Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
I wasn’t familiar with the thunderous, demand pounding between my legs or the desire coursing through my veins, leaving my mind spinning and desperate for more.
The lethal combination had me abandoning all my common sense because anything that took me away from this before I was ready to give him up was too significant of a cost. In another universe, another timeline, this, whatever this was, didn’t end here.
It only started.
I’d known leading Felix away from prying eyes was already a risk unlike any other I’d ever so boldly taken before, never mind with Ma in the building, but his query had played on repeat in my head until I thought the cassette player would chew clean through the tape.
“But what about a husband?”
Those words unraveled the wound-up nerves coiled tight beneath my belly button. Fended off the warning signs urging me to retreat and turn back toward safety. I’d expected him to break character when I challenged him, questioned his stability, and I’d waited on held breath for him to concede. For him to prove me right.
He hadn’t. Felix was staunch, unwavering, and when he’d shored up closer, his determined hazel stare working over me, words losing their strength as though he were struggling to reconcile what was happening between us, too—the unbridled need I’d fought to defuse, the fantasy I’d spent hours smothering, surfaced in an electric wave, so brilliant and fierce, and pulled me undertow.
And I submitted willingly. Where I’d anticipated to find pain, a sensation I was well acquainted with on the other side of the aftershocks, I found warmth, an insatiability so foreign, it had me acting in ways I ordinarily wouldn’t and throwing caution to the wind while I canted toward wanton abandon. The very kind I knew would inevitably blow up in my face for one reason or another.
I needed to know if the charged static that mounted every time he got closer was real or if it was a fixation. But when I gave into temptation in all the ways I faithfully swore during the Lord’s Prayer I wouldn’t, and his body caged me in while he ate at my lips, I knew this was worse than I could have ever imagined because it was real.
So real, I didn’t know what I’d do when I had to tear myself away and not look back.
For now, I wanted to stay in our own little alternate universe where reality didn’t exist, and I was free to do what I wanted to do with him.
Like getting out of my dress as fast as possible. I’d gone in here with modest intentions—or as modest as kissing could be, really—but proximity and privacy had compelled my body to act in other ways. Demanded things of me I couldn’t ignore—I wouldn’t ignore, because if I was destined to end up with someone like Martin, if I was supposed to spend the rest of my life craving physical touch to counter how much pain touch had brought me in the past, then I wanted to experience that with Felix.
I loved how he looked at me. He saw me as a woman, confident enough to take what she wanted when she wanted it. The version in my head I thought would exist if given the chance.
After I’d failed the ‘Are you a good flirt?’ quiz from Tina’s copy of Seventeen magazine she’d smuggled into my house four summers ago, she’d reminded me romantic relationships could only operate one of two ways.
“You can’t ever like a guy more than he likes you, Bel. He has to like you more,” she stated knowingly, flipping through the pages of the magazine, landing on a perfume ad. “Like Justin and me.” She opened the accompanying tester strip, bringing it to her face to sniff. “Majorly gross.” The slight droop of her nose wrinkled, and she held the page out to me to sample. I scanned the bright neon ad for the Tribe perfume before I inhaled and leaned back on my thighs, considering it.
“I like it.” She raised a disapproving brow at me. “I mean, I bet it dries down nicely,” I added, the nervous titter sliding out.
Tina’s expression didn’t budge. I’d always hated it when she looked at me like that, like she knew better. Even if she did about most things. Finally, she rolled her eyes, expelling a sigh. “Too young for my taste,” she said, as though we weren’t both just shy of eighteen.
I held out my hand, impatient fingers flitting. Surrendering the magazine to me, she watched as I liberally rolled the sample against my wrist. “Anyway, like I was saying,” she continued while I brought my wrist to my nose, taking long pulls. Tina always said you needed a signature scent. I really liked this. “ Or you gotta” —annoyed, she batted my hand away from my face— “would you quit smelling your wrist already?” I mumbled out an apology, settling in for another Tinaism, even if I’d already heard this lesson a hundred times over. “ Or you gotta both like each other equally.”
I’d made the mistake of liking Corey more than he’d liked me. That’s why the breakup had hurt almost as much as my torn hymen.
