Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
ALANA
The coffee machine is older than me and twice as stubborn.
I’ve been fighting it for three minutes, pushing buttons, pulling the lever, twisting something that might be a dial or might be decorative.
My hands shake. The machine looks like something that would grind coffee beans with its bare hands if you asked it nicely, and about as friendly as a bear trap.
I’m pretty sure if I press the wrong button, it’s either going to make espresso or demand I sign away my firstborn.
Zac comes up behind me and every nerve I have lights up. His chest is against my back. His hands come over mine on the lever, and he’s warm and he smells like coffee and that pine-resin soap, and everything from yesterday rushes back in this crushing wave of want.
“Needs pressure on the release while you turn,” he says, and his mouth is close enough to my ear that I can feel the warmth of him.
I turn around instead of following his instructions.
We’re inches apart. Maybe less. The coffee machine is forgotten. He looks at me like he’s running calculations — probably the same calculations I’m running, which are: what are we doing and does he actually want this and what happens when my brother finds out.
“Are you going to keep pretending you don’t want to kiss me?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer with words.
His hand comes up to my face first — just his thumb, tracing the line of my jaw, slow, like he’s memorizing the shape of me before he ruins us both. My breath stops. His eyes drop to my mouth, and the look on his face is something between surrender and starvation.
Then his hand cups the back of my head.
He pulls me in. Not fast. Deliberate. Like he’s been rehearsing this in his head for four years and he’s not going to rush the opening line.
His mouth finds mine, and for exactly one second it’s controlled — soft pressure, warm lips, the scratch of his beard against my chin. One second of restraint.
Then it breaks.
His other hand grips my hip and drags me closer, and the kiss goes deep and desperate and nothing like gentle.
His mouth is warm and rough and nothing like I imagined — better, realer, the kind of kiss that rewires you from the inside.
I’m gripping his flannel with both fists because my legs have forgotten their entire job description.
His beard scrapes my chin, my jaw, the soft skin under my ear, and I don’t care — I want the burn of it, want to feel this tomorrow, want proof it happened.
His tongue finds mine and the sound he makes — low, rough, involuntary, like something just broke loose in his chest — vibrates through my mouth and drops straight to the base of my spine.
Four years. He’s been holding this back for four years, and I can feel every single one of them in the way he kisses me, like he’s making up for lost time, like he’s terrified I’ll vanish if he stops.
I won’t. I’m not going anywhere.
His hand tightens in my hair and tilts my head back, and the new angle deepens everything.
I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe.
Breathing would mean pulling away, and pulling away is not something my body is willing to negotiate right now.
My hands slide up his chest, over his shoulders, into his hair, and I pull him closer like closer is a place we haven’t found yet.
I’ve imagined this. A hundred times in my dorm room, a thousand times in the dark.
None of it was close. None of it included the way his body feels like a wall I want to climb, or the way his hands shake against my hip like he’s barely holding on, or the way he kisses me like I’m the answer to a question he’s been asking himself since the Fourth of July barbecue where I crossed the yard in a yellow sundress and he forgot how to speak.
He pulls back. Breathing hard. His forehead presses against mine, and I can feel his pulse through his chest — fast, hammering, completely wrecked. His eyes are dark. His voice is rough.
“Tell me to stop.”
I grab the front of his flannel. “Make me.”
He lifts me onto the counter. The tile is cold against the back of my thighs, and he steps between my knees, and my hands are in his hair and he’s holding my face like he’s afraid I might disappear. His mouth moves down my neck, and every nerve ending in my body screams.
I’m in his flannel from last night, nothing underneath, and he doesn’t unbutton it. He pushes it open one side at a time, slow, watching my skin appear like he’s unwrapping something he’s been thinking about since I walked into the kitchen.
“Been staring at you all morning,” he says, his thumb dragging across my nipple. “Fighting that coffee machine in my shirt with nothing under it. You have any idea what that does to me?”
His hand keeps moving. Down over my belly — he doesn’t skip it, presses his palm flat against the curve like he’s claiming that too — and lower.
I’m only wearing underwear beneath the flannel, thin cotton, already soaked through, and he hooks the fabric to the side instead of pulling it off.
Like undressing me properly would cost seconds he can’t spare.
