Chapter 21
Saylor
Look away, *NSYNC. This is about to get inappropriate.
Justin Timberlake stares down at me from the poster on the guesthouse wall with his frosted tips and his denim-on-denim commitment, and I would apologize for what he’s about to witness except I’m too busy kissing Celeste’s neck at six in the morning in her childhood bed while the sunrise turns the bubblegum-pink walls the color of a blush.
She’s half asleep. Or she was, until I started tracing my mouth along the curve of her shoulder, down the line of her collarbone, across the soft skin just above her breast. She shifts against me, arching into the contact with the drowsy instinct of a body that has spent the past few weeks remembering what touch is for.
Celeste hasn’t been going to the office. She needs time and space, so she’s home—here in Westchester. And there’s not much to do in Westchester…except fuck. All hours of the night and day. And somehow, even during one of the most tumultuous times in our lives, it’s a little slice of paradise.
“Saylor.” Her voice is thick with sleep. “It’s before seven.”
“I’m aware.”
“The sun isn’t even fully up.”
“It’s getting there. So am I.”
She laughs. The sound vibrates through her ribs and into my mouth where it’s pressed against her sternum.
I slide lower, kissing the valley between her breasts, the plane of her stomach, the ridge of her hip.
She threads her fingers into my hair and tugs gently, not to stop me but to hold on, the way you grip the bar on a ride that’s just starting to move.
“Come here,” she says.
“I am here.”
“No, come here.” She tugs harder. Pulls me up and kisses me deep, morning breath and all, which is the kind of intimacy that means more than any silk-draped penthouse encounter because it means she’s comfortable with me.
She rolls me onto my back and climbs over me, settling her weight across my hips with a confidence she didn’t have a month ago.
Her hair falls around us like curtains closing on a stage.
“I want to try something,” she says.
“Handcuffs? Whips? Butt plugs?”
She narrows her eyes at me.
“Okay, sorry. I’m listening.”
“You know that thing where…” She pauses, squinting one eye, looking adorably bashful. “Where both people are…you know…going down on each other…simultaneously…”
“Sixty-nine?”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what? It’s a number, Celeste.”
“It’s a very loaded number.” She sits up, still straddling me, and pushes her hair out of her face. “I’ve never done that. It always seemed so logistically complicated. Like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time, except naked and with higher stakes.”
“It’s not complicated.”
“There are angles to consider. Breathing logistics. The question of where one’s knees go. And the whole thing seems very…” She waves her hand in a circle, searching. “Gen Z.”
I laugh so hard she bounces on my chest. “Gen Z? Sixty-nine has been around since the invention of two bodies and a flat surface. The Romans were doing this, Celeste. It predates democracy.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know. I missed that class during my sexual education. Honestly, my past sex life consisted of Greg Prescott and twenty or so years of missionary with the lights off. I’m working from a limited dataset.”
“Well, baby. I’m your professor now.” I sit up, bringing her with me, my hands on her hips.
“Here’s the deal. You turn around. I lie back.
You focus on what you’re doing and I focus on what I’m doing, and if at any point you feel like you can’t concentrate, just stop and enjoy it.
Don’t worry. Your performance will not be graded. ”
“I hate that you just made a school metaphor about oral sex.”
“Would you prefer a construction metaphor? Because I’ve got those too. Something about excavating your desire, or hammering in my point.”
“Dear Lord, stop.”
She stares at me. I stare at her. JC Chasez stares at both of us from the poster, frozen in a choreography move that now feels uncomfortably relevant.
“Fine, let’s do it,” she says. “But if this is awkward, we never speak of it again.”
She turns around. There’s a moment of negotiation that is, admittedly, less graceful than either of us would prefer.
Knees reposition. Elbows find purchase. She hovers above me and I can feel her self-consciousness radiating through her thighs, the tension saying she’s trying something unfamiliar and bracing for failure.
I press my mouth to her and the self-consciousness evaporates in approximately two seconds.
Her skin is already hot and slick when I spread her thighs in my hands, the taste of her familiar and urgent.
I press my mouth to her, tongue working in slow, circular strokes, and she melts downward, her hips riding the wave of contact.
I’m greedy for her—there’s so much more of her from this angle, so much more to explore.
