Chapter 31 #2
In the way I don’t really have to say anything at all, but he listens to my breathing, he matches his movements to mine. He moves his tongue in slow circles when my hips do. He speeds up when my thighs clench around him.
And he doesn’t stop when my shoulders bow off the counter, my moans echoing throughout the empty kitchen.
“Again,” he instructs, dark eyes flicking up to mine.
“I can’t—” I start to shake my head.
“You can.” He doesn’t look away, but he groans against me. “One more, Ren.”
It’s the sound of my name. He doesn’t say it often, but I think, despite all my best efforts, I like being Ren if she’s half of who Miller Colson-Burke says she is.
And I think that, maybe, I do deserve all of his undivided attention and I deserve the way he makes me feel.
I do come. Again. And again. And again.
He doesn’t stop until I practically beg.
“Good girl,” he murmurs quietly, planting kisses along the inside of my thighs. Pushing to stand, he grabs my hands, pulling me into him, and he drops his mouth to the crown of my head.
My palm flattens against his chest, and I feel his heart racing underneath the broad muscle.
“You, uh, you okay?” he asks, hand cradling the back of my head, fingers twisting along my scalp.
I nod softly, eyes practically fluttering closed. The sound of his heart might be the most beautiful lullaby I’ve ever heard.
“Was it, uh—” He pulls back, one thumb carving across my cheek. “Was that—alright? For you?”
“It was fine.” I shrug, like it’s a casual thing.
“Fine?” he repeats, voice strangled.
“Yeah. Fine. Average. Mediocre.” I wave a hand around. “You know, run-of-the-mill.”
But my cheek twitches with a smile underneath his palm, and he rolls his eyes, snorting. “Oh fuck you, Ren.”
I blink up at him. “You want to?”
He stares down at me, swallowing, before his face splits with a grin and his mouth crashes against mine. “Yeah, I fucking want to.”
“What are you reading?” Miller’s wide hands grip the steel rungs of the dock ladder as he pulls himself out of the water.
I’m not really reading. I’m trying—but it’s a bit hard when someone you have a crush on, the size probably bigger than any asteroid that triggered a mass extinction on any planet in any universe at this point, stands in front of you.
Perfect, soaking wet, dripping lake water from messy hair and the stretching valleys of muscle twining around his body all golden from the sun.
When that same person probably isn’t just a crush, because he’s been all over your body now, and when you stop to think about it, you realize he’s all over your heart, too.
I tap my screen, smiling softly. “It’s a new journal issue about the suspected habitat adaptability of the saurolophus.”
“Which one was the saurolophus?” He shakes out his hair, droplets flying off, peppering the muscles stretching along his shoulders, and he crouches down, hands finding my calves.
“They had duckbills.” I inhale when he drops to his knees, and those worn hands slide up my thighs.
“From the movie?” His fingers trail across the flare of my rib cage.
“Yes. Ducky.” I wrinkle my nose at him, setting my phone on the dock beside me. “We don’t know as much about their migration patterns over long distances as other species, but it’s interesting. They were actually able to travel on both two and four limbs so—”
One brow lifts, and he stretches out, settling between my legs before dropping his chin to my stomach. “What a coincidence, I’d drop down to my knees or get on all fours for you, too.”
“That’s not quite the same, but—” I shove at his face, and his teeth rake along my palm when he bites at it.
He gives a lopsided grin—lazy and spectacular under the midafternoon sun, damp hair curling around his ears, waves cresting across his forehead, and navy eyes so, so bright. “Can I do it again?”
“You’re not . . . bored?” I hate the way it creeps in—the anxiety seeping out of old wounds that I’m trying so hard to stitch back together.
“Of making you come on my tongue and all over my face? Yeah, that’s a real fucking snooze fest, you’re right.
” He makes a show of rolling his neck like he’s exhausted before his lips pull back, incredulous.
“No, I’m not fucking bored.” But his eyes snap to my fingers, my thumbs picking at my nails, and his head pulls back. “Did he make you feel—”
“I don’t think it was that I was boring, specifically. But . . . it was a task.” My voice drops, embarrassed. “A chore, like I said. And if I ever asked for it or wanted it . . . there was something . . . wrong with me.”
“It’s not . . . wrong to want to have sex.
It doesn’t make you bad or needy or whatever the fuck Scott got into his head.
” A muscle jumps in Miller’s jaw and he shakes his head.
“You didn’t—you didn’t feel . . . bad or anything about wanting to have sex with me last night? Or again this morning, right?”
Heat flares across my cheeks, entirely different from the kind baking down on me from the sun, when I think of him, climbing over top of me on that island. Bending me over it. Cleaning me off in the shower afterwards. “No,” I whisper.
“Good.” His eyes find mine, and something that’s not quite a smile curves his mouth, and his eyes pinch closed before he says, “I don’t think you really need anyone, but, uh, I think it’d be an honour, to be needed by you.”
“You think so?” I sniff, half laughing.
But Miller looks entirely serious when he answers, “Yeah, I do.”
It’s funny—because I think it’s an honour to be needed by him. And he does seem to need me, in a way no one ever has.
He says he needs me, right then and there on the dock.
He says he needs to taste me again, and he finds himself between my legs, groaning encouragement and placing kisses all along my thighs with each one. He swallows down every orgasm, happily, until I ask him if he’d mind if I practiced something else on him.
He doesn’t mind at all—turns out he really is a great teacher. But he seems to like just about anything I do when I take him in my mouth.
He says he loved it, actually. And, with this smile and these eyes glinting that don’t look like they’ve ever seen anything bad at all, that if I want to keep practicing, he’d be more than happy for me to keep using him.
He falls asleep on my chest, and I do get back to reading, and each time I read the words herd behaviour, I hear my best friend, and I think about the difference between the words can’t and want.
I can be alone—I have the last four years as proof.
And I have this person I want, awake and lying beside me now, stretched out in the sun, the hand marked with this ever permanent, ever painful loss behind his head. This person who is so silly and wonderful, and so, so brave—who makes me feel like I can be all those things, too.
He said I made him want to try again, but I think he makes me want to do the same thing.
“Ren?” he asks quietly, while he stares up at the cloudless sky before he rolls over to face me. “When we go back—when we go on our practice date? Please don’t make me pretend.”
My finger finds the corner of my mouth, still on fire and probably burning forever, and I shift to face him when I whisper, too, “I don’t want to pretend either.”