Chapter 36 Eliana
ELIANA
gin joint: /?jin ?joint/: noun
The credits roll, white text scrolling against black. I realize I’ve been holding my breath for the last ten minutes.
“‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,’” I whisper along with the final line before Rick vanishes into the fog with Captain Renault.
Bastian exhales beside me, and I become suddenly, acutely aware that we’re the only two people in this entire gorgeous theater. The house lights come up slowly, though not too bright.
I turn to look at him. “Thank you,” I manage, though the words feel woefully inadequate. “That was… I mean, wow. I don’t even know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“But you—” I wave a hand around at everything. What didn’t he do?
Organist who played vintage music before the show began: check.
Fresh popcorn that appeared in unlimited quantities: check.
The candy counter he told me to raid like a Viking: check.
The fact that he somehow secured an original 1942 print of Casablanca for a private screening: another unfathomable check.
“This is just… It’s crazy. All of this. You didn’t have to—”
“I know I didn’t have to,” he interrupts gently. “I wanted to.”
I shouldn’t ruin this moment with stupid questions, but I can’t help myself. “Why?”
Bastian is silent for a long moment. Finally, he says, “Because you deserve to see it the way it was meant to be seen. Not on some laptop screen or your phone. The real thing. The way people saw it eighty years ago.”
“Bastian—”
“And because… ” He pauses, then reaches over and takes my hand. “Because in eighty-one days, you won’t be able to see it at all. So if I can give you this now, while you still can, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
The tears that have been threatening all night finally spill over. I swipe at them with my free hand, laughing wetly. “You’re going to ruin my mascara.”
“I’m going to ruin a lot more than just your makeup if you keep looking at me like that.”
I laugh again, harder this time, and before I can overthink it, I lean over and kiss him. It’s soft and quick, just a press of lips, but when I pull back, his eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them.
That’s how I know: This is it.
The Shift.
Sweet Bastian, the one who rented out an entire theater and made my bucket list item come true, is rapidly being overtaken by something else entirely.
And this something is hungrier.
His pupils dilate until his eyes are almost black. His jaw tightens. The hand holding mine flexes until his grip is just shy of painful.
“Eliana…”
He’s warning me, but somewhere along the line, I decided without realizing it that I no longer care about warnings. Fuck it—let him break my heart.
But let him break my headboard first.
Because I’m realizing something important: I don’t just want the Bastian who brings me sunrises and classic movies. I want this one, too. The one who looks at me like he wants to devour me whole. The one who’s barely holding himself back.
I want the sweet and the sour.
The violent and the tender.
The gentleman and the beast.
I want all of him, even the parts that should terrify me. Maybe even especially those parts.
Bastian moves before I can blink. His hand clamps around the back of my neck, dragging me across the armrest and into his lap. I land with a gasp, my skirt twisted around my legs.
“Bastian, I—”
He swallows the rest of my sentence. His tongue invades my mouth, hot and insistent. I make a sound somewhere between a whimper and a moan, and his grip on my neck tightens in response.
“Do you have any idea,” he growls against my lips, “what you’ve been doing to me all night?” His free hand slides down my side and claws against my ribs. “This fucking outfit,” he mutters. “That little bow. Like you’re some kind of present I get to unwrap.”
His fingers find bare skin where my top meets my skirt, and I gasp at the contact.
“And this skirt.” His hand moves lower, bunching the fabric in his fist. “All flowy and innocent. But I’ve been thinking about what’s underneath it since the second you opened your door.”
“Bastian—”
“I’ve been going insane,” he continues, his mouth moving to my neck. He bites just enough to make me stifle a shriek. “Sitting next to you in the dark. Watching you watch the movie. Wanting to touch you so badly I could barely fucking breathe.”
His hand slides high enough to skim the underside of my breast through my top.
“Do you know how many times I’ve thought about this?
” He switches to the other side of my neck.
Every word is a breathy exhale on my bare skin.
“That first night in the office, when you put your hands on my chest—I went home and jerked off thinking about what would’ve happened if I’d just said, ‘Fuck it’ and dragged you to the floor then and there. ”
He tweaks my nipple through my top. I chew the inside of my cheek to hold back the moan.
“Bas… Basti…”
“The wine tasting.” His mouth finds the sensitive spot behind my ear. “I wanted to bend you over that table and fuck you in front of every single one of those pompous investors. Show them exactly who you belong to.”
