Chapter 1- Rain Drops
Hot breathing.
The feeling of lips gliding over rain-soaked skin.
I was living in some surreal-edged fantasy I couldn’t quite make heads or tales of. Surely this beautiful, dark-eyed God over me wasn’t really with me, right?
Maybe I was the crazy one...well, I was, but not like some I was sharing space with that night.
God, but I loved everything about the hands running over my sides, and despite the plunging temperatures and the wracking pain my body was in, I was so hot for this other human being that nothing in me could even bother to want to move out from under that heavier weight.
The rain pelted down from the lightning-lit sky overhead like an Orchestrator conducting a symphony, and the moment felt Godly, divined by fate, and ethereal. For a beautiful few minutes, it was just Danny and me under that ravaging downpour.
Those lips slipped from my jaw back over to sweep my hungry mouth, the touch was silken, deep, with a long velvet tongue that invaded that inner sanctum and sang to my soul with how well we danced together under that velvet blackened sky above.
I’ll admit that I’ve kissed a lot of men in my life, but no one has ever made me feel like Danny Coleman made me feel. Not when he wielded that tongue, teeth, and even just the soft flesh of his lips like weapons of mass destruction against me.
I let my eyes shut when the rain began to hammer like nails down into my face, threatening to blind me if I was stupid enough to keep them open, but all shutting them did was make everything else a hundred times more intense.
Suddenly, I could smell the pine around us, the freshly churned earthy quality of mud and grass mingled around us while we writhed like grubs in the dirt. In the downpour, I could suddenly smell Danny too: some wonderfully simple scent of his body wash, his hair, and I could feel every drift of fingertips, that elegant press of weight, and the manner in which his knee slipped up tight against my straining cock in a teasing bid to get us even closer together.
God, he was just unreal.
I kept expecting him to say something about wanting to go in -I mean, any sane creature would have- except Danny wasn’t that kind of guy.
Instead, he finally straightened, chest heaving, and I swear the man looked like a disciple of the Fallen Court of Heaven right then in the wind-lashed nightscape.
His shirt was plastered to his lengthy, muscled frame, the material draping over his ribcage, over the indent down his midline to suction wetly over the hollow of his naval and against his dark, pebbled nipples. His knees were stained with the dark red-brown dirt of the clay-rich soil, thighs streaked with it, and still, Danny made no attempt to leave the situation. In fact, he seemed to revel in it.
He reached back with muddy, streaked fingers to push his dripping dark hair back before turning his face up to the sky, hands falling to settle over my belly in loose fists while straddling me.
It looked like he had checked out entirely, breathing deep and almost shallow, even if the sound was lost to the universe of wind, whipping rain, the rumble of thunder roiling overhead.
I had never been so content.
This must be what an afterlife would be like. I thought it, and meant it. To me, I would have taken a life after death exactly like this; where I was alone save one solitary guide to the Other Side, a creature that was actually worth looking at, speaking to, who was interesting, unique, and unbelievably visually appealing.
The package was unreal, the mind even more extraordinary. Definitely an entity I could spend the Ever After with.
I cupped a hand in a shield over my eyes so I could just look at him like that while running my other hand over one of those strong thighs.
Honestly, I would have stayed out here for hours and hours more. Just to look. Just to be still in the universe with him. Just to be in the presence of something otherworldly.
For that precious minute, that was exactly what it was, and I reached for it and clung to that feeling for dear life.
It might be the only thing that got me through the mire ahead.
“Danny?” My voice was low, almost immediately lost in a snapping crack of lightning, and then a deep, very close peal of thunder.
For a long second, he didn’t answer, just let the rain pelt him, water pooling in the deeper sockets of his eyes before overspilling like overlarge tears down the edges of his temples.
Finally, I got a distracted sounding hum of, “Hmmm?”
It made my heart flutter, and almost pain with the intensity I felt even for that one, deep sound.
“Do you think when we die we remember who we are?” I was asking because, for the first time in my life, I kind of hoped I would, if only so I could recall this exact second in my life for the rest of eternity.
He laughed like he was surprised, and just made a rolling wave with his hand a few inches over my ribs before his head finally pulled up and he opened those waterlogged lashes to look at me again.
