8. Everett
EVERETT
You know how I know she’s nervous? She’s quiet the whole drive.
When she’s comfortable, she won’t shut up. She’ll talk about the chickens, her classes, and whatever else is bouncing around in her head.
When she goes silent, it means her brain is starting to spiral. Based on the way she’s chewing her thumbnail again, the scenarios she’s come up with so far aren’t great.
I pull into my driveway and cut the engine. She leans forward and looks through the windshield at the house. Around five expressions wash over her face in three seconds.
Finally, she asks, “This is your house?”
“Yeah.”
“Your house.” She looks at me, then back at the house. “Like, the whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
“Do you share it with anyone?”
“No. It’s all mine.”
She’s doing the math in her head. College student plus scholarship that only covers tuition plus whatever she thinks I make doing whatever she thinks I do equals this still doesn’t add up.
She’s right. It doesn’t add up with the information she has.
I’m not giving her the rest of it today.
She doesn’t need to know the down payment came from fourteen months of bare-knuckle fighting in warehouses and parking garages.
She doesn’t need to know every piece of furniture inside was paid for with somebody else’s blood on my hands.
That the reason I bought a place instead of renting is because nobody can take a house away from you the way a landlord can take an apartment.
I spent enough of my childhood getting moved around to know I never wanted to feel that again.
She doesn’t need to know any of that. Not yet.
“How can you...” She trails off, confused.
“Are you coming inside, or are you going to sit in the truck and ask me about my real estate situation?”
That gets a small, nervous laugh out of her.
She unbuckles her seatbelt and follows me up the walkway.
I notice her attention on the bushes along the path, which I planted myself last spring because the yard looked bare and it bothered me.
I don’t tell her that either. There’s a version of me that plants bushes and makes his bed. I even keep a clean kitchen.
Then there’s the version of me that breaks people’s faces for cash and levels my opponents on the football field. I’ve gotten very good at making sure nobody sees both at the same time.
Inside, her eyes move across the living room. She’s trying to understand me by trying to understand my space.
It won’t give her much. I keep it clean because chaos reminds me of growing up.
I keep it minimal because I’ve never had enough stuff to fill a house, and I don’t see the point of pretending.
But what’s here is taken care of. The couch doesn’t have stains.
The kitchen counter is wiped down. The floors are swept.
I don’t need much, but what I have, I maintain.
That’s a lesson I taught myself a long time ago, when the only things I owned were a duffel bag and a pair of cleats, and I treated them like they were made of gold because nobody was going to replace them if I didn’t.
She’s nervous. I don’t need her to tell me. I see it in the way she’s wrapped her arms around herself and the way her eyes keep moving. Her whole posture tells me she’s waiting for permission to exist in my space.
“This is really nice.” She looks up at me with a weak smile that doesn’t last very long. “It really is.”
“Thank you. Is that why you’re so nervous?”
“I’m not nervous.” Somebody should tell that to her voice, which just jumped two octaves. “I’m observing.”
“You’re nervous.”
“Fine. Maybe a little.” She tightens her arms around herself like she’s afraid she’s going to fall apart. “I’ve never been to a guy’s house before. Alone. With no reason.”
Something hot and dangerous uncoils in my belly as I close the distance between us. “You have a reason.”
“Do I?” She’s chewing her lip again, but she doesn’t back away, does she?
“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” I tell her.
I see it in her eyes when she looks up at me. She’s not afraid of me. She’s afraid of wanting this, which is different. I probably understand it better than she thinks I do.
“I want to,” she whispers. I swear to God, her face looks like it’s going to burst into flames. Even her ears are red. “I just... I’m a little worried. You’re too big to fit inside me.”
Jesus fucking Christ. I have to work very hard not to react to that. I mean, what guy doesn’t want to hear it? And she’s probably not wrong—just looking at us side by side would make a person wonder how I’d fit all of me into something as tiny as her.
It doesn’t matter how hard I work, because something must move across my face that makes her groan and cover her eyes. “Don’t laugh at me,” she begs.
“I’m not laughing.”
“You’re really close to it.”
“I’ll go slow.” I pry her hand away from her eyes and wait until she looks at me again.
