Chapter 18
Carrie
I rose up on my toes to meet his mouth, and the last two weeks dissolved like a headline nobody remembered to save.
The first kiss had been slow. Deliberate.
A question. This was the answer, and it was not polite about it.
His hands slid into my hair, fingers tangling, tilting my head back with a possessiveness that sent a pulse straight down through my center.
My toes curled when our tongues met. Two weeks.
Two weeks of telling myself I'd imagined how good this was, and my body was calling every one of those lies by name.
He tasted like beer and want and the particular recklessness of a man who'd just decided to stop fighting something. I could feel the decision in him, the moment the brakes came off, and it was intoxicating in a way that had nothing to do with the alcohol.
He walked me backward. Hands on my hips, mouth never breaking, guiding me through his apartment like he'd rehearsed the route.
My back hit the front door with a thud I barely registered.
Cool wood against my shirt. Hot body against my front.
The contrast ran through me like a current, and I made a sound into his mouth that I was going to pretend I hadn't made.
Then his mouth moved.
Down my jaw. Along the column of my neck. Finding that spot just below my ear, the one that existed solely to undo me, and he smiled against my skin before his teeth grazed it, light, deliberate, just enough pressure to make heat flood low and fast.
"Matt," I breathed, my hands fisting in his shirt.
He hummed against my throat, and the vibration traveled down my spine and set up camp somewhere unhelpful. He found the hem of my shirt and went under, warm palms climbing my ribs, and the feeling of rough skin on bare skin after two weeks without it was so good it nearly made me cry.
Not a poetic exaggeration. My eyes actually stung. Because his touch on my body felt like forgiveness. Like a second draft nobody gives you. Like the cruelest, most generous thing a man can do to a woman who hurt him, which is to touch her gently anyway.
He cupped my breasts through my bra, thumbs brushing over my nipples in slow circles, and I arched into it, pressing myself against his palms. He reached behind me, unclasped the bra with one hand, and it fell between us.
His thumbs found my bare nipples, hard and sensitive, rolling them until I whimpered, then pinching lightly, and the sharp pulse of it shot straight down between my legs.
I was already wet. Already soaked through my underwear in a way I'd have been embarrassed about if I'd had the bandwidth for embarrassment.
I could feel it, slick and hot, ruining whatever was left of my composure.
My hips rocked forward against his thigh, chasing friction I hadn't been invited to take, and the hard ridge of him pressed against my hip, thick and unmistakable through his jeans, and the size of him, the physical proof of what I was doing to him, made my stomach clench with want.
The sound he made when I ground against him, low and rough and wrecked, shut down whatever remained of my professional composure.
His fingers went to my buttons. Working them open while his mouth moved down my collarbone.
One button. Two. Three. The fabric fell open and cool air hit me for a half-second before his mouth was on my breast, hot and wet, sucking my nipple in deep.
I cried out, my back arching off the door, my hand going to the back of his head to hold him there.
His tongue circled, flicked, then he bit down gently and the sting bloomed into heat that radiated all the way to my clit.
He moved to the other breast, giving it the same devastating attention, and I could feel myself dripping, my underwear ruined, my body screaming for him to go lower.
Each kiss felt like a claim. Not aggressive.
Patient. Like he was charting a map he intended to use for a very long time, and the precision of it, the care, made me feel simultaneously powerful and transparent and terrified, because no one had ever paid this kind of attention to my body and I had no framework for what to do with it.
And the thing that was wrecking me, the thing underneath the want, was that he was choosing to do this.
After everything. After the parking lot, the photos, the headlines, the two weeks of silence.
He had every reason to keep me at arm's length and instead he was unbuttoning my shirt with steady hands and pressing his mouth to every inch he uncovered like I was something worth being slow about.
I didn't deserve this. The thought arrived clean and cold in the middle of all that heat, and I couldn't push it out. I'd hurt him. Badly. And here he was on his knees in front of his own door, treating my body like a gift.
For once in my life, the media strategist had no strategy.
Then he dropped to his knees.
Without warning. Without negotiation. Just sank down in front of me like that was a perfectly normal thing to do in an entryway, and the sight of Matt Baker looking up at me from the floor with blown-dark eyes and wet lips and his hands on my hips made my brain produce nothing but static.
"Carrie," he said. Just my name. But the way he said it, rough and reverent, made my knees buckle.
His hands went to the button of my jeans.
Popped it. Then the zipper, pulled down slowly, so slowly, his eyes on mine the entire time.
He hooked his fingers in the waistband and eased the denim down, inch by inch, over my hips, my thighs, my calves.
I kicked them off and stood there in my bra and underwear, pinned against his door, and the version of myself that usually narrated these situations had clocked out without notice.
I should have felt exposed. Vulnerable. A woman in her underwear in someone else's entryway, pinned against the same door she'd been asked to leave through not that long ago.
But the way he looked at me from his knees, like I was the answer to a question he'd been afraid to ask, made exposure feel like the point.
Like the whole exercise of being known by someone was exactly this.
Standing still. Letting them see you. Trusting that what they saw was enough.
I wasn't sure I trusted that. But my body had overruled the committee.
He pressed his mouth to my inner thigh, just above the knee.
An open, hot kiss that made my legs shake.
Then higher. His tongue traced a pattern on the soft skin that I couldn't follow and didn't try to.
