Chapter 21
“I’m ready now,” Jo breathed, resting her hand on Felix’s forearm. He turned her vibrator up to the higher setting that never failed to hurtle her toward the peak of pleasure. Jo’s breath flew from her lungs, and she squirmed against the secure circle of his arms.
“I know you like this one, cari?o,” Felix murmured. “I’ll come back to it if you ask, but I want to see what the rest do to you.”
“Yes,” she gasped. “Let me show you.”
Texting Felix about her vibrator was by far Jo’s best idea ever. It had been the first thing that came to mind when he’d asked her that sexy question. Since he seemed to like it when she followed her creative whims, she’d decided not to overthink it. And now, it was perfect. She’d never felt so naked in front of a man before, showing him something she’d only ever reserved for herself. The intimacy of it, the trust she gave him to see her so vulnerable…
“Moan for me, my Jo. Let me hear the sounds you make when you’re alone.”
Oh, God. There was nothing in the world like this feeling. Jo was sure of it. She gave herself over to it completely.
Felix went through every setting on her vibrator with pain-staking precision. As if he were memorizing what each one did to her. Which ones made her muscles twitch, which made her cry out, which made her bite her lip and dig her nails into his forearm, which made her thrust her hips for more.
And, most importantly, which ones made her come.
There were a few settings that were usually good for that, and Felix found them all. With their bodies connected like this, he couldn’t help but be completely in tune with the minute changes that signaled her next orgasm was close. Every time, Felix gave her little nudges of sensation until she tipped her over the edge—pinching her nipple or nipping her shoulder, running his foot up her calf or tickling her ear with whispers that carried beautiful, filthy words. He made damn sure that, when it really came down to it, he was the one who made Jo come, and she adored him for it.
“God, Jo, I could watch you come all night,” Felix said after a while. “Do you want to keep going?”
“You’re overdue for your turn, gorgeous.”
How long had it been since they’d started? She had no fucking idea. Long enough that his erection must be getting uncomfortable, but he shook his head against her hair. Jo’s heart melted. He was too much sometimes. Far more than she deserved.
“You’re giving me everything I need.” As if to emphasize his point, he rocked back and forth along her ass crack, moaning as his tip brushed bare against her pussy.
But, oh, she wanted to give him so much more.
“I need a break anyway,” she said honestly. She wrapped her hand around his and guided his thumb to the off button. Her body sagged against him, her pussy tingling as they eased the vibrator out together.
Felix nuzzled her cheek. “Mi hermoso cari?o.”
She turned her head to look into his eyes. “I love it when you say such wonderful things to me.”
“You deserve them all.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said with a modest smile.
“I do.”
Suddenly, there was a fierceness in his eyes that Jo had seen only once before. The night of the tornado, when he’d stayed at the library to wait for her.
I needed to make sure you were safe.
She touched his jaw, whispered his name, and raised her head to kiss him. As he opened his mouth to her, desire asserted itself within Jo. It made her want to be assertive too. They could either lie there and whisper sweet nothings to each other, or they could get the hell on with it. Her vote was for the latter option.
She dropped her vibrator onto the nightstand and rotated in his arms until they were face to face. Taking his cock in her hand, she began to caress him, even as she continued to press forward. She gave him no choice but to roll onto his back. He breathed out a curse as she got to her knees and straddled his thighs. With steady strokes on his cock, Jo coasted her free hand down Felix’s abs. She raked her nails over his skin the way he liked and listened to his sharp hiss. He arched his back.
“Jo, God, again.” He grabbed the hand she had on his dick and moved it to his chest. “Harder. Hard.”
With both hands now, she clawed him, harder than she’d ever touched him before, hard enough to leave marks. Felix cried out and scrunched his eyes closed, glorious agony in every line and crease on his face. His cock twitched and leaked pre-come, without her even touching it. His hand flew to his head, making a fist in his hair. Jo watched his every reaction, wide-eyed, fascinated.
“Do that while you fuck me,” he begged.
She would do almost anything he wanted if it made him feel that good. Her blood was singing in her veins, thrilling at the sight of Felix completely at her mercy. The stark white lines on his skin had already turned a vivid pink.
She couldn’t resist teasing him. Just once more. “I guess I wasn’t giving you everything you need after all, hmm? Ask me to my face, gorgeous. Tell me what you need.”
“Unh, God,” Felix complained. His eyes flew open. The depraved longing Jo saw there was so blatant, so indecent, she blushed. But she held his gaze, caressing his stomach with her palms.
“Please, Jo.” His voice broke over her name. “Please. You ride me so well. Fuck me and scratch my chest. Hard. Mark me as yours. You know I already am.”
“There,” she said. She had to draw on all her acting experience from MnM to make her voice light and playful. It was nearly impossible when her entire body was shaking with desire. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Please.”
