Chapter 16 #2
The energy is palpable, an exchange back and forth from the songstress to the crowd and back again, and there’s no stopping Bianca’s hips from twisting, her arms rising to the rafters as the music takes hold.
And Xavier’s there, behind her, her shoulders pressed into his chest, as his hand comes up around her waist, settling low on her belly, holding her to him.
There’s plenty of space in the VIP section to dance.
She’s facing away from him, singing along with Mari’s lyrics, but her back is up against his front and it’s easy to just let him wrap his hands around her hips and move with her.
One of her arms goes back around his neck when he leans down.
The song starts to fade and his breath is warm against her cheek as he murmurs against her ear while he tugs her back against him, firm and insistent.
“You’re the sexiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”
The words shoot straight through her as she grinds into him, feeling just how much he wants her.
It’s too much, the need coursing through her, too much to contain.
Spinning in his arms, she says, “We need to go.” Looking up into his eyes as they register the words, his expression shifts from intense lust to true concern.
“Are you okay?” he asks, a hand rising to cup her cheek, and she leans into the contact. “Do you feel sick?”
“No,” she says, grasping the front of his shirt to pull him in closer, pushing up on her tiptoes to press her mouth against his ear so he’ll hear her loud and clear as the music kicks up again, “but if we don’t leave right now, I’m going to suck you off in the middle of this crowd and then we’ll end up in jail and I can’t . . .”
He pulls away as she falls back onto her heels, his eyes wide, that sparkling green almost entirely taken over by the black of his pupils, pure fire pouring out of them as her words seem to fully register.
“Let’s go.”
Nothing has ever threatened her near-perfect Uber passenger rating more than the drive from the arena back to her apartment.
She presses herself into the corner of the car, as far away from Xavier as possible, and he respects the distance, but eye contact is enough to keep the electricity crackling between them as their driver weaves in and out of LA’s typical nighttime gridlock, as if she can sense that if she doesn’t hurry, she’s going to get one hell of a show in the backseat.
The Uber’s taillights are headed down the street away from them and they walk as fast as they can back up the stairs and down the hallway and through her door and suddenly, they’re back.
And things feel different.
“Are we really doing this?” he asks as she takes his hand and leads him across the living room to her bedroom door.
She leans against the doorframe and pulls him closer, letting go of his hand and reaching up to twist her fingers into the bottom of his shirt.
“If you want to.”
“Oh, I want to. I’m just waiting for the inevitable knock on the door. You’re not hiding any more friends anywhere, are you?”
Laughing softly, she shakes her head. “No, no more friends, but . . . just so you know, it’s been a minute,” she admits, looking up into his eyes, and there’s surprise there.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
Bianca lets out a soft snort of disbelief. “Why do I have a hard time believing that?”
“Because you find me, what did you say, irresistible?”
“I never said that.”
“You said that it’s a miracle anyone ever tells me no. That’s pretty close to irresistible.”
“I don’t know, I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job of resisting for the last five years.”
“Yeah, but now you admitted it to yourself and it’s like toothpaste out of a tube, there’s no going back.”
“Did you just compare my theoretical attraction to you to toothpaste?”
“Theoretical? I think we’ve gone way past theoretical here.”
“No, you don’t get to deflect and pretend like that wasn’t an absolutely terrible simile.”
“Okay, I’ll admit it was awful if you answer one question.”
“Deal.”
“It was terrible and trite. Done. Now, tell me, boss, how long has it been?”
She thinks back over her years since her last boyfriend – a relationship that fizzled as soon as she left New York for the West Coast again – trying to remember exactly the last time she had sex.
That one conference with the guy from Johns Hopkins she met at the bar, that was . . . how long ago now?
“That long?” he asks after more than a few seconds tick by.
“I’m just trying to remember which year that conference was . . .”
“And not that memorable, apparently.”
She wrinkles her nose. “It was a stupid hookup. It was after Frankie got married and I realized I was the last of my friends to find someone and I wasn’t even seeing anyone and I guess I was just feeling . . .”
“Lonely?”
“Yeah.” The silence hangs between them and she needs to fill it. “How long has it been for you?”
“A while.”
“C’mon, I told you!”
