21. Christine
— ? —
Christine
We don’t make it into the car.
We’re still three spaces away when Benedict’s hand finds the small of my back, then my waist, then I’m being walked backward until cold metal kisses my spine. His car. His mouth. All of it at once.
“Christine-”
I kiss him first.
It’s not polite. It’s not the restaurant-goodnight kind of kiss.
It’s the kind that happens because the walk from the door to the parking lot was already too long, because his cologne has been filling my lungs all night, because I’ve been watching his mouth form words over dessert and thinking I want that.
He makes a sound against my lips. Like I’ve knocked something loose inside him.
His hands frame my face, then slide into my hair, then drop to my hips like he can’t decide what to hold onto. I fist the front of his shirt and pull him in until there’s no air left between us. His thigh slots between mine. The car at my back. The night around us. Somewhere, a streetlight buzzes.
He kisses like he’s starving and trying to be gentle about it, and failing at both.
“We-” he breathes against my mouth. “We should-”
“I know.”
He kisses me anyway.
Deeper this time. I open my lips for him and he groans like it hurts. His tongue strokes mine. Slow, then not slow at all. I taste wine and him and the last hour of pretending we were going to behave.
His mouth leaves mine only to find my jaw.
Then the spot beneath it.
Then my neck.
“Benedict-”
“I know,” he murmurs against my throat, and it doesn’t sound like he knows anything except the way my pulse jumps under his lips. “I know. I know. Just - let me-”
He kisses the column of my neck like he’s learning it. Open-mouthed. Hot. His tongue traces a path that makes my fingers tighten in his hair. When he sucks gently just below my ear, my head tips back against the window with a soft thud.
“Sorry,” he whispers. Not sorry at all.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
A laugh, wrecked and quiet, against my skin. “We’re in a parking lot.”
“I noticed.”
“Anyone could-”
“Then you’d better keep your voice down.”
Something shifts in him. I feel it - the way his body goes taut against mine, the way his hands tighten on my waist like he’s one second from lifting me onto the hood.
He kisses me again, hungrier, and I meet him there.
All tongue and breath and the kind of need that doesn’t care about asphalt or streetlights.
His hand slides under the hem of my dress.
Just the outside of my thigh, at first. Warm palm. Slow. Asking without asking. I part my legs a fraction, and that’s all the permission he needs. His fingers trail higher, reverent and greedy at the same time, mapping the soft skin he hasn’t been allowed to touch in so long.
“Christ,” he breathes. “You’re - Christine, you’re shaking.”
“So are you.”
He is. I can feel it in the hand on my hip, in the mouth that keeps returning to mine like he can’t stay away for more than a second. He kisses me while his fingers trace the edge of my underwear, not pushing, just there, a question pressed against lace.
I have to bite his shoulder to keep quiet.
His thumb presses once through the fabric and my knees actually go. He catches me against the door with an arm around my waist, and for a second we just stand there in the dark, breathing like we’ve run the whole way here.
“Benedict-”
“I know.” His forehead drops to my shoulder. His hand goes still exactly where it is, and I can feel what that costs him. “Not against a car in a parking lot. Not the first time.”
“Get in the car.”
The doors unlock with a soft click that sounds too loud in the dark.
He opens mine first - always, even now, even wrecked - and I slide into the passenger seat on unsteady legs.
The leather is cool. The cabin smells like him.
He shuts my door, walks around, and when he drops into the driver’s seat he doesn’t start the engine.
He looks at me.
Just looks.
Then he reaches across the console, cups the back of my neck, and pulls me into him.
The kiss in the car is worse. Better. Closer.
No streetlight, just the small dark space of the cabin and the way we keep colliding with the gearshift and not caring.
I twist toward him. He meets me halfway, mouth open, hungry, one hand in my hair and the other already finding my waist. My knee knocks the console.
His elbow hits the steering wheel. It should be awkward.
It isn’t.
It feels like being young and reckless. Like we’ve stolen this. Like the whole parking lot could catch us and neither of us would stop.
“Come here,” he breathes.
I do. Awkwardly. Beautifully. I climb half into his lap, dress riding up, one knee braced beside his thigh, the steering wheel at my back.
His hands catch my hips like he’s been waiting all night to hold me there.
The car is too small. He is too much. I can feel him beneath me, hard and aching, and the sound he makes when I settle over him is almost a whimper.
“Christine-”
I kiss it off his mouth.
