Chapter 11
BOUNCING
bouncing seems funny to guess,
but mother likes it. so does brother.
weird furless gusses.
— gus
Istare at him for half a second before tossing my head to the side, a small smirk on my face. “Really? You mean it?”
Color rises beneath his pale skin. “Only if you meant it,” he says, stumbling over his words. “If you were just kidding or joking—”
“I never joke about fucking, Ash.”
I’m sorry, but the way I can make a ghost blush like that? It’s adorable. “What’s the matter? Don’t you opossums use that word? Fucking? That’s what we’re talking about here. Not bounding. Good ol’ sweaty fucking.”
Now I’m teasing. I’m teasing because I want to believe that he’s interested, that he wants me, that there’s something between that I’m not just imagining because of the mate bond.
That sucker has been clawing at me for days now. It doesn’t help that every touch between us lingers too long. Every little glance from him lands somewhere deep beneath my ribs and stays there, doing a samba with my stupid heart.
And now he’s standing in my shop, looking at me like I’m something worthy of such honest affection, and all I can do is think: mine.
I want him. I want him desperately. But since he still doesn’t know that there might be a reason why he feels anything for me at all, I need to make sure he understands what this actually means for the both of us if we… bounce.
I step closer slowly until I’m standing directly in front of him, close enough to smell a whisper of bergamot and deep woods beneath the strange cool edge of ‘ghost’ that clings to his skin.
“You didn’t answer me,” I whisper. “About fucking.”
Ash gulps. “Yes, opossums know all about the act. But I have to tell you that I’ve never done… that before. I’ve never mated.”
I lift my eyebrows. “Never mated?”
He shakes his head slowly.
I’m not surprised. Put a hundred shifters in a room and maybe a third of them didn’t mate until their bonding night. Not me. If there was pleasure to find as a young raccoon, I found it, but I was careful. And now I’m glad because if we were both virgins, can you imagine how clueless we would be?
Not that I mind hearing that Ash hasn’t had a lover before.
Call me a hypocrite if you want, but it does something deep in my chest to hear that I don’t have to share him with the memories of other females.
As for me? From the moment I caught my second whiff of bergamot and the woods at night, I can’t remember any of the males I enjoyed in the past.
They were fun, but Ash… Ash is going to be my forever.
He clears his throat. “I did… play around a little when I was younger.”
Yeah? “Like how?”
“There were some kisses?”
I think of the kiss we just shared. “Like we just kissed?”
“Um. No. Nothing like that.” He lifts his hand, scratching the back of his neck. “More like pecks on the cheeks.”
Probably with his clan.
Trying to hide my pleased smile, I ask, “Any touching?”
He thinks about it for a moment. “Does over the clothes count?”
Adorable! “Sure.”
“Then yes.”
“Okay. Okay… no mating, but what about oral? You ever let anyone kiss you on your cock?”
Ash sucks in an unnecessary breath, and I’m not sure why: my casual use of the word ‘cock’ or the idea that someone might want to put their mouth on his.
His lips press together, he shakes his head once, and I know that answer to that is both.
Now, I know that I suggested we have a little fun to relieve his obvious erection. I plan on it, too, but I’m thinking that it might be even more fun to shock him by doing that before jumping to the main act.
“What if I wanted to?”
His jaw drops.
I’ve got my answer right there. And because I want to make sure he is going into this with as much information as I’m willing to give him at this moment, I say, “I want to. Let me just put that out there. I do. But… I have done all that stuff. The kissing. The under the clothes… the fucking. You won’t be my first. Does that bother you? ”
Ash thinks about that for a moment. Just when I’m thinking I fucked up by saying that, he juts his chin out, bolder than I would’ve expected from my phantom librarian. “Are any of them here now?”
I make a point to glance around the empty store. “I don’t see them.”
“Are you offering to… bounce with them? Or kiss their cocks?”
I scoff. “Fuck no. Just you, baby. Just you.”
My opossum mate preens. “Then what do I care? You’re here with me, Roxy. That’s all that matters to me tonight.”
Right. Because he has no idea that I’m not just playing for one night. I want forever, and maybe if I can show him how good we could be together…
I take his hand. I’m sure he expects that I’m going to lead him upstairs where it’s private.
Not necessary. I drag him over to the sales counter where I keep my calculator and my cash box.
