Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
I woke up gasping for air, like I’d spent too long underwater, grasping at my throat like there was something in it making it hard to breathe.
It was dark, but not as dark as it had just been wherever I was.
Now there was moonlight coming in through the car window next to me, illuminating my hands as I held them up, made them into fists just so I could see whether I could squeeze them after all.
“Hey.” I heard a voice next to me, low and gentle, but it wasn’t that calm voice from before, the one that had said there was nothing to be concerned about. There was something to be concerned about. My body felt like it would explode with concern.
“Hey,” the voice said again, and I realized I’d been lashing out with my fists, making contact with the hard muscle of a chest, an arm, until I felt my wrists restrained in a firm grip. “It’s okay,” he said. “Shhh, hey, it’s okay.”
Eamonn. It all came flooding back to me, the last day I’d spent in Ireland, the reason we were sitting together in his car.
It was parked now, the silhouettes of a few skeletal trees the only thing I could make out in the dark outside the window.
I hoped that he’d parked it before my outburst, and hadn’t had to pull off the road in a rush. I really couldn’t remember.
I’d started to cry. I didn’t even know how hard I was crying until Eamonn loosened his hold on my wrists, pulling me closer to put his warm hands on either side of my face. “Jess,” he said, wiping at the tears on my cheeks with his thumbs. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”
Even in my frenzied state, I knew that the soft way he said my name didn’t mean anything—he was trying to calm me down, talk to me the same way he talked to that dog at the park.
It was only my imagination that made it sound romantic.
But the use of my name at all meant everything to me, because I didn’t know if this right now was the dream or if the vision I’d just left was, but I needed to be reminded that I was a person, that someone could see me.
I placed my hands over his on my face, wanting to touch him, wanting him to touch me harder.
When I pulled him in for a kiss, I mostly got his top lip until he slanted his mouth over mine, opening me up with his tongue.
I could feel his strong fingers on my cheeks, my jaw, holding me in place.
He kissed me like I was the dream he didn’t want to wake up from.
He licked at the corner of my mouth, where I’m sure some of my tears had gathered, and breathed my name against my parted lips.
“Jess…” He kissed my jaw up by where it met my ear. “Are you…”
I didn’t know what he was going to ask. Are you sure? maybe, or even Are you okay? I didn’t want to hear any questions because I didn’t want to have to stop to think about the answers. I just wanted to lose myself in the sensations of the here and now.
“You don’t need to be gentle with me,” I said, and I meant it in every way possible.
I didn’t need his soothing words, didn’t need him to ask why I was crying or what had made me wake up like I was coming out of a nightmare, because for all I knew, it had been a nightmare.
I couldn’t decide if I hoped it had been a nightmare or something else.
I also meant that it was okay if he held my wrists tighter, kissed me harder. I wanted that. I needed it.
He made a sound in the back of his throat, and then his hands were at my waist, half lifting me, half dragging me, and I was climbing over the center console to straddle him, our mouths still hot and wet on each other.
“I will always be gentle with you,” he said, but his hand was fisted in my hair as he tugged it back, pressing kisses against my exposed throat. “Jess, fuck.”
He was hard underneath me, and I ground down on him, feeling the friction through his pants, the thin fabric of my underwear. He groaned again, both hands threaded in my hair now, cradling my head as he pushed up into me.
“Tell me my brother never touched you,” he said against my mouth. “It’s been making me crazy.”
“He never touched me. I wouldn’t have let him touch me.”
Eamonn slid one hand between the two panels of fabric crossed over my chest, covering my breast with his palm. “He’s a dickhead,” he said, his thumb rubbing against the taut, painful bud of my nipple through the lace of my bra. “He’s always been a dickhead.”
I’d started moving on top of him in a pulsing rhythm, like we’d been on the dance floor earlier that night, the way I’d wanted to be as close as possible.
Eamonn had pushed one side of my dress down my shoulder, tugged my bra up over my breasts, reached down and shifted me closer by cupping my ass so that he could put his mouth on my nipple without breaking tempo.
