34. Utah

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

utah

S he looked at me like there was a decent chance I’d been born without a brain when I parked the truck in the middle of one of the fields that surrounded New Jersey’s house. The sun was already setting by the time we were leaving that orchard. I’d told her we needed to stop at the house, but she wasn’t allowed to get out of the truck because we were still going somewhere else. It was Memphis, so I hadn’t really expected her to listen. It surprised me that she didn’t even attempt to get out of the truck while I ran in, ignored Indy completely to gather what I needed, and sprinted right back out to throw everything in the backseat.

“You said we were going somewhere ?”

So much attitude for such a little person.

“And we’re here,” I said.

“We didn’t actually go anywhere, Utah,” she laughed. “We didn’t even leave Jersey’s property.”

“I’m sorry, Princess Memphis. I didn’t realize you needed a five-star resort to look at the stars.”

“What?”

“You said you’d never even been stargazing. You don’t need much more than an open field and a truck bed.”

I could almost see the attitude melt right out of her; that teeny, tiny glimmer of the softer side of her nearly broke through for a whole millisecond before she opened the door and escaped the cab of my truck. I couldn’t imagine where she thought she might escape to without the use of my truck and her hilarious inability to simply exist comfortably outside. I got out of the truck, too, and grabbed the pile of blankets from the backseat. She waited in silence while I climbed into the bed and threw them all open, and then she stared at me in pure confusion when I turned to look at her after I was done. She was so small that she wasn’t even sure how to climb up here with me. Stifling that laugh was the hardest thing I’d done in a while as I jumped back down beside her. This girl actually took a whole step backward when I raised two fingers to motion for her to come to me. All it took to change her mind was cocking my head at her. She came to stand directly in front of me like she still didn’t know what to do.

Every fucking thing she did was adorable.

“Turn around,” I said.

“Umm.”

“Don’t start with me, Memphis. You know I’m not going to hurt you. Turn around.”

She was sure to glare at me before she turned away from me. I tried to ignore the reaction that wanted to come out of me when I grabbed her by the hips, lifting her right off the ground until she could raise her feet up and plant them on the tailgate. I froze right where I was after I tried to release her only to have her hand lock in a death grip on mine.

“You’re coming up here, too?” she asked.

“Nah, I figured I’d toss you up there and just get back in the cab with the heat.”

I couldn’t help but cackle at the way that she whirled back around to look at me.

“Yes, angel,” I said and squeezed the hand that she still had wrapped around mine. “I’m right behind you.”

I waited until she picked her place in the truck bed before I climbed up myself and laid back on the opposite side, leaving as much as space as possible between our bodies to just stare at the sky.

“Utah?” she asked after a few minutes of silence.

“Hm?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for. Or at?”

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” she said and smacked me in the stomach. “Do you know what you’re looking at?”

“Stars.”

“Okay, so that’s a no .”

“I’m not the one who said I hadn’t been stargazing like I was missing out on something big,” I said and laughed again. “I don’t have to care about what you want to try or what you want to see to make it happen for you.”

“Utah—”

She stopped talking the very second that I turned to look at her, and she looked away as soon as our eyes met. I let her just sit with whatever thought she was trying to process. Pushing her for anything at all when she wasn’t ready for it only resulted in her retreating inward. That much was obvious at this point.

“It’s louder than I thought it would be,” she said after another few minutes.

“What? There’s no one?—”

“No, it’s a different loud,” Memphis interrupted. “Back home, it was constant vehicle noise. People everywhere, always talking, yelling, moving. There aren’t people or cars or city noises here. But are there really that many bugs in Indiana to be making this much noise? Thinking about how many it would take to make this kind of noise makes my skin crawl.”

“The things you’ve been able to do in life, and you’re going to sit here and tell me you’re one of those girls who’s afraid of bugs ?”

“I’m not exactly a woodsy kind of soul, Utah. Does this look like skin that’s spent a lot of time outside?” she asked while she held out her arm and laughed. She wasn’t wrong. She was absolutely the palest creature I’d ever seen in real life. And it was flawless, even with everything she’d scarred into it herself for one reason or another in the form of tattoos. I’d never seen anything more stunning.

