Chapter Sixteen #2
I had no clue what was going on. Or where we were heading. But I was hot. Dripping. I could feel a swollen wetness spreading in my underwear that I had no idea how to ignore. Is that what he’d meant? Ignore that? How did he even know? Was it so obvious?
I could feel that I was in a pivotal moment. Something huge was almost happening. (Was it happening?) And my brain was catching up, ready to call me out and pull me by the shoulders and yell, What the hell do you think you’re doing?
As if sensing something shifting inside me, Abel turned me, his body communicating with mine to roll over and into him so our limbs found a new resting place: my leg draped over his, my arm spread over his chest, my head in the hollow below his shoulder.
‘You’re okay, Mary,’ he murmured into my hair and I found I could breathe again. And almost ignore the way my body thrummed against his thigh where it pressed into my now wet underwear.
‘I’m sorry, Abel.’
‘Sshh,’ he said, with a kiss against my head. ‘I want you here.’
‘But I don’t want to …’ I didn’t even know how I was planning to finish the sentence, but he didn’t let me anyway.
‘I’m just warming you up. It’s no big deal. Are you warmer now?’
I nodded into him. Maybe that meant I should go back to my bed. My cold, lonely bed.
‘Do you want me to leave you alone? It’s late.’
‘You’re going nowhere.’ He pulled me closer, his tone gently assertive. ‘I’m just keeping you warm. Remember your talk on hypothermia? In the absence of the emergency department equipment, I’m your Bair Hugger.’
I smiled. A Bair Hugger was a piece of medical equipment used to prevent and treat hypothermia. ‘My Bair Hugger.’
I let my arm circle right round the broadness of his chest. He was huge, desperately squeezable.
How had I possibly come to end up here, with my head against Abel Sutherland’s perfect chest?
I really needed to stop thinking about the sexual potential of this moment.
How very easy it would be to take my tank top off and see how he responded to my bare chest against him …
This was the last night. Who knows where or when we’d see each other again … And if we did, would it be so bad?
‘Abel …’
‘Mmm?’
The sound was more sensation than noise.
Low and visceral. I was on the cusp of something.
I was thinking about his hand resting on my hip bone.
Of how it would feel if it inched beneath the elastic of my pyjama bottoms, down the soft fabric of my underpants to where the lace edge gave way to the flesh of my butt, until his fingers found the wetness right at my centre and slipped beneath the fabric to where I was hot and swollen.
How it would feel if he pulled me astride him. My breathing had quickened.
People would do that. People who weren’t me. People who didn’t think things through. And I currently wasn’t thinking much through at all.
Until the image of the girl in the photo on Abel’s phone flashed in my brain and squashed my erotic fantasies.
I shifted, rolling out of his arm so our legs disentangled, and lay on my back beside him, his arm a pillow beneath my neck.
‘Abel?’
‘Yeah?’
I felt him turn to me and if I turned to face him, I was almost certain I’d kiss him and pull his hands onto my body and plead with him until he took me right then and there. So I kept my eyes straight ahead.
‘Can you read to me? Your book? Can you read it to me?’ My voice was croaky, my throat dry, my heart hammering.
‘Sure.’ He sounded surprised. By the fact that I was interested in his book? Or by the fact that my intentions had done a full flip in the space of a second? Was he feeling the emotional whiplash that I was? Did he know the filthy contents of my thoughts? He masked it well if he did.
‘It’s under the bed,’ he said and I twisted to grab it, the cold air on the skin out of the covers a good thing. Refreshing. Grounding.
‘You do like it, hey?’ He was teasing again, but I had no capacity for teasing. No capacity for anything at all but the life-saving distraction of listening to the story.
His voice rumbled gently through his chest and into my ear. Like this, hearing was a whole-body experience; when the sound vibrated through air and through flesh and bones all at once. It was magnificent.
But I used my skills in discipline to listen to the content of the words, travelling to Greece, to a world that was warm, where a shepherd watched over a small village, and a young, beautiful woman was awed by the strength of a giant.
The story drifted around me with Abel’s voice, and his breath and his scent and my body settled into a deep relaxation until sleep seemed close, my brainwaves starting to form synchronous waves of calmness.
‘Abel?’ I whispered, already half gone.
‘Mmm?’
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
He would be frowning. I could almost see his frown. And smiling. A frown-smile. ‘Not at the moment.’
That was enough. Maybe Tessie was his dream girl. His life’s goal. But if she wasn’t his girlfriend right now, that was enough. I could rest knowing that, by lying in his bed, I hadn’t wronged her.
I’d keep my shit together from here on.