Chapter 31 Easton
EASTON
Elijah’s palm slides over my stomach, then cups a breast, before he rolls me to my side, my spine to his chest.
“Can I tell you something?” he whispers. “Because I feel sort of bad about it.”
I brace for whatever he’s about to say: I’ve been dating someone else. This shouldn’t have happened. “Okay.”
“I came in your bikini bottoms.”
I laugh. “What?”
“A few days ago, you left them hanging off the hook...I was thinking about coming in your panties that night on the pool table, and one thing led to another, and—”
I laugh again as I look over my shoulder at him. “Oh my God. That’s why you washed them.”
“Are you disgusted?”
I picture him standing in the shower, with them wrapped around his cock. Or sitting on the counter. Or...“Were you standing or sitting?”
He raises a brow. “I did not think that was going to be your primary concern.”
“It’s not a concern, idiot. I’m trying to picture it because it’s hot. If I had panties on at the moment, I’d have you do it all over again.”
He yanks my ass against him. He’s already hard.
“Fuck, Easton,” he groans. “You’re going to regret telling me that.”
I lift my thigh, letting him slide against my folds. I’m soaked from the sex we just had. More soaked by the conversation. He glides back and forth easily. Already my breath is coming short. “I don’t think I’m going to regret it,” I whisper.
I should probably return to my own bed. It’s nearly dawn, and I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve done all of the things.
Just...not yet. Once I get out of this bed, it’s done, and I love this too much—lying on Elijah’s chest, with my thigh slung across his, while his hand runs circles along my spine. As if we’re a couple. As if this is somehow going to last.
I’m not sure if he realizes what he’s doing. Maybe he thinks I’m smart enough now not to get my hopes up about him. He’d be wrong. I’m not that smart.
“It pisses me off that I wasn’t your first,” he says. “It was Mark, wasn’t it? Mark Patton?”
I shrug. “If it’s any consolation, it was really bad. Further consolation should be that if you’d been my first it would’ve been illegal.”
He raises a brow. “Or you could’ve waited.”
“Are you seriously salty with me because I lost my virginity when I was seventeen? How old were you?”
“No comment,” he says. “And just so you’re clear, if Mark hits on you at the wedding, I’m probably going to kick his ass.”
Does he realize just how much he sounds like a guy in a relationship? He has no intention of this lasting beyond tonight, but he’s jealous of someone I slept with over a decade ago?
“So you’re going to kick his ass for taking my virginity in a really poor, unsatisfying manner twelve years ago?”
“Correct. Although I’ll convince myself it’s about something else.”
This is the exact kind of shit that I shouldn’t like. Thomas never asked about my first, and he also wouldn’t care.
It seems a little unfair that Elijah’s saying it all aloud. A girl might almost assume he wants us to last.
I force myself to sit up. “I should let you get some sleep,” I tell him.
He wraps his arm around me. “Stay,” he commands. “Sleep here. We never got to do this either.”
As if he wants this just as much as I do. As I fall asleep, I’m actively reminding myself that he does not.
When I wake, his side of the bed is empty, and the clock on the nightstand says it’s noon. Outside it’s pouring rain, which means we’ve got another twenty-four more hours together, twenty-four hours during which I probably need to get back on stable footing.
I shower, throw on shorts and a T-shirt, and go downstairs, where he’s standing at the stove frying up the rest of the eggs.
His gaze drops over me, head to toe. Predatory, possessive. I want to ignore that look, but it goes straight to my core.
“Make the coffee,” he says.
“Bossy,” I reply, moving past him.
His hand reaches out toward my forearm. He spins me toward him. “I can be worse.”
His gaze drops to my mouth.
I should let this end. I should content myself with last night, but I’m already caving. I’m already loose-boned and eager and leaning into his touch. “You, bossier?” I reply, biting my lip. “This I’d need to see.”
He turns off the burner, then lifts me onto the counter.
“Just one more time,” he says.
“Just the once,” I agree.
It’s just once on the counter, then it’s just once on the table, and then the screened porch—he’s seated and I’m in his lap—and then it’s in the shower, and in bed.
And each time I insist that it’s the last while thinking I don’t know how I’ll stand to live without it, and waiting for him to suggest it doesn’t have to be, that he might want to see me again after I leave New Orleans.
But he never does.