Chapter 16 #2
He holds my gaze as he unzips them.
“It doesn’t count if you take them off,” I say, nearly panting.
My own words send a throb of desire between my legs. I’m desperate for his touch, already so wet and about ready to beg him to just please, for the love of god, touch me.
He walks us to a shallower end of the pool and pins me against the side.
“Hold on to the edge,” he instructs, and I obey, propping my arms on the warm stone.
He removes my legs from around his waist and then removes my shorts, setting them on the side of the pool.
My legs dangle in the water, and he moves into my space again, his soaking wet shirt against my bare chest a satisfying sensation.
He hooks his thumb in the strings of my thong, waiting for me with hungry eyes, his teeth sunk into his bottom lip.
“It doesn’t count if you take my panties off,” I say, dragging my lips over his and kissing him deeply as he does what I’ve asked him to.
“Tell me. Tell me what else doesn’t count, Abby.” His voice is husky, his own desperation thick in his words.
“It doesn’t count if you use your hands to pleasure me,” I say. It’s vague, but he doesn’t make me say any more. He yanks one of my legs up to his hip and angles himself so he can slide a hand between us, finding the aching core of me and brushing two fingers over it.
I cry out, the relief is so instant. My fingers bruise his shoulders as he strokes, putting me out of my mind. I feel feral as we kiss, biting his bottom lip, groaning and grinding my hips for more.
“And if I make you come? Does that count?”
“No.”
“Say it, Abby. Say you want me to make you come.”
“I want you to make me come.”
Our words overlap, the exchanged conversation punctuated by our labored breathing and our mouths meeting in heated, hurried kisses.
“Does it count if I use my mouth to pleasure you?”
“No.” The word is more breath than substance, followed by the swift removal of his hand.
Before I have a chance to protest, in one brisk movement, he grabs my hips and hoists me up onto the side of the pool.
The stone is warm under me, pool water spreading on the ground where I sit.
He places a hand over my heart to push me back until I’m reclined, propped up on my elbows.
I would lie all the way down, but Miles is a vision between my legs, dripping wet, heat and fire in his eyes.
“To the edge,” he commands.
I scoot as close to the edge as possible, and he hooks my legs over his wide shoulders, placing soft kisses along the insides of my thighs. His beard scruff is dripping wet from the pool, and it occurs to me as he gets closer to the center that there’s no way he’ll just be tasting me.
“Miles, the pool water—”
“I do not fucking care.”
He buries his face between my legs, parting my swollen lips with his tongue.
It feels even better than his fingers did, and I don’t censor myself this time.
With long, flat tongue strokes, he laps at me, a man as desperate to taste me as I am to be tasted.
The natural stone is rough against my skin as I arch and grind against his face.
I tangle my fingers in his hair and he digs his fingers into my thighs.
He brings me to the edge in no time at all, but stops abruptly.
I whimper and open my mouth to protest, but he slips a finger inside me, then two, curling them toward him, sending a burst of pleasure through me so intense that there are fireworks behind my eyes.
I close them, tilting my head back and surrendering to the sensation.
He pumps his fingers slowly at first, increasing pace and pressure as I encourage him, a “yes” occasionally slipping out between moans.
Everything he was doing before this moment felt amazing, but this is on another level.
The pleasure I’m feeling has a depth to it that it didn’t have before, and while stroking me from the inside, he leans down to run the tip of his tongue over my clit.
I lift my hips, desperate for more, and he groans against me, sending a vibration through my core.
He plays with me, his fingers in one rhythm, his tongue dancing in another, taking me to the edge again.
“Keep going,” I beg.
He does. He doesn’t change a thing. His cadence remains the same, and when the tsunami of pleasure inside me breaks, he sustains the pace and the pressure, coaxing noises out of me that I have never heard myself make.
I swear I black out for a second, and when I come back to my body, it’s like a whole new place.
As if I’d left town with my house a mess and came back to everything being in order.
I’m not just relaxed; I feel like I’ve been rearranged.
What the hell did he just do to me?
As my body comes down, he slowly removes his fingers and readjusts my shirt, smoothing it down over my stomach.
I curl into him, cradling his face in my hands and kissing him as thoroughly as he wrecked me.
His hands slide up my thighs, and when he gets to my hips, I put my hands on his to stop him.