My breath comes in short gasps as his other hand slides down my thigh.
“Mermaid’s Purse. Watching you eat those oysters.
” He growls wordlessly. “All I could think about was your mouth. What it would feel like wrapped around my cock. Then the elevator.” He palms my breast and groans.
“The fucking elevator. I wanted to push you against that wall and make you scream my name where anyone could hear. And the car…” His fingers find the hem of my skirt and snake beneath it.
“That wasn’t enough, though. Not nearly enough. ”
I’m stammering stupidly, not making any sense. It’s all I can do to keep from melting into a puddle right in his lap.
Then he goes deathly still.
“But you want to know what I’ve wanted most of all?” His voice drops to a baritone rasp that makes my toes curl. “What I’ve fantasized about every single night this week?”
I can barely form words. “What?”
He pulls back just enough to look me in the eye. “I want to taste you. I want my mouth on you. I want to make you come on my tongue harder than you’ve ever come before.”
The tongue in question darts out to wet his lips.
“So I’m going to do that. Right fucking here. Right fucking now.”
He doesn’t give me a chance to stop him or protest. He just drops me into the seat beside him with zero ceremony. Before I can make sense of what’s happening, he’s crouched on his knees between my legs.
His huge hands cuff around my ankles. “Spread them,” he orders.
I hesitate for half a second—not because I don’t want to, because Lord knows I’m as lost in the lust as he is—but because my brain is still trying to catch up with what’s happening.
His fingers tighten hard enough to bruise. “Eliana, I said to spread your fucking legs for me.”
I let my knees fall open.
“More. Wider.”
I do what he says. The theater seat forces my hips to tilt forward, and I feel obscenely exposed even though I’m still fully clothed.
“Good girl,” he murmurs. The praise makes my head spin.
He takes a fistful of skirt fabric in each hand and starts to roll it up my legs. He takes his time. Slowly, one inch at a time, my legs are exposed. My skin looks amber in the low lantern light. Bastian’s gaze stays riveted on mine as he rolls the skirt higher and higher and higher.
Until, finally, the fabric bunches up around my hips, leaving me in nothing but my underwear from the waist down.
He sits back on his heels for a moment, just looking at me. His chest rises and falls rapidly.
“Fucking perfect,” he breathes. “Everything I dreamed of and more.”
His fingers hook into the waistband of my underwear—simple black cotton, nothing fancy, even though Yasmin begged me to wear the lace lingerie set she bought me for a birthday present last year—and he starts to drag it down my legs with the same agonizing slowness with which he rolled up my skirt.
The fabric whispers against my skin as he peels the panties away, inch by torturous inch, until they’re dangling from one ankle.
He slips them free and holds them up between us for a moment. A smirk plays at the corner of his mouth. Then, maintaining eye contact, he folds them carefully and tucks them into his back pocket.
“Mine now,” he says simply.
Then his eyes drop low.
But he doesn’t move. Not right away. He kneels there before me, hands pinning my thighs as wide as they’ll go, and stares at my center. He licks his lips once more. He exhales.
And then he says, “More beautiful than I ever could have imagined.”
Then he leans forward and fucking devours me.
The first stroke of his tongue rips an unholy moan from my throat. He groans in response like he loves it. The vibration of his lips on me makes me spasm head to toe.
“Fuck, you taste incredible,” he snarls against my thigh.
He does slow, teasing circles around my lips, leaving little nibbles along the crease of one hip. He’s torturing me, but I love it so much. I’m so lost in the sensation that I barely register when he freezes.
“What the hell is this?”
My brain is too scrambled to process the question. “What?”
He pulls back to squint down. “You’re hurt.”
Oh. The shaving incident.
“It’s nothing,” I say quickly, trying to pull him back to where I want him. “Just nicked myself shaving earlier. It’s fine.”
His frown deepens as he examines the small Band-Aid I’d slapped on in my post-shower panic. “You should’ve been more careful.”
“Bastian, I really don’t think now is the time to—”
“Did you clean it properly?”
“Yes, Dr. Hale. I managed to apply basic first aid all by myself.”
He looks up at me. “I don’t like seeing you hurt.”
I’m torn between two reactions. One is aww-level sweetness at his concern for a tiny little shaving cut. The other is… less wholesome.
I opt for Reaction #2.
