Mina resuscitated me. She helped me remember who I am. She reminded me the world has enough assholes who are only out for themselves, and I shouldn’t be so quick to add my name to that list.
She’s a damn miracle. An answer to questions I didn’t know needed answered.
I am better with her. I feel safe to be myself with her. Mina won’t take advantage of me. She isn’t with me for personal gain…
I almost laugh out loud at the thought. The only reason we’re together at all is because I’m paying her to pretend to be my girlfriend.
But a pretend girlfriend wouldn’t have invited me in tonight. She wouldn’t have listened to me talk and held me patiently when I couldn’t. Blossom would have told me I was making too big a deal. That I was wallowing. That she couldn’t be around me until I was in a better place.
Mina opened her arms to it all.
That damn article blazes through my mind, the headline lit up in flashing neon. It’s Fake, Folks!
She would have invited me in if she were gathering more info for Fallon fucking Mae…
I banish the thought and pull Mina into my embrace, my heart full for the first time in maybe my whole life. I’m wide open and vulnerable to her. It scares me to death but I’m safe. I know she sees me. I know she cares about me.
I know that she’s with me for me.
Not what she can get out of me.
My jaw drops at the thought and Mina narrows her eyes. “You look like you just thought of something important.”
“I think I did.” I smooth her hair back, cupping her face and getting lost in her eyes. Blue like the clearest parts of the ocean, streaked with the gray of a foggy morning with hints of green grass poking through. The same colors in my favorite of Mom’s paintings hanging in my living room, like she saw into my future and knew Mina would be here.
Waiting.
Mine.
I angle my head, leaning closer, eager to kiss her, to taste her, to erase any distance between us so it’s just her and me and me and her, closer and closer until we’re one. Her presence erases my pain and I need her. In my heart. In my life. She’s already taken up a full time residence in my brain, she might as well claim everything else as well.
“What?” Her lips whisper against mine. Gaze fluttering to my eyes and then back to my mouth. Her hands swooping up my arms, along my neck and into my hair, pulling me close like she’s read my thoughts and agrees.
I brush her lips with a kiss. Her chest heaves. Her fingers clench. So ready for more, but I pull back, smiling down at this woman I wasn’t prepared for. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
The words are hoarse and rough, slow and faltering, refugees stepping into the light of day after being trapped underground.
“I crave you, Mina,” I say, cupping her cheeks and gazing into her beautiful eyes. “I don’t know how to be without you. You’ve brought me back to life.”
“Nathan…” she begins with a smile, but I haven’t gotten it quite right yet and I need her to know what’s in my heart.
“It’s more than that, though.” I brush my thumb across her cheek. “You didn’t just bring me back to life. You’ve shown me what it means to truly live.”
A soft smile plays across Mina’s face. “I’m falling in love with you too, Nathan. I think I have been for a long time.”
My name, from those lips. It’s medicine for my heart. It’s a jolt of need straight to my dick.
My mouth finds hers. My hands travel her body. There is solace here. With her. I stop thinking and start feeling. Pulling her to her feet. Tugging at clothes until she’s bare. Pressing her against a wall, pinning her wrists above her head and freeing my throbbing cock.
I will give her all of me.
The best of me.
The worst of me.
My hopes and dreams and fears and sadness.
I am safe with her and will keep her safe from the world. She will have everything she ever wanted because that’s what I found in her.
Mina’s breasts press against my chest, and I bend to take her into my mouth. Licking. Sucking. Teeth grazing her rose-colored peaks.
She moans my name, her hands in my hair, head tossed back, chest heaving.
“I love you, Mina,” I whisper at her throat, kissing the delicate skin below her ear.
“I love you too,” she whispers back and then I’m past speaking, past thinking. I slide my aching dick into her sweet warmth and lose myself to her.
THIRTY-SIX
Nathan
Someone’s in Mina’s apartment. My eyes blink open and I push up on my elbow, listening to the squeak and bump of the front door quietly being closed. Mina sleeps beside me, one arm thrown over her head, blissfully unaware as a stranger creeps down the hallway, ever closer to where we lay naked and vulnerable. Judging by the whisper of light slipping through the blinds, it’s barely morning, though the jolt of adrenaline sizzling in my veins has me wide awake.
I yank back the covers and slip out of bed, swipe my underwear off the floor and nearly fall over yanking them up, struggling to get them over my thighs, but wrenching them in place anyway. I’m not confronting an intruder with my dick out.
The bedroom door creaks open.
“Mina?”
It’s a soft voice. Not the roughened rasp of a burglar, but the gentle probe of a friend.
“Meens?”
A woman steps through the door. Judging by her silhouette, she’s small. And judging by her use of Mina’s name, she’s been here before.
She flips on the light, sees me crouching in my underwear and unleashes a scream of pure terror.
“Oh my fucking God and everything holy!” shrieks the intruder. “What the fuckity fuck is happening right now?”
Mina bolts upright and looses a scream of her own, hands up and shaking with the force of it leaving her body. There’s a moment of silence as everyone processes. Then relief on Mina’s face followed by, “Jesus! Fallon! What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?”
I’m sorry…Fallon?
Did she say Fallon?
As in Fallon fucking Mae?
That’s not possible. This has to be a different Fallon.
