Chapter Thirty-One Keely #2
“And here?” His voice was liquid fire, adding to the blaze along her exposed skin. He trailed a finger along her lower belly, the tops of her thighs. “Do you like to be kissed here?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’ve never—no one has. . .” If this was a mistake, she may as well go all in. Keely didn’t do anything halfway. “But I’d very much like to try, with you.”
He stopped his descent for a second, his breath harsh on her stomach. His fingers curled into the waistband of her leggings.
“Max?”
He rolled his forehead in the space between her hip bones, dragging teeth and lips along her skin, before pulling down her pants and underwear. “Needed a second.”
The gruffness of his words scraped over her most sensitive nerves.
“If you don’t like it, I’ll stop,” he promised. “And we’ll try something else. Or nothing at all. We can go back to how it was before.”
She released a shaky laugh. “No, we can’t.”
He grinned up at her. “You’re probably right about that.”
Then, he dipped his head.
The first touch of his mouth was so soft it tickled, and he laughed through an apology. He firmed up after that, and pleasure unfurled along her limbs, weighing her down. Making her float.
She gripped the sheets, squirming as he, in short, devoured her. They were the same motions he’d made on her mouth, her neck, so why had her blood pressure spiked, rushing to her cheeks? Why did it feel so different there?
Max panted against her, but he was tense. His shoulders were rigid lines where they held her open for him, and the noises—he sounded frustrated.
“Do you like it, Key?” He nuzzled his nose against the crease of her leg, little kisses and nips to the thin, sensitive skin there. “Do you like how I taste you?”
Key. There was that nickname again. “Do you like it?” she echoed, nearly jumping off the mattress when he peeled off all his fingers, only to use them to spread her wider.
Another slow, languid lick up, centering right on her clit with the flat of his tongue. “You first.”
“It’s hard not to like—that. Like that.” It started as an answer and became the only answer. That, there, with him.
He groaned, and it got caught in the back of his throat. “Me too. Fuckin’ love it. Love—” A strangled moan punctuated that sentence.
Her fingers wound through his hair. “Max.”
“Mmm.”
“Max,” she tried again, planting her heels in the mattress. She wanted to squirm away and burrow closer, chase the sensations and run from them simultaneously. That couldn’t be right, could it? Was this supposed to be exhilarating and terrifying all in one go?
“Let’s have sex,” she blurted after a particularly hard suck. It had to have been ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and she didn’t exactly know the mechanics, but it seemed like too long.
His smile took shape against her. “We are having sex.”
“This doesn’t count.”
“I promise,” he groaned, a noise deep in the back of his throat, “it does.”
It reverberated in her toes.
“God, look at you,” he murmured again. “Keely. Key.”
She only caught a glimmer of too-wet lips and chin before she squeezed her eyes shut.
He didn’t return his mouth to her. She expected the crinkle of a condom. Instead, he said, “Let me—let me just try something?”
She shot straight up. “You are not putting your finger in my ass.”
His grin was wicked around a bark of laughter. “Not what I meant, but noted. I meant this.” One of his hands came to rest on her sternum. “Since this worked so well on the track.”
When she spiraled too far into her mind. When he brought her back to earth.
He pressed her into the mattress.
“Feel my breath on your skin. Feel my tongue, my lips, my hands. Feel me here, Keely. Always here.” Max’s hand splayed wide enough to reach both her breasts at the same time; his little finger brushed the underside of one as his thumb supported the other.
“Your heart is the only place I want to be.”
He was already there. It held a lot more space for Max Simmons than Keely Sinclair cared to admit.
His mouth returned to her.
It wasn’t immediately different, but his hand—and his words—let her focus instead on the rise and fall of her chest, his fingertips and dull nails biting into her skin.
The subtle rock of his hips against the bed.
She was alive, every drag of Max’s mouth over her adding drops of liquid lightning to the heat pooling rapidly in her belly.
“Max,” she moaned, and he must have known, somehow, what it meant this time, because he groaned again in turn.
He pressed harder, kissed and sucked more fervently. He might have said something, if his mouth weren’t so busy.
She clutched his hair in her fists. “Please—don’t stop.”
Heat unfurled at the base of her spine, the juncture of her legs where Max worked so diligently. She was already trembling when he shifted, pushing up on an elbow so he could bear down on her more fully. And he grunted, a pleased sound, like he was satisfied with himself.
It was her undoing. Fractals of light burst behind her eyelids, and she was falling, falling, honey-sweet warmth flooding her veins.
Each cell in her body was a pleasure bomb, bursting apart and fusing back together the slightest bit differently.
Just enough room for Max, who worked her over so thoroughly she shook the bed frame with her aftershocks.
She landed back in her body after soaring out of it, above it all. And he was still there, placing little kisses to her clit, cupping her breast, rolling her nipple between his thumb and middle finger.
With a final, sated sigh, her body went still.
Max pulled away, the tip of his nose glistening. “Terrible, right?” He smiled.
She blushed but grinned back. “Worst I’ve ever had.”
It was her turn now, wasn’t it? She bit her lip, assessing the physics of the situation.
“What are you—”
He didn’t get to finish his question, because, in a feat of strength, she maneuvered him underneath her, pinning his hips with hers. Her fingers found the waistband of his pants.
“You want me like this?” he said. His eyes were all pupil, and hungry. “It can be a lot if you’re not used to it.”
“I’m a quick learner.” She tugged at his sweats.
He lifted his hips to help her take them down, and then he was—oh.
She imagined that would be a lot in any position.
She wrapped her hand around him, tugging lightly at first, then harder, to see what he liked, what made his throat bob or his head roll back.
Turns out that all of it did.
What a horrible experiment.
“Key.” He grunted. He grabbed her wrist, but she couldn’t tell if he was asking her to stop or urging her on.
