40. Chapter Forty
Aspen
We’re fighting over who wants this more, and I’m winning.
I catch his bottom lip between my teeth and press down lightly.
He groans into my mouth and slides his tongue against mine like he’s trying to take the point back.
My hands are already under his shirt, flat against the warm plane of him, and his skin shivers under my fingers.
His hands are buried in my hair. We’re both pushing so hard I’ve stopped being able to breathe.
He lifts me like I weigh nothing and sets me on the kitchen counter. Butterflies fill my stomach, and I laugh against his mouth. And even with me up here, he’s still got a couple of inches on me. The man is absurd.
“There’s flour all over back there,” I manage. “I’m sitting in your pie disaster.”
“I’ll clean it up later.” He pulls back just far enough to look at me, lips wet, eyes bright. “Much later.”
This is so easy and light. It’s different from before, and it makes me want to laugh out loud in the middle of it. It’s fun. It’s just him, and me, and a wrecked kitchen.
His eyes cut to the fridge.
“Hang on.” He’s grinning now, the one that means he’s about to do something ridiculous. He crosses the kitchen, pulls the fridge open, and comes back with the can of whipped cream.
“Oh no,” I say.
“Oh yes.” He shakes it. “Waste not.”
He sprays an absurd amount onto his finger and feeds it to me. I laugh and let him, and he gets some on the tip of my nose doing it, and then he’s eating it straight off the nozzle like an animal, and it’s so dumb, so him, turning a serious afternoon of both our lives into a good time.
I’m still laughing when a little of the whipped cream slips off my lip and lands on my shirt, the top of my left breast.
He stops.
I watch his eyes drop. Watch them come back to mine, and somewhere in that second, they go dark, the laughter banking down into something lower and hotter, and the whole temperature of the kitchen changes.
“May I?” he asks.
Heat floods all the way through me, top to bottom, off two words in that low voice.
I nod.
He lowers his head and licks it off my breast, his mouth warm through my shirt. I make a sound I’d be embarrassed by if I had a scrap of dignity left, which I don’t.
And then he hooks an arm under me and lifts me clean off the counter because he is Stanley Ermington and always keeping me on my toes.
I squeal, legs around him, both of us laughing, the can of whipped cream still somehow in his hand.
“Ermington,” I shriek.
“Hold on, Linwood.”
And he carries me out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and I’m laughing the whole way, flour and cream and all. I have never felt less like myself and more like myself at the exact same time.
He kicks the bedroom door open and shuts it behind us. He drops me onto the bed.
“May I?” I ask, reaching for the can of whipped cream.
His eyebrows go up. He hands it over without a word.
“Shirt. Off,” I command.
He laughs, low and delighted. He pulls the shirt over his head, and I feel the heat start in my chest when I take in his body.
He looks so good. It takes me a second to comprehend that he’s mine now –– that this is all mine.
I pat the bed, and he jumps on. I climb onto his lap right away, looking down at his body.
“Can I use the whole bottle on you?”
He laughs, leaning with his head back on the pillow, hands settling easy on my thighs. “What are you planning to do to me?”
I don’t answer. I draw a line of it down his chest and lick it off slow, and his laugh cuts out in the middle. I move to his stomach, and he twitches.
“That—”
A bit drops onto the waistband of his pants. I look up at him. “Oops.”
I lean down and get that too.
“That’s it.” He sits up, catches me, flips me onto my back in one easy motion that knocks the breath clean out of me in the best possible way.
Then he ducks his head under the hem of my shirt and presses kisses across my stomach, blows a raspberry that makes me shriek and grab at him, and then he does something slower with his mouth, moves lower, his tongue warm against my skin, and the laugh dies in my throat.
He pulls my shirt off over my head. Reaches blind for the can, eyes never leaving me, and the cold of it on my skin makes me gasp.
Then his mouth is there, warm, chasing it.
I get my own bra off because I can’t wait for him to do it, and he makes a low sound at the sight of me and does it again.
The cold presses against my nipples, and then the heat follows, and I’m arching up off the bed with my hands fisted in his hair.
By the time we’re kissing again, it’s frantic.
My hips roll up against him, and I can feel exactly how much he wants this.
I reach down and palm him through his pants.
He groans into my mouth and presses into my hand.
I slip my hand into his pants and grip him.
The sound he makes goes straight through me while I use my fingers to grip him tightly.
“The whipped cream,” I breathe against his lips.
I push him onto his back. I unbutton his pants and pull them all the way off.
I look at him and want pulls low and sharp in me.
It’s such a new feeling to want him the way that I do that I have to take a moment.
So, I shake the can and grin. Then I climb back on the bed and put whipped cream from the base of his cock to the tip.
He shudders, and then I lick it off, trying to take him into my mouth.
I only get about halfway before I pull him out.
“Fuck, Aspen,” he moans, saying my name like it’s been knocked out of him. His whole body goes tight.
I take my time with round two. I place the tip of the can at his base and swirl it around his dick this time.
His head falls back when my tongue follows.
Watching him unable to take the pleasure makes me feel powerful in a way I’ve never experienced before.
I start sucking him now, moving my head up and down, grabbing his base and letting my hand follow my mouth.
“Your mouth,” he gets out. “Fuck.”
I stand up off the bed and take the rest of my clothes off, and when he reaches for me, I put a hand flat on his chest.
“Stay there.”
He goes still, then he listens. He puts his hands behind his head and waits, watching me with dark eyes.
