Chapter 18 #2
In the low light, they just looked like black blobs. He wanted to get close enough to make out each line and curve, discover every last one still hidden by her clothing, run his fingers over them, his tongue—and now he could, he realized, his mouth going dry.
“Do you want me to, um. Get undressed?” He suddenly felt like that nervous teenage virgin all over again.
“Unless you’re planning on sleeping in your jeans.”
He glanced down, slowly undoing his belt, then his fly, before dropping his jeans to the floor. He thought about leaving his shirt on, but then he remembered the way he’d caught her staring that night at Off the Rails, and he pulled it off, too.
He made his way over to the bed, where Merritt was sitting close to the edge, her legs tucked under her, watching him. When he stopped in front of her, she rose onto her knees, skating her hands up his chest, through his thick forest of chest hair, sending tingles through his whole body.
“I love this,” she murmured.
“You do?”
“Yeah. It’s really sexy.” She leaned forward to brush a kiss between his pecs. “Please tell me I’m not the first person to say that.”
“You’re not, but it’s controversial.”
He was surprised he was able to pull out a word with that many syllables, now that she was using her nails to lightly scrape up and down his torso, driving him half out of his mind.
“When you took your shirt off in the kitchen,” she said, “this was all I wanted to do.”
“You could have.”
“That might’ve been a little hard to explain to Dev.”
He laughed in the back of his throat, then eased one knee onto the bed.
She pushed herself back to make room for him, leaning onto her elbows as he half crawled over her.
She yanked her duvet out from where it was stuck under their limbs and drew it over both their heads as she guided him down onto the mattress next to her.
They settled there under the cocoon of the blanket, legs intertwined, faces a breath away, hands roaming gently. It genuinely felt like they might be the only two people on the planet.
“When did you first know? That you liked me?” he asked, his voice hushed, like he was in church.
“That I liked you, or that I wanted you?”
“Either. Both.”
She took her time to think about it, her fingers toying with the elastic of his boxer briefs at his hip, then sliding up over his ribs.
“I was attracted to you from the beginning, I think. Before we even started on the house. Just seeing you around…it was hard not to notice you. I tried to fight it for a long time. But when I saw your paintings, that was the moment I couldn’t deny it anymore. It wasn’t just physical. It was you.”
“Really?” His chest felt like an overfilled balloon. Hearing someone whom he respected so much, who had achieved so much, compliment his work, which he’d never had the courage to take seriously—it overwhelmed him. Still, something nagged at him. “Is it because you saw my dick?”
She laughed, a soft gust of air against his neck, then pulled him closer. “No. But that didn’t hurt. You didn’t throw that one away, did you?”
“No, I still have it.”
“Good.”
He leaned in and pressed a soft line of kisses from her jaw to her shoulder, savoring the way her breath went ragged, her body pliant. He closed his lips over the ink on her shoulder—a stylized crescent moon, partially obscured by clouds.
“If you say you were into me after seeing me in my towel…” she murmured, amusement hitching her voice.
He pulled away. “No, of course not. I mean, I barely saw you. You ran out of there pretty quickly. But do you remember your and Olivia’s birthday party? It was a few weeks after that.”
She nodded, the rustle of her cheek against the sheets sending pleasurable shivers down his spine—or maybe it was her fingers tracing gentle shapes on his back that was doing it.
“You were wearing this dress…” He paused, overtaken by the memory.
“And you were kind of keeping to yourself. Like, you were part of conversations, but you weren’t really talking to anyone.
But I couldn’t stop looking at you. It was like you had this…
spotlight on you, or something. The way you were watching everyone, it was so… ”
“Judgmental?” Merritt laughed self-consciously. “That’s just my face sometimes.”
“No, observant. Like you could see everything that was happening, and you saw down to the core of it. I wanted to go over and ask you what you were thinking, but everyone had already scared me off. Including you.”
She was quiet for a moment, then the corner of her mouth curled up. “You remember the dress I was wearing two years ago?”
He nodded. “And you had that dark lipstick on. You looked like a vampire.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Like, one I would definitely want to suck me.” His face heated as soon as he realized what he’d said. “I mean…”
She buried her laugh in his throat, then opened her mouth against it, sinking her teeth into the side of his neck, just hard enough to draw a sharp exhale from him. She soothed the spot with a kiss, then her tongue, gently pressing on his shoulder to roll him onto his back.
She threw the duvet off them, the air shockingly cold after the heat of their cave, and straddled him just below his navel, the mood instantly shifting from dreamy to charged as she leaned down to kiss him, hot and deep and intense.
Niko brought his hands to her hips, grabbing two soft, full handfuls of her ass, feeling like he needed to devote a full day to giving each part of her body the attention it deserved. Maybe a week.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like this—that exhilaration of being with someone new, someone he was this crazy about, every moment a new discovery.
When she braced her hands on his shoulders, giving him a glimpse of the dark, soft-looking hair in her armpits, something that he’d never thought much about but that, on her, was surprisingly arousing.
When her tank top rode up to reveal a small scar above her navel where a piercing used to be.
When he was able to roll her over and pin her on her back with only the slightest effort.
