His hand is already on my thigh.
When did it move there? Sometime between the temple kiss and the neck bite, his hand relocated from the booth’s backrest to my leg with the seamless, unhurried confidence of a man whose body knows where it wants to be and doesn’t negotiate with itself about the logistics. His fingers grip—firmly, the pressure landing on the muscle of my outer thigh with the possessive, anchoring weight of a palm that has claimed its position and has no intention of relinquishing it.
He speaks against my neck.
His lips still touching the skin. The words forming in the warmth of his breath and traveling through my nerve endings before they reach my ears.
“Whoever called you masculine,” he murmurs, and the voice is dark, low, carrying the specific, controlled intensity of a man who is angry about something that was done to the person he wants and is channeling that anger into a delivery that is equal parts correction and worship, “is clearly projecting their own insecurities.”
His thumb strokes my thigh.
One slow, deliberate pass through the tights’ fabric.
“Because I’ve been struggling to think straight,” he says, “just from you wearing black tights and this damn crop top that makes your perky breasts so fucking hot.”
Perky breasts.
He said perky breasts.
In a diner. At eleven a.m. With his mouth on my neck and his hand on my thigh and his voice vibrating through my skin like a bass line that my entire body is dancing to.
I am crimson.
Not blushing.Crimson. The full-spectrum, ears-to-collarbone, visible-from-space flush of a woman whose cardiovascular system has decided that modesty is a luxury it can no longer afford and has redirected all available blood flow to the surface of her face.
My heartbeat is audible. To me. Possibly to him. Possibly to the waitress and the cook and the elderly couple three booths down who are pretending to read their menus and are absolutely watching.
Oakley’s fingers find my chin.
The touch is light—a pinch, almost, the pad of his thumb and the curve of his index finger closing on the point of my jaw with the precise, gentle directive of a man who wants my face at a specific angle and is asking for it through touch rather than words.
He turns me.
My head rotates on the axis he’s set—turning from forward-facing to sideways, my eyes finding his at a distance that is measured in inches and closing fast.
He kisses me.
And this kiss is different from the barn.
The barn was restrained. Promising. A preview. This is the thing the preview was advertising.
Nice and slow.
His mouth meets mine with a pressure that is firm enough to be present and soft enough to be savored. He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t escalate. He kisses me the way a man eats a meal he’s been thinking about all day—with attention, with appreciation, with the specific, unhurried pleasure of someone who intends to experience every component rather than consume the whole.
His lips move against mine in patterns that my mouth learns and echoes—slow, deliberate, the kind of kissing that requires two people to be paying attention to each other and nothing else. His thumb stays on my chin, maintaining the angle, keeping my face tilted toward his with a gentleness that is also an instruction.
And I almost forget.
That we’re in a restaurant. That there are other people. That the ambient noise of the diner—the jukebox, the coffee machine, the conversational hum of a Wednesday lunch crowd—exists beyond the sealed, two-person universe of this booth.
I almost forget all of it.
Until a voice appears.
“Here’s the blueberry crumble cheesecake and the Oreo rocky rumble cheesecake!”
I squeak.