I plunge deeper, sucking her clit into my mouth and drawing out a gasp that vibrates through her whole body and, by extension, into mine.
She’s trying to focus, I can tell—her tongue flickers over the head of my cock, tentative, then more bold when she feels me shudder in response.
For a second, I lose track of which of us is making which sound, the pleasure ricocheting back and forth until it’s all just one bright, shared current.
Her hands clutch my thighs, fingers digging in, and I counter by holding her hips fast, refusing to let her escape the intensity building between us.
I want her to know how good she tastes. How much I want to consume her whole.
She whimpers and writhes and I don’t let up, not even when I hear her breath catch and her movements stutter.
I drag my tongue higher, tease the tight ring of muscle above, and her whole body jolts—the shock of it making her clamp down on me, burying her face in my lap as if she could crawl inside the sensation to hide from it.
I work her with my mouth, alternating pressure and speed, and she loses all sense of self-consciousness, moaning shamelessly into my skin.
Celeste slides her lips down to the base, swallowing me so deep I see static behind my eyes.
She’s ravenous suddenly, devouring me with a hunger I didn’t know she had, and I’d like to say I’m still in control but I’m not—she’s running the show now, her hand twisting and pumping in perfect sync with the suction of her mouth.
The wet heat of her tongue, the clutch of her palm, the velvet clamp of her throat—it’s all too much, and I’m right there at the edge with no hope of rescue.
I double down, desperate to drag her with me.
I suck her clit, gentle at first, then harder, and when I slip a finger inside her, she goes taut, every muscle in her body straining as if she’s about to snap in half.
She sobs around my cock, the sound vibrating through my whole body, and then she’s coming, gushing, shaking so hard she has to steady herself with both hands on my thighs.
The taste of her floods my mouth and I drink it like I’ve never tasted anything sweeter, my own climax hitting me at exactly the same moment.
She doesn’t stop. She sucks every drop from me, her lips sealed tight, her tongue cradling the head, and when I finally collapse back against the pillows, she swallows, licks her lips, and laughs—this disbelieving, delighted little sound, as if surprised by her own animal ferocity.
We collapse in a tangled, backwards heap. Her feet are near my pillow. My head is somewhere near the foot of the bed. Lance Bass observes us from the wall with an expression of patient tolerance.
“Verdict?” I ask the ceiling.
She’s quiet for a moment. Catching her breath. “I understand the hype.”
“Not overhyped?”
“Not even slightly. But I do have a question.”
“Shoot.”
“How does anyone concentrate? I kept forgetting what I was doing because of what you were doing. It’s like trying to read while someone plays the piano. Hard to strategize.”
“You strategize while you’re giving me head?”
“Always.”
“Woman, if it’s the last thing I do, I will find a way to get you to relax.”
She crawls back up the bed and settles against my chest. “I’m relaxed.”
We lie there for a few minutes, tangled together in a twin bed that was built for a teenager and is barely containing two adults, while the pink walls turn gold in the sunrise and the *NSYNC poster bears silent witness to things no boy band should ever have to see.
Then the sound hits.
A truck. Not just any truck. The rattling, diesel-throated growl of a vehicle that sounds like it’s been arguing with its own engine for the past hundred thousand miles.
It rumbles up the driveway, loud enough to vibrate the guesthouse windows, and comes to a stop somewhere near the main house with a shudder and a hiss that suggest the brakes are having a philosophical disagreement with the wheels.
Celeste sits up. “Is that your truck?”
“My truck doesn’t sound like that.”
“Your truck sounds exactly like that. Saylor, is someone stealing your rental? How much are you paying for that thing, anyway?”
“Enough that I should own it by now.” I pull on my jeans and a T-shirt. “But that’s not my truck.”
“Then whose—”
“Stay here. Get dressed. Meet me out front in ten minutes.” I kiss the side of her temple, quick and warm. “I have a surprise.”
“The last time you surprised me, I ended up blindfolded in my own office.”
“This one’s better. Eh,” I correct myself. “Comparable. This surprise is comparable.”
I cross the yard barefoot. The grass is cold with dew and the morning air smells like cut wood and the end of summer. The main house is quiet. Mum will be awake soon, but for now the kitchen windows are dark and the only sound is birdsong and the ticking of the truck engine cooling in the driveway.