Chapter 21
twenty-one
LILIANA
The end credits of Love Don’t Cost a Thing roll by on Grant’s laptop, and my boyfriend looks at me for a rating.
Grant. My boyfriend.
I was surprised when he asked me—not because he was asking me, but because of his timing. I came here tonight already thinking he was going to ask to be exclusive, whether that was with a label or without one.
The longing looks Grant gives me, though, between kisses and during our pillow talks, led me to believe that whatever he’d ask of me, it would come with a label.
At first, doing this with him sounded absurd. Going from despising him over coffee cups to rolling around in his bedsheets. It felt too fast for how intensely my negative feelings for him were.
That’s what makes it different, though. Grant isn’t someone I met randomly during a work shift.
He’s an embodiment of my happiest days in undergrad, and my most disappointing, too.
He’s been rooted in my mind long before I reluctantly agreed to our deal.
I’ve seen the way he’s changed, how he’s still the same person I was infatuated with comms class, and I’ve uncovered a deeper side of his life, too.
It was hard for me to come to terms with the fact that my heart never really let Grant go. It was easy to fall for him all over again.
I want to be the person in his corner, supporting him, like he is with me. Whether that be as his partner, his friend, or something in between. The answer was always going to be yes.
“So?” Grant shuts the laptop and moves it off his bed, onto the nightstand.
“Still not better than the original.”
“You’re full of shit.” He grabs onto my waist and shifts us, rolling on top of me while I laugh playfully. “You’re just saying that to spite me.”
“I am.”
I’m not. The movie was fine, but not nearly as good as Patrick Dempsey driving off into the sunset on a lawn mower.
Neither movie comes close to seeing Grant’s dimples appear.
“You like teasing me too much.”
“I do.”
At the core of our relationship, before we started ripping our clothes off and stealing kisses over coffee tables, we’re friends. Grant is one of my best friends. It’s a bonus that he’s also become my boyfriend.
“I think you like when I tease you, too.” His voice drops into a sultry tone. My body responds instantly. Thighs rubbing together when he smirks and leans his mouth to my ear. “Do you like when I tease you, baby?”
Baby.
Grant has learned more about my body than I have in my entire life. My likes and dislikes, the way I twitch when he touches a certain spot. He never forgets, tracing my body into ecstasy every time we get lost in his apartment.
He’s taken note of how his nicknames affect me, too. My breath catches when he blows into the sensitive space of my neck.
Grant’s hand runs up the side of my leg, bunching the ruffled fabric of my dress around my waist. His lips kiss the exposed skin of my neck and my head goes back in a moan.
“Answer me.”
“Yes.” My voice is airy when I answer. “I love it when you tease me.”
The thin strap of my dress falls off my shoulder, and Grant kisses that spot, too.
“How do you want me to tease you tonight?” A thumb circles my temple.
I’ve learned that’s his signal telling me he wants to see my eyes.
His gemstone green stares back, intense and focused.
“My fingers? My mouth?” He breathes out and quiets like he can’t believe his own words.
“Or do you want me to tease you with my cock?”
Everything stills. My heartbeat, the air around us, his fingers caressing the back of my head. It’s the first time Grant has ever tried to initiate something that would directly involve his pleasure, or me touching him.
Usually, before I can do anything to pleasure him, he stops me. I never push or pressure, but when he tucks himself into my side and dozes off at night, I stay up wondering why he won’t let me touch him the way I want to.
I’ve been waiting so long to dissect his hesitance, that I’d almost resigned to never knowing.
It’s painfully poetic, considering how I went from despising Grant to desperate for the most intimate parts of him.
Things considered, not much is different between those days and this one. Except for a label.
My hand rests on his cheek and he kisses my palm. “Is that why you wanted to wait? You wanted me to be your girlfriend first?”
I have no problem with that. Lots of people want confirmed commitment before sex. Grant feeling that way wouldn’t change how I perceive him.
He shakes his head, though. “It wasn’t that. Trust me, even during our first night together, I wanted it so fucking bad. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.
“But how I feel about you and what I want to give you is more than physical. I want to do right by you, always. And we already started this entire thing on the wrong foot, because I left us there. I needed to make sure I deserved to have you that way.”
Grant’s eyes never leave mine throughout his monologue. They shine a certain shade of green under the dim light of his bedroom, only illuminated by the lamps on his nightstands. They’re softer, vulnerable, like at the dining room table.
“I wanted to right my wrongs first.” He pecks a kiss on my lips sweetly. “Helping you finish your story was my first priority.”
Realization hits me. Grant didn’t want to have sex, or be exclusive, until I finished my assignment. He didn’t want a repeat of undergrad.
On Grant’s bedsheets that have begun to feel like a second skin, the memory of loathing him feels miles away. The thought of feeling anything but love and adoration for him splinters a hole in my chest.
“You were always deserving of me.” My thumb traces over the indent where his left dimple rests. “I hope you know that.”
He kisses my thumb, and my palm, before gently guiding my hand to the buckle of his belt.
“I hope you do, too.”
Every time before tonight, when Grant would bring me over the edge with his tongue or by talking me through it across the bed, hand working over himself, it was frenzied passion. Clothing only half off before one of us ran our lips over each other.
Tonight is different. Grant takes his time, slowly untying the back strings of my dress and cherishing the moments as he peels it off my body.
“Another time,” he says while kissing the exposed skin of my chest. “You’re going to keep this dress on, and I’m going to bend you over and fuck you from behind in it.”