I’d remembered what she’d said when Ma set Martin and me up. I’d kept my feelings out of it, and his sparkling personality had made that easy enough to do. Not that it had made a difference in the grand scheme of things.
But I’d never experienced the latter. Mutuality. Liking someone as much as they liked me. Never believed I would, if I was honest. That was for the romance books I’d read by moonlight long after Ma had gone to bed.
Or so I’d thought.
The sight of Felix kneeling between my legs now, expression unreadable, had my synapses misfiring and my core straining to bear down on nothing like a cat in heat. My body’s response to him dripped from my core, settling between my ass cheeks and the desk, the incessant heartbeat between my thighs pounding so loud I was certain he heard it. I shifted, the pooling squelching a little, my cheeks flaming with heat. That had never happened before. Being wet, that was.
Wanting it.
Asking for it.
My bewilderment at his slow crawl up my inner thighs had been genuine.
But I’d been mortified when he’d asked with a gentleness that failed to conceal the ticking in his set jaw—as if he wouldn’t like the answer either way—whether anyone had ever gone down on me before. No. Definitely not. But Felix didn’t drop it and move on like I’d expected when I hadn’t replied. He asked if anyone had tried.
Shame had ridged inside of me before I managed to force out a brief headshake. Tina said she couldn’t keep Justin’s mouth off her if she tried, and I’d always just assumed there was something wrong with me. In all the ways Martin had touched me before, he never went there—he’d been the one who said it was gross—and I chalked that up to being another flaw in my design or, God forbid, because I might like it.
It was a struggle to relax on the desk, my anxiety at odds. On one hand, I didn’t want to use the precious time I had with Felix stressing about what he was thinking while down there—at least I’d groomed the curls back a little when I’d showered earlier—but on the other, the feedback dissonance my brain’s channel was stuck on had me fretting over whether he was disappointed or worse, silently comparing me to someone else. I’d die on the spot.
Pulling in a protracted breath, I held it for eight counts, releasing it slowly. I needed to calm down and catalog the situation again. Would someone who was underwhelmed appraise me with—was that starved appreciation glinting in his eyes?—while on his knees, abrading his bottom lip with the even, squared edges of his teeth?
I didn’t think so. Get out of your head, Belmira. You’re going to ruin this for yourself.
Was he… was he really going to—I blushed a little brighter— eat me out? As if hearing the unspoken question, Felix’s gaze peeled away from my core, meeting my eyes, mischief laced with a promise reflecting at me.
I swallowed.
Maybe I was wrong. Passion and desire weren’t just for books. It could be real.
‘You can’t keep him ,’ my conscience reminded.
But God, I wanted to. I hadn’t needed the tear-inspiring reminder. I beat the mist back quickly before they could set.
Once we left the claustrophobic confines of Jerry’s office, the spell broke. This night became a memory I hoped I looked back at fondly and not with agony because I had the keenest sense Felix would thoroughly ruin me for anyone else.
“Are you okay?” He gave my knee another of his gentle squeezes I was convinced had a direct line to my heart. “I won’t do anything you’re uncomfortable with.”
I knew he wouldn’t. Was Felix arrogant and pushy? Yes. Charming and disarming? Also yes. But he never took what wasn’t clearly his. Even if he had to check in more than once.
“You’re always allowed to change your mind,” he added. I really wished he wasn’t so nice, and I knew how that sounded—a man wasn’t forcing me into something, yippee —but when I’d lived a life wielded by force, it illuminated just how much I’d given up without ever being aware of it.
Up until tonight, I had mostly made peace with what life and Ma had in store for me.
But that had been before Felix.
Before he’d given me that single, promissory look that he’d keep me for as long as I allowed him and held me like letting go might kill him.
Before his thumb stroked along my ring finger in careful calculation.
“But what about a husband?” echoed again, and it nearly undid me. I didn’t want this to be a one-night thing.
I wanted it to last a lifetime, and I knew it couldn’t.
Not without taking chances that weren’t just calculated. They were downright stupid for a man I hardly knew.
“Bel.” The lust cleared from his eyes, replaced by concern. I blinked, losing one of the tears. Crap. I apprehended the wayward droplet by pretending to sweep a loose eyelash away.
