Chapter Thirty-One Keely
Chapter Thirty-One
Keely
Keely understood quantum mechanics now more than ever. Her entire body pulsed with energy, beating in time with her blood. But she was also frozen to her spot, terrified to leap when she wasn’t sure he’d catch her. Moving, yet not.
She wasn’t going to get any studying done tonight, not when he casually dropped bombs like that.
She slammed her laptop shut, the pen flying out at a wonky angle and landing somewhere beside her on the couch.
“This might be a mistake,” she said before she could chicken out. “We’re both going out for the scholarship, and the semester is ending soon, and Max, I don’t make mistakes. I’ve never been allowed to.”
He watched her with preternatural stillness. Sadness twisted the corner of his mouth. “Are you trying to talk yourself out of this, or into it?”
“Neither. Both. I don’t know.” She shook her head.
Keeping her thoughts focused over the last several weeks had been increasingly difficult around Max Simmons.
“What I do know is that you feel. . . safe. To make a mistake with. Like. . .” She wrung her hands together in her lap before sliding her computer onto the coffee table next to her planner.
She itched to pull her beloved to-do list close, but the only thing she’d be capable of scribbling would be the same thing over and over.
Max, Max, Max. “Like of all the people in the world, you’re the only one who understands what it feels like to screw up in the same way I do. ”
His chest expanded with a deep inhale, nostrils flaring wide. He nodded once, twice, some decision made that Keely wasn’t privy to.
“Okay. How about this?” He slid his laptop beside hers. It knocked her planner to the floor.
And then Max grabbed Keely’s hips and pulled her onto his lap.
Keely breathed in sharply. “This?”
Her heart relocated between her legs, and she knew that was anatomically impossible, but tell that to the pulsing that only seemed to get stronger as Max enveloped her.
“This.” He shrugged, a picture of nonchalance as his fingers tightened around her waist. “Mistake or not, I’ll go your pace, Key. Fast or slow or somewhere in the middle. But the choice is yours.”
Bracing her hands on his stomach, she leaned in. The muscles contracted under her touch. Their mouths were centimeters apart, and the bridge of his nose caught on hers with delicious friction. “Then I choose fast. Aren’t you a sprinter or something?”
Without warning, he splayed his legs wider, making Keely’s hips groan in protest before her center aligned with his, and warmth coiled in her belly.
They collided.
If their kiss at the track was exploratory, this was years-long, in-depth research. They needed to try it again and again, to prove the points they were creating. Do it not only until they got it right, but until it was impossible to get it wrong.
Max tilted her head, finding the spot that made her whimper as he kissed her harder, nipped at her lips.
Keely in turn discovered that when she gripped his shoulders, dug her thumbnails into the space above his collarbones, he took more of her mouth.
Max’s hips bucked up; Keely’s ground down. She bit; he licked.
He slid his fingers up and around the curve of her skull. They met resistance at her claw clip, which he deftly loosened and tossed to the floor. Then he knotted his own fingers there instead, twining together with the strands of her hair.
When his other hand breached the back of her leggings and came to rest on the top curve of her ass, she pulled back. “I—should we—”
“You wanna stop?” He sounded winded, like he’d just finished.
Finished racing.
She reached down, producing the pen that had been trying to find a home in her kneecap. “I want to not have this inside me before you are. So we should go to my room.”
She wanted to stretch out with his body over hers. Or under her—she wasn’t opposed to that option.
His throat bobbed as he rose, setting Keely gently down on the floor and twining their fingers together. He tugged her down the hall.
Her gaze jumped up from his backside to narrow on his neck, where score marks from her nails bloomed in bright red. “How do you know which room is mine?”
Max paused, then pushed open the door. “There’s a K hanging right here.”
“Sure.” She shut it behind them, closing them off from her apartment. The world. “Or you could finally admit you brought me home the night of the party.”
He took her hands and placed them on his waist. “You want me to admit that, huh?” His own hands found either side of her face, thumbs gentling over her cheekbones, all the way up to her temples. She shivered. “You want me to admit I haven’t stopped thinking about you in that little red top?”
The back of her knees hit her mattress, and she fell back. Then he was over her, around her, overtaking every one of her senses. If he was a mistake—if sleeping with him was a mistake—it’d be the best one she ever made.
“You smell like peppermints,” he murmured. His nose bumped the pulse point in her neck and made it go wild. “Your skin and your hair and your clothes. And now every time I smell one, I fucking salivate for you.”
