Chapter 9
Matt
This was stupid. Reckless. The kind of thing a man builds a very specific regret around.
I kissed her anyway.
Deeper. Slower than the hallway, because this time there was nowhere to go and nothing interrupting, and my hands moved down her sides, feeling every curve through the thin fabric of her shirt, and she made a sound in the back of her throat that went straight through me and settled somewhere I wasn't getting it back from.
She pulled me closer. I shifted on the couch and she tried to move with me, and the crutches clattered to the floor, and her ankle caught.
"Your ankle," I said against her mouth.
"I don't care about my ankle."
"Carrie—"
"I don't care about anything except you touching me right now."
My hands were already under her shirt. Her skin was warm and smooth and my fingers were learning the geography of her like a new system, new ice, reading what made her breath catch and what made her press into me.
She grabbed the hem of my shirt and pulled. I helped her get it over my head, and her hands went to my chest immediately, exploring, tracing the lines I'd built over fifteen years of training, and the look on her face was something I was going to carry for a while.
"God, you're solid," she breathed.
"Hockey."
"Remind me to thank hockey."
Her fingers moved lower. Down my stomach, to the waistband of my jeans, and my breath caught.
"We should—"
"Don't you dare say we should stop."
"I was going to say we should move. You can't stay twisted like this."
She looked down at her wrapped ankle, then back at me with blown pupils and swollen lips and hair I'd wrecked.
"The couch," she said. "Lay back."
"What?"
"Lay back. I'll straddle you. Keep the weight off the bad one."
The image went through me like a hit I hadn't braced for. Her on top. Setting the pace. Taking what she wanted while I watched.
"Yeah," I managed. "Okay."
I stretched out. The couch barely fit me, feet over the arm, but I didn't care, not when she was looking at me like she had plans and every one of them started with my name.
We fumbled with her shirt. I helped her pull it over her head. Simple black bra, nothing complicated, and somehow that was better than complicated. She reached back and unhooked it and let it fall, and candlelight touched her skin, and I stopped thinking in sentences.
Full breasts, pink nipples already tight, pale skin that glowed warm in the low light.
She was gorgeous in a way that didn't perform, didn't try.
Just was. And the look she gave me, half nervous, half daring me to say something, hit me somewhere that had nothing to do with want and everything to do with the quiet terrifying recognition that I was in over my head and had been since the parking lot.
I sat up enough to take one nipple in my mouth and she gasped, sharp, her fingers locking into my hair.
I sucked, slow, then harder, and her back arched and her hips rocked forward against me and the sound she made was small and broken and desperate, and it went straight to my cock like a current.
I moved to the other breast, tongue circling, teeth grazing, and her grip in my hair tightened until it hurt in a way I wanted more of.
The dog barked.
We both froze.
He was sitting by the kitchen counter, tail going, head tilted, watching us with the open, cheerful curiosity of an animal who had no concept of privacy and no plans to develop one.
"Are you seriously judging us right now?" Carrie asked him.
The dog's tail wagged harder.
"He's mocking us," I said.
"Definitely mocking us."
"Should we—"
"No. He can deal with it."
She kissed me again, hard, like she was closing a door on the interruption, and I forgot the dog. Forgot the audience. Forgot everything except the press of her against me and the fact that my hands were shaking, which they never did, which was the whole problem and the whole point.
We worked her jeans off carefully. Had to ease them over the wrap, and she hissed when the fabric caught, and I went slower, gentler, pressing my mouth to the inside of her knee as I worked the denim free, and her fingers found my shoulder and gripped.
Dark blue underwear, simple, soaked through, and the evidence of how much she wanted this made something clench low in my gut.
I hooked my thumbs under the waistband and eased them down, and she lifted for me, trusting me with the ankle, trusting me with everything, and that trust hit harder than the want.
My jeans were easier. I kicked them off, boxers too, and then we were both bare in the candlelight with the rain hammering outside like the weather had opinions about our timing.
She looked at me. All of me. Her eyes tracked down my chest, my stomach, lower, and stopped, and stayed, and her lips parted.
"Jesus," she whispered.
"Good Jesus or bad Jesus?"
"Definitely good." Her voice had dropped, rougher now, and she was still looking, and the weight of her attention on my cock had me harder than I'd ever been in my life. "Definitely, definitely good."
She shifted to straddle me, using her good leg for balance, and I held her hips and helped her settle. She hovered just above me, close enough that I could feel her warmth without contact, and the anticipation was its own kind of torture.
"You sure?" I said.
"Are you?"
"I haven't been sure about a single thing all day except that I want you."
"Good answer."
She reached between us and wrapped her hand around me and I groaned, and the sound was not controlled, was not managed, was nothing I'd have allowed if I'd had any authority left over the situation. She stroked once, slowly, base to tip, and my hips moved without permission.
"Carrie. I don't have—" I stopped. Breathed. Tried to locate the responsible part of my brain. "I don't have a condom."
"I'm on birth control." She held my eyes. "And I'm clean."
"So am I."
"Then stop being responsible and get back to ruining me."
