Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Creed
I kiss her.
Slowly at first, because if I don’t start carefully, I won’t know how to stay careful.
Her hands go up into my hair.
That changes the kiss.
Not because she pulls hard. She doesn’t.
She slides her fingers in and holds on like she has found the one part of me she’s allowed to need without explaining herself.
My hand goes to the small of her back. I pull her against me, and she comes, all of her, the way a woman comes against a body she has been waiting to be against longer than she is willing to admit.
Her hips meet mine.
She makes a small sound against my mouth.
I have never heard that sound from her before.
I know, immediately, that I am going to listen for it in every room we ever share.
Fuck.
I lift her.
She is small enough that it takes nothing. Her legs go around my waist, her arms around my neck, and for a second she breaks the kiss just to look at me. Her mouth is open. Her eyes are dark. Her face has lost every clever defense she usually keeps within reach.
That nearly ruins me.
“You okay?” I ask.
Her breath catches. “Yes.”
“Tell me if that changes.”
“It won’t.”
“Liv.”
Her fingers tighten in my hair. “I’ll tell you.”
Good.
That has to be enough.
I walk her three steps to the bed and lay her down on the side I haven’t put my own duffel on. The mattress dips beneath her. My black socks sit abandoned near her hip, ridiculous and domestic and not nearly enough to cool anything in me down.
She looks at them, then at me.
“Very seductive packing system.”
“Don’t mock the system.”
“You were losing to socks.”
“I was distracted.”
“You were alone.”
“I was anticipating distraction.”
That gets me a breath of laughter, and I kiss her again before the laugh can become a joke she hides behind. I kiss her until the laughter disappears. I kiss her until that small sound comes back and another sound joins it, softer, lower, a little startled by itself.
Her hands pull at the hem of my shirt.
Mine goes to the navy crewneck.
My sweater.
On her body.
That should not hit me this hard. But seeing her under me in it makes something inside me go quiet and absolute.
“Can I?” I ask, fingers at the hem.
She nods.
“Words, baby.”
Her eyes meet mine. “Yes.”
I push the sweater up over her stomach.
Slow.
Not because I am patient.
Because I am trying to survive the sight of her.
Her skin appears inch by inch beneath my hands, warm and soft and real. She lifts her arms so I can take the sweater off the rest of the way . Her hair catches in the collar for a second, and she makes an irritated little noise that would be funny if I were a better man.
I'm not, at the moment, a better man.
I pull the sweater free and drop it beside us.
It’s just her, caught in the middle of her ordinary life, deciding to let me see what I have been trying not to imagine for months.
I make a sound.
I don’t know what it is.
Something low. Honest enough that she notices.
She arches her back, very slightly, to put herself closer to where I’m looking.
“That’s a face,” she says.
“Yes.”
“What kind of face?”
“Liv.”
“Tell me.” The command is soft, but there is need under it.
She wants to know what I see because some part of her still thinks beauty has to be proven from the outside before she is allowed to believe it.
I put one hand beside her head and make myself look at her face before I look anywhere else.
“You are extremely beautiful.”
Her eyes close for half a second.
When she opens them, her face is open in a way I have never seen. It’s just Livia, receiving the truth and letting it reach her before she organizes it into something safer.
“Okay,” she says. Her voice is small, but not uncertain.
Then her mouth curves.
“Carry on.”
I laugh once, quiet and wrecked, and lower my mouth to hers again.
This kiss is different.
My hand slides along her side, over warm skin, slow enough that she can stop me and sure enough that she knows I want to keep going.
Her stomach pulls in under my palm. Her fingers dig into my shoulders.
I kiss the corner of her mouth, then her jaw, then the place below her ear that makes her inhale like she is trying not to say my name.
“Creed,” she says anyway.
I stop.
She opens her eyes, annoyed instantly. “Why did you stop?”
“Because you said my name like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I should check on you.”
Her expression changes.
Tender first, then wicked.
“Or like you should keep going.”
My entire body reacts.
I let my forehead drop to her collarbone for one second.
“You’re dangerous.”
“I’m academically gifted.”
“That doesn't apply here.”
“It applies everywhere.”
I kiss the skin above the edge of her bra, and the argument leaves her on a breath. Her hand slides into my hair again, not pulling, just holding, and the sweetness of it nearly does more damage than the heat.
Because this is Liv, who reads when she’s nervous. Liv, who stole my sweatshirt and my quiet. It adds depth. It makes every kiss feel like a promise none of us is reckless enough to say yet.