“I’m not that kind of guy, sweetheart,” he assured, timbre low, spearing me even lower.
Sweetheart. I’d nearly given myself whiplash when I’d heard him call me that the first time. No one had ever called me that before. Come to think of it, no one had ever used a term of endearment for me, at least not from a genuine place. Patronizing? Of course. But when Felix said it, I got the sense he meant it.
Man, I was totally about to start blubbering again. I sniffled, catching his brows digging in the middle. Ugh . I had to get it the hell together, or I would ruin this for myself before it even began. I wouldn’t get another chance like this with him again.
“I’m okay,” I assured brightly, selling it with a smile. Suspicion tapered his stare. “Just…” Say something half true, Belmira. “Nervous.”
His head tipped ever so slightly to the right, scrutinizing the explanation with a fine-tooth comb, the worry cementing his features.
“I am, too,” he admitted, a boyish smile crooking his lips, dispelling the traces of concern away. “But not because I’ve never—” he cut himself off, but it was too late.
Right. Not because he hadn’t done this before. That had been kind of obvious. You didn’t kiss like that without having gone around the block a couple of times.
The tips of his ears turned a brilliant shade of red. “That didn’t come out right,” Felix mumbled. He buried his face into the inside of my thigh, his gaffe swallowed up by his loud groan.
“Want to try again?” I suggested.
When he resurfaced, the cocksure man I’d come to know was gone, and in its place, insecurity.
“I meant it’s not just you. Feeling that way. Nervous.” I didn’t get the sense that happened very often. “And I”—he faltered, meeting my eyes—“I wanna do it right by you.”
The sentence felt strangely loaded, a dual meaning sewn in there he didn’t want me to ignore.
“I appreciate that,” I whispered. “Your honesty. It means a lot to me.”
He tensed, his attention darting elsewhere.
I propped up on my elbows. “Did I say something wrong?”
Rankled, he shook his head. “No.” He paused. “It’s me.”
Okay, now he was giving me mixed signals. “Do you still want to do this?” And could he let me close my legs first before he decided?
“Of course I do,” Felix assured, choosing his words carefully. “I’m not”—he scratched the back of his neck idly, a little distracted—“it’s been a minute,” he rephrased. “Since I’ve kissed someone I’ve genuinely liked, Bel.” The chill of my apprehension thawed. “Never mind getting the pleasure of pleasing them. So yeah, I’m nervous. Especially it being your first time.”
Hang on a second. Rewind. “You actually like it ?” I flicked my eyes past my naval back to him. “Doing it?”
His brow rose. I supposed “doing it” was a little open-ended, but… “Eating pussy,” he intuited, matter-of-factly. And there went my stomach and its Felix-induced somersault routine. “I love it.”
I lost the battle with the blush. “Really?”
“Absolutely. It’s weird to me when some guys don’t. Especially when they still want it for themselves. To each his own, I guess, but…” Felix licked his lips, eyes tightening with a predatory focus on my core, and I swore she fluttered in response. “Figuring out what gets you going. Tasting you. Making your legs shake.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Watching you come?” Pretty sure I’d stopped breathing because I’d never experienced that, either. His pained golden gaze sailed back to mine like it had physically hurt him to peel his eyes away. “What’s not to love?”
I could rhyme off a couple of reasons, but by the grace of arousal and the imagery he’d filled my head with, I refrained.
Neither of us uttered a word while we absorbed the other. Me watching him while he watched me. Want darkened his handsome features, lids heavy, tongue gliding along his bottom lip, hands contracting around my calves.
Engaging my abdomen, I reclined back with slow control, relaxing as the hard surface registered against my bare skin, cooling my clammy neck, my hair spreading out under me.
I tilted my head, observing his measured prowl. His face inched closer, beard intentionally rasping against my thigh—the only mark safe enough to leave on me—the rush of heat from his punching exhalations bathing over my swollen core. If I kept watching, I didn’t trust myself not to squeal or wiggle away from him out of reflex. Allowing my eyes to fall shut, I focused on the oscillating sensations, losing myself to the hot, open-mouthed kisses he used to soothe the beard burn he’d chafed my thighs with, alternating each side.
