Chapter 7
Deacon still couldn’t believe this was actually happening.
Even as it was happening—Jen blindfolded, her body flushed and trembling from the orgasm he’d just given her, pink and swollen from the attention of both his hands and his mouth, skin glowing with sweat and arousal—it felt like a hallucination.
A fever dream conjured by his own exhausted, overclocked mind.
When he’d sent her into the room to change, it had been for entirely practical reasons, he needed to get condoms sent up to the room.
While he was alone, waiting for the protection to arrive, he’d paced like a caged animal, wrestling with the fact that he hadn’t had sex in years.
Not months. Years. Not since his world had imploded and everything became about work and raising Tabby.
He’d lost touch with friends, didn’t socialize, he went to the gym, work, and home.
Nothing for himself. Even masturbating had lost its appeal.
Every urge had atrophied to a dull flicker. Until her.
Now every touch, every taste, every sound she made, involuntary gasp, and whimper lit him up from the inside. There was nothing tentative about their chemistry. It was volcanic, an all-consuming need, and it caught him completely off guard.
He’d expected to be nervous, to second-guess himself maybe.
Instead, the second he’d put his hands on her—hell, the second he saw her in his shirt—instinct took over and he didn’t think, he just did.
The only thing stopping him from flipping her over and fucking her until she couldn’t walk was the faint, brittle thread of his self-control.
He’d tried, desperately, to take the edge off. To desensitize himself by focusing on her breasts, her mouth, the way she responded to every command. He’d tried to dissociate, even a little, to build a firewall between his brain and body, but it was impossible.
Jen was his literal fantasy come true. Every box ticked, every dream manifested.
Curves for days, soft and lush in all the right places.
A personality that was equal parts snark and sincerity, the rare kind that could banter and then look at you with such sweetness it made your chest ache.
She was responsive, so fucking responsive.
Every moan, every twitch, every tremor was a direct line to his own brainstem.
Everything he did seemed to wind her tighter.
And her pussy…perfect. The word felt insufficient, but there was no other way to describe it.
He was obsessed. He could smell her even now, the sharp, sweet scent of arousal lingering on his lips and chin.
He’d barely gotten a finger inside her before he realized he wasn’t going to last five minutes, not if she made those sounds, not if her body clenched up around him, not if she looked up at him with those huge blue eyes like he was the only thing she’d ever wanted.
She was everything he ever desired in a partner, fantasized about.
She gave him control, and that is what he thrived on.
He’d always been a perfectionist, even as a kid.
If something was worth doing, it was worth doing flawlessly.
In first grade, he’d redrawn his alphabet worksheet six times because the first ones looked “sloppy.” In high school, he’d rewritten his notes after every class, sometimes in color-coded ink, just so the information would be cemented in his brain.
In college, he’d been the guy who showed up 40 minutes early to an exam room and spent the wait time making sure his pencils were all the same length.
Once, he’d spent a month with his arm in a cast because he broke his hand punching a wall when he got a B+.
He needed life to make sense, to be predictable and contained.
Sex had always been something in his life where he wanted a partner who would agree to rules or guidelines or checklists.
That wasn’t hard to find if you wanted to be in a sub/dom relationship, but in a more casual one, it wasn’t as straight forward. But Jen had no problem doing just that.
Maybe that’s why he hadn’t had sex in so long.
Maybe that’s why, when Jen looked at him, he felt both terrified and liberated.
Like she was both the bomb and the defuser, and he had no choice but to hand her the detonator.
He’d spent the last few years of his life numbing out, running on autopilot, refusing to let himself feel anything too deeply.
He didn’t need or want a relationship. The only feelings he allowed himself were the baseline ones: frustration, impatience, and the low-grade irritation of being alive.
Now, with Jen, every sense was dialed up to max.
She overwhelmed him, not just physically but emotionally.
It was like being given a new brain, one that only ran on sensation.
He’d never met anyone who had the ability to disarm him so completely.
