“Well, we’ve established we’re in love and might get married one day; what’s moving in together, eh?”
He rolled his eyes fondly, then leaned in to kiss me. I opened my lips a little to let him set the pace, and reveled in the feeling of Ben’s weight lowering onto me as he took the kiss deeper.
It amazed me that he’d never done any of this before with anyone else but seemed to be a natural at it. I could certainly remember some guys I’d kissed when I was younger who had been sloppy to the point of being disgusting while trying to kiss me.
Ben had nothing to worry about, and he had me hard from kissing alone within minutes. Eventually I groaned and wrenched my mouth away from his.
“I need a moment,” I told him, because I was headed into sensory overload where I’d either cry or come in my sweats.
Ben smiled at me. “Okay,” he said easily, then carefully got up and stood. “I think I’m going to check a couple of things for tomorrow’s workday and check my email, if that’s fine by you?”
“Yeah,” I groaned weakly, and he laughed.
I turned my head toward the TV, where a whale was swimming in crystal clear water. I closed my eyes. Ben had natural instincts when it came to turning me on, and he was using them for evil purposes, the sadist.
I loved that he knew he could do this and I would never push him for more. I’d heard so many horror stories from asexual people who had been pressured into doing things they never wanted, just to please a partner or even a date. Sometimes the people doing the pressuring had good intentions, but to me, it all boiled down to consent. I would never make an allosexual person do anything they didn’t want in a sexual situation, so why would I do that to an asexual person?
Either way, Ben had made me half-hard with one kiss at the stable earlier, after we’d untacked the horses, and now this. Clearly, he’d done some thinking and was feeling positively about intimacy at least for the time being.
* * * *
We had dinner with the guys and it turned into a game night. We hadn’t even known there was a pile of board games in a cupboard off the laundry room, but Cook showed it to us.
“I’m going to make snacks,” Rey announced.
“I’ll help him while you guys choose,” Cook added.
“We just ate?” Lake looked confused.
Theo chuckled. “Do you think you won’t get snackish if we have them at hand?”
We ended up agreeing that Monopoly would be too competitive, the edition of Trivial Pursuit was too old for anyone but Theo and maybe Cook, and that Ben and Lake would have an unfair advantage in Scrabble.
Rey bounced back as we were still trying to decide and looked into the cupboard.
“Wait, is that…” He jumped to see the top shelf. “Someone taller, take that black box down.”
Ben reached for it. “Cards Against Humanity? What’s that?”
Rey cackled. “Oh, this is the only option. Put everything else away.”
And that’s how we ended up howling with laughter at the inappropriateness of that game and what our brains came up with. Even Ben began to make more outlandish jokes with his cards, and by the time the snacks and drinks had been demolished a few hours later, we had all been wiping our faces of tears of laughter.
“Oh, Dog,” Lake hiccupped. “My abs will be so sore tomorrow.”
Everyone agreed that it would likely happen to all of us, even Rey, though he tried to tell us he’d have it easier because he was “young and in his prime.”
Theo and Lake left to go make sure the horses were okay and to let Bucky out, and Ben and I followed them to go into the cabin.
When we got in, I inhaled deeply, enjoying the scent of the wood more than I thought I would.
“It smells like a cabin,” Ben said when he noticed what I was doing.
“It does. It’s nice.”
“Yeah, I like it, too.”
We showered separately, both because we weren’t there yet and the cubicle being small, and met up in the loft.