I lift my head.
She watches me with flushed cheeks and parted lips.
“What?” she whispers.
I brush my thumb along the side of her face.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes soften.
I slide my hand up over the line of her ribcage, and I feel every rib beneath my palm, each one fragile and real under warm skin.
That’s what gets me.
Not the bra. Not the dark mesh barely pretending to cover her. Not the way the clasp gives the second I pinch it, like the whole damn world has been waiting for my fingers to make one simple choice.
It’s the reality of her.
She shivers.
A tiny, involuntary thing.
I stop moving.
She notices. Her eyes open, bright and dark at once, her dark hair spread across my pillow, her lips parted like she’s about to argue with me.
“What?” she whispers.
I shake my head once. I don’t trust myself with more than that.
The room feels too warm. Too close. The air has gone thin from everything I’m not saying. Outside the windows, the city keeps glowing like it has no idea something irreversible is happening here.
I pull the bra away from her body and let it fall somewhere I don’t care about.
Her breasts are full, her nipples already tight and dark, her skin flushed where my mouth has been. I roll one between my fingers, watching her face when I do it.
Her head tips back.
My name almost comes out of her mouth. I feel it before I hear it, the shape of it gathering in her breath, then breaking apart into a moan.
Something in me pulls hard.
Fuck.
I lower my mouth to her throat, right where her pulse beats fast beneath the skin, and I taste salt, heat, her sweet perfume losing its war against want.
I bite my way up from collarbone to jaw, not enough to hurt, enough for her to remember.
She grabs at my hair again, fingers sinking in, pulling as if she’s mad at me for making her need this.
Fuck.
I kiss the hinge of her jaw.
She arches into me.
I start to realize I have never, not once, been this far gone with someone. This unguarded. This fucking greedy.
It should scare me more than it does.
She keeps her arms around me.
Pulls me down.
I go because I'm not a better man than this.
For a second, we stay there. Foreheads pressed together. Breath caught between us, hot and uneven. Her fingers move against the back of my neck, not quite a caress, not quite a plea.
“I want to take your pants off,” I say.
Her laugh comes out low, a little rough, all throat and trouble. “Then do it.”
I look at her.
She swallows. Her eyes don’t leave mine.
“Do it slow.”
I nod once.
Then I do it so slowly, I think it might kill me.
I start at her ankles, because if I start anywhere else, I’ll lose the thread of myself.
My hands drag up the backs of her calves, over the tight muscle of her thighs, learning her inch by inch.
She watches me with her mouth parted, her hair a dark spill against my sheets, her hands gripping the comforter like she needs something to blame for staying still.
Her jeans are stiff with a little stretch. I thumb the button open.
Her stomach moves with one quick breath.
I slide the zipper down with care that feels obscene. Tooth by tooth. Sound by sound. Her eyes close, then open again, as if she refuses to miss what I’m becoming because of her.
She lifts her hips.
That simple offer almost ends me.
I ease the denim over her round ass, down her thighs, past her knees, and off. Then I am left with her bare legs, long and beautiful, dotted with faint freckles I would never have seen unless I was this close. Unless she lets me this close.
My hand pauses at her knee.
She notices again.
“Creed,” she says, and there’s a warning in it. A soft one. Like she knows I’m standing too near the edge of a truth and might do something reckless, such as speak.
“I know,” I say.
I don’t know what I mean.
I know I should slow down. I know I don’t want to.
I bend my head before she can ask for it.
Her panties are pink, wet at the center.
My self-control thins to almost nothing.
I run my nose over the seam and inhale.
She goes still.
The room does too.
No city noise. No air-conditioning hum. No sheets shifting beneath her. Just the broken sound of her breath, catching once, then again, as if her body has betrayed her and she doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed or proud.
I look up.
Her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes are on the ceiling. One hand covers her mouth.
That, I can’t allow.
I catch her wrist and move it aside, pressing her hand into the mattress beside her hip.
“Don’t hide from me.”
Her eyes cut to mine.
There she is. All fire, all panic, all feeling trying to pass itself off as irritation.
“I’m not hiding,” she says, breathless.
“You are.”
“I am processing.”
“You process with your mouth covered?”
“I process in a variety of formats.”
Despite myself, I smile against her thigh.
It ruins her a little. I see it happen. Her face softens before she can stop it, and the look she gives me makes my throat go hot with something I don’t want a name for.
Need, maybe.
No. Worse.
Hope.