Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
PINEAPPLE
The paparazzi are waiting for me the second I step out onto the street, a wall of flashes and sharpened voices already surging toward me before the gate has fully swung shut behind me.
They shout over one another, hungry and breathless and far too pleased with themselves, throwing the same filthy little phrases into the night like they have already decided they own the story.
Pizza ruined. Flavor betrayal. Structure lost. The words hit me in bright, ugly bursts between camera flashes, though none of them land with the clean damage they were built for.
They are too easy. Too cheap. Too certain of themselves in that way people always are when they think they have caught a woman slipping and cannot wait to turn her softness into a public warning.
I keep moving, slow enough to look in control and not one fraction slower than that, because if I stop, these people will start mistaking access for entitlement, and I am in no mood to let them near what is still moving through me.
The trouble is that I can still feel her.
I can feel the heat of her mouth, the way her breathing changed under my hand, the moment her proud little body stopped fighting every inch of what it wanted and started leaning into it with that same sweet, infuriating reluctance she brings to everything good.
She is probably still upstairs aching, angry, and wet with the aftermath of me, and that thought slides low through me with enough force to make every shouted question on the sidewalk feel very far away.
I left her wanting. I left her full of restless heat and unsatisfied tension, and if I am being honest with myself, that was not restraint so much as strategy.
I wanted her hungry for me. I wanted her standing in the middle of her own living room, dress half crooked, lips kissed swollen, center warm and throbbing, trying to decide whether she hated me for stopping or craved me harder because I did.
The answer matters less than the fact that I already know she will be thinking about my hands, my mouth, my voice in her ear telling her to stay still like a good girl while I take my time drawing every real reaction out of her.
That knowledge settles in me dark and thick and far too satisfying.
“Did you ruin Pizza?” someone yells, bold enough to make the others laugh, and I almost smile at the phrasing of it because they have no idea how badly they have underestimated me.
Ruin is such a lazy word for what I want.
These people hear scandal and think headlines, bad press, bruised reputations, comment sections foaming at the mouth because a classic beauty let herself crave something sharp and wrong-looking in public.
That is not ruin. That is foreplay for the culture.
Real ruin would be slower. Warmer. Much more intimate than these idiots with cameras could ever imagine.
Real ruin would be Pizza forgetting how to keep that polished spine straight when I kiss the stubborn answers out of her mouth and make her use her words for me.
It would be her sleek composure going soft at the edges while I hold her exactly where I want her and make her admit how much her downstairs basement aches, and the need she has been carrying for me since the first time I put my hands on her.
It would be her looking up at me with all that arousal turning her proud little expression glassy and furious and wanting, while I take my time teaching her that safe was never the same thing as satisfied.
It would be her body answering mine before her pride could dress it up in something respectable, her whole gorgeous self opening around the pressure of being seen, wanted, and handled with enough control to make her shake.
These people out here with their cameras think they have proof I have already ruined her.
They do not. What they have is a glimpse.
A smear of lipstick on the edge of a rumor.
A few flashes catching me leaving the one place I should not have been.
I have not ruined her yet. I have only made her aware of how badly she could be undone.
Another flash goes off hard enough to leave a white ghost across my vision, and behind it I see her the way she looked when I stepped back and left her there, all flushed cheeks and parted lips and that gorgeous, furious ache she was too proud to hide completely.
I should feel guilt. A cleaner man might.
Instead what moves through me is a deeper, more dangerous craving, because now I know exactly what she looks like when the structure starts slipping and something sweeter, darker, and far less polite begins to rise in its place.
I know the sound she makes when praise sinks in too low.
I know how she listens when I give her rules.
I know what it does to her when I stop before she is ready and leave her full of tension with nowhere to put it.
That is the kind of knowledge a man can build an obsession on, and I am already well past pretending mine is anything else.
“Did she ask you to leave?” another voice calls, desperate for humiliation, for a public little clipping of my wings that they can feed to the morning cycle.
I stop then, not for them, but because I want them to get a good look at my face when I answer nothing at all.
The cameras flare brighter. The shouting crowds closer.
I let my gaze move over them once, calm and heavy and entirely unimpressed, though inside my head I am already back in her house, already replaying the way she melted and stiffened at once, the way her center gave while the rest of her kept trying to pretend she was untouched, the way her whole body seemed to split between resistance and want until even she did not know which side was winning.
I think about her lying awake later, one hand clutching the sheets, her breath turning thin and uneven while her mind circles what I started and what I refused to finish.
I think about her trying to keep her dignity while her body remembers every slow kiss, every measured touch, every word that sank too deep.
I think about how easy it would be now to make her come apart for me the next time I have her under my hands, how ready she already is to hate me for it and ask for more in the same breath.
When I finally move again, it is with a smile just slight enough to make the whole line of photographers go louder.
Let them keep yelling ruined like they understand the word.
All they have seen is the mess on the plate.
I am the one who knows how much better she is going to taste once I really take my time.