Chapter 14 Natalia
NATALIA
I kissed him first. And I’m not stopping.
Johnny’s mouth is warm and hungry against mine, and the sound he makes when he drags me closer sends a pulse of heat straight between my thighs.
It makes me greedy in a way I don’t recognize. Makes me want to hold him there and find out what other sounds he’s hiding.
His bandaged hand slides up my ribs, careful not to grip too hard, and I melt into the tenderness of it. He pauses. Checks my face. Makes sure I’m still here and still wanting this.
I am. God, I am.
Nikolai’s voice slithers through my head uninvited. You’re only good for what’s between your legs. A tool. A transaction.
I swallowed Nikolai’s visit the way I’ve swallowed everything my whole life. Smiled. Waited for it to pass.
But Johnny’s hands on me, Johnny’s mouth on me, Johnny looking at me like I’m someone worth being careful with? That broke the spell.
Knowing that every second of this is something my father would forbid, something Nikolai would call a betrayal of the family’s investment in my virginity? That makes it sweeter. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.
But it’s not why I’m doing this.
The defiance is the icing. Johnny is the cake.
The way he listens when I talk. Really listens, like my words matter, like he’s storing them somewhere safe.
The way he makes me laugh without trying, and when I laugh, he watches me like he just won something.
The way he doesn’t try to manage me. Doesn’t tell me what to think or where to stand or who to be.
I want him. The rebellion is just a bonus.
“Couch,” I say against his mouth, and Johnny doesn’t hesitate.
He surges off the stool and lifts me, and my legs wrap around his waist on instinct.
The muscles in his arms bunch as he carries me across the room and I’m struck by how easy it is for him.
How effortless. Like I weigh nothing. Like he’d carry me anywhere I asked.
He lays me down on my back and settles between my thighs, tipping my chin up with two fingers before he kisses me again. Slower this time. Deeper. His tongue traces my bottom lip and I open for him, and his arms tighten around me like he’s trying to eliminate every last inch of space between us.
The weight of him between my thighs turns my brain to static. He braces himself on one forearm, the other hand sliding into my hair, and we kiss like we’re trying to memorize each other.
Outside, the last daylight has gone thin and copper. The breeze from the window smells like low tide and the neighbor’s wood smoke. Johnny’s skin is warm everywhere it touches mine.
He pulls back and strips his shirt over his head.
I’ve seen him half-naked before, cleaned his wounds, traced the edges of scars he didn’t remember getting.
But this is different. This is his body offered, not injured.
The muscles in his shoulders flex as he tosses the shirt to the floor, and I run my palms up his stomach just to feel them contract under my hands.
He reaches for the hem of mine. Slow. Watching my face the whole time.
I help him. Lift my arms, let him pull it up and off, and then I’m beneath him in just my bralette. The sheer white fabric that doesn’t match my underwear, which is plain lilac cotton, because nobody warned me this morning that I’d be making a decision that would require better lingerie.
Really nailing the seduction, Natalia. Stunning work.
Johnny doesn’t seem to notice. Or care. His eyes drop to the bralette and stay there with an expression that makes my skin flush from my collarbones to my hairline. Then he lowers his mouth to my breast.
The wet heat of his tongue through damp material makes my back arch off the cushion.
He sucks, gentle and then firm, and the pull radiates straight down through my belly.
I grip his hair. My hips lift against his without my permission, and I can feel him hard against my inner thigh through the thin cotton of his pants.
He shifts to the other side, nosing the fabric away so his lips find bare skin, and the direct contact tears a sound out of me that bounces off the walls. High and sharp and nothing I would ever willingly make in front of another person.
I clap my hand over my mouth. Johnny lifts his head.
“Don’t.” He pulls my hand away. “I want to hear you.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who just sounded like a smoke alarm.”
He grins against my collarbone. “Sexiest smoke alarm I ever heard.”
The ache between my thighs becomes unbearable.
“I want...” The word catches. I don’t know how to ask for what I want because I’ve never had to. Never been allowed to. My hips do the talking instead, pressing up against his hand.
Johnny reads it. “Tell me what you need.”