“A couple of years. Last time I was just . . . stressed out and needed some relief, but it didn’t really help.”
“So it’s been too long for both of us and we’re both about to be released out into the world after not having decent sex in years.”
“We could fix that.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Wait, what?”
“You’re the one who suggested it.”
“Because I never thought you’d agree to it. I thought after what happened the last time you didn’t want it to happen again.”
“I never said that,” she insists.
“We talked about it, before, that first night, when Chloe . . .”
“Do you care, really, what we said then? And besides, everyone knows . . .”
“Everyone knows what?”
“The things you say in the dark don’t count,” she whispers.
“I’d argue that those are the things that count the most. The things we say when the rest of the world falls away, when it’s just two people being honest. That’s gotta matter more than anything.”
“But then the sun comes up and nothing changes.”
“Okay, but what if we took advantage of that?”
“Are you suggesting . . .”
“You know exactly what I’m suggesting. One night, we let the walls down. You and me.”
“One night of . . . what could have been.”
“Is that . . . Are you . . . I need to hear the words, Bianca. Do you want this? Want me?”
“I want you. I want us . . .” She lets out a slow breath. “I want to fuck you.”
He lets out a groan from the back of his throat and dips his head, pressing his lips to hers in what would be a chaste kiss if his hands didn’t immediately latch onto her hips, pulling her against him so she can feel exactly how much he wants her.
This is what she’s been missing. She knew finally giving in would feel good and yeah, she can admit now that there was no way they weren’t going to end up here.
She’d lied to everyone, but most of all, she’d lied to herself.
The idea of him getting on a plane at the end of the summer without her knowing what it would be like to be with him, what it would be like to have his hands on her, his mouth everywhere, his body moving inside of her . . . it’s laughable.
Of course this is where everything was leading the whole time.
“You taste so good,” he murmurs against her neck, exploring gently until he finds that spot, the spot he texted her about, right where that one stupid curl always escapes.
She arches against him, her arms circling his neck, one hand falling to the back of his head to hold him there.
Then he runs his teeth against her skin and her hips jolt up against his.
“Xavier,” she murmurs as he soothes the bite with a slow, smooth swipe of his tongue.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Why aren’t you inside me yet?”
He lets out a husky chuckle which sends a wave of warmth over her skin. “Patience never was your thing, huh?”
“Five years, I think I’ve been patient enough.”
“That long, huh?”
“I told you, literally the first time I saw you, I knew I was in so much trouble.”
“You never said anything.”
“What good would it have done?”
She can think of a lot of good things that would have happened if he’d said something, but she’s just as guilty of staying silent as he is. So much wasted time. Years when they could have been doing this.
His hands slide down from her shoulders to her elbows, drawing her closer, his lips rising up over the curve of her jaw and then her cheek to her temple before he leans in close, just breathing her in.
He opens his mouth to answer, but she doesn’t want to know what he’d say, so she pushes up onto her toes, closes the last little bit of distance between them.
Xavier kisses like he does everything else.
Completely and fully, with a single-minded intensity that she feels all the way down to her toes.
When she pulls away, gasping for breath, it’s to the feeling of his hands at her waist, one rising up over her rib cage, under her breast, the other down over the curve of her ass.
“I forgot,” he groans. “Somehow I already forgot.”
“What?”
“How good you fucking feel in my hands. These curves’ll be the death of me.”
His voice is a rumble in his chest that echoes directly into hers and she gasps as his hands squeeze gently and then with more purpose, turning her gasp into a completely uncontrollable moan.
He lifts her and kicks the door shut behind them as he carries her over to her bed.
When her back hits the mattress, she loops her arms around his shoulders and pulls him on top of her.
“You keep saying that and you keep surviving,” she manages to quip despite the incredible sensations he’s drawing out of her body.
“Tempting fate, every damn time,” he whispers into her neck before sucking a bruising kiss into the skin there.
Their clothes are tossed away before he trails his mouth down her body, his tongue tracing pathways up over the rise of each breast, to the underside of her rib cage and down over the gentle curve of her stomach, circling her belly button, making her laugh at how it tickles as he looks up at her with a boyish grin at the sound.