24. “If love be rough with you, be rough with love”

24

"If love be rough with you, be rough with love"

Now

I'm hiding in the basement of our house. The builders have left for the day, and while I could feasibly go back to Romeo's and lock myself in the guest room until Selby gets home, this feels safer. Better. I'm farther away from him here, and space is good. I need as much space from him as I can possibly get. I can't be around him, that's for damn fucking sure.

I spent all day at the lake by myself yesterday, came home as late as I could get away with without looking rude, and found myself the honored guest at a meal that was so drenched in sexual tension it was a battle to swallow my food. I just chewed and chewed. Kept chewing and trying to wash my food down with wine while simultaneously trying not to look directly at Romeo.

And every time I slipped up, every damn time, his eyes were on me. A searing blue gaze that stripped me naked.

No .

No, I can't have a repeat of that, and I sure as hell can't have a repeat of what happened the other night. Kissing a married man and forcing your cock in his mouth is unacceptable. It's completely unacceptable. I have to keep it together and ensure it doesn't happen again.

I mean, yeah, if Romeo is down for a dicking that does hold more than a little appeal to me. Not going to lie about that. But Lexi's words ring in my ears, playing on repeat, " Men don't leave their wives for their mistresses ."

She's right. They don't. It's a well-known fact. I don't even need to Google it. Everyone knows that.

What absolutely no one knows is what the fuck is up with Romeo. Why's he been looking at me like that? And why didn't he stop me when I put my tongue in his mouth? Why did he kiss me back, and why did he kiss me like that? Like I was air and he was suffocating. He's married. His wife could have walked in on us. It was fucking insane. The stupidity of it makes me break into a cold sweat again.

And what the fuck was all that about the honeymoon?

This whole thing is doing my head in. I can't think of anything else, but the problem is that every time I think of something that happened, I remember something new. Something that makes more sense, or no sense, or less sense than it did seconds before. It's like the truth has become this fluid, feckless thing I can't quite get a grip on.

I laugh out loud, a soft, pitiful chuckle, and say, "Maybe you're right. Maybe I do have a funny way of remembering things."

I'm resigned, disappointed, but not surprised I've taken up talking to Romeo when he's not here on top of everything else. Seems like a pretty accurate reflection of where my mental state is at right now.

My mind has devolved into a cesspit of obsession, overthinking, and overanalyzing every tiny interaction between Romeo and me. Long-forgotten memories have resurfaced and mingled with new ones. The past and the present are no longer two separate things. The more I've thought about Romeo, the more the truth has marred and blurred, changing until I'm not sure what really happened and what I imagined.

At this point, only one thing remains certain: if I let myself get tangled up with Romeo again, I won't recover. If he's simply decided he misses dick, I'm the wrong guy for the job. I don't mean that lightly, and I'm not trying to be dramatic about it. I'm stating a fact. I cannot be the one to help him with that.

I didn't just dread his wedding. I feared it. I feared that day more than I've ever feared anything. In the months leading up to it, I lived the type of terror that made my hands and feet feel cold and my legs heavy. I was sure it would be the worst thing that would ever happen to me. The lowest point of my life.

I was wrong though. It was far from the worst day of my life. I didn't know it at the time. I thought there was no way anything could ever get worse or that I could possibly feel deeper despair.

I thought that once a heart broke, it was broken. Done.

I now know that's not the case. For me, at least, my heart didn't break once. That would've been bad, but it would have been okay. It would have been survivable. Instead, it broke over and over, every day, every month, every year. Scar tissue ripped and my heart cracked and broke down the middle. Turns out, the pain I thought would kill me in that motel room after Romeo's wedding was only a taste. A morsel. A little tidbit of what was to come.

Years of tears.

Devastation with no earthly limits.

So, no. No, I don't have it in me to fuck around and find out what it's like to have Romeo in my arms and lose him all over again.

I don't need to.

I know I won't survive it.

No .

What I need to do is keep my shit together and get out of here as soon as possible.

Ian, the site manager, has sworn black and blue he'll have the family bathroom in a semi-livable state by the end of the day tomorrow. Either way, I'm moving out of Romeo's house with or without running water.

It's obviously the sensible thing to do. The right thing.

And the next right thing will be for me to call Lexi and ask her to come and get me. That's what I should do. Yes. I should call her. I should call her right now before I lose my nerve. I should just tell her what's happened and ask her to come and get me.

The doorbell rings. The unexpected, piercing sound sends a jolt through me.

