Chapter Fourteen
“Tell me something real, Han.”
There was a pleading in Ethan’s tone that Hannah didn’t recognize, a desperation, like he needed her to peel away the layers guarding her heart as much as he needed to touch her.
She tilted her head as his lips skated over her throat, her head spinning from the sudden proximity. The citrus and pine scent of him and the movement of his hands on the bare skin at her lower back muddled her senses.
She couldn’t think straight with him so close, with the hard length of him pressing against her belly and his mouth on her skin. How was a person supposed to think when Ethan Hart was doing his best to make her come undone?
“I don’t know if I want to be an actress anymore.”
His mouth stilled in an open mouth kiss along her collarbone and her heart pounded in her chest. She hadn’t intended to say that. She wasn’t even sure if she meant it, except… How much easier would her life be if she never again had to worry about random people snapping her picture on sidewalk cafes? If she didn’t have to constantly be torn between her recovery and her career?
One of his hands slid down and gripped her backside, squeezing, as if he was rewarding her for the confession, urging her to continue. “What do you want?”
he whispered, his lips ghosting over the tops of her breasts through her shirt.
“I don’t know.”
The staticky feeling in her brain intensified as she tried to wade through the tumult in her mind. Was she really ready to walk away from everything she’d worked so hard for, the hard-won success she’d poured everything into? And if she didn’t, if she chose to continue on the endless cycle of auditioning and performing, of offering herself up for inspection and criticism day after day, could she maintain her recovery? Did she actually have a choice at all?
Tears pressed at the back of her eyes and she squeezed them shut. She didn’t want to cry now, for Christ’s sake.
He murmured sounds of comfort as he pulled her close, his mouth at her waist, hands gripping her sides as he lowered himself in front of her. “That’s alright. You don’t need to know.”
She pushed his hair back from his forehead, raking her nails across his scalp. “I want this time with you,”
she said, her voice raw and cracking. He looked up at her, his lips on her belly and hands sliding down to cup her ass again. She may not know what she wanted from her career, what came next, but she knew one thing with certainty. “I want you to know me.”
His forehead rested against her and she cradled his head in her hands. When he met her eyes again, there was a determination there she hadn’t seen before. “What about this, sweetheart? Do you want this?”
he asked, his fingers slipping under the waistband of her jeans.
“Yes.”
His nostrils flared, eyes darkening, and he held her gaze as he undid the button and zipper. He tugged her jeans and panties down in one pull, gently circling her ankle to help her step out of them. Even though they’d done this so many times before, there was something different about being there, in his kitchen, trading secrets, their half-cooked dinner cooling in the pan on the stove. It was profoundly personal in a way their hotel meetings never had been, in a way none of her previous relationships had ever been.
Ethan dragged his nose along the crease of her thigh, across her mound, and down the other side, breathing her in. “Do you trust me?”
“I trust you.”
He bit the sensitive flesh at the inside of her thigh and she yelped in surprise. “Then let me see you.”
She hesitated for a moment, not sure what he meant. At last, she pulled her shirt over her head, letting it fall in the pile with her jeans on the floor. Her bra followed. Ethan’s hands skated up her back, curled around her sides and cupped her breasts, his thumbs teasing the hard peaks of her nipples.
“Let’s play a game,” he said.
An incredulous laugh burst from her lips. “Now?”
The corner of his mouth twitched as though he was trying not to smile. “Now.”
“What kind of game?”
“You tell me things I don’t know about you and I’ll lick this pretty pussy the way you like.”
He pinched her nipples between his thumb and forefinger and she sucked in a breath, fascinated by the way his pupils blew wide at the sound. “But if you stop, I stop.”
“What?”
“You want to come, Hannah? Then tell me all the things you couldn’t for the last three years.”
He pressed a kiss to the crease of her thigh and hip, his tongue dragging along the line but stopping short of where she needed him. “Let’s see how many times I can make you come before you run out of secrets.”
“I don’t have any secrets.”
Liar.
And he knew it.
He tsked, twisting her nipple hard enough that she gasped at the bright burst of pleasure pain blooming beneath his touch.
“I never wanted to be famous.”
As the words rushed out of her, his touch gentled, pinpricks of heat blooming across her breasts. He smiled wickedly and let one hand drift down to her ass, tilting her hips towards him as he dipped his tongue between her folds. He looked up at her, his eyebrow arched, tongue torturously close to giving her the relief she needed, and waited.
“I wanted to sing and act with my friends, but I never thought anyone would know who I was outside of the theater.”
He lapped at her in slow, deliberate licks designed to drive her out of her mind with need and she knew if he stopped, she’d cry in desperation. She gripped his hair and let the words tumble out, how she hadn’t known what to do with the press, the first time someone had photographed her in line at the grocery store and that picture ended up on the late-night talk show circuit. When he sucked her clit into his mouth, sparks went off behind her eyes and she told him about the time she had gone to dinner with Jackson, how it was meant to be a simple public appearance to confirm the rumors of their (fake) relationship, how the next morning The Today Show ran a story analyzing the contents of her dinner plate.
