Chapter 34Liem
34
Liem
I’d been a student of mindful breathing for nearly seven months.
Ever since my Dezi—the world’s Cody—came back into the orbit of my fascination.
Since those few times he showed up last fall when he was able to get off the cruise ship, returning a little changed each time.
But he was always so beautiful. So strong and good. So loyal.
When his spirit dimmed further with each visit, I suspected that it was more than just stress over his family, over Bree, causing it. I’d wanted to care for him, to pull him to me as he did me to him now. To get his body underneath me and force the stress from it.
But I couldn’t. It hadn’t been our place or our time.
So instead, I breathed.
I breathed through the months, the aches, and the longing. And during one of those guided exhales, I finally found myself here. With my legs wrapped around my fascination, who was both feverish and exalted, and with the taste of cherries pulled from his lush lips coating my own.
“Skin. I need your skin.” I tugged the hair at his nape, emphasizing my desperation.
Cody guided me off him then and pushed his hands under my shirt, his mossy hazel eyes on me as he pulled it over my head. He threw it onto the armchair in the corner without looking and then pulled off his own shirt, which followed the flight path of mine.
I drank him in, and my mouth immediately watered.
He was just so… expansive, and I was surprised to discover that I was glad he’d kept his shirt on in class.
I laid my hand over his bare chest, over his heart. His beautiful, golden skin flexed under my touch, like the sun casting its light on the flower tattoos on my fingers. I pressed them into his skin, one at a time, imagining them opening, blooming in his radiance.
This was for me.
“I love the way you look at me, Liem,” he whispered, his voice cracking on my name.
I pulled my gaze away from our blooms and up to his face as I trailed my hand down the center of his chest to the waistband of his jeans. “I like the way you look at me too.” I tugged on his jeans. “But please don’t make me beg, Dezi. I’m afraid I’m not up for it.”
He pushed his jeans to the floor along with his boxers. I followed the movement, resting my forehead on his chest as I looked down, losing oxygen as I gasped like a maiden.
He was stunning all over.
I’d felt him before, of course, but I’d never seen him in his full glory.
I rested my open palm below his belly button, his erection jutting out beneath it. I licked my lips, then forced another seven-count breathing pattern through me before I asked, “Can you do something else for me?”
We were like the Gulf tide crashing against the shore at a rapid pace before retreating again with gentle laps, only to crank up the intensity at the changing of the wind.
The contrasts, along with the ebbs and flows, were delicious and maddening.
“Liem,” Cody groaned before laughing huskily, the perfect sound to describe that thought. “You’re going to be the one making me beg, aren’t you?”
I stroked the side of my index finger down his length. “Hopefully.”
He convulsed, and a bead of precum appeared at his tip, which I gathered on my thumb as I asked conversationally, “How quickly do you think you’ll come the first time?”
His head dropped back. “Seconds, LL. Fucking seconds.”
I smiled at his honest answer, but my smile faded when I took in his clenched fists. I wanted to play with him, but not to the point of true torture. “Can you sit on the bed for me?”
He gripped my waist, reversed our positions, and then sat on the edge of the bed.
My heart, which I’d just calmed enough to think, beat wildly against my chest at the sudden adrenaline as I sank to my knees, grasped and widened his firm thighs, and took him straight into my mouth, just as he had done to me.
And oh, it was pure ecstasy. My eyes fluttered shut, and I just held him in my mouth, trying to register it all. The feel. The texture.
The taste.
Divine .
Soft, hard, salty, masculine.
I inhaled deeply through my nose.
Coconuts and a hint of cherries that I’d stolen from his lips.
There was a tug at my scalp, and I opened my eyes to find Cody laser-focused on me. He threaded his fingers through my hair, his grip firm and entirely, wonderfully pleasurable.
I gripped him at his base in return as I popped off him and then kissed a line from above my fist to his tip, keeping my eyes on him as I went.
“Fucking seconds,” he said, and I took that as the warning it was as I pumped my hand and took him back into my mouth.
Bobbing down his length, I retreated when I met my hand, then slid my fist up him, following the retreat of my mouth. I flicked my tongue against his tip and grazed my fingernail lightly down the side of his hardness, wondering how he’d respond to the contrast.
“ Fuck,” he exclaimed as his hips bucked off the bed. “So good, Liem. So good for me. I cannot believe my?—”
Positively, then.
He traded his words for an undefined curse, and I flicked my tongue against his tip again, dragged my nail back up, and he cursed once more.
Smiling, I took him deep into my mouth, my breathing exercises working well for both of us.
His hand tightened on my hair as he gritted through his teeth, “So. Good. For. Me.” He punctuated each word with the slightest push further into my mouth.
I coordinated strokes with sucks then, working him over in earnest.
It took more than a few seconds, but not many, before Cody’s hips bucked off the bed a final time, his thigh tensing under my right hand and his hardness buzzing in my left. “ Liem,” he moaned loudly, drawing the word out as he flooded my mouth with his release.
I swallowed on instinct, closing my eyes in ecstasy and elation.
If I had to paint this feeling, it would all be shades of gold.
