Now it was me who was practically on fire. But not just my eyes. All of me. From head to toe. God, this vodka had all but disintegrated my wiser instincts. Even though I'd significantly sobered between the brisk walk here and our wrestling.
Both of us had our hands on the other’s smooth, bare side, our shirts having shifted during our wrestling match. We were just inches apart, his long, lean body stretched out next to mine. And close. So close. Close enough that I could feel his body heat everywhere. Covering me like a blanket made of one-hundred-percent virile male.
“Nobody’s here but us,” I whispered back, shocked by my words and my boldness. My hand drifted higher over his ribs.
“Eliza,” he groaned, closing his eyes and resting his forehead on mine.
He was struggling with something. And I was too chicken to ask what it was. There was smart, stable, sane Eliza, and I was sure she would be back tomorrow. And whatever happened next would be her problem. But tonight’s Eliza—this brazen hussy who didn’t care about consequences or broken teenage hearts or anything in the past or future—wanted something I couldn’t even put a name to. The need, thewant, was so fierce, so blinding, that I’d raised my back off the bed and pressed my chest against Jonah’s before I even consciously knew what I was doing.
It wasn’t even the vodka at this point. Yes, we’d had a lot of cocktails, but over hours. And there had been food, a walk in the brisk cold, plus time between then and now. I was sober enough to see reason. Yet I didn’t want to.
I didn’t want logic or loyalty. I just wanted Jonah.
I had wanted him for so long that I wondered if I even knew how not to want him. I wondered if this need could even be sated.
Or if it was just this bottomless desperation from now until forever.
With all those thoughts on a spin cycle inside my brain, I wasn’t the one who ended up moving first. He was. Maybe he could sense my desire swirling in the air around us. Or maybe he was more driven by the vodka than I thought I was. Either way, with a sound in the back of his throat, his mouth pressed against mine. Warm lips to parted warm lips. A spark to tinder waiting impatiently to ignite.
And then we were only lips and tongues and teeth. After we kissed ten years ago, I had never dared to imagine what it would be like again. After that first and only time, I promised myself I would never waste mental minutes fantasizing about Jonah and all the ways he could ravish me.
So with such a long time between our last kiss and this one—and having absolutely zero expectations on what it should be like—I was absolutely, one thousand percent rocked. From head to my fucking toes.
This wasn’t teenagers fumbling in the dark. This wasn’t a first for either of us. Or even a clumsy third or fourth. We were two well-practiced adults who knew the ins and outs of pleasure, who had honed and practiced and, dare I say it, perfected the art of kissing. This was a thousand wanted moments, a million seconds in the making. This solid friendship was blossoming into something more, something bigger, something that wanted to swallow me whole.
His body covered mine more completely, sinking me into the mattress and wedging his thigh between my legs. His lips explored mine, hungry and possessive. His hands shoved at my sweatshirt, pushing it up so he could wrap his hands around my ribs in a grasp that made me feel tiny, delicate, and fragile beneath his masculine touch.
He tasted like vodka and cinnamon, like spearmint and himself. His lips were so much softer than I could have ever guessed. And the way he used his tongue in my mouth was... next level. He made that sound in the back of his throat again—something between a sigh and a growl, and I whimpered in response. Actually whimpered.
I was trembling when his mouth left mine to trail kisses along my jaw, to nibble on the fleshy part of my ear, to lick and suck and nip down the column of my throat. And all the while, our bodies pressed into each other... closer and closer and closer until we were met with resistance from the physical aspects of our individual bodies. And still, it wasn’t close enough. It was like my soul needed to touch his. Like the nonphysical parts of me needed to crawl inside him until they were tangled together with his nonphysical parts. Until we were indistinguishable from each other.
His mouth worked slowly back toward mine. His kisses were slowing down. He was taking his time. Savoring each taste of me. My fingernails dragged over his back beneath his T-shirt. He made that sound again. The throaty one. So I did it again, and his mouth landed back on mine. Unable to wait.
We kissed again until I wasn’t even sure how much time had passed. Just two small business owning adults making out in a way that set me on fire.
He hadn’t tried to take off my clothes or push things a step further. Which I was coherent enough to be thankful for. I wasn’t a virgin by any means, but I didn’t just go around sleeping with people when there weren’t clear boundaries.
Like before, we’d made it clear we weren’t going to sleep with other people, for instance.
And usually, I knew the latest results of their sexual health test. Jonah and I were close, just not exactly that close.
But Jonah didn’t need to sleep with me tonight to completely upend me. His kisses ravaged me. Physically, emotionally, mentally. All I wanted were those kisses. All I needed were his lips on mine. All I asked was to be kissed like this for the rest of my life.
We kissed until I was gasping for breath and afraid I would be the one to take advantage of him.
We kissed until I had memorized the planes of his back, the dips between muscles, the ladder of his spine. Until I was fairly confident he had memorized the imprint of my ribs against his hands, the curve of my waist, the softness of my skin compared to the roughness of his.
We kissed until I knew exactly how he liked me to pull his lower lip between my teeth. And he knew how I liked him to suck on the hollow of my throat.
We kissed until our bodies melded together, and the bed beneath us—a perfect imprint of him on top of me.
We kissed, and he didn’t pull away, didn’t invoke Will’s name and ruin everything, didn’t remind me of all the people in our lives and the way they tended to get in the way of my happiness on a regular basis. The shadows were there, but they were far away. For now, this was between us. A delicious and private unspoken pause in the game of keep away we’d been playing for ten years.
A long time later, though neither of us had decided to stop, Jonah pulled away. The lights were still on, so I could see his gorgeous face as he looked down at me. His lips were swollen from my kisses, and his jawline wasn’t quite as smooth as usual this late at night. My God, he was absolutely beautiful.
“I’m going to shut the lights off,” he whispered, breaking the spell that had captivated us for over an hour.
“Okay.”
