K. Bromberg: Sweet Ache

The tear leaks over and slides down my cheek, the smile tasting bittersweet on my lips as my mom gives me the only thing I’ve needed from her in the past five years. She may still think of me as a little boy in her mind but she’s just given me the greatest gift. She’s stitched closed the wounds in my soul with those simple words, made me the most complete person I’ve been in the longest time.

Has given me the capability and hope to love someone else.

I nod my head and selfishly force my feet to move, afraid if I stay too long she’s going to revert back and ruin this moment I so desperately needed. “Bye, Mom.”

“Mm-hmm,” she says and smiles softly before looking back out her window. I stare at her for a moment longer, memorizing this feeling I have, the lighter heart and clearer head.

Quinlan reaches over and links hands with me as I leave Westbrook for the first time with a fuller heart than the one I entered with. With each step we take into the parking lot I feel a rush akin to the one I get after being on stage. It’s a bittersweet emotion but shit, I’ll take it. I’ll take anything that doesn’t leave me with that churning in my gut.

Once we reach my car, our hands still linked, it feels like there’s so much possibility stretched out before us that I’m looking forward to the tour now. I’m excited to be trapped on a tour bus with Quinlan.

Damn. The thought takes hold as I look over and meet her eyes and that fucking jolt hits me just as hard as it did the first time I laid eyes on her. I’m riding my high of the present and possible future. Hell if I’m waiting for the tour bus when everything I want is right in front of me.

I pull her into my arms, lift her feet off the ground, and I’m already spinning her around when my lips meet hers to quiet her laugh.

Rocker trumps everyone when it comes to her.

QUINLAN

Hawke moves inside me.

My head drops back and his hard cock slides against my tensed muscles to heighten the pleasure starting to rock my world. The piano keys fill the room with a mangled sound when our bodies hit against them, my feet and his thighs.

We move at a demanding pace yet there is an underlying tenderness to it that resonates within me. Even if he tied me up and blindfolded me it wouldn’t hold a candle to how much he owns me, mind, body, and soul, right now. His intensity, his reverence, his rough edges turned smooth just for me pull on so many emotions that I can’t process them right now. I’m so overwhelmed, consumed by him, and saddened that he’s leaving in a matter of hours and I’m just not sure how I’m going to cope with him thousands of miles away even if it’s for just a few days.

I push it all away. Allow the moment to exist, the emotions to flow, and the pleasure to pull us into its addictive haze. It’s only us, only him, only this, and hell if that doesn’t make me the luckiest girl on the face of the earth.

“Quin.” He calls my name in that liquid sex rasp of a voice at the same time he stills his hips. Our eyes connect, sensations tackling me from every angle as we sit in the silence of the room. It’s a fleeting moment because we’re both chasing the pleasure the other one is offering, but it’s enough for me to see what I need to see in his eyes, even if he’s unable to say it.

He leans forward and tempts my mouth, tongue fluttering, our moans expressing the pleasure we both feel. And then he begins to move again, to generate flashes of pleasure with his body that own my every nerve.

Hawke lets out a wild groan as he presses as deep as possible into me, strong hands holding on to my soft curves while he continues to drive us toward the razor-thin edge of desire. I want to close my eyes, succumb to the pleasure dragging me under, but our eyes are fused in an intimate conversation that’s just as intense as the union of our bodies.

“Hawke,” I moan, teeth biting into my lower lip, breath raw and ragged, errant notes filling my ears.

He flashes me a dirty smirk at the call of his name, as if I’m issuing him a challenge to bring me to the cusp quicker, harder, faster. He takes his hand from my hip to hold my neck for a beat before sliding his palm down between my breasts. Every ounce of skin he touches alights with an insatiable fire that I know only he can put out. A small reprieve in the onslaught of sensation—but I know it’s temporary because I can see his muscles tensing, can feel his dick swelling, and his restraint holding on like an unraveling string.

I shift my hips up, milking his cock in my own move that has him calling out my name in a curse the same time I begin to disintegrate, powerful shivers coursing through my body. I buck my hips, hands reaching out to hold him still because the pleasure is too much, too absolute, but I’m a second too late because Hawke’s head falls back as his hips buck wildly, dragging him over the edge with me.

The piano sounds a complaint to the two of us using it to make a different kind of music when Hawkin picks me up and carries me over to the couch in the studio. He sits down and then shifts us so that he’s lying down on it and I’m lying on top of him, my heartbeat trying to jump out of my chest and join his.

“Wow,” he says, blowing out a breath of satisfied exhaustion.

“You can say that again.”

“Piano, check !”

I laugh with him at our endless quest to mark off instruments as sex props. “What are you trying to do, kill me before you leave me?” I say off the cuff and then immediately fall quiet as it hits me that in a few hours he will be gone.

I try to push the sadness away, not wanting it in this moment, not wanting it to overshadow the good mood seeing his mom today put him in, but it still lingers.

“Uh-uh. Don’t be sad. C’mon,” he says, pressing a kiss to the top of my head and pulling me in closer to him.

“I know.” I shift to put my chin on his chest so I can look at his face. “I’m just going to miss you. Besides, I planted sexy panties all over your suitcase to find.”

“You did?” He laughs, eyes lighting up.

“Yep. You have to find them all and show them to me via text … and then once you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” I explain with a devilish grin, pretty damn proud of myself for thinking up this one.

“Come again?”

“Already? Jeez … I know you’re good but that’s a supernatural recovery time,” I tease. Hawke just rolls eyes at me and begins to speak when I catch a glimpse of something on the inside of his wrist where there was nothing before. “What the …?”

I’m scrambling to sit up astride him, grabbing his wrist and turning it over so I can see his forearm. A freshly inked bright pink heart the size of a quarter looks back at me. I know my mouth is agape and my eyes are wide at the sight. I start to say several things but nothing coherent comes out.

I itch to reach out and trace it, make sure it’s real, but it’s pretty obvious that it is. And of course I suddenly feel horrible because I’m the reason he has it. “But you told me you’d never degrade your other tats by putting something meaningless …”

He looks at me oddly, and as I look back and forth between his eyes and his wrist, it feels like I’m missing something. “Look closer.”

It’s the only explanation he offers and I immediately lean in closer, noting that up close the outline is fuzzy. But then I realize it’s not fuzzy at all, rather it’s letters intricately curved as an outline. “Hawkin? W-what?” I sputter as I connect the letters to form words. My lips fall lax. My heart skips a beat. My soul sighs with hope.

The letters form a single saying: Make it count .

My breath catches as a smug smirk lights up his face. I still can’t speak and the astonished look on my face must be hilarious because he starts laughing at it. “Don’t you get it, Quin?” he asks me and I think that I do, I really do, but I want to hear it from him. Need to hear it from that desire-inducing mouth of his. “This is the next lyric of my life’s song. You’re the bridge, the chorus, the final chord. This heart,” he says, eyes softening and smile widening, “brought you to me. Was the catalyst that forced me to see so many things I probably otherwise wouldn’t have. This heart represents you, represents me, and is my promise to you that I’m going to make it count.”