Chapter 15
One Night, Eight Years Ago
Bea
Silas kisses a spot below my jaw before he makes like he’s going to move away, then hitches on a sound and bites me in the juncture of my neck.
“Need a second,” he says into my collarbone, letting his mouth rest there. I tilt my head back against the house and smile up at the starlit sky, bubbles of anticipation popping under my skin. Every time my chest presses into his, my blood fizzes.
“I’ll see if anyone’s still awake,” he says. “I’m guessing you’re not dying to chat it up with my roommates?”
I look down the length of our bodies; at his hoodie pulled off my shoulder and my top pulled precariously off-kilter, to where I clearly damaged his collar in my efforts to get at his neck. Down to the bulge in his jeans.
“I’d say we’re a little too incapacitated for chitchat.” In dire straits, even.
He tracks my eyes’ path and does a lap of his own, slipping his hands around my hips and pulling them against his with a lurid grunt. I feel it like a lick up my neck. “Got it. We’ll sneak in.”
We take a side entrance and tiptoe up the stairs to his room, my hand in his the whole way.
He hauls me across his front through the door before ducking inside, shutting it quietly behind him in one smooth motion.
I glance around furtively. Shockingly clean.
Downright orderly. A made bed? With throw pillows?
I can count on one hand the guys I’ve hooked up with who had both made beds and throw pillows.
Let alone a whole bedframe with a headboard.
“What do you think?” comes his low voice, and I think I detect a hint of worry in it. “Up to snuff?”
I find him with his hands trapped behind his back, leaned up against his door, his eyes shadowed in the muted blue light shining through his sheer curtains. I can just make out the bob of his throat.
“Come here,” he says.
But other thoughts are trying to make themselves known, and I need him to drown them out as quickly as possible.
I take two steps toward him and pause, unzip his hoodie, and strip off my top so I’m naked from the waist up.
He lets out a harsh sound and is on me before I can drop it from my fingertips.
And then he’s pulling off his own shirt, chuckling into my mouth as I reach across to yank it over his head.
He swallows down my noises and presses us chest to chest, bands a hard arm beneath my ass and lifts me.
In four strides, I’m on my back, and pillows are being flung.
He looms above me, big and all-encompassing, breathing hard, unsure where to look.
“Fuck,” he whispers. “Beautiful.” The slow, dazed way he says it makes the word drag out of him, like he started with Bea and remembered partway through to finish.
“Another nickname?” I tease. He reaches over and palms a breast, then bends down and puts his mouth to it like he can’t help himself. Sweet, molten joy bursts through me at the touch. He blows out a dark laugh around my nipple before flicking it with his tongue, toying with the tiny barbell there.
“Just a truth,” he says, voice thick.
I keep trying to urge him faster, and he thwarts me every time.
I want something frenzied, mindless. Want to be held in the cloud of sensation I’m floating in and fucked stupid.
But he shapes his hands over me reverently, clasping at my waist to squeeze, lifting me into an arch off the bed so he can use me to grind himself against. Crude and needy and slow, letting me feel every inch.
He looks up his brow at me when his hands reach my jeans, asking permission.
I bite my lip to stop myself from saying anything too desperate, and nod.
Our stares catch again when he finishes peeling them off, his chain swinging into his mouth. He bites a wicked smile around it.
Silas. This is Silas, I think. The one who gave me rides for half of sophomore year, who dropped off mashed potatoes and Jell-O for a week after I had my wisdom teeth pulled.
The one who always picked up on any discomfort around other guys at parties and ran interference, happily.
The Silas who still sent me his condolences when my family dog passed away two years ago, even though we weren’t really speaking then.
This was the Silas I apparently missed these last four years, who I suspect had missed me, too, and still respected my space.
I want him and this, and I resent that I feel even the slightest bit of shame over it when it feels this right.
I can’t allow myself to acknowledge it. Maybe I am greedy or selfish or just fucking desperate to feel good, but regardless, I’m past the point of caring—I don’t want to stop.
Maybe if I close my eyes, I can just feel.
Leave the complicated shit for tomorrow.
But then his tongue dips into the hollow of my navel and my hands rake into his hair and I couldn’t look away from his face moving down between my thighs if I tried.