I couldn’t help letting out a small huff of air, close to a laugh, which might’ve killed the mood except I felt him smile against me. “What?”
“This is all so surreal,” I said. “Being like this with you, here.”
The fact that my hands were in his hair, touching the soft fuzz above his ears, feeling the shape of his skull.
The sight of my own breast exposed through my open dress in the pale moonlight, my nipple wet with his spit, the feel of him against me as he took hold of my hips to drag me hard over his erection.
“Tell me you haven’t been thinking about this all day,” he said. “God knows I have.”
“Really?”
The word came out a little breathless, because his hands had found my bare thighs under my dress, his fingers biting into me as he hitched me higher and then down onto him. If not for the layers of clothes between us, we really would be fucking.
“I’m obsessed with this part of you,” he said, burrowing his face where my neck curved into my shoulder.
He dragged his open mouth over the spot, leaving a trail of his hot breath as he kissed my jaw up by my ear.
He took a deep inhale, and when he let it out it sounded a little shaky. “I’m obsessed with your hair.”
Eamonn squeezed my thighs, and I really wanted his hands to keep going, to touch me where I was most crying out for it. He took my lower lip between his teeth, and I let out a whimper that didn’t even sound like me.
“And your mouth,” he said, pressing his against mine, not even a full kiss so much as like he wanted to feel me, just for a second. “Your fucking mouth, you don’t even know.”
He sucked on my lower lip, sending a pulse straight to my clit. I moaned, wiggling my hips on top of him, trying to create friction where I needed it most.
“You did say you were orally fixated,” I said, panting a little between words. The tension was building to a point where I almost couldn’t bear it, I would do anything to ease it up whether that meant grinding on him harder or saying something light to defuse it a bit.
“That time I wasn’t thinking about your mouth.”
His hands were high enough up on my thighs now that his thumb could press against my underwear, rubbing my clit through the thin fabric. I clutched at his shoulders, arching my back as I leaned into it.
“Please,” I said. “God, please. Touch me.”
His knuckles brushed against me, his fingers playing with the edge of my underwear. “You’re so wet,” he said, running his thumb down my slit through the fabric. “I can feel it.”
“So feel it,” I said, pressing into him. “Please.”
When he slid his first finger inside me, I almost felt the rolling wave of an orgasm right then, could feel the tide edging closer before I willed it to recede.
I couldn’t say I’d been thinking about this all day, necessarily.
My imagination wasn’t that good. But I did have a flash of all the times I’d noticed his hands—wrapped around a stick shift, petting a dog, fixing a stack of books, half under my dress while he grabbed my thighs for the first time.
I couldn’t believe he was inside my body.
“Eamonn,” I gasped, because I liked to say his name.
“So wet,” he said, pushing in deeper, filling me up.
He was looking down at my exposed chest, which rose and fell as I panted my need on him.
When he curled his finger inside me, I gave a strangled cry, leaning into him so he couldn’t see my face.
It seemed too intimate, all of a sudden, more intimate even than the way he worked inside me, adding another finger.
His earlobe was right next to my mouth, and I bit down gently on it, giving it a tug with my teeth. Now that I had thought about, this exact moment, and I wanted to relish it. I swirled my tongue in the shell of his ear, and felt him shudder beneath me.
“Fuck,” he said, his hand pausing for just a moment, his fingers still filling me up, before he started stroking me again. “Fuck, Jess, I want to make you come.”
He had me halfway there, just with those words. “Again,” I breathed into his ear. “Say that again.”
“Come for me,” he said. He rubbed my clit, hard, and I felt that wave cresting again. “Ride my fingers. That’s it.”
I’d started moving my hips on top of him, grinding myself against his fingers even as he was pumping them into me.
I held on to his shoulders as I felt my whole body clench, the orgasm hitting me hard enough to make me grip him tight, my nails digging into the muscles of his back through his T-shirt.
