Chapter 18
As soon as Merritt’s mouth met his, the first word that flashed across Niko’s mind was control.
It was the last thing he’d expected to happen when he offered to go over there—but at the same time, it felt so natural that he wasn’t surprised at all. All that mattered now, though, was keeping his cool, even as he felt like he might burn up from the inside out.
He forced himself to move twice as slowly and gently as he wanted to.
It would be a rookie move to jump from zero to a hundred, all over her like it was their first time unchaperoned in someone’s basement—especially since control had been the last thing on his mind when he’d kissed her at Off the Rails.
At least then he had the excuse of thinking that might be his only chance.
Now that he knew he had the luxury of time, he slowly dragged his hand up her arm, finally splaying his fingers across the bare stretch of skin at the base of her neck, under the collar of her sweater. She gasped into his mouth, then sucked his bottom lip between her teeth.
Holy fuck.
Control. Control.
She didn’t seem interested in that, though.
It almost felt like she was baiting him—the more he held back, the more she seemed determined to make him break.
Her fingernails digging into his skin, her tongue sliding between his lips or dragging up his neck, her little whimpers and moans as she pressed against him.
All of that ferocity she performed with, all of it directed straight at him.
He was only fucking human.
With a grunt, he hooked his arm under her knees, slinging her across his lap. She let out a laugh of surprise, clinging to his neck and burying her face into it until she was fully re-situated.
He kissed her again, matching her hunger this time, finally allowing his hands to wander, sliding them under her shirt and over the soft, smooth expanse of her belly, letting out a helpless, borderline inhuman sound when he realized she wasn’t wearing a bra.
Jesus fucking Christ. He was so overwhelmed by that news that he backed right off, bringing one hand to rest at her waist, the other one cradling the base of her scalp, finding a tight grip in her hair.
Control, he reminded himself, over and over again, with increasing desperation.
“I want to take this slow,” she breathed, when they came up for air. “But is it sending mixed messages if I ask you to stay over?”
“Yes. Uh, no. I mean, yes, I’ll stay over,” Niko said, already so hard he felt like he was going to rip his jeans. She laughed against his lips, then pressed a soft kiss there.
“I didn’t have sex until I was twenty-two,” he blurted out. She pulled back, confused, so he clarified, “What I mean is…I’m okay with taking it slow.”
“Really?” she asked. He was always worried about being judged when he told people, but there was only curiosity there.
“Yeah,” he said, absentmindedly stroking his hand up and down her spine.
“I had girlfriends and stuff, but I, um. My mom was really young when she had me. Like, high school young. I didn’t want to do anything that had any chance of getting a girl pregnant.
” He paused. “I may have held out longer than I needed to.”
“Wow,” said Merritt, with a wry smile. “I can’t imagine how many bad hand jobs you must have gotten.”
Niko winced involuntarily. “I wasn’t selfish about it, though. I knew I had to get good at other things.”
“I’m not concerned,” Merritt murmured, brushing a curl off his temple, then kissing the spot where it had been. “But you know those other things are still sex, right?”
He opened his mouth to protest, but then once he thought about it, he realized she was right.
It wasn’t the definition of sex he’d been (barely) taught about in school, or what his friends had considered the main event.
But even though he’d called himself a virgin back then, he’d still been in physically intimate situations where everyone had ended up satisfied.
Or, at least, he’d given it his best shot.
When he met her eyes again, the corner of her mouth tugged up. “You look like your mind has been blown.”
“Kind of, yeah.” He drew her closer, tracing her jawline with his thumb. “What about you?”
She curled deeper into his arms, resting her head in the crook of his neck, and he pulled her close, his other arm under her shirt, on the bare skin of her back.
“I was fourteen. For all of it,” she said. He couldn’t see her face anymore, but her tone was threaded with sadness. “Which sounds so young now. But I remember feeling like I was already an adult at the time, just nobody else had realized it yet.”
“I remember that feeling,” he murmured into her hair. “Were you in love, at least?”
“No. We weren’t even dating. It was my best friend’s older brother.
I had a huge crush on him. I think he was eighteen or nineteen, he had already graduated.
