Chapter 26 Benji #3
“Off,” he says. “I need to touch you.”
I pull my shirt over my head and drop it on the counter beside me. The air hits my bare skin. Mickey goes still. He’s seen me on his phone — the bathroom mirror photo, the thirst trap with the staged sheets. But he’s never seen me shirtless in person. Never been this close with nothing between us.
His gaze starts at my throat. The silver chain first, sitting in the hollow above my sternum.
Then down. Across my chest, smooth and lean.
Nothing like his. Over the flat plane of my stomach.
A faint tan line across my hips from running shirtless on the beach in Miami.
I don’t suck anything in or straighten my spine. What he sees is what he gets.
“You’re beautiful,” he tells me.
I’ve been called beautiful before. By men in clubs who were looking at the eyeliner and my tight jeans, saying beautiful the way you’d compliment a car you wanted to drive.
By my mother, who means a different thing by it — beautiful like be careful, beautiful like the world might punish you for this.
I’ve heard the word so many times it stopped having meaning.
Mickey says four unnecessary words a week. So, when he uses a word like beautiful, I know he chose it carefully before saying it out loud.
Beautiful, from his mouth, means I see all of you and I’m not looking away.
“Fair’s fair.” I’m barely functioning as I tug the hem of his shirt. “Your turn.”
He grips the fabric and pulls it over his head in one motion. The shirt lands on the tile and his chest is bare. I stare openly and without apology, needing him to see that he’s wanted.
I reach forward and put my palm flat on his chest. His skin is scorching. His heartbeat slams against my hand hard enough that I feel it in my own palm.
His jaw flexes. Then something shifts behind his eyes. Not hunger exactly. More like a decision being made.
“Hop down,” he says.
I blink. “What?”
“Hop off the counter and turn around. Put your back to me.”
I slide off the counter. My bare feet hit the cool tile and I turn, giving him my back.
“Now sit down,” he says. “On my lap.”
I turn my head and look at him over my shoulder. “Sit on your lap? Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah. Come here.”
“Mickey, will I—I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“You’re a hundred and fifty pounds. I bench-pressed more than that. Sit down.”
“Mickey, what if I squash something important? Like your dick? And you don’t even know it? And then it’s flat forever?”
He chuckles. “You won’t.”
“You don’t know that. I might be only a hundred and fifty pounds, but those pounds are made of reckless decision-making and you’re inviting me to sit on your dick.”
“Benji. Sit. The. Fuck. Down.”
“Okay, if you insist.”
I lower myself carefully. His hands find my hips and guide me down.
I settle onto his thighs, my back against his bare chest. His skin is against my skin from my shoulder blades to the base of my spine.
The coarse hair on his chest grazes the smooth plane of my back.
The solidity of him behind me, wide and immovable, is a wall of hard muscle that I sink into.
His arms come around me. Both of them. Wrapping across my chest and pulling me tighter against him until there is no gap between his body and mine. His forearms cross below my collarbones and his hands settle on my ribs, and neither of us moves.
“Finally,” he says into my hair. “This is where I’ve been wanting you forever. Wrapped up in my arms where I can touch you. Kiss you.”
I reach up and grip his forearms, one hand on each, because I need to hold onto something or I’m going to dissolve.
His arms are thick under my palms. These arms carry him everywhere his legs can’t.
They lift him out of bed every morning. They lower him into the chair.
They are the strongest part of him because they have to be.
Right now, they’re wrapped around me. Tight. Inside Mickey’s arms I feel held in a way that rewrites the word. Enclosed and protected. Like he drew a circle around me with his body and nothing on the outside can get in.
I learned early that safety was my own job. That nobody was going to step between me and whatever was coming for me. I built a life around that belief. I got so good at it that I forgot what it felt like to let someone else hold the weight.
Mickey’s arms remember for me.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. The first press of his lips against my nape sends a shiver straight down my spine.
He kisses the spot where my hair ends and my skin begins, soft and barely there, just the brush of his lower lip against the sensitive skin.
His breath fans across the dampness he leaves behind.
Every tiny hair on the back of my neck stands up and a ripple of goosebumps cascades down both my arms.
“I can’t see your face,” I say.
