31. Taylor
Chapter 31
Taylor
“ T his whole giant penthouse and only one fucking bed?” I hiss softly as I close the door to the room where Gemma now lays sleeping.
Ainsley laughs, and my heart lifts at the sound. I’m not sure I really understood what it was to need someone to be okay until tonight. Until I saw into the dark holdings of this man and worried that I’d lose him.
Losing him is officially not an option.
“It’s not exactly designed for a family vacation,” he says, leading me down the sweeping staircase to the ground floor.
I huff. “Do you want to go for a swim?”
He shakes his head. “Let’s save it for the morning. I’m beat.”
I nod, watching him head toward the downstairs bathroom where he put his toiletry bag earlier.
He peeks his head out a second later, eyes narrowed at me. “And you’re not swimming either, wino. First rule of drinking and swimming, never go alone. ”
I huff again, seeing the logic in his words. I’m not going to admit that diving straight into that big, empty pool was my plan as soon as he disappeared into the bedroom. “Nah. I’m ready for bed as well.”
Ainsley takes the center, something I’m silently grateful for.
It’s not that I hate sleeping with other people, it’s just that they never stop moving and making noises and getting in and out of bed. For someone who sleeps poorly on the best of nights, it’s just one more layer of awake I don’t want to deal with.
I wake when Gem gets up to use the bathroom and crawls back in bed.
I wake when Ainsley rolls to his back and pulls Gem’s torso onto his chest.
I wake when the two of them roll toward me, Gem’s arm draped gently around Ainsley’s waist.
I wake a while later, the wide-open window showing a slight brightening of the dark sky. It’s early morning, stars still twinkling, dawn on the horizon. The two of them have shifted toward my side of the bed, still wrapped around each other, facing me, inches away from where I lay.
There’s just enough light for me to trace the curves of their naked bodies, draped lightly in the white sheet. Gem’s long, slender arm curves up and around Ainsley’s chest, her delicate fingers curled in on themselves. Ainsley’s chest rises and falls with his sleeping breath, his hair messy on the pillow and obscuring one closed eye, but I watch the other. Watch his lid shift as he dreams, watch his forehead go from smooth to creased and back again.
And I have to touch him.
I don’t want to wake either of them, but I need to be in the fold.
I shift slowly and gently until I close the inch wide gap between my body and his, starting with just a knee touch, and when he doesn’t wake, I slip my arm over his chest to rest on Gem’s back where she curls tightly behind him.Ainsley stirs and shifts, his legs opening as he rolls half onto his belly, trapping my leg between his own. I slide deeper into the position until my chest just barely grazes his as we breathe together.I can’t tell if he’s still asleep or just pretending.
I feel it on my thigh first. The hardening of his dick. His hips shift just enough to press the tip into my leg and then pull back until it’s just a phantom, leaving me wondering if I actually felt it.
When he presses forward again, he’s harder, and I press back against him. There’s a definite shift in his breathing pattern, but not enough to convince me he’s awake. Throwing caution to the wind, I tighten my arm that’s draped over the two of them, holding him a bit tighter, a bit closer. I tilt my head down to rest my forehead against his with the slightest touch.
He grinds against my leg again, harder. And again. My own cock is stirring, wondering what game we’re playing here, but I make no move to include myself.
Ainsley’s rock hard now, sliding the full length of himself against my thigh, only a thin sheet separating his skin from mine.I’m struck with worry that he is still asleep, or if he’s not, that he somehow mistook this limb for one of Gemma’s in our dark tangle.
“Ainsley, that’s me,” I breathe the words, sending them over the tiny gap between our faces so softly that only he could hear.He grinds against me harder, still not opening his eyes. Not giving any signal that he’s awake or that he heard me.
“Ains—”
His hand comes out of nowhere so quickly that I can’t guard against it, aiming for my mouth, but with his eyes still tightly closed, he mostly touches my chin, only his pinkie and ring fingers landing on my lips as his thumb curls around the underside of my chin, holding tightly as he thrusts against my leg harder.
He’s clearly aware of what’s going on, so I relax into it, as much as I can relax with Ainsley touching me like this for the first time. I pull my lips apart just enough for his clasped fingers to slide between, and then I bite down on them. Not enough to hurt, just enough to hold him there.His breathing definitely shifts then, locked in his chest as his hard cock slides up and down against my bare thigh.
He comes silently, gracefully, like someone who’s been hiding his behavior for a long time. His dick is wet under the sheet as he continues to rub against me, forehead pressed to mine, fingers in my goddamn mouth.
When he stills, I relax my jaw, but he makes no move to pull his hand away. We lay there in the heavy silence, both of us breathing harder than we were a second ago—Ainsley from his orgasm, me from the weight of my own hard cock after what may have been the single hottest moment of my life.
