Chapter 12 Angie #2
“Can I stay and watch?” he asks tentatively and moves us back toward the living room.
“Okay.” I untangle myself from his grasp and move over to the bench.
I hear him take a seat on the couch behind me and warm up my fingers with some scales.
When I’ve run through my warmup twice, I start on a cover of Arcade by Duncan Laurence.
Without stopping, I loop into the original piece I’ve been working on for the last few months, to some classical pieces, and then a Florence & the Machine song.
As the last note fades, I see movement out of the corner of my eye and scoot over on the bench to allow Brandon some room.
I keep my fingers on the keys, playing a simple melody, and turn to him.
“Wow,” he says while watching my fingers move along the ivory and black keys.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I knew you were good, but this…wow.”
I giggle, which is so unlike me, at his speechlessness. “I like when you can’t get your words out.”
His eyes flicker up to me and the lack of space would bother me with anyone else, but with him, I like it. “Why?”
“Because it proves you’re human like the rest of us. Getting flustered around pretty things.”
Brandon snorts and hesitates to place his fingers on the keys. I stop playing and help him position his fingers on his right hand to a simple A major chord. I instruct him to keep doing that while I start a cover of Let It Be by The Beatles.
“How do you do that?” he asks, bewildered when the song ends.
“The same way you can easily design a video game. Years of repetition. Also, I have really good ears. When I started trying my hand at covers, all it took was hearing a song once and playing around until I found the chords, then obsessively fixating on it until I could effortlessly play it. It would take me a day to get the bones of a song down and about a full week to absolutely perfect it.”
“You’re a lot more relaxed here, confident,” he notes, and my cheeks flame with a blush that he’s caught on so easily.
“Imagine you’re at work,” I begin with my fingers still twiddling away at the keys for some background noise. “Would you rather be behind the computer or in front of a group of people who basically tell you your game is bad?”
“Okay, fair point,” Brandon says and chuffles.
I play the last of the melody and place my hands in my lap, but keep my foot on the pedal to keep the note going for as long as possible. “Thank you for the outfits. I was going to tell you tomorrow, but since you’re here…”
“You’re welcome. Which one are you gonna wear?”
I turn on the bench and straddle it so I’m facing toward him. “I’m gonna keep that a surprise.”
“Tease,” he jokes and mirrors my position, but surprises me and sets my legs on top of his. The movement drags me closer to him and the mood changes from playful to something more.
“What are we doing?” I ask and trace his face with my eyes.
“You mean right now? Or in general?”
“In general.”
“Well,” he starts and places his hands on my thighs, “I know I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for weeks. But I also know that our families, mine specifically, would forbid us from being together. Or even cut me out if they knew we were together.”
“Because of my brother,” I interrupt.
“Yeah. But I also know that you’ve lit something inside me that has been dark for the last two years.”
“Brandon…”
His demeanor drops and I fear he’s about to bring reality into our bubble. “If our brothers were still alive—”
I shake my head and look off over his shoulder. “I don’t want to play the alternate universe game because I know where that leaves us.”
“Hey,” Brandon says and gently hooks his thumb on my chin to keep our eyes locked. “Yes, if our brothers were alive…who knows if we’d have found our way to each other. But I think one way or another, our paths were always meant to intersect.”
“And what about our age difference?” I ask because that’s something that rears its ugly head.
He shrugs like it means nothing. “What about it?”
“You’re older than me, you’re years into a career that you love, and I’m still trying to figure out what I want and where I fit. How are we expected to make anything work?”
“How does any couple make their differences work? They talk it out. They don’t give up. And so you’re still figuring out what you want to do. Who says you need to have everything figured out by a certain age?”
“Yeah, says the guy who loves what he does,” I snark.
Brandon’s lips twitch with a smile, and I narrow my eyes at the movement. “You’ll figure it out, Ang. It doesn’t have to be tomorrow or next week or at the end of the year. If the piano bar is what you want, then it’ll happen. If not, then something else will come about.”
“You make it seem so easy,” I muse.
