“Look at you, Sloane. I’m barely touching you.”
I moan as he grips my hip with one strong hand, holding himself up with the other, running his thumb over top of my jeans, over my hip, squeezing. I clamp down aroundnothing, feeling out of control as he finally dips down, parting my lips with his and sliding his tongue along mine.
I’m boneless, limp, putty in his hands. His gentle caress could undo me, I think—nothing else required. His fingers make slow, tantalizing circles on my waist, as he kisses me with just as much tenderness, like he did at his door. When he grinds himself against, Iwanthim to hear my whimpers, want him to know he can touch me everywhere. Like he can read my mind, he slides his hands up, palming my breasts before torturing me with a brush and a tug and a pinch and—my voice isn’t even mine at this point. It’s a mess of moans and almost cries, a long desperate plea that is new and not at all what I’m used to. It runs away from me, like a barrel rolling down a hill.
“I can’t believe I’ve gone this long with really touching you,” he mutters, his mouth just inches from mine as the need for him overwhelms me.
“I need—” I start to say before his hand snakes down to where I’m lifting her hips, desperate for friction. He pulls back, locking eyes with me when his touch ghosts past buttons and zippers, and he sinks two fingers in.
“I know what you need,” he has the audacity to say, a cocky smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Just like I knew you’d be soaked.”
“Tends to happen when anyone’s touchin’ you like this,” I grit out as I tense around him, frustrated and flustered, because this would happen with anyone. He’s practiced, and I almost tell him that in less than pleasant terms when he pulls out, circling my clit.
“Anyone?” he asks as I gasp. He drags in and out of me,drives me to a euphoric wall of nothing because he’s holding back. I shut my eyes against the strain, grinding my teeth before forcing them back open.
“Yup.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
It’s done something, my denial, my complete avoidance of the elephant on this roof—that every touch feels different. He moves down my body, still driving his fingers into me with impossible attention to every detail he’s already mapped to memory.
“Because you’re arrogant,” I try to tell him, but it’s swallowed by the cry I choke on when I feel his mouth on me, hot and wet, working in tandem with his fingers to push me over the edge. And I do, shatter around him and into him, tugging his hair, clawing at his head, pressing my hips up, surrendering against him, as he wrings the last of it from me.
“Fuck,” he breathes, his jaw going slack as he looks up at me, like that wasn’t his plan either. And even though I just came apart, I need it again—I need more. I push up, everything urgent all of a sudden, and he does the same, seeking me out. We collide, and that’s really how it is. Catastrophic. Seismic. Torrential, a fucking typhoon of lust and longing that we couldn’t side step any longer if we tried.
I can feel the way he can’t have enough of me. His fingers digging into my skin, his lips rough against my skin, and I feel the hunger slam into me like a ton of bricks. He slides his hands under me, and it only urges me on, sinking my fingers into his scalp, raking my nails against it as he hoists me into his lap with no effort at all. His hands frame my face, hold me as he angles our kiss so it’s deeper, one wrapping itself in my hair, before he suddenly breaks away to let his heavy-lidded gaze roam over every kiss swollen part of me.
It’s too long. He looks at me too long, with too muchgoodness for someone who Iknowdoesn’t usually find anything holy in this.
“Are we doin’ this or what, Spellman?” I whisper, wetting my lips, trying to look past it.
Heart in my throat, he sets me down, laying me back on the blanket before hooking his fingers over the waistband of my jeans and tugging them off me. He turns to toss them on our coats, reaches in his wallet for a condom, and I pull my knit sweater over my head, the cold immediately biting into my sensitive skin. He turns, sees me, our gazes locking when he realizes my intention. I brush my hands across the blue lace of my bra before reaching behind me, before letting it fall to the ground. Slip my fingers beneath my underwear and shove them away.
“You could’ve—” he stutters, blinking past the reverence lodged in his gaze. “You’re gonna freeze.”
“So come warm me. What are you scared of?” I tease, leaning back on my forearms. His eyes roam over me as his lips part, his breath uneven, and it does something. To see him so unsettled by the sight of me.
“Honestly? That this will be over before it’s started,” he admits, dragging a hand down his face. My stomach pitches, like a tilt a whirl, dizzying me, because he can’t mean it. It’s a thing he says when he’s with women, a line he barely realized he uttered.
I watch as he grabs the collar of his sweater and pulls it over his head, and the flex of his chest, the subtle power in his forearms, the cut of those muscles from a life on the court, from years spent doing and being everything for everyone he cares about—they have my chest buzzing with want.
He kneels on the ground, then braces himself above me. My whole body flushes, pulse throttling in my throat.
“You do this all the time,” I remind him as his teeth graze past my collar bone.
“I think,” he murmurs against the center of my chest, dragging his lips back up the column of my neck. “I think you might ruin me for anyone else,” he whispers, and my hum vibrates against his lips as I consider the impossibility of it. I tell myself this is just more canned responses. More of his usual and not words that took root in him solely for me.
“I think you’re stallin’, my friend,” I tell him, and he huffs a laugh, nipping at my skin. “What’s so funny?” I run my hands down his back, feeling the dip and shift of his traps as he moves.
“It’s funny,” he says, nudging my head the other way so he can taste me there, “that I’m being honest, but you still think I’m just your friend.”
He reaches down, kicking off his pants. I hear the unmistakable roll of the condom, feel him pressed against me, and I swallow hard as I avoid looking in his eyes. Because I don’t want what I find there: the gentle care, the concern. I want him to take what he wants from me, want him to let me give him this part of me of my own volition. I don’t want this to be part of some emotional bargain because this could be so easy, if he let it.
“Wait—” I muster an amused lift of my lips. “You’re not secretly a virgin who’s gonna get all attached to me, are you?”
Emotion, unnamed and long reaching, gathers in his gaze as he slides his palm across my hips, worshipfully dragging his touch back up my body. His finger tips linger on the goosebumps, trail every small imperfection they find, before he answers me.
“Not a virgin,” he says, low in my ear, but that’s it. No other promises as he brings his mouth to mine and swallows the possibility of any reassurance with his kiss. I arch up intohim, unable to unwind myself, despite our distance from that inevitable fall. He grinds against me in long, rolling drags that have me groaning, have me pleading.
