Chapter 16 #2
I step between her thighs and reach behind her, fingers finding the clasp of her bra.
It gives under my hands and the straps finish their slide down her shoulders, revealing her to me in the low kitchen light.
I draw her nipple into my mouth, tasting the ghost of chocolate still clinging to her skin, and her moan is so quiet, so honest, it vibrates through my chest like a chord I’ve spent my whole life trying to write.
Her fingers thread into my hair, grip tightening every time I change the pressure, guiding me without words the way she does everything—with certainty.
I scrape my teeth gently and she gasps, arching into me, and I’m wrecked.
Undone by the sounds she’s making, by the way her body trusts mine, wanting things I shouldn’t want—permanence, mornings, her hands in my hair for the next fifty years.
Dangerous, greedy, impossible things that have no business living in the same head as everything else I carry.
I take my time with the button of her shorts, searching her face for permission, even though the current running beneath her skin is unmistakable. She lifts her hips in answer, and I slide the denim down her legs, pressing my mouth to the top of her foot as I let the shorts fall to the floor.
I hook my thumbs into the cotton at her hips and draw her panties down slowly, the pads of my fingers dragging along her legs, tracing the slight tremble of her muscles.
She watches me with heavy-lidded eyes, and when the final barrier between us is gone, I step back and look at her.
Slowly and deliberately, she spreads her thighs open, her gaze locked on mine the entire time.
“Fuck, Joey.” The sight of Joey Morgan spread out on my kitchen island with her thighs open and zero hesitation on her face has ruined me in ways I’m never going to recover from. I run a hand over my jaw, the breath leaving my lungs in a rush. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
“I can’t help it.” She bites her lower lip, her voice dropping low and sure. “You’re so good at it.”
I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh, and she threads her fingers into my hair before I even reach her center, guiding me with a grip so confident it makes me groan against her skin.
My tongue traces her slowly, spreading her open, teasing until her hips lift off the marble and a sound tears from her throat, so raw it sends a jolt straight to my cock.
I’m painfully hard, straining against my jeans, and the friction of the denim is almost enough to undo me right here, standing at my kitchen island with my mouth between her thighs.
She rolls against me, fucking my mouth with her hips, setting the pace I follow.
She knows what she wants, and the fact she isn’t afraid to take it—pulling my hair, shifting my angle, whispering my name like a command—makes me so greedy for her I lose track of where the teasing ends and the desperation begins.
Every sound I pull from her makes me want ten more.
I want to spend the rest of my life learning every version of the sounds she makes when I drag my tongue exactly where she needs it.
When she comes apart beneath me, my name torn from her throat, I hold her steady through every tremor. My hands are firm on her hips, grounding her while the aftershocks pulse through her body.
I rest my forehead against her thigh, breathing her in, watching the rise and fall of her chest as she comes back to herself.
Her fingers loosen in my hair, shifting from grip to caress, and she looks at me with an expression so open it terrifies me—like she’s handing me something fragile and trusting me not to break it.
She pulls me up and catches my mouth in a kiss so deep I lose my head. “I want you to fuck me, Jesse.”
I reach for my wallet with shaking hands, fumble the condom out, and as desperate as I am to be inside her, the kitchen island doesn’t feel worthy of this moment. I stop and take a beat.
“Joey.” I press my forehead to hers. “Not here. Not on a counter for our first—”
“Jesse,” she laughs, placing her palm on my cheek. “I don’t need silk sheets and roses.” She pulls me closer by the waistband of my jeans. “I just want you.”
She presses her lips to mine, and her tongue slides teasingly along mine, her hips rolling into me.
I groan against her, lose myself in the heat of her for a dangerous stretch of seconds, my hands gripping the marble on either side of her while she unravels me with nothing but her mouth and the slow grind of her body.
I pull away. Press my forehead to hers and fight for breath.
“I love you.” The words fall out of me graceless and unrehearsed, nothing like the way I’ve practiced them in my head a thousand times. “I don’t—I’ve never said it to anyone. I don’t even know if I’m saying it right.”