Jo got the condom on him as fast as she could. He moaned when she rolled it on and again when she lowered herself onto him. She rode him and dragged her nails across his pecs, over and over, until he was shuddering. His fist in his hair tightened, and the other one clamped around Jo’s arm, just above her elbow. Anchoring to her without restricting her movement.
“More, more, more.”
It wasn’t long ago that Jo had first dreamt of riding Felix, but never in her wildest imagination was it like this. Her eyes fell on the nightstand, and an idea wilder still sprang to mind. She lunged for her vibrator.
“You want more, my gorgeous man?” She buried her nails in his chest as she sank the vibrator between her labia, pressing it firmly just below her clit. She waited until Felix raised his head, waited long enough for him to stop her if he wanted to.
His mouth fell open, and he whispered, “Holy shit.” His gaze darted between her hand and her face.
Jo cocked her head and smiled.
“Do it.”
She turned it on, and they both contorted in ecstasy.
“Fuck. Fuck, I feel it,” Felix panted. “I can feel it.”
“Can I turn it up?”
“Ye-yes.”
She clicked it to her favorite setting and tossed her head back. Drowning in pleasure, she pounded their bodies together, flesh slapping against flesh. Her hand on his chest jerked into motion, all the way down to his stomach and back up again. Felix howled so loudly Jo was sure her neighbors heard it. Hell, half of Ashville probably heard it.
Her orgasm ramped up so fast it took her by surprise. She gasped as her whole body lurched forward. Her cunt clenched around Felix’s cock. He screamed her name, his hips driving upward as he came along with her. Jo grinded into him and gave him another scratch, pulling her arm down, hard, in one long stroke.
A guttural sound came out of him as he collapsed against the mattress. Jo’s orgasm lasted a second or two longer than his, and he grunted as her pussy spasmed one final time. She switched off the vibrator, lifted off of Felix, and tumbled down next to him, utterly spent.
“Jesus,” she sighed.
“Yeah.” There was a long pause while they both caught their breath. “Have I told you lately how much I love the way your mind works?”
A giggle bubbled up out of her. “Tell me again.”
He cupped her cheek and smiled. “I love the way your mind works.”
Jo reached out and rested her hand on his chest. It was warm and flushed, with raised lines crisscrossing over it. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” he said. “You were perfect, my Jo. You are perfect.”
Even as his praise washed over her, a pleasure as rich as her orgasm, Jo chewed on her lip. She ran her palm over him, soothing the places she’d scratched to hell. “Can I check anyway? If I made you bleed, we should put something on it.”
Felix’s expression went soft. He nodded. “Let me take care of the condom first.”
“Washcloths in the top drawer,” she told him with a kiss.
Later, in the quiet darkness of Jo’s bedroom, Felix skated his fingers along her upper arm. They lay with their foreheads inches apart, and he listened to her breathe. Her eyes were closed. His were wide open.
His heart thudded beneath the adhesive bandage she’d insisted on putting on him. One tiny nick in his skin from the corner of her nail, and she’d treated it with all the seriousness of applying a tourniquet. Her fingers had been gentle and dexterous as she’d dabbed antiseptic on him and covered the cut with the bandage. Then she had leaned in and kissed it. She didn’t apologize, which he was grateful for. He didn’t want to have to remind her that she didn’t need to. He’d asked for it, and he’d loved it. He wanted her to do it again (and again and again) and didn’t want her to feel guilty about it. But there was no apology. She just took care of him, made sure he was safe.
Felix hadn’t planned on telling her. They’d only been together for a week, for fuck’s sake. It was ludicrous, the way he felt. She almost certainly didn’t feel the same way about him.
But then she’d kissed his cut. She’d kissed his cut and chosen not to apologize for giving him what he wanted and gazed up at him with a protective tenderness that Felix had never seen in a woman’s eyes before. And suddenly nothing else mattered. It didn’t matter that it had only been a week. It didn’t matter that sometimes she was still anxious about being herself around him or that he saw uncertainty in her eyes when she thought she talked about MnM too much.
The only thing that mattered was that she knew the truth.
“Jo?” he whispered into the darkness.
She stirred under his gentle touch. “Hmm?”
“I need tell you to something.”
She shifted again, closer to him. “What is it?”
His hand went still on her arm. “I’m in love with you.”
Jo’s breath caught. Her fingers slid into his chest hair. His skin tingled where she touched the scratches she’d left on him. Marks on his skin to match the ones she’d already carved on his heart.
“Really?” Her voice had been sleepy until now, muffled and soft and low. Now, she sounded wide awake.
“Yes.”
Her arm looped over his shoulder, and she dragged herself against his body. She buried her face in his neck. “Felix. Say it again.” Her voice was breaking; her body was trembling. “Please, please say it again.”
