Chapter 15
C HAPTER 15
The look on his face made me weak. In the very best way.
“First,” he said. “I’m going to taste you. I’m going to lick you until you beg me to stop. And then I’m going to fuck you. You have no idea how much I want to do that. How much I want to feel you. Wet and hot around me.”
So much for my belief that sex like this was confined to books.
I felt like a wall between us had just been torn away. And I could see the truth of him.
The truth that I hadn’t wanted to see. That he was intense, sexual, unapologetic about it.
That he absolutely could give me the best fuck I’d ever had in my life, and possibly ruin me for all other men.
Part of me had maybe known that. At least since New Orleans. And if not from before.
Josh was jealous of Ryan.
Had it always been there? Was I just that committed to putting blinders on so that I didn’t have to deal with the complicated things?
The things that felt like a threat to my safety?
Because this did not feel safe. It didn’t feel easily controlled. It felt volatile and wild, it felt like jumping off the edge of a cliff. It felt like a million different things that I would never do, but there I was. Laying on the bed, my legs slightly parted, my eyes glued to his, desperate to hear what he would say next, to see what he might do next.
He pushed his shirt off of his shoulders, let it drop down to the floor. He was wearing nothing but black, low-slung pants.
He undid his belt smoothly with one hand, a sexual magic trick the likes of which I had never seen before. The ease and smoothness making my internal muscles squeeze tight.
A promise that my body responded to.
He would be that smooth and unerring when he touched me. I just knew it.
He stripped the rest of his clothes off, and my mouth went dry.
He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He was hard and thick, bigger than I’ve ever seen in person. His thighs were firm and muscular, and I couldn’t say that I had ever given a lot of thought to a man’s thighs. Until right then.
I wanted to lick him.
All the things he’d said he was going to do to me, I wanted to do to him. And yet I found myself immobilized. Pinned down to the bed by the intensity of his gaze.
“I’m going to make good on my promise,” he said.
He prowled slowly to the edge of the bed, and got down onto the mattress. He moved slowly between my legs, his face inching closer to where I was wet and needy for him.
Then he moved his hands beneath my ass, and lifted me up off the mattress, bringing me down toward his mouth, his lips firm and sure as he began to lick and suck me where I needed him most.
“Holy shit,” I groaned, as he went to work, eating me like I was the greatest delicacy he’d ever tasted in his life.
He pushed two fingers inside of me and fucked me with them while he continued lapping at my clit.
My hips shifted restlessly, my whole body on fire with need for him.
He was right. He was relentless. He pushed me to the edge, over and over again, and he didn’t let me go over.
Normally, when I couldn’t reach the edge of my orgasm, it was frustrating. Normally, there was no control there. It was just me not quite being able to get to climax. This was different. He would take me there, then pull me back, and I felt each and every time like I could go over easily, and every time he teased me, it didn’t end with a sweep of disappointment, a raging feeling of irritation at my aborted pleasure; no, it only ramped up my need. My excitement.
It only brought me even more pleasure. I wanted it to end, and I also wanted to stay suspended there as long as possible.
I was strung out on a rack between pleasure and pain, and I had never loved anything more.
He lifted his head, made eye contact with me, and then slowly slid a third finger deep inside of me, and I exploded.
Everything in me shattered, cascading around me like a million stars, my orgasm blinding me, ripping through me like a violent storm. I was breathless. Lost.
He growled. “Come again.”
“I can’t,” I said, breathless.
“Sure you can.”
He began to move his thumb over my clit, back and forth. “Come again for me.
“Come on, Poppy. Be a good girl for me.”
I had no idea that was such a trigger for me, but it was. Because I burst, bright and euphoric, another time, just as strong as before.
I was gasping, trying to catch my breath.
And he was moving to the nightstand, grabbing hold of a condom, and I wasn’t going to ask how long it had been there, or who it had been intended for.
I hadn’t gotten to touch him. I hadn’t gotten to taste him.
I knew a moment of regret for that. But I also didn’t have the patience to stop him now. I wanted him. I wanted him inside of me. So, I didn’t tell him to stop when he took out the condom and rolled it over his thick length. I begged him to take me when he pressed the head of his cock against my slick entrance. And when he took me in one smooth thrust, I gasped. And I shook.
I looked up into his eyes, and I was overwhelmed. It was Ryan.
Ryan Clark.
