Page 43 of Blueline Baby

“I know.” And I do. I know exactly what I’m asking. I ask it anyway, forehead pressed against hers, because I’ve wanted to be exactly this close to her since the night I fell through the wrong door, and I’m done pretending otherwise. “I just want to feel you. All of you, just tonight. Please, baby. Please.” I almost whimper and I’m not even embarrassed about it.

For a second she doesn’t say anything. I’m waiting for her to stop me. To send me out of the tub and dripping through the house.

“Okay,” she breathes. Then she nods, like the decision is final. “Yes. Just this once.”

When she sinks down onto me with nothing between us, the sound that comes out of me isn’t a word. It’s just air. I’ve never felt anything like it, and I know right then that I’m ruined for anything that isn’t her. She goes still. Both of us are breathing hard, foreheads pressed together, and for a moment neither of us moves.

“Okay?” she whispers.

“No.” I get a hand in her wet hair, half-laughing, wrecked. “I’m never gonna be okay again. You’ve ruined me. Please move before I lose my mind.”

She rolls her hips, and that’s it for me. I get a solid grip on her and pull her down. She feels so good with nothing in the way that I have to stop and lock my jaw to keep from finishing in the first thirty seconds, like it’s the first time anyone’s ever touched me. She braces her hands on my shoulders and finds the angle she wants, and I let her take exactly what she needs, right up until she leans down and kisses me.

It’s deep and messy, her tongue sliding against mine, and when I groan into her mouth she catches my bottom lip between her teeth and bites, and I feel it all the way to my toes.

I keep her locked against me, meeting her every time she comes down. “Baby, I’m close. I’ll pull out, I swear I will, but you gotta come for me first. Please. Please, Chloe, come on.”

“I’m close.” She’s panting into my shoulder, moving faster. “Don’t you dare stop moving.”

I drive up into her, almost gone. “Fuck, Chloe, if you don’t come right now, I can’t last.”

That’s what breaks her. She shatters around me with a cry, clenching down so hard she nearly drags me over the edge with her. Her whole body wrings me out. It’s the best and worst thing I’ve ever felt, because I’m exactly one heartbeat from finishing right there inside her.

I get my arms around her, haul her up off me, and stand. Water sheets off both of us and slaps down onto the floor. She’s still coming down, breathing hard. Then she drops to her knees in the cooling water and reaches for me.

She wraps a hand around my cock and looks up with her mouth parted, and that’s all it takes. I watch as everything I was barely holding onto jets out across her tongue and her cheek while she strokes me through every last pulse.

For a second, all I can do is stand there with my chest heaving. Then I lift her out of the tub, grab one of the big towels stacked by the sink, and bundle her into it.

She stands there and lets me dry her off. I press my mouth to her temple and pull her close, breathing her in.

“Okay,” she says, still catching her breath. “That wasn’t in the plan either.”

“None of the best things ever are.”

Tomorrow the house fills up. But tonight it’s just us, and I’ve never in my life wanted a morning to come slower.

“Whatever comes next,” I say into her hair, mostly to myself, “we’ll figure it out. I meant that part too.”

22

CHLOE

JACK IS SO CAREFUL

The rink where Jack’s team holds their preseason practices is exactly twenty-two minutes out of my way to campus. He’s been casually asking me to come watch all week and I finally had enough of a break in my schedule to show up.

There are maybe fifty people sitting in an arena built to hold eighteen thousand. There’s no music playing. No announcer. It’s just the harsh echo of whistles, the scrape of skate blades, and a coach screaming out positional drills.

I sit down by myself a few rows up and open a math textbook. I know I’m not actually going to read it. I’m too busy watching Jack skate around looking extremely, insufferably cocky during his drills.

I last maybe four minutes alone before I see Lorelei waving at me from behind the glass, standing in a little clustered group of women. So I pack up my entirely decorative textbook and go sit with the wives.

She starts rattling names off entirely too fast for my brain to process. Two of the women I recognize from the suite last season. The rest I don’t. I’ve just finished nodding along to Lorelei’s introductions when Jack finally spots me from the ice.

I know the exact second he does, because he fumbles the puck.

At the water break, he coasts over to the boards. He stops in a little spray of ice, grinning at me through the heavy glass like I’m a complete surprise and not the girl who promised him she’d stop by before her 10:00 a.m. class.