“Looks like the kind of skin I could spend a lifetime trying to memorize, just to have to accept that a lifetime still wasn’t anywhere near enough.”

The wind picked up when she sat up beside me.

I was right back to believing that she had to be something from another world. How else could I explain the fucking atmosphere shifting with her mood? Not that it was overly surprising. She was the kind of woman that they named hurricanes after; the category five kind.

The way that she looked at me had me worried that I’d upset her, though. What I felt wasn’t exactly something I’d been trying to hide from her, especially the last few days. Any person in possession of even a single one of the five senses would be able to tell that I wanted her. I wanted every weird as shit piece of her. I wanted to touch her, taste her, feel her around me. But more than that, I wanted her to want it, too.

“Sorry,” I said and shook my head at myself, thinking this was where she’d drawn the line. I brought her to an outdoor bed and told her it was to look at the stars just to hit on her. She had to be thinking I was just doing this one to get laid. “I wasn’t trying to?—”

She shrugged her way out of my flannel then pulled her tank top over her head, and I suddenly didn’t have access to the English language anymore. I couldn’t do anything to stop myself when my eyes moved from her face, down her neck, and across the most delicate little collar bones I’d ever seen on a human. Everything about her was so perfectly little. My hands would dwarf her already small breasts, but the only thing I could fucking think about in that moment was how badly I wanted the little black posts that were pierced through her nipples in my mouth. How easy it would be to make her squirm and writhe beneath me if I started there. I’d seen the little revolver that dangled from her belly button before, but that didn’t stop me from staring at it for a few seconds, like it was somehow holding the key to my salvation, too. Her skin nearly glowed in the darkness, even the parts that were covered in tattoos. Everything about her was perfectly unique. Perfectly her.

Then I realized that I hadn’t fucking done anything but stare at her in silence like a maniac. I had to wonder if she wanted me to take control of what happened next, or if she needed to work up the nerve to do it herself. I didn’t give myself much time to consider it from there. I’d wanted this since the moment I laid eyes on her. I was up on my knees and towering over her a second later.

I could hear thunder in the distance the moment that her face was in my hands; because apparently, I needed more proof that she wasn’t human at all while the weather crashed around right alongside her emotions. Her hands shook when they landed on my hips that time while she tried to raise up a little taller to get me to kiss her. It took everything in my power to prevent myself from smiling about it.

She wasn’t fragile, by any sense of the word, but I was prepared to calculate every move I made ahead of time—she absolutely was a flight risk when something spooked her. And any kind of contact, physical or emotional, seemed to spook her. So, I kissed her like there was a chance my lips would shatter her entire body if they touched her too hard. Until she’d squirmed all the way against the front of my body, and she worked up the nerve to dig her fingernails into my hips. I pulled back for just a second to make sure there wasn’t anything on her face that said I needed to stop, and the tiny whimper that came from her had my dick scraping its way up the front of my jeans to try to get to her faster.

After that shit, I kissed her like I might find every secret she’d ever kept if I could just get deep enough, like I could draw out every piece of herself that she’d ever kept hidden from the world. I wanted those pieces of her all to myself. I’d free them from her, so she didn’t have to carry their weight anymore, just to lock them back away safely inside me. They’d still be hidden from the rest of the world that way, just like she wanted, but they’d never hold any power over her again if I was the thing keeping them caged.

Her hands weren’t shaking anymore when she started trying to tug my shirt off, and there wasn’t a damn thing unsteady about her when her fingernails raked their way down the muscle of my chest. Her eyes followed her hands all the way down the front of my body. She hesitated at my belt buckle to look back at my face though. If she was afraid of what was under there, I couldn’t very well lie to her and tell her it’d be easy for someone her size to take me just to make her feel better about it. I smiled instead and kissed her again.

“Give me a minute, angel,” I sighed with so much annoyance about having to interrupt this moment. “I’ve got condoms in the truck.”

She shook her head and tried pulling my head back down to hers. An adorably frustrated little groan came out of her when I didn’t let that happen.

“Gonna need more than a head shake to tell me how to interpret that, Memphis.”

“Don’t use one.”

