Chapter 27
Chapter 27
He doesn’t knock, and I don’t expect him to. I’m leaning against the wall right in front of the door, waiting for him. I do briefly wonder whether I misunderstood, whether I’m crazy, whether he’ll change his mind, but he appears and mirrors my pose, back against the door, restructuring the shape of the room with his presence.
“Hey,” I say, soft even though the house is asleep, or too inebriated to pay attention to us. My neighbors are Nyota and Axel. The former is supportive of any interaction between Conor and me, and the latter…Axel is the kind of guy to give a universal thumbs-up to whoever’s about to get laid, be it person, anime character, or wild animal.
“Was it necessary, sending me up alone? I doubt Lucrezia patrols the hallways.”
“That’s not why, Maya.”
“What, then?”
“A chance for you to change your mind. Clear your head.”
“You’re assuming that I can’t think clearly when you’re around.”
“ I can’t think clearly when you are around.” He breaks eye contact. “You’re way too fucking young to—”
“To consort with boys, to have sexual desires, to choose who to satisfy them with.” A still moment. “Conor?”
His frown is displeased.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
He nods once.
“You are so fucking boring .”
The line of his jaw softens. His exhaled huff could be laughter, too. “Thank you, Trouble.” He pushes away from the door, crossing the room to me. In the soft, warm light of the floor lamp, his hair is pitch black. Without the speckles of gray and fine lines around his eyes, this Conor could easily be a boy, ten years younger than I know him to be.
And he would still bitch about being too old for me.
“Do you do it on purpose?” he asks, standing squarely before me. We haven’t been this close since Edinburgh. I’ve taken off my T-shirt, and his head dips to look down at me, fingertips tracing the top elastic of my bikini bottoms, stopping right above my belly button.
Suddenly, violently, I am light-headed. “What?”
“The stuff you wear. You do it to drive me out of my mind, don’t you?”
I glance at myself. I didn’t have a chance to go shopping before this trip, or I’d have bought the flossiest piece of nylon-spandex blend on the discount rack, just to annoy the shit out of him. But the bikinis I already owned are style over skimpiness. Retro. Vintage high waist. Lots of polka dots. Jade calls them my hipster librarian swimsuits .
“You don’t even know how grateful you should be, Conor.”
“Is that so?”
“It’s not revealing at all—”
“It’s not about revealing , Maya.” His fingers dip down past the waist of my bottoms, and my breath catches. “It’s the way you take over the space around you. You remind me constantly, loudly, indecently, of all the little things that make you you . It’s impossible to escape, and it makes me very angry.”
His hand inches down, and I bite my lower lip. “I’m sorry for being myself.”
“You should be,” he says, but the last syllable becomes something groaned and choked and dragged out, and he’s touching me right between my legs. I’m wet, because…because of him. It’s not new. But maybe he didn’t know, and when the tips of his fingers first brush against me, his eyes flutter closed. “Fuck me , Maya.” He seems to sink back into himself for a heartbeat. All his muscles clench, as though knowing that I’m this ready triggered an earthquake inside him.
“That’s what happens every time I see you,” I say. My hand finds his thigh. “I hope you think about it from now on. Every single time we are together.” He’s hard. I can feel the heat of his erection between us. My palms travel upward to cup him, and—
I wish I could say that it surprises me, the way he grips my wrist and traps it against the wall. But just like everything else, this has to be on his terms. He doesn’t want to be in control of me, I don’t think, just of himself. For that, however, he has to minimize environmental interference. Keep the variables constant.
I grin, feeling troublesome. “Like I said, boring .”
“Can you be good? Just for once?”
“I’ll think about it.” My free arm reaches up. Locks around his neck as I pull him down to me. “What’s it like?” I ask against his ear, inhaling sharply when his fingers slide between the slick lips of my cunt. Conor smells like a night out, faint traces of cigarette smoke and brine and sweat, but underneath it all it’s just him . I want to lick the skin of his collarbone, so I do. “To be this boring?”
“You may think I’m boring,” he murmurs against my ear. “But I’ve been fucking superhuman for so long, when it comes to you. Since Edinburgh.”
