Shredded

Chapter 14 Ophelia

Z’s words seem to echo in the room even as they echo inside me, filling up all the empty space I’ve been rattling around in for so long. I look into his eyes and there’s that vulnerability again, the same as I witnessed the other night. I don’t think he lets anyone else close enough to see it.

I should let him go, let him walk out of here right now before this thing turns as ugly as I know it can. But I’m not that strong. Not tonight, when the emptiness is yawning inside me.

I’ve worked so hard not to miss Remi, not to feel the pain of losing him. But it’s there, whether I feel it or not, shredding me from the inside out. So why shouldn’t I say to hell with it? Why shouldn’t I let Z make me feel good, just for one night?

Just for one night.

“Why does this have to be so complicated?” I demand. “I want you. I think you want me. Why can’t we just make each other feel good?”

“Is that it?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Is this just about sex? Just about feeling good?”

I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone, like everything is topsy-turvy, upside down and inside out. This is Z Michaels—the fastest zipper in the West—asking these questions. Z Michaels who’s been with more girls than either of us could probably count if we had a year to do it in.

“I don’t understand,” I tell him. My voice is shaking now. I’m shaking, and I don’t know how to fix it, how to hide it. I don’t know how to fix anything anymore. “I just want … I just want to feel good for once. I just want—”

“Shh, baby. It’s okay. I get it.” Z shifts, turning us until we’re stretched out on the bed. Then he trails soft kisses along my jawline, down my neck. “I’ll make you feel good. I promise.”

He presses a kiss to the top of my head, then one to each of my cheeks. As he does, he mutters something about having sympathy for Hamlet under his breath. I don’t quite catch it, but heat crawls up my cheeks anyway.

I hate my name and all the implications that come with it.

Hamlet’s fragile girlfriend who’s driven insane by design and circumstance.

Who loses herself in the demands and machinations of the men in her life.

Who dies a terrible death because she can’t face the reality of what they’ve done to her—of what they’ve made her become.

When I first read Hamlet in school, I flat out asked my mom if she’d been drunk when she named me. Or if she just hated me. She hadn’t understood, but it turned out she’d never read Hamlet. She’d just liked the sound of Ophelia, and the idea of naming me after one of Shakespeare’s characters.

Go, Mom.

Too bad she hadn’t chosen Katharina from The Taming of the Shrew. My whole life might have turned out differently.

But she didn’t, and here I am with a guy who is guaranteed to mess with my head if I let him. Which I won’t. This is about pleasure, I remind myself. About losing myself for a little while. About feeling something after going so long without feeling anything.

Z continues pressing soft kisses across my cheeks, down my jaw, over my collarbone. At the same time, his hands skate around the waistband of my jeans, his fingers delving beneath denim to caress my abdomen and hips and ass.

They’re simple touches, but they feel good. Really good. Relief shudders through me as I arch beneath him, as I wind my arms around his neck and pull his mouth to mine. His eyes, his beautiful, mysterious eyes, meet mine, and there’s something there. Something I don’t understand. Something that sets warning bells ringing in my head.

“Z, I—”

This time he’s the one who presses his fingers to my mouth. “It’s okay, Ophelia. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

And then he’s kissing me and kissing me and kissing me. Everything I’m thinking, everything I want to say, disappears in a maelstrom of desire as I give myself up to him. To this.

The second our bodies touch, sparks start flying all over the place. I take a deep breath, try to ground myself, but all that does is fill me with the spicy cinnamon and icy snow scent of Z. He smells good, really good, and I want nothing more than to burrow closer. To bury my face in the curve of his neck and just breathe him deep inside me.

He closes his eyes on a half laugh, half groan, then pulls me more tightly against him. I go willingly, even as a part of me wonders at how right this feels. His breath is hot against my cheek, his body hard against my own, and touching him feels good in a way nothing has for a very long time.

“What are you doing to me, Ophelia?” he murmurs after a few moments.

“I don’t know.” The words come out small, shaky.

“Yeah.” He presses a soft kiss into my hair. “Me neither.”

Then his hands are everywhere, everywhere, and I gasp as he flips us again, pulling me on top of him, helping me sit up with my knees on either side of his hips. I lean over, start to flip the light off, but he rests one big, scarred hand over mine.

“I want to see you,” he tells me.

“No.” I turn the light off.

He reaches over and turns it back on. “Okay, Ophelia. You’re going to need to tell me what’s going on, because I don’t understand this whole I-can-only-touch-you-in-the-dark thing. What are you so afraid of me seeing?”

