“What color are they?” he repeated.
Flustered, she had to check. “Black.”
“Are they wet yet?”
Touching a shaking finger between her legs, she whispered, “Yes.”
“Let me feel.” The words brushed her skin with heat. “Sit on me and let me feel them.”
The reward for straddling his waist was the pressure of his cock pushing against the fabric, pushing and rubbing on her core each time she rocked over him. Her breasts ached too, so she leaned forward until her nipples pressed his chest, but the friction she could generate herself wasn’t enough. Like every other part of her body, her sensitive points ached for more. She stretched to thrust her breast to his lips at the same time she pushed on his probing cock.
He took her offering, and his tongue twirled and lapped while she melted into him. Between nerve-tingling sucks that drove sensation all the way to toes she didn’t even have, he whispered into her skin. “If I could, I’d rip your panties off and lick until you came in my mouth.” Because he couldn’t, his teeth pulled at her nipple. “I’d watch you this time. I’d watch how big and dark your eyes get.”
Grinding harder against his steel cock, she imagined him inside her, but she didn’t have to settle for fantasy. Tonight everything was in her control. It was a trick to balance on one knee and work her panties off while keeping as much of her skin pressed against him as she could—a good trick, made better by looking only at his body, not her own. The black fabric already smelled like sex from being rubbed between them. She trailed the lace over the hair at his groin and wrapped her panties around his shaft, then slipped the smooth silk up and down between his throbbing cock and her palm until he pumped his hips.
“Ride me now,” he protested when she removed her hand to brush the fabric up his sternum and swirl it around his nipples. “Come on.”
“Fifteen hundred years and you haven’t mastered patience?”
“Nope.” After she moved the fabric under his chin, he inhaled as if seeking her scent. “Will you punish me?” He sounded eager.
She froze, uncertain how to respond.
Sensing her immobility, he also stilled. “You must be angry.” So quietly his chest barely lifted, he continued. “Really angry. About the explosion and—”
“No!” Her denial came out too harshly, so she lowered her voice. But she wouldn’t let him bring the outside world into their cocoon. “I’m not angry. Not anymore.” She’d worked through anger months ago, reached whatever stage this was—probably acceptance.
“It’s safe to let your feelings out with me. Nothing hurts me.”
That was a load of crap. “I think a lot of things hurt you.”
“Not physically,” he said.
“I know that.” Even without fulfillment, the passion of moments ago had shifted into an intimacy deeper than she’d expected.
“Sometimes I’ve come close to nothingness, where all I could do was fight, because nothing else touched me.” Unable to read his eyes, she concentrated on his lips, which drew downward as he searched for words. “But you—you touch inside where I have missing pieces. It’s why I need you. Without you, I’m...” His voice trailed away.
“Empty?” That was a feeling she knew too well.
He nodded.
“Me too.” Right now she could tell him all her corrosive secrets, maybe because he couldn’t see her. “A lot of the time I feel hollow, like I’m missing more than a leg.”
“A shell casing.” His voice was quiet. “Sometimes I pick up dead brass on the range and recognize myself.”
“No.” She pressed a kiss to his chest, then the base of his throat. The salt on his skin tasted like a necessity of life. “You’re not empty.”
“Neither are you.” He paused, as if weighing a decision. “Ray, your leg, your home. I want to give you a chance to get something back, but I need to know you’ll forgive me.”
She pushed back against the flare his list had lit in her stomach and spoke the rational answer she knew she should give. “You didn’t set the bomb.”
“Promise you’ll forgive me when I’m done.”
“I don’t understand.” The last five minutes had veered out of her control, and she had no idea how, or even whether, to return to what they’d been doing. “What are you going to do?”
Instead of answering, he asked a question. “You’re medically discharged, but you’re still a licensed doctor, aren’t you?”
The reminder of the career she’d left hurt her like he’d thumbed down on a bruise.
“You can still practice medicine, right?” This time he was louder. “Your brain’s fine?”
Suddenly chilled, her flesh shrunk from his. “I don’t have a traumatic brain injury.”
“So you’ve been too busy feeling sorry for yourself to work? When did letting other people wait on you become your style?” The sneer in his tone came out of nowhere and whacked her with accusation bordering on condemnation.
“I don’t let anyone wait on me.” As the words popped out, she knew what he would say next and dammit, he was telling the truth.
“You’re telling me your mother didn’t cook your dinners and do your laundry? I thought you were a go-getter who didn’t give up, but one setback and poof, you quit.”
“This isn’t a setback.” Her nails dug into her palms, and she tried to understand how they’d gone from kisses to insults. What had gone wrong? “This is forever. I lost my leg.”
“Whoop-de-do.” His mouth twisted. “You have a great mind and eyes and hands. That’s more than a lot of other vets.”
“You don’t know what it’s like!” With her fist, she dammed a sob from escaping her mouth. “You’re never injured for more than five minutes!”
“You’re right, I don’t know what it’s like to sit on my ass and whine.”
“So I’ll get a job if you shut up! Shut the fuck up!” Like it didn’t belong to her, wasn’t connected to her arm or her brain, when her fist bounced off his shoulder she couldn’t believe what she’d done. Ohmigod, that wasn’t her. She couldn’t possibly have hit him.
“See—your hands work. Why haven’t you been using them to help people?” One corner of his mouth turned up. “Think losing a leg is your ticket?”
“You don’t know what I’ve lost!” This time she knew the instant before she did it, and she listened for the thwack of her open palm on the meat of his arm. It even hurt her hand a little, but she felt a shocking stir of satisfaction, as if she’d snatched back a piece of her own strength, until the tide of self-disgust raged through her. “That was wrong! I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s fine, Theresa. I’m consenting. In fact, I’m pushing you. Let all the poison out. Use me to—what’s the medical term?—lance your wound. I want you to.”
His voice kept her eyes focused on his lips as she covered her mouth with both palms, afraid to free the hands which had become so unpredictable.
“The convoy.” He threw out the two words guaranteed to blow up the emotions she tried so hard to lock away. “Tell me about the convoy.”
It felt like he’d pulled her stomach inside out through her throat. “Why? Why’d I go?” She didn’t recognize the sound that burst from her chest, a sound like crows fighting, but it was the sound of the feelings she was finished hiding from herself, from her group therapy sessions, from the whole damn world. If he wanted her to share, then she would. And she had rage enough to spare. Rage at the army that had tossed her out as easily as a pair of latex gloves, rage at the fucking Afghans and their fucking opium, rage at the whole fucking war, and somehow she smacked his shoulder again and it was louder this time. “Why’d I do it? I knew. I knew it wasn’t safe. I knew it before you told me.” Each repetition called up her fury at everyone who still had their same old lives, and that fury mixed with the sobs that were shaking her because she had nothing but her shitty new one in her fucking pink bedroom and even that wasn’t hers anymore, it had burned along with Ray and her whole fucking life. “You were right and I knew it, but I went anyway. Because I’m stupid.” Arms wrapped around herself, she rolled away from his warmth and sobbed out the full truth. “It’s my own fault I lost my leg. All my fault.”