He went very still and very silent then, which made her wonder if she’d said completely the wrong thing. It sounded kind of unfair when she put it like that, and it made her want to take it back. He was being so cool with her, after all. Surely there was a way they could do this without making him feel uncomfortable?
She hoped there was, because he sounded odd when he finally spoke.
“You want to just do things to me?” he asked, only he wasn’t really asking at all.
He was repeating what she’d said, with a stripe of deadpan right down the middle.
“I don’t know. I guess I—I mean we don’t have to do that. It was just a—”
“How would you go about that?”
“What? What do you—”
“How would you go about doing stuff to me?”
She hesitated then, unsure of how to answer. This time it had nothing to do with nerves, however. She suspected there was nothing to be nervous about. His tone had sort of shifted, from something she’d read as vaguely mocking to this much deeper and more direct sound.
He really wanted to know.
He wanted to know so much it was sort of making him all grave and intense. His eyes had turned from bright blue to that dark navy, and no matter how long she went without answering he just kept right on looking at her. He stared until she was sure she had two burning holes through her body—which probably should have felt bad.
Yet somehow it didn’t.
It spurred her on, instead.
“I could probably...start like this,” she said, then took a step forward, and just reached forward a little. Just to get hold of the hem of his t-shirt maybe, to give him an idea. That way, if he didn’twantthe idea she could pretend it wasn’t what he thought. She wasn’t suggesting she strip off his clothes at all. She was simply toying with the material.
Or at least, she was until he responded.
Dear God, his voice when he responded.
“Oh like that, huh?” he asked, so low and lust-roughened she had to accept it. He was turned-on at the thought of her taking his clothes off. He was turned-on by all of this, no matter how hard she tried to make it otherwise.
“Yeah, unless you—” she started.
But he cut her off before she could finish. “There’s no unless.”
“Are you sure, because—”
“There’s no unless. Go on,” he said.
So she did. She slid a hand under the t-shirt she’d chosen for him, with the smiling face of David Hasselhoff on the front. Every breath shuddering in and out of her as if she’d just run up a hill, most of her body trembling and trembling with a sort of excitement she barely understood.
It seemed like far too much, for a slight touch to someone’s lower abdomen. But if it was, then he obviously hadn’t received the memo. He looked the way she felt. His face was flushed from jaw to hairline, and he seemed to have forgotten what breathing was. Each time he attempted it he got stuck halfway, until he was just making this hitching sound. This really, really interesting hitching sound that reminded her of moaning.
But he couldn’t be moaning, could he? They hadn’t even done anything yet.
She didn’t know how to do anything. She was just operating on some previously unknown instinct—one that told her to keep sliding her hand up and up until she could feel all that lovely chest hair and those big, firm muscles. Then once she was there it didn’t take much to move her hand around a bit. He felt so good it was kind of an imperative. She wanted to stroke and squeeze and feel things out.
And she wanted to do it with both hands. Would he mind if she put both hands up there? His expression seemed to say no, but then his expression would have probably accepted anything. He looked so intense and turned-on it kind of scared her to glance up. She had to focus on fondling him just to keep herself sane.
But even that came with problems.
For a start, it was more exciting than she had initially imagined. She kept thinking of the wordgropeand getting this odd burst of sensation through her. She was groping him in a really eager, greedy kind of way, and that idea was bizarrely arousing. Her nipples had gone all stiff again just like they had in the bathroom, and when she moved she could really feel something between her legs.
Everything seemed slippery down there. Slippery and enormous.
And that was before he spoke.