Which led to his favorite discovery so far: when she looked up at him with that laser-focused intensity that made him feel like he’d never been more desired in his life, like maybe no one else in the world ever had been.
He settled over her, their hips finally aligning, her legs wrapped around him, the shock of sensation making them both gasp.
Niko couldn’t help but roll his hips slowly, dragging his length against her and back again, and he was gratified to see her eyelids flutter, feel her nails dig into his biceps.
“You’re going to have to tell me what ‘taking it slow’ means to you,” he said through gritted teeth, already holding himself back from the edge.
“I think…” she said, her breath coming in shallow pants, “I think we shouldn’t take off any more clothes tonight.”
Niko nodded, a short, desperate burst, and eased back onto his knees, needing a second to cool down.
His foot bumped against something hard buried in the crumpled duvet, and he leaned over to pick it up.
It was a long, cylindrical plastic wand, with a round head on top made of spongy material.
When he pressed a button, the head began to vibrate.
He glanced back at Merritt, who’d rolled onto her side, head propped on her hand. “Intimidated?” she asked dryly.
He shook his head. “I’m just wondering if using this on you right now counts as sex.”
“Very funny.” Still, her voice went breathy at the suggestion.
“I’m not trying to be. I want to follow the rules.”
The corner of her mouth curved up. “I already told you my rule. Anything else is fair game.”
He spent a moment playing with the buttons, figuring out the different speeds and settings. “When you use this,” he asked, turning back to her, “what do you think about?”
She didn’t hesitate. “You.”
Even though it was the answer he’d been hoping for, hearing her say it was like a lightning bolt straight to his cock.
He set the wand to the side, within reach, and nudged her onto her back again. He kissed her deeply, with intention, before dipping his head down to bite and suck at her nipples through her shirt.
She gasped, arching her back, tangling her hands in his hair, as he kissed his way down her stomach, cupping her between her legs, groaning at how hot and wet she was already.
The fabric of her leggings was thin enough that he could tell she wasn’t wearing anything underneath them, just one barely-there layer separating them.
He glanced up, meeting her eyes. “Tell me to slow down,” he said, his breath ragged.
She shook her head in an impatient thrash. He dipped his head back down, dragging his tongue up her center in one long, slow stroke over the fabric, drawing a sound out of her that he felt all the way down his spine.
He returned his attention to the vibrator then, turning it onto the lowest setting, then trailing it up the inside of her inner thigh, pausing lightly between her legs, and pulling back completely when she tried to strain toward him.
She let out a whimper of frustration, but that only spurred him on.
He kept going like that, teasing her, so focused it was like he was in a trance, pressing the vibrator between her legs and then away again, occasionally coming up to capture her breast or throat or bottom lip between his teeth as she squirmed beneath him, her moans becoming more desperate.
He feverishly wondered if he could keep this up forever, driving her—driving them both, honestly—higher and higher, to a peak where neither of them had ever been before, one they could only reach together. He had never been this fucking turned on without even being touched.
But when he looked up and saw the neckline of her tank top had been twisted by her writhing, exposing one hard, dusky nipple, that was what broke him.
His mouth was on her before he could think about it, finally tasting her velvety skin after nothing but fabric; it was so fucking perfect that a shudder rolled through his whole body.
At the same time, he turned the speed of the vibrator up to the highest setting and pressed it against her, hard, unyielding, as she arched and shook in response, her mouth a silent, gasping O.
He released her nipple and came up fully beside her, crushing his lips to hers, capturing her cries in his mouth as she exploded beneath him.
He was so focused on her that he barely noticed he was rubbing his cock against her hip, bucking mindlessly, matching her movements, until she reached down and wrapped her hand fully around him for the first time, through his briefs.
“Fuck,” he said, louder than he meant to. All it took was a firm squeeze and he was coming, hard, helplessly, the inside of his shorts hot and sticky, but he was too wrung out to give a fuck.
Once he was able to move again, he switched off the vibrator and tossed it to the side, giving Merritt another long, deep kiss. When he pulled back, he saw she looked dazed, her eyes unfocused.
“What the fuck,” she breathed, “was that?”
The afterglow slowly faded, replaced by a creeping embarrassment. Had he taken things further than she’d wanted? Or not far enough? Was she upset that he’d come so quickly?
“Sorry,” he said, his breath still coming heavily. She blinked at him.
“Sorry? For what?”
“Uh…”
Her face softened, clearly seeing his panic.
“Niko,” she said, and the sound of her voice saying his name in that soft, throaty, post-sex way was almost enough to get him hard again already.
“That was one of the hottest things I’ve ever experienced.
You have nothing to apologize for. I should be the one apologizing for contributing to your list of bad hand jobs. ”
Relief washed over him, and he shook his head, the movement loose. “Nothing about that was bad. It was barely even a hand job. I’m not helping my reputation as a one-pump chump.”
She laughed. “Honestly, it was pretty flattering. And I hear it’ll only get better from here.”
He felt the world’s goofiest smile spread slowly across his face. “Yeah,” he said, leaning over to gather her in his arms, still reeling that he could. “It will.”