Chapter 16 #4
“I want to tell you something.” Ramona bites down on her lip, as though suddenly debating whether she wants to tell him at all. “It’s about what happened in your office. I know we said we weren’t talking about it, but…”
They’re not. They shouldn’t. But curiosity gets the best of him. “You can tell me.”
A slow blink before she leans in closer, nose grazing the side of his neck.
In response, he grips her back harder. “That was…no one’s ever—I mean, I’ve never…
” When she trails off, his mind fills in the blanks with flashes of her on his desk.
Face in his shirt with his hand in her panties, coaxing her closer and closer.
Her lips brush his earring, and he thinks he might pass out. “…finished like that before.”
With every fiber of his self-control, he urges himself to remain upright, trying to understand what she’s saying. “That was your first orgasm? Ever?”
This makes her snort-laugh. A roll of her eyes. “You dweeb, definitely not. It…was my first with someone else.”
Everything in the room disappears, and it’s not Halloween and he’s not in a stranger’s beautiful house, it’s just the two of them and this delicate confession.
Her first. With someone else.
Sure, there’s an undeniable hint of pride there. A rush of heat through his body. And yet he can’t fathom it, someone lucky enough to go to bed with this girl and not wanting to do everything in their power to make her moan.
“Oh,” he says quietly, the intellectual that he is. Take away his PhD.
Her words pulse between them. He’s had nothing to drink and yet he feels unsteady, off balance. Another pair of dancers bumps Nick from behind, and he thinks he mumbles an apology before his feet start working again.
When he speaks, his voice is a rasp. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I just thought it might—I don’t know. Build your confidence or something to hear that,” she says. “When you’re getting back out in the dating world.”
A hard swallow. A bucket of cold water. “Right. Well—thank you.”
Ramona drops her forehead to his collarbone, this sweetly intimate gesture that shouldn’t be too foreign given what she just shared, and he fights back a swell of desire. He wants to pull her into a dark room and press his mouth to her thigh.
And then he wants to cook her dinner and find out what her favorite dessert is.
All of it is so confusing, the friendship and the UCLA handbook and his hormones acting like he’s a teenager all over again.
He wants to think his self-esteem isn’t that far in the gutter, that his ex didn’t shatter it, but even as a naturally confident guy, the divorce made him wonder if he was actually, truly lovable.
What else was he supposed to think when the person who loved him the most simply…
stopped? And here is this beautiful girl, this clever and secretly compassionate girl, who’d somehow rather be here with him than any number of guys eager to worship her.
It’s not love, of course it’s not, but it’s the closest he’s felt in a year.
The music switches to something faster and Ramona’s tugged away by Betty declaring it’s her favorite song, and Nick is left with a flood of emotions he doesn’t know what to do with.
He was her first orgasm. He was her first orgasm. The revelation makes him high, furious, and horny all at once.
When he gets home at two a.m., he’s certain he won’t be able to sleep.
It wasn’t just the schoolgirl costume or the dancing or hearing her confirm that she liked spending time with him.
It was the way she spoke low and rough into his ear, her mouth grazing the earring he got back in college during one drunken night with his buddies. Like she wanted to bite it.
He opens the drawer with her panties inside.
Out of our systems.
That was what she said in the library. That they’d hooked up once and had presumably extinguished whatever magnetic charge pulsed between them, therefore never needing to do it again.
Now his fingers dip into crimson lace as he wonders if Ramona is already wedged so deep in his system that only a crowbar could get her out.
First he presses them to his face. Inhales, and—oh.
He can still smell her, earthy and feminine.
She’d been so wet for him in these panties.
The way she’d trembled and bucked around his finger, sliding her hips along his slick touch…
fuck, he’d give anything to feel her again.
He wishes he’d licked her. He’s desperate to know the way she tastes, to be fully consumed by her.
Heartbeat roaring in his ears, he lowers her panties to his erection.
A few experimental tugs, and then he loses himself a bit more.
Clutches himself harder. In his head, he’s bending her over his desk, undoing her tie with his teeth.
Giving her every compliment he’s held back, whispered directly into her skin.
He feels fucking depraved, pumping the fabric around his cock, but he doesn’t care. He needs this release more than oxygen. So he watches the red lace slide back and forth, until he can’t take it anymore and squeezes his eyes shut, giving in to the fantasy.