Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Scarlett
The second the light goes out, the cabin shrinks to nothing.
I could touch every surface from this bunk: Dean’s chest, the edge of the table, the wall behind my head, the thin layer of fleece covering my body from collarbone to knee.
The darkness is total—no window, no glow from the storm, nothing but breath and pulse and the snap of rain on fiberglass overhead.
Dean’s mouth is on mine before I can change my mind.
The first kiss is a misfire—he misses, lips landing on the corner of my mouth, then the second is better, open, fierce, hungry in a way that makes me want to laugh.
I kiss him back harder, so hard our teeth knock together.
I want him to taste the wanting, the days of holding this in, the weeks of being watched by every person in this town except the one I actually wanted to see me.
“Three weeks,” he says against my mouth. “Three weeks of you walking around my dock like you own it.”
“You hated it.”
“I jerked off thinking about it.” He says it flat, like a man reporting weather. “Every night. Hated myself after. Did it again the next night.”
Heat drops through me so fast I make a sound I don’t recognize.
His hands are huge. One on my cheek, warm and steady, one on my waist, thumb pressing the thin cotton of his own sweatshirt tight against my hip.
I’m sitting up, braced by the table, but he pushes into me until I tip back onto the mattress.
He follows, sliding a knee between mine, all heat and scratchy stubble and salt on his skin.
I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him down. I want him close. I want him now, not next week or next hour. I want to outrun the thinking part, the years of caution and choreography, the version of myself I’ve been selling to strangers.
He groans, low, and the sound goes straight through me. I find his hair, the back of his neck, the ridge of his spine under the sweatshirt. He’s solid everywhere, built for holding weight. I pull him down, and he comes.
His hips grind against my thigh. I hook a leg around him and drag him tighter, anything to force the last of the hesitation out. I want friction. I want to be pinned, not handled. If I’m going to let myself do this, I want to burn.
He pulls back just enough that his mouth leaves mine. He’s searching my face in the dark. His breath is fast. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Say it again.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Good girl.” His mouth drops to my throat. “Because I’m about to be very bad at pretending I don’t want this.”
He slides a hand up under the sweatshirt and flattens his palm just under my ribs. My body goes rigid.
He doesn’t notice. He moves the hand up, aiming higher.
Every nerve in my body spikes. I catch his wrist before he gets there. “Dean.”
He goes still. He doesn’t pull away.
I hold his wrist tight. I can feel the pulse under the skin, hammering. I let go and guide his hand back to my waist, where it started. “Not there.”
A second passes. “Okay.”
He doesn’t ask why. He doesn’t ask what happened. He puts his hand back on my waist and pulls me under him, and he lets out a breath he’s been holding.
He kisses me again, slower now, and this is worse.
The first version was reckless, momentum and heat and the relief of movement.
This is careful. I don’t want careful. I arch against him, rub my thigh against him through the layers of borrowed sweatpants and his jeans, and the next kiss is sharp, more teeth than lips.
“Don’t get careful on me now,” I say.
“Wasn’t planning on it.” His hand slides down instead of up, spreads flat and low on my stomach, presses. “This where you want me?”
“Lower.”
“Ask me.”
“Dean—”
“Ask me.” His voice has gone rough at the edges. “Three weeks I’ve had to guess what you want. Tell me one time.”
“I want your hand between my legs.”
He exhales like I hit him. “Fuck.”
I slip my own hand under his waistband, catch the elastic of his boxers, and wrap my fist around him. He’s already hard. I squeeze, then stroke, and he makes a sound that’s almost a whimper. I want more of that sound.
He buries his face in my neck. “Jesus Christ. Do that again.”
I tighten my grip. The space is tight and his weight is pinning my free arm, but he shifts to give me room, then pushes his hips into my hand.
“You’ve been thinking about this,” he says. “Don’t tell me you haven’t. You’ve been thinking about it since the porch.”
“Yes.”
“Did you play with your clit while thinking about me?”
My whole body goes hot. “Yes.” I squeeze his cock again, hard, and his whole body bows over me.
He groans, head dropping to my shoulder, breath ragged.
Then he rolls, dragging me with him until I’m on top, straddling his hips, knees braced on either side of him, my hair spilling out everywhere.
The lamp is still off, but the storm throws shards of blue and white through the porthole, enough to make out the outline of his body, the shape of his jaw, the hands finding my thighs and digging in.
He wants marks and so do I. This is not the gentle kind of night.
“Show me how you did it, Hollywood. Show me how you like to be touched.”
I wedge my hand under my waistband, palm flat against myself, and slide until the pressure is right.
The first brush of my fingers on my clit jolts through my body, raw as an electric shock. Dean’s hand presses down on mine, and the weight of it is almost too much.
“Slow,” he says. “Show me. That’s it.”
My fingers are shaking, but I circle the spot the way I do when I’m alone.
I do it the way I always have: pressure, then circle, then pressure again, and it’s so much better than alone there’s no comparison.
I’m riding his thigh and he’s under me, keeping my wrist steady, dragging his palm up and down my arm in a way that shoots the tension everywhere except out.
In the dark, it doesn’t matter what I look like.
It doesn’t matter what I sound like. Nobody is going to record this, edit it, post it to a million screens.
I don’t have to perform.
The thought alone nearly undoes me.