The pads of his fingers dug into tight, coiled muscles, working the tension away, coaxing a premature moan from me. God, that felt good. His firm touch climbed higher, settling at the juncture where my pelvis met my thigh.
He didn’t dive in. No, he opted to torture me a little while longer until I had no choice but to look at him, finding him admiring me. Goosebumps pebbled my skin, anticipation an urgent percussion in my chest. A wry smile wrung his lips, and I shifted with impatience, a needy ache coiling tight beneath my navel.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he asked, voice rumbling into a dark chuckle. “Do you need something?”
I nearly jolted at the firm press of the tip of his strong nose circling the span of skin over my pelvis—avoiding where I wanted him all together—gliding upward, my restless limbs twitching.
He pressed his weight into me, his cock rolling rhythmically against my abdomen as his hands settled on my breasts, palming me. “All you have to do is ask, Belmira.” His touches turned firm, punishing in the most delicious way as he rolled each hardened pearl between his thumb and index finger until I let out a cry I’d never heard from myself before.
It hurt. But God did it feel good, too.
I chased after his hips, my short nails scraping against the desk, resisting the urge to circle his waist with my legs and rub myself against him. My eyes fluttered shut at our next collision, but just as I found a steady momentum and the tiny tides of pleasure conjoined under my belly button, Felix peeled away, and I sagged with a tiny whine.
My eyes opened, finding reverence and heat aglow in his as he sank to his knees. He gathered my hands, settling my touch against either side of his head. His face turned into my right palm, pressing a kiss to the center, a thick fog enveloping us both in some lust-induced haze that made my stomach do another flip.
“I’m gonna taste you now, sweetheart.” He wet his lips, my nerve endings firing all at once in response. “And when you’re ready”—he blanketed his hands with mine again—“you’re going to drive.”
Okay. Yeah, sure. No idea what that meant, but I’d find out soon enough. His hands slipped from mine, shoulders hefting under my thighs, edging me a little closer.
His muted groans of approval turned my brain into mush, my pulse surging as he descended within a finger’s length away from where I really wanted him to be, soft breaths billowing against my swollen flesh.
My curiosity engulfed my shy avoidance. I wanted to watch. Slanting my neck, I attempted to get a better look at him. There weren’t enough adjectives in my vocabulary to describe him. Not the way he deserved. The rigid set of his granite square jaw, the dogged focus in his half-mast eyes—more whiskey than they were green right now—complimented by the pinched concentration between his furrowed brows. I could admire the beautiful, even balance of proportional features as if it were my favorite pastime. Looking at him distracted me, and not even the jut of his extended tongue could force me to lo?—
My eyes flared. Oh. Fuck . The first featherlight stroke of his flattened tongue swiping from my entrance and ending against my clit had my soul leaving my body.
The second lap, though?
I ripped my hands from his face, slapping them mercilessly to my mouth, something between a moan and a chant driving into my palm.
Oh. My. God.
The reverberation of his hummed approval vibrated against me, and I didn’t know if I wanted to grip his hair and keep him pinned there or keep breathing into the tight fence of my fingers linked over my mouth.
“You taste so good,” Felix said, his voice growing hoarse. His tongue laved against me, while my hands gripped my fastened jaw. “So fucking good.” He drove his statement home by covering me with his open mouth, his tongue flicking against my sensitive clit.
My hips levitated, my spine curving away from the desk, chasing after his mouth.
This was how I’d decided I wanted to die. My lungs weren’t cooperating anyway, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a full intake.
He tested my body’s tells by licking my slit with slow and timed measures. I managed to get a short breath in, but it was when he dragged the stiff muscle in his mouth upward, circling the sensitive hood, that I lost the inhalation in a stuttered gasp.
“Mmm.” The pulsation of his praise had my soul leaving my body. The hungered pulls of his mouth as he vacuumed each swollen labium before he probed the tight center with his tongue and tunneled forward had me nearly crawling away because something was happening to me.
His stare locked on mine, and I couldn’t look away. Ecstasy-inducing pressure mounted below my belly button, an intensifying buildup of sharp and tiny nerves sparked as the seconds stretched, and I was dangerously on the verge of losing control.
