12. Aspen
Chapter twelve
Aspen
R ick’s eyes on me light up my body. I feel like I’m a thousand degrees, boiling in a cauldron of my own skin. I feel like those charred fries—already quite overdone. Something wild and untamable twists inside me, and I feel feral. Like a wild beast. Watch out; the double tree girl is going to turn into this monstrously awesome thing with the strength of a bear and the speed of a cheetah. It’s not funny imagining myself as this sexed-up mix-and-match beast, but I smile.
Rick doesn’t smile, but his eyes never leave me, and that’s more than enough. I’ve never been so aware of anyone in my life. He’s the only thing I can focus on. He’s been the only one I could focus on for a while now.
He watches me intently while I slip my hands into my panties and pull them down my legs. I’m wet there. Totally soaked. My bra is already half off, but I unclasp it and let it go. It can run wild and free. I don’t need it anymore. I’d much rather have Rick’s hands on my breasts. I want his mouth. I want him touching me everywhere my clothes just graced.
He’s always in control. He’s so in control of himself and every situation. He’s learned and been trained that to be out of control means death. It means danger. It could cost other people their lives. He doesn’t know how to surrender, and I’m not sure how far he’ll let me go before he needs me to stop. I’m not going to push him. This isn’t about me taking the lead or needing it. It’s about our combined pleasure, and I need to find and learn what makes this man feel good. I’m not going to push him and make him retreat.
I don’t feel like he’s in control now, but that’s far from surrendering. I just feel like…like we’re something special. Like we’re more than fire and gasoline around each other. This is us wanting each other, but it’s a choice. It’s not something we can’t help.
I think.
Maybe I’m thinking too much.
I kiss Rick while the shower runs in the background. I pull him to me, and god, his lips are so freaking delicious. He’s so hard, but his skin is soft under my fingertips. Softer than I expected a man so muscular and so battle-trained to be. When his shirt was on, I thought he’d be stone under it, but of course he’s not. He’s warm with smooth skin and some puckered scars. Like the huge one on his side where that blade entered or grazed him. Either way, it caused damage. We’re standing in the light in here, and I trace my fingers over it. He doesn’t flinch or pull away.
He opens his mouth to me, and I slip my tongue in. I guide his hand up to my breast and curl his fingers against it. My knees go weak, so I wrap an arm around his neck and pull him to me as I back up against the wall. I love the press of his body against mine. His skin might be silky, but he’s so hard and so hot. Maybe we are combustible after all. I feel like one of us might go up in flames at any second.
I lose myself in kissing him. I’ve never had a kiss like this. I’ve never felt like every single second was a dance and a masterpiece. I love the way he groans when I scrape my teeth over his bottom lip. I’m the one who feels like I’m going to fall over when I run kisses over his short beard, down his neck, to his chest. I keep going. We’re not even in the shower yet, but I don’t need it. I want the taste of him too badly. I don’t want the water washing it all away. I like that he’s sharp and masculine and somehow soft under his sharpness. He tastes so good that it makes my head swim.
I slither down to my knees, and they give out like melted goo. I’m doing a very good impression of a jellyfish down here.
But I don’t want to be a jellyfish. I want to have bones. I need bones. I finally get my hands in working condition, and I move to tackle his jeans. I want them off.
“Aspen,” he groans. “Maybe it’s best to—”
“You can’t shower with your jeans on,” I interrupt.
I wait for him to undo them. Letting out a soft groan, he steps back and pulls them down. His boxers too. He’s as naked as I am after he steps out of them. Naked and magnificent. He’s chiseled from his hard, square jaw all the way down to his freaking ankles. Chiseled ankles? Yeah, they’re apparently a thing.
His cock is so hard that it looks like it might be an issue. I mean, an issue as in painful, which I sort of get. I’m so hot between my legs, so empty, pulsing, and aching that it’s not comfortable. It’s physical discomfort I’ve never known. I want his hands all over my body, but I reach for him instead. I want to make him feel good. Right here in the bathroom, beside the running shower that neither of us is in any hurry to get into. It will probably be cold by the time we do. Then again, this is a rich person’s house, and I doubt rich people ever run out of hot water. There’s probably a backup tank for a backup tank for a backup tank.
I close my hand around Rick’s shaft, and he literally gasps. Yes, this man who looks like he can kick all the ass, who has never been surprised about anything in his life, draws in a surprised gulp of air.
“Jesus, Aspen, no, I—”
I lean forward and guide him to my lips. He’s salty and soaked like I’m soaked. He’s the hardest thing I’ve ever felt and held, and he’s like velvet. Cocks look kind of weird, I guess, but they’re actually very ingeniously constructed.
