35. Penelope
thirty-five
penelope
Anthony hasn’t moved.
He’s frozen in the middle of the dining room that stands between our two ends of the house, his belt already undone like he was planning on tending to the thick cock trapped behind his jeans all by himself.
As if .
I don’t know what it means that he boarded up those windows for me, but he’s lucky I didn’t ask him to see his childhood bedroom while everyone else was distracted by pie and video games. I was wet the moment he pressed his knee up to mine beneath that dinner table, and it only worsened as the night wore on, especially when I rested my hand on his thigh and could feel the stretch in his jeans. I’m aching for him. There’s no better way to put it.
“Are you going to help me?” I ask, dipping my words into that scratchy, sly timbre I know he likes so much. “Or am I going to have to do it myself?”
“That depends. You said you wanted to take care of your heart first, and I want to protect that more than I want you naked.”
Oh.
A bowling ball lodges itself in my throat, making it difficult to swallow.
Admitting to myself and Anthony that my heart is starting to feel like it’s on solid ground again between us is more than a step; it’s a leap off of a diving board into the deep end. But he boarded up windows for me, and told me to chase my dreams, and has been nothing but wonderful. I step toward him, taking a deep breath as I go.
“I felt safe in your hands tonight. Can I trust you to keep making me feel that way this time around?”
“ Yes ,” he shudders, his chest deflating as he steps toward me, extending his hands until he’s holding mine. “Yes, Pen, I’m going to take care of your heart first.”
“Okay,” I nod, my words scratching out when I say, “Then this is what I want.”
“Be more specific,” he says, his voice equally as grating. “What do you want?”
I can’t quite put it all on the table—that I want to lay everything out, and find out where we went wrong, and do our best to right this thing between us. Instead of going with the big picture of it all, I settle on what I want right now.
“I want you to finish what you started when you put your hand on me underneath the dinner table.”
He swallows. Tilts his head back. Groans. And then dips his head forward with fire in his eyes. I have to clutch the bell to keep it from falling when he grips me by the shoulders and lathes his tongue stiffly and lazily along the column of my throat.
“Words,” he rumbles between strokes of his tongue. “I need words , boss.”
“Take off my clothes and take me to bed, Anthony.”
It comes out heady, desperate, but more sure than I’ve been in a damn long time about anything. My future career is up in the air, but I am absolutely sure that I want Anthony Ellis.
“Yes ma’am .”
He lifts me like I weigh nothing, and when I clench my knees against his hips, his cock rests right where I need it to be. By the time I start to grind against him, I’m on my back, dazily peering up at a predator cornering its prey for the kill.
“Fuck, you look so good like this,” I whine.
“Like what?”
“You look like you’re about to tear my clothes off with your teeth and fuck me until the end of break.”
He does that thing—that sexy man thing—and yanks his sweater and undershirt up over his head from the back in one fell swoop, leaving me with a picture of his glorious abs.
“Damn. Have you been reading my diary?”
“You seem more like a journal guy.”
He grins widely, but the craze in his gaze remains as he shoves both his hands beneath my sweater and tugs it off.
“If it’s filled with more dirty stories, maybe I will snoop. Is it under your pillow?”
He chuckles darkly, shaking his head as he descends over me, tracing my jawline with his nose.
“Penelope. If I have you in my pillows, you’ll be too preoccupied to snoop.”
I purr, leaning into his touch as he shoves off his jeans and toes them to the floor. I’m in the process of unbuttoning my skirt when he grabs my hands and pins them beside my head, shaking his.
“Let me unwrap my pussy.”
I let out a sharp laugh.
“ Your pussy? Excuse you? What makes it yours?”
Anthony dips his head, his crazed look somehow deepening if that’s even possible. He answers with his mouth on my skin, peppering kisses down my exposed abdomen, dipping his tongue into my belly button before following the band of my skirt with sloppy wet kisses. He hesitates, then squeezes my wrists, lifting a brow.
“You gonna be a good girl and keep your hands still?”
I roll my eyes in jest.
“Fine. I guess .”
He releases my hands to tug my skirt and thong down, shucking them to the floor with the rest of our clothes.
“Fuck me, P,” he groans. Ant uses both hands to push on the insides of my thighs, spreading me so that his head has space to dip between them. He smirks up at me from between my legs, then drops his voice to ask, “You wanna know what makes this pussy mine?”
I bite my lip and nod.
Holding my gaze, he sticks out his tongue, flattens it, and runs it from the end of my slit all the way up to my clit before wrapping his lips around it and sucking in this gentle pulse that has my eyes rolling to the back of my head on a strangled sigh. He releases me, chuckles, and when I look down drunkenly, he’s grinning like a fool.
“I licked it. It’s mine.”