Hoisting myself on my weak forearms, Felix’s left hand molded around my waist, his right spanning against the stretch of my stomach, persuading me onto my back again.
“Felix.” I said his name on a pant. “I’ve never—” I tried to shake my head, my neck weak and unwilling, like my body refused to stop this. His teeth banded around my clit, rolling gently, replaced with the firm nursing seal of his lips that had my eyes rolling back in my head.
He freed me from the intoxicating torment with an audible pop, and I trembled, conflicted by the reprieve yet overwhelmed by the desire for more.
“What’s wrong?” he crooned, and I swore I clenched around each syllable. “Has no one made you come before?” He knew the answer. I jolted at the brandished flick of his tongue against me, dislodging the moan from my chest. “C’mon, Belmira. Tell me.”
I would have liked to. Really. I would have. But as his tongue burrowed forward, he stole the words along with my next breath away. My hips pitched, following his mouth, but then he was gone, and I was a despondent pile of limbs and edged frustration on the desk, bearing down on nothing.
My answer wobbled out of me. “N-no.”
“Never made yourself come, either?”
My face brightened, and I shook my head to compensate for my uncooperative vocal box. I’d tried. A handful of times. Tina said I had to know how my body worked. Or that’s what she’d read in Cosmopolitan magazine, and that was basically her Bible. I’d never felt particularly safe in my body to begin with. It was the source of so much disappointment for the people in my life. Ma. Martin. I avoided looking at myself in the bathroom mirror when I got out of the shower. I got dressed as fast as possible when I changed my clothes. I didn’t want to see what they saw. The defects.
But the moments I’d tried to… I dunno… familiarize myself with curious fingers, separating my lower lips, exploring and probing, the shame always crept in, and I stopped. I was too caught up in the web of my own thoughts or distracted by each creak in our old, dark house.
I never thought I’d know myself that way, because I wasn’t worthy of pleasure, of feeling good.
But just like everything else, Felix was changing that. This whole night felt closer to a vivid dream I never wanted to wake up from.
His groan drilled against my core. “That’s okay.” He ran his tongue up my slit. “I’m going to take care of you from now on.” My nipples tightened, and my breathing grew erratic. “You’re going to relax for me, and then,”—he pressed a kiss against my clit, nuzzling my pubic bone, his eyes finding mine—“you’ll come on my face, won’t you, Bel?”
The question had been rhetorical. He’d already decided for me a long time ago. Or so the rhythmic pummel of his tongue thrusting inside of me suggested.
I’d do anything he wanted right now as long as he didn’t stop. My fingers thrust into his hair, his nose rubbing against my clit in just the right way. I didn’t know what was happening. Who I was in this moment. It was like instincts ingrained in my biology were taking over, turning every wayward thought and anxiety into white noise, canting my body straight toward whatever he was promising me.
Pleasure.
Freedom.
Choice .
When my spine arched for a second time, Felix let out a noise so masculine, so feral, it was the lit match meeting kerosene, setting off an explosion inside of me, so intense and life-altering, I wanted to hold on to it for as long as I could. My grip in his hair twisted, rooting him as detonation after detonation recoiled and shattered in endless waves, dissolving into sizzling aftershocks. The hold on his chocolate strands slackened, my fingers slipping away, as my boneless body thudded against the desk.
Wetness puddled under me, but I was too spent to be self-conscious, ashamed, to be anything but blissed out. Felix’s tongue sat flush against me, cleaning up the mess we’d made in lazy strokes.
He wasn’t kidding. He really did love eating pussy. So much so, he looked like as soon as I recovered, he’d feast on me some more.
Trembling fingers reached out, the shorn parts of his hair at the back of his neck registering against my fingertips. Seismic quakes shook my frame as he orbited my clit in dizzying revolutions. A sharp whimper escaped my lips when his teeth grated softly, the sensory shift catching me by surprise, my thighs quivering.
He soothed the strung-out spasms with soft kisses peppered against my center, the fanning of his breath cooling me down. Firm hands scanned my lax thighs still wedged under his shoulders. Felix freed one arm from under me, keeping my hip propped up on his shoulder. With an extended hand, he nudged my pulsating core, the tip of his blunt middle finger teasing, and I swore it was like my body latched onto the digit and pulled him in.
