9. The ultimately versatile phrase
Chapter 9
The ultimately versatile phrase
As soon as she agreed to talk, Megan found herself with nothing to say. Abso-fucking-lutely nothing, of course.
The simplest thing, or at least the only thing she could think of that wasn’t well, let’s go, then was to pick up the box and read the brand name of the condoms. “Did you know that contrary to popular belief, the whole Trojan Horse thing isn’t in the Iliad ?” He’d claimed to want her to talk, so he would get whatever came out of a classicist’s mouth and he’d learn from it. So be it.
“There are a few references in the Odyssey , but most of the story actually comes from Virgil’s Aeneid .” She’d never considered the Latin title to be particularly intriguing, but with a gorgeous guy signaling sexual interest, all those vowels somehow felt dirty. She stared harder at the box, and hoped that she could stop babbling about Virgil and Homer long enough to encounter some male nudity, maybe even to use one of the items he’d bought. “Nobody makes movies out of that epic, so somehow in popular imagination it glomped on”—that was the least sexy word her lips could form, so of course it tumbled out. Next she would probably say moist —“to the more popular story of the Trojan War.”
Finally, finally, her brain stopped the ongoing social catastrophe that was her mouth.
“I did not know any of that. Afraid I’m limited to movie versions.”
She glanced through her eyelashes without looking him in the face. His wobbly smile was an improvement.
“I like listening to you.”
Instinct prodded her to insert a small, self-deprecating laugh, which happily released a huge chunk of the nerves that had driven her monologue.
“I mean it. I like it.” He raised a hand to rub the back of his neck. “I think, maybe, if you tell me what to do, what you want? Or even talk about Greeks and Romans? That would all be good.” He stopped and looked at her.
In that instant, a feeling she couldn’t name clicked into a spot that she hadn’t known was empty. The good-looking hookup she’d expected to enjoy tonight had morphed unexpectedly into more, and left her incapable of forming any words beyond the ultimately versatile phrase oh fuck , looping and stretching from oh fuck to oh fuuuuuuck to OH- pause -FUCK, but finally settling on a background-level ohfuckohfuckohFUCK. “Um, sure.”
He raised one of his dark eyebrows, and a smile lifted the edge of his mouth, but she knew he couldn’t see the shiny, flat expanse of the blank whiteboard that seemed to have replaced her brain the moment she tried to say something scintillating and/or sexy. He appeared to be waiting. For her to speak.
“I’m kind of dirty. I’d like to take off my shirt—”
Hell yes, he was a dirty man, she was a dirty woman, they were dirty people. Latin declensions of bellator sordidus could rise in front of her like Caesar’s legions and she’d want the dirty shirt stripped off each and every filthy warrior.
“—maybe you’ll tell me to do that?” The way he looked directly at her, and then waited for her response, was crazy-sexy, a treat akin to sticking a finger in the icing bowl before there was a finished cake.
She licked her lips, but didn’t have enough saliva left to douse the heat that threatened to char her skin. “Take off your shirt.”
Holy shit, she actually sounded like the woman she wanted to be, a woman who knew what she wanted.
Nico didn’t take his shirt off one arm at a time, none of the fumble-with-the-armhole style of shirt removal, not him. He used that crossed-arm, raise-both-sides-together move that she associated with film scenes and lifted his shirt evenly from the bottom. His elbows and hands rose smoothly, as if the moment was set to music, or maybe that was her fantasy filling in the blanks. The fabric rose to reveal his chest. His stomach was flat, sculpted with the dents and grooves of muscles, as she’d expected. His nipples were brown, the hair around them very dark, matching the flow of hair leading down to circle his navel and point at his waistband. She wanted to stroke her fingertips across all his planes and angles, wanted to study the intricate colors of his tattoo, wanted to taste his skin and fit her lips and tongue into the dips of his stomach and the ridges of his bones. He was perfection, and he was here for her.
Stripped from the waist up, he tossed his shirt on the counter. His gaze dropped, and she knew he knew she’d gone braless. Presumably, he’d known from the moment he’d walked in the room, since her breasts hung differently under the clingy fabric. And now, of course, it outlined her nipples.