“That’s pretty fucking clear,” I chuckled. I wrapped an arm around the small of her back and started to push back against her to lower her down beneath me. I could get my jeans off myself. There wasn’t any need to make it worse and scare her by letting her do it. I was quick about getting them off just so I could get right back on top of her to take my time there.

I tried to hold most of my weight off her, because fuck . She was so small now that she was under me. I had several layers of blankets in this truck bed to try to add padding for us to lie here, but I didn’t want to crush her by adding me on top of it. She sighed against my mouth when my hand traveled from her cheek, down the front of her throat, and stopped with my palm covering her breast. I raised up just enough to be able to see her lip tremble when I moved my hand down a little further to run the pad of my thumb back and forth over the post through her nipple. She wiggled beneath me until I lifted myself off of her just long enough for her to squirm out of her jeans. I about choked on the perfectly clean and abundant oxygen available to me at the sight of her entire body bared for me. I watched her squeeze her thighs together and then I noticed her hands left my body to cover her breasts.

“What?” she asked.

I’d fucking stared at her until she was uncomfortable again.

Fuck it all.

I got back up on my knees to take both her hands in mine and I moved them over her head to pin her under me. I pushed my knee in between her thighs to force her to stop trying to squeeze them together.

I laid my forehead down against hers. “I’ve never seen anything quite as perfect as you. You’re fucking flawless. Especially beneath me this way, angel. Don’t ever try to hide. Not from me.”

Memphis squeezed my hands, and for a terrifying second or two, I thought she was about to start crying. Then she whimpered my name and I nearly turned feral anyway. I released her hands so I could kiss down her neck, until my tongue came to life with the slight metallic taste from the post through her nipple. Her fingers gripped my hair in an instant when I sucked the whole thing into my mouth and pulled up on it. Her body jolted at the loud crack of thunder all around us, and I had to convince myself not to laugh again. It took me a few minutes to get over how much I fucking enjoyed those piercings before I dragged my mouth from her sternum all the way to her belly button. I froze when her hands locked into my hair that time.

“Please,” she whispered so shakily that I wouldn’t have been able to move my body if God himself had willed it to happen. “Not that.”

That was definitely a first for me.

I couldn’t recall a single time in my life when any woman had turned that down.

But nothing about her even came close to falling under the umbrella of normal , and I wasn’t about to push it. She started to pull my hair to try to drag me back up her body. I had absolutely no problem with her being in control, so I sure as fuck let her pull my hair until she had me where she could kiss me again. I smiled against her mouth when she raised her hips up into me. I forced a hand down between our bodies to grab my dick and run the full length of it across her clit. Her kiss halted instantly, and she sucked in a sharp breath at the friction between her legs. I did it again, and I was rewarded with the tiniest moan from the tiniest mouth. I shifted down a little further to make sure the head of my dick was soaked from her own arousal before I did it a third time, and her back arched until I could feel the posts through her nipples pressed up into me. I had to stop for a second to remind myself to breathe that time, so I wasn’t coming on her stomach before I’d ever even had the chance to be inside her. I shifted my weight again so I wouldn’t crush her while I lined myself up with her, but I stopped when her hands shot straight to my back to dig in with her nails.

“Wait, wait, wait. Please, Utah.”

There was so much panic in her voice. Nothing about it was stable. And it wasn’t the good kind of shaky, where it was overrun with excitement. It was the kind of shaky where she couldn’t keep the fear out of it if her life had depended on it. My heart shattered into more pieces than I’d ever be able to recollect to put it back together again when I saw that her eyes were squeezed shut as tight as she could get them. Her bottom lip quivered even while it was trapped squarely between her teeth.

I wasn’t about to make a single fucking move until she told me to at that point, and she didn’t move either. I was probably bleeding from where it felt like her nails had punctured the skin on my back, but I definitely didn’t feel anything at all in that moment.

A fucking eternity passed before she finally opened her eyes again. And the second that she did, lightning lit up everything around us to let me see all too clearly every ounce of fear that she usually hid so well.

There I was, caught in the green eyes of a hurricane.

“You stopped,” Memphis whispered.