I get a fraction of a second to remember that first week we lived together, when I’d done the same thing to his pizza, and how maybe I’m not the only one who stores away the little moments that happen between us as keepsakes. But I don’t linger in the past for long, because Anthony Ellis spends the next several minutes showing me just how much he owns the pulse between my legs.
He fucks me with his tongue while his thumb rubs tantalizing circles over my clit, then fucks me with his fingers while his tongue does illegal things to my throbbing nerves. He edges me, bringing me right to the point of thigh shaking madness, before backing off and starting again. It’s torture. I don’t want it to end. But I do need to come. With my right leg wrapped around his upper back to trap him against me, I start grinding against his mouth.
“You greedy for it, boss?”
“Only a little.”
“Show me.”
“I can’t,” I whine. “You won’t let me use my hands.”
He stops, lifting his chin to gasp up at me.
“You haven’t moved them this whole time?”
“You told me not to.”
“ Fuck ,” he whines, then plants a sloppy kiss to my pussy before sliding up the front of my body to tangle my taste around my own tongue. I moan as his mouth works against mine, clenching my fists to keep from threading through his hair, if this is how he reacts to me following directions.
“Tell me what you want to do with your hands, baby.”
“Tug on your hair. Hold you between my legs until I come. Play with my nipples. I want?—”
“Yes. All of that.”
I thread one hand through his hair and yank down my bra with the other to pinch and pull on my nipple. Ant dips his head to suck on the other, doing that fluttering thing with his tongue I love so much. When I realize he’s given me permission to do whatever I want with my hands, I slide the one in his hair down his sculpted abs, then wrap my fingers around him. Cupping his cock releases the most animalistic moan I’ve ever heard.
“ Baby .”
Anthony whines, thrusting into my grip.
“Oh, so good. Oh fuck .”
I push up with my other hand and flip us until he’s on his back. I straddle his thigh, gazing down at him with a Cheshire smile.
“You know,” I say, tilting my head as I stroke him slowly up and down. “I haven’t gotten to taste you yet.”
“That’s a shame,” he manages through shallow breaths.
“Mhm.” I bend over his cock and spit on it, using my hand to spread it around. The sound that comes out of Ant is sexy, inhuman. His back jolts, and his eyes flutter, like they’re trying and failing to stay open.
“Can I?” I ask, batting my lashes.
“Penelope, when I say you could do anything to me and the answer will always be yes…”
By the time I let that comment register, his hips are bucking in desperation. I’ll linger on it later. Right now, my only want is to make this man desperate for me.
I lathe my tongue over the tip, and his hips buck. When I tilt my head and stroke to the base and back, his butt swivels against the mattress. When I bat my lashes and lower my mouth over him, sucking from the middle back up to the tip, his entire body unravels beneath me.
“Pen… Penelope…”
My mouth comes off with a pop, and I use firm, slow strokes with my hand. Watching him pant, watching him lie here at mercy to me, gives me something firm to stand on.
I lower my mouth back to him, and spend as much torturous time with him in my mouth as he did with me. I want to take my time with him. While I’ll admit that watching him squirm is kind of fun, it’s the fact that I have Anthony Ellis fully surrendered to me that makes me feel like he’s allowing himself to be putty in my hands. Like he trusts me with himself, wants to give in to me. And hearing him moan and sigh, feeling his hands against my head to keep me there, those massaging fingers digging in when I do something he likes, makes me believe I’m finally in the right place.
Until he tugs on my hair, wrapping it into a long mane of a ponytail to pull me up his body, right to his lips. He moans against my mouth, and his hands are so indecisive about where they want to be on my body, you’d think I just asked the man what restaurant he wants to eat at. He threads his fingers through my hair, then releases it in an untethered waterfall. He paints his fingers across my back, up and down, then lands on my ass, which he squeezes before positioning me right over his cock. All the while, he paints soliloquies inside my mouth, his tongue making me dizzy, his lips leaving bruising tattoos.
“Fuck,” he bites, placing one more kiss at the base of my throat before falling victim to my pillow stash. Perched above him, I take in the view. Anthony Ellis in my pillows, a dazed look in his eyes, still smiling because he’s here with me.
“What?” I ask, running my hand over his forehead and up into his hair. He purrs, turning toward my touch, and for a second, I want to freeze time. Just be here , in the little stolen touches, and the sleepy smiles. Just Ant and me.
“I think we left the rest of the condoms in my room.” He tilts his head, squeezes my hips, and sits up beneath me to press a long, slow, wet kiss on my lips, the kind that makes you feel like you’re parched in the middle of the desert when it ends. When he tries to move me off his lap, I press him back down into the mattress.
“Listen, you’re the boss in most other circumstances, but would I sound desperate enough if I said that I’m going to literally die if I don’t get inside you soon?—”
“You will not literally die, Ellis.” I lift a single brow to level him, and land both hands on his chest. “And anyway, I uh… I’m on the pill. If you want to— gah! ”
I’m on my back before I can finish that sentence.