One finger traces me first. Just the outside. Slow. Barely there. I’m so wet the sound is obscene and my face burns, but he groans against my neck like it’s the best thing he’s ever heard.
“Fuck, Alana.” His voice sounds like it’s been dragged across gravel. “You’re dripping for me.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me, and he holds up two fingers.
“Lick,” he says.
It’s a command, not a request. He wants them wetter. He wants to watch. I take his fingers into my mouth and hold his eyes while I do it, and the power of that — doing this because he told me to, tasting myself on his skin — undoes something in both of us.
He slides those wet fingers inside me. Slow. Deliberate. The feeling is so specific, so different from my own hand — thicker, rougher, the calluses catching in a way that makes my brain go white — and I grip his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
“That’s it,” he murmurs against my ear, his beard scraping my jaw. “Relax. Let me in.”
A third finger. Slow. Stretching me open. I gasp and his mouth finds my ear.
“Breathe,” he says. “That’s it. Take all three.”
He curls them and something lights up deep inside me that I didn’t know existed.
“There she is.” His voice is rough and sure.
“Right there. Feel that? Feel how your body’s pulling me in?
” He moves his fingers in a slow circle and I make a sound I’ve never heard myself make.
“Good girl. That’s it. You’re so full of my fingers — been thinking about this, haven’t you?
Since last night? Since you were touching yourself in my bed? ”
His thumb finds my clit. Presses. Circles.
I can’t answer. I can barely function. He moves his fingers in a slow circle inside me, and his thumb has a rhythm going that’s deliberately building me toward something, and it’s so fast and so intense that I’m embarrassed when I realize I’m already there.
“I can’t—“ I push at his shoulder. “It’s too much. I can’t?—“
“You can.” His mouth drops to my chest. His lips close around my nipple and he sucks, hard, and the sensation connects straight to where his fingers are moving inside me like there’s a wire between the two points I didn’t know existed.
I arch off the counter. His teeth graze the peak — not gentle, not careful — and the bite sends a shock through me that makes my thighs clamp around his wrist.
“That’s it,” he says against my breast, his voice vibrating through my skin. “Right there. Let me feel you.”
His fingers curl. His thumb presses. His teeth catch my nipple again — harder this time, deliberate — and everything inside me pulls tight like a rope about to snap.
“Zac — I’m —“
“I know.” His thumb grinds down on my clit and his fingers curl deep at the same time and I shatter.
The orgasm tears through me — not a wave, a detonation — and I’m gripping his hair with one hand and the counter edge with the other, and the sounds coming out of me aren’t words.
His fingers keep moving, slower now, drawing it out, and his mouth gentles on my breast, tongue soothing where his teeth just were.
Every aftershock rolls through me and he catches it, rides it, keeps me right there on the edge until my whole body goes limp.
I’m still shaking when he pulls his fingers out. Still trying to remember how lungs work. My thighs are trembling against the counter. I feel hollowed out and full at the same time, like he just rearranged something fundamental inside me.
He drops to his knees.
“Zac, wait — I can’t — it’s too much.”
“You can.” His breath is hot against my inner thigh. “One more.”
“I’m too sensitive. I can’t come again.”
“Yes you can.” Zac presses a hot, open-mouthed kiss to the crease of my thigh, beard scraping my skin as his breath ghosts over me. “This pussy is mine now, Alana. And it’s going to come on my tongue until you forget how to say anything but my name.”
“I can’t?—“
“You said that last time.” His huge hands grip my hips, spreading my thighs so wide the stretch burns in the best way. “And then you came so hard on my fingers you soaked my whole hand and tried to rip my hair out.”
“That’s—that’s not fair.”
“I don’t play fair with what belongs to me.
” He lifts his head just enough for me to see his face — eyes black, beard already shiny with me, jaw clenched like he’s barely holding himself back.
“I’ve been starving for this taste for four years.
Since that barbecue where you crossed the yard in a yellow sundress and I forgot how to breathe. Tell me to stop. Mean it. I dare you.”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out except a shaky breath. Because I don’t want him to stop. I want him to own me.
“That’s what I thought.” His voice drops to pure gravel. “Good girl. Now watch me eat what’s mine.”