It comes up to his navel. When I drop to my knees in front of his crotch, no one can see me or what I’m going to do to him.
And Ash.. he’s a ghost, yeah? So as far as anyone on the sidewalk outside the store knows, there’s no hanky panky going on inside at all.
“Do your best not to float away,” I coo, grabbing my hair and, using the hair tie on my wrist, throwing it up into a messy bun. “I’ll hold onto you and make you as solid as possible to keep you right where I want you.”
“Roxy—”
I don’t mean to, but I hush him by grabbing the zipper on his jeans and tugging it down.
I’ll admit, there’s a split second where I’m afraid that we won’t be able to do anything.
If he’s stuck in his ghostly clothes and I can’t get to his cock…
yeah, my options are limited to a handjob, maybe.
But, the way I see it, if anything I touch on Ash goes solid, and just being around him makes him hard, there’s gotta be a way to… Yes!
The zipper goes down, and I glance up at him through the fringe of my eyelashes, my yellows gleaming in the dark.
And then, because I’m nothing if not a tease, I fall back, resting my ass against the soles of my boots. “Hey, Ash?”
As soon as the zipper went down, Ash threw back his head and closed his eyes, waiting for my touch on his skin. He quirks one open when I call his name, a look of bewildered horror crossing his features when he sees that I’ve let go of him.
“Ro—Ro—Roxy?”
I tilt my head, eyeing him. “I’m sorry. I just gotta ask. I mean, I get not mating. A lot of shifters wait for their mate… but you never let anyone suck you off?”
“Are you really asking me that now?”
“Yeah,” I say brightly. “I just… I’m curious like that.”
If it was any other male, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t put up with my shit. But this is Ashton Morgan, my fated mate, and instead of zipping up and floating away, he takes a moment to gather his thoughts.
And then—
“The truth is that there was never anyone I wanted to be that intimate with… until you, Roxy.”
A lump lodges in my throat. I force it down. “Huh.” I let out a tiny laugh. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a raccoon.”
“It’s not because you’re a raccoon. It’s because you’re you.”
Damn him. Damn my sweet, sexy, dead opossum librarian mate. And if that’s something I never thought I’d have cause to think in my life, that just goes to show that Fate has a twisted sense of humor because that’s exactly who I’m peering up at now—and who I want so badly, it aches.
“No male can tame Roxy Kane,” I tell him.
Ash reaches down, swiping a ghostly finger across my cheek.
“I don’t want to tame you. I just want to have you.”
Heat flashes straight through me. I dart out my tongue and wet my lips the same time as I flick open the button on his jeans. I reach inside his mostly see-through boxes, pull out his cock, and murmur huskily, “I think that can be arranged.”
I already knew he was hard. I take a moment to gauge his size—a decent length with a thick enough girth that won’t be a problem to feed into my body, but will still stretch me out decently when the main event happens—and then, with a cheeky wink, I give him a stroke.
It’s undeniably weird. He’s solid, but this close, I can see that my skin almost melds into his.
There’s a ghostly aura surrounding his soul that I’m reaching through, and there’s no actual life.
No warmth. He’s not cold, either, just solid.
Like he’s there, and I can touch him, and he can obviously feel me because he’s already making soft panting sounds over my head…
but I can honestly say that this is a first for me.
Then, humming softly at that realization, I kiss the head of his cock before sucking as much of him as I can into the heat of my mouth.
The moment I do, any hope of Ash retaining any semblance of his gentlemanly composure goes poof just like that. His head tips back while his fingers clutch uselessly at the edge of the counter hard enough that they disappear into the marble.
The ghost dick gets even stranger. Faintly translucent one moment, almost completely solid the next.
But the more pleasure I drag out of him, the louder he grunts, the realer he seems to become beneath my hands.
It’s almost like his need for me is anchoring him to this plane.
I swear, his shoes are flat on the floor instead of him floating, and at some point, his fingers seem to clutch the counter instead of disappearing inside of it.
But then he moves his hand to my hair, guiding me to take him even deeper, sucking him even harder. I hum around his cock, smiling next when the way he has a full body shudder tells me he enjoys that a lot.
I use every trick that I have to make him enjoy my touch. Hollowing my cheeks, turning up the suction, licking his sac before returning to lap at the tip as though it were my favorite lollipop flavor.