Rhapsody (The Teplo Trilogy #2) (15 page)

"Mm," she moaned as he kneaded and massaged, ignoring the way she wriggled below him. "I like waking up this way."

"Do you?" He chuckled, rubbing little circles into her shoulders.

"Mmhmm."

"I like waking you up this way," he admitted after a minute. "You're so soft."

She wriggled her ass against him, laughing. "That makes one of us then."

He stopped massaging. "Is it bothering you?"

"No." She blinked and turned her head to the side, trying to see him. "I like waking up to that, too."

She saw him smirk out of the corner of her eye. "It's your fault, you know."

"How so?" She wriggled until he let her roll over. He smiled down at her as he straddled her hips, causing heat to crackle as his erection landed on her stomach. She was sore in all the right ways, but not sore enough to keep her from wanting him inside her again.

"You were talking in your sleep." He reached for her hands, twining their fingers together. She loved when he did that, and he'd taken to doing it so often lately, as if he had to have physical contact between them.

"What did I say?"

He shifted his position, leaning forward until his smiling face was an inch from hers, his lips lined with hers. She tilted her head back, urging him closer.

"You said that you love me," he breathed, his lips moving feather light across hers.

"I do."

He bumped his nose to hers. "And that you want me."

"Always." She captured his lips with hers for a minute before he pulled back, teasing her.

"Please, Tristan," he continued, his mouth moving across her cheek to her ear. She shuddered as his breath sent strands of hair tickling at her neck. "I need you," he murmured, nipping at her earlobe.

Heat twisted through her as he repeated what she'd said in her sleep.

"Harder."

"Oh," she moaned as his tongue traced the shell of her ear. He slipped one hand from hers and slid it between their bodies, his fingers dancing down her torso.

"More."

His fingers brushed over her pubic bone, his lips wrapped around the shell of her ear. She writhed atop the bed, trying to position his hand where she ached for it.

"So good…."

His fingers slipped lower, brushing through her curls.

"So deep…."

"Oh," she whimpered again as one long finger slipped inside of her. She was wet already, her arousal dripping down her thighs. A sharp hiss sounded at her ear when he felt it, too. He pumped his finger inside of her before adding a second.

"Don't stop," he whispered.

She bucked her hips into his hand. The way he repeated what she'd said made her crazy. God, she was ready to reenact whatever she'd dreamed. She remembered snatches of it, brief glimpses, brief sounds, a sense of being complete, but nothing more.

He nudged her legs apart and settled between them. Her good leg lifted of its own accord, wrapping around his waist even as his fingers continued to pump torturously slow inside of her. Her eyes fell closed on a hum of pleasure as he bent forward and captured a nipple between his lips, flicking his tongue over it before moving to the other to repeat the process.

Her hips arched and retracted beneath him, matching the slow thrust of his fingers inside of her. She didn't know how she could want him so intensely so soon after the way he'd taken her in the living room four short hours before, but she did.

"No," she pleaded, protesting when he removed his fingers from her.

"Shh," he soothed, shifting until his cock probed at her entrance.

She wriggled restlessly, as he leaned forward, placing light kisses across her lips.

"Please, Tristan, don't stop," he breathed into her mouth.

She cried out as he pushed forward, slipping inside of her.

"Please don't ever stop," he groaned, his eyes falling closed.

She kissed him hard, burning for him. He kissed her back as he moved inside of her, loving her sweetly, gently…whispering in her ear as he took his time with her. The words falling from his lips weren't the erotic commands that always set her afire, but loving confessions that made her heart turn flips in her chest and her breath catch in her throat. The gentle way he took was a sharp contrast to what they'd done earlier, but was equally as perfect.

He left her gasping for breath and shaking beneath him until tears burned at her eyes from the intensity of it, and then he sent her slipping over the edge as he whispered in her ear that he loved her, that he needed her, that he belonged to her.

When it was over and they were curled around one another, tucked beneath the blankets as the sun peaked over the horizon, he brushed her hair back from her forehead and kissed her tenderly. She smiled up at him before nuzzling into the crook of his neck and sighing in contentment.

"I never thought I would feel this way," he said, his voice quiet.

"What way?"

"Happy."

"Me either," she confessed. "It's weird, isn't it?"

"Hmm?"

"That the situation can be so…so…fucked up," she finally said, unable to find another word to describe what had brought them together, "and you can still feel so good. It shouldn't be possible to be this happy with everything else going on right now, but I am happy. Crazy happy."

"Yeah," he agreed, playing with a strand of her hair. "I probably shouldn't be surprised though."

"Why not?"

"Because we haven't done anything the normal way, beautiful. I fingered you on the dance floor, made you hate me, forced you to let me move in with you, drove you crazy, made you cry–"

"Protected me, made me laugh, fell in love with me," she broke in, not liking that so much of his list was negative. He'd done so much more for her than he realized. Yes, he'd driven her crazy and made her want to strangle him, but he'd also made her feel cherished, like she mattered to him more than anything else.

"My point is that, despite all the bullshit, it still worked for us. You still fell in love with me," he said with a quiet chuckle. "Maybe I'm not as bad at this boyfriend thing as I thought."

"You aren't," she responded, snuggling closer. "Even when you make me crazy, you make me feel like I matter. You make me feel cherished. No one has ever made me feel that way," she confessed. "Not ever. So I wouldn't change anything about what we've done. Besides, no one ever said falling in love was supposed to be easy."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," she said. "I don't think most people realize how much work goes into a relationship, but dance gets it right. Everyone thinks ballet is beautiful because it's so honest. The best pieces are full of tragedy, adversity, and sorrow. They're reality set to music."