“Pavlov’s. . . dog,” she breathed.
“Please keep talking about science.” He sat back on his haunches, then pulled his hoodie off. His T-shirt came with it, and she lent him a helping hand, palms scraping the ridges of his torso. “Gets me hard every time.”
Heat erupted in her stomach. “You’re so funny.”
“Keely.” Slowly and so, so carefully, he laid his body atop hers again. Long lines, scorching heat, right over where she ached most. “Does this feel like I’m joking?”
Tentatively, she dropped her hand, scraping her nails through the fine dark hair below his belly button, and she delighted when his stomach caved in under her touch.
“Need more data,” she murmured. Then she cupped him over his sweats.
The curse that flew from his lips was filthy, ground between gritted teeth, and his head fell forward, thudding against hers. “Please move your hand. Please.”
Her grip was clumsy, but he did most of the work anyway, mouth gliding over her lips, chin, throat while his hips rocked.
“Changed my mind.” He caught her earlobe with his teeth and tugged her hand away, laying it on the mattress beside her head. Next, he dragged his open lips across the outside of her left pinkie.
Her thighs clenched, then spasmed when his tongue traced the same path. “Max.”
“Good?” he mumbled. When she confirmed, he repeated the movements, biting her wrist, sinking his canine into the flesh of her thumb.
She wouldn’t come from this—right? She didn’t want to find out.
Did she? Her brain filled with thick, cloying fog.
Eventually, his mouth wandered up her arm, tracing the lines of her shoulder, down to the collar of her shirt. This was happening. Max Simmons—Max Simmons—was in her bed. Was about to take off her clothes.
His hands glided her shirt up her torso.
She shivered.
Max paused, his palm splayed on the skin of her ribs as her shirt bunched at the bottom of her bra. “Have you done this before?”
“Does it matter?” She lost sight of him for a second as she finished pulling off her shirt.
His brow was furrowed when she reemerged. “Not to me. But I’d have to go slower.” He sounded like the thought pained him. Or excited him. With the rasp in his throat, it was sort of hard to tell. “Do different things.”
He kissed her again, slow and melting, and her hands found a home in his hair this time. The soft tendrils glided through her fingers, and she had to knot them, take a fistful to keep from sliding into oblivion.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he mumbled between a nip and a suck of her bottom lip, pulling back. His pupils were blown, his mouth swollen and deep red.
She tried to tug him closer but he remained immovable. So it was like that.
“I tried, once. Freshman year.” She willed her pulse to settle a little so she could get this out. “It wasn’t. . . wasn’t great.”
His face shuttered; his arms locked beside her ear. “Did someone—Keely, did—”
“I wanted it,” she rushed out, and his shoulders twitched but didn’t relax. “I just realized about halfway through that I didn’t want him.” Her nose scrunched. “So we stopped. He left. Didn’t call.”
Max’s lips parted, his tongue darting out to wet them. “Was that your last time?”
She nodded, sneaking in an open-mouth kiss to his chin. “You?”
“Last spring. Right before Olympic trials.”
Before his dad got sick. Before his priorities shifted.
Before her.
His fingers trailed his eyes as a flush climbed his neck like ivy. Crept over the paper-thin skin covering the pulse point in her neck. The chasm between her collarbones. The dip and swell of her breasts. She shivered under his touch.
“We’ll give you a do-over, then.” Max chuckled softly and licked his lips. “Yeah. I’ll do those different things I mentioned.”
A white-hot spike of pleasure drove into her stomach. Or maybe that was him, hard and thick and notched in the crease of her hip. “What kinds of things?”
“Kissing,” he murmured against her mouth. “Lots of kissing. In lots of places.”
Keely stifled a whimper as he ghosted over her jaw. “Like where?”
“What about here?” His tongue explored the area behind her ear. “Do you like it here?”
“Yeah.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own.
A noise rumbled in his throat. Small sucks, a graze of teeth. He pulled back, his chest rising and falling in a near pant.
She nodded, again and again, and twined her fingers in the hair at his nape, tugging him back down. This time, he grinned against her skin. His teeth scraped her bra straps.
Then, once that hit the floor, another “here?” That was her favorite of all, if the moan she let out was any indication.
Max, ever the scholar, repeated his experiments many times over here, on one breast, the other. Her nipples pebbled under his mouth, and when his tongue trailed lower, dipped near her belly button, they got harder still.