“Fuck, you’re beautiful like this,” Dean says, and his hand joins mine, his thumb replacing my fingers on my clit. “Right here?”
A shudder works through me, and my head drops back. “Oh, God.”
“Yeah, right there.” He sits up and kisses my throat. “You’re gonna come on my hand, and then I’m gonna do it again.”
When his fingers dip inside me and pump, I lose track of everything. I’m vaguely aware of the boat rolling, the storm rattling the porthole, but mostly I’m aware of his thick fingers inside me and the pressure on my clit.
“Fuck,” he groans. “You are soaked. Look at you dripping down my hand. Take what you need from me.”
I grind on his palm, and the edge is already there, jagged and desperate.
I want to hold on, but it’s been too long, and the relief of it is so much bigger than the embarrassment.
I come hard, all at once, breath ripped from my chest. My thighs clamp around his hand, and my fingers tighten in his hair. My mouth opens, and nothing comes out.
He doesn’t stop moving his hand until I let go of his hair. He’s a furnace underneath me, breathing like he just sprinted a hundred yards. My hand is still in his pants. He’s even harder now, and I give him a testing stroke.
All at once, he flips our positions again. I’m under him on the bunk, and he rips off my pants. He tears the waistband, and I don’t care—they were his to begin with, and I want them off.
I want nothing between us and spread my legs.
“Fuck me nowHe freezes. Just for a second. Then he’s on me, his weight pressing me into the bunk, his mouth on my jaw, my throat, the soft place under my ear.
His hand slides down my stomach, over my hip, and I tense.
I can’t help it. The body remembers what the mind is trying to forget.
“Easy,” he says. Not a question. A command. “I’ve got you.”
He doesn’t go higher. He keeps his hand on my hip, his thumb tracing the ridge of bone, and the tension bleeds out of me in a long, shuddering breath. He’s giving me the space I asked for without making me say it twice, and the relief of it is so sharp it borders on pain.
He reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out a condom. The foil catches a flash of lightning through the porthole, and I almost laugh. He’s been carrying it. Since when? Since the porch? Since the marina? Since the moment he jumped in after a suitcase?
He tears the packet with his teeth. I watch the outline of him in the dark—broad shoulders, the dip of his waist—as he rolls the condom on.
My body hums. Every nerve ending is alive and singing, and I’ve never wanted anything the way I want this man right now.
He covers me with his body, weight and warmth pressing me flat.
His hands guide my knees up, wide, and the head of his cock catches against me, thick and blunt.
I’m already open for him, slick and hungry.
He slides in on the first try, and I gasp at the size of him, the stretch.
He groans, drops his head to my shoulder, and waits. Only a second.
Then he fucks me.
He’s not gentle. Not careful. Exactly what I want. What I need. He drives into me like he’s been starving for it, and I meet every thrust with my hips, raking my nails down his back.
The bunk creaks.
The storm howls.
Something slides off the shelf and shatters on the floor, and neither of us stops.
“Look at me,” he demands. “Scarlett. Look at me.”
I open my eyes, but I can only see the outline of him. His breath is on my lips. His forehead touches mine.
“Right here,” he says. “Stay right here with me.”
I wrap my legs tighter around him. I want to crawl inside him.
I want to be so close there’s no room for the version of myself I’ve been for the last eighteen months—the one who flinches at touch, who redirects hands, who sleeps in sports bras because looking at herself in the mirror is still a negotiation.
He shifts his angle and hits something that makes my vision white out and rips a sound from my throat I don’t recognize. He does it again, and again, and my hands are fisted in the sheet, the bunk frame, his hair, anywhere I can hold on.
“Dean—”
“Say my name again.”
“Dean.”
“Louder.”
“Dean.” It comes out broken. “Don’t stop.”
He picks up the pace, and the boat rolls with us, and I’m losing track of where the storm ends, and he begins.
His hand slides under my lower back and lifts me into him, and the new angle is devastating.
I’m making sounds I don’t recognize, high and desperate, and his mouth finds mine and swallows every one of them.
“Let go,” he says against my mouth. “I’ve got you, Hollywood.”
The second time I come, it’s different.
The first was sharp, sudden, a relief so acute it was almost grief.
This one builds slow, deep, pulled out of me in long waves by a man who has figured out my body faster than I’ve managed it myself in two years.
I arch off the bunk and he pins me back down with one hand flat on my sternum, and even that—even that—doesn’t trigger the old fear.
He’s not looking. He’s not examining. He’s just holding me in place so he can drive into me harder, and the distinction matters more than I can say.
I come apart the second time with his name in my mouth and my heels dug into the backs of his thighs.
He follows me over the edge on the next thrust, head dropping, a sound tearing out of him that’s half my name and half a wordless groan.
He shudders and collapses on top of me. Not his full weight—he catches himself on his forearms—but enough that I’m pinned, warm, surrounded.
His heart hammers against my chest. Mine answers.
The storm rages on. The boat pitches. Neither of us moves.
I wait for the panic. The regret. The scramble for clothes and space and excuses.
But none of it comes.
Oh my God.
I did it.
I had sex for the first time in nearly two years.
With Dean Kinsella.
My body is molten. Blood is still roaring in my ears. Every inch of me that was numb or strange or borrowed two hours ago is now so furiously alive I could scream.
I didn’t know I could still feel like this.