Chapter 10
If this was a game of sexual red rover, then AJ had just called Poppy over. He’d said that whether or not he could have sex was her business if she wanted it to be.
That was a green light, right? Oh, that rhymed. Stop.
She had to stop overthinking this. Just feel. The energy in the room was electrically charged with foreplay. Or at least that was how Poppy felt. She was tingling all over, and AJ hadn’t even touched her.
"It is?” Poppy questioned, her breaths coming in shallow pants.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She tried to inhale slowly through her nose and then exhale through her mouth so she didn’t hyperventilate and pass out before they even got to the good stuff. “I want it to be.”
“Yes, I can have sex.”
“How?” she blurted out.
That amused glimmer in his eyes returned. “Have you not had the birds and bees talk?”
Poppy chuckled, and it broke the tension just enough to soften the edges of her frazzled nerves. “You know what I mean.”
His eyes warmed to a soft smolder that she felt spread through her body. “Typically, I have to get to know someone to feel comfortable with them. It takes months before I can be intimate with someone, and then I have ways of dealing with it.”
“Oh.” Months. She nodded and felt her heart drop in disappointment, but she did her best to hide it. “Right, yeah, that makes sense, of course.”
His hands rested on the counter behind him, and he leaned back casually, portraying an ease that Poppy was not feeling. She was strung tightly.
“That being said, I’ve never met someone and wanted to touch her just to feel how soft her hair would be running between my fingers.
Or not been able to take my eyes off of a woman all night and then subjected myself to taking part in an antiquated ritual because the thought of another man taking a photo with her made me want to put my fist through a wall. ”
Wait. Was he talking about her?
“Or had an entire room of people disappear the moment she sat on my lap to take a photo, and I felt peace and calm come over me like she was the equivalent of a human weighted blanket, and a sexy one at that.”
Yes. He was talking about her.
“Or pulled her against my body and held her in my arms, not wanting to let her go but scared if I didn’t, I would embarrass myself. Or driven thirty minutes after I’ve flown across the country just for an excuse to spend more time with her because I would do anything for the night not to end.”
“So does that mean there are exceptions to—”
“No.”
“Oh.” How was she getting this so wrong?
“Not exceptions. Just one exception. You.”
The way he said that one word, “you,” was like tossing a lit match onto a dry bush doused in gasoline. Her entire body went up in flames of arousal.
“Does that mean that you want to… that we…” Poppy was trying to get the words out, but they weren’t forming.
“Yes,” AJ replied. “If that’s what you want.”
“I do,” she confessed breathlessly.
Poppy had never been so nervous to have sex before.
Not even when she lost her virginity in the corn mazes with Jeremy Miller.
She was trying to tell herself that her high levels of anxiety could be attributed to her never being with anyone she’d been this attracted to.
And while there was some truth to that, the real issue was that she’d never been with someone who was neurodivergent.
She didn’t want to do anything that would turn him off or make him feel uncomfortable.
Perhaps sensing her inner turmoil, his brow furrowed slightly as his eyes searched hers. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she doubled down as she took a deep breath and blew it out. “Just promise me that you’ll tell me if I do something wrong, even if it’s super awkward and you think it will hurt my feelings and you want to stop. Promise me.”
He blinked, once, then twice, before letting out a sound that was not quite a laugh but more like the leak of air leaving a balloon. “You’re funny,” he said, lips twisting at the corners.
As much as she appreciated that he found her amusing, this was not a joke.
“This isn’t a bit. I’m not workshopping new material for a five-minute set. I’m serious—”
“You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Yes, I do,” she blurted out, her mouth was moving faster than her brain again. “You have sex with you all the time. I don’t.”
She heard the words as they tumbled out, and for a half-second, she wanted to stuff them back in, maybe with a handful of cotton balls for good measure.
She hadn’t meant it to be funny, she was just trying to make a point, but it just sounded like she was accusing him of being a chronic masturbator, which, okay, maybe not inaccurate, but still. Not sexy.
AJ’s lips parted, and the megawatt smile that spread across his face took her by complete surprise.
She’d thought she’d seen the man smile, but she realized that what she’d seen before were merely warm-up, stand-in grins to the real thing.
This was a full-fledged, ear-to-ear, knock-the-wind-out-of-you smile so bright it made her heart stutter.
It revealed a dimple in his left cheek, deep enough to collect rainwater, and for some reason, the sight of it made her want to pour warm chocolate in there and lick it out, which was such an insane thought that she had to bite down on her own tongue to stop from saying it out loud.
She took a breath and did her best not to show how affected she was by his smile, his eyes, his voice, his scent, his mere presence. Everything about this man turned her on.
“Are you sure you’re not working on a set?” he teased.
“Now who’s being funny?” Poppy tried for a little extra bravado, but her voice quivered, an audible tremor that betrayed her.
She felt her cheeks flush, her chest tightening, and at the same time her whole body seemed to want to dissolve into the charged space between them.
If she’d had any hope of hiding how completely AJ unraveled her, it was gone.
She was certain he could read her body like a damn road sign.
But AJ, for all his directness, didn’t call her on it. Instead, he studied her with a scientist’s focus, as if committing her every microexpression and tell to memory.
“You know what I mean,” she said, determined to keep the conversation on track, even as her brain started to short-circuit under the weight of anticipation. “I’m worried I’m going to do something, move some way, or touch you somewhere that will turn you off or make you feel uncomfortable.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” he stated plainly as if it was a fact like grass being green or the sky being blue.
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you know all the things that you like and don’t like.
And with your sensory issues, I would assume that those things are heightened.
” She tried to sound clinical, as if they were discussing dietary restrictions instead of the precise boundaries of sexual pleasure. “How do you deal with that?”
“Typically, I have ways around that.”
What was all the “typically” talk?
“You have ways?”
“Yes,” he said, and there was a finality in the word that sent a new surge of electricity through her.
She bit down on her lower lip. The look in his eyes as he stared at her had the inner walls of her sex clenching. A tingling sensation was whirling in her core, picking up momentum with each second that passed.
“Are you gonna share with the class?” she asked breathlessly.
His stare grew more serious, pinning her in place, his expression inscrutable. “It involves me being in control. Total control.”
Control. Total control. No euphemism, no circling around the subject.
The explicitness of it was hotter than anything she’d expected, and it landed inside her like a shot of molten metal.
She closed her eyes for a second and thanked her one-night-stand fairy godmother for sending her a man who took control in the bedroom, which was all she ever wanted.
The men in her past relationships claimed to do just that, but they had been more talk than action.
Poppy’s lady-part intuition was telling her that AJ was more action than talk.
She could feel her cheeks warming at the thought of him dominating her.
When she opened her eyes, she found AJ staring into her soul.
The look in his eyes as he studied her made her entire body shiver with need, trembling with a ghost of sensation that left her dizzy.
She bit down on her lower lip once again, trying to anchor herself, but instead her mind spun further out.
His eyes narrowed slightly. “What are you thinking?”
She didn’t trust herself to respond truthfully, so she reached for humor, her oldest armor. “I’m thinking Santa must have gotten my letter, because that’s all I wanted for Christmas.”
AJ’s lips twitched up at the corners, then broke into a real, dangerous smile. “And you’ve been a good girl?” he asked, his voice a velvet threat.
“What if I said I’ve been naughty?”
“Then I would say Santa got my letter,” he replied.
Yep. Her one-night-stand fairy godmother was working overtime on this one. Poppy knew one night with one man wasn’t going to solve all her problems or make them go away, but if one night with a man could…