Chapter Three #2
“Beautiful,” he murmurs, his hands sliding up my inner thighs, spreading me open. “So fucking beautiful.”
When his mouth descends on me, I cry out, my back arching off the bed. His tongue is hot and skilled, finding my center with devastating precision. He licks into me like he’s starving, like he can't get enough. The sensation is so intense I have to grip the sheets to anchor myself.
“Oh God,” I pant, my hips bucking against his mouth. “Lachlan…”
He doesn’t stop. If anything, he doubles his efforts, his tongue circling my clit before dipping lower, his hands holding my thighs apart when I try to close them. Pleasure builds rapidly, a tight coil winding deep in my belly, higher and higher with every stroke of his tongue.
“That’s it,” he murmurs against me, the vibration making me moan. “Let go, kitten. Come for me.”
His words push me over the edge. I shatter, crying out his name as wave after wave of sensation crashes through me, my body trembling uncontrollably. He doesn’t stop licking me through it, drawing out every pulse until I’m limp and gasping, my vision blurred at the edges.
He rises above me, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes dark with satisfaction. “Good girl,” he says softly.
Two words. That’s all it takes, and my whole chest goes warm and stupid with it.
“Again,” he says.
I blink up at him, still shaking. “I can’t—”
“You can.” He’s already moving, settling beside me, one arm sliding beneath my shoulders until I’m tucked back against his chest. His other hand skims down my stomach, unhurried, like we have all night. “Open your legs for me.”
I do it without thinking. That’s the part that undoes me. That I don’t even hesitate.
“There she is,” he murmurs against my ear.
His fingers find me slick and swollen, and he takes his time, learning me. One finger, slow, working in and out while the heel of his hand grinds against my clit. I whimper, my head falling back against his shoulder, my hips chasing the rhythm he sets.
“Feel that?” he says, low and rough in my ear. “How easy you open up for me?”
“Lachlan—”
“Look down. Watch.”
I do, and it’s obscene—his hand between my thighs, his forearm flexing, the ink dark against my skin. He adds a second finger, and I keen, my body clamping around him, the stretch riding the edge of too much.
“Breathe,” he says. “You can take it.”
And I can. That’s the thing. Whatever he tells me I can do, I do. He curls his fingers and finds something inside me that whites out the edges of my vision. He stays there, precise and merciless, his thumb working tight circles while I come apart against his chest.
“That’s my girl. Give me one more.”
I break with a sound I’ve never made before, my whole body seizing, my thighs clamping around his wrist. He works me through every last pulse, murmuring things I only half hear, holding me together while I come undone.
When I come back into myself, I’m boneless and shaking, and his arm is still solid underneath me.
He presses a kiss to my temple. Then he shifts, easing out from under me, and moves to sit on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands.
“I should go,” he says, his voice rough. “I won’t take you tonight. Not like this.”
I push myself up on trembling arms.
I want to argue. I want to tell him I’m ready, that I don’t care how it happens or where. He could have me right now, and I wouldn’t stop him.
I don’t say any of it. Because he isn’t asking, and something in the set of his shoulders tells me the answer was never going to be mine to give.
“Then when?” I ask instead.
He turns his head and looks at me over his shoulder for a long moment, and whatever’s in his face, it isn’t refusal.
“When I take you,” he says, “it won’t be in a dorm room with a door that doesn’t lock. Two days after I made you cry in my kitchen.” His jaw works. “It’ll be in my bed. And you’ll know exactly what you’re walking into when you get there.”
Heat floods me all over again, low and molten.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“That’s not tonight, Tatum.”
“I know.”
“Say it back to me.”
“Not tonight.” It comes out unsteady. He hears it because something in his expression softens.
He finds my blanket and pulls it over me, and the gentleness of it after everything else closes my throat.
Then, instead of leaving, he sits back down on the edge of the bed.
Neither of us says anything for a while. Somebody’s music thumps through the wall and cuts off. The room turns gold, then gray, as the light drains out of the window.
“What do you do?” he asks eventually. “All day. Walk me through it.”
It’s such an odd question that I laugh. “Why?”
“Because I don’t know.” He says it plainly, no shame in it, looking at the wall instead of at me. “Four years. I know your address. I know your major.” A pause. “I don’t know what your days look like.”
Something about that snags—how would he know my major—but he’s still not looking at me, and I don’t want to be the one who breaks this open.
So I tell him. About the eight a.m. I hate.
About the professor who says ipso facto so often the back row keeps a tally.
About the carrel on the fourth floor of the library with the broken chair nobody else will sit in, which means it’s always mine.
About eating at seven, alone, most nights, and how after a while you stop registering the alone part and just call it dinner.
He doesn’t interrupt. He asks a question here and there, short ones, and every time I answer, he goes quiet again, taking it in like it matters.
When I finally run out, the room is dark.
“You should’ve had somebody,” he says.
“I know.”
He stands. At the door, he stops with his hand on the frame, and I think he’s going to say something more. He doesn’t elaborate.
“Lock this behind me,” he says. “I’ll fix it Saturday.”
Then he’s gone, and I lie there in the dark with my body still humming and my chest aching in an entirely different way. Now, I understand something I’d been careful not to look at directly.
I’m not chasing a memory. I’m falling in love with the man who sat in the dark and asked what my days look like.