Page 57 of Her Rival

His bedroom was on the second floor and I hadn't been in it. I'd only ever been in his kitchen, his living room, the guest suite. The stairs up were lit by recessed lighting on dim. The hallway was carpeted in something soft enough that my heels didn't click. He walked behind me. He didn't touch me. He let me walk into the room ahead of him and find the bed with my own eyes, the size of it, the simple frame, the dark linen, the windows above it that looked out onto the valley.

He came in behind me. He closed the door. He turned off the overhead and turned on the lamp on the far nightstand, low, so the room was warm and yellow and dim but not dark, and I stood in the middle of the carpet and watched him do it.

He came up behind me. Didn't touch me yet. Stood close enough that I could feel him without anything actually touching. I closed my eyes again. His hand came up to the back of my neck. Light. He found the zipper at the back of my dress. He didn't pull it. He waited.

"Yes?" he said.

"Yes."

He pulled the zipper down.

The dress slid forward off my shoulders. He caught it before it hit the floor. Laid it carefully over the back of the chair near the window, like he'd been raised to take care of nice things, and then he came back to me, and his hands found my hips in the dim yellow light. I was in my bra and underwear and heels in a man's bedroom for the first time in my entire adult life, and the strange thing was that the man behind me wasn't a stranger anymore.

He turned me around.

He kissed me.

It wasn't the dry small kiss from his front step a week ago. Nothing like that kiss. This was a kiss that had been arriving in slow motion for two weeks, and it landed open and warm and unhurried, his hands staying at my hips and not roaming, and we kissed like two adults who'd finally, on the same hour, decided to do a thing they'd both been refusing to do for a long time.

He walked me backward to the bed.

He laid me down.

I lost track of the carefulness somewhere in the next few minutes. The next thing I knew the heels were off, the rest of the clothes were off, and I was naked on his bed in the warm yellow lamplight with my hands above my head against his pillow and his mouth working its way up the inside of my thigh, slow, unhurried, like he had all night and intended to spend every minute of it on me.

I still wasn't sure how the hell I'd gotten here. Naked, laid back on Jett's bed, in Jett's house, with the whole valley burning below the windows and the man I'd spent nine years not letting myself think about settling his shoulders between my thighs like he belonged there. Then the flat of his tongue dragged up the length of me, one long slow stroke, and every thought I'd been holding scattered like a flushed flock. My hands dove into his blond hair. I tugged him against me, wrapped my thighs around his face, and stopped giving a single damn about the body I'd been trained for twenty-six years to give a damn about, the body I'd spent my whole life keeping small and quiet and covered. He licked into me like a man dying of thirst who'd finally found the well and meant to drain it, slow at first, then deeper, the flat of his tongue and then the point of it, and a low sound rolled up out of his chest and into me, and I felt it everywhere.

I'd never been eaten like I was something somebody wanted to remember. That was the thought that surfaced, stupid and clear, while my hips lifted off the bed of their own accord. He wasn't getting through a thing to get to the next thing. He was here. He was settled in. He had the patience of a man who'd decided this was where he lived now and the rest of the world could wait.

My legs trembled around his shoulders inside a minute.

"Jett, fuck. Holy shit, where the. I. your tongue. it."

He came up just far enough to sear the words into me. "Shut up and take what I give you."

"Oh my god."

"There's no god for you here," he said into me, and went back down, and the filthy promise in it lit me up worse than the tongue did.

I bucked against him. I lost all sight of who this was, where I was, what was happening. Long gone was the apology I'd been carrying for nine years. Maybe it would come back. Maybe it never would. Maybe I'd apologized enough, and what was happening on this bed was the first conversation he and I had ever had that didn't run through the thing I'd done to him, or maybe it ran straight through the heart of it, and that was why it burned the way it did.

This didn't feel like an apology.

It felt like the opposite of one.

It felt like being forgiven by force.

It felt fucking incredible.

He hooked his arms over my thighs and pinned me wide open and pulled me down onto his mouth like I was a meal he'd been kept from for years, and the wet, obscene sound of it filled the whole quiet room, and I should have been embarrassed by it and instead I wanted it louder. He went slow and deliberate right where I needed him and then flicked fast, slow, fast, learning the exact shape of what undid me, watching the way my hips chased him from under heavy-lidded eyes, giving me precisely enough to chase and not one degree more. He was building me like he built everything. With his hands. On purpose. Until I held together only as long as he kept his mouth on me.

"Jett, Jett, Jett," I breathed, chanting his name as the pressure coiled tight and bright and unbearable at the base of my spine, "don't stop. Don't stop. Please. Oh, fuck."

And then he stopped.

"What?" I asked, breathless, my whole body humming at the edge of a cliff he'd just walked me back from.

"What?" he asked, as I felt the blunt tease of his fingers gather the slick at my swollen, soaking entrance and not give it to me.