Chapter 17 #2
"That didn't take you long," she observes, settling deeper into the seat.
"Figured I'd catch you this way."
"Nice PJs, Callahan." She smirks, hugs her knees closer, looks straight ahead.
I pull out from the curb with a matching smirk and don't answer that.
She turns to watch the dark street moving past her window, and I drive, and neither of us feels the need to fill it. That's always been one of the things I like about being in this car with her. She doesn't perform comfort. She just is.
Except it isn't the same silence it used to be. This car used to feel like neutral ground, the one place we could exist near each other without everything pressing in. Now it feels like all of that is sitting in the back seat, present and patient, waiting to be acknowledged.
"Drive around?" she asks quietly.
I drive around.
I take the long way along the water, the road that curves past the harbor where the boats sit quietly in their slips and the street lamps make gold stripes on the black surface below. She watches it with her chin tipped up. I watch the road. And I watch her.
We don't talk. I don't need her to talk. We can just be here and it's enough.
I park as close to the water as I can get and settle back to watch the tide shift.
She leans forward and presses the screen until she finds what she's looking for, hits play, and sits back. The opening beat comes through the speakers, a slow unhurried pulse. I recognize it in about four seconds, though I couldn't name it.
She has her head back against the seat, eyes fixed on the water, so I take her in.
The line of her profile. That mouth with the curve in the middle that makes her look like she's always halfway to a pout.
I could reach out and trace that line, press my face into her hair and breathe her in.
I want to rest my face in the crook of her neck and stay there until my heart goes back to normal.
Our eyes meet across the dim glow of the dashboard. I don't know which one of us is going to break first. I'm gripping the wheel harder than necessary, and her expression says she's waiting for permission she shouldn't want.
And just like that, the fight leaves me. All of it. Gone.
"One song," I say. Surely, I am allowed to have her for one song only?
Her eyes soften, the want in them so obvious it almost hurts.
"Just one song," she echoes, barely above a whisper.
I unbuckle her belt. She unfolds from her seat and slides across the console into my lap.
My hands find her hips before I can think better of it, fingers pressing into the soft give of her through her clothes, pulling her flush against me. I exhale, finally.
She's in my arms, in my hands, on me. My thumbs trace the curve of her hips through the fabric like they've been aching to, and I can finally let go of that death grip on the wheel. The one I hold like a lifeline every time I'm near her, just so I don't do exactly this.
My whole body is tuned to her in a way that feels dangerous. But so right.
Then she moves, and that is the end of anything reasonable. She kisses me first this time. Slower than the frantic heat of the firehouse, slower than the stolen press on the porch. But god, the certainty of it.
Her thumbs dig into my jaw, holding me steady as her lips part mine. One touch is gentle while the other is urgent, and her tongue slips in to taste me, hot and wet, curling against mine in a slow teasing drag that pulls a groan out of me I couldn't stop if I tried.
I lick into her mouth and nip at her lower lip just hard enough to make her gasp, and the sound goes straight to my cock. She tastes so good I want to live in her mouth.
Her breath hitches, desperate little pants between the deep, devouring press of us.
And then she rocks against me, harder. Her pussy rubbing over my cock through the thin barriers of fabric, insistent and greedy. I'm thrusting up to meet her before I can think, chasing it, needing it. I need it so bad.
My mouth breaks from hers to kiss the rest of her face, teeth grazing because I am hungry, in a hurry. I find her collarbone and latch on, sucking hard enough to mark her, to leave something on her skin that says I was here.
She arches into me and makes a sound that's going to live in my head for the rest of my natural life, so I stay there longer, tongue laving over the spot. She’s all warm skin and that faint floral shampoo and her.
My cock aches for her. Her grind turns erratic, hips chasing pressure, and I'm losing my mind. I'm losing my fucking mind.
"Callahan..."
My name in her voice is barely above a whisper, a plea.
A groan rips out of me, the kind of sound I've never made before, because I've never had Lily like this before. She presses closer, thighs clamping around my hips, nails scraping lightly over my scalp like she's trying to anchor us both to something.
Her hands move from my face into my hair, and mine find the hem of her hoodie and slip underneath to the skin of her waist.
She's in my lap in my car on a dark street at two thirty in the morning. The windows are fogging at the edges. There's nobody here.
She shifts against me and I pull her in with one hand flat across her back. We are one clear decision away from all of it. One decision. I'm ready to make it. My hips buck up to chase that wet friction and I can already picture her later, on her knees, calling herself mine because she is.
Then headlights sweep across the windshield. Her hands stop in my hair. Mine still against her skin. We freeze in that suspended breath, caught like teenagers, and for a second I don't care. I almost don't care.
The car passes at normal speed and disappears in seconds. She exhales, and only then do I let myself do the same.
We sit there in the dark, panting, the decision unmade between us like something fragile neither of us wants to be the one to break.
"Hi." Her voice is broken in a very specific way that I feel in my core.
"Hi."
My thumb moves once against her ribs and she closes her eyes. I take her in: lashes dark against her cheeks, mouth soft and wet, hands loosely in my hair like she's forgotten they're there.
The song ends at some point. The playlist moves on to something that doesn't matter.
I reach past her and press the screen. The opening beat comes back, low and slow and unmistakable. Her eyes open.
"Just one song," I whisper, my hand moving up her spine, and she goes pliant under my touch.
I gather her hair back with both hands, all of it. "Still just one song."
And then I do the one thing I'll never regret. I take her mouth with mine.