Maybe he didn’t know, either. “I won’t last like that.
I just need to—fuck.” He sat half up when her thumb ran in small circles, spreading the bead of moisture around.
His fingers pressed phantom bruises into her lower back. “Do you have condoms?”
She tipped her chin toward her nightstand drawer. “When I picked up my allergy prescription from campus health, I snagged a few. I’m on birth control, though.”
He ripped a package. “We’ll be triple protected, then.”
She arched a brow. “Triple?”
“Condom, birth control, pulling out. Because I know you,” he said. He rolled the condom on. She was riveted. “You won’t be able to relax if you’re worried about anything going wrong.”
Keely lifted onto her knees.
“You’ll be in control like this,” he murmured, swirling designs on her outer thighs. “Which I’m sure you’ll love. And I will too. But if you want to give me some of it, just let me know.”
And she knew, the same way she knew atoms and cells, that he meant it.
She lined them up, and slowly, slowly, sank down.
Her body was still soft from his mouth, but she cinched tight around him, pinches of uncomfortable fullness rocketing down her legs.
Max groaned, low and long in his throat, throwing his head back to her pillow. “You’re so tight, shit, I can’t even—”
Keely braced on his chest, tilting forward to find an angle that would allow him in deeper.
It was a lot like this, he was right. But she threw herself into it the way she would anything else: focusing on her subject, observing for any microscopic difference.
The sounds he ground out, the movements that made her insides clench around him.
The pace that had them both gasping, gripping each other and the sheets and the headboard.
At one point, Max planted his feet, driving himself deeper, and a spike of pleasure-pain bloomed in her middle. She whimpered.
He must have heard a difference.
“Sorry, Key. I’m gonna—” He wrapped an arm around her, flipping them so she was against the mattress. He caught her head before it hit the pillow and smoothed back damp hair from her temple. “This will be better. I’ll make it so good for you this way.”
She nodded, but didn’t catch his expression.
She was too busy lost in this new sensation, the ecstasy of drowning in him.
When his forehead lowered to press against hers, she moved his hand to her throat, and she thought she might float away again, even though he covered almost every inch of her body.
He shifted his hips, angling them upward, and pulling Keely down.
“Max,” she gasped, eyes flying open.
His jaw locked tight. “There you go. Just like this.”
Passion. Chemistry. Words Keely knew by definition, but never by practice.
Never until now, with her body sensitized down to her bones, her heart. Her very cells were screaming his name.
She certainly was.
Max sped up, his movements choppier. He was ripping apart at the seams, the lines of his muscles quivering under her touch. “I’m—I’m not gonna come in you, I promise.” His brow furrowed; sweat misted his forehead. “Just a few more—”
The thought tightened her core, and they both made strangled noises at how that changed the sensations. “You can,” she said. Begged? “I want you to.”
“You’re so perfect. Come with me?”
In the haze of her brain, she recognized the cadence was different from what she would have expected. He didn’t emphasize come, but with. The way you’d ask someone to run away with you, to leave everything behind and take only each other forward, forever.
Like he wouldn’t go without her.
Her hands dug into his back, nails scoring marks on his shoulders. Holding on so tightly, when everything was so dangerously close to shattering and slipping away. “I can’t.” A tear slipped from the corner of her eye. He kissed it away.
“Now, Keely,” he chided, gruff and grinning. Her name was choppy from his mouth, and the way he spat it, she couldn’t tell if it was a curse or a supplication. Both, maybe. “When has that ever stopped you before?”
An ember of pleasure, newer, deeper, went through her center. He understood her so completely. And that thought alone had her tensing, quivering beneath him once again as her hand wound between them to meet his fingers, already fast at work.
It was brighter this time, but softer. Her toes curled as she arched up, lost in the sensations of his body bowed over hers. Push and pull. Give and take.
Keely and Max.
His lips trembled when they touched down in the center of her sternum as he came.
And every single cell in her body pounded in time with their heartbeats.
She was still pulsing when he rolled away. After grabbing a few tissues and wrapping up the condom, he gathered her in his arms, tucking her head beneath his chin.
His heart thundered under her cheek.
He played with the ends of her hair, fanning it across her bare back like a paintbrush. “Are you okay? I didn’t mean to go that hard.”
“No, it was—” She shook her head into his chest. “I really liked it.”
He hummed a sound that was nearly a purr, and for so many minutes, she laid in arms strong enough to carry all her problems.
“Can I ask you something?” she whispered, not wanting to wake him if he’d drifted off.
He nodded, made a noise of agreement. “Anything.”
She bit her kiss-stung lips, and a shock of fresh want flooded her system.
She tried to focus. “You wrote your to-do as Kiss Key. K-e-y. This entire time I thought you were saying ‘Kee’ with an E, short for Keely. So, Max Simmons.” She rested her chin on his chest, stared at him from beneath her lashes. “What am I the key to?”
One long exhale, a shake of his head like he wouldn’t answer. And then: “Everything, I think.”
Hope buoyed Keely’s chest. “What do you mean?”
“For a long time,” he said after a minute, drawing stars and shapes on her lower back, “I used running as an escape. I couldn’t think about anything—school or home or how long Dad was going to live—if I pushed hard enough.
It was restful for me here.” A hand atop Keely’s, which splayed over his heart.
He tangled their fingers together and then lifted them to tap her temple.
“And here. Peaceful in a way nothing else has ever been. Until you.”
She slow-blinked, memorizing the fan of his eyelashes. The angle of his nose. “What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know.” Something flashed in his eyes, but before she could think too much about it, he kissed her again.
It was softer, this time, unhurried. When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against hers.
“I just know my mind is quiet when I’m with you.
My mind is quiet, but my heart is so, so loud. ”