Chapter 22 #2
The look he’s giving me is serious and desperate, concealing nothing. In a corner of my mind, I’m vaguely aware that the song playing outside as he expresses a sentiment I’ve wanted to hear my entire adult life is “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” by Kenny Chesney.
“I want that too,” I say, and he crawls over me.
My brain glitches, but my body knows what to do, sinking back on the pillow and welcoming his heat on top of me.
His arms bracket my shoulders and there it is: his shaky breath against my lips.
I want to keep it forever. I want to turn it into lipstick and wear it every day.
He grazes my bottom lip with his and pulls away.
My instinct is to chase him. To lift my head and fasten our mouths together and pull him back to me, but instead I wait.
Show me. Please, please show me. He cradles my jaw in his hand and slides his thumb to my lips, tracing the edges and then the seam.
When he dips his fingertip inside my mouth, nudging it open with gentle pressure, a whimper slips out of me.
In the end, the wait is worth it. He buries his hands in my hair and fits his mouth against mine, and his rumbling groan sounds like relief.
This kiss is deep, hypnotizing. The slow press of his lips, the indulgent glide of his tongue turning me pliant.
He tastes like toothpaste. The heat of his chest against the vee of bare skin at the top of my pajama shirt scorches me.
When my fingernails dig into his shoulders, he shivers. I savor it all.
The song changes to the Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” iconic yet not exactly right for this moment.
Nate smiles against my mouth. “Is this your playlist?” He moves to my neck to suck lightly on the skin at the base of my throat.
I arch toward him and realize the comforter is still between us.
We scramble to tear it out of the way, then do the same with the bedsheet, which gets tangled around Nate’s ankle as we move it.
“Shit,” he says, extricating himself and shoving the whole mass of bedding to the floor.
When he returns to me, I realize just how much feeling the fluffy blankets were suppressing.
Not only the sensation of him hard against my thigh—although definitely that—but also our tangled knees and the flex of his quads as he moves.
Eventually, when I’ve all but dissolved, he drops a kiss on my forehead, sits back, and touches the top button on my shirt. “Off?”
“Please,” I rasp.
The pace he chooses is torturous. He undoes the buttons with intense focus, his eyes lingering on each new scrap of exposed skin before moving on to the next one.
He’s not just moving like we have all the time in the world. He’s moving like we need all the time in the world.
When there’s one button left, an inconvenient thought comes to my mind. “What about Livvie and Kyla?” The last show of the night must be nearly over.
He runs his hand down the center of my chest, almost to my belly button. “They’re not coming back tonight.”
“What? How do you know?”
“Livvie texted me. It wasn’t Ravi earlier, it was her. They’re staying with a couple friends who got one of the yurts.”
“Why’d she text you and not me?” I thought she and I had bonded. She’d let me borrow her clothes.
He huffs out a laugh and closes one eye. “Probably because she wanted to give me a pep talk about making a move on you.”
“What?” I prop myself up on my elbows. My shirt falls open a bit more, and his eyes dart there. “She knows about our…situation?”
“You mean she knows I’ve been crazy about you forever? Yeah, she knows that.”
“Oh,” I squeak.
He circles the last button absently with one finger. “When Logan tried to set me up with her, my response to her first message was basically, ‘Nice to hear from you. Unfortunately, I’m emotionally unavailable because I’m hung up on someone else.’?”
Our eyes meet. I nudge his finger out of the way and flick open the button, and he swallows thickly.
The tension turns this tiny room in this stupid red RV in this little corner of a big, gussied-up pigpen full of people vibing to a thousand different soundtracks—well, it turns it incandescent, the air loaded with the weight of everything that’s brought us to this moment.
We are a single sparkle suspended in a cascade of glitter glue. One fleck of stardust floating in the solar system. Definitely not the sun, because if everything here revolved around us, I would not be listening to the opening notes of “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” right now.
It’s fitting for it to happen like this, though. Everything unexpected about this trip—especially every single one of these ridiculous, chaotic parties—has brought us closer together. The chaos has been a sledgehammer, breaking down his walls and mine.
He slides the two sides of my shirt apart, and I shrug it off the rest of the way. “You’re beautiful, Quinn.” He squeezes my waist and we watch his unhurried hands slide up my torso inch by inch, applying pressure the whole way. Like my body is a flower he’s trying to press between pages.
He brushes my nipples with his thumbs, then follows with his mouth.
My hips rise involuntarily, searching for him, but he’s holding himself too high above me.
I fight the urge to beg for more, faster; yes, it would feel good, but it feels even better to learn what he wants to give and take from me without my begging for it.
All he wants for the next few minutes, apparently, is this, his mouth and hands, my breasts and, at one point, the dip of my waist. “This is what I see every time you wear those little workout shirts,” he says.
“I like when I catch you looking there.”
He kisses me again as his hand slides down to my thigh, curving around to grip my ass, his fingers almost between my legs. The next time my body shifts, they nudge the spot where I’m aching, and I moan.
“I want more,” he says. “Do you?”
“Yes. Now. Please. ”
The next time he kisses me, he bites my bottom lip, gently pulling it away as his hand ducks under the hem of my shorts and underwear.
He makes a desperate noise like he’s the one being touched.
“I need to see you,” he says, pulling away as I try to kiss him again. “I’m sorry, please, I just need to—”
We yank off the rest of my clothes and he sits back to watch himself touch me, his lips parted.
