My adrenaline picks up until my heart feels like a bomb is about to detonate in my chest. What the hell. It’s just a kiss. Although a part of me knows it will be anything but just a kiss with Baya.
I cradle her cheeks in the palms of my hands and draw to her to me, slow and measured. I give a gentle smile as her eyes close, her lips part waiting for mine to greet her. I want to freeze this moment. This is innocent and pure—untainted from my past in a way that I wish the rest of my life could be.
“Baya,” her name strains from my lips as threadbare as the wind as I bring my mouth to hers. I offer a barely-there pass, soft as down feathers before landing hard over her mouth like I want to, like I’ve wanted to ever since that afternoon she first arrived. I swipe my tongue over hers and a groan rips from my gut as if it’s waited all my life to come out. A burst of passion releases from me like I have never known. I’ve waited years for a kiss just like this one—an entire lifetime. I had never had a kiss that mattered so much—that I’ve craved so badly before and now I know why—Baya wasn’t there to give it.
Steph tries to surface but I hold down the past and refuse to let it cork to the top. This is my moment with Baya and once she learns the truth about me, we may never have another.
She runs her hands up my T-shirt and warms herself over my skin. I pull her in tight, and she jumps up on my waist, wrapping her legs around me as if I were a life raft—her lips never leaving mine. We indulge in the pull and push of ecstasy like I have never experienced before—the hard-on blooming in my jeans can attest to that. A series of soft groans emit from her and it takes everything in me not to ride my hands up her shirt—not to take her greedily in the back of my truck, if she wanted me to, and something tells me she more than wants to.
Baya reaches down and plays with the button on my jeans, and I catch her hand in flight.
“No,” I whisper, dotting her lips with a kiss.
“Yes,” she pants trailing her molten hot lips to my ear then pausing.
“No way,” I insist, soft as a whisper.
She gives a little sigh over my lips and it makes me dizzy. “You’re off the hook for now, but I want this.” She pulls her finger up my belly in a solid line, and I take a breath and seal it in my lungs.
“You hardly know me.” A dull laugh brews in my chest as I spin her gently with my hands tucked beneath her knees.
“Hardly know you?” She averts her eyes and I’d do just about anything to please her any way she likes but I know the damage I’m capable of. “Right—you have one-night stands all the time. And, I know exactly how many.” She taps my chest, resisting the urge to laugh. “Your wall whispered all of your secrets to me this morning while you were in the shower.” Baya tries to hide a smile, and I nibble on her lower lip before pulling away.
“I’m not having a one-night stand with you, Baya.” True as God. If I had Baya one night would never be enough. “We’re just kissing buddies nothing more.” There. Somehow I managed to set a boundary—not that my dick agrees.
“Buddies, huh?” She reaches down and strokes my hard-on over my jeans, and I lurch into her. I’ve never felt so damn turned on, so ready to come with such little effort. “Your pants feel awful friendly.”
“They’re not, and neither am I,” I tease as a light rain starts to fall.
“Let’s get back to the kissing.” She pulls her lips across my cheek down to my mouth. “We can figure the rest out later.”
Baya lands her candy sweet mouth over mine, and everything in me feels as if it’s floating on air. It’s as if Baya’s kisses were the exact elixir I’ve been waiting for all these years, a salve in the form of another sweet girl reminiscent of the one I lost.
I’ve hung out in the dark for so long, I’ve forgotten what it really feels like to live, too soar with the promise of something wonderful on the horizon.
Baya just might be the light at the end of this long, hellish tunnel. But does she really have the power to pull me from the wreckage? I doubt it. I’m too far gone, too much of a fucking mess to ever hope to recover.
The rain starts in, heavy and hard, matching the rhythm of my heart over hers.
I hope to God, Baya is the cure to this disease I’ve been wasting away from because it feels like I’m about to die, or at least it did just before I met her.
Her tongue knifes over mine in strokes of lust-driven madness, and I’m right there with her. Not another person on the planet exists right now, not Cole, not a thousand faceless girls from Whitney Briggs—and not the one I left behind in the past.
Right now, it’s just Baya and me, drowning in a sea of kisses that taste and feel like the sweetest release. They feel like hope. And, for the first time in a good long while, I have it.
I push Baya up against the truck, and we indulge in the hot of one another’s mouths until the sun illuminates a new day with its feather soft beams.
Baya Brighton is in my life, and, now, nothing will ever be the same.