“I’ll take my time. And you can tell me to stop anytime you want to.
No pressure.” And I mean it. This girl trusted me once already, and she’s trusting me again now.
I’m not going to be the reason she stops trusting people.
“You say that, but...”
“I mean it.” Letting go of her wrist, I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and let my fingers graze her jaw. Her breath catches. “I’ll make sure you’re comfortable. But you’re in control of this, okay? You really are.”
She takes a deep breath. It’s shaky. So is her hand when she places it in mine before I lead her up the stairs to my bedroom.
The bedroom is the same as the rest of the house. Clean, furnished with the bare minimum. A bed, nightstand, lamp. She looks around the room the way she looked around downstairs.
Then she looks at me, and I see the exact second she decides to stop being scared.
I take my time with her clothes because she deserves that.
The sweater first. Slowly, so slowly, giving her room to back out at every step.
But she doesn’t. She stands there and lets me, and when I pull the sweater over her head, she’s looking up at me through her glasses with those big brown eyes and those dimples, and I have to remind myself that going slow is the plan.
The jeans are next. I undo the button and slide them down so she can step out of them. Once she does, we both look down at the same time.
Chickens. Her underwear has chickens on it. Little cartoon ones in different poses. One of them is wearing sunglasses. Another one holds a guitar.
She closes her eyes. “I forgot I was wearing these.”
“Sure you did,” I tell her with a smirk.
“I have other underwear. Without poultry.”
I hook my thumbs into the waistband and pull her a little closer. “I like these.”
“You do not.”
“I like everything about you, dimples. Including whatever is happening on your underwear.” Holding her gaze, I ask, “Can I?”
She nods. I slide the underwear down her legs and toss them somewhere behind me. The chickens will survive.
She’s naked now, standing in my bedroom, and she doesn’t know what to do with her hands.
They go to her sides, then cross over her chest, then drop again.
This is definitely the first time she’s ever been totally naked in front of somebody.
Even when she was partially naked, there was a lot less eye contact than there is now.
“Stop thinking,” I tell her.
“I can’t stop thinking. Thinking is what I do. It’s my whole—”
My kiss shuts down whatever she was about to say, which was probably going to involve a metaphor or something.
There’s nothing she needs to say with words, anyway.
I understand how she’s feeling, which is why I’m gentle when my hands go to her waist, and I walk her backward before lowering her onto the bed.
Slowly. With one hand behind her head so she won’t bump it on the headboard.
Her glasses. I reach up and slide them off her face, folding them carefully and setting them on the nightstand. She blinks up at me, unfocused, and murmurs, “Now I can’t see you.”
“You don’t need to see me. You just need to feel.
” Then I press my mouth to her throat, and she gasps, her hands flying to my shoulders.
I take my time there, kissing the spot just under her ear, dragging my lips down the side of her neck until I feel her pulse jump under my mouth.
She smells like shampoo and something underneath it that’s just her, and I breathe her in while I work my way lower.
Her collarbone. The hollow at the base of her throat.
I kiss across her chest, slow, and her breathing picks up when I get close to her tits, but I don’t touch them yet.
I go around. Underneath. Along the curve.
By the time I finally close my mouth over her nipple, she’s squirming.
The choked little cry she makes almost makes me lose my patience completely.
But I don’t. Not this time. This time, I’m going to go slow with her if it kills me. Based on how hard I am right now, it might.
I give the other tit the same attention, using my tongue and my teeth—gently, barely there—until she’s arching into me, and her fingers are in my hair, and she’s making sounds she probably doesn’t know she’s making.
I map her with my mouth. Her ribs. The soft skin of her stomach, where she tenses and then relaxes when I press a kiss just below her navel.
The curve of her hip. The inside of her wrist when I lift her hand to my lips.
Every inch of her. I want every inch, and I take my time getting it.
By the time I settle between her legs, she’s trembling. Not from fear this time. Her thighs tense when I kiss the inside of one, then the other, working my way up in a way that’s probably torturous for her, but I can’t bring myself to rush.
“Everett.” My name comes out broken, harsh.
“I’ve got you,” I whisper between gentle kisses against her mound.
“I know, but could you maybe... I need you to...”