Not as his stubble chafes along my skin and the metal of his chain drips over me in its wake, or at his mouth pressing a kiss into the slippery material of my panties.
He cups the backs of my knees and rolls me over. I let out an eager, grateful sound, assuming he’s read my urgency and is skipping over foreplay for the main act.
He doesn’t. Before I can ask about a condom, he begins tracing more of me with his hands and lips.
The knobs of my spine, each divot in my lower back.
He does it until I’m sinking deeper onto my forearms and pushing my chest into the bedspread, my ass higher into the air.
Warm, calloused fingers glide back and forth along the top string of my thong before he pulls it taut.
I sob out at the friction, the material slipping against my aching cunt.
“Bea, baby. Can I get a taste?”
I’m nodding, the bedding hissing softly against my cheek.
“Let me hear you?” he says plaintively. Then, firmer, more demanding, “I want to hear you.”
“Yes,” I say.
He gently glides off that last bit of fabric, lifting each knee until he can slide it off all the way, until I am utterly bare, completely vulnerable to him.
He uses his thigh to nudge mine wider apart, exposing me somehow more.
I’m certain I’m embarrassingly wet, can feel it in how cool the air gets against my hot skin.
He reaches down to palm the back of my head briefly, so heartbreakingly tender my throat goes tight, then places one more featherlight kiss to the base of my spine.
I do my best to hold still, to not circle my hips or reach back to ease that needful throb.
I curl my hands into fists while his massage the soles of my feet, my calves, the backs of my thighs, before giving my ass an appreciative squeeze.
“Fuck. Fucking beautiful,” he says again, this time an edge of mirth there, like he can’t believe it. Like how dare I and also of course I dare.
“Please—”
He saves me from begging, his mouth cutting me off when it closes over me completely, hot tongue licking up my center, his grip hardening around my hips, holding me flush to his face.
And then he’s working at my clit like he’s mad at it, teasing around me just beyond where I need him, pushing back the hood and flattening, lapping at me, sucking at me, kissing me.
Humming coarse, satisfied noises into me like he’s getting as much as he gives.
His thumbs circle and spread. His whole face becomes involved, his nose rubbing against me in places I’ve never wanted touched before.
He catches each fold of me in his teeth, not quite biting, but I swear he is smiling.
It’s either hours or seconds or days until I’m a whimpering, groaning wreck.
Shaking with it, grinding myself back into him shamelessly, fucking desperately, all while he murmurs praise into my skin.
Low, exhaled curses and things like So good, Bea, and Yeah, that’s a pretty sound, and I fucking knew it’d be like this.
He pinches my clit between a forefinger and thumb and tugs, then slips the thumb of his other hand inside me and uses it to rock me back and forth, some toy at his disposal.
The orgasm rips through me before I process that I’m there—over the brink before I realize I’m approaching it.
Blinding-bright waves so good I dissolve into watery laughter.
I’m melting into the bed when Silas comes down beside me and flips me over, arranging us chest to chest on our sides, guiding my head onto his bicep. His panting, grinning mouth hovers close to my laughing one like he needs it over air.
God, he’s beautiful like that. Self-satisfied and glistening.
“Why are these still on?” I ask him, hooking a finger into one of his belt loops. A sound dies in the back of my throat when I palm him through his jeans, though I’m not sure why I’m surprised at the thick size of him. I should’ve figured.
His breath snags, eyes rolling closed, hips pushing into my hand. “Take them off,” he says. Then, like he’s unsure about the command, “Please.”
“I thought you promised a distinct lack of manners,” I say. But I lean into him and bite his earlobe before I drag down his pants, and all he manages is a crisp grunt in response.
I reach into his briefs and wrap my hand around him, inhaling a soft gasp when I look down between us to watch.
I take in the sight of me working beneath the snug cotton, his strong, hairy thighs as they flex, the indentations his blunt fingertips make when they clutch at my limbs.
. . . The weed makes every pang of want shudder in slow motion, like my nerves are wobbly with satisfaction.
“Condom?” I whisper, a small shock going through me when my gaze strays back up to his and finds him studying my face.