In the night, those eyes were pitch black, and the effect gave off something alien and Other that was very present in both look and sheen in his gaze. “You know what I think is interesting about death?” He smiled before he leaned forward and shielded my wincing eyes from the splattering raindrops. “That it won’t matter. Just picture it, Grey.” He reached down and gently smoothed my soaked hair back from where it was clinging to my cheek. “One day, after thousands of days waking up, you just won’t. One day, you’ll shut your eyes, and everything that makes your soul tick in this body will just pull free and release itself back into the aether. It’s like we’re all just renting space, you know what I mean?”
He didn’t look very concerned over that, and as wildly discombobulating as that thought was to me, it only served to make Danny look relieved.
“That’s really dark to think of.” I caught his hand against my cheek and couldn’t help but get a little emotional thinking about it. “What if you’re not ready to forget?”
He shrugged and just smiled at me with that soft curve of lips. “That’s the nice thing about not knowing when it happens, sweetheart. There’s no time by then to rewind, to rethink, to reassess. It just is and it’s the only clock you can’t fight...fuck, it’s the only clock that makes sense.” His dark eyes searched mine. “Death isn’t an answer or a question, it’s just a given, but it makes me think about who we all are right now, right?” He looked at my lips before pulling his lower one under in thought, and tilted his head. “The other day, I was talking to someone, and they said that reality is just a skin we all wear, trying to make sense of the unknowable. That there are things we can never see, understand, or make sense of and the only time that the chaos stops is when your heart stops beating.”
Then he said something that kind of scared me.
Danny laughed softly, and those eyes darkened. “Sometimes, they want me to kill myself and find out, but I’ve always had the same argument.”
I gripped his hand a little tighter, couldn’t pull my eyes from that black stare, and holy shit but the idea of this man departing early in this life for any reason filled me with a sense of inner dread so vast, I have never felt anything like it; not for someone else and not like it hit me then.
Until right then, I hadn’t even thought I was capable of that depth of emotion, sadly enough, but apparently, I had just been waiting to meet Danny. “What, um...what’s the argument?” I had to ask, right?
He grinned and shrugged, eyes creasing so beautifully before he held up one long finger over my face. “We only get the one shot at it as who we are right now. I want to see how this version of Danny does in this reality. I’m not afraid to die, but I also don’t want to be afraid to live either.”
I blinked up at him, heart pounding, belly tight, and then had to rub my eyes while I thought about that, this man, the situation, and then inevitably, my life.
It was a swift glimpse into myself, but also the brain housed under that soaking wet head of dark hair leaning over me, and it was all uncomfortable.
I tried to smile and ran a hand over his taut belly. “You want to go shower?” I swallowed but couldn’t keep the tremor from my voice right then. “I still want to spend the night.”
Danny’s smile softened before he nodded, reached down, and clasped my neck and face both, before brushing soft lips over mine. “Yeah. It’s really cold, right? You have to be hurting too.”
I was. Sincerely and without question my body sucked so bad especially after running, slipping, and sliding, fooling around, and generally trying to push myself to the breaking point.
However, the consideration there made me smile, and I meant that doofy-ass grin to the depths of my soul. “I’m in agony,” I admitted. Fuck, but it all hurt so damn bad I kind of wanted to curl up and cry all about it.
He laughed softly before sweeping my lips with an intensity and burn that made me warm to my toes, curled my limbs, and the giddy delight that hit me was so foreign and alien that the only time I had ever achieved that sensation prior was under the influence of either lithium or poppers.
Zero out of ten: would not recommend either one. The high, to be clear, was great; the after effects would ruin your fucking life.
After that, it was a precarious slip and slide back to our feet, Danny holding my hand while I went arms out to keep my balance in the disaster we had made of that square footage of new mud pit, and I couldn’t help but start to giggle at the ridiculous farce it became to move out of the fucking grass. “Danny, this is so fucking stupid.”
He was also grinning, taking tiny shuffling steps until his feet hit the more rooted grass, and then yanked me over in a groaning, wincing wreck before threading out fingers and starting us back for the side doors to the patio.
My shattered body aside, it was, by far, the best I had ever felt.