“Bastian,” I breathe, “if you don’t make me come right now, I think I’m going to die.”
He chuckles. “That’s the hottest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”
Then he dives back in. He seals his mouth around my clit and sucks and holyfuckingshitballs I see so many stars.
He adds one finger, then two. The dual sensation has me climbing fast.
“Bastian—I’m—”
“I know. I can feel you. Come for me, Eliana. Let me taste it.”
Welp, that does the trick. I explode with a guttural gasp. I can’t stop myself from clamping my thighs around his ears while I hold onto the roots of his hair for dear life.
He doesn’t stop, though. If anything, he becomes more insistent. “One more,” he demands. “Give me one more.”
I’m spiraling in every direction at once. This is all just batshit crazy. My billionaire boss is kneeling in front of me in a vintage movie theater, eating me out to the most drool-inducing orgasm I’ve ever had in my life.
It’s so fucking wrong.
It’s so fucking right.
It’s so fucking—ohmygod I’m gonna come again.
It shouldn’t happen that fast, it defies logic, and yet it is happening, it does happen: Bastian licks and kisses and sucks just right and the explosions are consuming me once more.
My back arches hard enough to give my chiropractor anxiety. Again, I bear down on the sides of Bastian’s head so hard that I have to wonder if suffocating him is a genuine possibility.
But I truly cannot make my muscles obey any command that isn’t more, more, MORE.
A sound rips from my throat that I’ve never made before. It echoes through the theater, bouncing off the walls and probably alerting every living soul within a three-block radius that someone is having a very good time in here.
My toes scrunch up so hard they cramp. My fingers twist in Bastian’s hair, and I’m definitely pulling out strands, but he doesn’t seem to care. If anything, he groans against me like his pain is his pleasure.
The whole thing is almost too much. It’s not the gentle, rolling kind of orgasm I’ve given myself with my vibrator at home. This is violent. Consuming. It feels like Bastian is pulling my soul out through my pussy and swallowing it whole.
Colors explode behind my eyelids, gold and crimson and electric blue. For a terrifying second, I think maybe this is it, maybe my vision is finally giving out, that the mother of all orgasms is robbing me of my sight ahead of schedule.
But then the colors fade and I can still see the ornate ceiling above me, still see the vintage light fixtures, still see Bastian’s blonde hair between my trembling thighs.
Still here. Still seeing. Still alive.
Well, mostly. Barely. Kinda.
He keeps working me through it, drawing out every last aftershock until I’m literally begging him to stop.
“Bastian—I can’t—it’s too much—”
Finally, he pulls back. His mouth is glistening, his eyes are wild, and he looks like a man who just won the lottery and found God and discovered the meaning of life all at the same time.
“You’re so fucking beautiful when you come.”
All I can do is stare at him while my chest heaves and my legs shake and every cell in my body hums with liquid satisfaction.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand—such a casual, crude gesture that somehow makes the whole thing that much hotter—and then he’s rising to his feet and pulling me up with him.
My legs are jello. I fall, and he catches me against his chest.
“Easy,” he murmurs, steadying me. “I’ve got you.”
I can feel how hard he is through his jeans, pressed against my hip. I want to do something about that. If I can make him feel even a fraction of what he just made me feel…
But when I reach for his belt, he catches my wrist. “Not here,” he says.
“But you—”
“Tonight was about you and your list. About giving you something to remember.”
“Mission accomplished,” I manage breathlessly.
He smiles and nods. “Good.”
He helps me straighten my skirt. I’m very aware that I’m not wearing underwear anymore. If I recall correctly, they’re currently tucked in his back pocket like some kind of trophy.
“Can I have those back?” I ask, pointing at his ass.
“Absolutely not.”
“Bastian—”
“They’re mine now. I told you.”
“I can’t go home without underwear!”
“Sure you can.” His grin turns wicked. “In fact, I’m going to enjoy knowing you’re bare under that skirt for the entire drive back.”
My face flames. “You’re impossible.”
He just winks. Then he bends down and kisses me deeply with tongue. Tasting myself on his mouth is depraved and so hot I can feel myself trembling all over again.
He takes my hand and leads me up the aisle toward the exit. My legs are still wobbly, and I have to concentrate on each step to avoid face-planting into the vintage carpet.
But I can only think of one thing as I go.
If that’s what the Bastian Train is like…
… sign me up for the whole damn ride.