Higher still. His breath warm against me, getting closer and closer to where I was already soaked and desperate.
"Please," I whispered, and I didn't care how it sounded. The woman who controlled messaging for a living was begging, and the irony was not lost on me and I genuinely did not give a damn.
He looked up. The smile he gave me was slow, knowing, pure masculine satisfaction, the smile of a man who understood exactly what he was doing to someone and had no plans to rush.
Then his fingers hooked in the elastic of my underwear, shifted the fabric to one side, and put his mouth on me.
The first stroke of his tongue went through me like a current.
Flat, slow, licking up through my folds from bottom to top, parting me, tasting me, and my head fell back against the door hard enough to hurt.
A moan escaped, raw and desperate. He licked again, slower this time, savoring, and I could feel how wet I was against his tongue, could hear the obscene slickness of it, and instead of embarrassment all I felt was hunger for more.
He circled my clit with the tip of his tongue, then flattened it in broad strokes that made my vision blur, and I grabbed for his hair because I needed something to hold onto while the rest of me came apart.
His hands gripped my thighs, keeping me spread, keeping me upright, digging in hard enough to leave marks I'd find tomorrow and not regret.
Then he pushed his tongue inside me, and I stopped thinking entirely.
Not in the cinematic way where thoughts scatter like petals.
In the total-system-failure way. The operating system crashed.
The strategist, the narrator, the woman who always had a take on the situation, gone.
Just his mouth and my body and the obscene, consuming pleasure of being unmade by someone who knew exactly where the seams were.
He found my clit again, circled it, sucked, and I cried out, hips jerking forward into his face, and he groaned against me and the vibration amplified everything.
My grip locked in his hair and pulled, and he groaned again, harder, like the pulling was something he wanted, and the sound went straight through me.
He worked me with his mouth, relentless, alternating between focused pressure on my clit and those devastating broad strokes, and I was losing things.
The composure. The self-narration. The ability to stand here and editorialize on what was happening to me instead of just feeling it.
He was stripping away every layer of the woman who performed for a living until there was nothing left but nerve endings and need and the terrifying awareness that I was trusting someone with the most unguarded version of myself, and that someone had every reason not to be gentle, and was being gentle anyway.
Then his hand moved from my thigh. Two fingers pushed inside me, and I gasped at the stretch, the fullness, the feeling of being opened up and filled while his tongue kept working my clit.
He curled his fingers, found the spot, pressed, and my legs nearly buckled.
The dual sensation, his tongue circling and his fingers stroking that swollen place inside me, was so intense my vision went white at the edges and a sound came out of me that I would have been mortified by if I'd had any capacity left for shame.
The orgasm built fast. My inner walls clenching rhythmically around his fingers, my clit pulsing under his tongue, every muscle in my body winding tighter. I could feel it gathering, that impossible pressure at my core, the pleasure stacking on itself until I couldn't breathe properly.
"Don't stop," I managed. "God, please don't stop."
He didn't. His tongue kept going, he kept curling inside me, fucking me with his fingers in a slow, deliberate rhythm that matched his mouth, and I was right there, right on the edge, my thighs trembling, my hips rolling against his face, every nerve pulled taut and one stroke away from breaking.
The doorbell rang.
Loud. Insistent. The sound of it crashing through the room like a brick through a window.
"No," I gasped, grip tightening in his hair. "Ignore it."
He didn't stop. His tongue pressed harder, trying to carry me over before the interruption could steal it, and I was so close, so unbelievably close.
The doorbell again. Then pounding. Fists against the door, rattling the wood against my bare back, and a thick baritone voice calling from the other side.
"Matt! Open up, man!"
Matt's mouth slowed. Stopped. He pulled back, and the loss of contact ripped a sound out of me that was half whimper, half profanity.
His fingers slid out of me and my body clenched around nothing, the emptiness obscene after how full I'd been.
My whole body was shaking, throbbing, stranded at the peak of something it wasn't going to get to finish.
I could feel my pulse between my legs, insistent and furious, and the ache of it was physical enough to make my eyes sting.
He looked up at me from his knees. Lips wet with me. Eyes dark. Jaw tight with an expression equal parts apology and fury.
"I'm going to kill whoever's on the other side of that door," he said, his voice wrecked.
"Get in line."
More pounding. "Matt! Come on!"
He stood slowly, steadying me first, one hand on my waist, because my legs had genuinely considered resignation.
I grabbed my jeans, pulled them on with hands that wouldn't cooperate, buttoned my shirt with fingers that missed the first two attempts.
Matt ran his hand through his hair, took a breath that didn't settle, adjusted himself in his jeans with a wince that told me he was in his own private hell.
"Stay," he said, looking at me. "Please stay."
Three times since I'd met him, this man had told me to leave. Go away. Get out of his life. And now, standing in his doorway, half-dressed and shaking and one doorbell ring away from the best orgasm of my life, he was asking me to stay.
The word landed on something that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with being wanted. Being chosen. Being the person someone turns to when the door is about to open on whatever's next, even after you've given them every reason to face it alone.
My chest ached with the weight of it.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. And meant it in more ways than the sentence could hold.
He looked at me for one more second, long enough for me to see the gratitude and the frustration and the heat all competing for space on his face. Then he turned to the door.
Took a breath.
Opened it.