Chapter Ten
Ten
I dig under the sink for a toothbrush for him, coming up to find him standing directly behind me.
His smiling eyes meet mine in the mirror, and like this we brush our teeth, mouths foamy and grinning.
Does he feel it, too? This anticipatory giddiness?
It’s a little like being ten and handed a crisp twenty-dollar bill outside a candy store.
There’s something delicious in my future and I don’t even know where to sink my teeth first.
When I bend to spit and rinse, his hand comes over my waist, beneath my shirt, fingers seeking skin.
When we switch positions and he bends, spits, rinses, I wrap my arms around his middle and let myself go blank inside, just holding him and feeling the hard planes of his back pressed flat against my cheek.
In the bedroom, he peels away my clothes without hurry. A gift teasingly unwrapped. It isn’t the first time we’re touching and looking, but it’s the first time there’s no ticking clock in my ear.
Though there may be one in his.
I pull his shirt up his torso. “What time do you have to leave in the morning?”
He pauses his exploration of my chest to look at his watch. “Around six.”
I glance at the clock on the nightstand. It’s a few minutes before eleven. I can work with this.
He moves to taste my neck, hands sliding up over my breasts.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” I ask.
“Some promo shoots.” His thumb and finger close over my nipple in a soft pinch. “A fan meet-and-greet and signing at around one thirty, I think.” He straightens, looking at me, and finally lets me get his shirt off. “Do you have an office you have to go to?”
I shake my head. “I have a desk, but I’m rarely there.”
“Are you working tomorrow?”
“I’ll probably make calls,” I say. “Follow up on a few things.” I don’t say Josef Anders’s name but it penetrates the space between us like a dark spot in a photograph anyway. My heart begins to thrum in anxiety. The pressure to do this right is intense.
He unbuttons his jeans, distracting me from my impending panic by kicking them off, and then pulls me back onto the bed, guiding me over him.
I look down at him, tracing his jawline with a fingertip.
His eyes fall closed, he hums, and from this vantage point, I register how much I like being on top of him because I get to witness how he gives in to pleasure so absolutely.
Alec’s eyes drift open and he watches me watching him, and the silent moment of understanding makes me ache.
Reaching down, he shifts under me to get his boxers off.
I feel like I’ve been hungry for this since he grew hard against me underwater, arching in futile weightlessness as we bobbed in the deep ocean surf.
The hunger grew with him sleeping silently next to me on the hot sand and on the quiet drive home where he resumed his wandering exploration of my thighs—occasionally pressing a firm hand between my legs and then sliding away, teasing—and somehow reached a frantic peak as I saw how easily he integrated into my life with Eden.
I come over him now, trapping him between us, sliding over his length. Not taking him in, just rocking. “I’ve been worked up like this all day.”
Eyes closed again, he smiles at this, mumbling a soft “Me too” as his hands come up over my breasts.
I want to capture this view on film, burn it into my long-term memory: Alec on my bed, Alec underneath me.
The long line of his neck, the sharp point of his Adam’s apple, the masculine curve of his collarbones.
He has a small bruise on his chest that looks like a bite mark, from yesterday or the time before.
I don’t even know. It would easily be hidden beneath a shirt, but it’s there in front of me like our perfect little secret, and the knowledge of it lights me up like sunrise inside.
“Gigi,” he says, eyes drifting open. “Take me in.”
He licks and sucks at my chest when I lean over him to dig in my nightstand.
I feel him go still for a fraction of a second when he hears me open a new box of condoms. And I see the smile in his eyes when I look at his face as I tear the foil.
He’s still looking at me as I turn my attention down, as I put the condom on him with less grace and speed than when he put one on himself our first time.
“Why are you smiling?”
“You know why,” he whispers.
I can’t help it. I love the weight of him in my hand. If I didn’t feel the gravity of my own need, I would play and tease and touch with fingers and tongue, but I’m impatient and he is, too, arching his hips, hands urging me forward and over him.
It’s only the second time he’s been inside me, and the moment I sink down I have to cup my hand over his groaning mouth, bite down on my own lip so I don’t cry out.
He presses his head back into the pillow, neck corded with restraint, and it feels like every part of my brain turns on.