“Tell me something.” The timbre of his voice had deepened and slowed until she almost thought she could fall into the stretch of his words and roll around. She nearly trembled as he continued, “Did you ever sneak guys home?”
She shook her head. The table and chairs had already gone, so the space should feel big and empty, not this close, overheated crowding that stuck her shirt to her back and made her thighs prickle with heat.
He was watching her, waiting for more. She was supposed to talk. “No.” She breathed the word.
“So this…” His hands landed on her hips, the weight and heat pressing through her denim shorts. His fingers spread to encompass her curves, his pinkies flirting with the frayed hem and his thumbs reaching to her waist, where they met only a thin layer of shirt fabric. Her body remembered what his fingers could do to her, and she felt the contradictory impulses of arousal sweeping through her. “Is a bit transgressive for you?”
Her lips parted, but she stopped herself before repeating transgressive . For a person who had agreed to keep talking, she kept finding herself reduced to echoes.
A crease at the corner of his mouth told her that he was amused. “At Full Service Movers, we like to employ our college board words. Shall I promise to be straightforward?” His hands slid up a few inches. “Uncomplicated?”
Of course, the son of a librarian knew how to string syllables together to get what he wanted. Good that he didn’t require her to answer, because standing upright, despite feeling like Icarus plummeting the moment his wings melted, was her current limit. Coherent speech? That was out of reach.
His lips looked so firm that she felt her nipples peak with need for the promised sensation, but still, he didn’t place his mouth on her. Instead, his hands gathered more fabric, and his knuckles trailed up her ribs as he raised her shirt. He paused when his fingers brushed the undersides of her breasts.
“May I take this off?”
She shaped a yes, but her mouth was dry. Her brain knew that her tongue moved, because she felt it touch the roof of her mouth even though her speaking ability seemed to be displaced by the feel of his hands sliding higher, air on her bare back, his hands brushing the crests of her breasts as he lifted her shirt away. Then her shirt was gone, and her breasts were completely free.
For an instant, she hung suspended between being the woman who had responsibilities and the one who had empty hours stretching in front of her. There was only one way to plunge.
They collided into each other. The wall of his chest, hot and hard and broader than hers, became the limit of her vision. He pulled her tight to his frame, stomach to stomach. Their lips met. Tongues entwined. His stubble was scratchier than it had been at lunchtime. Her skin absorbed the texture of his chest hair, her hands explored the hardness of youth and fitness, her bones pressed into the tough edges of a man of rock. Part of her brain imagined the moment she’d grab his head and rub his chin and cheeks over her sensitive places until he’d stimulated every inch of her skin, even while here and now, she gripped his shoulder blades so tightly, her fingers could feel his muscles flex.
In the dark glass of the wall oven door, she glimpsed their reflections, two semitransparent figures becoming one. She’d wanted to be this close to him from the moment she’d noticed him through her bedroom window. Her hand trailed the length of his spine, a motion repeated by her reflection.
“Upstairs?” He punctuated his question by moving his lips to the skin behind her ear.
She shivered at the touch. He traced her lobe with his tongue. Each time his chest rose, she could hear his breath in her ear and feel his ribs move through her own skin.
“We left the mattress.”
Oh yes, she knew that. “Yes.”
They kissed, stroked heated skin, and tangled their feet and hands as they stumbled through the hallway toward the stairs. At the bottom step, he pulled her against his chest. His mouth burned the hollow of her throat, her bare shoulder, her neck. When his cheek rubbed the upper slope of her breast, she arched backward, seeking more of the promising friction. He guided her to the first step, which positioned her breasts closer to his face.
His mouth besieged one of her nipples, and she felt herself wobble. Every touch loosened her joints as much as it seemed to tighten her skin and nerves, until her body felt almost like an invention, a new contraption roaring to life, about to fly away.
She looked past his shoulder. Anyone on the porch would be able to see Nico’s bare back, her arms and shoulders, her breasts so obviously mid-suckle.
