11. Rowe
ROWE
She doesn't answer with words.
Her fingers leave the blouse buttons and drop to her jeans instead. The button pops. The zipper hisses as she lowers it. She lifts her hips off the bench and shimmies the denim over her thighs, and I watch it happen, unable to look anywhere else.
The jeans hit the floor. She leaves her underwear on. Plain cotton, pale blue, nothing designed to be seen by anyone, and that makes it worse, makes it better, because she didn't plan this. She's giving it to me anyway.
There's a dark patch soaked through the fabric between her thighs.
The groan rips out of me before I know it's coming. Low and animal, from somewhere under my ribs.
“That's—” My voice fails. I start over. “That's for me.”
“That's been for you since yesterday.” Her face is scarlet, but she doesn't look away.
Christ.
She goes back to her blouse. Works the buttons halfway down with unsteady fingers, and then—instead of reaching behind for the clasp—she hooks her thumbs into the cups of her bra and drags it up and over.
Her breasts spill free.
Heavy. Full. They settle against her ribs with a soft weight that empties my skull of every thought I've ever had.
Her nipples are peaked and dark, tightening in the trailer's cool air while I stare, and my cock jerks in my fist so hard I have to let go of it entirely.
I grab my balls instead and squeeze, teeth clenched.
“Rowe?” she whispers.
“Give me a second.” The words come out strangled. “You almost ended it right there.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. A smile fights its way through the blush, small and stunned, like no one's ever told her that her body could end a man.
I'm going to have words with every person who never told her. Right before I kill them.
Her hand drifts down her stomach. She hesitates at the waistband of her underwear, then settles over the top of the cotton instead—shy about it, her fingers finding her clit through the fabric and starting slow, tight circles.
Her breath catches on the first one. Her knees fall open an inch wider on the bench.
I could ask her for more. Ask her to pull the cotton aside, show me everything. The want is a living thing.
I don't ask.
Because she chose the underwear the way I choose the distance, and I know exactly what it costs to give someone this much and keep one thin layer for yourself.
“You're perfect,” I tell her instead. My fist closes back around my cock, slower now, matching the rhythm of her hand. “You know that? Sitting there like that. I want you so fucking bad it's been keeping me up.”
Her circles falter, then speed up. “You—really?”
“Last night.” The confession scrapes out of me. She's bare-chested on my bench with her hand between her legs. She's earned every secret I have. “I came so hard thinking about you I couldn't see. Twice. Said your name out loud in the dark like you could hear me.”
“Oh my god.” Her hips rock up into her own fingers. Her breasts sway with the movement and I have to squeeze the base of my cock again. “What—” She swallows. Her voice comes out breathy and cracked. “What do you think about? When you—”
“You sure you want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Your mouth.” I watch the words land, watch her lips part. “Most of the time it's your mouth. Fucking it. Your lips stretched around me, your eyes looking up while I—” I break off, jaw tight. “Slow at first. Then not slow.”
The flush pours down her throat, over her chest, all the way to the soft undersides of her breasts. She turns pink from hairline to navel, and her hand between her thighs never stops moving.
“I can't—” she starts. Stops. Her eyes squeeze shut, then open, and there's something building behind them, some decision assembling itself.
“You can't be touched. But if I couldn't touch you. If there was—” She wets her lips.
“Like a glory hole. I could kneel on the other side and you could just—and I'd never—my hands would never—”
“Fuck.”
My hand freezes on my cock. Has to. My whole body locks up, thighs shaking, because the picture she just built detonates behind my eyes—her mouth waiting for me in the dark, warm and wet and willing, no hands, no skin, nothing but the one place I want to be in—and I'm two strokes from ruining this before she finishes.
“Too much?” she whispers.
“Too good.” I'm panting. Actually panting, like I've run the length of the midway. “You can't say things like that when I'm this close. You'll kill me.”
“Sorry.” She doesn't sound sorry. She sounds drunk on it, her fingers flying faster over the soaked cotton, her breath coming in little hitches now, her thighs starting to tremble. “Rowe. Rowe, I'm—I'm close. I'm really close.”
So am I. I've been close since her jeans hit the floor.
“Wren.” Her name comes out wrecked. “Can I—” I make myself say it. All of it. “Can I come on your breasts? I won't touch you. I just want—I want to see it on you.”
Her teeth sink into her bottom lip.
She nods.
I'm out of the chair before the nod finishes.
Three steps and I'm standing over her, closer to another human being than I've been by choice in twenty years, close enough to smell her—clean sweat and something floral and the dark salty scent of how wet she is—and my hand is working my cock right in front of her and neither of us is pretending anymore.
Her eyes go back and forth. My face. My fist. The ink blurring under my grip.
Her fingers are a frantic rhythm against her clit now, no more shyness, her hips grinding up off the bench, and she starts to moan.
Soft ones first. Then more. Then constant, a rising string of sound with my name tangled in it, her chest heaving, her breasts shuddering with every gasp, and I memorize all of it because I need this burned in deep enough to last the rest of my life.
“Look at you,” I rasp. “Look at you, Wren, god, you're—”
“Rowe—” Her spine bows. Her thighs clamp around her own hand. “Rowe—”
Her whole body locks. Her head tips back and she keens my name at the ceiling, high and broken, and the sound of it snaps the last thread holding me together.
I come.
Harder than I've ever come in my life—harder than last night, harder than any watched night in any dark corner, my vision whiting out at the edges as the first pulse lands across her breasts.
Then the second. The third. I'm painting her, marking her, spurt after spurt striping her flushed skin, and I hear my own voice from somewhere far away, chanting.
“Wren. Wren. Wren.”
Like a prayer. Like the only one I've ever meant.
She's still shaking through the last of her orgasm, little aftershock tremors rolling her hips, and she looks down at herself—at what I've done, my release glistening on her chest, dripping slowly between her breasts—and instead of reaching for something to wipe it away, she just breathes. Lets it stay.
Lets me see her wear it.
My knees nearly go boneless.
I brace one hand on the wall above the bench, careful, so careful, a full foot of air between my skin and hers, and we stay like that. Her looking up at me. Me looking down at her. Both of us gasping like survivors of the same wreck.
“Hi,” she whispers.
A laugh punches out of me—rusty, disbelieving, real.
“Hi,” I say. “You’re fucking amazing, Wren. And I’ve never come harder in my life.”
And I mean every word.