The tip of his middle finger sinks inside me, just one digit, and my nails dig into his nape, feeling the thrum of his blood underneath. There’s his thumb, too, lazy circles around my clit, glorious, perfect pressure, delicious friction. He listens to every sound I make, pays attention to the way I move against him, and…What turns me on the most, even now, is the moan that feels dragged out of him. The fast, shallow rhythm of his breath that tells me he’s as into this as I am.
“And after that?” I ask him.
He closes his eyes. Slides deeper. I consider myself lucky: I’m easy, responsive. I’ve always been quick at finding my pleasure, alone and with partners. This, though, is different. It’s not just my body—Conor is in my brain, pushing into my soul.
“What about in Austin, Conor?” The pad of his finger strokes the right spot. My body contracts against him in surprise.
“Fuck, you— unbelievable .” His teeth open at the base of my throat. He lets go of my wrist and his hand finds my hip, twitching, tightening around it.
“Do you remember that night, a little over a year ago?” Heat rises within me. Between us. My words are breathy, choppy, damp against the fabric of his shirt. “You needed to talk to my brother. But he was gone, and I opened the door, and—”
His silent yes vibrates through me. “You had been asleep,” he says through clenched teeth. I wrap both arms around his neck, press my breasts against his chest, and he swears under his breath.
“Remember what I was wearing?”
A low groan. He does remember. It was very little, after all.
“You turned around and left. Like you were in pain.” I press a lingering kiss against his Adam’s apple. Run a finger through his hair to pull him toward me, arching to meet his lips.
He draws back, a warning growl deep in his throat.
This man, who’s been fingering moans out of me for the past five minutes, refuses to kiss me. Conor and his fucking control. “R-really?” I stutter. “Are you really going to do this to yourself?”
His thumb slides on my clit, rougher. My hips jerk toward him.
“Come on, Conor.” I try to laugh, but there’s not enough air in my lungs. “You want to kiss me so bad— oh .”
I come suddenly, painfully, straining against him, shuddering like I cannot contain the pleasure within my body, and it feels so much better than the best orgasm of my life, the one I had on his thigh in Edinburgh. It’s a tide, sweeping over me, a glow of heat from within that has no right or reason to be this damn good except for one.
Conor, watching me. Conor, touching me. Conor, talking me through it.
“It’s okay,” he says when I slump in his arms, mouth silk-soft against my temple. “It’s okay, Maya.” He’s hard against my flank. I may be wobblier than jelly and out of breath, but there’s nothing that I would love more than to make him come, too.
“You’re gonna do that again, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” he says, pressing a kiss against my cheekbone. Like the fucking liar he is.
I fist his shirt with both hands. “So if I offer to return the favor with a hand job, or a blow job, if I tell you that you can fuck my tits or literally any other part of my—”
He groans. “You can’t, huh?”
“What?”
“Be good. Not even once.”
I laugh, but no sound comes out. He’s quiet, too, as he picks me up like I’m a cotton-stuffed plushie. I follow his lead, wrap my legs around his waist, and he carries me to the bed like the exhausted girl that I am, pulling back the cool sheets, depositing me between them.
I stare at him from the too-thick pillow, yawn, and say, “Conor Harkness, you are a coward.”
The twitch of his lips feels like agreement. “Go to sleep.”
“You’d love it, wouldn’t you? It would make me shut up.”
“Such a fucking menace,” he mutters.
His hands tremble as he pushes a few strands behind my ear. There is a cautious, fragile glint in his eyes, as though he’s shaken, tender and achy from what just happened, but in a way that has nothing to do with his body. I think I get it: He thought he’d come up here and play me like an instrument, handle me like a business deal. Maybe he hoped that there would be something clinical about this.
He underestimated me.
No, Conor has always recognized me for who I am. What he underestimated is us .
“I wish you good luck,” I inform him.
“On what?”
“On your righteous journey of self-denial. You’re going to”—another yawn—“need it.”
He shakes his head. Takes my phone out of his pocket and plugs it into the charger. “Go to sleep, Maya,” he repeats.
I bury my face in the pillow, waiting for him to walk away, but I’m out like a light before he even leaves the room.