Maybe Tyler would return. She imagined the younger man leaning against the wall and watching while Nico worshipped her breasts. Would Nico turn her so that the other man could see more? The two of them, and her. Her mind stuttered on the image, wanting and not wanting. Nico bent low enough to circle her navel with his tongue, and the air that wafted across her wet, exposed nipples didn’t cool her. Not at all.
Part of her wanted to be seen. That part scared her as much as it intrigued her, because this man could so easily unearth needs that she herself barely recognized. Needs that she barely understood.
Not far away, a car rumbled past in the street. Her gaze flew back to the glass in the door, the porch, and the walk leading to the house. All was quiet, all was empty, but the mail hadn’t come. Whether that meant the carrier could arrive momentarily or her mother had discontinued service, she didn’t know. She shivered.
“Don’t,” Nico said. He stood, giving her a semblance of cover, although from her higher step, she could still see the window.
Her fingers tightened on his upper arms. His skin, so hot, so tight across his muscles. She wanted to be crushed by him. Crushed into mindlessness. “What?”
“I want you to be comfortable. Let’s go up.” His hands stroked along her ribs and down again, soothing.
The main event when he would fill her and screw her, that was her goal, but…her feet stayed firmly fixed to the stair. She liked being a step higher than him. And she liked the possibility of being caught here, with him. It all reminded her of those stories.
“No, let’s stay.” She lifted her chin in the direction of the front door. She held back the direction to carry on, although it was a near thing.
“You sure?” His eyebrows built vertical lines over the bridge of his nose, and she remembered she was supposed to be talking to him, keeping him outside of his own head.
“Maybe you need to do what I say.” That was good, even if her voice sounded like a smoker’s rasp.
He dropped his hands to the button at his fly, letting the weight of his hands pull his jeans lower. “What would that be?”
Now she was well and truly on the spot. “Take off your jeans.”
Giving him an order and then watching his eyelids drop and his chest expand as her command penetrated was a powerful aphrodisiac. “Take them off right here.”
When he pulled his hand from his pocket, he held out a dangling three-pack of condoms. “Hold these, please.”
From then, he seemed to do every motion at half speed, focusing her attention while simultaneously making her brain frantically urge him to go faster. She wanted him to yank at the fastener. Rip at the zipper. Shove the denim past his hips. Make it happen faster, not this slow dance. The only thing that felt immediate was the serrated edge of the condom packaging that crinkled against the ball of her thumb.
Through his opened fly, she saw the elongated shape tease from under his boxer briefs. Her mouth filled with saliva and heat flared in her stomach, a flame that urged her to see and feel and taste that elusive anatomy.
“Just the jeans?”
“All of it.” The words whipped out.
He pushed his pants and briefs past his hips and knees, leaning forward to remove them from each foot and giving her a view of the beautiful ridge of his spine leading to paler curves, his buttocks, tight enough that the dents at the sides flexed when he kicked his clothes into a heap. He straightened. Nude, he was gloriously sculpture-worthy. His penis stood out from an abundance of dark hair at its base, and his thighs flexed as he shifted his balance. The inverted triangle created by his shoulders and chest narrowing to his hips was exaggerated by her perspective on a higher step.
“Feel more comfortable?” he asked, while his hand wrapped loosely around his shaft. Perhaps the gliding motion of his hand was without volition, but the way his pupils expanded and his nostrils widened told her that he liked having her watch.
Mute again, she nodded. She was only one step up, so it couldn’t be the height that made her feel she was at risk of falling into him, landing with her breasts and nipples smashed into his chest, getting impaled on the swollen tip of his spearhead. The imagination fever left her so weakened that she reached for the wall.
His free hand pressed next to hers. “Tell me what you want next.” His voice wrapped around her skin. “Do you want to watch me?” His other hand was moving slowly, not the frantic pounding described in the magazine stories, but a mesmerizingly steady rhythm that stretched her own needs in tandem with the dark flush of the head popping over the top of his squeezing fist. “Do you want to tell me to come?”