Wetness pools between my legs, and I almost ask him to hand the dress back so we can make it happen.
Words are lost in my throat when Grant starts inching the last piece of clothing off his body. His fingers twitch while I watch him, Armani branded boxers easing down his defined hips and thighs until his cock springs out.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen him exposed like this. He made good on his promises to get off while watching me touch myself. But those times before, he kept his distance.
He doesn’t stop me now when I reach out and wrap my hand around him.
“Fuck.” Grant drops his forehead onto mine. His eyes close. I’m tempted to rub his temple jokingly, tell him that it’s his turn to pry his eyes open in the middle of ecstasy, but it’s too cruel.
He’s already bucking into the space of my grip and groaning into my ear.
“It’s so fucking good, baby. You’re so good.”
The praise makes me hot everywhere. With one hand working over his length, the other forces my panties off my body. Grant and I are two bodies, limbs entangled and sweat pooling in anticipation.
Licking my lips, I roll my thumb over the slit of his cock, gathering the precum and rubbing it down his shaft.
“Lily, stop.” He’s panting and I remove my hand instantaneously. “Sorry, you’re fine. I was just about to come.”
“Why didn’t you?” My fingers twitch. I want to send him spiraling into an orgasm like he’s done with me so many times, but he shakes his head.
“Too soon. I need to be in you.”
My hips roll, searching for something to touch the most sensitive part of my body and finding nothing.
It’s been too long. I’ve pictured what it would be like with Grant whispering pretty things in my ear while his cock moves inside of me, and my imagination has been good every time. The real thing has to be better.
Mind slipping to the pleasure, I don’t hold back from touching myself, running my fingers over my most sensitive area so I can feel something.
Grant watches. His gaze burns on my skin and another wave of heat shoots through me.
“You’re gonna finger yourself for me, you want it that bad?”
Moaning, my body arches and I slip two fingers into myself. His left hand pumps his cock twice. The tattooed ink on his forearm flexes during the motion and I lose all sense of dignity.
“Yes, Grant, please.” I moan out through gritted teeth. “I’ve been waiting so long. I need it, please.”
My fingers do enough to get me to the edge and leave me teetering on it, but never to satisfy. I stare at Grant and try to convey how desperately I need him.
“Grant, please.”
He breathes once before reaching over to a nightstand. “Let me get a condom.”
“Forget the condom.”
His forearm flexes again, gripping the base of his cock tight. “You sure about that?”
“Yes.” The movement of my hips is out of time. I’m right there, so close to tipping over into an orgasm. “I need your cock so bad.”
“Yeah, baby?”
He’s breathing heavy now, pushing my hand away from my body. I whimper at the emptiness but only for a moment before the head of Grant’s cock is rubbing between my folds.
“Grant.” I whine. It’s so close; his cock only slipping half a centimeter in before he retracts it and spreads the mixture of us around instead. “Stop teasing.”
“I thought you said you liked being teased?”
I try to grab his cock myself, but he uses his right hand to pin both of mine above me.
“Aren’t you supposed to be a good girl, Lily?”
Grant’s voice is stern, the way he likes to be when he’s trying to turn me on with his words. But I can hear the shake in them and I know he’s barely holding on, too.
“I am a good girl.” My eyes open to stare at him. His lips are parted, chest heaving to hold himself back. I roll my hips against his cock and chase the friction. “I’m your good girl, Grant. So please, stop teasing.”
Grant groans. His right hand keeps me held down, but his left guides his cock exactly where I need him.
He slows his way into me, pausing to catch his breath and look down where our bodies meet.
It’s slow and sensual and so good.
When Grant bottoms out, he releases my arms to kiss me hard on the lips. I moan into it while he pulls out and slams back in once, twice, ten times.
My hands grip onto the strong muscles of his shoulders, nails digging. I get lost in the feeling of him. Every hit of his cock deep into my cervix sends another jolt of white-hot pleasure up my body.
“That’s my girl.” Grant groans into my ear when I lose control of my hips, moving back onto his cock and chasing my high. He twists my nipple and moves faster. “Take what you need from me, baby. Take it. It’s yours.”
He hits the spot in me that sends my back arching, eyes rolling up to see stars. “Oh my gosh, Grant.”
His fingers move between us, working me until my legs start to shake. “You can do it, baby. I want to see this perfect body come all over my cock. Do it.”
The pleasure shoots everywhere, euphoria taking a hold of me while my thighs vibrate uncontrollably. The orgasm is too powerful to handle. I come with Grant’s name echoing off the walls of his room and my thighs squeezing impossibly hard around his hips.
He pumps me through it until the wave wears off. When he pulls out, cock still hard and needy, I flip us. For once, Grant is laying flustered and sweaty on the bed, and it’s me who gets to lean down and make him moan with my tongue.
I take his length in my mouth, let him tangle his fingers into my hair, and relish in everything he says to me.
“Fuck, that’s so good.”
“You’re so beautiful like this.”
“Good girls like it deep down their throats, right?”
“Are you gonna let me come in your mouth, baby?”
I swallow everything he gives me and commit his orgasm to memory.
An hour later, after Grant cleans us up in the bathroom and gives me a beige sweater of his to wear, he holds me under the covers of his comforter. And when the time for the pillow talk he loves comes around, Grant moves a piece of hair behind my ear, leaving a featherlight kiss across my brow.
“I’m so lucky I have you.”
I sigh contently and kiss his palm.
“Me, too.”