“...Touch me.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like someone braver. “Please?”
His fingers drag down my stomach, and every inch of skin he crosses lights up and begs for more. He finds the waistband of my jeans. Button. Zipper. Each tiny metal sound enormous in the silence.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
I lift my hips and we work my jeans down together. He tugs them the rest of the way off and drops them on the floor, and the casual confidence of it makes my stomach flip.
His hand tracks back up my inner thigh, and when his fingers brush the cotton between my legs, my whole body clenches. I’m soaked. Embarrassingly, no-possible-way-to-play-this-cool soaked, and he hasn’t even really touched me yet.
His thumb presses against my clit through the fabric and I jolt. He circles once. Twice. My fingers dig into the couch cushion hard enough to feel the springs.
Then he slides his hand beneath the cotton and touches me bare.
“Fuck.” My head drops back against the cushion.
He drags one finger through me with a patience that makes me want to scream. My thighs fall open wider. He does it again. And again. Learning me. Finding the spots that make me twitch and the ones that make me gasp.
“So wet,” he murmurs against my neck, and the words send heat flooding up my chest and into my face.
So much for playing it cool. But the way he says it—like it’s doing something to him, not just something he noticed—makes the embarrassment dissolve into something hotter.
His thumb finds my clit, skin on skin now, and starts a rhythm that makes my vision blur at the edges.
I need to tell him. Before this goes further. Before I lose the ability to form sentences.
“Johnny.” My voice shakes. “I need to tell you something.”
His hand stills. His eyes find mine immediately, and I watch him brace for something bad.
“I’ve never done this before.” I hold his gaze even though I want to look anywhere else. “Any of this. I’m a virgin.”
Silence. His hand slides out of my underwear, settling on my hip instead, and the loss of contact makes me shiver.
His expression goes through three things in quick succession: surprise, then something fierce and possessive that he visibly wrestles down, then a tenderness that makes my ribs ache.
“Your father,” he says. Not a question.
“Never let me date. Never let me get close to anyone.” I shrug one bare shoulder. “Can’t have anyone ‘sullying the merchandise’.”
His nostrils flare. A vein pulses at his temple, and his hand on my hip tightens just enough that I feel each individual finger press into my skin. For one beat he’s not the man who makes me laugh. He’s the one who came home with blood drying on his knuckles.
Then he exhales, long and deliberate, and his grip softens. When his eyes find mine again, the storm has passed.
“Then we go slow, Nat.” His thumb traces my hip. “And you tell me the second anything doesn’t feel good. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He leans down and kisses me again. Softer this time, like he’s resetting. Starting over.
His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw, down the side of my neck, and I feel my body unclench beneath him. By the time his fingers trail back down my stomach, I’m arching into his touch before he even gets there.
He starts slow, easing one finger inside me. Shallow strokes, barely moving, letting me adjust to the feel of him. Each one goes a little deeper. My breathing changes, quickens, and my grip on his shoulder loosens as the strangeness melts into something warm and liquid and good.
“Okay?” he murmurs against my neck.
More than okay. I rock my hips against his hand and he takes the cue, pressing deeper, and then he curls his finger and finds a spot along the front wall that makes my hips buck off the cushion.
“Right there.” I barely recognize my own voice. “Oh god, right there.”
He works that spot while his thumb circles my clit, and the dual sensation is so far beyond anything I’ve done alone in the dark that I almost laugh at every fantasy I ever thought was good enough.
This is a different language. This is someone else’s hands knowing my body better than I do after sixty seconds.
“How are you so good at this?” The words fall out before I can catch them.
His fingers don’t stop. “No idea. Can’t remember ever doing it before.”
I choke on a laugh that turns into a moan, and I can feel the smug bastard grinning against my neck.
My fingers drift toward his zipper. I hesitate there, pulse hammering, and meet his eyes.
He reads the question on my face. “By all means, baby.”
I work the zipper down and free him, and my hand stills.
He’s thick and flushed and leaking at the tip, and for a second, I just stare. I’ve seen plenty in porn but the reality of him, hot and heavy in my palm, is something else entirely.