An image flashed of him erupting, ropes of cum leaving his body, his lean and muscled torso tightened in that exquisite moment, all at her command. And then he would kneel at her feet and… oh fuck. The condoms crinkled in her fist, tethering her. “Here?”
“Why not?” His elbow began to piston. “Right here. You can watch.” The speed of his fist jolted his body. “Or upstairs?” The drops of liquid she saw on the tip of his cock called to her, drawing matching preparation from her body. “Your call.”
She wanted to do more than watch. She was ready to be fucked and pounded, simple and hard. “Up.”
“Then lead.”
Atalanta at the races with a suitor on her heels couldn’t have dashed more fleetly.
Megan’s room was empty except for the bare mattress, a pale blue rectangle resting on its box springs, and the magazine she’d been reading. She turned to see Nico, as naked as a kouros statue , paused behind her. Unlike classical nudes, his cock was huge, as huge as the ones she’d been reading about all day. It bobbed parallel to the ground, locked in a battle between biology and gravity that left him pointing straight at her. On the stairs, she’d been above him, where perspective and distance had blurred how meaty he would be when they were at the same level. Appreciating that she was finally about to have that gorgeous thick man-part inside her made her want to hold her breath.
Without knowing how it happened, they were both horizontal, legs tangled, and her chest smashed half underneath his. She pressed against his sun-kissed skin while he cupped her breast, creating an instant need that gave her the strength to grab his hips and pull until his pelvis nudged her cradle. Whether it was the day-long buildup, the magazine stories, or the way he’d sought her agreement, none of the awkwardness of first sex stuttered through her. His ass felt like a rock, if a rock could be warm and accept the dent of her fingers. She wiggled to try to get his cock rubbing against the crotch of her shorts. That barrier had to come off, fast.
“Whoa,” he breathed the word into the angle of her neck. “Want to do this right.” He maneuvered away from her efforts and switched his hands from her breasts to the skin on her inner arms. “Don’t make me come too fast.” His rough fingertips trailed along the fine nerves below her elbows, emphasizing that he was a man who worked with rocks and tools, in contrast to her soft office life.
Then he gripped her wrists. Firm and strong, but not scary. He placed the back of both her hands low by her side and slightly away from her body, making her into the living statue. The pose let her easily arch her back and thrust her chest toward him.
“Don’t move your hands.”
The command sent shivers of anticipation through her. “Then you have to take off my shorts.”
He was all business with her last two pieces of clothing.
She looked down the length of her own body, between the valley of her breasts, past the curve of her stomach, to where he knelt between her thighs. With this view, his penis seemed even larger and the groove where his thighs connected to his torso was as defined as a marble sculpture, distinctive enough she believed that she could lay the side of her hand in it.
Still on his knees, he held the strip of condoms and paused, raising an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Yes.” Even her breath froze as he tore open the plastic package and removed the protection inside. Watching him apply the condom while he watched her was the porniest thing she’d ever done. He performed, working his penis so she could see the hole at the end open when he pulled his skin back in his fist. When he finally covered the tip, the latex circle looked like lips enveloping the end of his cock before he unrolled the edges.
She wanted to reach up and push aside his hands to do this for him, weigh his balls in her palm and circle her fingers around him like he’d done for himself, but his gaze and her promise kept her pinned and immobile. She’d had no idea that visual imagery could cause her to become this slippery, that seeing him don a condom in front of her could arouse her until her buttocks tightened, lifting her toward him, or that she could feel so ready before he even touched her there.
His hands fell to the jut of her hip bone and flattened her into the mattress. “You agreed not to move. Didn’t you?”
The shiver of desire caused by his deepened voice, his command, his question, liquefied her muscles and flattened her to the mattress. “Yes.” Her acquiescence stretched like a sigh.
“Good. Then watch me.”