“Watch in the mirror.”
I lift my eyes and catch sight of us in the mirror above the sink.
Mickey behind me, his bare chest broad against my narrower frame, his blonde head bent to my neck, his arms wrapped around me.
And me, flushed, my lips swollen from the kissing, my eyes wide, sitting in his lap like I was made to fit there.
His mouth moves to the side of my neck. He drags his lips along the tendon below my ear, tasting, and the scratch of his stubble against the tender skin there makes me grip his forearms harder. My hands dig into the muscle and he makes a low sound against my neck.
“Do you know how many nights I’ve thought about holding you like this?” he says against my ear. His breath is hot and his lips graze the outer edge. “Lying in that bed. Thinking about pulling you against my chest. Running my fingers through your hair. I dream about your hair, Benji.”
His hand lifts from my ribs and slides into my hair.
His fingers push through from the crown to the back of my skull, spreading wide, the pads dragging across my scalp, and my head tips back against his shoulder.
The sensation of his big hand moving through my hair is so good it makes my eyes flutter shut.
“Smelling your hair,” he says. His nose presses into the spot behind my ear and he breathes in deeply.
Being smelled by Mickey, him pulling air through my hair and holding it in his lungs, undoes me more than the kissing did.
“I imagined what it would be like to wake up every morning with the smell of your hair on my pillowcase.”
“God, Mickey.”
“Kissing your neck.” He presses his mouth to the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, and the kiss is open and wet.
His teeth find the muscle there and bite hard.
He keeps going, his mouth never losing contact, the scrape of stubble leaving a trail of fire across my shoulder.
“Feeling the goosebumps come up under my mouth.”
He’s right. They’re everywhere. I can see them in the mirror — my arms covered in them. Every word he says against my skin raises a new wave and the waves keep rolling.
“Every single night I think about this,” he says. “Having you against me. Feeling your skin under my hands. Finding out what makes you come apart. I thought I would never get the chance and now you’re here.”
His hand slides out of my hair and down.
Across the side of my neck, over my collarbone, and onto my chest where his palm flattens.
He holds there for a moment. Feeling my heartbeat the way I felt his.
Then his hand begins to move with the flat of his palm dragging down the center of my chest, between the pecs.
He’s learning my body the same way I learned his during all those nights with the cream, except his hands are bigger and the noises I’m making are louder.
His thumb finds my left nipple. My whole body jolts in his lap. A sound tears out of me that bounces off every tile surface in the bathroom and probably reaches the hallway and possibly the parking lot.
“Oh fuck,” I gasp. “Oh fuck, Mickey, that’s — oh my God.”
“You’re sensitive,” he says. A grin is living in his voice. He just found a button and is not above pressing it again.
“Extremely sensitive. I should’ve warned you about that before you —”
He does it again. A leisurely circle with his thumb, tracing the edge before grazing the center. His refusal to rush turns the sharp jolt into a sustained burn that radiates from the point of contact outward through my chest and down into my stomach.
“Mickey. If you keep —”
“Keep what?” Another circle.
“Doing that. I’m going to — I can’t — the noises, Mickey. I told you about the noises. I’m not joking. The nurse situation is about to become critical.”
His other hand comes up and finds the right one. Both thumbs now, moving in tandem, synchronized circles that are dismantling me from the chest down, and a sound comes out of me that is part moan and part plea. It’s very loud. It echoes.
He was warned. That’s all I can do.
“The door is locked,” he says into my ear. The genuine enjoyment he’s taking in what he’s doing to me is almost hotter than the touching itself. He’s having fun with my body and the fun is bringing joy back to his face. Pure, simple, joy in making another person fall apart.
I grab his arms again. My hands can’t fully close around his biceps — the muscle is too thick — and the fact that I can’t get my fingers all the way around excites me.
I’ve never been with a muscular man. The men I’ve been with in Miami were lean, slender, bodies that mirrored my own.
Mickey’s arms are something else entirely.
I run my palms down to his forearms and the veins stand out beneath the skin, thick and branching.
I trace one with my fingertip from his inner elbow to his wrist. The vein pulses faintly under my touch.
His blood running just beneath the surface, alive and insistent.