I groan loudly and drag myself up the stairs. It must be fucking Ian. He probably forgot something. Why can't he just fucking wait until he gets back tomorrow? That's what I want to know. What's so fucking important that you have to disturb the peace of a man who hasn't known a moment's peace in years and now, through every fault of his own, knows even less? For fuck's sake, Ian. What's the matter with you?

I plaster a broad, lippy smile on my face and swing the door open.

It's not Ian .

It's Romeo.

My entire spine contracts, forcing me to draw such a sharp breath that there's an audible hiss as air fills my lungs.

Romeo is standing on the threshold. He's wearing dark jeans and a faded gray T-shirt that clings to his chest. He has both hands in his pockets, shoulders raised slightly as though he's bracing against bad weather. He isn't. The weather is fine. The only thing bad here is the thing between us. He dips his head down and then looks up at me through a forest of lashes.

The air crackles.

My hand is on the door, holding it wide open, and I don't appear to be moving. I read his face for a sign, a clue, anything that will tell me what the fuck's going on.

He nods, a slow up-and-down motion that makes it look like he not only understands the question but knows the answer as well.

Something about him is different. Or the same. There's an eerie familiarity to this encounter that makes my dick swell. He looks at me openly, mouth slightly ajar, as he grazes my lips and throat with a heated gaze. My nipples tighten, pebbling and hardening as beach glass scrapes lightly over them and moves even lower.

He takes a hand out of his pocket—his right hand, I know that without thinking about it because it's the hand without a ring—and unfurls it in my direction. His fingers are long and the movement is graceful.

There's a sachet of lube clenched between two of them.

"Jesus!" I exclaim, quickly swinging the door shut in an attempt to close it with him on the other side.

I'm confused and enraged. What the fuck is he doing? He's married. Legally wed to someone else. He must be crazy. We can't do this. He steps forward, quick as a cat and twice as determined, shouldering the door open and staring me down. My resolve flounders. It's a permeable, porous thing with something hard rubbing against it. It wears down. Gives way. I'm suddenly weak and defeated. Afraid and angry about how out of control he makes me. My heart is pounding. I don't have any words. Not my own words anyway. All I can find are the words I read night after night, heartbroken and sleepless, in those awful first months after I moved to New York. Words from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet .

"Romeo!" I warn with enough meaning to make my voice shake, " ‘Tempt not a desperate man .'"

He smiles then, like the night, the day, and everything in between. I feel it right between my eyes and between my legs. It's a quick smile, just a flicker. There and then gone, and when it's gone, it's replaced by a lust so profound there's only one other place I've ever seen it. And that was in the mirror. He doesn't skip a beat. He knows the text too. Unlike me, he always did. When he speaks, his voice isn't his voice. It's a low, thunderous rumble. Loud and determined, and not at all sorry about it.

He lowers his chin, one hand still held out to me, the other now tugging his belt open, and says, "‘ Give me my sin again .'"

The words cut into me, slicing this way and that and leaving me in tiny, bloody pieces. The heat from his body radiates out and curls around me, burning until I'm an inferno. A furnace of want and desire. A man on his feet, held up by nothing but longing.

I reach for Romeo through a thick fog, ignoring the small voice that shrieks at me not to. I watch as my hand wraps around his throat, squeezes hard, and then drags him roughly inside.

The front door slams shut, and I think I might have been the one who slammed it.

Blood rushes and my temperature spikes. Arousal starts leaking out of my pores. My mind moves slowly. Everything that isn't Romeo's skin and the palm of my hand is a distant memory now.

His mouth is open, his expression as serene as I've ever seen it. He looks more like a man experiencing the rapture than one in a chokehold. When I get closer, he strains against my hand, snapping at my jaw and grinding his hips against mine. Swords cross, but this time, we're not playing with sticks and shoelaces. This time, it's blood, sinew, and muscle.

It's that feeling, his cock against mine, that breaks me. The last murmurs of common sense, restraint, and moral reasoning are stripped away. I'm undone. An animal. I take the lube he's offering me and hold it in my teeth as I tear his jeans open. I spin him around, hard, so his hands land on the wall with a loud slap and pull his jeans down just enough to expose the curved shelf of his ass. I lift his T-shirt and yank it up over his head, messing his hair up just how I like it.

Fuck.

Oh fuck.

He's perfection. More perfect than perfect. His ass is so smooth and soft and round it looks like it was carved from marble. I grab it, this cheek, that cheek, both of them, squeezing them senselessly until they bear the angry tracks of my touch.

I'm gasping, snarling, groaning. I can't tell which. I only know that I've never heard sounds like the ones I'm making right now coming out of a human.

