Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
GIA
There. I said it. Six months of fantasies, wants, and wishes blurted out.
Desires laid bare, strewn like seeds desperate to blossom.
JC slips his hands over mine, and my stomach twists with anxiety.
Did I kill the mood? Does he see me now as naive and inexperienced?
I have no idea what’s coming or how to stop it if it’s all wrong.
“Are you sure?” he asks, his voice the barest scrap of sound.
I catch something in his expression, a hot flame of need, and push through the nerves. “As sure as I won’t be the next Sabrina Carpenter.”
A lightning-quick flash of emotions dances over his face, and suddenly, he’s laughing.
Laughing! I feel boneless, relief flooding out of me.
I didn’t realize, not until now, how much angst I’ve been holding on to.
I’m ready to laugh it off if needed, but he meets me here, in the space between serious and playful, pressing a featherlight kiss on my forehead.
“You’re sexy when you’re funny. And when you’re not.”
“So, all the time?” I say in my best smoldering voice.
JC wordlessly scans my face. I feel more like myself again, free of the crushing weight but lost in his eyes, each its own cloud of swirling blue-gray smoke.
“Okay then,” he says. “We’re doing this.”
My reply is a tight tremble. “Hell yes.”
I love listening to how his breathing changes when his hands roam up and down both arms. The thrill of it beams light into the darkest part of my soul. We’re finally here. No JC flirting or come-hither Gia BS. Nothing coded. There is nowhere else to go, and nowhere else I’d rather be.
I lose my next breath with how he kisses me, sensual and soft, tongue sweet and unhurried. Just thinking about what’s coming makes me crave his touch. He’s older and more experienced. That comes with some advantages.
He kisses along the arc of my throat, lower and lower until his head dips between my breasts. His tongue travels against my hot skin to curl around a swollen nipple, sucking it deep into his mouth.
I can only moan and dig my nails into his scalp.
“You’re such a turn on,” he murmurs, his breath warm against my aching, tender flesh. “I’ve never felt like this before.”
I blush, feeling wanted and vulnerable and stupidly in need of reassurance. My boobs are beestings, and his lust for them is as true as sunshine in July. “Really?”
“Gia, you’re impossible to forget.”
The dirty-white light through the lamp shade brightens the hunger in his eyes. It dawns on me in a slow wave. All this time, I’ve just been trying to keep his attention. Figured he liked prettier and softer women, and a lot less mouthy. Why else didn’t he try to contact me after The Troubadour?
Because maybe you poured a drink on his head?
I feel my stomach twist again, gentler this time.
JC finds my eyes. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” I say quietly. “Everything. What you just said. It’s how I feel about you.”
He touches my hair, and the broken smile on his lips almost pulls my heart out of my chest. “What the fuck have we been doing all this time?”
I shrug, smiling back. “Being idiots.”
He laughs and sits back on his knees. Two gentle hands pull my hips forward, and he lunges on top of me, kissing me hard enough that our teeth clash.
I know the hot curve of his ass from the other night, and my hands spread open wide to clutch that fine flesh.
And I’m kissing him back with everything I've got.
Possessive and powerful.
When he finally breaks our kiss, he’s flushed and breathing hard. Everything’s hard.
“Don’t move,” he says.
JC rolls off the bed and unbuttons his jeans. Flashes of us together in the bus blitz through my mind. I rolled with the punches, too thirsty for him to think straight. But when his jeans fall to the floor, my stomach surges with an ache so specific to him.
We look at each other for a long moment.
Damn, he’s beautiful.
Then he strips the boxers off, and I’m suddenly so unsure what to do. The whole big hands, big everything logic is distressingly accurate.
I drag my eyes up to his face. “Wow,” is the clever thing I say.
He smiles, crawling onto the bed. He kisses me, slow and dirty, as his fingers hook into the side of my special bought-on-sale panties. So much for those being any highlight. They’re yanked off without a second glance.
“Fuck, Gia,” he whispers. “Look at you.”
I feel so exposed under his hot gaze. Anxious he’s measuring me against some invisible standard.
I want to please him so bad, and I’m worried I won’t.
The desire hasn’t left—it’s still there, warmth low in my belly, awareness of him as a physical presence.
Now tangled with anticipation of a different kind.
Wondering if it will hurt and what it will feel like.
I watch him drop between my legs. He presses his warm palms flush on my skin, like he’s searing bar chords into trembling flesh. Pushing my legs wide, wider, widest. Everything that makes me a woman suddenly bared and there for the taking.
I look down at his face between my thighs, eyes shining, hair falling forward. He’s watching me so intently, his skin lit up by the moon.
“If it gets too crazy, let me know, okay?”
Oh, god. This is it.
I bite my lip and tell him I’m ready.
His warm breath gusts against me before his tongue gently licks my seam. I fist his hair, gasping in shock.
“Is that good?” JC murmurs.
It feels like … where are the words? Where do I even begin?
