34. Callum
34
CALLUM
My entire body was strung so tight I wasn’t sure I could breathe, much less walk, as the ride jerked forward and then began to move again. I removed my hand from between Nadia’s legs as she removed her hand from inside my pants. Not able to resist tasting her, I lifted my fingers to my mouth and sucked her juices off. As the ride descended, my cock was straining, screaming with urgency. I adjusted myself so my full salute was pressed up against my body and secured with the waistband of my jeans after I zipped and buttoned up so it wouldn’t be visible to the general public.
By the time the ride came to a stop and it was our turn to disembark, the blanket was removed, and Nadia and I were both fully clothed with no evidence that there’d been any heavy petting, or not, happening beneath the cover of darkness and fleece.
Neither of us said a word as we exited the ride. I grabbed Nadia’s hand, and she held onto my forearm, giggling beside me as I practically dragged her through the crowds of people on the pier. From my periphery, I could see and hear people waving and saying hi to us. Nadia greeted them, but I had tunnel vision. I was a man on a mission. I needed to get her alone.
I guided us down the stairs that led to the beach below. I didn’t have to tell Nadia where we were going. She knew.
The waves were crashing as we walked onto the sandy beach. We made it to the cabanas, where I’d worked as a teen, in less than two minutes. I reached up and grabbed the key from the ledge of the roof. I was relieved that it was still there. Some things never changed in this town. There had been countless nights that we’d hooked up in the cabana storage.
“Wait, aren’t we too old for this?” Nadia giggled as I unlocked the door. “This is breaking and entering.”
“Is it? I have the key.” I held up the key.
“What if there are security cameras now?” she asked as I pulled her inside.
“Do you honestly think Old Man Pike put in security cameras?”
She considered it for a second, then shook her head. “No.”
Jenson Pike was the cheapest man on the planet. Even if he’d installed dummy cameras, which after a quick look around I did not see, he definitely didn’t have them up and running. Once the door was shut and locked, the only sound that could be heard was that of our labored breaths.
Stacks of cushions surrounded us, cocooning our bodies in the space. There was really only room for us to stand. In the old days, there was more room in the storage shed, and I used to lay down several cushions and clean towels. Tonight it looked like this was going to be a standing-room-only situation, which was fine by me.
Nadia’s back was against the door as I stared down at her. The only light in the claustrophobic space came from a small skylight in the roof where the moon shone through, illuminating her eyes, lips, cheeks, and hair.
“Fuck, you are so beautiful,” I rasped as I brushed a strand of hair behind her ear and leaned down to kiss her.
She lifted her hand and pressed it to my chest, stopping me as she inhaled a shaky breath. “I need to tell you something.”
I straightened. “Now?”
She nodded.
“What?”
“When you saw Jerry leaving my house?—”
“We don’t need to talk abou?—”
“No, I mean yes. Yes, we do.” She licked her lips, which was a nervous tic she had.
My chest was heaving as arousal surged inside of me. Urgency was coursing through my veins, but I could see in her eyes that what she was about to tell me was important. Her eyes flicked down to the ground and then back up to meet mine.
“What? What is it? You can tell me.”
I wasn’t mad at her any longer. To be honest, I was always more hurt than angry. I just didn’t understand how she could have slept with him. Him , of all people. Even if we were technically broken up.
But we were young. We’d had a long-distance relationship for three years. It had clearly taken more of a toll on us than I’d been aware of. In fairness to her, I’d focused so much of my time and energy into fighting those first two years that I’d really neglected our relationship. I took for granted the fact that we loved each other and that she’d always be there for me. I might not have agreed with her actions, but after all these years, I was able to understand them.
Her head shook back and forth as a single tear slid down her cheek. She swallowed, and I heard an audible gulp.
My mind was spinning trying to come up with what information she could possibly need to share with me that could have her feeling this on edge. What had happened that was worse than her sleeping with him?
Had she been seeing Jerry Clemons when we were together?
No. That wasn’t possible. Was it?
