Chapter 5 #2
Because now he's looking at me the way he described in his messages.
"Hi," he says, softly. And his voice drops into that register, the one from the phone, and my entire body responds like a switch being flipped.
"Hi," I say back.
His eyes go soft and tender. "I really need to hold you. Can I please?"
And something about the desperate gentleness of the ask, after weeks of baring our souls to each other through screens and phone lines, makes my eyes sting…and my voice comes out thick and cracked.
"God, yes. Quickly, ‘cause I think my legs are going to give out."
He crosses the room in two strides and his arms wrap around me—strong and sure and warm—and I collapse into him.
My hands fist the back of his shirt and I press my face against his chest and he pulls me in tighter, one hand cradling the back of my head, and I can feel his heart pounding as hard as mine.
We're laughing, but it's that shaky, wet kind of laughter that's one breath away from tears. The kind that happens when something you've been carrying alone for so long suddenly has someone else holding the weight.
"I've got you, baby," he murmurs into my hair, his voice rough and breaking at the edges. "Everything's going to be all right."
I clutch him tighter and press my forehead against the solid warmth of his chest and just breathe.
He smells of zesty soap and the woods. And he's here.
The man behind the words is standing in front of me with his arms around me, and he's not running away, he's not disappointed, and the world hasn't ended.
We hold one another for a long time. Long enough for my legs to steady and my breathing to even out and the laughter to settle into something that feels like the beginning of everything.
Janis directs us to our cabin after, and the walk there is surreal…his hand on the small of my back, both of us stealing glances at one another like teenagers, laughing at nothing because the joy is too big to contain.
The cabin is gorgeous: timber-framed, candlelit, with a dining table set for two in front of floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the mountainside. There's wine, a gorgeous spread of food under silver cloches, and a fire already crackling in the stone hearth.
It's romantic as hell, and neither of us can focus on any of it.
We try. We really do. He pulls out my chair, and I sit, and we lift the covers off the plates—seared salmon, roasted vegetables, something with risotto—and it smells incredible and I cannot even process it since he's right there.
His forearms are resting on the table and I'm staring at his hands, thinking about everything those hands promised to do to me, and my mouth has gone completely dry.
I stand up. "I'm going to grab water for us from the kitchen."
It's a flimsy excuse. I just need to move, to breathe, to collect the nineteen thousand nerve endings that are currently firing at once. I cross the cabin to the small kitchen alcove, open a cabinet, reach for a glass—
And he's behind me.
I don’t remember hearing him get up. But I feel him…the warmth of his body, the nearness of him, the displacement of air that says I'm done pretending I can sit across a table from you and not touch you.
"Camille." My name in his mouth sounds holy.
I turn around and he's inches away. His hands come up to cradle my face, and his thumbs trace my cheekbones, and his eyes are dark now and completely focused on me.
"If you want to wait until after dinner," he says, his voice low and rough, "I will. But I need you to know that I've been thinking about touching you for weeks and you're so beautiful it physically hurts to be in this room and not be kissing you."
"The salmon can wait," I whisper.
His mouth is on mine in an instant.
And every flirty message, every late-night confession, every word we typed or whispered in the dark comes rushing to the surface like a wave that's been building for miles.
His mouth is hot and firm and hungry, and my back hits the wall as his body presses against mine. His hands are sliding into my hair and I'm kissing him back with everything I have—weeks of desire and years of loneliness and the wild, reckless hope that this is actually happening.
He groans against my lips…a deep, aching sound that vibrates through my chest. "You have no idea how long I've wanted this."
"I have some idea," I breathe, and he laughs into the kiss, and then his mouth moves to my jaw, my neck, and I'm gripping his shirt as if it's the only thing tethering me to earth.
"God, you smell incredible," he murmurs against my throat. "You feel even better than I imagined, and trust me—I imagined a lot."
"Same." I pull him closer, and he presses his hips against mine and I can feel how hard he is, and a moan slips out.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. His eyes are wild, his breathing ragged.
The playfulness is still there, but underneath it there's an intensity that makes my knees weak.
He holds my gaze as he sinks down. Slowly. His hands slide from my waist to my hips to my thighs as he drops to his knees in front of me.
I can only blink. Is he—?
"I've been thinking about this," he says, voice raw and low, looking up at me from the floor as if I'm some kind of angel. "About tasting you. About making you come on my tongue. I've thought about it every single night since that phone call."
I can barely breathe. "Chevy—"
"Please, baby. Let me take care of you." He pushes up my dress, gathering the fabric at my hips. The air hits my bare thighs and I shiver. He presses his lips to the inside of my knee and I make a sound that's somewhere between a whimper and a moan.
"These thighs," he groans, kissing higher. "Fucking gorgeous." He lifts my left leg and drapes it over his shoulder, and the stark intimacy of it—his face between my legs, his hands gripping me, his breath hot against the thin fabric of my panties—makes my head fall back against the wall.
"You're soaked," he murmurs, and the awe in his voice nearly kills me. He drags his nose along the seam of my panties, inhaling deep, and the sound he makes is obscene. "You smell so good. Fuck me.”
He merely tugs my panties to the side, and the first stroke of his tongue on my pussy tears a cry out of me so loud it echoes off the cabin walls.
"Oh my god—"
"Yes…" he says against me, the words vibrating through my sensitive flesh. "I want to hear every delicious sound you make."
Then he gets to work with the single-minded focus of a man who has, indeed, been thinking about this moment for weeks and intends to prove it.
He's thorough. He licks into my folds in long, slow strokes that make me tremble, then sucks and licks and tugs with his mouth and tongue, like he’s kissing me deeply.
He teases and circles and nips, my fingers twisting into his hair.
I make every sound imaginable…from groans to gasps.
And he moans against me as if he's the one being pleasured, and it sends sparks up my spine.
"You taste better than anything I’ve fantasized about,” he breathes, pulling back.
"Oh…don't stop—please don't stop—"
"Fuck, no." He seals his mouth over me again, and this time his tongue dances around my clit, making me shake and writhe.
Of course, this man, who listened to me and learned me and paid attention to every word I ever said, would know exactly how to touch me.
My leg is trembling on his shoulder. My hand is fisted in his hair. The wall is the only thing keeping me vertical because my entire body has become a single point of sensation centered where his mouth is ravaging me with unrelenting pleasure.
"Chevy—I'm going to…"
"Come for me, baby," he says, voice raw. "I want to taste every drop of it. Give it to me."
After a few more mind-blowing brushes of his tongue over my swollen clit, I’m done for. The orgasm hits me, my whole body seizing and then releasing in an intense rush.
“Chevy!” I cry out, and he moans, still working my pussy. He holds me through it, his mouth gentle now, his hands steady on my thighs, easing me down from the high with soft kisses pressed to my trembling skin.
When I can finally see straight, I look down at him.
He's still on his knees. His hair is a mess from my hands. His lips are slick and his eyes are glazed with want and something deep and wonderful.
"You are trouble, indeed," he says, his voice like gravel.
And I know, with a certainty that settles into my bones, that this man is just as much trouble as he claims I am…in the best way.