“Amazing,” I whisper back. “Keep going.”
With my approval, he dips his mouth into the wild, screaming jungle of chaos waiting for him.
He sucks my ready little clit into a throbbing bundle of anticipation and stokes the burning desire into a near-fatal level of ache.
He ignores my cries from the whiplash of my body brought to the edge of an impending explosion before he backs off.
Then he starts tongue-fucking me with deep, wicked strokes.
I moan, my stomach tightening in response. His halo of stubble and the rub of it burns exactly as I imagined.
“JC,” I pant.
His mouth suddenly moves off me. “Too much?”
“No!” I clarify, a little too frantically.
He sits up with a lazy twitch of a smile, completely aware of how desperate I sound. I shiver as he gropes through his jeans on the floor, pulling out a condom.
Those eyes are heavy and low when he says, “We’re not done. Not by a long shot.”
He rips the package open with his teeth, and I’m mesmerized by how a tiny piece of latex engulfs his fullness. He positions himself, and the warmth of him pressing up against me feels huge. I jerk my hips higher, but he grips them and forces me to be still.
“I’ll go slow,” he says, his voice rough with a deeper edge to it.
He starts to penetrate me with a careful, testing thrust of his hips. I shut my eyes. My whole body begins to shake.
“Gia, are you okay?”
I stare up at the concern etched across his brow. My breath is coming out of my mouth in tiny gasps. “It’s fine. It’s fine. Are you in? All the way?” I glance down. Fuck. Still miles to go. “What are you, like nine, ten inches?”
He lets out a hazy laugh. “I’ll take that, but more like seven. Point two.”
“Jameson,” I breathe. “Tell me you did not slap a ruler against that thing.”
“Of course not, Regina,” he says, the tiniest bit amused. “I used the tape measure from my tool kit. Like a real man.”
No, no, no!
But yes to our laughter. It keeps me tethered to the moment instead of spinning out into anxiety. This is just beyond.
“I think you need to go deep and get it over with it,” I say. “Bottom out.”
He nuzzles my jawline with the coarse scratch of his whiskers. “Always so demanding.”
“Do not—”
Whatever remains of that sentence dissolves into a juddering gasp as JC sinks to the hilt, the pain sharp and biting. I jerk my hips back involuntarily to relieve the shock of him filling me.
“Gia,” he says, his voice sounding far away. “I’m here. I’m with you. Tell me what you need.”
A raw ache grips my throat, and I suck in air, panting like a dog in heat. “Shh. Shh. Shh. Just hold me for a minute. I want to feel close to you.”
He shifts his hips slightly to ease the pressure. His entire body is trembling with the effort to control himself. “This is crazy,” he breathes. “I’m about to explode.”
His eyes have wild white rings around them, like a cornered animal, and his nostrils flare as he takes short, erratic breaths. I can smell his male musk, spiked with exertion and that familiar citrus scent.
“Just tell me when,” he says with a barely-there whisper. “I’m going to make love to you while I touch you. Is that cool?”
I nod, heat creeping up my neck. I’m having trouble breathing. He pushes up on one arm and pulses, slow and steady, stretching me, pain dulled by the thrill of him throbbing deep inside me. Darkness swirls around us, my blood half adrenaline.
“Fucking hell,” I mutter.
“Gia.” He swallows hard. “You feel incredible.”
His free hand dips to my clit, and he draws precise, maddening circles with his finger pad. My walls squeeze tight around him, a sparkling kind of awareness funneling lower until both of my feet start to burn, toes curling into a tight pinch.
“JC.” My voice is thin and weak. “I think it’s happening.”
“Already?” he rasps. “Fuck. Hold on.”
He starts moving in and out of me with less control, heavy burning strokes, the sensation of him spiraling my own desire faster and higher.
It feels like he’s lit a match to a whole warehouse of fireworks inside me, and the orgasm shimmers on the fringes of my peripheral vision before it slams through me.
A split second of wild muscle-clenching, and I howl at the sky, the pleasure like nothing I’ve ever known.
The room feels like it’s cracking wide open, the walls flowering with colors I’ve never seen before.
And I thought I’d heard every sound that could come out of JC, but as he surges against me, as deep as he can go, my name mangled in his cry is a raw melody stripped of all polish.
Then another beautiful chain of explosions rips my heart and mind apart. I’m crying out like a wild thing, and the last of his release trembles out of him, his face twisted with the pleasure rocking his body.
When I go lax, he does too, collapsing on my chest. His fingers, those beautiful things that coax the heart-dropping notes from any guitar, curl in my hair. Stillness surrounds us, as delicate as the French lace curtains and the slow retreat of his heartbeat against mine.
I hear his faint, “Goddamn,” but I don’t know what to say.
So many things in life exist on a spectrum.
Good, bad. Hot, cold. Up, down.
Positives, and the chances of me recovering from this are deep in the negatives.