When it had passed, I was limp and wrung out on top of him, the sound of my own breathing suddenly loud in the otherwise quiet car.
“Jess.” Eamonn’s fingers were still inside me, and he was saying my name, and I understood better what he was talking about before, how if it felt good then why not keep going.
But I also felt a little embarrassed, now that the most heightened emotions had passed.
I’d woken up from a bad dream and I’d just…
attacked him? Started kissing him, climbed on top of him, ridden him like he was some kind of toy for my pleasure?
“Oh my god,” I said, really looking at him for the first time since I’d hidden my face, then immediately glancing back away, because that meant I could see him looking at me, too.
There had been something too soft and almost grave about his expression, something too close to the way he’d looked when staring up at the ceiling in the church. “I’m so sorry.”
I felt the sudden emptiness as his fingers left my body, sliding a stripe of wetness along my inner thigh.
“What are you sorry for?”
For the fact that I just came all over him.
For the fact that I could feel that he was still hard beneath me, that I’d never even gotten to touch him before having this post-sex panic attack.
For the fact that it had been my post-dream panic attack that had led to all of this in the first place, and maybe I’d forced something to happen that otherwise wouldn’t have, or at least not right now, in his car, parked somewhere along the side of the road in the middle of the night.
But I couldn’t imagine saying any of that out loud, so instead I started the shameful process of putting myself back together, pulling my bra down and shifting my dress to cover myself again.
Getting off his lap was ten times more awkward than getting onto his lap had been, between the steering wheel that dug into my back when I tried to move and the fact that Eamonn apparently wasn’t as invested in helping me off as he’d been in getting me on.
Finally, he lifted me by the waist to help throw myself back into the passenger seat in a tangle of limbs, my hair falling over my face.
My hips were unused to all these contortions, on top of a day filled with walking, and I knew they’d be sore for a while.
I also ached deep in my core. I could still feel the way his fingers had felt inside me, the way I’d clenched around them as I came.
“Sorry,” I said again.
I was pretty sure my elbow had connected with his chest at one point as I was pushing myself off him.
He was rubbing the area above his heart, like it hurt there, and I hoped he’d count my apology for that, too.
Eventually, he reached down to turn the key in the ignition, and it was only when he switched the heat back on that I realized I’d started to shiver.
“I’m going to get some air,” he said, and then he was out of the car before I could say anything, shutting the door behind him.
I leaned my head back against the seat, trying not to cry.
Trying not to cry again, since I could still feel the tracks from my first round of tears cold and drying on my cheeks.
How had I managed to fuck this up so badly?
One minute we’d been together, and it had felt so good.
God knows I have, he’d said about how he’d been thinking about it all day, being with me, and in that moment I’d believed it.
All the tension I’d been feeling, this strange, almost primal connection. It hadn’t just been in my own head.
But then it had felt so overwhelming, being with him. Having him touch me like that, make me come apart like that. I hadn’t known what to do with it.
I’d also been using him to distract myself from thinking about that dream, or whatever I’d woken up from, which I knew wasn’t right.
It had seemed like…was I in a coma? Back in my real life, if that’s what the vision was of?
So what did that mean about where I was now, what did that mean about any of it?
When I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, I almost didn’t recognize the woman I saw.
My hair was a mess, tangled and flipped to one side.
I’m obsessed with your hair. My eyes were swollen from crying, and my lower lip looked puffy and almost bruised.
Your fucking mouth, you don’t even know.
If this were a dream, surely I would’ve chosen something exactly like this, a hot guy who would get me off and say nice things about me.
So then why did I feel so guilty and bad?
I flipped open the glove compartment, hoping to find a package of tissues or something I could use to clean up my face.
There weren’t any tissues, but there was a neat stack of paperwork inside what looked like a gallon Ziploc bag, what I could see even at a glance looked like records of car parts purchased, services performed.
When I looked out the window, Eamonn was standing in the grass, his hands in his pockets, staring out at where the earliest morning light was starting to leak into the sky.
I took a deep breath, and opened my door.