If he didn’t look so turned on, I wouldn’t be able to handle the vulnerability I feel.
I’d be reaching for the blanket, pressing my knees together.
But his face is so open and full of need, I want to give those things back to him.
He checks in with me when he drops his head to replace his fingers with his mouth.
I nod, and when his tongue meets me, I curse and grab the sheets.
He finds an angle and rhythm that no one else has ever discovered, and my whole body winds up with tension that leaves me shaking.
But this magic angle requires him to really get in there, and he can’t possibly be comfortable in this position.
I tilt my hips away, trying to give him space.
I can’t have moved more than an inch, but he knows, and he knows why.
His hands clamp down on my hips and he holds me like a loaded spring, not stopping until all that tension inside me cascades over and my body stops trembling.
He presses a soft kiss to my inner thigh and looks up, his eyes flashing in a way that reminds me of chilly nights on the beach in sweatshirts with the moonlight fracturing off the ocean.
What just happened—the way he worshipped me, the way he’s looking at me—makes it undeniably clear: He’s wanted this as badly as I have, for as long as I have. Since those first chilly Seapoint nights.
Okay. That’s enough of him proving himself.
I try to sit up, but I’m too dazed to coordinate my limbs, and my elbows give out. He laughs softly. “You okay?”
“I want to touch you.” It comes out breathy and desperate, and he responds with a hungry groan that gives me the boost I need to drag myself up. I take him by the shoulders and guide him onto his back, straddling him. “Can I?”
“Anything you want,” he says. What I want is to make him feel good. To be as open about how badly I want him as he just was with me.
I slide my hand into his shorts, and he tips his head back, murmuring expletives.
He’s right; taking this slowly enough to appreciate it fully is the right move.
While my hand is on him, I use my mouth to explore every other place on his body that’s transfixed me over the years: the spot where his neck meets his shoulder, the tiny brown birthmark on the right side of his chest. When he lifts his hips so I can pull off his shorts, I press one hand to the dimples at the base of his spine.
Then I lower my mouth to him, and he scrapes my hair back with his hands. The second our eyes connect, he pulls me back up. “Too good,” he says with an abashed laugh. Then he licks his bottom lip. “I have a condom. Not from the value pack in the car. It should, uh, work.”
His statement hangs suspended in the air for a second before I realize he’s waiting for my reaction. “Get it,” I urge. Seductively, I’m sure.
A scramble off the bed, a zipper on his bag.
A glorious minute when I get to watch him, kneeling naked and focused as he rolls it on.
The tender look on his face when he moves toward me and the joy that threatens to burst out of me when I see his expression.
This look isn’t proof of his wanting me.
It’s about the rest, the feelings we don’t get to keep.
But we do get to keep the memory of this night.
One little fold in my brain will be a cul-de-sac containing a miniature version of this RV, like one of those elaborate dollhouses people build as a hobby.
Inside will be us, kissing and touching and proving that we mattered to each other.
Whatever comes next, we get to live in a world where this happened.
There’s a soft smile on his face. “Devil horns.” He kisses each of my temples.
After that, he slides into me in one agonizingly slow movement, the pleasure intensifying as the pressure does, until he drops his forehead to mine and I shudder beneath him.
“It’s so good,” I gasp, and he nods against me, his face burning hot.
I need more, more of him, so I rock forward.
At first, we stick to Nate’s steady, measured tempo, even though my body is so greedy for him it’s a challenge.
Based on all the sounds he’s trying to bite back, he’s struggling too.
Yet we persist, slow and deep, and I dig my nails into his back while he bites my shoulder, like if we can only find a way to burrow under each other’s skin, it’ll last longer.
It’s his noises that get me. I want to crack him open the way he’s cracked me, so it’s impossible for him to stifle them. In a second, I flip us over so I’m on top of him, sinking down and grinding against him. His hands rove everywhere.
The pleasure starts to come in pulsing waves, and I’m no longer sure whether we’re moving slowly or hummingbird-fast. The next time a sound rises in his throat, he sets his teeth against his knuckles, and I pry his hand away and pin it to the bed. “Please don’t hide from me.”
My face is level with his, and his eyes, dark now, pierce mine and don’t let go. He groans again, his mouth unguarded this time. It’s a sonic boom reaching my bone marrow, knocking everything loose. I kiss him, and he slides his hand out from under mine to gently grab my chin.
“Nothing about you is cold, Quinn.” He’s panting. “You’re the opposite of cold. The way you feel, god. The way you are. You’re warm. You’ve only ever been warm.”
He grips my waist and thrusts up into me and I break apart in his arms, riding it out until he tumbles over.
Afterward, he pulls me close while we catch our breath.
His heart beats against my cheek, slowing gradually.
I don’t want to let go of this moment. I could never tire of this feeling, a miraculous, impossible combination of safety and openness, of contentment and exhilaration.
I’d lie in a heap on top of him forever if I could, but eventually he has to get up to get rid of the condom.
He’s coming back, I know, but that won’t always be true.
The sheets and blankets are on the floor, and with Nate in the bathroom, I am very alone on the bed with a layer of sweat and mental snapshots of tangled, trembling limbs and teeth on skin.
The hottest, sweetest experience of my life, and it’s no longer something we’re doing.
Now it’s something we did once.