She leaned forward and let her hands glide up around my back and across my shoulders. She pressed a soft, open mouthed kiss to the center of my chest and it made my entire life zero in on that tiny point of contact.

“Well you can be scared alone or we can be scared together. I prefer the second option but if you need some space to get your head around it and figure out what you want I can make that happen. I want to be with you Rule, but I’m not going to be here with you if it makes you hurt and makes you freak out. We both deserve better than that.”

I wasn’t sure at this point it was about what I deserved or not but I wasn’t stupid enough to let what I had with her get demolished under the weight of doubt I couldn’t control. I finally reached out and pulled her to me in a suffocating hug that pressed all her length against all my bare skin. I had spent plenty of time with her this morning, making her beg, turning myself inside out but that didn’t seem to matter, my cock reacted under the towel letting her know that whatever was going on inside my head had no bearing on how my body felt about her. “I’m just messed up Shaw. I’m sorry that I get this way but the last thing I want is to chase my tail all alone.” I kissed her, letting her feel the things I couldn’t say as they burned through my blood. I wanted her always and the idea of that made my knees weak.

She let me devour her mouth, let me get my hands all tangled up rough in her hair, let me press her up against the closest wall and press an insistent erection against her all without complaint or argument. There was no gentleness, no concern for skill or whether or not I was making it feel good for her, all that existed was a blinding need to get inside her, to make her feel the emotion that was making me go crazy. I needed to syphon off some of the want and need and the only way to do it was to get it out of me and into her. Her head made a dull thunk against the wall and I felt her suck in a tense breath and still none of it gave me pause. The towel hit the floor and my t-shirt offered no resistance as I rushed through getting both of us naked. Somewhere in my head I knew I needed to slow down, needed to get control back that my hands were too hard on her, that my mouth was going to leave marks but I couldn’t pull it in.

She whispered my name, tried to get me to slow down but I didn’t care. I was ready to just move in her, to burry all the fear and uncertainty blindly inside her warm body but this was a girl that knew all my tricks, knew that I was operating from a place where I probably wouldn’t even remember what I was doing in the morning and she wasn’t going to let me turn her into another faceless conquest that I used to find silence. Since I no longer had hair and was so much bigger than her she had to resort to digging her nails into my scalp and pressing her teeth down on my invading tongue to get me to jerk back and give her some breathing room. She struggled to catch her breath and pushed away from the wall by planting her hands in the center of my chest and giving me a hard shove.

I stumbled back a step and shook my head back and forth. “Casper,” I wanted to apologize, wanted to tell her I would never devalue all that she was coming to mean to me on purpose but she didn’t give me a chance. She stood up on her tiptoes and put a small hand over my mouth. Her green eyes were big and there was a mixture of desire and trepidation in them that twisted my heart into a knot. This girl just simply understood me and wasn’t going to blame me for all the crazy that I had built up inside of me.

“Just don’t, Rule.” She moved her hand and kissed me with a million more levels of care than I had just shown her. “You need me to take care of you right now so I’m going to do it but I’ll be damned if you don’t know its me.”

“I know it’s you Shaw.”

“Good because for a minute there I wasn’t sure and I can’t even being to tell you how much that pissed me off. Now shut up and let me help you out of the dark.”

I went to grab for her, to wrap her up and hold her close but she evaded my hands and slithered around so that she was on her knees in front of me. I stopped breathing for a second when her lips landed somewhere below my navel and my abs contracted hard enough that it hurt. We had messed around plenty but this wasn’t and area she had seemed ready to venture into before now. My dick quivered in anticipation as the tip of her tongue traced the outline of the mermaid I had inked down there where the long tail curled right around the base of my cock. I didn’t know how far she was willing to take it so I gingerly placed my hands on the top of her head. Her hair felt like silk against my fingertips and I stop moving just in case anything I did was going to make her stop.

“Shaw.” I wasn’t sure if I was going to ask her to keep going or to stop because I wasn’t sure how much I could take. I felt wound up too tight and too ready to break as it was. “You don’t have to do this.” I meant it when I said it but I also knew there was a good chance I would die if she decided to stop. Her mouth was damp and warm and the apadravya piercing I had through the tip of my dick and the Jacob’s ladder that was spaced out on the underside pulled the sensitive skin taunt when she closed it over the eager flesh. My eyes squeezed shut as I hit the back of her throat and every sensation I had ever experienced up to this point in my life ceased to exist.