I climb over him. “Grab the condom.”
He stretches for the nightstand, finds one, and rips it open. I watch as he rolls it on, and I sink down onto him. We both make a sound as I move my hips. He sits up to kiss me, but I place my palm on his sternum and shake my head. He grips me harder as I start to move.
“You’re so perfect,” he says, biting his lip. His hands glide to my hips, holding on but letting me set every inch of the pace. “You’re so fucking hot.”
And I do feel so fucking hot. I feel like I’m the one running this, completely here in my own body, watching his face for what each roll of my hips does to him. He grabs the whipped cream and lays a cold line of it across my chest and grins up at me.
“Oops.”
Then he sits up and licks it off, making out with my skin. I moan, running my fingers through his hair, arching my back.
I gasp, and he murmurs into my skin, “Does that feel good?”
I nod, rocking on him, the build coming faster than I’d planned for.
“Can you come like this?” he asks against my throat. “On me?”
I nod again and push him back down. “Lay back.”
He goes, and he moves up into me, and I grind down and chase that feeling.
God, that feeling. It builds fast and aches so deeply for him.
The whole time he watches me — my body, my face, my eyes — like there’s nothing else worth looking at.
I lean down and kiss him. His tongue slides against mine, and the spark rolls through every inch of me.
I rock my hips, and I’m right there, so I don’t stop.
I grind on him, chasing my pleasure. I start moaning in his mouth, body shaking and trembling.
I accidentally pull his hair, but he doesn’t seem to mind as I tip straight over the edge.
I flip my hair, arch my back, and my moan fills the quiet room.
His hands hold my waist as I prolong this feeling of ecstasy. I come, riding on top of him.
“Oh, fuck,” he breathes. “You—”
“I did.” I can barely talk. “It felt so good.”
He flips me onto my back like he’s been waiting for the green light and finally got it. He drives into me, and my spine arches off the bed at the new angle, a different and bigger wave tearing through me, my toes going numb with it.
“Look at me,” he says.
My eyes find his, and I watch while he thrusts into me deeper. My walls are clenching around him. The feeling of him against me after an orgasm is unreal. My body is shaking, and he knows it. He slides a hand under my knee and lifts it. He glances down and moans.
Then he pulls out quickly, looking right at me as he jerks himself off. I watch as his come fills the condom. He shudders and then leans down to kiss me through the tail end of it.
He eases back, breathing hard, and takes care of the condom, then cleans us both up gently with his discarded shirt. And then he picks the whipped cream up off the mattress, puts a little in his mouth, and arches an eyebrow at me.
“Want some?”
I laugh, wrecked, breathless, and stupidly happy. I open my mouth with a quick nod.
He props himself over me on one elbow, flushed, soft around the eyes. He gives me a mouthful and then he’s kissing me. I nearly spit the entire thing into his mouth. Some of it ends up on his nose and his chin. I start laughing, and now it goes in his eye.
“Sorry,” I mutter, covering my mouth. I swallow what I can, and then I bring his face to mine and lick him clean.
“I could get used to this,” he says, looking down at me.
He puts whipped cream on my boobs again and grins as he leans down to lick it off. I giggle, feeling it spark low through me all over again.
“Do you want to shower?” he whispers against my skin.
I shake my head.
“Do you want to cuddle?”
I shrug.
He laughs.
I grab his face. “What do you want to do?”
“The truth?” He winces toward the door. “There’s a massive mess downstairs, and I really need to clean it.”
I smile. “Yeah. I’ll help.”
We get dressed and go downstairs to the kitchen, which is a lot worse than I realized. The pie was horrible, but I appreciate his effort.
Stanley props his phone against the fruit bowl and puts music on and proceeds to clean a kitchen the way nobody in history has cleaned a kitchen — singing, badly, into a spatula, catching me around the waist every time he passes to peck me somewhere, my cheek, my temple, the corner of my mouth.
Somewhere under the flour is the note from the Hawthorne House boys — clean the kitchen after. I laugh while reading all of their notes. They thought of everything.
Before he scrapes the pie into the trash, I make him stop.
“Wait.” I dig my phone out. “I need a picture.”
He poses with it — the tragic, lopsided ruin of it — proud as anything, and I take the picture, and I already know I’ll keep it forever. The worst pie ever made. By the best hands. For me. As promised.
Then a good song comes on, and he sets the spatula down and pulls me in by the hand, and we dance in the middle of his disaster kitchen. My face against his chest, and neither of us says a word. We just hold each other, and I smile because somehow this is more than enough.
We finish cleaning the kitchen, and then we go out and get food somewhere cheap and loud.
He holds my hand across the table and steals my fries and cracks so many jokes that my cheeks hurt from laughing.
And when he drives me home and walks me up, I stop at my door with my hand on the knob, and I don’t want the day to end.
“Do you want to come in?”
He doesn’t even pretend to consider it. “Yeah. Obviously, yeah.”
And later, with him wrapped around me in my own bed, I close my eyes and think about what all of this means.
I take a tally of where every single thing stands, what everything means.
And for the first time ever in my life, I find that everything comes to the same conclusion, which is that I have never been this happy.
I kiss his sleeping face, and to my surprise, he pulls me in closer.
“Don’t go, Linwood.”
He whispered those same words to me at the hotel. I tighten my hold on him.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I whisper. “You’re in my bed tonight.”
He chuckles against my hair.