She pulls back and looks at me, her nose scrunching in that way of hers. She grabs the hem of my shirt, lifting it over my head. “I know,” she says, like she decided it long before I caught up, and the words are a formality. “You don’t need to sweet talk me. I’m a sure thing.”
“Fuck,” I laugh, cradling her face in my hands, forcing her to meet my eyes. “I’m trying to be a gentleman here, Joey.”
She blinks at me. “You weren’t a gentleman when you came on my chest the other night.” Her eyebrow arches, and she has a fucking smirk on her face. The heat climbing my neck has nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with the memory.
“Jesus, you’ve got a mouth on you,” I say with a smile.
She pulls me in and takes my mouth, one sharp, salt-edged kiss that hits like the first strike of a chord.
“Baby.” She lowers her lashes. “I love you,” she says, all sweetness and devotion, then hooks her finger through my belt loop and tugs me closer. “Now fuck me.”
I smile. “You found my weakness.”
“What’s that?” She tilts her head, hair spilling over her shoulder, and I push my hand through it, angling her the way I need.
“You.” I kiss her, tugging on her lower lip between my teeth, and she moans.
She reaches between us, takes the condom from my hand, and tears the foil open.
Her fingers wrap around me, and I hiss through my teeth, my hips jerking into her grip.
She rolls the condom on with a steady hand that contradicts the rapid pulse I can see fluttering at her throat, and when she’s done, she doesn’t let go.
She holds me there, guiding me to her entrance, and our eyes lock in the space between one breath and the next.
I push inside her, and every wall I’ve ever built collapses.
She’s impossibly warm, her body accepting mine with a sharp intake of breath, and her fingers dig crescents into my shoulders as I press my forehead against hers, fighting for composure.
I told her I loved her and she said it back, and now she’s wrapped around me, and I’m drowning in the reality of something I spent years convinced could only exist in the songs I wrote about her.
“God, Joey,” I say, my voice like sandpaper.
I move slowly, pulling almost all the way out before pressing back in, giving her time to adjust to me.
I brush the hair from her face, press my lips to her forehead, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth.
My thumb traces the line of her jaw while I hold myself in check, every muscle in my body straining against the instinct to take more.
“Don’t be gentle.” She raises her leg to rest on my shoulder as she lays against the marble. “I don’t want gentle.”
“Jesus, Joey.” I grip her hips and stop holding back.
The girl who used to blush when I brushed my hand against hers at summer bonfires is matching every thrust with a confidence I never predicted, making sounds I’ll replay behind my closed eyelids for the rest of my life.
She keeps revealing versions of herself I never imagined, and each one pulls me deeper into territory I have no interest in mapping an exit from.
I am completely, irreversibly, catastrophically gone for this girl.
The oven timer shatters the rhythm like a cymbal crash.
“Fuck.” I still, my forehead dropping against her calf, a laugh escaping before I can stop it.
“Oh God, don’t stop,” she says, breathless, hair splayed across the marble, cheeks flushed, looking up at me with an expression caught somewhere between desperate and amused. “I like my brownies well done.”
I laugh against her skin.
Her leg slides from my shoulder to wrap around my waist, and I grip her hips, pulling her to the edge of the marble as I drive into her.
Every sound she makes is a lyric I’ll never be able to write down, never be able to recreate, only carry in the marrow of my bones.
My thumb finds her clit, and her back arches off the marble, her moans rising loud enough to rival the timer note for note.
Her thighs tremble against my ribs and she tightens around me so hard my rhythm stutters.
The noise in my head has never been this silent.
My hands slide from her hips to her thighs, holding her steady, slowing my pace while she comes down.
Then I pull her up, one arm hooked beneath the small of her back, and her mouth crashes into mine.
I bury myself inside her and come undone, groaning against her lips while her body pulses around mine.
We stay tangled together, breathing hard, skin damp, her forehead pressed against my neck and my arms still locked around her like letting go isn’t an option I’m willing to consider.
Joey lifts her head from my shoulder, hair tangled, cheeks flushed, and a lazy grin spreading across her face.
“Well,” she says. “The brownies are fucked.”