Felix assessed me as he sunk knuckle deep, and I ground against him till his folded fingers pressed against my slick lower lips.
But I wanted something else. I needed something else.
“Put it in.” I didn’t recognize my voice when I said it, but I knew exactly what I was asking for, and above all else, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied until I got it.
Him. All of him.
Felix stiffened. “What?”
“Your cock.” His nostrils flared at the declaration. I’d never said that word before. Never wanted to. I’d turned eight shades of red when Tina had described Justin’s in great detail and then darted an expecting brow, waiting for me to do the same with Martin. I never did. Never looked. Didn’t want to stare at the very thing that had caused me so much pain. But with Felix, I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t want to. It was a waste of time. “Put it in,” I urged.
Who was I right now?
“Jesus Christ, Belmira,” he gritted out, looking elsewhere. Unfastening me from the brace of his shoulders, he lowered my weight to the desk, putting a sliver of distance between us.
I heaved up on my forearms. “I don’t care if it’s just the tip.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking for.” His eyes tightened on me. “That’s post-orgasm bliss talking, alright?”
“So, you’ll eat me out again, but you won’t fuck me?” That didn’t make any sense.
Broad shoulders launched to his ears. Felix didn’t know what to do with this side of me, but neither did I. I’d only just met her, and she refused to go back into the box she’d come out of.
“I’m not fucking you in some guy’s office.”
“The same office you made me come in?” He licked the gloss shimmering on his lips from my orgasm away with the memory, exhaling a taut breath. “Who cares if it’s the post-orgasm bliss?” I tacked on.
“ I care.” He glared. “You think I don’t want to fuck you into that desk?”
I gave him a half-shrug.
He huffed out an exasperated laugh. “Sweetheart, I’ve been thinking about what’s under that dress”—he gestured to the velvet garment piled on the floor—“since the moment I met you. I’ve fantasized about what you’d look like riding my cock. What that would feel like.” My cheeks warmed, but I didn’t dare look away. “And then you had to go and taste better than I could have ever imagined, and now I feel like I can’t breathe.” He rocked his jaw. “Like I might lose my ever-loving mind if I don’t get inside of you.”
I felt like I might burst. “So?”
“ So ,” Felix bit out with a frustrated gusto. “I am going to help you put your dress back on. You’re going to walk out of here first. I’m going to reset this office and give my dick a few minutes to relax. And then I’ll come find you and pretend I won’t be counting down the minutes until I can get home and stroke myself stupid while remembering how sweet you taste. I’m going to do that every single night until I can have you how I want you.” His chest hitched. “How you deserve.” His tone lost its steam, despondent. “Got it?”
I swallowed. There wouldn’t be another night, not after this.
There was only here and now. Me and him.
Felix had changed me, and I’d be damned before I dismissed that as being a symptom of post-orgasm bliss.
It was bigger than that. Bigger than me.
My body was fully attuned to his. There was a safety permeating between us that was impossible to ignore, because with him, I was safe to be vulnerable and spread out on some unfortunate stranger’s desk. Safe enough to lose myself to Felix, even for just a little while.
I didn’t want that to end before I was ready because once it did, it concluded with an irrevocable finality neither one of us would be able to change.
There was no universe in which I got to keep Felix Ferreira the way I longed to.
I watched as he moved for my dress, discomfort set in his profile. Felix winced as he hinged at the waist, collecting the garment. He was mid-stride on his return when I said, “No.”
“No?”
“No.” I glanced from the dress to him. “If you don’t want to have sex with me, fine. But don’t make decisions for me about what I want or deserve.”
His jaw clicked again. “Bel?—”
“If you’re deciding for me”—I razed him with a flat look—“then that doesn’t make you any better than anyone else.”
Irritation carved his frame. “That’s not fair, Belmira.”
“Tell me about it.” I sat up completely, the ends of my hair whispering over the small of my back. “I’ve gone my entire life being told what to do. I’ve had to accept that without question. So again, if you don’t want to have sex with me here.” I lifted my chin, feeling braver than I ever had before. “Then say that. It’s okay. I understand. But don’t pretend to make it about me or what I deserve. That’s not what I asked for.” Thickness registered in my throat, my short-lived bravado fading. “And it’s certainly not what I need.”