“If you start that, we’ll be here all afternoon.”
“So? You got somewhere to be? A hot date?”
“Please,” I say and reach for my discarded clothing, standing to re-dress myself. “One a day is enough for me.”
He hoists himself out of the pool, his white T-shirt clinging to every muscle on his torso, his jeans soggy and dripping. “This was a date?” he asks, eyebrows raised, a corner of his lips turned up in a smirk.
“No. It was…not. It was…you know. Friends, doing friend—oh, stop it.”
I playfully slap his arm, and his smirk turns into a full-blown smile as I trip over my words. He picks up the pink shell from earlier, pocketing it with a wink.
“Come on, let’s get you back to the resort.”
We walk around the house through the back gate so as not to drip through the house, and Miles shakes out a couple of towels for us to sit on, although I don’t think it makes too much of a difference. We drive back with the windows down, trying to air-dry as much as possible.
I catch Miles glancing over at me every so often, like he’s afraid I might disappear or something. Before we’re back at the resort, he asks me if I want to join him for dinner.
Without hesitation, I agree, realizing as he drops me back at my room that I’m actually really looking forward to it.
After my shower, I don my robe, moisturize my face, and call my best friend.
“Oh my fucking god, I need to know what’s going on,” Hazel says immediately upon answering the phone.
We talked four days ago, but it might as well have been a month given how much has been happening. I suspect she knows that too, like she’s got a sixth sense or something and can tell something is up but doesn’t know exactly what.
“Okay, well, you first. Anything exciting there? How’s Captain?” I ask.
She hauls herself off her couch and walks through her living room to the guest room in their house, mostly reserved for the cats. She crouches down, flipping the camera to show me the sweetest senior cat, hiding in a cat tree.
“Hiding as usual. Probably hoping you’ll come by and rescue him,” she says and flips the camera back around to her. She returns to the living room and flops down on the couch again.
“Where’s Winnie?”
“Working late, so you’ll either have to tell this story twice or give me written permission to give her the story because you know she’ll ask if I have your permission.”
“Consent is hot, Hazel.”
“I’m not arguing with you, but she’s made me wait to spill tea to her before until I had permission, and you know how bad I am at keeping gossip to myself.”
“It’s why you could never be president.”
“The only reason,” she agrees, deadpan. “Now I swear to god, if you don’t tell me what is happening with Miles, I will fly down to Mexico and find out for myself.”
I drag a hand down my face, half covering it, feeling my cheeks and my neck warm.
“Oh my god. Oh my god, you fucked your ex.”
“No! No. We didn’t have sex.”
“YET. The rest of that sentence is yet!” Hazel is practically screaming. “Oh my god, Abby. Spill!”
I groan, covering as much of my face as I can with my hand. And then I pick up where we left off before the pasta class, how he took me out of the class during the wine tasting because he remembered it was a trigger.
I tell her how he apologized and it was a really tender conversation and I was sort of open to talking to him until he said that he thought our breakup was for the best and it made it sound like he was successful because we broke up and it really hurt me.
I recount the way he followed me around at all the resort activities and ended up apologizing in a way that truly dissolved a lot of the hurt that I’d been holding onto for years.
I told her that I really thought that was a closure conversation and that I wouldn’t see him again, but I saw him at the beach party and didn’t want to just ignore him so we talked and danced and then I started to remember how fun it was to be around him so when I ran into him at the hot tub, I didn’t go back to my room.
“Not a hot tub, Abby.”
“I know. I know.”
She gets the details out of me about the hook-up after the hot tub and I move on, letting her know we got dinner and saw a magic show. When I tell her I woke up the next day with a migraine, she interrupts me.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she pleads with me.
“What could you have done, Haze?”
“I don’t know! I’m sure they have McDonald’s in Cabo and I could have sent you fries and a Coke.”
“Well, I ended up missing my sunset sail, and because I had invited Miles with me—”
“Abby, that is so freaking romantic. What the hell…”
“I know! I know. I just…I’m enjoying his company.”
“Continue,” she says.
“And he ended up taking care of me.”
“Taking care of you? How?”
I tell her how he held my hair back when I puked, how he carried me to bed and got my meds, water, and held me because I couldn’t lie down.