His hands slide up my thighs, under my dress, warm palms on bare skin. Not rushing. Mapping. Like if he goes too fast he’ll wake up. I roll my hips once, just to feel him, and his fingers dig into my flesh.
“Don’t,” he says against my lips, wrecked. “Don’t do that. I will lose my mind.”
“Then lose it.”
He laughs, broken, and kisses my neck instead. Tongue. Teeth. The sensitive place under my ear that makes me gasp too loud in the quiet car. The windows are already fogging.
“We can’t here,” he murmurs into my throat, even as his hand slides higher. “Anyone could walk past. Anyone could see.”
“Then you’d better be quiet.”
That undoes him the way it did outside.
His fingers trace the edge of my underwear again. Asking. I part my thighs over his lap in answer, and he swears softly, forehead pressed to my collarbone.
“You’re already so wet for me,” he whispers, like it’s a secret. Like it wrecks him.
“I’ve been all night.”
His fingers slip beneath the lace.
Not inside. Not yet. Just skin. Just the slick heat of me, and the way his whole body goes taut when he feels it, like he’s been handed something he’s not allowed to keep.
He strokes me with two fingers, slow, devastating, learning me in the dark of a parked car while the world sits just beyond the glass.
I have to bury my face in his neck.
“I’ve got you,” he breathes. “I’ve got you. Just this. Just - god-”
His thumb finds me, circles, precise, while his fingers slide through my folds without pushing in.
It’s almost worse than if he had. The almost. The not yet.
I’m shaking in his lap, dress rucked around my hips, his mouth on my neck, my jaw, the corner of my lips, kissing me through every pass of his hand like he’s trying to memorize the sounds I’m not supposed to make.
The windows are white now.
“Benedict-”
“I know. I feel you. You’re so warm. So ready. I’ve thought about this. Your mouth. Your neck. My hand right here.” He groans against my throat. “I have thought about this every night since you kissed me in that bathroom.”
I kiss him to shut him up and it doesn’t work, because he keeps talking into my mouth, wrecked praise, filthy and tender at once.
“That’s it. Just like that. Use me. Take what you need. I’ve got you. No one can see. I’ve got you.”
His fingers press, circling, building. My hips rock into his hand without permission.
The steering wheel digs into my back. His other arm is locked around my waist, holding me to him like I might disappear.
I can feel how hard he is beneath me, ignored, aching, and he doesn’t ask for anything.
He just touches me like worship, like hunger, like a man who will wait.
“Look at me.”
I do. His eyes are blown, wrecked, so careful it makes my chest hurt.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he whispers. “Come on. I’ve got you. You’re so good. So quiet. Let go.”
I break.
Sharp. Sudden. My whole body locking around his hand as I bury my face in his neck to swallow the sound.
He doesn’t stop. He just slows, eases me through it, kissing my hair, my temple, the damp skin of my cheek, whispering I’ve got you, I’ve got you, that’s it until I’m trembling and boneless in his lap.
His hand withdraws like it costs him something.
He smooths my dress down. Gentle. Shaken. His forehead rests against mine while we both come back down. I can still feel him, hard against my thigh, and when I shift he makes a wounded sound and stills me with both hands.
“Don’t,” he says, laughing weakly. “Please. I am hanging on by a thread and I am not - not here. Not in this car. You deserve a bed. A door that locks. All the time in the world.”
I kiss the corner of his mouth.
“Then take me home.”
He nods. Once. Like he’s trying to remember how cars work.
I climb back into my own seat on legs that barely belong to me. He starts the engine. The defroster kicks on, eating the fog off the windshield in slow stripes, and for a moment we just sit there, flushed, kiss-bitten, the parking lot coming back into view like a secret we almost got caught in.
His hand finds mine over the console.
Squeezes.
“Seatbelt,” he says, and he’s smiling, wrecked and fond and still visibly uncomfortable.
I buckle in.
At every red light, his hand finds mine again.
When we pull onto my street he parks, kills the engine, and doesn’t move. Just looks at me in the dark.
“When we get inside,” he says, voice low, “I am going to put you in my lap and do that again. Properly. With the lights off. With my mouth this time. And nothing else. I want you shaking. I want you saying my name like you just did, except louder, because no one else gets to hear it. And then I want to hold you until you fall asleep on me.”
His thumb traces my lower lip.
“For tonight,” he says. “Just that.”
I swallow.
“Okay.”