Felix didn’t utter a word. Not for the longest time. He simply stared. Or glared. It was hard to tell the difference anymore. They’d become interchangeable over the last few minutes. But his chest pumped, the air in the room so stiff and thick with lust and frustration I couldn't ignore it.
His hold on my dress tightened, his knuckles turning white, the grind of his molars audible as his brows lowered.
“What do you need, hm?” The dress slipped from his fingers, his voice low and taut.
My pulse throbbed. I didn’t know which beat to focus on. The one threatening to split through my chest or the relentless ache between my legs.
I bit my lip. “Your cock.”
He was on the prowl again, closing the short distance in four short strides. His thighs boxed mine in, hands slamming down on either side of my waist against the desk. “Where?”
I flustered. It had been easier to pretend I was all confident and sexually aware when he wasn’t so close. Now, when I could smell the spearmint, the cigarettes, and me on his mouth, I was all but ready to sputter and backpedal.
But I didn’t.
His flinty gaze worked over me, broad body looming. “I asked you a question.” His nose nudged mine, hazel eyes lowering. “Where?” he croaked over my lips. “Where do you want my cock?”
I held my ground. “In my pus—” I never got a chance to finish the sentence. Felix was on me in seconds, sending me toppling backward on the desk, cushioning my head under the cradle of his palm. His mouth worked urgently over mine, demanding entry past my lips I gave willingly. The hand not under my head gripped my waist hard and unrelenting, the kiss growing more frantic as the fraught milliseconds strained. Teeth gnashed, tongues fought for dominance, but it was only when I bucked up against his hard length, and a charged cry dislodged from my throat that he cursed under his breath. “Fuck it.”
I didn’t know what that meant. But yes, please.
He dragged me closer to the edge of the desk, his body folding over mine, meeting the next roll of my hips. His hands were everywhere. In my hair. On my breasts. My waist. Gripping my ass. He peeled back unexpectedly, breaths short and labored, parting my thighs to admire his work. Licking his lips, his stare floated up to mine, the hunger replaced by a weighty sincerity.
“Bel.” Something in his tone said he was just barely holding it together. “I gotta ask you something.”
“What?” I panted.
Felix’s chin tipped to the ceiling, his hold on my waist turning tender, thumbs brushing along the bone. “I should have asked you this before, but…” he paused, regarding me once more. “You’re not a virgin, are you?” Huh? I blinked, schooling my features immediately. Why was he asking me this? “I feel like I know the answer to that because…” he faltered, his left brow hooking north. “Martin Pinto is?—”
“Martin Pinto,” I concluded for him.
Felix’s expression clouded over. That was an answer.
In the grand scheme of things, losing my virginity the way I had, despite the emotional pain that followed days later, had spared me in other ways. Martin had expected to be the first, and I could only imagine how much worse it would have all been for me if I had been. Instead, I got to hold on to the fact I’d had a choice once, and I’d acted on it.
“But he wasn’t my first,” I added, blanketing my hands over Felix’s. “If that makes you feel better.”
His fingers curled against mine, his focus wandering. “It doesn’t.”
“You asked.”
His dark gaze returned. “I know.”
Had I given him too much information? I was almost too afraid to ask, but, “Are you mad about it?” I wasn’t sure what I was asking exactly. Was he mad I didn’t check off all the boxes under ‘good girl’ after all? Did it bug him he wouldn’t be number one or two but number three?
I searched his face, frantically hunting for a sign. It would crush me if I affirmed any of those questions. Particularly when nothing about him screamed virginal. But so said the double standards of the society we lived in. He could do whatever he liked, and I couldn’t.
“No, I’m not mad about it, Bel.” His tone remained stilted. “You had a life before me. I would never judge you for that… or with who. But…” Felix faltered. “Was it all bad?”
Why was he asking me that? This was getting too raw, too honest, too tethered in forming an attachment that would ultimately make it harder to walk away. I wanted to go back to the kissing, the grinding, the will-we-won’t-we, not this.
“Most of it.”
“Most of it,” he echoed.
The truth sets you free or whatever. “Yeah.” I smiled, but he didn’t return it. He just… stared, like he was filing the information somewhere.
