“I’m never gonna let you leave this bed,” he whispers.

“You’re not, huh?” I snag his earlobe in my teeth and bite down hard.

Tank growls, and his full lips twist with a wry grin. “Don’t plan on it, nope. I was just makin’ you aware.”

“I think I can take you,” I say, flexing my hips so his cock slides over the hood of my clit.

“Can you now?”

“You bet your arse I can, Mr Whitecross.”

Tank chuckles. The sound resonates through his big barrel chest and my nipples turn to hard, tight little buds. His mouth covers mine as he slides one arm beneath me, cupping my arse. I kiss him back and use the distraction to roll us so that I’m lying on top. It’s graceless and not without a lot of effort on my part—because like I said before, he’s heavy—but his brows arch in mock surprise.

“You know I helped there, right?”

“Shut up,” I warn, but he doesn’t say a thing, just grins and takes hold of my waist when I push myself into a sitting position. I lift my hips and reach for his thick cock, guiding it slowly inside me until he’s seated balls’ deep and I can feel every inch of him stretching me wide. He’s so big it hurts, and my instinct is to ride him harder, to make it hurt even more, but this isn’t about punishment.

Tank groans, “Jesus, fuck. You’re tight.” He slides a hand across my hip and down to my pussy where he rubs my clit with the softest of touches. I rock back and forth on top of him. I need to come again. I need to come with his cock buried inside me, opening me, stretching me. I need to feel his release as I pulse around him. But I know it’s far too soon for that. I move my hips, matching the rhythm he creates with his hand. It’s such a simple thing, and yet it feels as though I’ve never experienced pleasure like this before. And maybe I haven’t. Maybe I never really knew what pleasure was.

He pulls me down and threads his hands into my hair, smothering my neck and shoulder with kisses. There’s an urgency to his touch that wasn’t there before. “Babe, I’ve gotta fuck you now.”

I nod, rocking my hips in time with his, coaxing and willing him closer to the edge. I can’t think when he’s inside me, can’t form words. Not after he blew my world wide open with a few well-placed touches and that very talented tongue.

I deliberately clench my muscles and he hisses as if he’s in pain, and then his hands are gone from my hair. They grip my hips. His fingers claw at my soft flesh as he pumps in and out of me. Tank intensifies his pace, and I can’t hold back any longer. With a cry, I come. I shatter into a billion tiny pieces. I’m suspended around him, above him, and I’m spent. I’m undone.

Somehow, I keep time with him and, rocking my pelvis against his, I ride out my orgasm with my eyes closed and tears streaming down my cheeks as pleasure forces my body to jerk and quake and completely let go. Tank trails a hand up my back and grasps the nape of my neck in his hands. I open my eyes and smile down at him.

The reinvention of Ivy.

That’s what this is. That’s what all these gentle, sweet and achingly tender touches are about. He wasn’t kidding when he said he intended to show me something other than hurt. And I should be angry at him for wanting to change the way I’m hardwired, for wanting me to be something other than a fucked up pain junkie, but I’m not. I’m not anything but a boneless pile of muscle, tissue, sinew, and nerve endings. And I don’t care that he wants to put an end to all that mercilessness, because sometimes you have to break even the most wilful of things to make them fit back together whole, complete, and stronger than before.

Tank continues to move inside of me, and though I’m spent, I writhe against him, with him. When he finally does slip over the edge, I take his face in my hands and crush my lips to his. I kiss him so deeply I don’t know how we ever kissed any other way. I swallow his primal grunts and cries of pleasure, and he wraps his huge arms around me like a vice and squeezes me until I can’t breathe.

When his body goes lax and his breathing turns from heavy and strained to a light snore, I pull away a little, in order to see his face. His eyes are closed, his lips parted, and his face is slackened with sleep. Tank has one of those too-square jaws with sharp cheekbones, and dark, intense blue eyes that can be so full of emotion one second, and so devoid and cold the next. His full lips are always red from riding in the wind. His beard is dark and unkempt, and his hair too, most of the time, because he crops it himself with a rusted out old pair of clippers. When I met him it was down past his shoulders with natural light brown highlights from the sun. He looked a lot younger then, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss being able to tug on it while his face was buried between my legs.

He’s far too masculine to be called beautiful, but I love that about him. Kick was pretty in a roughed up, hard-done-by kind of way, but Tank? Tank is all man. He’s hardened, yet somehow oddly vulnerable, with a face I could stare at all day. It has character. A story. A life of scars and hurt and struggle is written all over it.

On some level I think that part of him, that abused kid carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, he’s still in there, and he calls out to the fragile, broken girl inside me. His demons rage and roar at my own, and when we’re here in bed like this, joined, our bodies grown soft with pleasure and lethargy, I think they even quiet one another. They soothe the wrath, the want to hurt, and be hurt, and they just … are. Like wild beasts snarling in the darkness, baring their jagged teeth and claws, eventually they find a middle ground, reach an impasse, and they curl up together and just be still.

And it’s enough.

We are enough.

When I know he’s sleeping soundly, I slide out of bed and walk naked out to the lounge room. I love this house, with its open windows, its seclusion, and its scent of pine and eucalypt. I love that even though it’s not, it feels like home. Or what I imagine home should feel like. It’s what I wanted my whole life, but never thought I’d get to experience, and I know that has little to do with the building around me and everything to do with the man who inhabits it. A man who’s quickly breaking down all my walls and slowly, second by second, laying claim to my heart.

I head over to the couch and pull out the sofa cushions, searching for the three tiny pills that I’d thrown at Tank earlier. I grope around in the darkness for a long time, and find two wedged in the crack between the base of the armrest and the under-cushion support. I fish them out, and after feeling around for what seems like an eternity, I find the other pill on the rug beneath the coffee table.

Walking over to the garbage disposal, I stare at the pills in my hand. It would be so easy to take them without Tank even knowing, and I close my eyes because the post-orgasmic high is wearing off and the oxy would go down a treat. Before I can think too much about it, I splay my fingers wide and let the little pills fall through into the garbage disposal. I don’t turn it on, because it would just wake Tank. Instead, I turn on the tap and wash them away, ensuring there’s no way that I can retrieve them. I run my hands under the warm water and contemplate a soak in the huge claw-foot tub. That would probably wake him too, and I’d really rather just go back to bed and lie with him, even if I can’t sleep. I like having him near. He makes me feel safe. He makes me feel loved, which is something I’ve never felt before. And I’m starting to think that maybe, despite what I told Adeline today, it’s something I could learn to do again. To love. To trust, and to place myself in someone else’s hands and be content there.