For long seconds I don’t answer. I just stare at him, biting my lip as I figure out how much I want to tell him. Or, more specifically, how much I can get away with not telling him.

“Don’t hurt yourself.” He reaches up, presses on my lip until I let it slip out from between my teeth. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I was in a car accident. About a year ago. I’ve got some scars. They aren’t … they aren’t very pretty.”

“Are you all right?”

I close my eyes against the sudden burn of tears. Of course he would be the one to ask that, this man who acts so hard and callous but who has a secret, vulnerable center that he doesn’t let anyone see. “I’m fine.”

“Good.” Once again he brings my hand to his lips, presses kisses to it. “Do you really think your scars will make you less attractive to me?” He brings my hand to his stomach, runs it up and down those gorgeous washboard abs of his. “Feel those?” he asks, rubbing my hand on a particularly slick patch of flesh. “I have lots of scars. Yours don’t mean anything to me, except that I know you suffered for them and I’m sorry for that. Really sorry.”

God, is this guy for real? I thought this would be easy, thought we could just fuck and be done with it. But nothing about this situation, nothing about Z, is turning out quite as I expected it to. “What do you want from me?”

“What do I want? Just to see you, touch you. Make you feel good. I think the question is what do you want from me?”

I thought I knew what I wanted, but he’s so different from how I imagined him to be when I dumped that coffee on him the other day. And now that I’m here with him, everything seems upside down. I don’t know what I want from him anymore, only that I do want him.

Slowly tentatively, I pull my T-shirt over my head. It’s harder than I thought it would be, more nerve-racking, to sit here waiting for his judgment. The scarring isn’t terrible, but it’s not great, either. I had surgery on a collapsed lung and a ruptured spleen, numerous surgeries on my arm, which was shattered in the wreck, and a number of deep cuts from flying windshield glass. The doctors say it’s a miracle I have only a small scar on my face from the glass, but my torso is another story. All told, there’s something like fifteen scars, small and large.

Z looks me in the eye for long seconds, not even bothering to drop his gaze to my chest and stomach. I know what he’s doing, know he’s trying to show me that it really doesn’t matter to him. But it matters to me and I just want to get it over with.

Finally, finally, he looks. His expression doesn’t change at all, even when he runs his hand over the largest scar—a long, reddish purple one that runs from just under my breastbone to just below my navel. The doctors assure me that it will fade with time and turn the soft, opaque white of all scars. But for now it’s still vivid, still ugly, and I hate looking at it. Hate even more that I resent it when I at least have my life, which is more than Remi got.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he says.

I nod, look away. “Yeah. Me too.” And right now I really am, even if I sometimes forget it.

Z curves a hand around my neck, pulls me down until my lips meet his. And he kisses me like he wants me. Like the scars don’t matter. Like I’m the most desirable woman in the world to him.

We kiss for what feels like hours, until I forget about everything but him and the way it feels to be held and touched and kissed by him.

When I’m panting and trembling and no longer care about anything but being with him, Z finally reaches for my bra, his skilled fingers unhooking it and peeling it off in the space from one breath to the next. I freak out for a second, slap my hands over my breasts. No one’s seen me like this since Remi, and suddenly it scares me. In making love to Z, I’m taking an irrevocable step away from my past, from who I used to be and whom I used to love. It’s harder than I thought it’d be.

Especially since Z seems totally inclined not to rush me or push me into anything. I can feel him pressed up against my sex—all hard and hot and even bigger than I remembered—and I know that he must want to get this show on the road, especially after how I left him last time. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t try to take my hands away. Doesn’t do anything but lie there and watch me out of eyes turned almost black with desire and something else I don’t recognize.

Slowly, so slowly it almost feels like a dream, I lower my hands. Rest them on his chest. And then I wait. Just wait.

“You sure you want to do this?” Z asks finally, his eyes locked on mine as his hands slide up my arms to cup my jaw.

I start to speak, to say yes, but my voice breaks, so I just nod instead, praying it’s enough for him.

It must be, because after long moments of silence, of stillness, his fingers slide into my hair. Then he’s pulling out the pins I use to keep it out of my face while I’m at work, tossing them onto the floor, one by one, until my curls tumble down around my shoulders and onto my back and breasts.

“You’re so beautiful,” he tells me as his hands follow the same path as my hair, stroking, soothing, gentling me in a way I never would have expected from him.