If I’m being honest, this kind of thing has always seemed a little bit demeaning. It’s a position that I couldn’t understand why anyone would like to be in. The guy has all the power. It’s lowering to be on your knees like this. It takes a lot of trust. I guess there are so many images out there where this is exactly that, but what’s happening right now is nothing like that. I do not feel demeaned in the least.
I want this. I want this so fucking badly that it seems like the most beautiful, natural thing in the world. Taking Rick into my mouth is what I want. I want to make him feel good, but it makes me feel good too. I’m basically going into full-on detonation mode between my legs. I like everything about this. The taste of him, the way he feels when I stroke him with my hand, the sounds he makes, and how his body moves against me as I swirl my tongue over the head of his cock. I love that when I look up, his head is angled sideways, and his eyes are closed. He looks like he’s focused and concentrating. Actually, he looks like he’s meditating, but I can see beneath the outer calm. I feel the tremble that races through his whole body as he holds himself back. He’s still, and he doesn’t work my mouth. Instead, he lets me taste him the way I want to. He lets me be in charge of his pleasure.
I like that he doesn’t make a noise, but his breathing becomes raw. It sounds like his lungs are being scraped against a cheese grater, minus how much that would hurt. He has to throw a hand up against the wall as though he would stumble if he didn’t.
His fingers flex and uncurl and flex up again. I watch everything before I close my eyes and take him deeper. I still work him with my hand, but I want more of him. I don’t want him to pull back or pull away, even if he’s going to lose control. The tremor is now trembling. His hips slowly move, just a bare minimum, but it feels like everything.
It feels so right when his fingers find a handhold in my hair. I steady him in return with a hand on his hip. I curl my fingers into his perfect, rock-hard butt cheek the same way I did a few nights ago on the stairs. It was life or death then. It was him going into a head-on freefall, and I was the only one holding him back. But this is a different freefall. This one is safe. I’m not here to hold him back. I’m here to help him lose control.
I should probably go slow because I’m not very experienced with this, but I don’t want to go slow. I want his whole dick in my mouth, as far as it will go, and I want it now. I want his saltiness on my tongue. I want him losing control, fucking my mouth, grabbing my hair. I want the kinds of sounds torn from his throat that tell me he’s going to lose it.
“Holy dick, Aspen,” Rick hisses.
Yeah, holy dick. That’s about right. But I don’t want that to be it. I use my other hand to stroke his balls before I cup them. He jerks, nearly bending in half, and I feel the wild shudder that rips through him.
“Holy blinking balls,” he rasps.
Blinking balls? Is that what they feel like for him? Like they’re doing Christmas light things, flashing on and off? That must hurt. I should make it better.
I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to ever stop. I want to keep pleasing him like this for…for a good amount of time.
I keep up with caressing his balls and doing whatever I can with my mouth. I take him as deep as possible and then pull back, using my tongue in tandem to lick around him. I don’t think I’m very good at this, but the way his hips start to thrust into my face says otherwise. He starts making noises like a cow stuck in the muck would make, and oh my holy package, I like it.
I’m down here, enjoying this more than if it were me being touched and teased and tasted.
When Rick gets a little wilder, I open my eyes and tilt my head up to watch him. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful than he is right now. His head is bent forward, and his long hair, which is normally neatly combed back, is flipped over his forehead and in his eyes. They’re closed, and his lips are moving, but he’s not saying anything. Maybe he’s just sucking in the air really quietly. I can’t hear him, especially considering that the running shower sounds like a roar next to us.
This is unbearably intimate, but he’s here with me, and we’re doing this. I’m honored it’s me. That I’m the one who gets to see him in this private moment of unguarded passion.
I watch him, touch him, and use my mouth on him until he tries to jerk my head up. He winces, and his jaw grinds hard, his teeth clashing together. “Aspen.” My name barely sounds human. In fact, it barely sounds like my name at all. I think this is the best way anyone has ever said it. “Aspen, I’m going to…”
“Yes,” I murmur.
“I seriously can’t…you’re going to have to…”
I make it pretty obvious that I’m not going to stop. I’m half terrified, but I want this with him. I want to give him something I’ve never given to anyone else.
The way he shakes is a moment I’ll never forget. I close my eyes and savor it. He’s gentle, even if I don’t need him to be. His hands cup my face, and he arches over me, shaking brutally before he comes in my mouth. His cock kicks on my tongue, and I swallow. Honestly, I thought it would be pretty gross, but it’s not gross. It’s different. I’ll say that. I should have known nothing about this man is anything less than beautiful.