He was in this terrible band, and I thought he was the coolest person alive, and he’d ask my opinion about music sometimes, which made me feel like the coolest person alive.
I started sneaking into his room when I would stay over, late at night, after she’d gone to sleep.
We’d hang out and listen to records and talk. ”
“What a creep,” Niko said before he could stop himself, but thankfully, Merritt just laughed.
“Truly.”
“And he was your first everything?”
She shook her head. “Not my first kiss. That was with her.” She paused, like she was bracing for his reaction, but he didn’t say anything, just smoothed his hand over her back.
“When she found out, she never spoke to me again. Neither of them did.” There was a hardness to her voice, armor protecting an old bruise.
He frowned sympathetically. “You were fourteen. Everyone does reckless shit at that age. When I was fourteen, my friends and I would steal PVC pipes from construction sites and try to pole-vault into dumpsters. He’s the one who should’ve known better.
It was his fault for ruining that friendship, not yours. ”
“Trust me, I know that now,” she said with a rueful laugh. “But I did end up writing about it, to try to process all those feelings, and those songs were on the demo that got me signed.”
“So something good came out of it, after all.”
“Sure. I went from one predator to a whole industry full of them. Less lemons to lemonade, more frying pan to fire.”
He flinched, his stomach rolling queasily. A dozen questions crowded his mind, but all he could manage was “Jesus. Merritt…”
She quickly sat upright again, so they were face-to-face.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, taking his face in both hands and planting soft, playful kisses all over his cheeks, his forehead, his nose, smoothing out what must have been a stricken expression.
“That was supposed to be a joke. Not trying to get too dark. I told you, I’ve been working through all of this for a long time.
If I can’t change the past, at least I can laugh about it. I’m okay. Really.”
“Okay,” he said, still not totally convinced. “But if you do want to talk about it…”
She pressed a gentle kiss to his lips, cutting him off.
“Thank you. Another time. Right now, I really don’t.
” He readjusted his hands, resting them on the curves of her hips as she traced her thumb over his bottom lip.
“Tell me more about yours,” she murmured.
“You waited all that time—was it everything you hoped it would be?”
“Sort of. I think maybe I had built it up too much, waiting that long. We were serious about each other, at least—it was my college girlfriend.”
“The one you moved out here with?”
“Yeah. I got a fancy hotel room, champagne, rose petals, the whole thing.”
“And you came in two seconds?” Merritt filled in.
“Pretty much. She was nice about it, though. The second time went a lot better.” He paused. “How did we get to talking about me having sex with someone else again?”
“You were promising that you could sleep in my bed without ravishing me.”
“Oh yeah.” He slid his hands from her hips back under her shirt, over the smooth skin of her torso, both of their breaths hitching at the same time, her ribs expanding beneath his palms as they brushed the undersides of her breasts.
“Slow,” he murmured into her neck, inhaling deeply, feeling like he was hypnotized, and he skated his hands back down to grip her waist in a last grasp at restraint.
She let out a shaky breath.
“On the other hand, this might be an internationally recognized form of torture.” She turned her face toward his, catching his lips in a long, lazy kiss. “Do you want to move?”
“Where? Your room?”
“It would probably be more comfortable. The power’s out, the fire’s mostly out, there’s not much reason to stay here.”
They both got to their feet, a little clumsily, Niko shaking off the head rush as he tried to adjust himself as discreetly as possible. They each grabbed a candle before she led him down the hall.
“Watch your step,” she warned, a moment before Niko caught himself from tripping over a pair of shoes in the doorway. “Sorry, it’s always a disaster. I have some stuff in storage, but it still feels like I have a whole house’s worth of junk in here.”
Carefully, they navigated around the room, placing a candle on her nightstand and another on her desk, casting the room in a soft, flickering glow.
He watched her, his heart hammering, as she shrugged off her cardigan and draped it over her desk chair, leaving her in just a tank top and leggings. She made her way toward the bed—unmade, rumpled duvet—and crawled onto it.
He’d seen glimpses of her tattoos before, though not often, since Crested Peak was a long-sleeves-long-pants climate most of the year.
She had more than he’d thought—at least six or seven on her arms, another curving below her collarbone, and the intriguing hint of something in the gap between her tank top and leggings.