Had they been having some sort of affair for years?
My chest was getting tighter and tighter as I started imagining worse and worse confessions.
Had she gotten pregnant with his child?
The walls felt like they were closing in on me.
“Nothing happened,” she stated.
I stared down at her as the two words she’d spoken sank in.
“What?”
“With Jerry,” she clarified. “Nothing happened.”
“What?” I repeated again, sure that I had to be missing something.
“Nothing happened. The night, or I guess the morning, you saw Jerry leave my house, nothing happened. Jerry was passed out on my lawn at three o’clock in the morning. I woke him, and he asked to come in and use the bathroom, then he threw up on himself and crashed on my couch. I washed his clothes and left them folded beside the couch. He woke up and realized he was late for a training session or something. That’s when you saw him leaving at six. He was getting dressed because he’d thrown up, not because anything happened between us.”
“But why…?” Nothing she was saying was making any sense. “Why did you tell me that?—”
“I didn’t tell you,” she cut me off. “But I did let you think something happened, which is just as bad.” She shifted her weight from her right foot to her left. “The only reason I woke up in the middle of the night to find Jerry passed out on my front lawn was because I was worried about my mom. When I got home from your house that day, I randomly opened her mail and found overdue bills from the hospital and test results and all these brochures for care facilities that I knew we couldn’t afford. It was bad. Really bad. After going through her stuff, I figured out she had COPD. She needed in-home care, and I knew that I was going to have to be the one to do it.
“I also knew that you couldn’t move back here. You would have been miserable. We wouldn’t have made it. We were breaking up all the time, which was my fault, I know. But it wouldn’t have mattered what I told you. You would have insisted on us still getting married, and you would have moved back here. So, when you came over and confronted me, I just let you believe that we’d slept together. I know it was wrong, and I’m so sorry, but I did it because I knew it was the only way you’d actually go back to Arizona and continue fighting. If you knew the truth, you would have given it all up. You would have moved back to Firefly, and I was scared you would have ended up resenting me. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t be the one who cost you your dreams.”
“I would never have resent?—”
“Well, even if you wouldn’t have. I couldn’t live with myself if I let you make that kind of sacrifice for me. You needed to go and live your life. You needed to follow your dreams and become a world champion, not end up back here?—”
“Working construction,” I finished with a note of irony since that’s exactly what I had ended up doing.
A sad grin tilted on her mouth. “You know what I mean.”
She was right. I did.
The information she was telling me should have been a shock to me, but actually, it made a hell of a lot more sense to me than her hooking up with Jerry Clemons. It had never sat right with me that she’d done that. Part of the difficulty in coming to terms with it was that I just couldn’t believe she’d done it.
She licked her lips. “I’m sorry that I lied to you.”
“Technically, you didn’t lie.”
“I’m sorry that I let you believe a lie.”
“I know you did it because you thought it was the right thing to do.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“Well, I can think of one way you could make it up to me.”
Her full lips curled in a smile as moonlight shimmered in her eyes. She made quick work of unbuttoning and unzipping my jeans, pushing both my jeans and boxers down my legs. I braced one hand on the wall behind her as she wrapped her fingers around my shaft, causing me to hiss through a clenched jaw. Her touch intensified the carnal ache that had been throbbing in my balls since we were up in the Ferris wheel. As I watched her delicate hand move up and down my hard column of flesh, the knowledge that my instinct was right—Nadia never hooked up with Clemons; she’d been faithful to me me—hit me like a Mack truck.
I was overwhelmed with a surge of emotions so strong it consumed me. All the love I’d tried to suppress flooded through my system. Mixed with that love was anger and sadness for the years we’d spent apart, the time we’d never get back. The loudest emotion was fear, fear that I would lose her again, that I would lose another ten years. That fear made me want to claim her. To make her mine.