“So are you,” I answer, gliding my hands up and down his long, lean torso. “Your tattoos are the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve wanted to lick them pretty much from the first second I saw them.”

“Really? You could have fooled me. You seemed singularly unimpressed that first night at the coffee bar.”

“What was I supposed to do?” I ask, leaning down to press openmouthed kisses over the ink on his shoulder, down his pec. “Fall on the floor and beg you to do me right there?”

“It would have saved a lot of time,” he answers, arching beneath my attentions. “We could have been doing this days ago.”

“In front of the entire lodge.”

“I would have taken you into the changing room,” he jokes, right before sliding his thumbs over my nipples.

My breath hisses out of me and it’s my turn to arch, to press my breasts into this hands. “Wow. You’re a real class act,” I tease.

He smiles, that wicked, wild grin of his that turns my blood to lava and my willpower to mush. “I do what I can.”

“Oh, yeah?” I move against him, rocking my pelvis against his cock until we’re both covered in a light sheen of sweat. “Because I think you can do more.”

“You might be right.” He wraps an arm around my shoulders and another around my hips and then he’s flipping us yet again. Only this time I’m on the bed and he’s on the floor between my knees. “I should probably start by getting these jeans off you.”

He starts with the button, then peels the zipper down. As he does, he presses soft kisses to my stomach, following the line of the zipper until he runs into the top of my bikini underpants.

“Lift up,” he tells me, and when I do, he tugs my jeans off with one strong pull.

And then he’s sitting back on his heels and looking at me. Just looking at me. At first it doesn’t bother me, but then it goes on so long that I start to worry that something’s wrong. That the scars bother him more than he let on. That he doesn’t like what he sees.

I fumble for a blanket, try to cover myself, but he strips them all from the bed. Drops them on the floor. “What’d you do that for?” I ask, shivering a little. It’s been almost a year since I’ve done this and I’m anxious, nervous, horny … and determined to actually do it this time.

“You keep trying to hide yourself from me. I don’t like it.”

For some reason, it strikes me that he’s talking about a lot more than the blankets. But that doesn’t make sense, not when this is just a one-night thing. And not when Z himself is the master of disguises.

“Well, you should probably stop staring at me, then. It freaks me out.”

He grins, strews hot, wet, openmouthed kisses across my abdomen. “I like staring at you. You should probably get used to it—I’m planning on doing it a lot.”

I freeze at the words, which sound so much more than casual. Almost like he’s planning on doing this again. Which I might be okay with—if I can get through the next hour without humiliating myself, that is.

If Z notices my sudden stillness, he ignores it. Instead, he trails his tongue along the edge of my panties, licking across my mons slowly, slowly, slowly, until I feel like I might actually lose my mind.

My hands leave his chest and tangle in the cool silk of his hair as I hold him to me. I’m on fire, my body arching for his—aching for his—in a way I’ve never before experienced.

My sex life with Remi was good. I mean, he was a considerate lover who from the very first always took care of me as well as himself. And since he was the one who took my virginity, I never had anyone to compare him to. Which was fine. I was happy with him. Totally satisfied.

Being with Z isn’t like that, though. It isn’t about being happy or satisfied or any of those other words. No, being with Z is like being in the center of a lightning storm. Powerful, overwhelming, electric. And dangerous, so dangerous, without the proper precautions.

I want to take those precautions—thought I did take them, to be honest. But nothing could have prepared me for what it feels like to be loved by Z. To have his hands and mouth and body all over mine.

All. Over. Mine.

“Hey.” He pauses, lifts his head. “Where did you go?”

“I’m right here.”

Somehow, impossibly, his eyes grow even darker. “No, you’re not.”

I think he’s going to say something else, or maybe even leave. I clutch at his shoulders in desperation, knowing that if he leaves me—again—there’s no way I’ll be able to try this a third time.

But I’m wrong. This time Z isn’t going anywhere. Instead of getting up or suggesting we stop, he takes the opposite approach. He strips my panties down my legs in one swift move, then buries his face between my thighs.

I come off the bed at the first touch of his tongue against my clit, and seconds later my legs are over his shoulders and I’m in the throes of my first orgasm in eleven long, terrible months. I clutch at him, hold him to me as it goes on and on and on, thanks to Z and his oh-so-talented tongue.

When it’s finally over—and I once again have control over my brain and my limbs—I sit up with some vague idea of returning the favor. But Z just puts one big hand on my stomach and presses me back down.

