Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
Julie
W hen I wake up in the morning, I’m still pressed against Asher, my arm around him, my hand pressed low on his belly. When he shifts in his sleep, my fingers graze his hard cock, and he moans into his pillow.
“Do it again,” he rasps, his voice thick with sleep and so fucking sexy I feel that rasp through my entire body and my clit throbs, as if I didn’t have the best sex of my life less than six hours ago. We fell into bed naked last night, so there’s nothing between us as I wrap my hand around him and stroke him long and slow.
“Fuck, baby, I need you right now.” His raspy morning voice turns urgent as he rolls over, wrapping his arms around me and kissing me deeply, exploring every inch of my mouth until we’re both gasping.
“I want my mouth on you,” I say, pulling back to watch his eyes go feral, exactly what I was hoping would happen.
“Then do it, Juliette.” Asher settles on his back and laces his fingers behind his head, leaving his body open for me to explore. Knowing that we’re on borrowed time and that at some point one of my parents is going to come looking for us for breakfast, I get right to it. Shifting my body to kneel next to him, I grip the base of his cock and swirl my tongue around the head before I swallow him right down. When I slide my mouth back up, grazing the underside with my tongue and sliding my finger back to rub along the sensitive skin behind his balls, his hips shoot up and the garbled sound he lets out is barely human.
I don’t have time to be amused by that because suddenly he sits up, wrapping his arms around my legs and swinging me around so I’m laying on top of his body, my thighs bracketing his face.
“Hold on tight and bring your A-game Juliette. First one to make the other come wins.”
I don’t have time to process his words before Asher grips my hips and pulls me closer to him, sealing his mouth over my clit and sucking so hard my vision blurs. Barely coherent but hating to lose at anything, I grip his cock at the base, sucking at his head while I move my hand up and down, stroking firmly.
He groans against me, and I feel the vibration through my entire body as his tongue laps at my clit, and his flavor explodes in my mouth. I keep my mouth on him as my body coils tighter and tighter, desperate for release at his delicious suction on my clit as his tongue works me. Wanting him to come, needing him to come with a desperation that borders on manic, I cup his balls and slide my fingers back to that sensitive spot, making his hips jerk again.
He chuckles darkly against me, and I hear his thoughts as if he’s speaking them out loud.
Game on Juliette .
With his mouth sucking me harder, his tongue moving faster, he grips my ass, pulling my cheeks apart and pressing his thumb against my tight hole, the place no one but him has ever touched. The filthy move has pleasure shooting through me, a deep moan rising from my chest. I double my efforts, increasing the pressure of my hand moving in tandem with my mouth. The combination of Asher’s mouth suctioned to my clit and his thumb tracing slow circles has me two seconds from exploding, so with my last rational thought I graze my teeth along the underside of his cock at the same time as he flutters his tongue along my clit and presses in with his thumb, and my entire body bursts in a supernova of pleasure while his cum floods my mouth and his deep groan rumbles against me. My legs are trembling against Asher’s face as he wrings every drop of pleasure out of me, and I swallow down every drop of him.
When we’re both finally wrung dry, I roll off him, collapsing onto the bed, my head at his feet.
“I guess it was a tie.” I pant out a laugh, trying to take in oxygen as my heart gallops.
“Jesus Christ, you’re good at that,” Asher gasps, trying to catch his breath.
“You know how I like to be the best at things. And you’ve turned me into some kind of sex crazed maniac, I swear.” I fling an arm out and wrap it around his leg, my fingers grazing absently along the back of his knee.
“It’s just that I’m so good at sex.” He lifts his head to grin down at me.
“Well, at least you’re confident in your abilities,” I say with a smirk, my hand still stroking along his knee. He brings his hand down to cover mine, blowing out a breath and moving it away from him.
“If you keep stroking my knee like that, I’ll have no choice but to show you again just how confident I am. But I’m starving, and I hear voices in the kitchen, so I think we’re going to have to save round two for later.”
“Sad but true,” I say, sitting up and laying right on top of him, leaning on my elbows and bracketing his face with my hands. Looking down into his gorgeous face, love runs through me, warm and true and absolutely sure.
“I love you, Ash.”
He grins at me, and his face lights up at my words. “I love you too, Juliette.”
Asher
If I wasn’t so sex drunk and focused on Julie’s ass as she walked down the stairs in front of me, it probably would have registered that there was way too much noise in the kitchen for it to be only Julie’s parents in there. But it didn’t, so when I walk into the kitchen, I stop dead in my tracks, staring at the table where Rachel and Steven Parker sit chatting with my parents, coffee mugs in front of all of them. Julie is already rounding the table to hug my mom and dad and sit down before she notices that I haven’t moved from the kitchen doorway.
“Coming, Hot Shot?” she asks, a grin on her face.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. “And why don’t you seem surprised to see them?” I direct that question to Julie as five sets of eyes settle on me.
“You’ll have to excuse my son, Rachel. He usually has better manners than this,” my mom says, giving me the mom look that still shrivels my balls even though I am a grown-ass man.