“It can be. As for what we’re doing, we’ll take this one day at a time, okay? And if you don’t end up madly in love with me by the end of the year, you can dump me,” he says lightly.
“Stop joking,” I exclaim, and he pulls me closer toward him.
“Okay. If I don’t end up madly in love with you by the end of the year, I can dump you,” he tries to compromise with a straight face, but fails.
“You’re ridiculous.”
Brandon sobers up quicker than I’ve seen. “I am ridiculously falling for you, Angela Taylor. I know you said slow and trust me, I respect that. But I realized something about myself—and it’s that I am incapable of doing anything half-assed when it comes to you.”
“Yeah. I’m ridiculously falling for you, too, Brandon Hayes,” I say softly and push back a piece of hair that’s fallen on his forehead. My heart is pounding like a stampede at what’s to come and what I need to say next.
“What’s wrong?” Brandon asks as I let my fingers trace over his face, his nose, and his lips before keeping my hand on his cheek.
“Remember when I told you about how I was diagnosed with clinical depression?”
“Yeah.” He nods and then stops. “You’re okay, right? Like I’m not pushing you or anything? Please tell me if I do.”
“No. No, you’re perfect and patient. But one of the side effects with the medication I’m on is lack of…
” I pause as I look for the right words.
How do you tell someone that a lack of sexual desire isn’t because of them?
“It can be a struggle to have any sort of sexual stirrings because of my medication.”
“Oh,” is his response.
“Yeah. And I don’t want you to think it’s because I’m not attracted to you, because I am. I want to be upfront with you and let you know that it might take a little longer to find my release, or I might not always be in the mood.”
“Patience and communication. I can do that,” he says.
“Thank you. Can you kiss me now?” I ask, and his smile is the last thing I see before he leans forward and closes the inches of space between our lips.
We fit perfectly together. Weirdly, I knew this the first time he kissed me and all the times after that.
But until this moment, I haven’t let myself notice.
The eldest Hayes brother and I fit together like a complicated puzzle and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Brandon’s arms wrap around my waist and any remaining distance between us is eliminated in that movement.
This kiss makes all the others seem like child's play. This kiss is all tongues and teeth, groping hands and tugging on clothes, hands going under shirts to feel the other, and breathing each other’s air.
Brandon pulls me onto his lap, but my knee bumps into the underside of the piano, preventing us from moving further.
“Hold on, baby.” He says into my mouth and moves us off the bench.
My legs wrap around his waist as he walks back over to the couch and sits down with me in his lap.
My breath catches as I feel his obvious erection through the worn jeans he’s wearing.
The thin fabric of my sweatpants does nothing to stop me and my nipples are pressing into the fabric of my top.
As our tongues tangle and the sound of our ragged breathing is heard in the otherwise empty room, my hips begin to move, seeking friction that only he can give.
Brandon’s hands land on my hips and he helps guide my choppy motion over his stiff dick.
I rise up on my knees and sink back down, sighing into his mouth and letting the feel of him at my entrance ignite me.
Our kiss stutters and my breath catches in my throat as the feel of us together grows more real and one of his hands leaves my waist as it travels to the front of my body.
“Is this okay?” he asks as his fingers rub along the seam of my sweats.
That, with the added feel of lust coursing through my veins, has only one word coming from my mouth. “Yes,” I whimper. “Yes, that's more than okay.”
Brandon leans forward and takes my lips in a breath-stealing kiss as his fingers rub maddening circles on my clit driving me to an orgasm. All of it is too much, and I weave my hand through his brown strands and tug, making him groan into my mouth.
“I can feel the heat of your pussy through your sweats,” Brandon says as he rips his mouth from mine and trails his lips over my cheeks and to my neck. He finds a spot that makes me melt and chuckles. “What do you need?”
He expects me to form words? “I need you to touch me.”
“I am touching you.”
Smartass. “I need you to make me come with your fingers.”
He pauses where his fingers are rubbing my clit and pulls his head back. His pupils are blown, his lips are kiss-bruised, and his hair is wild from my hands. “Stand up for me.”
My eyebrows scrunch in confusion.
“Up, Angela.” His firm tone of voice leaves no room for objection.