“It wasn’t supposed to be about me,”
she whimpered as he slipped two fingers inside her, slowly driving her closer and closer to the precipice of her orgasm. “It was supposed to be about him.”
Ethan dragged his teeth over her clit and sucked hard, shoving her off that precipice until she tumbled headfirst into a climax that hit her like a punch to her sternum. She was still quivering with the intensity of it when he began curling his fingers again, pressing on that soft spot on her front wall.
“It should have been about you,”
he insisted, his eyes locked on hers. “What you needed. What you wanted.”
She opened her mouth to tell him that it had been, in a way—the exchange of her public self for the ability to pull herself from the depths of a disorder that had controlled her private life for over a decade. It had been an easy decision, and one she would make again, even knowing what she now knew: that she couldn’t casually and quietly go about her life while the whole world thought she was dating a pop star. That the person the public saw would have very little resemblance to the person she was.
But she wasn’t ready to tell him that. Even now. How could she tell him the ways she had hurt herself, the damage she had done? How could she explain the sticky shame of it that still coated her skin, that she was afraid she’d never fully shake?
“When I was a child, I wanted to be a ballet dancer,”
she said instead.
He hesitated for a moment, as if deciding if he would allow this change of subject. His eyes skimmed over the swollen place between her legs and his tongue darted out to swipe at his lips.
“I took my first class when I was five,”
she continued, her fingers gliding down the side of his face and over his beard. “Even at five I was behind. There were girls there who had started when they were two, barely old enough to walk.”
His eyes darted between hers, brow drawn low as he listened. And she waited to see if this story would suffice. She watched him debate with himself, the knowledge she was avoiding telling him something wrinkling his forehead and tightening his jaw.
At last, he leaned forward again, latching his mouth onto her with a ferocity that startled her. She fell back against the counter, hands gripping his head as he worked her clit fast and hard. “Oh God,”
she whimpered, her climax already taking hold.
And then he stopped.
“Keep talking.”
The vibration of his voice thrummed through her. “You stop, I stop.”
So she told him about being the only girl who had to order a size large leotard, about the other girls making fun of her wide feet, about the way her ballet teacher had poked at her belly with the end of her walking stick and recommended she try fasting. With each new confession, his pressure intensified.
She told him about the boy on the playground who called her Dumbo, the gym teacher who left copies of fitness magazines in her locker in high school, the prom date who ditched her when he saw she was wearing shapewear under her dress.
She came with a sharp cry, her knees giving way. But he caught her with an arm around her waist, his mouth latched onto her and mercilessly working her to a new, sharper peak.
“Ethan,”
she panted.
“You stop, I stop,”
he repeated. A challenge.
He pulled three more orgasms from her before she ran out of words, each moving closer to pain than pleasure and yet each so bright and clear she would have asked for more if she had the capacity to form any more thoughts.
Ethan cupped her gently between the legs, his lips skating across her over-sensitive skin as he murmured words of praise. “Such a good fucking girl to give this pussy to me,”
he said when his mouth at last landed on her own. “Such a beautiful, brave girl, letting me make you come so many times.”
She glowed under his praise, the warmth of it slowly suffusing her limbs with a heavy, sated peace. He stood, supporting her as her knees shook, her legs unable to support her weight as the aftershocks of her last orgasm reverberated through her. When she kissed him, she tasted herself on his lips.
“Your turn.”
She reached for him, pressing her hand to the front of his jeans, but pulled it back, startled, when her fingertips met the sticky proof that he’d already found his own release.
Ethan breathed out in an echo of a laugh. “See what you do to me?”
he asked, peppering her jaw with kisses, her cheekbones, her eyelids. “You didn’t even need to touch me. Just the taste of you, and the sounds you make—”
He bit her lip, tugging on it gently. “Fuck, I’m getting hard again just thinking about it.” As if to prove his point, his cock jerked between them, the hardening outline of it pressing against her belly.
“You… in your pants?”
she asked.
He hummed the affirmation.
“But I didn’t do anything,”
she protested.
“You let me kiss this perfect pussy.”
His hand dropped between her legs again, fingertips ghosting over her swollen flesh, barely touching her yet still sending sparks across her overstimulated nerves. “You let me fuck you with my tongue. You screamed my name when I sucked on your clit. Christ, you’re perfect.”
She wanted to believe him. His praise was warm and soft, cocooning her from the riot of voices in her head trying to pierce the haze of this perfect moment. Instead of giving those voices room, she focused on his touch, the words he gave so freely, the look in his eyes, and realized she felt naked in a way that had nothing to do with skin.