“I can have you bare?” he groans against my throat before laying open mouthed kisses up and down it.
“Yes, if you’re comfortable with?—”
“I had a physical done at the beginning of this school year. I’m good.”
“What about…”
I won’t say her name. Not in my damn bed .
“We uh… didn’t. Not after you, P.”
I don’t know what this means. Don’t know what any of this means. Not Ant in my bed, or the fact that he didn’t sleep with his girlfriend after hooking up with me in Florida, or the look in his eyes that holds more candor than any of the words he’s said to me since we moved in together. All I know is that if the walls around my heart continue to crumble, he’d better be there to catch me this time.
I kiss him. Hands up in his hair, body pressed into his, near levitating from my bed. He does catch me. Hands around my back, he lays himself over me, and the weight of his body becomes my anchor.
“Not gonna lie, just the thought of having you bare has me kind of at hair trigger status,” he says with a breathy chuckle.
I roll my hips into his, letting his cock notch against me. He pulls back, groaning, then steadies himself.
“Can I do it?” I ask, wrapping my hand around him. He’s still slick from my mouth, and just the featherlight touch of my fingers has him twitching.
“The sweetest question you could ever ask me. Yeah, P, put me inside you. I want to watch.”
I shiver, then do exactly as he’s asked. Inch by torturous inch, Ant sinks inside me. But when he said he wanted to watch, that’s not what he meant. When I catch his gaze, it’s locked on my face, my parted lips, my eyes . As soon as he bottoms out and settles atop me, I sigh, letting all my muscles relax. And then I feel it. That little click. It’s not a spark, or fireworks. It’s not some big revelation with strobe lights and fog machines. It’s a foundation. And he sees it too.
“There it is. There’s my girl.”
He cups my face, stroking his thumb down the side of my cheek before he presses his forehead to mine and rears his hips back.
He takes me so slowly. I know he wants to savor this. I want that too. But something about that click makes me want to run and hide, lock my heart away again so that when he inevitably drops it, there’s at least steel bars of reinforcement. But Ant holds me so tenderly, I’m beginning to wonder if I can trust us not to crumble this time.
“Anthony,” I pant. “If you don’t start moving faster, I think I might literally die .”
“You will not literally die , Barker,” he parrots, smirking. But he punctuates that statement with a hard thrust of his hips, and I let out an ungodly sound. “But if you keep making those sounds, I’ll do anything you ask.”
He bends one of my knees and presses it up by my shoulder, opening me wider. I curse, claw at his back, meet him thrust for thrust.
“We fit together so well, P,” he bites out between thrusts. “Look how well you take me. Made for each other.”
I nod. I can’t deny him this, not when he feels so good, not when it feels so right this time. I grip his butt, squeezing, which seems to spur him on. The snapping of our hips and the panting breaths and stuttered curses that fill the room weave together like a sweet symphony that only we get to hear. And then, he breaks it.
“Pen, Penelope I’mgonnacome .”
I moan. His pleasure is what gets me. I want to own it. Live in it. I don’t even care if I finish if he’s going to sound that desperate when he does, but when, “Tell me you’re close baby. Need to feel you first,” comes out in clipped groans, I reach for his hand.
I guide it between our legs, where I can feel the vibration of his thighs from where he’s so clearly holding back.
“That’s so hot,” I whine. “Do you feel that? You’re shaking.”
“I’m fully aware.”
With his hand sandwiched between us, I reach up and wipe the sweaty hair from his brow. His jaw is clenched in pleasured agony, but his eyes are bright with me. Holding him there, I press my lips against his.
“Make me come, Anthony. Make me come so I can feel you come inside me.”
His thumb works in quick circles in tandem with his erratic thrusts. I can’t even keep up. I just lie there and take what he’s so willing to give. I wrap my free leg around his back and clench my inner muscles, crying out as they spasm around him. All the while I keep my eyes on him.
They’re my favorite shade of blue, that turquoise that doesn’t quite fit the ocean or the night sky. But they explode into technicolor, like the birth of a new planet, when he slams his hips into mine and lets himself go.
And he says my name when he does.
Penelope sounds more like longing, more like need and desperation than any other way you could arrange those letters. It makes my heart stutter step until it finds his beat.
It takes him a few stuttered thrusts, but he buries his head into my shoulder and melts there. I don’t dare move him.
Not when I have Anthony Ellis surrendered like this.
Not when that look in his eyes when he called my name tasted like forgiveness and second chances.
I don’t know what to do with it all. So instead of figuring out the why’s and the how’s, I simply wrap my arms around him and hope that he doesn’t slip through my fingers this time.