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Rachel waves away my mom’s concern, getting up from the table and crossing to the oven, stopping in front of me to pat my cheek. “I have some experience with ill-mannered children.” She lets out a dramatic sigh that has me choking out a laugh before she opens the oven and takes out a pan of cinnamon buns.
“Asher, honey, come sit down,” my mom says, pulling out the chair next to her that Julie left vacant. I walk over and hug her and then my dad, taking the seat in between her and Julie.
“So now can you tell me what you’re doing here, having coffee in my girlfriend’s kitchen in Pittsburgh when you live in Boulder and I saw you three days ago?”
“I called them,” Julie says next to me.
I turn to her, confused. “When?”
“When I left your house yesterday. I called Jeremy and then I called your parents. I didn’t think you would want to tell them over the phone, and I wanted you to have all your people with you. They got on a red eye as soon as we hung up.” She shrugs a shoulder, as if it’s nothing that she got my parents here and sitting next to me twelve hours after I got my career-ending news. After I’ve been agonizing over how to tell them. I wrap an arm around her and bury my face in her hair.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Anything for you, Hot Shot,” she whispers back. When I pull away, both sets of parents are grinning maniacally at us.
“Can you all stop it? It’s fucking creepy.”
Rachel pins me with a stern look. “Asher Hansley you may be a grown man, but you will not say fuck in my kitchen.”
I give her a sheepish look as Julie snorts out a laugh next to me. “She’s messing with you, Asher. No one appreciates a well-placed fuck like Rachel Parker. ”
“Be that as it may, watch your mouth, pal of mine.” My mom elbows me in the side, and I toss an arm around her.
“So,” my dad says, leaning around to look at me. “It seems like maybe you have some news for us.”
I take a deep breath, checking in with myself. I’m surprised to find that I’m not anxious about telling my parents. I’m just glad they’re here. I don’t know what shifted my perspective so fast. But then I get a flash of Julie moving over me, my dick buried inside her, and I realize it’s probably that.
“Why are you grinning like you’re thinking about me naked?” Julie hisses at me.
I grin at her. “Because I am.”
“Jesus Christ,” she mutters. “Shut it the fuck down, Asher.”
“I love it when your claws come out in the morning. Scratch me, baby.”
“You are a toddler.”
“Something you’d like to share with the group?” Steven Parker’s voice breaks us out of our whispered banter.
“Nothing, Dad. Just Asher forgetting for a minute that he’s an adult.” Julie smiles sweetly at me, and I chuckle back at her.
“I apologize for my son,” my mom says to Julie’s parents. “I tried housebreaking him and was almost successful.”
“I have an almost housebroken son of my own,” Rachel says. “I know how it goes.”
“So, Asher, talk.” My dad’s voice is gentle but firm.
I wonder where to start and then take a deep breath and jump right in. “I’m retiring.” It doesn’t feel as scary to say it this time as it did last night. “I had the physical with the team yesterday, and my MRI was about as bad as it gets.” My parents don’t react, just wait for me to continue, so I do. I tell them everything about the appointment, my talk with the guys last night, Jeremy’s job offer, and my talk with Julie.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you right away,” I say, when I finish. “It took me a minute to get my arms around it. I would have called you today. Probably.”
“How do you feel, Asher?” asks my dad.
“I feel…okay I think. I mean, I hate it and I wish it wasn’t happening, but I hate it a little less today than I did yesterday.”
My mom leans over and pulls me into a hug, her arms around me, settling me the same way Rachel’s did last night.
“We’re proud of you, Asher.”
“You are?”
“Of course we are,” my dad says. “You’re making the hardest decision of your career and being smart about it. You’re surrounding yourself with good people who are going to help you through this, and you’re already thinking about your future.”
I get a little choked up at that. Julie covers my hand with hers under the table, and I turn mine over, lacing our fingers together, so fucking grateful for her.
“And you,” my mom turns to Julie. “Thank you for making our boy so happy, and for helping him through this. I’m proud of both of you.”
“Well Susan, it’s a real travesty, having to hang around him all the time, but he has a never-ending pipeline to my favorite seasonal candy, and he put Diet Pepsi in his soda fountain, so what was I supposed to do, really?”
I sling an arm around Julie, pressing a kiss to the side of her head, to the delight of the four parents sitting around the table. “Juliette, you’re my favorite human.”
“Yeah, yeah, I like you too,” she says, squeezing my hand again under the table and tucking herself more securely against my side in a gesture that has my heart exploding.
“Well, now that we’ve gotten the business out of the way, let’s have breakfast and get to know each other, yeah?” Rachel looks around the table like she’s daring anyone to disagree with her and then gets up, followed by Steven. He starts cooking while Rachel puts a latte in front of Julie and a giant cup of soda in front of me. “Dr. Pepper,” she says, winking at me and taking her seat. And in the bright kitchen with my arm around Julie and our parents chattering away like they’ve been friends forever, I think maybe, despite everything, this is exactly where I am meant to be.