"Hmm," he murmured. "Maybe."

"I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect relationship. They all take work. They're all hard in their own ways. But sometimes, the things that are most worth it are the things we struggle with the most. We value love above all else because it isn't easy to find or to hold on to. It takes work and sacrifice, patience and trust. Don't you think?"

"I don't know. I've never thought about it like that," he said.

"Oh." She paused. "I guess I've thought about it so much because I spent so much time portraying it on stage. You know the funny thing though? In all that time, I never experienced it for myself. I was too busy dancing to bother with relationships, and my mom left me and my dad when I was a baby. Until he remarried, ballet was the only example I had."

"Why'd she leave?" Tristan asked.

"I don't know. I guess married life wasn't what she expected. She didn't like my dad's job, and she didn't really want a kid. I think when she got pregnant with me, she expected him to quit his job to be a stay at home dad while she worked, but he didn't. So, she packed all of her stuff, dropped me off with a neighbor, and left while he was on duty." Lillian bit her lip, thinking about how much her father had done to raise her on his own. She didn't know her mother, and had come to terms with it a long time ago, but she sometimes wondered how someone could walk away from a baby and a guy as awesome as her dad without looking back. She had no desire to meet the woman to ask, though.

Tristan was quiet a minute. "My parents were crazy in love," he said then, his voice soft. "My dad was in the military when he met my mom, and being apart was hard on both of them. When they were together, they were really happy. Always kissing, always touching. Watching them together was pretty amazing. When I was a kid, I knew I wanted what they had when I grew up. I wanted a relationship as strong as theirs, and a family."

"And then you lost them," she whispered, pressing her face into his neck.

"Yeah," he sighed. "And then I lost them."

And he'd stopped believing he deserved to be happy or to find what his parents had. That broke her heart for him. She couldn't imagine giving up on love or the thought of a future at the age of thirteen. That kind of grief…even after everything she'd experienced, she couldn't imagine losing what he'd lost. His parents, his innocence, joy, and hope. In the blink of an eye and a hail of bullets, all of it had been torn away from him.

"I think the fact that they were so happy made losing them even harder," he said after a moment. "They were always so fucking happy, and then they were just…gone. It was brutal. Everyone kept telling me that God has a plan for everyone, but I couldn't understand why God punished them for being happy. I was the one who did something wrong, so why did he take them instead?"

"Oh, Tristan." Her heart clenched in her chest.

"I know that's not what really happened, but at the time it didn't make any sense to me. They'd driven over to my uncle's house to return some stuff I'd borrowed, and they decided to grab lunch with him. They were half a block from the damn restaurant when they had to turn around to pick me up. I don't know if they even saw the guy pull up beside them, if they saw the gun or knew what was about to happen to them. They didn't–" He cleared his throat sharply. "They didn't even know why. They were shot to death for no fucking reason. Eventually, I decided that taking them instead of me was my punishment, not theirs. I fucked up, so I had to pay for it."

Lillian placed her hands on either side of his jaw, forcing him to meet her watery gaze. "You told me that what Marc did to me wasn't my fault," she said fiercely, her throat aching at the haunted look in his eyes. "You told me that he bore the blame. That he's the one who put that needle in his vein knowing he was responsible for my safety, and that I didn't deserve what happened to me."

"You didn't," he answered, those two words full of force.

"Then how can you think what happened to them was your fault, Tristan? You were a teenager, and you kept a secret you didn't think would hurt anyone. You didn't know your uncle owed someone money. You didn't know he'd be with your parents that day. You didn't know a drug dealer would go after him. You didn't know how bad things were. You were a kid and you made a stupid mistake. That's all. You didn't give the drugs to your uncle or keep giving them to him when he couldn't pay. You didn't pull the trigger. You didn't murder your parents. And you didn't survive so you could be punished over and over and over."

He stared at her, not speaking.

She took a deep breath and let it out. "Bad things happen, Tristan. All year, I've wondered why me. What did I ever do to deserve what Marc did to me? And then everyone blamed me, and I thought maybe they were right. Maybe I'd caused the entire thing by not appreciating what I had more. I didn't care about all the stuff that goes along with being a ballerina. I wanted to dance. That's it. So maybe I wasn't grateful enough or deserving enough." She placed her hand over his lips as his eyes narrowed and he started to protest. "I don't believe that now. But I did. I thought that I had to have done something terrible to make so many people hate me, and that's why it happened. I thought Marc was the universe's way of giving me what I deserved. But that's not true, Tristan. Bad things happen. Bad
people
happen. There is no reason. There is no answer to why it had to be my leg he broke, or why your parents were murdered. We weren't being punished for something we did. It just
happened
and nothing is going to change that. It sucks and it always will, but blaming yourself doesn't change that, baby.
It wasn't your fault
."

He stared at her for a protracted moment before his lips curved against her fingertips. "I love you," he said into her hand.

"And I love you. But I mean it, Tristan. It. Wasn't. Your. Fault."

He nodded and took a deep breath, repositioning her in his arms. "I'm trying to believe that, beautiful, I am. Sometimes though, it's so fucking hard to accept it."

"Yeah, it is." She knew exactly how he felt. Sometimes you wondered. Sometimes, when there wasn't a reason, when there wasn't an answer, you couldn't help but grasp at straws and piece together answers from the tiny pool of unconnected facts you had. For him, that meant blaming himself. For her, it meant wondering if maybe all those taunts she'd endured over the years, all of those whispers behind her back, had been right. In both cases though, they were wrong. What happened wasn't his fault. It wasn't hers. Sometimes life just fucking sucked.