That she couldn’t not do. All her attention focused on watching his hands spread wide to span her torso as he stroked from her hips into the dip of her waist and then up along her ribs. His thumbs met in the center of her chest and bumped up under her breasts, lifting them higher and closer together. She felt jittery and precariously balanced, even though she was flat on her back, as she kept watching him. Past the greedy points, tight and puckered with wanting, she saw his cock jutting straight toward her. Devoured by the desire for him to rub that hard stick between her legs, the need for him to pinch her nipples, to put his mouth on her, to give her the ride his body promised, she kept watching. But the peaks of her breasts, where sensitive skin changed to pure nerves, remained untouched.
“You’re so tense,” he murmured. His gaze alighted on her breasts, her shoulders, her lips, and made her so edgy, she feared she might break into shards like a dropped glass. His lips parted.
This would be it.
He lowered his head toward her breast, and she arched toward him, but then he clicked his tongue and retreated, leaving only the sensation of air across her skin.
She moaned again, moaned for the touch she needed. Moaned because she had to release this tension even if she shouldn’t move, so she forced her spine into the mattress and flattened her shoulders.
“When I get inside you, I’m going to tap out way too fast. So let’s play a little first.” His face was so close to her breast that her body assumed his mouth had touched the tip of her nipple each time he pursed his lips, even though her eyes insisted all he’d done was exhale. Her mind created an illusion from only breath and desire. “Some people can give an orgasm without physical contact.”
With effort, the backs of her calves stayed pressed to the mattress, and her hands dug into the ticking beside her thighs. Because she knew they would both win at the end, she could play his game.
His lips reshaped into a tight circle. “Blowing on erogenous zones like this”—she felt a tiny puff across her puckered skin and focused her conscious brain on remaining still, holding her breath so she didn’t cry out, keeping herself flat—“stimulates coolness.”
With his arms braced on either side of her rib cage and his knees between hers, he loomed over her like a dark wolf about to slake a thirst. The only contact between them was her inner thighs squeezing the outside of his knees, and yet her whole being was held in thrall.
“An open mouth warms and dampens skin.” His head lowered so close to her breasts that she knew this time, he would suckle. He must. She felt his mouth wrapping her in wet heat, but that was her mind telling her body what she wanted. Her eyes told the truth. He never touched her skin. And yet she felt a pull so intense from her breasts, through her body, to the yearning spots of her need, that he must have touched her.
“It’s an art form.” Another cool breeze, across her other breast. And then warmth.
She heard herself moan. It sounded far away. She didn’t think she could move, and yet at the same time, her breasts felt so intensely sensitive that something as simple as the weight of a hand or the friction of his chest might send her into a bacchanalian frenzy. While she waited, she saw his tongue. Wet. Pink. Close, so close. He could lap her nipple. A cat, with milk. Her brain, her body, thought he did. Only her eyes knew he didn’t. She shivered.
“Please.” The word broke past her clenched teeth and frozen throat.
“No.” The tip of his tongue curled on the edge of his top lip, but he didn’t touch her. “Not yet.” The casual denial, like he didn’t burn with the same need for connection, for penetration, for fulfillment, when she could see the quivering in his locked elbows, could hear the struggle in his own breathing, made her moan again. He had control. She had none.
“Please.” Her whole being needed his parted lips to latch on the point of her nipple, his tongue to press and flick, his mouth to suck her deep, give her more. “Please, Nico, please.”
Instead of answering, he slid away, leaving empty air over her aching areolas. He lowered his chest and shoulders between her legs, spreading her farther.
She felt his breath on her inner thigh and closed her eyes to better drop into the sensations. The world disappeared, except for the sounds of his rough breathing, the rustle of their weight on the old mattress, the tiny suss of air leaving his lips. When every other part of her felt like the center of the sun, she shivered from the coolness he blew across her thigh. Every muscle in her buttocks and hips tensed, involuntarily lifting her pelvis to his mouth. “Yes, please, oh please yes.” She was beyond words longer than that one plea.
“Stop moving.” His command was flat and sharp enough to slice the strings that pulled her body toward him, dropping her spine to the mattress. “I’m imagining your taste.”