“What—” I’m so dazed, so sated, that the words still aren’t forming right in my head.

He just laughs, a low, warm, delicious sound that sends new shivers up my back. And then his mouth is right back on me, his tongue tracing the folds of my sex and dipping inside once, twice, then again and again.

“Z!” I call his name as the maelstrom starts to build again, and he reaches up, twines his fingers with mine. He anchors me, gives me something to hold on to as he takes me right up to the edge of my control and then flings me over a second time.

And a third.

By now, my body isn’t even my own anymore. Z has laid claim to it and he’s determined to do what he promised. To make me feel good as he wrings every ounce of sensation—of pleasure—that he can from me.

“Please,” I whimper, my hands clutching at him as his tongue delves inside me for another long, leisurely lick. “No more. Please no more. I need—”

I cut myself off before I finish the sentence, before I scare us both off with an admission of just how much I need him.

But Z won’t let me hide. He strips away my last barriers—and every ounce of self-protection I have left—as surely as he stripped my clothes away. “What, baby?” he asks, his voice all sex-drugged black magic. “What do you need?”

I don’t want to answer him, don’t want to give him this last piece of myself when I’ve already given him so many. But when he brushes tender kisses across my shoulder and down my breast—kisses that tell me he wants so much more from me than just the good time we agreed to—I can’t stop myself from blurting out the truth.

“You,” I whisper, my body arching against his as he slips two fingers inside me and strokes my G-spot. “I need you, Z.”

“You’ve got me, Ophelia.” He murmurs the words against my breast, in between long, languid licks around my nipple. “I’m not going anywhere.”

For the first time, I wish that that was true. That we could stay right here, hiding from the outside world forever. Or at least until our bodies give out from the pleasure.

Except Z hasn’t taken any pleasure yet. He’s made me come three times and is giving every indication that he wants to go for a fourth, but I’m not having it. Not right now, when I am drowning in the need he created and my own determination to make him feel as good as he’s made me feel.

So I clutch at his hair, tugging at him until his face is level with mine and his hips are between my thighs. “Now,” I tell him. “Please. Right now.”

Except he’s pulling away, straightening up. Leaving me. “No!” I gasp, clutching at him. I’m not ready for this to end, not ready for him to leave me again. Not yet. Please, not yet.

“It’s okay,” he tells me, reaching for his jacket and unzipping a secret pocket on the inside. “I need a condom.”

Right. Because that’s who he is. The guy who carries condoms in his snowboarding jacket. And probably his pants and his wallet and his car, too. I need to remember that no matter how crazy he makes me or how much pleasure he gives me, I’m just one of a crowd.

Which is fine. This isn’t about love or forever or any of those other things. It’s about forgetting.

Then he’s back, kissing me, sliding into me. I kiss him back, try to lose myself in the sensations ripping through me. But it’s too late. Z might be a better lover than Remi—and I feel a little guilty even thinking it—but he doesn’t care about me.

Which was fine the other day, when I didn’t care about him, either. But now … now it’s not so easy. Because he isn’t just some guy looking to win a bet anymore. He’s the guy who’s helped me out nearly every time he’s seen me. The guy who somehow wormed his way under my defenses and made me like him way more than I should.

“Ophelia.”

Z’s voice brings me back. I open my eyes, find his face only inches from my own. His eyes are dark with desire, his jaw clenched against the need to come.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m good.”

He bends his head, nips at my bottom lip, hard.

“Hey!” I exclaim, bringing my hand up to soothe the hurt. “What was that for?”

He doesn’t answer, but then he doesn’t have to, because already I can feel the heat spreading through me. The pain grounds me, brings me right back to the precipice of desire I’d been balanced on only minutes ago.

Z’s watching me closely, and he must be satisfied because he starts moving again, thrusting into me oh so slowly. I can feel every inch of him stroking through me, and heat starts building inside me, spiraling my own desire up, up, up.

It scares me a little. How easily he can make me want him—and how much. Part of me wants to disconnect again, to take a step back out of sheer self-preservation. But Z’s having none of it. He chooses that moment to lower his mouth to my neck and bite me again.

“Z!” I gasp his name as fire sizzles along my nerve endings, and I clutch at his shoulders. He laves the little hurt with his tongue, even as he slips a hand between us and strokes my clit.

That’s all it takes. I come apart in his arms once more, and this time he comes with me.