Chapter 19 #2
She launched herself at me, throwing her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck. I just had time to admire the crush of her tits against my chest before her mouth was on mine, hungry.
Lyssa Luxe said hello by kissing the shit outta me.
I forgot to give a shit about all the people watching, about my vow to clean up my slutty little act, or that we’d left things in a weird place.
I wrapped my arms under her ass and hoisted her higher, worshipping her mouth like we were somewhere much more private, with much less baggage.
Her hands dug into my hair, knocking off my party hat, and she moaned under my lips, not stopping her frantic pace or the push of her tongue.
I met her press for press, stroke for stroke.
I wasn’t going to be the first one to stop, fuck that.
Eventually, wolf whistles penetrated my brain.
When someone yelled, “Get a room, Mike!” Lyssa broke our kiss.
She held my head between her hands and stared into my eyes, breathing heavily. My nose caught the scent of peppermint.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Thanks for catching me.”
I should have shrugged or said, no problem, or something chill like that. Instead I said, “Always.”
I was so cooked.
She wiggled, wanting to be put down. Reluctantly, I let her, half loving, half hating the agonizing slide of her down my body.
She waved apologetically at the stall next to mine, Maya’s Jams, and fished in the grass for her croc and my party hat, which had fallen to the ground as we kissed.
She didn’t see Maya elbow her husband, Tom, who’d tilted his head to eyeball Lyssa’s ass as she’d bent over. I scowled at Tom over her head.
After giving Mini M a pat hello, she turned to me with a wide smile, but whatever she had been going to say cut off when she saw the balloons tied to the horse float.
“What are those?”
I wiped my palms on my jeans, which were suddenly damp. “For you.” I pulled the release knot and passed her the bunch. My brains must have been swapped for mashed potatoes while she was kissing me, because I felt the need to add, “Balloons.”
The clown had fashioned her a bouquet of different flowers, tall ones and round ones and ones that I knew for sure were tulips. Yellow, purple, pink, and red. There was also a dog and a ‘snake’ intermingled with the flowers.
Lyssa blinked rapidly, looking from me to the balloons and back again. “You got me a balloon bouquet? With a dog?”
Damn, why won’t my palms stop sweating?
“Yeah.”
She clutched them to her chest, and I worried for a second that they were going to burst. But then she turned her head, and the light illuminated wet tracks across her cheeks.
Suave Mike, normal Mike, would have pulled her into an easy hug and teased her until she was grinning and laughing again.
Sweaty-hands Mike stood there, feeling awkward as balls.
People were watching.
I wanted to pick her up again, to carry her home, to buy her more fucking balloons and fill the damn house with them. Instead, I stayed where I was, uncertain, unmoving. The stares from the town were drilling a hole in the side of my head.
“Thank you. This is the nicest thing anyone—” She cleared her throat. “Thank you. I love them.”
With great care, she fastened her balloons to her bag, then sat at the picnic table, pulling my tin money box and the roll of ticket stubs to her.
“It’s been busy today,” she said brightly, after looking at the contents of the tin.
“Good hustling.” Then she noticed the blackboard I’d borrowed from the café to scrawl my prices on.
“Well, that’s awful. Did one of your chickens write that?
Where’s your chalk?” She found it in my backpack and then rubbed the sign clean, painstakingly redoing it in swirly writing.
All the kids had gone now and there wasn’t any demand for pony rides, but a good portion of my friends and neighbors were milling nearby, eager for a look at the American with her batshit outfits, who’d rocked up and pashed me so publicly.
Luckily, Lyssa was busy with her sign and didn’t notice.
I scowled at people over her head. Eventually, most of them took the hint.
“Lyssa, why are you here?”
“I thought I could handle the money for you,” she said cheerfully. “Then you could just focus on the rides and turn over customers faster.”
“The fair is nearly done.” I gestured at the gazebo where the performers were packing up. There was barely a kid still in sight, just liquored adults. Those who had been at the port booth were the loudest.
“Oh.” Her shoulders dropped for a second before her spine straightened. “Maybe I can go around handing out flyers? Do you have flyers? Or I can clean up? I got here as quickly as I could, but my flight got delayed?—”
“Lyssa. Why are you here?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “I thought acts of service would be your love language.”
I choked on air. “My what?”
“Maybe I was wrong.” Her eyes raked me. “Maybe you’re a words of affirmation guy.” She took a deep breath. “Mike, I’m sorry that I used you for sexual gratification without reciprocating.”
“Lyssa!” At the next booth, Maya and Tom were craning their necks trying to listen to our conversation. “People might hear you.”
“Sorry!” She leaned toward me, as if being two inches closer would stop Maya’s and Tom’s flapping ears. “Mike, I regret the way we left things. I essentially used you for…?.” Her eyes searched the town square, passing over various stalls before landing on Gil’s bratwurst stand. “ Sausages .”
“Sausages?”
“It’s code.”
I sank down on the other side of the picnic bench and buried my head in my hands.
“I shouldn’t have reduced you to a sausage, Mike. I know that must have made you feel used.”
“You didn’t get anywhere near my”— kill me— “sausage.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“I thought it was a co?—”
“It’s a code and a metaphor.” She tossed her hair. “The point is, if you ever want to, uh… share your sausage with me, I’ll make sure that in return I give you some of my?—”
“Lyssa, please stop talking,” I mumbled into my hands.
“—Mustard.”
“Hey, Maya?” I called loudly, without looking up. “You’re a nurse, right? Could you knock me out with pain meds?”
Maya giggled. “What was that, Mikey? I can’t quite hear you and your lady-friend. Speak up, would you?”
