Page 42 of Say You'll Stay
The truth of it hangs heavy in the air between us, a palpable force that seems to crackle and hum like a live wire. I can see it in her eyes, the reluctant acknowledgment, the bone-deep recognition of the inescapable bond that tethers her soul to mine.
“I won’t let you go,” I vow, my thumb stroking over the plush swell of her bottom lip. “I can’t. Not when every fiber of my being screams out for you, aches to possess you, to consume you until there’s nothing left but the ecstasy of our union.”
Cara’s breath hitches, her lips parting beneath my touch as if begging to be claimed. I lean in, a hair’s breadth separating our mouths, the anticipation a sweet, excruciating agony. “Let me in, Cara Mia,” I coax, my voice a rough, honeyed growl. “Surrender to me, to us, and I’ll show you pleasures you’ve never even dreamed of.”
For a moment, the world seems to hold its breath, suspended on the knife’s edge of her decision. I can feel the war within her, the push and pull of longing and fear, need and self-preservation. And then, like a dam finally crumbling under the relentless onslaught of the tide, she breaks.
Her mouth crashes against mine, a fierce, desperate claiming that steals the air from my lungs and sets my blood to boiling. I respond with equal fervor, my hands gripping her hips, yanking her flush against me until there’s no space left between us, no room for doubt or hesitation.
We move together in a frantic dance of lips and teeth and tongue, a primal give and take as old as time itself. Clothes are torn away with reckless abandon, buttons scattering like fallen stars across the hardwood floor. Skin meets skin in a blaze of heat and friction, every touch a searing brand, every caress a wordless vow.
I hoist her up, her legs wrapping around my waist as I carry her to the bedroom, our mouths never breaking contact. We tumble onto the bed in a tangle of limbs, the cool silk of the sheets a shocking contrast to the inferno raging between us.
“Say you’re mine,” I command, my hand skimming down the quivering plane of her stomach to delve into the slick, molten heat at her core. “Say it, Cara. Let me hear you.”
She arches into my touch, a broken moan falling from her lips as I stroke her most sensitive flesh with ruthless precision. “I’m yours,” she gasps out, her nails raking down my back hard enough to draw blood. “God help me, June, I’m yours.”
Those words, that sweet, hard-won surrender, unleash something feral and untamed within me. I set about worshiping her body with a single-minded intensity, determined to wring every last drop of pleasure from her until she’s boneless and spent beneath me.
A dark chuckle rumbles in my chest as I trace the delicate line of her jaw. “Don’t you see? Nothing about us has ever been right. But it’s real. Visceral. Inevitable.”
My lips find her neck, worshiping the frantic flutter of her pulse. Cara arches into me, a broken whimper escaping her throat. The sound is my undoing.
I drink in the sight of her—all tousled hair and kiss-swollen lips, a debauched goddess in the making. I stroke and tease her like a maestro playing his instrument. She writhes beneath my ministrations, teetering on the knife’s edge of ecstasy.
“Let go for me, Cara,” I command, my voice strained with need as I hold her tightly against the wall.
Her body trembles in my grasp, but she fights against it, her feral pride evident in every tilt of her chin and clench of her fists.
I know I must earn her surrender, prove myself worthy of possessing her completely.
So I drop to my knees, kissing and caressing her body until she writhes beneath me.
With every moan and gasp, I feel her control slipping away. And when she finally shatters around me, her thighs quake around my ears.
“June!” Cara screams my name loudly.
Only then do I allow myself release—without her touch, or the pleasure of her wet cunt—spilling hotly on my own skin. I know Cara owns me.
“There’s no escape now,” I murmur into her hair, holding her tight as we both catch our breath. “You’ve always been mine, Cara. And you’ll never break free of me.”
As she relaxes in my embrace, I revel in the full weight of my obsession for her. She is everything to me, and I would burn the world down before ever releasing her.
As the aftershocks slowly subside, I roll to the side, gathering her boneless form into the shelter of my arms. She burrows into my chest, her ear pressed to the thundering cadence of my heart, and I feel a fierce swell of possessiveness, of protectiveness, rise up within me.
“Stay with me,” I murmur into the silken cloud of her hair, my fingers tracing idle patterns along the dip of her spine. “Stay, and let me love you the way you deserve to be loved.”
She’s silent for a long moment, and I feel a flicker of unease, of fear that she’ll retreat back behind her walls, that she’ll deny the undeniable pull between us. But then she tilts her head up, her eyes meeting mine, and the tenderness, the raw vulnerability I see there steals the breath from my lungs.
“Okay,” she whispers, her fingers coming up to trace the line of my jaw, the curve of my lip. “I’ll stay. God help me, June, but I’ll stay.”
And with those words, the broken pieces of my world finally slot back into place. She is mine, and I am hers, and nothing - not my family, not her fears, not the demons that haunt us both - will ever tear us apart again.
Because in the end, this is what we were always meant to be. Two shattered souls finding completion, absolution, in the arms of the only person who could ever truly understand the darkness within.
And as I crush her to me, sealing our pact with a kiss that feels like a promise and a prayer, I know that I will burn the world to ash before I ever let her go again.
Cara Mia, mi amor, my salvation and my damnation - she is the beginning and the end of me, the axis upon which my entire universe turns.