My body becomes a precision machine, working the hard length of him into me again and again, moving against him, finding what feels good.
After we find a rhythm together, he stares up at me, eyes black, mouth moving in silent speech.
His mouth forms a silent, Like that?; a soundless Fuck spoken through a smile.
I stare at his lips as I move, watching him lick them.
Watching them make quiet sounds of pleasure.
Watching as he pulls them back in a dirty little growl.
This focus means pleasure comes at me sideways, rising like a ship out of darkness until it’s there in the deepest part of me, climbing up my spine and filling my chest with a cry I trap there, lips sealed and head thrown back.
For a second I lose track of what he’s doing while I’m falling; all I can do or feel is my own relief and what seems like a streak of wild silver tearing through me.
Just as I start to come down, he sits up, almost like he can’t take it anymore, digging a hand into my hair and coming for my mouth.
Alec rolls us over, taking charge again, and I have a thought that feels almost like a brag, a betrayal, that if anyone ever saw him like this, they might fall into madness knowing he’s exactly what the world wants him to be behind closed doors.
I love his breathless laugh—the sound I’ve come to recognize as his elated disbelief.
“Shh,” he whispers down at me, and then I get it, what made him laugh, what made him happy—my melting down beneath him, the way I’d started to let out these tiny rhythmic cries, forgetting where we are, and the roommate only two walls away.
His hand comes firmly over my mouth, and he presses a kiss to my cheek, reducing his movements into tiny, teasing snaps of his hips.
“Are you trying to wake up the neighborhood?”
Turning my face into his neck, I press my mouth there, whispering an apology I don’t mean, an apology he doesn’t want.
“I like watching you struggle to be quiet as much as I like making you loud,” he says, and then, testing me, he pushes up onto his hands, staring with playful warning before he starts to move in long, hard strokes.
But at some point, we transition from frenzied to slow.
With him over me, holding me, his mouth open against my neck, I fall into a pleasure trance.
This is making love without a goal, just moving together, lost in the same thing.
I’ve never in my life felt so connected to someone before, like we’re sharing the same high.
I wrap my arms all the way around him and try to focus on every tiny sensation: the smooth glide of his chest over mine, the quiet sounds carried on his breath against my neck, the warm, gentle friction of his hips against my thighs, and the thick drag of him in and out and in and deeper in.
Afterward, a long time later, when he’s come to a gasping stop over me—sweat-slick and worn-out—he collapses at my side, turns on the light, and runs his fingertips along my hairline, down over my jaw, looking at me.
Touching my ribs, tracing the mark his teeth left on my breast. Sliding his hand down my stomach, he comes to a gentle stop between my legs.
“You’re so warm. Are you sore?”
“No.” Sleepily, I drag my finger along his collarbone. “Maybe I will be tomorrow.”
He turns his gaze away from my face and down to where his fingers rest over me. My fevered pulse still beats there. “I can’t stop touching you.”
“I know.” I close my eyes. I don’t feel like I’m living in the same world I do during daylight. If this is what contentment is, I never want to leave this bed. “I like it.”
His fingertip runs over my clit, slowly circling. “I like this tiny, soft part of you. I like what happens to your expression when I touch you here.”
My voice is slow and drowsy. “What happens?”
“I’ll have to make up a word for it. It’s like relieved begging.” I laugh as he pushes up onto an elbow to get a better look at my face. I’d be self-conscious if I were more awake. Or if it wasn’t Alec. “You’re so beautiful it makes me feel this sweet sort of anguish. I’m desperate for you, Gigi.”
“Desperate for me? Please. I’m a sure thing.”
A distracted smile is there and gone. “Before I return to London, I’d like to state for the record that I claim this bottom lip.
” He shifts his touch. “But also this single freckle on your shoulder. I’ve gone hunting and it’s your only one.
” He gives me a thoughtful once-over. “Your eyes when you laugh—they’re also mine.
The curve of your spine when you’re coming.
The soft skin of your thighs against my neck.
” His hand returns, cupping me between my legs.
“And this, right here. I’m greedy for these things. ”
“My turn.” I reach up, tracing his mouth. “I claim your bottom lip.”
He blows out a breath against my touch. “You have to pick something new.”