Cody’s thumb brushed over my cheekbone, and I sighed dreamily, nuzzling against his inner thigh as I looked up at him.
He smiled back as he continued to lazily trace my face, and we just existed together.
“What did you want me to do for you that you mentioned earlier?” he asked eventually.
I rubbed my cheek against his leg as I searched my memory. The taste of him in my mouth, the feel of him still gripped in my hand, and the skin beneath my cheek were all too distracting to allow for easy recollection.
But some of the fog dissipated enough that I recalled the picture I’d painted in my head. I remembered, and now I needed to see if reality matched my imagination.
“I want you to stand by the window,” I said, soaking in his hooded gaze as he kept his attention on me. “In the light.”
He furrowed his brows, and his hand fell from my face. “Umm,” he started, “can’t think when you’re holding my dick, LL.”
I released him.
He slumped his shoulders and pouted, making his reddened bottom lip prominent. “That backfired.”
I laughed and then stood up from the floor, and he stood with me before walking straight to the bay window, his round, muscular ass flexing as he went.
He positioned himself there just as I’d asked, a perfect silhouette for so long that I was compelled to reach down and touch myself through my pants, biting back a moan at the perfection of my life.
At this human in the full light of day, uncovered. Bare. Revealed to me.
Wanting to feel what he was feeling, I slid my pants down my legs and pushed them to the side with my foot.
At the faint rustle, Cody twisted toward me, his jaw slackening as he unhurriedly swept his gaze over me.
But then it flexed, his face all the more gorgeous for it.
“You’re wanting,” he rumbled as he stalked toward me. “Did you see what you needed?”
“Yes,” I answered. “And no. But it’ll do fo?—”
He cut me off with his lips, holding my face in both of his hands. I grabbed his wrists, taking my time to taste him, sweeping my tongue in and exploring his mouth for so long that my body went faint at the lack of oxygen.
I didn’t want my breaths anymore. I wanted him to take them.
Releasing his wrists, I turned my head so I could kiss his palm just as Cody pushed my hair behind my shoulder and kissed down the side of my neck. He stroked down my throat, his breath fanning my skin before he pushed his thumb over my throbbing pulse. His pupils were entirely blown when he looked at me, all black with only the faintest bronze around the edges.
And then he released me, only to grasp me by the back of the thighs and lift me into the air. This time, when my back hit the bed, he followed me. His gorgeous, bare body caged me in as he crawled on top of me, herding me to the top of the mattress. Our erections bumped against each other as we went, and I couldn’t help but buck my hips to chase the feeling.
“You’re ready again,” I panted through a grin, understanding what I was feeling.
“It’s become a condition when I’m near you, Ti Bet,” he all but growled, then pressed his hips forward deliberately. “I’m not sure I’ve been anything but hard or semihard since you cut my hair.”
“Hallelujah,” I breathed, but he likely didn’t hear it as he buried his face in my neck and took a huge breath.
“That was the first time you touched me.” Encircling my wrist, he guided my hand to the back of his neck, just like in the classroom. “You touched me here first.” He guided my fingers to brush along his skin, shuddering as he said, “And then you painted me there.”
Cody’s laugh wasn’t so much a sound of joy but of need as he rolled his hips, sliding us against each other.
My toes curled in pleasure, and my back arched even as I tried to process what he’d said, but the feel of his bare skin on mine overshadowed coherent thought.
“It’s true,” he said, picking up on my muddled thoughts. “I was gone from the moment I heard your sweet voice, Liem, but I was doomed the first time you touched me.”
He bucked, sliding against me again, and any remaining capacity for thought evaporated.
“I’m going to make you mine now, Liem. Has anything changed for you?”
“Everything,” I breathed, “And nothing.”
He studied me for a second and seemed to grasp my meaning, because he sat back on his heels and bit his lip as he looked at me.
“These fucking nipple rings,” he started, low and hushed as he brushed his thumbs over the metal. “They haunt me.”
My body bowed beneath him, my spine tingling.
“Good?” he asked as he tugged on the piercings experimentally.
“So good,” I agreed. “Again, please.”
He followed my instruction and brushed his fingertips over my nipples again, toying with the metal, and my body jerked.
Cody smiled in satisfaction and then leaned over me, reaching for the bedside table, his broad chest blocking out the light temporarily until he returned with a bottle of lubricant in his hand.
He didn’t open it, though, instead setting it beside us before leaning down and kissing me on the lips, soft and sweet. Reaching past my head, he dragged a pillow from the pile and, just as he broke our kiss, lifted my hips and eased it under me to prop up my bottom half. I pressed a hand over my chest, the rapid beats increasing and then briefly stuttering to a halt as Cody’s kisses did the same.
He grasped my inner thighs, the flow of our lovemaking almost turning toward unhurried as we looked at each other, another small ebb in the current of our desire. His gaze moved down the length of my body then, intensity and anticipation pulsing between us as he pushed my legs apart. The next wave crested, escalating in force and becoming almost a tangible thing as I opened to him.
Cody’s expression became absolutely ravenous as the wave crashed, and his head disappeared between my legs.