33. Delilah
DELILAH
The hall is dark because my mother keeps the hall light off to save on the bill, even with twenty-four people in the house.
I don’t stop at the powder room off the kitchen. Aunt Sherry’s purse is sitting outside the door and I can hear the fan going, and she’d probably try to join if she knew what I was about to do with Kane.
(To Kane? For Kane? That’s TBD.)
So I go up the stairs instead.
Kane follows me without speaking a word.
The upstairs bathroom is the one nobody’s allowed to use. A basket of seashell soaps sits on the back of the toilet. It’s been there since I was in high school, solid as rocks, still smelling faintly of cucumber. There’s a hand towel folded into a triangle that has never touched a hand.
I flip the light on. Kane steps in behind me and shuts the door.
Then he turns the lock.
The noise from downstairs still drifts up through the floor. Somebody laughing. A chair leg dragging. My mother raising her voice at the end of a sentence.
Kane stands with his back against the door and looks at me. “You did well down there,” he says.
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Alright. Then what do you want?”
I turn around. He’s still against the door with his hands at his sides. Big and dark in my mother’s tiny beige bathroom. The man I shouldn’t touch next to the towel that nobody’s allowed to touch.
“I want you to kiss me,” I say.
Kane doesn’t move, blink, or otherwise respond in any way, shape, or form. It’s like he didn’t hear me. Or he did, and he’s choosing—for the sake of sparing me some really nasty embarrassment—to pretend that I hadn’t spoken.
I feel the burn come up my neck. “Okay, actually, on second thought, forget it.”
“Not a fucking chance.” He bends close. “I want you to say it again.”
I refuse to look at him, even though his warmth and scent are blanketing me in this teeny little room. “I’m good, thanks. One humiliation is enough. This was a stupid idea anyway.”
Kane touches my chin and forces me to raise my eyes. “Why do you think that?”
“Because,” I say with a swallow, “I obviously massively misinterpreted everything that’s going on between us and stepped way over the line.”
“Hm.”
My blush deepens. “I think ‘Hm’ is the only sound you could’ve made that is worse than silence.”
Kane laughs.
“Actually,” I say, “laughing is also worse than silence.”
He turns the laugh into a low hum in his chest. “Sladkaya… Just a few short weeks ago, I had you against a wall in my kitchen,” he reminds me. “And I stopped.”
“I remember. I was there, actually.”
“Do you know why I stopped?”
“Uh… physical disgust? Sexual repulsion? You couldn’t remember if you left the oven on or not?”
His thumb strokes across my cheek. “I stopped because I couldn’t tell whether you wanted me or whether you thought this was part of our deal.”
“Kane—”
“Hush. It’s my turn to speak, and I’m not finished.” He pushes off the door to press against me.
“I’ve wanted you since you stepped into that fucking pantry, Lilah. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve jerked off thinking about you. The squeak you made when I dragged you onto my lap? Your filthy whimpers when I put my hand under your dress?”
Oh. Good. So we’re having this conversation ten feet above my family’s heads.
He takes my wrist. “You want proof I’m not disgusted? I’m so fucking hard for you I can barely think right now. Feel what you do to me.”
He guides my hand down and presses my palm over the front of his trousers.
There is no mistaking that he means what he’s saying. He is brutally hard and thick beneath the wool. My entire nervous system flashes the blue screen of death.
His jaw locks when my fingers curl on instinct.
“That’s for you, sladkaya,” he growls. “It’s been for you since I walked into this house tonight. We’ve already spent three of the five minutes you asked for debating whether or not it’s real. So tell me: Does it feel real to you?”
Heat pours through me so fast I’m surprised the decorative towels don’t ignite. I stroke him once through his pants before I realize what I’m doing. Kane’s breath punches out against my cheek, hot and gratifyingly ragged.
His teeth graze my ear. The seashell soaps witness it all silently. Judgmental little cucumber fossils.
Then, to my horror, he peels my hand away.
“Good. So you’ll understand then how hard it is for me to say that I can’t do this.” He lets go of my wrist and straightens up. “I will not take something from you that you’re only handing over because of that debt. I’d rather want you for another fifty years than have you once like that.”
I gasp. “You think that’s why I brought you here? To this house? To this bathroom? Kane… I asked you here because I wanted you beside me.”
He frowns. For once, I’m the one surprising him.
“And I brought you up here because I want this. Not to get even with anybody or to work off a single nickel of the four million I owe you.” My throat tightens up. “I just want something that’s only for me. Something that’s only mine.”
Kane closes his eyes for a second. I wait, breathless, hopeful, terrified, wondering what the hell is going to happen next.
