“Do you want me to leave?” I focus on the painting hung on the wall behind her. I can’t stand to watch her lips form words that will push me out of her life. Again.
She doesn’t say anything. Not with her mouth, at least. Instead, she is a flurry of action.
The door slams, locking in place. With two flat palms she pushes against my chest. I stumble backward across the small room until something soft but large stops me. Ember presses into me, her hands on my neck, her breath against my cheek, her lips finally finding their way to mine.
My mind is going haywire. I feel like I’m eighteen again. All I can see is Ember, all I can feel is Ember, all I want is Ember. Suddenly, we’re new. We haven’t experienced the pain of hurting one another. We never missed phone dates, never cancelled trips home to visit, never hoarded hurt feelings until they grew into the monster that ruined us. We are whole again.
She steps back. “Sit. Couch.”
I drop onto a cushion like my ass is on fire.
Ember sinks down onto my lap, her knees pressing into the outsides of my thighs. I grab onto her hair and tug, dipping her head back and kissing her throat. She moans as my lips travel down, her hasty hands fumbling with my belt buckle. She pauses, lifting her arms in the air so I can pull her shirt over her head.
“Take off your pants,” she tells me.
I don’t know when she became this authoritative, but I’m not going to question it. I do as she says, while she slips off her pink pajama shorts. Standing in front of me is the woman I dream about, naked, but she doesn't give me the chance to drink her in. Before I can ask her to slow down, she’s on top of me.
In seconds, we are one. In minutes, she tips back her head and loses herself. When she comes down from her high, eyes hooded and face dreamy, I stand with her in my arms and walk from the living room to the hallway. She points at the door on the left, and I carry her in.
I have not forgotten the curves of Ember’s hips. The contours of her arched back. The soft skin at the base of her neck. The red hair brushing against her creamy skin.
I could try for a hundred years to forget this woman, and it would be futile.
The saying is true.
You never forget your first love.
21
Ember
“Mmmmmm.”Noah’s moan reverberates through my back. He tightens his arms around my waist and pulls me closer, though I’m not sure it’s possible.
“I’d love to wake up like this every day,” he says, his voice making the little hairs on the back of my neck stand upright.
He shouldn't say things like that. This was a break from reality, a dip into the past.
It was fun though. Unexpected. When he stared at me in the open front door last night, daring me to tell him to go, I felt the old enchantment, invoking me to enjoy him for the short time I could have him. Time hadn’t lessened the magnetic pull. The only thing time had done was turn us into a man and a woman.
Rolling over, I drink in his bedhead and squinty-eyes. Without thinking, I lift one hand and trace his profile with my fingertips, starting at his temple and going down to his hips. Across his ribs is something the dark of the night kept from me.
Gaping down at the inked skin, my mouth falls open. “You got a tattoo.” The three-inch-high Sutton name stares back at me.
He glances down at himself. “I did.”
“Were you afraid you’d forget your last name?” I bite my lip to keep from laughing.
Noah grabs my hand and twists, showing the inside of my forearm. “Did you mistake yourself for a bird?
I snatch my hand away, laughing. I happen to love my newest tattoo. “It’s a dove. A symbol of purity. And love.” My hand returns to his hip.
“You haven't been too pure recently.” He peers down at my hand, where it sits on his hipbone.
The sheet covers him from the waist down, and it would be so easy to let my hand disappear under it. Instead my fingersbump bump bumptheir way up his rippled torso.
“I take it you’re still playing soccer?” His abs are enviable. His thighs are muscled. From his scapula to the bottom swell of his backside, he is all cut muscle and sinew.
Noah moves his head to the side and studies me.
