Chapter 3
three
. . .
By the time I pulled out of the garage, my body was still arguing with every good decision I’d made in the last hour.
My hands sat at ten and two like I was calm.
Like I was just another woman driving home from another mixer with a decent drink in her system and good music low through the speakers.
Like I had not spent the better part of the evening trying not to picture what Micah Sutton might feel like if the room disappeared and all that dark-eyed restraint he wore so well finally gave way.
That man had touched the small of my back for maybe one second, and my body had been carrying on ever since. His voice, his mouth, the way he looked at me like he was seeing more than my face and liking what he found—all of it had stayed with me.
And then there were his words.
That I actually looked like myself.
That one stayed with me because it was honest, a little rude, and exactly the kind of thing a man only got away with when some part of you already knew he was right.
The light ahead changed. I eased forward, city glow sliding over the hood in streaks of gold and red.
There was a time when a younger version of me might have looked a man like that in the face, smiled once, and asked whether he was coming home with me or not.
This version of me had better sense.
My pussy, unfortunately, did not care.
I laughed under my breath and turned the music up instead of down, because pretending quiet was going to save me felt foolish at that point.
Carl Thomas had already settled into “Hey Now,” smooth and low through the car, all that grown, intimate heat in his voice like he knew exactly what kind of mood he was helping me nurse instead of escape.
The song was too on the nose.
Too much silk. Too much late-night possibility. Too much of that come here and quit acting like you don’t know what this is energy.
Exactly where my mind was.
Because that was the truth I was trying not to dress up into something more respectable on the drive home.
I wanted Micah. In the immediate, body-first, grown-woman way that made logic feel like a suggestion and not a rule.
I wanted to know if he kissed the way he looked at me.
Wanted to know if that restraint was real or if it only held because the room had witnesses.
Wanted to know what his hands would do if nobody else was around to make him behave.
I should have been relieved I’d come home alone.
Instead, I felt unfinished.
My phone sat in the holder beside me, full of possibility in the way phones were now. One story. One reaction. One sentence, and the night could stretch itself past the place I had left it.
At the next red light, I picked it up, took a picture, and sent it to my story.
Just my hand on the wheel, lavender nails against black leather, the dashboard lit low and pretty, Carl Thomas sliding through the car like he had been sitting in my lap all night telling me to quit bullshitting myself.
I typed the caption before I could talk myself out of it.
maybe some things really do hit different in person.
I posted it and set the phone back down.
The light turned green.
Halfway to the bridge, the screen lit.
I looked.
Micah had replied to my story.
That caption got a little too close to the truth for me not to feel like I was in it.
My mouth curved before I could stop it. His wordplay was dizzying. It was …foreplay.
At the next light, I typed back.
Did it?
This time, his reply took long enough for me to feel the space between messages. Long enough to picture him reading what I wrote, maybe smiling to himself a little, maybe deciding how much honesty to hand me back.
My thighs pressed together on instinct, a small, useless movement that only made me more aware of the ache gathering there.
Because that was the problem. Micah was fine, yes. He had sense, which made the fine worse. But the conversation had been good enough to follow me out of the room, into my car, through the city, and all the way into places I was trying to ignore while operating a vehicle.
It was the way he had looked at me like wanting me was not a performance. Like he had clocked exactly what was happening between us and saw no reason to insult either one of us by pretending otherwise.
That sat lower than flirtation. That sat in my body.
I knew better than to answer him. I also knew if I didn’t, I’d think about it all the way home anyway, and there was something even more embarrassing about acting indifferent in private when my whole body had already picked a side.
The city moved around me. Red lights. Passing headlights. Glass and steel and soft dark between buildings. And all through it, Micah kept coming back to me in pieces.
His hand at my back. His eyes on me. That voice. That little current under his words like he knew exactly how close he was standing to saying something he couldn’t take back.
By the time I got to the townhouse, I was tired in the wrong places.
Tight. Too aware. Full of heat with nowhere useful to put it.
I parked, grabbed my clutch, and let myself in with the kind of practiced calm I had spent years learning. Keys in the bowl. Heels off by the door. Lights low. The city beyond the windows all gold points and soft distance.
And still, under the silk of my dress and the gloss on my mouth, the truth sat plain as day.
I had gone downtown for a drink.
I had come home wanting a man.
His mouth. His hands. That broad, steady body I had only gotten one decent touch from and had been building trouble around ever since.
I stood there in the quiet for a second and let the wanting have its name.
Then I walked to the bedroom like I already knew exactly where the night was headed, dropping one earring on the dresser and the other on the chaise because precision had left me somewhere around the bridge.
My phone buzzed once in my purse. I ignored it.
If it was him, good. If it wasn’t, I didn’t care.
The dress came off first.
I peeled it down slowly, silk dragging over my thighs before it landed in a dark heap at my feet. Then the bra. Then the panties, warm and damp enough to make me pause when I hooked my fingers into the sides and pulled them down.
“Ridiculous,” I murmured to the empty room.
My body offered no rebuttal.
It did not need one.
I stood naked in front of the mirror for a moment. Gloss a little faded. Pixie still laid. Nipples hard, skin warm from lotion and city air and being looked at the way he had looked at me.
