He rocked his palm against my leg before sliding it down to my knee and closing it into a fist on the center console. I didn’t move. After living entire lifetimes in the minutes it took us to get here, I needed a breath before I could rely on these legs to carry me across the driveway and up several steps.
Once I was ready, I did my best to climb out of the truck without falling on my ass. It was simple enough, though with the compounding factors of the uneven gravel and the starlit darkness—plus the painful clench of my inner muscles—I held on to the door handle until I found my balance.
I made it up the steps and unlocked the door while Noah gathered Gennie, her head pillowed on his shoulders and her arms loosely ringed around his neck. He carried her inside, one arm tucked under her bottom and the other holding her to his chest, and it struck me that Noah learned how to care for this girl within the pastyear. If I didn’t know any different, I’d assume he was her father and he’d adored her since the moment she’d arrived.
He glanced at me as he moved toward the stairs. “Stay right there,” he whispered.
I stared at his ass as he went and I could still feel his hand on my leg. I could measure the distance between the tip of his pinkie and the apex of my thighs from memory. For a second, I let myself dip under the surface of this heat and let it soak into my skin.
For the first time in too long, I felt all the way alive. I wasn’t dried out. I wasn’t a husk. I wasn’t agonizing over all the things I’d lost. I wasn’t planning to scream out my rage when the ball dropped at midnight on New Year’s Eve rather than kiss someone.
I felt good and present and aroused, and I couldn’t put my finger on the last time that’d happened with another person. I wasn’t interested in digging too deep into the last time I’d been with the ex. It was buried in the past and I wanted to keep it there though I knew without much consideration that I hadn’t responded this way with him. I wasn’t sure I’d ever responded this way.
Rather than spend a single minute contemplating that, I assigned myself the task of straightening up Noah’s kitchen. Fold some dish towels, wash a pair of cups in the sink, wipe a smudge off the refrigerator door. That was how I ended up opening the fridge—what if there were smudges on the edge of the door?—and organizing everything I found inside. I wouldn’t say it wasdisorganized though I turned all the jam jars so that their labels faced forward and lined up the juice boxes in two even rows.
“Hungry?”
I jumped back at the sound of Noah’s voice, low and rough enough to scrape down my spine and start a tremor behind my belly button.
“I’m organizing,” I said.
“You’re doingwhat?”
“Organizing,” I repeated. I gestured to the open refrigerator doors. “Your juice boxes were chaotic and the jam was turned in twenty different directions.”
He glanced into the fridge. “I can’t have more than fifteen jars of jam in there.”
“Like I said.”
Nodding, he pushed the doors shut and moved toward me. Instinctively, I took a step back and then another until I hit the countertop. He followed, his eyes darker than I’d ever seen them. He dropped his hands to my waist and locked them tight there. “Can I touch you?”
A breathy laugh slipped out of me. “You’ve been touching me all night.”
Noah pressed his forehead to mine and brought a hand between my legs. He gave me a fast, firm squeeze, jolting me upward. I yelped and grabbed onto his shoulders as he pinched and stroked me through my jeans. The way he grabbed me there, it wasn’t polite. So far from polite that it bordered on degrading, as if he felt entitled to inspecting me before taking me to bed.
And…I liked it?
I mean, I did. I liked it. And I was positive he knew this because I could feel my pulse hammering in my center. I was pulsing and miserably wet from the drive here, and it was only a matter of time until my arousal soaked through my jeans. If it hadn’t already.
Oh god. He’s going to notice that too.
That was another thing I liked?
No one had ever handled me this way. It felt like I was tiptoeing along the razor’s edge between the kind of sex I knew and understood and something else entirely. The kind that started with sweet kisses on a Ferris wheel and cartwheeled into orgasming in the middle of the kitchen before anyone got their clothes off.
That would be a first for me.
“I want to touch you like this,” he said, the words barely more than a growl. He scraped a fingernail along the seam of my jeans and I swear, it reverberated all the way into my bones. “I want—fuck, Shay, I can’t even tell you half the things I want.”
“Try,” I whispered, nearly climbing him for more contact, more friction.
He blinked down at me, his lips parted and his breath warm on my cheek. “You’d run out of here so fast you’d leave a cloud of dust behind you.”
“I’ll promise on a stack of jam jars that I won’t.” I stared at him, my eyes pleading for more. I needed to know what he was thinking. I needed to know everything. After all that silence, all those debates about spreading my legs, I required it. “There’s nothing you can say to me that will be wrong.”
A blush traveled across his cheeks and over the tips of his ears. He lifted a hand to my neck and pressed his thumb to my pulse. “What if it’s all wrong?”
“It’s not,” I said, trying to nod though his hold on me wouldn’t allow much more than a shaky bob of my head.
