Tommy & Livia

11-11-2011

“Tommy?”

He steps out of the shadows at the edge of the woods, moving toward me. That tall, lean frame. That light, boyish stride. The blond hair catching the moonlight. I’d know him anywhere.

He takes another step, slower this time, almost hesitant, as if he can’t quite believe it. His hand reaches out, fingers brushing along my jaw.

“It’s really you,” he says softly. “You’re not supposed to be here… not in the dark.”

His touch sends a shiver racing across my skin, the tremor running from my jaw down, coiling warm and alive in my belly. Tommy has always lived there—I've known I loved him in my gut, not my heart, not my head. The knots I’d feel when I worried. The heavy stone when I lied. The wild flutter when his eyes were on me, every nerve in my body awake, like a thousand butterflies fighting for a place inside me.

He looks into my eyes and I see it—love, rolling like waves in the blue of his irises. I know it. The whole world can deny it. Even Rob—his best friend—can warn me. But my gut knows the truth. Isn’t that what “gut feeling” is all about. Tommy is mine. All of him. Even the parts he’s kept hidden from me—the wounds, the secrets, the nights, the enemies. I want all of it. I need all of it.

There’s no choice. Every fiber of me aches for his touch. His fingers slide from my jaw to the hollow of my throat, tracing the softest parts of me like a feather. I want to throw my head back, let him kiss me there, whisper that he wants me. I want to stand bare before him, bathed in moonlight, to tell him we can finally be whole. No more secrets. Just us.

A soft sound escapes me, his name already on my lips like it has been a hundred times before. When I was angry, my tongue pressed hard to the roof of my mouth, spitting the “T” sharp as glass. When I came undone on his soft fingers, his name drifted out of me, the “T” trembling like a leaf on a tree—sweet and filthy at once.

“Tommy,” I breathe, his name rolling out heavy with surrender.

But I’m not ready for what happens next.

The man I would give my life for grabs me hard by both arms and shakes me. My insides rattle like a jar of stones.

“Livia, what the hell are you doing here?”

I stare at him, stunned. The waves of love are gone. Only blue remains. Not the calm blue of a summer sea, but the fathomless blue of deep water you can’t see the bottom of—treading, waiting, wondering if you’ll ever touch ground again.

“I don’t want you to throw your whole life away for me. You and I—we live in two different worlds. Yours is light. Mine is dark.”

His eyes aren’t afraid. Tommy is never afraid. He’d stand in a lion’s cage and make the lions back down. But in their depths I see something else—ripples of irritation, maybe even anger, cutting through the deep blue.

I look at him, searching his eyes. Seeing isn’t enough. I close mine and listen to my gut, muscles tightening like a fist. He wants to protect me. He wants to leave me in the light. But the stars only show themselves in the dark. Sometimes, when it’s black enough, you see the whole Milky Way. Nothing makes you feel smaller and more alive than staring at the burning meteors, some falling, some burning up, and some so big they survive the atmosphere and hit the earth.

And I want to risk it.

I’d rather stand in the darkness with him for one night counting stars than spend a lifetime alone in the sun. I’d rather burn up, crash through the crust, bury myself in the earth’s core—if it means I get all of him.

I open my eyes again.

“Look,” I whisper, pointing upward. “What you see in the dark, you can’t see in the light.”

His gaze follows mine.

“No,” he says, because he knows exactly what I’m trying to say. We’ve had this conversation a hundred times—silently, in our heads, and a few times out loud. I made one mistake: trying to drag him back into the daylight, as if one small, sunlit planet could ever be enough for someone who can see the whole galaxy.

“I…” I hesitate now, because something in his voice makes me shiver. That steel. That final edge to the no.

I want to tell him I can do it. That I’m ready. That I’d rather stand with him in the pitch black, tracing constellations, than live a whole life alone in the sun. But I don’t get the chance.

“And your timing,” he adds, “is worse than ever.”

So that’s the irritation I see now. Timing. The frustration in his stance, like a sprinter who’s made a false start. The annoyance in his eyes like a marksman who had his target in sight and then lost it. As it hits me, I can almost taste the adrenaline in the air—and if I couldn’t taste it, I’d feel it in the vice of his hands around my upper arms. He’s holding me harder than he ever has before. Not threatening. Not painful. But so firm it feels as though he could lift me—carry me off like Superman—and set me down anywhere in the world.

What was he doing? What exactly have I interrupted?

“Tommy,” I whisper, careful, my voice soft. I’ve never liked being rescued, let alone snatched up and dropped somewhere in the galaxy. I’ve always learned to save myself, as best I can. I breathe in the scent of damp earth, listen to the wind playing with the branches, and then say calmly, “You’re gripping me…”

His hold eases a little, and I use the moment to bury my face in his neck, where I can inhale him. The scent of danger, of someone who always goes to the edge. Male, fearless. And a hint of woods that betrays how long he’s been out here.

“What are you doing here, Livia?” he asks again.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I shoot back, “because from now on, I want to know this part of you too.”

I’m done being the same girl—the one Rob takes home on the back of his scooter, the one fobbed off with vague phrases. ‘It’s better if you don’t know what this is about’—I don’t ever want to hear that again.

“Livia,” he says, and for a moment I think he’s going to scold me. But instead he leans in and kisses me. His lips on mine as if nothing could ever come between us. Pleasure spears through me as he presses closer. Then his tongue brushes against my lips, breaking them open gently, and I welcome him in.

He broke open my heart long ago, splitting my life into before and after him, like two chambers that can’t survive without each other. Opening my body to him now is nothing in comparison. My mouth is his. My throat—where he’s kissing me now—is his. My hips, where his hands slide softly as though he’s tracing every curve, are his. All of me is his.