But when his eyes open again, I get my answer.
Because they’re on fire.
“Well, fuck,” he snarls. “You should’ve said that sooner.”
Then he proceeds to absolutely ravage the fuck out of my mouth.
He shoves me back against the cold marble sink and forces my lips apart with his tongue. His fingers grab my hips and tug me into him. He’s taking whole handfuls of me like he’s been dying all night to find out what it feels like.
The porcelain against my spine is borderline painful, but my brain files that away under Do Not Give a Shit.
I’ve got other things to focus on.
His teeth catch my bottom lip and pull. When he lets go, I chase him. He lets me whimper for about two seconds before he takes over again.
We accidentally bump into the toilet and the seashell soaps go over. Three of them roll off the tank and hit the tile, and one goes skidding under the radiator.
“Whoops,” I breathe.
Kane clearly couldn’t care less. He knocks my knees wider with his hips and kisses me again, deeper, until my head tips back and bumps the mirror. His mouth goes to my throat.
He drags it down the side of my neck, open and wet, dirty and shameless.
My token resistance is a trembling whisper. I try to turn my head, to push him away, but his grip tightens. His thumb is pressing hard against my jaw, forcing my lips to stay locked with his. A feral growl rumbles out of his throat and vibrates against my skin.
When he finally breaks the kiss, a strand of saliva glistens between us.
“You get sweeter every time I taste you,” he breathes.
His hand slides down my belly, finds the hem of my dress, and pulls it up. The first touch of cool air on my thighs makes me shiver.
I get one powerful urge to push it back down and hold it there. The fluorescent bulb over the mirror is the least forgiving light in all of Brooklyn and there is a lot of me under this dress.
Kane catches my wrist without even looking at it. “No.”
“I’m just—”
“I know what you’re doing.” He puts my hand up on the counter’s edge. “Keep it there.”
Then he looks at me. His eyes are tortured and swimming with heat. “Do you have any idea,” he growls, “how long I have wanted to do this?”
I don’t have a joke. For once in my life, not one. No puns, no quips, no nothing.
“I didn’t fucking think so.”
He hooks his fingers in my underwear and takes it down, past my knees, over one shoe and then the other.
Then he drops to one knee in front of me.
“Kane!” I hiss. “What the hell are you doing?”
He laughs, with a cruel, dommy tint to it that makes me flush from head to toe. “Do you really need it explained?”
“You can’t— We can’t—”
“I dare anyone in this house to stop me,” he says.
He lifts my leg over his shoulder and puts his mouth on me.
He’s not in a hurry. I didn’t realize it until now, but I have a very old idea in me that this sort of thing gets done quickly and with a certain amount of holding of the breath, and that after it’s over, you say thank you and then get to work on the other person.
That’s the arrangement. The unspoken deal.
Kane is operating off a different playbook.
“Tell me what you want.” He lifts his head half an inch. “Where. How. Faster, slower. You’ll tell me, and I’ll do it.”
“I don’t—” I manage. “I don’t really do that.”
“You don’t say what you want?”
“Not out loud, historically speaking. No.”
“Then tonight will be a very entertaining first.” He turns his face and kisses the inside of my thigh.
He inhales the scent of me, then drags his broad tongue slowly from the base of my pussy up to my clit, teasing the swollen nub. I gasp and squirm, so he digs fingers into my thighs to pin me there.
“Are you going to tell me what you want?” he asks. “Or are you going to make me punish you for your silence?”
“I…”
But I just can’t do it. A lifetime of refusing to stand up for myself has muzzled me when I so badly want to tell him how to push me over the edge.
I don’t think he minds the latter option, though.
Because the half of his face that I can see turns into an evil smirk—and then he slows his licking to a crawl.
It’s torture. That’s the only word for it.
He flicks the tip of his tongue around—but not quite on—my clit in soft, teasing circles.
Just close enough to tease.
Just far enough to torment.
I grab his hair by the roots. “You… asshole!” I stammer.
“You can end this anytime you want,” says Kane. “Tell me what you want and I’ll give you exactly that.”
He laps around the lips of my sex. So close and yet so far away.
“I… I… Oh, please just give me more.”
He chuckles. “That’ll do, for a start.”
Then he takes mercy on me, drawing the sensitive bud of my clit into his mouth. His lips seal around me and he sucks.
It’s like tightening every nerve in my body. I’m instantly at a breaking point, wound to an impossible degree, all of it centered where his mouth is destroying me.
He says he wants me to tell him what to do, but I think he’s managing things just fine.