14. Ashton
Ashton
Isend the text and then sit on the edge of the bed like a man waiting on a verdict, my cock already hard against the seam of my pants before her door even opens across the hall.
That’s the piece I can’t get straight in my head.
Not the wanting. The wanting I’ve made my peace with, it’s been gnawing at me since she stood in my refrigerator light with her bare legs and her smart mouth.
What turns my stomach is the speed of it.
One word from her on a screen and my body answered like a struck match.
Her footsteps die in the carpet. Then two knuckles on the wood.
I’m at the door before I’ve decided to move.
She’s in the worn-collar shirt that quits too high on her thighs, arms folded across her chest like she’s keeping herself in one piece by hand, and she comes past me into the room quick, glancing back down the hall for the kid who’s been out cold for a couple of hours.
I close the door and turn the lock.
“So,” she says.
“So.”
“You said you wanted to talk.”
“I did.”
“So talk.”
I look at her standing there with her arms crossed and her chin up, and the speech I had ready on the walk across the hall goes wherever speeches go when they stop being useful. “I don’t have the words for it.”
“Try anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For last night. For the hallway the night before. For all of it.”
She’s quiet for a second. “That’s the talk?”
“That’s the start of it.”
That’s all of it because I don’t have a speech anymore, so I quit trying to find the words. Instead, I reach for her.
She comes to meet me, which takes me apart faster than waiting would have.
My palm finds her jaw, fits there the same as it did on her bed last night, and then her mouth’s against mine.
She kisses how she fights with me, all forward, no give, her fists already knotted in my shirt to haul me down to her.
I walk her back into the door. The wood knocks against her shoulders, she breathes out hard into my mouth, and I take the sound off her like I’ve been starving for it.
My hands go where I swore for they’d stay off, down her spine, over the curve of her ass through thin cotton, gripping there and hauling her up onto her toes against me until she can feel exactly how hard she’s made me, no question left in her about it.
She doesn’t flinch back from the shape of my cock pressed against her belly. She rolls her hips into it, working herself against the length of it through her shirt like she’s been thinking about it as long as I have.
“You’re so fucking hard,” she gets out against my jaw, her nails dragging up my stomach under the shirt and back down.
“You came.” I fist my hand in her hair, draw it tight at the root, tip her head back where I want her throat bared. “Don’t stand there shocked at the arithmetic.”
“I’m not shocked at anything.” She catches my bottom lip in her teeth, bites down, and the sting of it runs the whole length of my spine and pools in my cock. “It’s your favorite story, isn’t it. Everyone in the room’s working an angle on poor Ashton Fraser.”
“They usually are.”
“I’m in your bedroom at midnight in a shirt I’ve had since my sophomore year. There’s no angle. There’s a woman being a grade-A moron about her boss, so do me a favor and shut the fuck up.”
It hits a spot I didn’t have braced, low under the ribs, and I bury the hit the only way I know how, with my mouth and both hands.
I take the kiss down to teeth and tongue, press her harder into the door until there’s no air left between us, work my thigh up between her legs so she’s riding the muscle of it through heat I can feel soaking warm through the cotton.
She makes a ruined sound against my teeth and grinds her cunt down on it without one ounce of shame, her hands clawing up my shoulders for somewhere to hold on.
I drag the loose collar off her shoulder, put my mouth to her throat, her collarbone, the soft hollow under it where her pulse is hammering against my lips.
Her whole back bows off the wood. I bite down where her shoulder starts, not hard, just to feel her jump, and she pays me for it with a gasp that splits down the middle.
My hands have stopped asking. One stays knotted in her hair, the other spreads wide over her ribs under the shirt, no bra under it, my thumb dragging up to find her nipple already hard, and every inch higher I take it she forgets to breathe, waiting on what I’ll do with the next one.
“Your hands are shaking,” she says against my temple. It comes out cracked, so she’s no steadier than I am.
“They’re fine.” They’re not, but I can’t make them stop. “Quiet now.”
“Make me, then.”
I roll her nipple between my thumb and finger, pinch it just shy of too hard, and the noise she makes against my neck is filthy enough to kill the rest of her argument where it stands.
I kiss her and her hand drops between us and closes over me through my pants, palms the hard length of my cock through the fabric and squeezes. The groan that comes up out of my chest is one I’ve never heard out of my own mouth. My hips drive into her grip before I’ve sent the order.
I’ve got her pinned half off the floor, my mouth on hers, her hand working my cock through cotton pulled tight, and the want’s a roar now with no thought left underneath it, two years of nothing tearing open at once against a door I bolted with my own hand.
I want her on the bed. I want this shirt on the floor.
I want to find out if her pussy’s as wet as it felt soaking through her shorts on my thigh, want that clever mouth wrecked and wordless for once, want to give her every filthy reason she came down this hall to collect.
Then her fingers hook the waistband of my pants, her knuckles grazing bare skin below my navel and Harrison’s face surfaces in that instant. My hand shoots out and catches her wrist before she gets lower.
I pull back. An inch, no more, my forehead nearly to hers, the two of us hauling air like we ran the stairwell together.
“Wait,” I get out.
Her hand goes still under mine. I feel the question come into her before she says it, and I could put my own head through the wall for doing this to her twice in two nights.
Here’s the war, and I fight it in the dark with her wrist caught in my fingers and my heart slamming like the night I watched Luke struggle to breathe.
One half of me wants this to be the truest thing I’ve put my hands on since the marriage came apart, wants her under me for the whole night, wants it to mean every reckless thing it’s threatening to mean.
The other half has run the figure she can’t see.
She’s Harrison’s girl. Every hour I leave out what he is to me I’m lying to her, and if I let this turn into something real, I’m not stepping over one line, I’m pouring a foundation on top of a thing I’ve got buried, and buried things work their way up.
When it surfaces it doesn’t just take the two of us down.
It takes my son, the custody, the board, the whole floor we’re standing on.
The afraid half wins. It always does. I shift my weight to set her back from me, but she doesn’t move.
Her hand flattens on my chest, not pushing me off, holding me where I stand, her chin coming up, and in the dark her eyes find mine and refuse to let go of them.
“No,” she says. “Not again. You don’t get to do this to me twice.”
“Imogen.”
“Whatever it is, whatever’s in your head right now, say it. Out loud. To me.” Her palm presses harder against my chest. “Because if you can’t do that, then you don’t get to keep pulling me in and pushing me back out. Pick one.” She sighs. “Stop fighting it, Ashton. Just live in the moment with me.”
I look at her hand on my chest, then at her face. I think about Harrison in a dinner jacket at midnight holding two cold coffees, and I think about my son calling her name instead of mine in the dark.
Then I stop thinking about any of it.