Page 31 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

“Like what.”

“Anything. Something about you that is true.”

I look at the roof of the container. There is rust coming through the paint up there in a shape like a country. There is nothing about me that is of interest to a prince.

“Where did you get this?” he prompts, taking his hand and putting it on the stripe across my ribs. I’m not sure I want to tell him, but he asked and I don’t think I can deny him anything.

“Foster placement,” I reply. His fingertips are whisper-light on my skin. “I was nine maybe. The guy had a belt with a buckle on it. I don’t remember his name.”

His fingers stay there, on the raised line. He doesn’t say sorry. I would have hated it if he had.

“Now you tell me something true.”

His eyes light up with amusement. “My life is out there in front of the cameras. Everyone knows everything. I am not allowed any secrets.”

“Everyone has secrets. What doesn’t everyone else know?”

He hesitates, not because he doesn’t want to tell me, but because he is thinking.

“My mother died when I was five,” he says finally. “That’s not a secret. She used to hug me. After that, nobody touched me. Not without gloves, and they kept their eyes down when they did it. There was a woman in Chicago, a week ago. My dresser. She touched my neck by accident doing my hair. It was the first time since my mother. It sent a shiver down me and I remembered how nice it was to have another human there.” He moves his fingers on my scar. “I thought there was something wrong with me.”

“There’s not.”

“No. I know that now.”

I don’t know what to do with that so I say, “Tell me something else. Doesn’t have to be a secret. Something I don’t know.”

“There are always cameras, even in the bathroom. This is new.” He waves up at the steel walls. “I’m not used to not being watched.”

We go on like that. A thing for a thing. Somewhere in it his scent starts to change again. I smell it before he feels it. The sweet thickens up and goes darker and his hips move against my thigh, once, small, like he doesn’t know he’s done it.

“It’s coming back,” I say.

“Yes.” He sounds relieved. He gets his knee over me and sits up, and the light from the lantern goes down the whole front of him, and he looks down at me and says, “Please.”

Fuck. The way he says please.

This time I get to watch. For the last few days, I have been half out of my head with it, the smell of him.

This time I put him on his back and I keep the lantern where I can see his face and I go slow enough to look.

He keeps his eyes open. The whole time. When I push into him he doesn’t shut them, he watches me do it. His mouth comes open and his hands come up and hold my face, and I have never in my life had anyone look at me while I was inside them. Not like that. Like I was the thing they were looking for.

“Banks,” he says, when I’m all the way in.

I go still.

The name sounds wrong in his mouth. It’s a lie and he knows it. He is looking up at me like that with my cock inside him and he has my lie spilling out of his mouth.

“Roan,” I say. My voice has gone to hell. “It’s Roan. Roan Kessler.”

He doesn’t say anything for a second. Then, “Roan,” trying it, and clenches around me, and I put my forehead down on his and move.

His hands go down my back. Over the shoulder where the bullet went in, over the knife scar, over every place on me that somebody put something. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t skip any of it. He holds on to the worst of me like it’s just more of me, and I am fucking him slow and deep on the floor of the boat. Something in me that has been shut my whole life is standing wide open and I can’t get it closed.

He comes with my name in his mouth.

After, he pulls me down so I’m lying on him with my whole weight, and when I try to move off he says “No,” and holds on, so I stay.