Quinn thought of him as the author of her fate.
I had always found that annoying.
And yet, in that moment, with him deep inside of me, I couldn’t escape the fact that he was tightly wound around my fate.
I had just never been able to see it.
He began to move, each thrust taking me closer to the edge yet again.
I clung to him. If I didn’t, I was going to fly off of the bed. Maybe off of the earth. Out of my body.
But I had also never felt more connected to myself. He was deep inside of me, and I could feel every inch, every stroke, so much more than I had ever experienced.
This was like something entirely new. And I felt broken apart by it. Shattered.
I couldn’t breathe.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to hold onto him and let him show me what was real. I wanted him to make me real.
And all the while, the realization of who this was kept roaring inside of me. I opened my eyes, I looked at his face.
Contorted with pleasure, as lost as I was.
I kissed him. Because his mouth on mine made sense. My hands on his skin. Sweat slicked beneath my fingertips.
Our breathing was fractured together.
We had never been so in sync. We had never both worked so hard toward the same goal before.
Except for maybe when he had helped me rebuild that cake.
Maybe I was wrong about him.
That made me falter. But then, he rolled his hips forward, and the new rhythm took hold of me. I wrapped my legs around his waist, he went deeper.
I didn’t realize I was saying his name until he growled. Until he said mine.
“Poppy.”
It sent me over the edge. I came hard, gripping his cock, pulling him deeper, and then he lost it. Any semblance of control. His thrusts became erratic, and I surrendered to it. To him.
I came again, shuddering, shivering. Begging for more, begging for a reprieve. It was too much. It was not enough.
It was everything, just like him.
Just like us.
When it was over, he rolled out of bed, and went into the bathroom. I lay there, the sheets warm and a little bit damp underneath me.
My breathing couldn’t find its rhythm. My heart couldn’t seem to settle down.
He came back into the room, and I swallowed a big gulp of air, then managed to make myself choke. On air. That was just how destroyed I was.
He came to the bed. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I wheezed.
His face was unreadable. I had hoped that maybe this would make that wall go away forever. That maybe I would look at him and understand him. But I was maybe even more mystified now than I had been before.
I wasn’t sure what this meant. Any of it.
I wasn’t sure how to fit all these pieces together. Everything I knew about him from back then, everything this told me about now.
Except, what was there to know?
Attraction had been there, underneath the surface, all this time.
We both gave in when we knew we were going to have to see each other.
That said everything.
I sat up.
“Stay,” he said.
I found myself laying back down, as he sat back down on the mattress.
He lifted his hand, put it on my cheek, held me like that as he leaned in and kissed my mouth.
I shivered beneath his lips.
When we parted, he was looking at me with that same intensity.
It was all the same with him.
He had looked at me like that so many times, and I had thought that he was angry.
I felt like I had a chest of drawers in my head that contained various things I had observed about Ryan over the years. And suddenly all the drawers had been pulled out and dumped upside down. I had that same collection of things I’d always had, but they were in disarray. I couldn’t figure out how they were supposed to be organized or pieced together. What I felt like I knew, I clearly didn’t know anymore. And maybe never had.
He lay down beside me, and pulled the covers up over both of us. I tried to relax, but my heart was still playing havoc inside of me.
“Relax, Poppy.”
I tried. The absurdity of it. I had rarely had a conversation with this man that hadn’t ended in an argument and here we were laying in bed together skin to skin. But I had to tell myself that. Because I didn’t really feel that.
This didn’t feel unnatural. This didn’t feel wrong. It felt nice. It felt good.
I didn’t feel panicked.
My heart was still beating fast, but it wasn’t fear.
It was something else I didn’t have a name for.
I turned over onto my side, and he wrapped his arm around me, his large hand on my stomach. I could feel him against my back, his chest hair crisp against my shoulder blades, the press of his cock against my ass arousing, even though I should be totally good.
He was getting hard again. Which seemed a little bit excessive. I couldn’t complain.
After all, being wanted . . .
That did things to me.
He kissed the back of my neck. I moaned. And I thought of all the things that I still wanted to do to him.
He was leaving tomorrow.
Leaving. We both were. Getting on planes that would take us to different corners of the world.
This was our night.
