Rubi pressed our foreheads together, a rumbling groan vibrating from his strong chest. “I can’t breathe around you, but when we’re apart, I drown, Riv. Cos I’m fucking empty inside without you.”
I wanted to tell him I knew how that felt. That the years I’d been gone from the club had hurt me more than anything, even losing my parents, the pillars of our entire lives, to such a horror show of tragedy. But he’d lost people too.
Lark.
Both his parents.
My ma, who’d raised him better than his ever tried. And he hadn’t run away. He’d stayed and propped up his best friends—his brothers—despite knowing, like I did, that he could lose them all too.
A shiver passed through me, cold and vicious. Like the world would be without him in it.
“Hey.” Rubi released my jaw and brushed my hair out of my face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pile my shit onto you.”
I jerked back. “What? Fuck. No. You can pile anything onto me. I just get lost in it sometimes and it reminds me what a terrible human I am.”
Rubi caught me before I could wheel away, his grasp harder this time, his hand a vice around my wrist as he yanked me back to him. “You ain’t a terrible anything. You love people too much. That’s all.”
I tried to twist out of his hold, but Rubi was strong. Rooted in place. He held me tight, tugging me back into his arms, fitting us back together as if we’d been this way our whole damn lives.
He rubbed his cheek on mine, like a lion scenting his mate, and lord, if I didn’t love it when he did primal shit like that. As if it didn’t remind me that, underneath it all, we were just animals fated to love each other.
Heat rose in me. I licked his neck. “You’re too good to me.”
Rubi laughed. “Mate, I’m good for nothing when you do shit to me like that.”
I wanted to lick him again. I wanted to bury my face in him and never come up for air.
Christ, I just wanted kissing him to be easy.
Make it easy then.
I slid my arms around his waist and pressed my mouth to the pirate skull tattoo I’d just skated my tongue over. A brush of my lips. The kiss of my dreams.
The sweet ones where we had all the time in the world. Where the shudder that rocked Rubi’s hulking frame didn’t have a time limit.
It started to rain. The pernicious kind that soaked you to the skin with feather-light drops, salty from the noisy ocean somewhere below. My lips were still at Rubi’s neck. I raised my head. His face was right there, eyes wide, as if he didn’t quite believe I was real. “Do you remember if you kissed me that night?”
Rubi’s cautious half-smile faded. “I want to say I didn’t—because there’s no way I’d ever forget that. But sometimes, even if I can’t remember it, I wish I had. In case I never get to do it again.”
His honesty slayed me. Ripped me open and tunnelled through every bitter wall I’d built around my heart, freeing every pure—and not so pure—emotion I’d ever felt for him.
They all came tumbling out, and the sensation of letting the fuck go returned to me, even if it was just in this moment.
We were already closer than close, my hands on his hips, fingers hooked in his belt loops as he gazed down at me. I stretched up, slowly, giving him time to evade, despite knowing the second my lips touched his that everything about us would change forever.
I kissed him. The rain kept falling, but that was the only constant from the existence we left behind.
We’ve never done this before.
It was my only thought as I sank into the magic we’d been simultaneously nurturing and hiding from our entire adult lives. Rubi’s lips were warm and dry. Stoic. But the tremor in the big hands that seized my shoulders gave him away.
He kissed me back, a soft sound escaping him. A plaintive fucking moan that held me tighter to him than his arms ever could. His eyes fell closed and he drew me closer, the solid planes of his body moulding to mine. His legs, his chest.
His cock.
I’d seen him naked before, more than once. More than just that night. I knew what his dick looked like hanging heavy and limp. Couldn’t remember it hard. Fuck. How was that possible? As the bulge in his jeans expanded, I was pretty sure aliens on Neptune could probably see it.
Hell, I wasn’t even touching it and I felt it everywhere.
The kiss deepened. I parted my lips and gave myself up to the slow slide of his hot tongue. Rubi was good at everything he did, and at this, he was the fucking master. The way he played my mouth—goddamn. My dick couldn’t get any harder. No pill or powder could get me higher, and maybe it didn’t matter if we never fucked again. As long as we did this until the end of time, I didn’t need anything else.
It was only the freezing rain blowing in from the sea that made me stop. The goosebumps on Rubi’s bare arms—the fucker never wore a jacket unless he was riding. I slowed until our lips were still, fingers wrapped around his faded Harley hoodie, twisting, as if that would ease the stampede in my chest. “We should get going.”
Rubi lifted his eyelids enough to look at me. His gaze was hazy. Dreamy. “Did that just happen?”
I pecked his lips and backed up. “You tell me, boo.”
His rumbling laugh chased me as I spun around and kept walking, sticking close to the sea wall on the coastal pavement. The broadening grin I didn’t have to see to know it was splitting his face in half.
Fuck, it felt good to make him smile. Better than the organic zip in my blood. Than the burn of his gentle kiss on my tingling lips. For the first time in as long as I could remember, it felt good to be alive, and the doubt monster rattling his cage could fuck all the way off.
Headlights appeared in the distance. I didn’t pay them much attention, too focused on the warmth behind me. The footsteps hurrying to catch me up.
Rubi called my name. Once.
Twice.
Then louder. “Riv!”
The urgency in his deep voice turned me around. I was a fast walker—I’d put some distance between us while he’d stayed in place.
He was running now, his long legs eating up the ground, his wide eyes fixed on the road. On the approaching vehicle that sounded too close for the specs of light I’d seen on the horizon.
I knew the timbre of a speeding engine as well as I knew my own hog, and it was never a sound that alarmed me. But Rubi’s face, man. I’d seen his features splinter with terror before. Seen him charge down a disaster he couldn’t derail.
Only this time, it wasn’t my dad’s name on his lips, it was mine.
“Riv! The car. Get out of the fucking way.”
I wasn’t in the way. I couldn’t be. Rubi’s kiss had routed my brain. My entire fucking being. But I wasn’t dissociated enough from reality to be goddamn jay-walking.
The engine grew louder.
I ripped my gaze from Rubi and whipped back to face it. A black car with mismatched lights, like my boots. A rough diesel engine that needed some tender loving care to make her purr right.
It was twenty feet away.
Ten.
Five.
It was mounting the pavement, and it wasn’t going to stop.
