Instead of shuffling around the bed and meeting him on the other side, I hiked up my skirt and climbed onto the mattress. I knee-shuffled toward him and he reached for me with both hands like I might tumble right over the edge.
“There will be rules,” I said, pressing my palms to his chest.
He fussed with the hair tie I’d used to cinch my t-shirt until it came loose. “Rules,” he echoed. “Such as?”
A breath skittered out of me as he ran his hands up my sides, his thumbs sliding just beneath my breasts. I had to focus. I had to put words into a logical order and speak sentences. “We don’t talk about Lance.”
He made a harsh, impatient noise. “Please explain to me why, for any reason at all, we would talk about Lance.”
“Because he’s like”—I fluttered my hands around—“everywhere. Between us.”
Beck locked his hands on my waist and pulled me toward him until there was no space, no air, only heat. He was hard against my thigh, unbelievably so. Just like everything else about him, it was too big, too much.
“Sunny, sweetheart, I don’t know what you think this is, but it’s not Lance.”
“Thatis not what I meant and you know it.” One corner of his mouth crooked up in a smile. “We don’t talk about Lance anymore. What he’s going to say, how long his tantrum will go on, none of it.”
“It will go on for six or seven months and he’ll sink into the core of the earth in order to have peace while resenting us for disrupting the order of his universe.”
He gripped my backside, rocked against me at an angle that brought my eyelids down and forced my lips apart. Light flashed behind my eyes, and for a second or fifty I wondered how any of this was possible. How did it feel this good but also this easy? Like my body knew what it wanted, knew what to do, and I just had to let it.
“One more rule,” I managed.
“I think we have enough already.”
“We promise that, no matter what happens with us, nothing has to change. I don’t want you to lose your best friend because of”—I drummed my fingers on his chest—“you know. This.”
He reached between us, adjusted himself in his trousers. Groaned like he wanted me to know I was killing him. “I don’t know if either of us can promise that but if it’s what you need, I will try.” When I nodded, he asked, “Can we institute the not-talking-about-Lance rule now? The things I want to do to you can’t exist in my mind while Lance is there.”
“What do you want to do to me?”
He swallowed up my question with his kisses, shoved his hands into my hair, growled like he was a wolf and a bridge troll and a bossy, broody man all smoothed down and folded away into one complicated creature. I loved his sounds, the way his hands seemed to flex against his will, how he’d exhale into my skin like this was torture, true, endless torture.
I hadn’t known it could be like this. Not for me. Everyone else, sure, but nothing about my body was like everyone else. I’d always had to work a little harder, focus on getting comfortable, getting into it. But here I was, a landscape of goose bumps and a throb between my legs that ached like nothing I’d known before and Iwantedhim. I wanted him in a panicked, humiliating way that had me hooking my fingers into his belt loops and between the buttons on his shirt, holding on like it would be all too easy for this to disintegrate in my hands.
“I want to put my head under this skirt and eat you for fuckinghours.”
“That’swhat you want?”
“Only every time I see you in a skirt.” He looped a finger around the neck of my t-shirt, tugged it down to kiss his way across my collarbones. “I’d die under that skirt if you let me.”
“I don’t think I will, no,” I said, a hysterical giggle slipping out of me.
“That’s disappointing.” He was a rush of kisses and scraped teeth, sighs and raspy hums. His hands were everywhere. “I would’ve thought you’d take an opportunity to get rid of me.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have time to hide a body. If I kill you, it’s going to need to be somewhere that I can wipe my hands and walk away.”
“Why am I not surprised that you want me to fuck you in the woods, at night, like the little witch you are?”
“You said it,” I whispered. “Not me.”
“I want to bend you over this bed and watch that perfect mouth of yours pop open every time I thrust into you,” he said, smiling against my neck. “I don’t think your feet will touch the floor.”
“We don’t need any short girl slander here.” I needed to tell him. I needed to be clear about my…issues. I closed my fingers around his shirt and buried my head in his chest, a small, defensive position that would save me from nothing. “This might not be the best time to tell you that I don’t usually like a lot of penis.”
He froze like we were playing a game of statues. “I’m sorry,whatdid you just say?”
I heaved out a breath and glanced up at him. He stood beside my bed, his stance wide and solid like he’d grown out of the floorboards. “I don’t like—the penis part of this whole thing doesn’t always work out well for me.”