That was the part still working on me.
How he looked.
Greedy enough for me to notice, controlled enough for me to respect. Like a man trying hard to stay decent while his body had already moved on to less civilized thoughts.
I understood that look because I had worn its twin all the way home.
I wrapped my hair up, turned the shower on hot, and stepped in before the water had fully settled, hissing once when it hit my skin.
Steam climbed fast, wrapping the room in warmth.
I braced one hand against the tile and let the water run over my shoulders, my throat, my breasts, down between my thighs where I was still too aware and nowhere near sorry enough about it.
Carl Thomas was still in my head.
Hey now…
That low, intimate sweetness of it. The kind of song that made a woman feel held in her own wanting instead of ashamed of it.
And God, I was wanting.
His voice found me first. The texture of it.
That baritone. The way it dropped at the ends of certain sentences like he knew better than to oversell a point.
The way my name had sounded in his mouth.
The way he’d said I actually looked like myself and somehow made honesty feel like a hand closing around the back of my neck.
I slid my palm over my stomach, lower.
There had been a time I would have ignored this. Let the tension follow me into sleep. Let maturity have the last word.
There had also been a time I would have brought him home and let him work the rest out himself.
Tonight, I had done neither.
Tonight, I stood under hot water with Micah Sutton’s eyes in my head and one hand between my legs like that was somehow a sensible compromise.
It wasn’t.
It was enough for now.
My fingers slipped through my slickness easily, and the first slow circle over my clit made my breath catch so sharply I had to close my eyes and just feel it.
There.
That ache.
That fucking pull.
That deep, hot little pulse that had been following me since the second his hand landed at my back and let my body know this man was not hypothetical anymore.
I did it again.
Slower this time. Then tighter. The pad of my finger dragging, circling, easing the ache open instead of away. Water ran over my breasts while I rubbed myself deeper into it, my head tipping back against the tile, my mouth falling open.
His hand at my back. His gaze on my mouth. The way he’d looked relieved when he saw me, like the truth of me had given him something he didn’t know he’d needed.
That did something low and mean to me.
“Mmmm,” I breathed, the sound disappearing into the steam.
My fingers moved with more purpose now. Small circles. Then firmer ones. A wet, steady pressure that made my thighs tense and my stomach pull tight. My other hand moved over my waist, up my stomach, over my breast, thumb brushing one hard nipple, and that only made it worse.
Because the ache was not only about his face or his body or that hand I kept replaying.
It was the mind behind the restraint. The way he listened.
The way he answered without reaching for applause.
Talking to him had not felt like work. I had not had to drag him toward substance and hope he could stay there.
He had just been there.
Watching. Listening. Matching me thought for thought.
Making the conversation feel like it had a body of its own before either one of us touched the other.
My fingers moved faster.
A tighter circle. Then another. Slickness and hot water made the friction sweet, almost too good. I bit down on my lip as a moan started low and climbed out of me anyway.
His cologne came back to me then, warm and expensive and close.
I imagined stepping into it. Into him. Imagined that same big hand at my back, lower now.
His mouth at my throat. His palm spreading my thigh open with the kind of quiet confidence that would have made resistance feel decorative at best.
I could almost feel it.
That was what got me.
The shape of him in the fantasy. The weight. The steadiness. The deepness. The idea of a thick dick pushing into me slow while that voice dropped lower in private and told me exactly what he was about to do.
“Oh, fuck.”
The sound left me before I could care.
I pressed harder over my clit, circling it in short, wet strokes while my body tightened toward something hot and overdue.
My thighs started trembling. My stomach pulled taut.
My pussy clenched around nothing, already greedy, already grasping like there should have been something there to answer it.
Him.
That was the truth.
I wanted a body there. Wanted thickness. Weight. A hand to hold me open. A mouth to kiss me through it. Wanted that big, composed man between my thighs making me lose every bit of my own good sense.
That thought nearly took me out by itself.
My fingers slipped lower for a second, teasing at my opening, then back up to my clit because that was where the ache was meanest. I rubbed harder.
Faster. My breath broke. My body coiled.
My free hand flattened against the tile as if I needed something solid to brace against while I came apart around absolutely nothing.
His voice.
His eyes.
That hand.
The way he had looked at me like he already knew what we both weren’t saying.
I came apart with a broken little moan that got swallowed by steam, my body shuddering around emptiness, pussy clenching hard at air like it was looking for a thick dick that wasn’t there.
My thighs shook. My stomach seized. I kept rubbing myself through it because the pleasure had turned almost too intense to bear and still wasn’t enough to make me stop.
Then it reached that edge. That oversensitive, almost painful sweetness that made me snatch my hand back with a hiss.
After that, there was only water, my breathing, the cool tile under my feet, and the city still alive somewhere beyond the bathroom walls.
The orgasm had been real. Good too. My legs were still weak from it. My skin too tight. My pussy still pulsing from the aftershocks.
But my body knew the difference.
Fingers from fullness.
Fantasy from flesh.
Relief from being answered.
I stood there a minute longer and let the water run over me while my heartbeat settled.
Micah Sutton was still very much a problem.