I can’t move, can’t speak. I have no idea what to do. The longer I lay here, completely still, the less likely it seems that he’s going to say something. Sure enough, after what feels like an eternity in aching cock land, his breathing evens out and his eyelids start to shift in the dim, early morning glow.
As gently and slowly as I possibly can, I slide myself away and out of the bed. I pad barefoot down to the lower-level bathroom and close the door behind myself. When I grip my dick, I almost cry out at the sensitivity after waiting so long for its release. I come all over the inside of the marble shower stall, leaning against the glass door, panting and breathless.
The clock on the living room wall tells me it’s not even four. I curl onto one of the sofas and pull a soft throw over myself against the chill of the air conditioning, praying I can get a few hours sleep.
And somehow, after a lifetime of never sleeping two hours in a row and waking up anytime someone turns on a light three rooms away, I manage to sleep through the two of them waking up, taking showers, and making coffee in the kitchen five feet from my head.
“Morning, sleepy head,” Gem greets me with a smile when I sit up.
“Morning,” I answer, still a little dazed. “I can’t believe I slept so long.”
Gem laughs, no stranger to my insomnia. “I was just about to check if you were still alive.”
I smile at the cup of coffee she holds out, but my expression drops when I catch Ainsley, putting the cream back in the fridge, pointedly avoiding my gaze.
The night before comes flooding back to me, catching my breath in my lungs and waking up my dick, where it hangs naked between my legs.I snatch a pair of shorts from across the back of the couch and walk over to where he’s on his phone at the breakfast table. “Hey,” I say, unsure how much of this he’s going to want to talk about.
“Hey,” he responds, not looking up from his phone screen.
“I just needed to get a few hours of sleep down here. You know it’s hard for me to sleep with other people in the bed…” I trail off as I start to hear how stupid and desperate I sound.
Ainsley tosses me a split-second look and then focuses back on the screen. “Sorry for keeping you awake.”
There’s a sharpness to his tone that he fails to disguise.
“Ains—”
He stands abruptly, setting the phone on the table. “I’m going to hit the pool.” Hands in pockets, he looks at me with his mask back in place, calm and bright eyed, as if nothing in the world is bothering him.
I grind my teeth. “Ains?—”
But he walks away, jogging back up the stairs and out of sight.
“What’s that all about?” Gem asks, bringing her coffee and a croissant to the table and sliding into one of the chairs.
I chew my lip, wondering how much of what went on last night I should tell her. It’s clear Ainsley doesn’t want to talk about it, and I’m sure that means he doesn’t want me talking about it with other people…but this isn’t other people. This is Gem.
“We had a…moment last night.”
Her eyebrows raise. “Like a fight?”
I cock my head to the side. “No, like the opposite of a fight.”
Eyes wide, her mouth falls open. She’s about to demand the full story, but the man in question jogs back down the stairs wearing bright blue board shorts and carrying a striped towel. We both watch as he passes through the living room and disappears through the sliding glass doors to the pool patio.
Gem’s gaze shoots back to me. “You could have woken me up.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
I have no idea how to answer, so I just shake my head again. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
I take my coffee out to the patio where Ainsley’s setting himself up with a towel and music on the Bluetooth speakers. Reggae.
I walk over to where he stands next to the pool. He sees me too late and can’t escape without making a scene, and I know he’s not going to do that .
“We cool, man?” I ask, trying to make this as easy on him as possible.
“Yeah,” he says, giving me a quizzical look. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
Our gazes lock for a heated moment, and I can see him daring me to bring it up.
I almost do. I almost ask him what the fuck that was, him touching me for the first time right after telling his own goddamn father I was his boyfriend.
Instead, I lift both hands and give him a hard shove backwards.
Right into the pool.
His surprised cry brings a smile of satisfaction to my lips.
“Pool party,” Gem cries as she tosses her own towel on a chaise and takes a running leap into the crystal blue water, swimming over to where Ainsley’s still recovering.
Her arms around his neck bring a smile to his lips, and he turns from me, dragging her along as he swims to deeper water, stretching his long, lean body athletically as he kicks.
And so the day goes.
We swim, we tan, we nap.
Gem looks as relaxed as I’ve seen her in weeks. I know she’s stressed about her program coming to an end and having to make decisions about her future. It’s not something we’ve talked about as much as I’d like, but we’ve been distracted.
I shield my face from the splash of said distraction taking a cannonball from the low diving board. When I look back up, he’s surfacing, grinning and tossing his wet hair to one side of his face. Gem swims over to him and locks her arms around his waist. I watch him spin her around in the water and then take them both under.
This is the happiness we were searching for. It took me a little while to get on board, but I’m sure of it now. Whatever Ainsley is bringing to the table—it’s what we needed.
Just as they surface, laughing and thrashing, a voice comes from behind me.
“Mind if we crash your party?”