In the darkness behind her closed eyes, she pictured his mouth finally going down. She had to be still. He would touch her where she needed, he would, he must, but only if she didn’t move. She didn’t know how she survived his warm breath on her sex, then the coolness, and then again the heat of his hovering open mouth, the ever-higher bill she’d have to pay for the promise from his lips. He still hadn’t used his hands or his tongue, but she shook furiously with the effort of remaining locked to the mattress. He must see how much it cost her.
And then his hands wrapped around her knees and lifted her legs from the mattress. She’d been freed from being a statue, and that was all she needed. She heard herself begging, felt the thrust of his shoulder blades under the backs of her thighs, and heard him gasping too. She was open, and this time, he must be about to put his mouth on her, he must, he couldn’t continue teasing. “Come in me, please. Please. I’m going to—”
And then his tongue speared her nub, and the pleasure rolling from that one point obliterated all. The wet strength of his tongue worked her back and forth, faster, faster, and little noises filled her until she must be rising, but his hands anchored her hips so that the room swirled instead. Fingers, his fingers, inside her and his mouth still working and her skin shivering and contracting. Up and up, her cry not stopping, she flew beyond their bodies. She was here with him and she was above them, she was in the room and in the sky. The day disappeared, and her body became waves of color with flashes of knowledge, like billboards announcing this was his tongue, these were his fingers, this was her pussy, her skin, her, her, her, as she became feeling that had no form.
When he lowered her legs, the flashes behind her eyelids stopped, but her skin still felt two sizes too tight. She opened her eyes. Her young Apollo’s lips and chin glistened, a flush colored his cheeks and throat, and his chest heaved from exertion. Her gaze dropped to his cock. Covered with the condom, it was as big as any she’d ever seen, rising from dark hair at his groin. She wanted that.
His fingers traced her labia, spreading her, and she lifted toward him, inviting him before she even knew his question, but then he paused at the threshold of her body. “Ready?”
He expected an answer? Crazy man. Crazy good. But she choked out a yes. She was so slippery, so ready, that he plunged deep with the first thrust. And smoothly pulled back, even though her body sought to keep him. Each thrust notched that thick shaft where she wanted him, and her whole being gripped him when he pulled back. Her legs tried to wrap around him, but he held her raised enough that she was the receptacle, he was the pumping force. He did the work. She merely felt, wrapping around him with everything she could move, and then he was shouting “ Yes ” and shuddering like her, and his lips pulled back from his teeth and he closed his eyes against the light he must also see.
The chirps of birds greeting dusk brought Megan back to awareness. She faced Nico across the mattress, their feet touching while their upper halves angled away to leave space for sweaty skin to dry.
“Thank you,” he said. His jaw had slackened and his eyelids drooped a little, like he was tired and relaxed. He seemed more like his actual twenty-seven years than he had when he’d confessed his abstinence.
“Thank you too,” she replied. “That was—I’m just really good right now.”
Out of words, she rested her hand on that dip above his hip, where his abdominal muscles made a deep plunge around his navel. She could feel each time his breath went in and out. To avoid continuing the awkward close-range eye contact, she studied the tattoo on the upper left part of his chest. It was a carabiner, one of those metal clip things rock climbers used, with a length of rope winding out and over his shoulder. But the hasp—hank? Shank? What was the clicky metal part actually called?—was cracked.
She laid two fingers gently on the dark image. Broken things had meaning, especially when someone took time and money to ink them. Even a woman who didn’t have any tattoos knew that. Her throat closed, thinking about survivor’s guilt, Tyler saying “ We all remember Chloe, ” in such a somber tone, and Nico’s years of celibacy. There was a tragedy written here. A story people couldn’t see when they looked at a dark-eyed, smiling, clever god and shared a laugh. A story that had changed more than a patch of skin on his shoulder, one that must have changed his world.
She ached for him.
He reached up and wrapped his hand around hers, lifting it from his shoulder and bringing her fingers to his mouth. “I’m glad.” His voice was low and quiet, but sounded sincere.
Their hands blocked the lower part of his expression, so she couldn’t tell what he was thinking or how he was processing what they’d just done.