I shifted, turned over so that I was facing him. He looked at me, and there were questions in his eyes. I wasn’t sure what the questions were, so I really couldn’t find answers. Except I pressed my hand against his chest, let my fingertips trail down the muscles there, down his abs, moved it down to his ever-hardening erection, squeezed him.
He groaned, closing his eyes, letting his head fall back. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and I followed the rogue desire that I had, and licked it.
He growled, suddenly gripping my wrists and pinning them up over my head. “You’re playing a dangerous game.”
“Am I?” I asked, panting.
I wanted to be. This kind of sex, this kind of intense, consuming sex, had never been part of my experience. I licked my lips, and I watched as his eyes flared with desire. I couldn’t help but respond to that.
I was wet and throbbing again, even though I had come more times in the last fifteen minutes than I ever had in a single night.
I had a feeling I was going to again. And maybe even again.
I pushed him onto his back, and he let me. Then I ran my hands down his chest and back up again, kissing his neck, kissing down, until I reached his cock. I had never been especially bold sexually, but then, the kind of sex I’d had hadn’t really necessitated boldness.
I felt it all now. Need, mixed with an incredible desire to make him feel what I was feeling.
I felt wild. Like something elemental had been stored up inside of me.
I didn’t care right then how I looked. What he thought.
I was beyond that need to please. It was something earthier than that. Something deeper.
He was so beautiful. I couldn’t say that I had ever thought of a man’s penis as beautiful. But his was.
Thick and glorious, and it had given me so much pleasure. I owed it a debt of gratitude.
I didn’t care if that was silly.
I licked him from base to tip with the flat of my tongue, swirled around the crown.
The sound he made was feral. It turned me on.
His hand went to my hair, pulling hard.
This was definitely a different side to sex than I’d ever experienced before. Maybe that was what I was feeling. This need that bordered on violence.
That space that contained both pleasure and pain.
I sucked him in deep, and he made a sound that was inhuman. I loved it.
I loved his reactions, but I wasn’t working just for those. His pleasure was mine. It was that simple. That mystifying.
It was like I knew what to do next, exactly. Perfectly.
I swallowed him down, pushed him to the brink, and when he couldn’t take it anymore, he gripped my hair hard and pulled me away from him. “Not like that. I’m going to fuck you again.”
“Okay,” I said.
He wasn’t going to get an argument out of me. I probably should have said something sexier. I needed to work on my porn dialogue. His was great. Mine was probably lacking.
“Ask nicely.”
Oh. Well. He was coaching me.
“Please,” I said. I looked up at him, gave him my best innocent expression; hilarious, given everything that had happened in this bed in the last half-hour.
“Please what?”
“Fuck me,” I said.
He pinned me down, taking hold of my wrists again and deftly applying a condom with one hand as he held me fast.
Then he slid into me, and my body welcomed him, in spite of a little bit of soreness from the last time.
It was wild. Fractured.
Somehow more intense and electrifying than the first time.
He was breathing hard, so was I.
He held onto me when his pleasure built, and mine reached the same peak. We went over together.
This time, he didn’t immediately get out of bed. This time, he just held me.
Like we had both been shipwrecked together, tossed by the waves.
I clung to him. I fell asleep. And when I woke up, he was breathing steadily beside me.
I panicked.
I was in bed with Ryan.
We’d had . . . we’d had sex twice.
And in the morning, he was going to leave. We were going to go to the airport together, and say goodbye. It made me want to throw up. I couldn’t stand it.
I was too embarrassed. By the intensity of all of it. By everything.
I couldn’t bear it.
I knew that I couldn’t.
I scrambled out of bed, and thankfully he didn’t stir.
Heart hammering, I collected my clothes, and slipped out of his room, and into mine.
I went into the bathroom and looked at myself.
My hair was wrecked. A reflection of my innermost self.
I turned away from the mirror, and finished packing the few remaining things I hadn’t gotten to the day before. Then, as quietly as I could, I took my suitcases down the stairs, slipped my shoes on and walked out of the house. I walked my bags down three houses, and pulled up a rideshare app on my phone.
There was a driver pretty close by, and I put in the location of the Queenstown airport, and waited.
It only took five minutes. He helped me get my bags in the trunk, and I got into the backseat. I called myself a coward in a hundred different ways.
He would be in the international terminal. Since he was flying directly out of the country. I would be in domestic.
I was wrecked after last night. And I still couldn’t say what I felt for him.
I just knew that I didn’t want to say goodbye.