It’s adorable how worried he is about me. After he’s spent and done shaking, he lifts me up and kisses my forehead, my nose, and my cheeks, and then full-on kisses me on the mouth. My whole body sparks up into a red-hot flame shower of burning incendiary delight. I would say it’s a pretty dangerous thing to do, but Rick is pretty used to living on the perilous edge of things.
He takes me into the shower while kissing me until I’m weak all over. The way his mouth guides mine, dancing with me and leading me into him—it’s an intimacy I haven’t experienced before either. His hands twine into my hair when we’re both in the shower. It’s as modern as you’d expect, with a glass door, an immaculate tile job, and a huge square showerhead that has the world’s most gentle and even spray. It looks like it’s never been used before.
Not that I notice it. I barely notice anything except Rick.
But I do notice that, of course, the water is still hot.
I’m definitely not a virgin, but I’m not the most experienced person in the world when it comes to sex either. However, I’ve never felt anything like this before. I expect to be hoisted up onto Rick’s hips and trapped between him and the glass while he fucks the ever-loving daylights out of me, but he kisses down my jaw, my neck, and my shoulders and then slowly spins me around. He takes my wrists and guides my hands over my head. My palms flatten on the glass. It’s been warmed up by the temperature of the water, even though it’s barely wet. It appeared clear before, but now that my palms are on it, I can feel the steam. I curl my fingers as though I can hold on.
Rick knocks my legs apart, not meanly, but not with the gentlest touch either. I don’t want gentle. I don’t want him to treat me like I’m made of glass because I’m definitely not. I arch my back and let my legs fall open. He makes a barely human noise, and then, thank everything in the universe, his fingers land on me.
I’m slippery and soaked. I’m probably so wet that my thighs are smeared with wetness. I don’t know. Now that we’re in the shower, I can’t tell. All I can concentrate on is the feel of his fingers gliding over my folds. He goes straight to my entrance and doesn’t stop. He pushes two fingers in, just a little bit. It stretches me, and it burns so fucking good.
“More,” I groan.
“Like this?” Rick apparently likes to be mean sometimes because the heel of his palm comes down on my clit. Well, no, that’s not mean. He’s not rough. But he knows exactly how to make me wild and not give me everything I need all at once.
I can imagine him entering me in twenty different ways, which is shocking as I’ve never had such vivid, shocking images go through my brain. But right now, I’d like every single one of them if Rick is going to do them. I’m so far gone that I’m panting. I’m going to thrust myself back and make him put his fingers inside me, or I’m going to thrust myself forward onto his hand and make him please me that way.
Except I seem to be frozen.
It’s damn inconvenient when I’m already this ridiculously needy for it.
I still want to make him feel good. I want him to be able to show me and teach me what he likes, so I let him touch me like this instead of begging him. He knows what I want. I’m pretty sure he knows since I’m panting like a steamboat and moaning like there’s a rabid rabbit chasing after me.
He strokes his fingers over my folds again, playing with me before he takes the pressure away from my clit. I don’t know if reverse touch is a thing, but the ghost of that touch does things to me that have their way with the bones in my legs.
“Bend over, sweetheart,” Rick instructs. He doesn’t stop touching me.
Is he freaking serious? Bend over? I don’t know how flexible I am, so I’m not sure how far I can go. I’m not going to just grab my ankles or anything.
He guides my hands for me, the hardness of his body brushing up against my bare skin. He positions me where he wants me, and I’m happy to go along. I’m not embarrassed or self-conscious about the position. I just want more. More of him, more of his hard, muscular body pressed up against me, more of him surrounding me, and more skin to skin contact.
His teeth graze over the back of my neck before he straightens up. As for me, I still have my hands on the shower glass. I trust him. I trust him so fully that when he guides himself to me, all I do is arch back and try to take him immediately. I should be intimately acquainted with the size of him, but when he lines his crown up with my entrance and pushes in slowly, he feels seriously large.
Oh god, oh shit, holy dick. Holy blinking Christmas balls.
“Are you okay?” Rick’s hands caress my hips. His fingers are the ones that are going to be digging into my butt this time.
“I’m good,” I rasp.
“Are you?” He sounds amused. He pushes into me another inch and then another. He goes slow, and I don’t know if I want it slow or I want it to hurt, but he’s going to set the pace. I’m just going to be a wild sex goddess in my head, and that’s okay. I don’t need to break myself over here.
“Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes, I’m good,” I reply.
“Okay. That’s good.”
Jesus, feeling him all the way inside me until his legs are pressed up against mine blows my mind. My body wants to come right freaking now. I can feel my orgasm barreling full steam my way, but not yet. Not yet.
I have my eyes tightly closed. Because if I open them, I’m finished. If anything gets near my clit, I’m finished. If I start thinking about what we look like in this position, I’m finished.