Like her, he seemed to want connection despite the heat. His fingertips trailed up and down her forearm and paused to draw invisible figure eights over the reminder she’d jotted this morning. “Write on yourself often?”
She welcomed the simple topic. “Sometimes.” Usually nothing more interesting than pickup times for Callie’s activities or a reminder to stop for milk, but after today, maybe she’d reference assassin cults more frequently.
He propped himself on an elbow and studied the length of her body. Between her legs, she felt the sticky combination of arousal and leftover condom lubricant, and her skin prickled with self-consciousness. Her legs weren’t smoothly shaven, and her breasts had started to flop a tiny bit over the last year or two. She didn’t want to get up, didn’t have the energy to find her clothes or leave the mattress, but posing here in the last light while he stared was unsettling. She rolled to her stomach, pillowing her left cheek on her folded arms.
The weight and pressure of his hand stroking her back felt good, almost too good. She sensed vibrations deep in her throat each time he pushed into the muscles between her shoulder blades. He used the base of his palm to press into the tight strips connected to her spine, which must be connected to her eyelids’ automatic off switch.
“No real ink?” he asked. “No tattoos?” He could see her body, with the answer obvious, so maybe he too didn’t know what to say.
“Only real marker.” She didn’t think she was afraid of the pain, but the permanence had never appealed.
“I have an idea.”
His massage was stealing any energy she might once have had for implementing ideas, not to mention that her mouth felt like she’d sucked a hair dryer. “I need water first.”
“Will a bottle do? Glasses are gone.”
She lifted her lids enough to watch him sit and roll his shoulders.
“I take my job seriously, you know.”
“Excellent customer service.” She too stretched, but without shifting from her stomach. Her fingers reached past the top of the mattress and her inner arms brushed the edge of her ears. She pointed her toes toward the other end and arched into the dips and bumps created by years of use. The contour where she’d settled fit exactly to her pelvis. “Exemplary.”
“Before we get to starred reviews, I need to deal with—” He gathered the used condom from next to the mattress and rose to his knees, apparently confident that, even flopping and spent, his cock didn’t need to be covered. It hung almost relaxed between his legs, no longer erect, but still long. “The only garbage is downstairs. I’ll be right back.”
How could he move when her bones felt like melting ice cream? That was the difference between her thirty-five and his twenty-seven, she guessed.
“Stay right here?” His grin and lifted eyebrows clearly indicated he was plotting something. “Just like that, until I come back?”
“Hmm.” She caught a hint of a latex smell and hoped he’d take time to rinse off. She pictured his wet hand stroking over himself to remove the stickiness and rubbery taste. Cool water might draw him tight, but she’d warm him with her full appreciation when he returned. She shifted , and felt the crisscrossed stitching on the mattress catch the tip of her nipple. It felt good. “Won’t move.”
“You don’t have to be that literal.” He bent to caress the back of her thigh, running his palm up to and over the curve of her butt. She lifted her hips and parted her legs enough to let his hand slip between her thighs. “Go ahead and rub against the mattress.” He spread his fingers until the pressure on her inner thighs shifted her legs farther. “While you think about what I’m going to stick in your pussy.”
Her brain supplied the image of Nico holding the toy she stored in her dresser, carefully hidden under her workout clothes. The way his big, rough hand would cradle the translucent pink base, how the shaft would rise from his grip, and the way he would use it. Inside her head, the hum in the back of her throat echoed the battery purr, and she could almost feel him pressing that joystick into her, vibrating faster than his tongue could move. The anticipation opened her legs.
“While I go downstairs, you can wiggle—” He did it. He pressed her spot, but no more. “And rock yourself.”
Eros descending from Olympus to seduce her again and again was a fevered dream, a story, a myth. Women like her didn’t pass out from excellent sex, but she hadn’t even fully calmed herself yet from the first—third? Did the magazines count?—time she’d come, and here he was, doing her again.
“But one thing you shouldn’t do.” He slipped a finger inside her while he held down firmly on her clit and issued rules in that sex-drunk voice that set her reeling. “No touching.”
Breathe, Megan. Remember to breathe.
“Don’t touch yourself.”