I undo my fly and take my straining cock out, rutting against Romeo's bare ass as I tear the lube open with my teeth. It spills onto my hand, and without hesitation, I find his opening and shove two fingers into it. He shouts on penetration. A wild, lustful sound that bounces back and forth in the hallway and doesn't die down completely before he releases the next one.

My forearm bulges and I pant as I jam my fingers in and out of him. This is no seduction. It's sure as hell not a soft caress. This is me opening a hole for my own gratification.

As soon as I think he can take me, hell, a little before that if I'm being totally honest, I rub the rest of the lube on my throbbing erection and line myself up.

"This what you want?" I demand, speaking into his neck and biting for good measure.

"No," he says so dreamily it almost sounds sweet. "It's not what I want. It's what I need ."

That fucks me up worse than I already am. I hold his cheeks open and a tiny pink star stretches and distorts as I force my way in. He shouts again. Louder. Worse. Better than before. It ruptures my mind, spinning the past and the present into a wormhole until they collide.

The pressure on my dick is acute. So is the pleasure. I start to thrust before I'm ready, before I have time to think about what I'm doing. The first thrust is true. Deep and hard. A beautiful, beautiful feeling. A perfect feeling. I glide into him and fuck him so deeply he has to go up on his toes to take it. I do it again. And again.

He thrashes in my arms, beating the wall with his fists and reaching back to find any part of me he can grab onto, using it to pull me closer. I thread my fingers through the hair on the back of his head and make a fist. His neck arches back. It's beautiful too. I tilt his head, turning it slightly so I can see as much of his face as possible. His pupils are blown, black, and lazy as they search for me. His mouth is still open, tongue out as an offering to me. I take it, sucking it into my mouth and shuddering from the unmistakable taste of my Romeo.

It sobers me. No, not sobers, exactly. More like wakes me from a stupor. I pull out of him and step back. His knees buckle, and without my cock holding him up, he slumps against the wall.

"No, Jude," he garbles, "don't stop. Don't stop. I'll die if you stop."

I fall to my knees, something I've imagined myself doing for years, a posture I've seen myself adopting over and over in my mind's eye. In my mind's eye, it's always something I do as I beg him to come back to me.

I'm not begging now. I'm prying his cheeks open, holding them in both hands and pulling them apart. His ass isn't pretty or pink anymore. It's red. Angry and gaping. A fucked-out hole, a wide-open mouth, gaping for me. I let myself fall onto him. Into him. It's not slow or seductive. It's not even well thought out. There's no finesse to my actions. I lick into him as though my life depends on it, spearing him with my tongue, grunting as I try to consume him. He's oversensitive and raw from being fucked, and he screams when I do it. It doesn't stop me. If anything, it spurs me on. I don't stop until he's slithered down the wall and onto the floor, and even then, I keep going until I'm holding him up by the hips as he fails helplessly on the floorboards.

"Tiger, you're killing me," he whines over and over. "I'm dying."

When I've finally had my fill, I spit on my dick and eek the last of the lube from the sachet. He looks back as I do it, and I see a flicker of concentration on his features. I know that look. He's pushing back, opening himself, offering himself to me.

Fuck. I love that.

I want to cry from the terrible sweetness of seeing Romeo like that. Doing that for me. I want to sob and hold on to him and never, ever let him go. I want to take him and steal him away and never give him back to Selby, no matter what anyone says. I want all that, but right now, there's one thing I want more. One thing I need .

Right now, I need to expel the biggest load of my life.

I reach around and take Romeo's drooling dick in my hand.

" Yesss ," he wails the second I touch him. "God, yes, Tiger, yes . Kill me like that. Please, please , kill me more."

I stroke his dick hard and fast. I fuck him hard and fast too, aware that if he keeps talking like this, I'm going to blow in under five seconds. As it is, the pleasure is blinding. The pressure surreal. His body is stretched tightly around me, stroking me, tugging me, making me feel good. Every cell in my body starts screaming and my heart pounds, frantically beating the only name it knows.

Romeo

Romeo

Romeo

I come the second I feel Romeo's ass clamp down around my cock. A massive white wave engulfs me. Day swallows me whole and tosses me into a blinding abyss. Everything is good. It's peaceful and lovely and bad things don't exist here. The feeling is sublime. Only one thing is wrong. I'm here and he's there, and even though I'm pretty sure I'm in heaven, I'd gladly go to hell for Romeo, so I open my lungs and roar my way back to the night. Back to dark things. Back to him. I find him on the floor beneath me, eyes screwed shut.

He's writhing in pleasure and saying my name.