I dart toward him. The short distance between us feels miles long as I clamber forward, finally pressing my lips against his. As soon as he opens his mouth to catch my tongue, a guttural moan escapes his throat and bellows into mine. I swallow its vibration and my taste that’s been sitting on his tongue.
He lets me lead while his hand slides back around my neck.
There’s nothing mechanical about our kisses—just a natural rhythm that we both fall into as if we were only meant to kiss each other for the rest of our lives.
For a long time, I thought I wouldn’t live long enough to taste a man other than AJ, but here I am sucking the breath out of Rich’s body for a second time while his hand squeezes my throat.
I moan, sucking his bottom lip into my mouth and prying his fingers from my neck. I drag them down to my racing heart.
“You feel that?” I breathe against his mouth.
He nods.
I pull his fingers from my heart and slide them between my wet legs, pushing them against my even wetter lips. “You feel that?”
“Uh-huh,” he rasps.
“Tell Rasheeda you own them. Tell her you ownmethe next time she texts you about me. You believe me when I say I belong to you now?”
“Damn, Slim…” he groans. “Straight like that?”
“Justlike that.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
RICH
I rakemy fingers through Slim’s soft hair and rock her in the chair on my back porch. The humidity makes her moist curls glide between my fingers as rain patters against the steel cover that extends over the porch.
I huff under my breath.
Arnez just doesn’t understand pretty baby birds like I do. If she did, she’d know I couldn’t just stay away from Slim. Shit didn’t work like that with me and her. Arnez wouldn’t get how satisfying it was to finally have Slim’s naked body spread out in front of me, or understand how that tingling from fourth grade came back and spread in the pit of my stomach after Slim said Iownedher. She for damn sure wouldn’t understand that Slim wanted me so bad that I smelt it on her. It floated off her body when she stood in front of me on my porch, and I hear it every time she talks to me. She wantsallof me, but I don’t think she understands that’s the one thing I can’t give her.
I pull the strap of my wife beater back over her shoulder while her bare pussy sits on my stomach.
Her first design of sophomore year lives in my house now. She let me peel it off her then made me follow her to my bedroom where she folded it and stuck it in a drawer next to my T-shirts.
“Don’t wash it…” she said. “It’s for those days when I’m not here.I sprayed my perfume on it before I left the house.”
Yeah…Arnez just wouldn’t get it.
I chuckle to myself, watching the light rain fall across my backyard.
Slim presses her ear over my heart and sighs. “Rich?”
“Yeah, Slim?”
“Can I tell you something?” she whispers.
“You can tell me anything. I don’t judge, remember?”
Her cheek lifts against my chest.
“Go ‘head. I’m listening…” I murmur.
Crickets chirp from the grass, and sirens wail in the distance while I hold my breath, waiting for her soft voice.