“You said wait ? Several times. That usually means?—”

I hadn’t learned much that was truly worthwhile in my teen years, but when a girl told a boy to stop, he was supposed to fucking stop.

That much stuck with me.

Her entire body was shaking now, and she was doing everything in her power to look anywhere but at my face. Someone somewhere flipped the light switch to turn my brain back on a couple seconds after that.

“Memphis, have you ever?—”

“I’m not a virgin,” she whispered and closed her eyes before she let out a long breath.

“What is it?” I asked. “Are you about to tell me that you actually prefer women? Because I feel like that’s maybe something that you could’ve mentioned before this moment.”

“It’s not my first time,” she repeated, but she swallowed so hard that I could see her throat tighten. “It’s just—it was never with—I didn’t—I’ve never even had a boyfriend, Utah.”

I got the fuck off that girl as quickly as I could move.

“Memphis.”

She sat up and pulled her knees up to her chest to wrap her arms around her legs like she was trying to hide again. “Yeah?”

“This isn’t your first time, but is this the first time that you’ve wanted it?”

She looked down at her knees. “Are you going to leave if I tell you the truth?”

I forced all the air out of my body in one giant exhale to add to the tornado of emotion that might as well have engulfed the whole fucking truck just then.

“Alright,” I said and moved until I was sitting behind her, leaning back against the cab of the truck. I put both arms around her to pull her back into me. I let go of her just long enough to pull one of the blankets up over both of us and went right back to squeezing the absolute shit out of her.

“I wasn’t saying no,” she whispered. She sounded so fucking defeated that it still managed to break my heart into even smaller pieces.

“ Wait and no sound pretty synonymous on this side of it, angel. I don’t want to be a decision that you can’t take back tomorrow just because it feels like a good idea right now. I’m not going anywhere, so we’ll just take this at your pace.”

“What’d you have in mind, then?” she asked.

“That’s not how this works. Not yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“ You tell me what you want. And I mean in the clearest words that are available to you, Memphis. If you need to tie me up so I can’t touch you and just let you use my body until you’re ready, I won’t even lift a finger to stop you. Or if you want me to tie you down and hurt you, take your choice right out of it, that’s what I’ll do. If you need me to spend a night worshipping every inch of you without ever being inside you, then you’ll spend an entire night with just my tongue until you ask for more. If you want me to be gentle and slow, tell me. If you want me to fuck you like a madman who can’t get enough, I’m right here.”

She was quiet for a long time after those words.

“What if I don’t know?” she finally asked.

“Then tell me where you want to start, and we’ll do it all until you figure out which you prefer.”

“Utah, I’m so sorr?—”

I brought a hand up to cover her mouth. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence, angel. Sorry is for when you’ve done something wrong. You’ve been wronged. Big difference. Big fucking difference.”

I felt her hand come up to the one I had over her mouth, and she pulled it off her face to lace her fingers through mine while she stared up at me over her shoulder.

“What if we just start with these?” she asked and kissed my hand. “I still want this. I still want you . I’m just—I don’t know.”

She closed her eyes before she could say that she was afraid. I slid my hand out of hers to grab her by the jaw, forcing her to look at me another time before I kissed her.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Memphis. I would never hurt you. Unless you ask me to,” I reminded her. “And even then, it won’t really feel like pain.”

She smiled and kissed me that time. When her mouth stopped moving, she kept her eyes locked on mine while she took hold of the hand on her face and slid it down under the blanket, between her breasts and across that little revolver. She paused when she had my hand directly in the center of her hips.

“Go ahead, angel,” I whispered and kissed the side of her head. I didn’t move a fucking muscle on my own. I was entirely prepared to wait there until I was dead if that was what she needed. “Show me what you want from me.”

She slid my hand the rest of the way down between her legs and my head dropped back against the truck with a thud at the feel of skin that fucking soft and that fucking wet.

“Fuuuck,” I groaned out before I could even think to stop myself. She paused again, so I didn’t dare move my hand on my own, either.

“What?” she asked quickly. “What’s wrong?”

I laughed and wrapped my other arm across her breasts to squeeze her against me. “The things I’m going to do to this perfect little pussy the very fucking moment that you give me the green light, Memphis.”