Losing Her Wings

Chapter 41

Skylar couldn’t resist him. She couldn’t resist the way Ryan chose to torment her, his hands caressing her lovingly in a way she had never known before, slipping under her dress in ways she didn’t expect. She couldn’t do anything other than go along with his tempting idea of how to spend the evening, reaching back to touch his face, giving him just one sign of her affection and letting him use that sign as proof of her permission to kiss her. And he did. As soon as he felt her hand on his jaw, he turned her in his arms, taking a moment to adore the softness of her eyes before kissing her heatedly, having been so desperate to do so for the last week that he couldn’t contain himself. Skylar melted into his arms, taken over by the romanticism of it all, her life imitating the art of her favourite painting in the world. Ryan was just happy that she didn’t reject him again. If she had, he wasn’t sure if he could pass it off so easily as he had done before. Neither even noticed their changed position as they stumbled back until they hit the wall, backed up against it in the darkest corner of the room out of pure coincidence. At the way the night was going and with how his week had been, Ryan wouldn’t have cared if the entire fundraising party had seen them right then, Skylar letting out a soft whisper of pleasure and breathlessness as he reluctantly dragged his mouth from hers to plant a tender kiss on her beating pulse. Nothing was going to stop him from kissing her into submission until she agreed to be his girlfriend and nothing less.

With the way she was responding to him, he couldn’t imagine her not wanting to be his girlfriend, if he could just keep her there, alone with him until she brought it up herself, he couldn’t be shot down again, it wouldn’t help the way he felt at all. The way she ran her fingers through his hair and held him close as he kissed her neck, even arching towards him when he brought his mouth back up to hers, kissing her sensually, it all said that she needed him just as badly as he needed her. Neither of them had felt anything remotely like what they felt that night, nothing so overpowering or uncontrollable and when he whispered in her ear, she closed her eyes and whished that he hadn’t ruined everything by speaking. “Stay with me tonight…” Ryan asked, not finding it too much to ask when they had already shared a bed together, shared a room and their lives with each other, why couldn’t he ask her just, for one night, to forget everything else and be with him? He had just kissed her cheek in that playful way he had when he was trying to convince her of something, when an altogether different interruption added to her disappointment.

“Skylar…are you in here?” Niles’s voice called out, surprising them both and all Ryan could do was stare down at her in the hope that she would ignore it and just kiss him. But she didn’t do that, she couldn’t…so she wasn’t happy about the interruption but that didn’t mean she could just forget about all the good reasons she had for not being with Ryan because of it. With a sadness in her eyes that told him exactly what she was going to do, Skylar took a step back from him into the light of the room, looking so sad and hesitant about making that move that he knew he’d lost her again. She replied to his question, admitting that she was there, only for Niles to snap back at her angrily. “Pepper’s looking for you. What’re you doing in here anyway?” He sighed to himself disapprovingly, leaving the heavy door to clunk into place behind him as Ryan stared at Skylar, praying she would finally do something that made sense to him.

“Don’t go.” He asked, unsurprised when she took another step back away from him, the continual rejection tearing him to pieces as she tried to justify it with a simple ‘I have to’ before turning and walking away from him. He was left alone, in the darkness of the room, with the last thing he saw was Skylar leaving him, yet again, not even looking back on her way out. He leant back against the wall with a sigh, not sure why he couldn’t stop loving her or chasing after her when she was so adamant not to be with him but he knew that he was addicted to her on a level he couldn’t control. No matter what he did, she would always have a hold on him until the day he died. He needed her so badly that it drove him insane. He was so mad at having let her into his heart and his life, and found himself needing her so badly that when his fist made impact with the wall behind him, he didn’t even feel it. He’d told himself he would never need anyone and now he was so in love with Skylar that he could barely breathe…he’d done a great job of protecting himself.