. You like what you like, right?”
He held both the bar of soap and the bottle of shampoo up to his nose at the same time and took a good long inhale. His senses filled with Jane. “I like it, too,” he said.
He liked it a lot.
After the water ran cold and Jane had another orgasm—there was something to be said for “slow”—she started to think she might have a problem.
It was just an inkling, a little unformed thought niggling at the corners of her mind, hinting that something wasn’t sitting quite right.
It was easy enough to shove out of her consciousness, though, once she was seated at the breakfast bar in Jay’s kitchen watching a shirtless Cameron make them grilled cheese sandwiches. “That hipster dinner was too small,” he proclaimed, and she had to agree.
She stared at his tattoos. It was so cliché, but they were the hottest thing ever, and when he was otherwise engaged like this, moving silently around the kitchen, she was free to observe them. She couldn’t imagine letting someone drag a needle across your skin in order to permanently mark it, and in that sense, they still sort of freaked her out. But she was starting to understand the power of being made to sit with your own discomfort. Roller coasters, tattoos…wild, animalistic sex. It was all rather exhilarating.
“Will you tell me about your tattoos?” she asked. She’d heard him say earlier to Gia that there was no story behind his ink, but she hadn’t believed him. He froze in place, his back to her, as he stood over the pan the sandwiches were cooking in. “You don’t have to,” she added quickly. He clearly didn’t like talking about the tattoos, so why had she thought she’d be the exception?
“Okay,” he said, flipping a sandwich but not turning around.
She waited a beat for him to start talking, and when it became clear he wasn’t going to, she said, “The one on your back is Flanders Fields, right?” The field of poppies was an iconic symbol of Canada’s war dead, something any citizen would recognize as such, and was probably a pretty logical tattoo for a soldier to have. She figured it was the safest one to inquire about.
“Yes,” he said after a beat. “The crosses at the top are for dead buddies.”
“What were their names?” she asked, feeling like Cameron was the kind of guy who’d rather she skip the platitudes.
“Eric and Haseeb. They were our IED guys.”
“IED?”
“Improvised explosive device. They were the bomb squad.”
“Oh God.”
“That’s what the PTSD is from,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact, devoid of inflection. “We all watched them get blown up. We…couldn’t save them. Or the boy who was the bomber. He was so young.”
“Oh my God,” she breathed, feeling like a stupid broken record, but she realized with a thud that next to the crosses was a small crescent and star, the symbol of Islam. He’d immortalized his fallen comrades and the boy who’d killed them.
“I mean, who does that to a child?” he spat, his voice suddenly angry. “Uses a child as a weapon like that?”
There were a million more questions swirling around in her throat, but she swallowed them in favor of asking, “And the angel?”
He was still standing at the stove, so the tattoo in question, which was on his chest, wasn’t visible, but she could see it in her mind. It was an angel, all sleek and muscular and masculine—kind of like him. But its head hung, semi-obscured behind one of its mammoth wings, while the other extended to its full, fearsome wingspan. The image was huge—it covered most of his chest. It was hard to explain why exactly, but there was an aura of sadness about it.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said when he remained silent and still. “It’s none of my business.”
“I was a bad kid,” he said, seeming to come to life as he used a spatula to move the sandwiches from the frying pan to a plate. But he didn’t do any more than that. Just kept standing there facing away from her.
To hear him call himself “bad,” so clinically and with such detachment, made her shiver.
“We lived in this trailer park, and everyone hated me. They were scared of me.”
“I’m sure your bark was worse than your bite,” she said, hating the way he was talking about himself, wanting to somehow make it un-true with her words, though that was impossible.
He finally turned, and he flashed her a small, defeated smile. “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I became what they saw. The trailer park was called Deer Haven, which was stupid because there were no deer anywhere and the place was not a haven.” She smiled. The way he could inject humor into what was clearly a painful subject made her heart twist. “They started calling me the Devil of Deer Haven.”