I stifle a laugh, trying to remain quiet. “The wait is over.”
Her heels cross at my lower back as I go deeper. It’s a tight fit, and I don’t want to hurt her, but based on the way she lifts herself to meet my thrust, it’s clear that I’m not. “More,” she begs, and a crack forms in my self-control.
“We need to go slow.”
She rolls her eyes and presses her hands against my back, closing the distance between our bodies.
I should probably remind her who’s in charge here, but her impatience is too fucking cute to address it.
“You feel so good,” I say, pressing my forehead against hers. There’s a tingling at the base of my spine, and I worry I won’t last long. “So fucking good, Linds.”
The moment I’m fully seated is also the moment the suckler attaches to her clit, and my worries fade in a flash.
She can’t stay quiet anymore, so I swallow her quivering cries with a kiss that I refuse to break until she’s come twice more. The first one unfolds like a boat climbing over a tall wave. There’s an obvious tipping point, and the fall is a long, steady ripple. The second takes longer.
“I can’t,” she murmurs against my cheek. “It’s too much.”
“You can,” I assure her. Part of me wants to ease off and let her body recover, but I have a strong hunch that she thinks she can’t come again because her exes never took the time to get her there. That’s about to change. “I know you can.”
Her grip on my shoulders is tight as she holds onto me. I shift our bodies so the suckler can reach her clit from a slightly different angle, and within three thrusts, Lindsay’s secondorgasm has her silently screaming and body bucking wildly in my arms. That’s what does me in. I come inside her wet heat, filling her up as I pepper her face with soft kisses.
By the time my heart rate returns to normal, I’m fucking spent, but I can’t seem to let go of her, even to clean up. It isn’t until I hear a knock on the door and Natalie’s cheery voice ask, “Dominic, do you know when you’ll have the schedule for next week ready?” that I extract myself from her warm embrace in a panic.
“Yup, it’ll be done tonight. That okay?” I call back. I grab the box of tissues from my desk and hand Lindsay several before taking just as many for myself. Then I dispose of them in a small trash bag that I knot and tuck under my desk, where I’ll keep it until I can personally drop it into the dumpster out back when no one’s looking.
“Okay. Thank you,” Natalie replies.
Lindsay and I struggle to right our clothes on unsteady legs, but we help each other, exchanging knowing looks and laughs when it seems like one of us is about tip over. When we look decent, I return to my desk and pretend to care about whatever is on my computer screen as Lindsay slips out the door.
Natalie invites Lindsay to Crust Lust for a slice when her shift ends, and I wonder if this is the last time I’ll see her before she leaves tomorrow. I come around the bar and open my arms to give her a goodbye hug. She wraps herself around my middle and whispers, “Coffee tomorrow morning? Meet me at the B&B at eight.”
I nod as I pull back, trying not to reveal how relieved I am, or our hushed plans. “Have fun,” is all I say before she leaves.
I’m locking up the front entrance of the bar when I’m momentarily blinded by headlights. At first, I think it’s Tilda looking for a late-night pint, or Vlad, in need of a tall glass of O negative, but it’s neither.
“Hi,” Lindsay says with a shy wave as she climbs out of her car. “In the mood for a rom-com?”
My smile is probably wide enough to show all my teeth. I don’t care. It’s her last night here until who knows when. This is not the time to play it cool. “Always.” I gesture to the door of the apartment upstairs. “Shall we?”
She narrows her gaze. “Do you secretly live here? In the most boring apartment ever?”
“No. I live in a trailer out thatta way.” I point toward the tree line, about a hundred feet away. “The interior is equally boring, I can assure you. Besides, this is closer.” It’s not that I’m ashamed of my trailer, it’s more…that I’m deeply ashamed of it. It’s not spacious at all, and beyond the appliances that were already installed when I bought it, I have a recliner, a TV, and queen-sized bed with a mattress that Vyla gave me when she upgraded hers. It’s not clean, because I don’t take the time to clean it. The apartment is clean, however, and that’s where I want Lindsay to be. At least until I have the time to properly clean the trailer before her next visit.
We brush our teeth and put onYou’ve Got Mail,but I can’t seem to follow the dialogue. The woman of my dreams is here with me, wrapped in my arms, but the only thing on my mind is how long I’ll have to wait before I get to feel this again.
Chapter 10
LINDSAY
Once I’m back in Boston, days fade into more days, which fade into weeks. It’s a slog. Board meetings and pitch meetings and marketing meetings fill my time, and my patience wears thinner with each one. I knew it would be less thrilling, of course, because in Mapletown, there lives a zombie with a heart of gold and a dick tailor-made to give me the most mind-blowing sex of my life. I just didn’t realize returning to my daily life would be this much of a bummer.
Since I got back, Nic and I still text throughout the day, and we FaceTime more nights than not. It’s nice, but it’s not the same. I miss his minty, woodsy scent, and the way he held me so tightly against him. I miss the way his body radiates warmth, even from a few feet away. We haven’t discussed labels, and that’s how I want to keep it.
I don’t like missing him, let alone giving whatever it is between us a rigid designation that dictates every aspect of our lives when we don’t even live in the same state. There’s no chance of him leaving the safety of Mapletown to move to Boston––a man walking around with green skin would not dowell here––and it’s not like I’m about to pull Jules out of school and away from her grandparents to move to a monster town.
He’s a good friend and an excellent sex partner. We should all be so lucky to find both in the same person. When the physical part of this ends, which it will, I hope there’s a chance for us to remain friends. I doubt it, though, since that hardly ever happens. He seems like the kind of guy who could be friends with his exes, which I’ve never understood. But when this thing falls apart, at least there won’t be a huge mess to clean up. We have separate lives in separate cities and won’t need to worry about awkward run-ins down the road.
It’s on a snowy Wednesday night that I convince him to show me the inside of his trailer. “The anticipation is killing me,” I tell him. “And if you’re hiding decapitated heads in your freezer, I think I have a right to know.”
