Chapter 19 #2
“It does, actually.”
Then we were standing side by side looking out onto the street, cradling our mugs.
As if hot drinks and conversation were the only reasons he’d brought me home.
What was this? I didn’t want him bloody well serenading me.
I didn’t want coffee either. I wanted his hands on me the way they had been last night, and to taste the salty-sweet tang of his skin.
I wanted to know what he’d do when he didn’t think he had to hold back.
Simon studied me. “I didn’t really bring you back here to drink coffee.”
He clunked his cup onto a bookcase shelf. My skin prickled.
“Thank fuck. Me neither.”
Every bloody piece of Simon’s clothing had buttons.
Right when I wanted to unpeel him there in the window like an easy-open delivery box from an evil conglomerate internet company making a mockery of competition law, there they were, getting in the way.
His eyes flashed at me, shimmering with amusement as I wrestled the hundred thousand down the length of his shirt front with my sweaty sausage fingers.
“Tomorrow, I’m going to bonfire all your suits.”
Simon laughed, voice all husky and burred. “Please don’t.”
He pushed my hands away, deftly flipping down the line of his shirt front, undoing two and three at a time with a flick of his thumb.
His smile made me glow. The way he watched me, I couldn’t breathe. His was the close-in focus of sun-rays intensified under a magnifying glass. I always knew I was an ant. Sometimes it felt like he wanted to eat my words right off my face, but what if he was reading my lips the whole time?
What if—
He ducked to kiss me.
“Mmnngh.”
His mouth. Devastatingly soft, slow, like he wanted to take his time, take me apart, take everything he could get. Fuck me, I’d let him. Arching up against him like a line of iron filings, I’d let him take whatever he wanted.
Teeth grazed my lower lip, my brain blue-screened.
Error.
Input not detected.
System offline. Reboot required.
Sucking in a shaky breath, I yanked my shirt off over my head before he changed his bloody mind, stripping off like he’d hit a timer on a naked race.
Simon’s laugh rang loud and clear between us.
“Slow down.”
I goggled at him. “Why the hell would I do that?”
Last time was a fluke. This was back to reality where quick sex was good sex.
Orgasms all round, so no one complained when my bit-of-rough act collapsed under its own weight.
So they didn’t get the chance to notice my outside only matched what they expected of me, not who I really was, or what I really wanted.
No one cared. Simon was not the exception.
We had to get on with it. Before he changed his mind. Before it turned to a repeat of everything at Luke’s place. Before Simon remembered he had a billion and fourteen reasons not to go there with me. Ever. Including deep frying my testicles.
Simon squeezed my wrist. “I’m serious, where’s the fire?”
I froze, midway through unbuttoning my fly, far too conscious of the weight of his hand so bloody close to my crotch. I grimaced with the effort of squashing my daft grin down. “Oh come on.”
He blinked at me – the face of innocent confusion. “What?”
“You know I’m about to tell you it’s down my pants.”
He shoved my shoulder, eyes rolling. But he’d already laughed.
“Bedroom. Now. Before you scandalise half the street.”
Inside the bedroom door, he murmured wordlessly against my lips and the buzz ricocheted right through me. Hands cupped my face, holding my jaw, drawing me in and up. He kissed me like I was special, and I kissed him back like I believed him.
That wasn’t what this was for him. He was just good at this. And that was fine. Perfect. Amazing. Do not stop.
Lips dropped down, pressing in against my throat with a wicked graze of teeth, right over the ticking pulse in my neck. And I nearly buckled like he’d kneecapped me. Every inch of me hummed, thrumming with charge. His mouth was bloody magic.
Fewer clothes. We needed fewer clothes.
I wrenched his jacket off his shoulders as he peeled his waistcoat off.
Simon sex-godded his way to total nudity, shedding clothes, tugging his cuffs off backwards.
All those buttons were nothing. And there he was, with his cock bobbing about, looking like an exceptionally horny classical sculpture, all balance and poise and coiled energy.
He had to be itching to hang his things up. But they stayed crumpled on the floor at his feet; he didn’t even glance down – he was watching me instead.
And there I was – a desperate prat, jeans bunched around my knees, hopping about trying to get my socks off. But he was looking at me like I was a prize he’d won, which made no sense at all.