Not that I have a frame of reference. But it feels like a lot.
“Show me.” I wrap my fingers around the base and his forehead drops to my shoulder. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Firm grip.” His voice is wrecked. Lower than I’ve heard it, stripped of his usual easy humor. “Don’t be careful with me.”
I stroke him, clumsy at first, too light, then too tight, reading his reactions like a language I’m learning in real time.
When I twist my palm over the head, his breath catches, so I do it again.
And again. Pre-cum slicks my fingers and the glide gets easier, and I start to find a rhythm that has his hips rocking into my fist.
I’m making this man shake apart under my hand. Me. The virgin who learned her grip strength thirty seconds ago.
His mouth finds my neck, teeth grazing the spot below my ear, and his fingers start moving between my legs again. I whimper at the contact and my grip on him falters for a second.
He adds a second finger, and I cry out. The stretch borders on too much, and then he curls both against that devastating spot and it’s perfect.
We work each other in tandem, his fingers inside me, mine around him, and the living room fills with the wet, urgent sounds of it. Our breathing. His groans. My whimpers that I’ve stopped trying to muffle.
The cool breeze from the open door hits the sweat on my skin and I shiver, but I’m burning underneath it. My hips roll against his hand in a rhythm I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. The orgasm builds low in my belly, tightening like a fist.
“I’m close.” My voice breaks. “Johnny, I’m so close.”
“Come for me.” He presses harder, faster, his thumb relentless on my clit. “Let me feel it.”
It hits me nothing like what I’m used to.
Alone, I have to chase it. Build it brick by brick in the dark with my eyes squeezed shut and my breath held, working for it. This doesn’t make me work.
This takes.
My thighs lock around his hand. My fingers claw into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks. Every muscle I have fires at once and the sound that comes out of me isn’t pretty or performative, it’s raw and startled and louder than anything I’ve ever heard leave my own mouth.
I say his name. Or I try to. It comes out broken in the middle, half gasp and half sob, and I don’t care because his fingers are still moving and my body is still pulsing and I couldn’t stop any of it if I wanted to.
He strokes me through it, gentling as I pulse around him, and then thrusts into my fist twice more and comes with a guttural groan.
Warmth spills across my stomach. He buries his face in my neck, his body trembling, and I hold him there with my free hand pressed against the back of his head while the aftershocks roll through both of us.
For a while, neither of us moves. The air from the open door has gone cold against my damp skin, but Johnny’s chest is warm under my cheek and his breathing is slowing against my hair, and that’s enough.
Eventually he lifts his head and glances down at the mess on my stomach. He huffs a laugh. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
He eases off the couch, holding his pants with one hand, and disappears down the hall. Water runs. I lie there with my shirt off and my jeans bunched at my knees, sticky and flushed and grinning at the ceiling like an idiot.
I just did that. That was real.
Johnny comes back with a warm washcloth and kneels beside the couch. I clean up while he watches, pointing at a spot I missed on my hip.
“This is the part nobody prepares you for,” I say, shimmying my jeans back into place.
“What, you thought the movies just cut to black for no reason?”
I throw the washcloth at him, and he laughs as he disappears back into the bathroom.
When he comes back, I’ve got my shirt on and my legs tucked under me. He drops onto the couch beside me and pulls me into his side. My head finds the hollow below his shoulder, and his arm wraps around me, and for a while we just breathe.
The house is dark now. Neither of us gets up to turn on a light. Through the screen door, the ocean sounds closer than it did this morning. Louder. Like the tide shifted while we weren’t paying attention. I can hear his heartbeat through his chest, slower than mine, steadying.
There’s more I should tell him. About my future. About the man my father’s already promised me to. Things that could change the way he’s looking at me right now. But that’s tomorrow’s weight, and I’m not ready to pick it up yet.
“Hungry?” His lips press against the top of my head.
I smile against his skin. “Starving. You cooking? Because you promised me that days ago and I’m still waiting.”
He laughs. The vibration moves through his chest into mine.
“Tonight, I deliver.”
Neither of us moves. Outside, the tide keeps pulling.