Most of my thoughts are his too. Where is he? Is he safe? Is Rob with him? When will I see him again? And right here, right now, everything comes together. This is the moment I stop standing on the sidelines of my fake little life and step into the darkness of the woods with him.

I press my body against his, and even through my jeans I can feel how hard he is as I move closer. My mouth parts, his name slipping out again—this time in a moan—and I open myself to the softness of his lips. Those lips. As fragile as a butterfly’s wing. A piece of him no one knows the way I do. With my full lips I play against his, our noses brushing, stroking, until he pulls back.

His lips linger in my sight now—soft pink cushions framed by a sharp line. Only the brush of his nose remains against mine, grazing lightly, and suddenly I know: there is so much sensation even in the tip of a nose. He strokes me gently there, breath mingling with mine. I can smell our kiss in the space between us—a mix of pheromones, of love, of hunger. I want to devour him. But he wants me to burn for him.

He sweeps strands of my long dark hair from my face, tucking them tenderly behind my ears. Then he takes a step back and looks at me.

“You’re too beautiful for this world,” he says, his mouth tugging into that crooked half-smile only he can give—left corner lifted, devastating.

He’s the most dangerously gorgeous man I’ve ever seen, confidence dripping from him—not arrogance, never arrogance. Just a simple, grounded kind of certainty. The kind that shows in his scuffed work boots and torn jeans.

I love when he looks at me like this. I don’t know what I crave more—his eyes, locked on me with all their unfathomable depth, or the way his touch always surprises me, shifting from softness to sharpness. Like that night he tied me to his bed, his hands stroking, kissing, then striking until my skin bloomed red beneath him. I had never moaned louder in my life.

Now I hold his gaze as he takes another step back.

“You have no idea how…” he begins, but I don’t let him finish.

I take all my power, everything I know about him and everything I feel for him, and pour it into a single gesture. I unzip my jacket. Beneath it, only a plain white shirt. I shrug the jacket from my shoulders, let it fall at my feet, then in one swift motion pull the T-shirt over my head. I stand before him in nothing but a black lace-trimmed bra.

I hear him inhale sharply as the moonlight slides across my bare skin, catching on the curve of my breasts, reflecting against pale flesh. Around us, nothing but the restless whisper of the trees.

I find his eyes, daring him with my own. His pupils, already wide from the dark, dilate further as he takes me in. I lock onto him, let him know that every breath, every movement is his. Slowly, deliberately, I drag my hand over the swell of my breast until his sigh escapes into the night.

I match my breathing to his, then slide one strap down my shoulder, exposing myself inch by inch. I know what he loves—how he greets me as if he knows my body better than I do. And now I give it to him. Not all at once. I want him waiting, wanting, drowning in it.

The trees rustle in a sudden wind as I drop the second strap, baring myself fully to him. I see it—the moment he can’t control himself anymore. But when he moves toward me, I stop him with a sharp, firm “No,” my hand raised like a warning.

I don’t even know why I do it. Maybe because I want to deny him, the way he denied me. Maybe because I want him to ache, to watch, to crave.

I turn my back to him, letting him come close, letting him press himself against me, his hands cupping me from behind. His breath in my ear, hotter than the wind rushing through the leaves. His body is fire against mine, and for long moments we just stand there—exactly as I want—together beneath the burning lights scattered across the endless black canvas above.

“Turn around,” he orders, and I hear in his tone that I shouldn’t test him any further. I obey. There’s something intoxicating about knowing someone so well—sharing so many moments that you can dance without music, speak without words.

A low growl of approval vibrates from his chest as his eyes drop to my breasts, first the left, then the right. With one practiced move my bra slips to the ground, joining the pile of clothes at my feet. He bends down, taking my nipple into his mouth, and I brace myself for the pull, the soft bite. He’ll tease me until they’re so hard and sensitive I won’t be able to stand his touch. Then he’ll travel lower, down my stomach—first across the oblique lines I train in the gym, then to the soft centerline, the tender place that leads straight to my navel. A map drawn across my body, guiding him to the place where all my desire gathers, where it can finally be set free.

A guttural moan slips out. Tommy can read me like no one else. He knows every step of the route, every pause, every detour. He’ll circle my navel, then keep going, lower, until—

A louder moan escapes at the sheer anticipation. But just as I think I’ll shatter from the pressure, the sound rips through the night. A gunshot. Screeching brakes.

Tommy snaps into sharp focus, his eyes locking hard on mine.

“Go,” he says, already crouching to grab my jacket, holding it open for me to slip inside. My fingers fumble as I zip it closed. I can’t look anywhere but at him. But the connection—the invisible current between us—is gone.

He whistles sharply and Rob bursts from the trees. Tommy shoves my shirt and bra into my arms as Rob’s hand closes tight around mine, yanking me away.

“Get out of here,” Tommy growls, “and fast.”

“No!” I scream, but Rob’s grip is iron, his stride so fast I have no choice but to stumble after him to keep from falling. He lifts me easily, leaps over a ditch, and suddenly we’re at a dented red Peugeot I recognize as the car Rob’s been driving lately. He shoves me into the passenger seat, slams his own door, and peels away.

I stare at him in profile—those brown eyes narrowed beneath lashes too long for a boy like him, the ever-present baseball cap as worn and weary as he is.

By the time I open my front door, I’m crying. I glance inside—nothing out of place. Still, I step across the threshold and move through the house, turning on lights, checking under the couch. Then I go to the kitchen window and give Rob the signal. All clear.

He raises his thumb, then drives away.