Driven by a primal, primitive need to possess her, I picked her up and set her on the air vent. She gasped as she held onto my shoulders. With much less finesse or care than I typically showed, I roughly yanked her hips to the edge of the vent. Her cheeks flushed, and I could see that she liked what I was doing. Instead of taking the time to remove her underwear, I pushed her skirt up to her waist and pulled her panties to the side, revealing the soft, dewy flesh of her feminine folds.
“So pretty,” I whispered as I ran my knuckle up and down her seam, making sure she was wet and ready for me. “Such a pretty pussy.”
I lifted my gaze and saw she was biting her lower lip as her eyes were cast down, watching as my knuckles grazed her delicate mound. Her breathing was labored as I held her panties in place to one side and took myself in the other hand.
My forehead rested against hers as I pressed my thick tip against her opening. I pushed my hips forward and watched my cock disappear as her body accepted me. The resistance of her tight canal caused my balls to tingle. Slowly, one inch at a time, I sank into her; the warmth of her contracting muscles enveloped me completely. Once I filled her to the brim, I pulled out and then I pressed again, this time with just a little more force.
“Yes.” Her eyes closed as she leaned back against the wall, and her hands gripped the sides of the vent.
The space was so small, I lifted her legs and caught her knees in the crease of my elbows, then drove in and out of her in deep, demanding strokes. Each thrust held just a little more power, building in intensity. A tremor ran through her inner thighs as the walls surrounding my shaft began to pulse, electrifying every nerve ending. I could feel that we were both getting close.
“Open your eyes,” I growled softly.
She did as I asked, and as soon as her lids fluttered open and our eyes met, the tiny shred of barely controlled restraint I was holding onto snapped. My release tore through me with no warning. A monsoon of pleasure flooded me as I rode out my climax, continuing to increase the speed and force of my thrusts. Seconds after I hit my peak, a shuddering orgasm claimed Nadia. Her entire body trembled as a rush of liquid heat covered my shaft, and her body milked out every last drop of my orgasm until there was nothing left.
As we both caught our breath and recovered, all of my senses were triggered with nostalgia and sensory memories that were a powerful aphrodisiac and heightened the experience.
The black-and-white cabana cushions stacked around us, the sound of the waves crashing, the moonlight shining down from the skylight, the smell of the salty sea air, and the combo taste of cotton candy and pretzel that we’d shared earlier—a tradition we’d kept even though Nadia wanted to win at all costs—all of it made it feel like it could have been fifteen years ago.
“That was…” Nadia was resting against the wall, her arms flopped at her sides.
“I agree.” I smiled as I gingerly pulled out of her.
I was getting dressed when a loud knock sounded on the door.
Nadia squealed and jumped. I reached out and put my hand on the door, even though I locked it when we came in.
“Hey! Whoever’s in there needs to come out!”
Nadia was off the vent and had her underwear straightened out before I was able to get my pants up and buckled. It took me about thirty seconds longer.
“This is Deputy Clarke! If you’re not out in?—”
As soon as I was buckled up, I opened the door.
Deputy Clarke, whom I’d met the first day I was in town when I tried to file a missing person’s report for Chloe, looked surprised to see us.
“Oh, I was…I thought that some kids had broken in. I was doing my rounds, and I heard some…commotion.”
“Nobody broke in, George. We have a key.” Nadia showed George the key we’d used. Then closed the door behind us and locked up.
“Well, what business do you two have in there?”
Seriously? Was he seriously asking that?
“Scavenger Hunt business.” Nadia pulled the paper out of her pocket. “For Miles and Zoe’s bachelor/bachelorette party. Which we have to get back to because we won.”
Nadia took off walking, and I followed her.
When we got to the stairs that led up to the pier, I asked, “He didn’t actually buy that, did he?”
She glanced over her shoulder with a glint of trouble in her baby blue eyes and a smile that could start a war or end one. I opened my mouth and almost said, I love you . Thankfully, I stopped myself. Tonight was not the night to make any sort of declaration. There were some things I needed to take care of first. But after that, I planned on putting all my cards on the table, and I really hoped I had a winning hand.