Chapter 7 #3
I thought about it. The toast. The kitchen.
Lilac’s food, Betty’s napkin swans and Maya throwing pasta at Colt.
Wren’s shy smile across the table. The way every couple in the room had their own private language — hands finding hands, names said softly, the automatic gestures of people who’d chosen each other and kept choosing.
“I think this is a family,” I said. “A weird, loud, slightly terrifying family.”
Handful laughed. Then he looked at me — the way he’d been looking at me for months now, the way that had nothing of the old performance in it. Just attention. The full, steady kind that made me feel like the only person in the building.
“Stay tonight.”
“In the clubhouse?”
“In my room.”
I hesitated. Not because I didn’t want to — I’d known how tonight would end since I’d said yes to coming.
But in the version I’d rehearsed, I was the one doing the inviting in after Handful drove us back to my apartment.
My territory. Staying here, in his bed, in this building, was a different proposition, and it snagged me for a second.
He caught it.
The grin went. “Hey. We don’t have to do anything.
” He shifted on the couch, and I didn’t miss the way the denim had gone tight across his lap, or the slow breath he took to steady himself.
“I want to. I’m not going to insult you by pretending I don’t.
But I’ve gotten good at waiting and I can keep waiting.
After tonight, watching you in here, with all of them, I’d be happy just to fall asleep with you next to me. That’s the whole ask.”
I screwed up my face.
“Whoa.” He sat back like I’d pushed him. “Okay. We can head out, I’ll run you home, it’s no—”
“It’s not you, it’s…”
“Okay, stop there. You don’t have to explain. I’m a big boy, I don’t need the it’s not you, it’s me speech.”
“Handful.” I caught his arm and slapped it, light, the kind of slap that meant stop talking.
“It’s not me. It’s not you. It’s the bed.
The idea of the bed.” I nodded toward the stairs.
“You’ve had — what? Half the women in this building in that room?
I’m not in a hurry to be the next one in that bed. ”
The color climbed his neck and kept going. I had never once seen this man blush. It was extraordinary.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’ve been a monk,” he said. “You know what I was. But I haven’t had a woman in my room since the night you first made me an Old Fashioned.” He held my eyes. “Haven’t had a woman anywhere since then. Not one.”
I went still.
“That bed up there’s the closest thing I’ve got to a virgin.
” The rueful tip of his mouth. “It’s new.
Nobody’s been in it. Never brought a single woman up those stairs since your Old Fashioned.
I won’t lie and say I’m not hoping you’ll be the first — the one and only — but if all I get tonight is you asleep next to me, I’ll take it and count myself ahead. ”
I’d been chased before — plenty. What I hadn’t been was waited for, and it turned out a man holding himself back did more to me than all the chasing ever had.
Especially this man, the one everyone in my life had warned me off, standing in his own clubhouse at eleven at night, wanting me and not reaching for me.
I’d walked in with a plan — take him home to mine afterward, my turf, my sheets, my rules — and somewhere in the last five minutes everything had stopped making sense.
I looked at him. Sandy hair, brown eyes, the pin-up tattoos on his arms that I’d traced with my fingers in the dark of my apartment. His room was upstairs. His world was this building. And he was asking me to step into it — not as a guest at a dinner, but as the woman who stayed.
“I’ll stay tonight,” I said.
His room was small and tidier than I expected.
So clean, I suspected he’d done it this morning, just in case.
Bed against the wall, dresser, a chair with a jacket thrown over the back.
The window looked out on the lot. His cut was hanging on the back of the door, where he’d put it when we’d come upstairs.
He stood by the door, hands at his sides.
Not moving. Not closing the distance between us.
He was waiting — for me, for a signal, for permission just like the first time he’d asked to kiss me outside Fir & Salt.
The asking was new for him. I could see the effort it cost, the restraint that went against every instinct he had.
“Handful,” I said softly, moving towards him.
“Tyler.”
I stopped. “What?”
“With you, I’m Tyler.” He glanced at the cut on the back of the door, then back at me. “Out there I’m Handful. That’s theirs. Venom Riders gave me that when I patched in. But I haven’t handed anybody Tyler in a long time.” His eyes stayed on mine. “I want you to have it, to use it.”
The whole room had called him Handful all night. Tyler was just mine. “Tyler,” I said, trying it out.
“Yeah.”
I crossed the room and kissed him. He made a sound against my mouth that I’d never heard from him before — low, involuntary, like he’d stopped holding himself back.
His hands found my waist. Then stopped. “Tell me what you want,” he said.
“I want you to stop asking and start paying attention. Follow my lead.”
His eyes went steadier — not the old confidence, not the grin. He kissed me back, and his hands moved — slowly, deliberately, up from my waist to my ribs, his thumbs tracing the line of the fabric, reading my reaction. Paying attention.
I pulled his shirt over his head. The pin-up tattoos ran down both arms and across his chest, ink and skin that I’d seen in daylight and was seeing differently now in the low light of his room, in the room where every other woman he’d ever touched had been someone he’d forgotten by morning.
I was the first in this bed, and I wasn’t going to be someone he forgot by morning. I was going to make sure of that.
I pushed him back onto the bed.
He went without argument. Flat on his back on his new bed, which we were about to christen.
Given everything, that was exactly the right call.
I climbed over him and kissed the tattoo on his left shoulder, then the one on his chest, working down while his hands stayed on my hips — firm, present, but not directing.
Following. Touching. When I pulled back to take off my own shirt, he watched me with an expression I hadn’t seen from him before.
Not hunger, though that was there too. Something closer to reverence.
“You’re staring,” I said.
“Yeah.” He didn’t look away. “You’re worth staring at.”
“That’s a line.”
“It’s not a line. It’s the truth.”
I kissed him again, because if he kept talking like that I was going to lose the rhythm of what I was doing, and I wasn’t ready to lose it yet.
His mouth was warm and tasted like the beer he’d been drinking earlier.
When I shifted against him, his hips moved up to meet mine and I felt him — hard, ready, held in check by a patience that was costing him something.
He rolled us, carefully. Put me on my back and looked down at me, one arm braced beside my head, the other hand on my hip. “Tell me if—”
“Tyler.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll tell you. Stop talking and start doing.”
He nodded. Then he kissed my throat, my collarbone, the space between my breasts, moving down with a slowness that was tender and torture together.
His mouth traced a line down my stomach that made my muscles clench, and when he reached the waistband of my jeans, he looked up at me — one last check, his eyes on mine — and I ran my fingers through his hair and pressed down. Hell, yes!
He undid my jeans. Pulled them off with my help, my hips lifting. Then he was between my legs, his mouth on the inside of my thigh, and I stopped thinking about anything except the heat of his breath and the slow, deliberate way he kissed from my knee, up my thigh, and then moved inward.
The first touch of his tongue made me arch off the bed.
His stubble rasped the inside of my thigh, his breath hot against me.
He held my hips steady with both hands and took his time — long, slow strokes that paid attention, circling where I needed him without rushing, reading every sound I made.
Paying attention. His tongue found my clit and held there, circling in tight, steady passes, adjusting when I moved, following when I tried to chase it.
“Tyler —” My hand was in his hair, gripping, and I felt him smile against me.
He slid two fingers inside me. No announcement. Just read the movement I made and did it, his mouth not stopping. I felt the curl of them and my hips drove forward and I stopped trying to be quiet.
The bastard. He was good at this. For the first time in my life, a man was between my legs and his attention was fully on me and my pleasure. Not on his own skill. Not on the proof of what he could do. On me. What I was doing. What I needed.