She was everything he wanted, and it scared him shitless.
He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her to realize he wasn’t worth this kind of devotion, that he was broken in ways no one could fix.
That he was a walking cautionary tale. But she didn’t.
She just let him want, let him take. And he wanted to take.
He wanted to ruin her for anyone else, to make her so addicted to his touch she’d never want another.
The only thing keeping him under control was sheer exhaustion.
The only reason this night wasn’t already over was because he hadn’t slept at all in the last week.
The combination of insomnia and adrenaline made him slightly delirious.
If he’d rested, he probably would have blown his load the second he walked in and saw her standing in his shirt.
He definitely would have when he saw her perfect body, or when he’d had his shaft sliding between her tits, or when she took him in her mouth.
He watched her now, sprawled across his bed in the aftershock of her orgasm, lips parted as she caught her breath.
He wanted to take a Polaroid, to freeze this moment forever.
He wanted to tell her she was beautiful, but the words felt too small, too ordinary.
Instead, he settled for memorizing every detail, the way her lashes clumped together, the rise and fall of her chest. The scent of her.
The taste. The dangerous, insatiable urge to have her over and over.
He’d once thought of himself as sexless, broken, and incapable of feeling anything.
Now he felt too much, so much it made him reckless.
The kind of recklessness that led to mistakes, to heartbreak, to loss.
But looking at Jen, he found he didn’t care.
For the first time in years, he wanted to risk it.
He wondered if she’d ever been with someone who wanted her as badly as he did.
From what she’d told him, he doubted it.
He could see it in the way she melted under his touch, the way she responded to every command, the way her body opened up to him like a secret.
It made him want to slow down, to savor every second, to make it last.
The way she looked up at him now shot straight to his heart and his balls.
Those wide, impossibly blue eyes, glassier than before, pupils eclipsed with the aftershock of pleasure, lips parted, body ragdoll-pliant.
The effect was narcotic. He had known, academically, that he wanted her, but this—her gaze, the way she waited for his next move, trusting and needy—stunned him.
He felt a pang in his chest that was more than just lust, something tangled and sharp. The kind of urgent, inconvenient ache that had gotten him into trouble his whole life.
Fuck. What was wrong with him?
He tried to reset and focus on the task at hand. “Do you ever come from penetration?” The question was blunt, but he needed to know, he wanted to give her that, if he could.
She blinked, startled. “What?”
“Do you ever climax just from someone being inside you, or do you need outside stimulation?” He didn’t let her look away. He wanted honesty.
Her cheeks bloomed with color. He could see it was a question she’d never answered out loud, maybe never even thought about like this.
So much bullshit, he thought. People acted as if wanting to know your partner’s body was something to be coy about, rather than acknowledging it was the whole point. He waited.
She found her voice. “I only did once. I think it was a fluke. I was pregnant. Doggy style. I don’t know if it would ever happen again.” She sounded almost apologetic.
He grinned, unable to help himself. “A fluke?”
She shrugged, her hair a messy halo on the pillow. “Not a fluke, but I read somewhere that it’s easier to have an orgasm when you’re pregnant because of all the extra blood flow down there. Maybe it was a science thing. A one-off.”
He shook his head, bemused, and reached out to trace her hipbone with his thumb.
“I don’t think it was a fluke. And honestly?
Blood flows when you’re turned on too.” He saw the shiver that ran through her, the way her thighs flexed the tiniest bit in answer to his touch. “Maybe you’ve been with the wrong men.”
He wanted to show her what it could be like.
So he started slow, patient, and methodical, even though his own need was a livewire running up his spine.
He began at her right ankle, pressing a lingering kiss over the delicate bones, then moved to the left, savoring the symmetrical ritual of it.
He worked his way up—right inner calf, then left, then right knee, left knee—each time watching her muscles twitch, her breath catch, her skin pebbling beneath his lips.
By the time he reached her thighs, he felt her pulse in the air between them.