With a grunt, I got to my feet and tugged Lyssa a few feet behind my horse trailer, which was hopefully out of Maya’s nosy earshot and Tom’s pervy eyeline.
“Listen, Lyssa. Sausages and mustard aren’t at an equal exchange rate.
I don’t care that I didn’t get any mus—” I made myself stop.
I was a grown fucking man. “I don’t need to get my dick inside your vagina to have a good time.
What we did was supposed to be about you.
You don’t need to feel bad because you orgasmed and I didn’t. ”
“Are you sure? Afterward, it felt like you couldn’t get me out of your house fast enough.
” She frowned and then muttered to herself, “But you were pleased to see me, just now. You got me balloons. You kissed me back. So you must like me a little bit. Or you don’t, and you’re just being friendly.
” Her eyes flew back to mine. “Oh god, is this a Kiwi thing, somehow? Are you?—”
“Lyssa.” I put a hand under her chin. “It’s not a Kiwi thing. You’re great. I don’t help girls get themselves off to be polite. You know I don’t have the squeakiest clean rep around town, but I’m trying not to make it worse while I get the Entrepreneurs Association to take me seriously.”
She nodded. “You’re in your reputation era.”
I didn’t know what that meant. “Sure. But let me be really clear. You’re a smoke show. This is not about you.”
An unfamiliar glint hit her eyes. I wondered what I’d said wrong until she stepped closer, pressing her body along the length of mine. My chest filled with air, as I suddenly had to work hard to get it and blood to my brain.
“So, you do want me?”
“Yeah.”
Understatement.
I wanted to have ice cream every day, I wanted to wrap up at the fair and get home, I wanted to tease my sister’s boyfriend to see if I could get a rise out of him. Her, I needed . Craved. Was fucking goop for.
Suddenly, her hands snaked around and grabbed my ass, pulling my hips forward. I hissed when my thickening cock met the resistance of her soft body. If she was just a little higher and would grind her hips a bit…
Like she could read my mind, she gave a little experimental push of her groin, teasing my cock, taunting me with everything that was right in front of me but I couldn’t have.
She wanted me to lose my cool and make a bad decision.
My eyes darkened as I imagined wrapping an arm around her, hauling her into the back of the horse float, and fucking her so good the whole thing shook. Old Mike would have.
She knew it too, my little vixen. She knew I was close. Capitalizing on my hesitation, she leaned forward and with one hot swipe, dragged her tongue up my neck.
Fuck.
I gripped her shoulders in my hands, half to stop her from getting any closer, and half to stop her moving away.
“No one can know,” I told her.
Her breath hitched.
“If we do this,” I continued, “if I fuck you like you want me to, it has to stay between us.”
“A secret?”
“Yeah. Between you and me.”
She opened her mouth, and I added firmly, “ Just me and you. Not me and you and a couple million followers.”
She looked surprised that I had anticipated this, then her cheeks flamed and she quickly shut her mouth.
Lyssa shared a lot of her life on her social media.
I knew she had wanted to use me as some kind of revenge thing for that fashionable prick at her old workplace.
But I was an offline guy, and I needed discretion in my private life now more than ever.
If she wanted this, she could have it on my terms or not at all.
“Caroline especially can’t know,” I added.
When she hesitated, I kissed her. Her face was delicate between my hands, but I didn’t make allowances.
As our lips met, I devoured her, taking her lips, her mouth, her breath like I’d wanted to since I’d first seen her wearing one of her little tartan skirts.
I was trying to stop her heart and rewrite it with a new pattern, one that followed the syllables of my name.
Her small hands clutched at the mass of me, trying to pull me closer. I resisted her tug. If she wanted me, she could come my way. I was done letting her think I was easy, biddable. I fucked like a train, and she was about to love it.
When I pulled back, her expression was heavy-lidded and dazed. Satisfaction roared in my chest.
“I—I’m sorry,” she whispered when she could catch her breath. It wasn’t what I was expecting her to say. Holy fuck, Mike or You’re a sex god, Mike was what I was thinking. But I should have known her mind would always be running along a hundred rails at once.
“For not saying this after the bath thing,” she explained. “You weren’t just a coaching voice. Or a man’s gaze. You were a significant participant.”
I’d never been called such a nice word. Significant. Not hot, not a good lay, not funny or charming or useful or entertaining. Significant .
I couldn’t fucking help my chest puffing up. “You think I’m significant?”
She nodded.
I couldn’t leave it. “I’m significant to you, Princess?”
“Yes.”
When I grinned, Lyssa took my shoulders in her hands and stretched up on her tiptoes to press her lips against mine.
Unlike her earlier kiss, this was soft, tentative.
With each little press of her lips, I felt a syllable in my chest. Sig-nif-i-kint .
In her accent: siiig-niff-ih-kahnt . Over and over.
When she pulled back, I couldn’t help but look at her like the sun shone the fuck out of her.
I kissed her again, once, twice, just to be sure.
“Are we doing this, Lyssa?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
Thank god.
I gestured for her to go first to walk out from behind the trailer. When we emerged, Maya and Tom quickly busied themselves, deliberately not looking at us.
“Lyss lost her contact,” I lied.
Lyssa oversold it by bumping into the table and fumbling for her bag and balloons.
I didn’t care anymore that it wasn’t yet five: I packed up the stall and loaded Mini Mike in record time.
I couldn’t wait to take her home. I knew I couldn’t keep her forever, and maybe this attraction would ruin my life, but I could at least give her a good time while she was here.
It didn’t matter if she wasn’t here long or she never thought about me the way I thought about her.
She thought I was significant. And she wanted to have sex with me. Significant, significant sex.
That I could do.