Under my hands he fitted together all slim and spare and strong. God I wanted him. Hard up, pressing into me, wanted him like I’d barely wanted anything or anyone. Ever.
He kissed my neck again, teeth grazing over my barely-there stubble and his hand dragged, impossibly slow, up every notch of my spine, dissolving me from the inside out.
The thoroughness of his lips carved a hollow into the core of me in the shape of his name – the space it took in the air when I signed his run of letters.
When I breathed all the way in, the bruising ache of it panged deep inside me.
What the hell was this?
He could get me off with his little finger and a precisely deployed waggle of his eyebrows. Anyone else stood no chance. After this, I might as well become a monk. He’d annihilated any possibility of me settling for anyone who wasn’t him ever again.
“You’re gorgeous, Ben.”
What a beautiful liar.
“Don’t have to lay it on that thick.” I scuffed a self-preservation laugh. “Already got my kit off, haven’t I?”
Simon frowned. And I wanted to stuff my words back down my ungrateful throat.
“Why do you do that?”
Silence rang in my ears – nothing but his eyes on me and the steady in and out of his breathing for the longest moment. I should have taken the compliment.
“Oh come on Simon.” What did he want me to say?
Couldn’t we get back to the having of the sex?
My voice was too dry, too quiet and it didn’t matter at all with his attention burning into me, reading every syllable even without sound.
“You’re gorgeous. Everything you bloody do is elegance itself.
I go to the gym too much to make up for the fact I’m really really not. ”
He tilted his head, eyes catching mine for an uncomfortable heartbeat. “I appreciate the gym visits.” He arched an eyebrow. “Am I allowed to say that?”
I closed my eyes, blocking him out, and nodded, wordless. Everyone appreciated the gym visits. His hands trailed across my pecs, down my stomach like he planned on worshipping me, and I tensed to give him some corrugation, breathing madly, blinking to look – watching him watching me.
“I do like your body.”
“Shame about the face though. Right?” I grinned to tell him it was meant to be funny. How many times had I heard that?
But Simon didn’t laugh.
“It’s just a broken nose.” His voice was a steady whisper. Burred clear and dry with the truth of it.
The tip of his finger trailed an acid line over the bump in the skewed cartilage. I wanted to swat his hand away. Push him back. Stop him touching me like that, because it wasn’t just my skin. It wasn’t just my face. I never asked him to look this close at any of me. And it itched.
“I know.” It wasn’t though, was it? He had to know we didn’t match.
Scrappy. That’s what they’d called me the first time it happened. When James Taylor laughed at Mum at pick up, and I’d set to, bristling with it. Trouble, Grandad said about me, years after that.
“I like your smile too.” Calm as anything, Simon kissed at the base of my throat, tasting me like an obscene delicacy. He peeled back, eyes far too bloody gentle. “You hardly show it to anyone.”
My chest tightened and my throat knotted. Fuck. I was going to hyperventilate.
That hollow keenness with his name on panged inside me again, and I gritted my teeth against it. Why did he think he had to do this? We were just supposed to be having sex.
“Right.” I strained a tight grin. Why was he trying to pick me apart?
Dropping to my knees and begging to suck him off would shut him up. Stop all of this. But his eyes wouldn’t leave me alone and the words lodged at the back of my throat, and my knuckles wouldn’t curl into any shapes at all.
And—
Fuck him.
“So, do you have any condoms here, or what?”
Simon laughed. “Are you asking to fuck me?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed hard. “Alright.” This was it. My chance to show Simon I could be everything he wanted. “Or I could...” What was it Luke had asked? My head felt dizzy. “Rough you about a bit?”
Simon’s nose wrinkled sharply. “You want to beat me up?”
“No.” I wanted him to stop talking. “I mean. Only if you want. Sometimes guys expect that. Because I’m all...”
It wasn’t a proper sign I used. Puffing my cheeks and flexing my arms with fisted hands, like the Incredible Hulk.
The image hung in the air between us, bloated and wrong. My entire head filled with blood. If he so much as sniggered, I would burst all over his Instagram perfect walls like an angry boil.
“I’m not buying it,” he whispered, breath against my earlobe. Far too close. “Tell me what you really want.”
The world shuttled back and forth. His eyes stayed locked on mine – the only static point.