I had received head from a bunch of different girls in my lifetime, had enjoyed it pretty much every single time but there was something about having Shaw on her knees before me, having her suck and pull me into her pretty mouth that made this experience better than all the rest. I was breathing hard and my knees were suddenly feeling like they weren’t going to hold me up anymore. My cock throbbed in time to my heartbeat and flesh that was sensitive suddenly felt to tight and ready to split into pieces. I didn’t have the words to encourage her or to tell her what I liked and didn’t like, not that it mattered because just like with everything else we did in the dark she seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. She played with my piercings, her quick little tongue darting in and around metal that heated and cooled as she moved her mouth around it. I sucked in a breath and tried to stave off the impending orgasm but there was no controlling it. I gasped her name in warning, tried to tug at her long hair to let her know that she might want to get out of firing range but she wasn’t having any of it. She finished me off like a champ, placed a kiss on my quivering stomach while I tried to get my mind back in working order and glided to her feet in all her naked glory. She lifted a blond brow and flipped her now tangled and messy hair over her shoulder.

“I’ll always take care of you Rule, in fact I like doing it because it makes me happy and it feels good but I’m not ever going to let you use me to work out your demons like you did with all those girls that came before me so you better learn the difference.”

I didn’t answer her because she was right so instead I picked her up by the waist and tossed her on the bed. I didn’t need to give her time to get ready for me I was pretty sure that working me over better than anyone ever had, had done a good job of turning her on and making her wet and slippery. Her folds were already slick and ready for whatever I had to give. When I moved inside I made sure the top ball of my piercing rubbed against her most sensitive parts. Now that we had sex with nothing between us I knew even if I wasn’t particularly stellar in the sack that having all that jewelry down there could and would create a sensation that got her off regardless, not that I didn’t always make it my goal to make her lose her mind. She hooked her legs up around my hips as I moved in and out of her and let her eyes fall at half-mast. I was braced up above her and her hands were wrapped around my biceps. I was pretty sure I could die a happy man having her look up like that at me, with having her moan and writhe beneath me as pleasure shot through her body and made it clench around mine. I had never really given much thought to monogamy and committing to having sex with only one person over and over again because I had never really seen that as a path I was going to take. With her I knew it to the bottom of my soul that I would be happy just having her, making her fragment and break apart. When she moaned my name low and needy it triggered my own release and I buried my face in the delicate curve of her neck and growled like a feral animal. After we were both wrung out I collapsed on top of her in a boneless heap and felt her wrap her slender arms around me. I kept my face pressed into her neck and gave her a series of butterfly kisses with my eyes closed.

“You make me think everything will be okay.”

She turned her head to give me better access to her neck and rubbed her hands lightly up and down my spine. “All we can do is try, Rule. I’m willing as long as you are and I’m not delusional, I’ve known you a long time and know it isn’t always going to be easy and fun that things like pizza and a quiet night at home have the ability to send you into a tailspin but I’m here as long as you recognize what is happening and agree to try.”

I snickered a little against her damp skin which made her shiver. “If freaking out means I get you to go down on me to get me to stop acting like an idiot I can’t promise to knock it off any time soon.”

She swore and swatted me on my ass. I fell asleep with her wrapped up in my arms and her soft laughter in my ear. The tunnel was long and dark and sometimes no matter how good my intentions were the walls tended to close in on me but if Shaw was willing to be my light at the end then there was no way I wasn’t going to try.

***

We were both quiet the next morning when we got up to go back to her car. We stopped at the corner coffee shop for breakfast and neither one of us seemed overly eager to rehash the events of the night before. After a solid night’s sleep and waking up to her peaceful and innocent face I had my head back on straight and was calling myself all kinds of fool for letting my usual hang-ups pull me in such a dark direction the night before. Pizza and quiet time on the couch was nothing compared to all the heavy shit I now had rattling around in my brain after she made me come clean. I was ashamed that she knew I had been trying to use her body to escape, to take something that was so different with her and on such another level and drag it down to where every other sexual encounter had begun and ended. If Shaw hadn’t called me on my shit and just let me go it would have been the end for I us. I knew it and I was pretty sure she knew it. Allowing me to put her in a box with all the rest was something she wouldn’t stand for and I was eternally grateful.

It had warmed up just a tad from last night so the icy spots on the sidewalks were now mushy puddles of dirty slush. We navigated around them while balancing hot coffee and trying to stay warm. She had parked her car off the street a couple blocks over from the shop in one of the neighborhoods. I was getting ready to ask her if she was alright, if everything was still cool between us but she came to a grinding halt and I almost ran into the back of her. I swore softly as the hot coffee splashed over my hand. “What the hell Shaw?”

She didn’t move and I had to jump back when her coffee slid out of a suddenly lifeless hand and clattered on the snowy ground. She lifted a shaking hand to her mouth and before I could ask again what was wrong a pickup truck that was waiting to make a left hand turn moved and I caught sight of her car.