She lowered herself onto me, slow, so agonizingly slow, taking just the tip inside, and the wet heat of her closed around me and my vision whited out for a half-second.
I gripped her hips and fought the urge to drive up in one stroke.
This was her pace. Her show. I was going to let her have it if it killed me, and it was going to kill me.
She sank deeper. Inch by inch, her body stretching to take me, her breath coming in short, sharp pulls, small sounds escaping that she couldn't catch.
Her teeth were in her bottom lip and her eyes were half-closed, and watching her face as she worked herself down onto me was the single most erotic thing I had ever seen in my life.
Her body gripped me tight, impossibly tight, and every inch she took sent a pulse through me that I felt in my teeth.
Until she'd taken all of me and we were flush, and the world went very still and very simple.
"Oh God," she breathed.
"You okay?"
"Better than okay. You're just—you're—"
"Big?"
"I was going to say perfect." She opened her eyes, and they were glassy, blown black, and the smile she gave me was wrecked and genuine. "But also big."
We stayed that way for a beat. Not moving. Just feeling. Her palms braced on my chest, my grip at her waist, both of us breathing hard, both of us recalibrating around the fact of what we'd just done. What we were doing.
Then she moved.
Slow up, feeling every inch of me slide through her slick heat.
Fast down, taking me deep in one hard drop that punched a groan out of both of us.
A rhythm she found on her own, and it was devastating, and it pulled every trained instinct I had about controlling my own body into silence.
I couldn't do a damn thing except hold on and watch her ride me, and watching was its own kind of undoing.
Her breasts moving with every stroke, her stomach flexing, the candlelight painting her gold, and on her face a look of pure concentrated pleasure that made me feel like I'd been handed a gift I had no right to.
She leaned forward and the angle changed, and I hit something inside her that made her cry out, raw and loud, and her walls clenched hard around me, and I locked onto that angle and stayed.
"There. Right there. Don't stop."
I didn't.
She moved faster. Harder. Riding me with the kind of full-body commitment I recognized from my own sport, muscle and drive and no hesitation, her good leg doing the work, her injured ankle tucked carefully aside, and I don't think she felt it.
I don't think she felt anything except what I was doing inside her, and that knowledge wrecked me in a way I wasn't prepared for.
I touched everywhere. Her hips, her waist, cupping her breasts, rolling her nipples between my fingers until she moaned and clenched tighter, and every sound she made stripped another layer off whatever control I'd been pretending I still had.
"Matt." My name in her mouth, broken in half.
"I know, baby."
"I'm close. So close."
"Already?"
"Don't—" A gasp as I thrust up hard to meet her. "Don't sound so smug about it."
"Can't help it."
I could feel it building in her. The way she tightened around me in rhythmic pulses, the way her movements went ragged, hips grinding instead of stroking, chasing the edge.
I slid my hand between us and found her clit, swollen and slick, and pressed two fingers against it, circling slow, matching her tempo, and her whole body jerked.
"Oh fuck. Oh fuck, don't stop, don't—"
She went over.
Her scream filled the apartment. Her whole body locked rigid, nails raking down my chest, and the pulse of her orgasm clamped around me in deep, rolling waves, squeezing and releasing, and the sensation was so intense I nearly lost it right there.
I watched her come apart above me, head thrown back, throat exposed, mouth open, completely lost in it, and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I wasn't far behind.
The sight of her, the sound of her, the way she still moved on me in small involuntary rolls as the aftershocks ran through her.
It was too much. My release built at the base of my spine, hot and unstoppable, and I drove up hard, once, twice, three times, burying myself deep, and it broke over me like a wave I couldn't outskate and didn't want to.
I came hard enough that my vision blurred and my hands locked on her hips and the groan that tore out of me was raw and animal and nothing I recognized as mine.
I pulsed inside her, filling her with everything I had, and she clenched around me as I came, drawing it out, milking every last second, and the pleasure kept cresting long after I thought it was done.
For a few long seconds there was nothing in my head.
No tape. No replay. No missed shot, no booing crowd, no season.
Just the warmth of her and the rain on the windows and a silence inside my skull that I hadn't heard in months.
Maybe years. My body had been the one thing I'd always trusted, the one constant, and it had just done something entirely off-script, entirely out of my control, and instead of the panic I expected, all I felt was quiet.
She collapsed onto my chest, boneless, her forehead against my neck, her breath hot on my skin.
I wrapped my arms around her and held on.
We stayed connected, both of us trembling, both of us breathing like we'd just come off a double shift, and the candles flickered and the dog had finally stopped watching and I realized, with the calm certainty of a man who knows he's already fallen, that nothing about this was going to be simple.
"Wow," she breathed against my neck.
"Yeah."
"That was—"
"I know."
She lifted her head. Looked at me. Her eyes were soft and open and a little scared, and I knew the face because I was wearing it too.
"We probably shouldn't have done that."
"Probably not."
"Are we going to regret this?"
I tightened my arms around her. Felt her heart going fast against mine, felt her body still warm and flushed and perfect against me, felt the dog settle at the foot of the couch with a sigh.
"Ask me in the morning."