“What about you?” I asked around a laugh. “Are you a virgin?”
“As pious as an altar boy.”
I laughed, raising a brow. Mhm, and I was the sixth member of the Spice Girls.
He turned pensive again, eyes flickering over my face. “That bother you?”
“Should it?” I slid my hands up his forearms. “You had a life before me, right?” He’d have one after me, too.
So if the bargaining in my head begging for a different outcome could get with the program, that would be super swell.
“Yeah,” Felix affirmed soberly, eyes a little guilty. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, maybe to pacify me, but then thought better of it.
Relaxing, he settled between my thighs, kneeling. A companionable silence fell upon us, his fingers tracing shapes against my knee, mine teasing his hair, waiting until my impatience won.
“So?” I probed, trying for casual.
He rested his chin against my thigh, his breath wafting over my core. “So?”
“Are you going to put it in?”
His throaty laugh reverberated against the apex of my thigh, his shoulders quaking. “Put what in, Belmira?” he asked, goading me.
Pain zipped up my spine when he trapped a fleshy nip at my thigh playfully, and I caught the squeal behind my hands. He soothed the spot with a series of chaste kisses, studying my responses with each dusted path.
Reaching for his hands, my fingers traced over his thick digits. “We could start here.”
Felix scissored his fingers with mine, his hazel eyes smoldering. “Oh, yeah?”
I swallowed, nodding my head. “Now that you know I’m not a virgin.” No hymen to deal with or post-coitus guilt about tainting my virtue. Good to go.
My chest hitched as he answered the call by running a curious knuckle against my seam. I shuddered in response, losing myself to the tentativeness of his touch, running up and down along my slit. My body warmed under his rapt focus. Pretending he didn’t affect me was pointless. He’d orgasm the truth out of me.
Come to think of it, that didn’t sound so bad.
Turning his hand, Felix orbited the blunt tip of his middle finger against my entrance, his palm brushing against my clit as he coated his finger in my body’s arousal.
I snatched my bottom lip between my teeth, eyes floating shut as my inner muscles gave way willingly around the slow intrusion of his thick finger bottoming out.
Impatience had my hips rolling, grinding against the heel of his palm.
Hazel eyes glazed over with a blistering heat. “Greedy girl,” he rasped, making a beckoning motion with his index finger that had me seeing stars.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for the tandem torture as his beard chafed my thighs, his mouth affixed to my clit, and his finger hooked inside of me, hunting for—my eyes flared.
“Oh. Fuck,” I cried out as he stroked slow and deliberate circles against a ribbed stretch of skin.
I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to. No, I thought everything that had led me exactly to this moment in time had been completely worth it, and I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently if it changed my course.
I wanted to get permanently lost in that toe-curling, can’t-focus and don’t-want-to, come-hither massage.
The slick squelch beneath me registered under the hungered, relentless pulls of his mouth, but I didn’t care. Couldn’t care. It was a rhythmic slippery chorus, and I was floating, so close to that brink, that edge, desperate to go under because the command he held over my body turned me into a marionette, his to manipulate as he saw fit.
I never wanted this to end—my pussy leaking all over his face, leaving a glossy ring on his lips and sheen on his beard, his tongue eager to lap up every single drop I gave him. I almost missed the addition of another finger, stretching and working, my body flexing tight around his fingers as he plowed them into me with a merciless, single-minded attentiveness I wasn’t familiar with from anyone because no one ever prepared me first. No one had ever cared to.
They just took.
Yet to this near stranger, the one I couldn’t remember, he’d made me feel like I was the only one who mattered.
My suppressed whimpering turned frantic, the refractory period ending as nerve endings sparked under his care.
I was so fucking close it almost hurt.
My thighs closed around his head, fixing his face in place, my fingers bounding to his hair, twisting the strands in my grasp.
I concentrated on the pressure gathering beneath my belly button, the tiny frissons igniting, the frenzied delirium as he ate and finger fucked me senseless and snatched what was left of the air in my lungs.
Then it happened again—that collision. The bursting of the dam. An endless euphoria. Somehow ten times better than the first time because now I was aware of it.
What my body was capable of.