When I first arrived at Rick’s doorstep, having left everything in Atlanta on pause, I didn’t see us ending up here, bumping in the shower.
That day feels like seven million lifetimes ago.
I’m glad we’re here now.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Rick says, but he doesn’t stop. He slowly thrusts into me. My brain is pretty much peanut butter and jelly in a skull sandwich, but I don’t think he’s talking about what we’re doing.
“I don’t want to hurt you either,” I tell him.
“You won’t, Aspen. You couldn’t.”
“I could, Patrick McDonald. I very well could.”
He doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t have to. We both know it’s true. I said this didn’t have to change our fake marriage into something real, but I wasn’t prepared for how I’d lose my sense of reality whenever I was with him. I wasn’t prepared for how I’d lose my sense of self and become something else, someone else. Someone more than just me.
I thought sex could be a singular act, just about pleasure. I wasn’t expecting to be blown away by how connected we are to each other. Emotionally.
“You’re going to come, Aspen. You’re going to come so hard that I’m going to have to hold you up.”
I imagine him doing that the way he’s doing it now. Without his hands. I almost laugh and come at the same time. I’m so close. I should tell him that he’s okay. That I’m okay with all this and more. I should tell him that I’m on birth control, but I can’t find the words. All I can do is pant one small word of agreement.
“Okay.” Yes, yes, yes. Okay, okay, okay. Please, please, please.
Rick grasps my hips again and does more than thrust slowly. He finds a rhythm where he can probably feel all of me, and I know for sure that I can feel all of him. He’s beyond hard, long, and thick inside me. I’m going to die, and it’s going to be amazing. In the next minute, he sets a pace that turns me into a roasted marshmallow over a campfire. He’s the campfire. And he’s right. I do need him to hold me up. One more stroke and I burst into flames, shattering into pieces. The world is fire and marshmallows and more marshmallows and then more. My bones turn into sugar, and my skin is white light.
I don’t expect Rick to be able to come again so quickly, but he pulls out, makes the smallest choked noise, and comes against my back.
We’re so quiet, but our bodies are screaming loudly. The world is covered in crystalized water droplets, and everything sounds so loud. The shower spray, our breathing, our frenzied hearts.
I turn around slowly and set my hands on Rick’s heaving shoulders. Then, I look up into his face and see that he’s already closing himself off. He’s going to retreat and hide behind that blank slate.
I kiss him softly. “You know what we need?” More of this. That’s what we need. But no, not right away. Not right now. I don’t want to literally kill us. “We need something mundane. Something normal. We need to get out of the house. Let’s go for a walk.” I run my thumb over his bottom lip. I wish he’d suck my finger into his mouth and bite it, but he shakes his head.
“No,” he says.
“Let’s go to the park again.”
“Not in the daylight. There are children there, and we don’t have any children with us. We’d be creepy.”
Right. Yeah, that’s probably not a good thing. “A different park then.”
“No.”
“Let’s just go for a walk then,” I say.
“No,” he repeats.
“We could go to a movie.”
“No.”
“The beach?”
He shakes his head again. “Especially not the beach.”
I’m not going to let him frustrate me, and I’m not going to let him win. Except in the shower. Or in bed. Or anywhere else in the house. And only in that way.
We could go to the one remaining bed in the house, and I could sit on your face. My nipples become another ten percent harder than they already are, which puts them somewhere around one hundred and eighty percent hard.
“We can go for groceries,” I suggest.
“We have—”
“Okay, well, you have to pick one of those options! It’s healthy to get out of the house. You need to do that more. You don’t even like this place.”
He opens his mouth to give me more no’s and protests, but the words dry up, and he sighs with a hint of a caveman grunt at the end. It rolls on, that caveman sound. It’s so hot, and his frown is so smoldering and delicious that I want to jump into his arms and have him drive me up against the glass the way I first imagined.
“We’ll get chicken,” I say, trying to coax him into it. I want to be playful. I’m not very good at it, but I darned well want to try.
“Fine,” he huffs. “Fine.”
“Because you know I won’t stop bugging you about it until you go with me?”
“Yes, that’s exactly it.”
I grab the bottle of manly body wash off the ledge that’s hollowed out in the tile. Then, I pop the cap and squirt a stream onto his chest. We both freeze. His lips part, and his left eye twitches. I grin, put the bottle back, and rub until suds appear all over his chest. I thought our fun in the shower was done, but I was wrong. This is fun. Touching him, cleaning him, learning his body, and memorizing him is fun.
“Holy balls,” he grinds out. He’s already hard again. His dick must be one of those super dicks from another dimension.
“Yeah,” I breathe. “Holy balls.”