“I did,” Sam whispered. “We are not going back to the office tonight.”
“I have beer,” Patrick offered. “And whiskey.” He glanced at my face. “And ice.”
Considering we grew up under the same roof and then lived together at Cornell and now we worked together all goddamn week, I didn’t make a habit of spending time at Patrick’s apartment, but I went along anyway. True to form, he put Riley to work stowing his outdoor furniture in preparation for the snowstorms expected in the coming weeks while I rinsed the blood out of my mouth.
I found Riley flipping through the stack of industry journals and magazines on Patrick’s kitchen table. “Do you actually read all of this?”
Patrick locked his fingers around four beer bottles and shook his head. “Asking that tells me you don’t.”
I didn’t know how they could nag each other right now.
“Can someone tell me what we’re going to do about this?” I snapped. “This is fucking insane.Heis fucking insane. How am I supposed to have a life when he’s whacking people with two-by-fours and throwing paperweights and trying to hijack the business accounts and threatening to go find my fucking girlfriend?”
Patrick busied himself with the bottle opener, and I waited, hoping he’d have the answer. He always had the answer.
“That’s just it, Matt,” Sam said. “You don’t. We just need him to hurry up and die.”
*
Lauren didn’t respondto my text, and after rereading it forty-one times while holding a bag of frozen peas to my face and mainlining whiskey, I remembered she hated being told what to do. This was her method of teaching me a lesson about my caveman tendencies.
So I went to her. The walk from Patrick’s place in the North End to her Beacon Hill apartment burned off most of the alcohol but it did nothing for the waves of anger and frustration in my system.
“Miss Halsted,” I said when she opened the door. She was wearing the clingy yoga pants that did terrible things to my imagination and that little UCSD t-shirt that stretched across her chest in the best possible way, and I forgot most of my argument.
“Mr. Walsh, you should know you’re only allowed to tell me what to do when I’m naked,” she said, her eyebrow arched. The stern expression stayed in place just long enough for her to notice the contusion. “Oh my God, what happened to you?”
Her fingers passed over my jaw, and she frowned at the bruise. Flinching, I pushed her hands away and stepped back, trying to locate my anger.
“It’s nothing, I don’t want to talk about it.” She peered at me, incredulous, and I knew if she showed up at my door with a big-ass bruise on her face, I’d freak the fuck out too. Of course, that would require her showing up at my door of her own accord, and that seemed rather unlikely. “You didn’t return my text.”
“I wish you’d tell me what happened.” I shook my head, and she muttered something about cavemen. “If you wanted to see me, you could have asked, Matthew.”
I reached out, stroking my finger down her cheek, over her lips, and we stared at each other. It was clear I was on the prowl, but I didn’t think either of us knew what I wanted.
Her face in my hands, I kissed her, my tongue moving between her teeth, begging her for all the things she held back. I didn’t care how much my jaw hurt; I just wanted to feel her, to own her tonight. She wrapped her hands around my coat, pulled me inside, and slammed the door. My hands were under her clothes within a heartbeat, and her skin, her sighs, her scent—they were the balm I required to feel whole again.
“I love that you’re naked under this,” I murmured against her mouth.
“If that’s what you like, I’ll stop buying fancy panties,” she whispered. She unfastened my belt, drew my zipper down, and pressed her palm over my cock, and if she asked me right then whether I liked her daily game of Make Matt Beg, I would have said yes. It was so simple, her hand on my body, but it leveled me every time.
“Don’t…don’t do that,” I said. “Fancy panties are nice, too.”
No need to mention I considered arriving at her door with a pair in my hand. This probably wasn’t the time to discuss the pussy necklace in my pocket either. I didn’t leave the house without it.
Clothes landed in piles around us, and I pulled her to the velvet sofa, settling her on my lap. She was damp and ready, and I couldn’t keep my mouth away from her nipples and I wanted her like this—always. I wanted this place we created where she stopped caring about everything else, where the only thing that mattered was how we fit together, where we could get lost in each other. This was what I wanted.
Burying my face in her hair, I murmured filthy words about her ass, her tits, her pussy, about wanting my fuck toy, my dirty little slut. And the tension riding my nerves subsided as I breathed her in.
She responded, I knew she did, but I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t interpret anything she said. I knew only the rhythm of her body, her skin against my mine. Her nails scratched along my scalp and shoulders, and I was there, pressing into her, and I couldn’t think past the frenzied hunger in my head. I filled her with one thrust, groaning her name as I bottomed out.
I closed my eyes, focusing on Lauren’s musical sighs and reminding myself to be gentle. My hands clamped on her hips, my fingers digging grooves into her skin, and we crashed into each other. Her mouth mapped my chest and arms and jaw, and I wanted more than the warm, wet sensations she left behind. Bites and scratches weren’t enough; I wanted her fingerprints tattooed on my skin. I wanted something that would be there tomorrow.
“Tell me what you want,” I panted.
“What you’re doing. That. More. Harder.”
Grasping Lauren’s free hand, I placed it between us. “Touch yourself.”