Felix wrapped her in his arms. He cradled the back of her head. He closed his eyes and felt every inch of their joined bodies. “I’m in love with you, Jo. I don’t expect you to say it back. I know it’s… it’s so soon. I just needed you to know.” Tears welled in his eyes, and he tightened his grip on her. Jo squeezed tighter too.
“I wish I could,” she said. “But not yet.”
Yet.
His heart leapt at that beautiful, hopeful word. “I know. I understand.”
They clung to each other, neither one willing to let go. Soon, Felix could sense Jo fighting off sleep. Her breathing would deepen, and her body would relax, then she’d stir and redouble her effort to hold him close. After the third time, Felix kissed her temple and whispered, “Go to sleep, cari?o. I’m not going anywhere.”
The days that followed were some of the happiest of Jo’s life. June was just beginning, but even the sweltering humidity couldn’t dampen her spirits. It did, however, dampen her scrubs, mostly in her underboob and between her thighs. Even the briefest walks to and from her car left her clammy and in want of a shower. It would take some getting used to, but it was worth it. Because, while Ashville, Kansas, might have god-awful humidity, being here meant being with the man who loved her.
Felix loved her, and he even seemed to love all the nerdy, over-the-top parts of her that she was slowly learning to love again herself. In those last ten days leading up to the game night launch, Jo lived and breathed Monsters and Mythology in a way she hadn’t in years. Immersing herself in it, with Felix alongside her, was like learning to fly. No, it was like remembering that once upon a time she had known how to fly and realizing she still had wings.
Both Jo and Felix had long since given up pretending that she was volunteering at the library for only one hour a week, so most of her free time was spent helping with final preparations. On Sunday afternoon, they met up with Leni at Ashville Community College for the summer outreach event. The three of them spent hours handing out flyers and talking up the library’s programs. Felix and Leni discussed the programs as a whole, changing up their pitch depending on what each person was interested in. Jo, on the other hand, had no qualms about giving every single person the hard sell about MnM. If she was going to be out there getting sunburned in the sticky heat, she was going to get some new gaming friends out of it, damn it.
To help, she had brought twenty sets of dice that she wasn’t terribly attached to. She hung a sign on the front of their table reading “Free Dice!” and gave them away to the first twenty people who signed up for the library’s e-newsletter and put the MnM launch in their calendars.
The dice were gone within thirty minutes.
“How are you so good at this?” Felix asked her after she handed off the last set to a student in a Minecraft T-shirt.
Jo smiled and sketched a bow. “You, sir, are looking at the 2009 to 2011 Social Coordinator for the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing, Gamma Tau at-Large chapter.”
He stared at her. “I know some of those words.”
She laughed, a big, boisterous sound that carried across the quad. “The first rule of advertising to college students, Felix? Give them free shit.”
“All of the library’s programs are free,” he said, clearly puzzled.
“Which you should be leading with, by the way,” Jo said. “It’s an obvious selling point.”
Leni piped up. “Should we take the sign down now that the dice are gone?”
“No, no,” she replied. “Tell people they just missed the giveaway, but there will be more freebies at the MnM launch, and to sign up for the newsletter for more info.”
“We’re giving away freebies at the launch?” Leni asked, turning to Felix.
Jo answered her first. “We are now.”
By the end of the afternoon, Jo was a living, breathing puddle of sweat, all the flyers were gone, and over fifty people had signed up for the newsletter. Not bad for podunk little Ashville. Ecstatic, Felix called Warren on the spot to let him know how well it had gone, giving Jo all the credit. She grimaced and tried to mime to him to stop, but he only winked.
“Aren’t you supposed to be saving your job?” Jo asked him after he’d hung up. “I don’t mind if you and Leni take credit.”
“Skilled volunteers are hard to come by. We’ll take the credit for finding you; you take the credit for doing the work.”
“All right,” she relented, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist, “I can live with that.”
The rest of the week was a blur. At work, Jo reminded Vanessa about the launch and helped her make a character over lunch—a druid with a crow companion named Tom. On another day, she used her break to call up a local bakery and paid out of her own pocket to order three dozen cupcakes decorated with the MnM logo.
Her evenings were spent at the library, or wherever else she was needed. She drove all around town to put up flyers in every place she could think of, including the Starbucks out by the highway. She showed Leni where to order dice sets in bulk to give away. She helped Felix punch up the newsletter copy so MnM night, and all of the library’s programs, sounded more enticing.
After hours, she stationed herself at Felix’s dining room table, creating half a dozen starter characters for people to choose from if they didn’t have their own. Felix sometimes sat with her, making his way through a thick book about the transcontinental railroad. (Jo called him a nerd for that, and he fired back a very mature “look who’s talking” that sent them both into a fit of giggles.) Otherwise, he was down in the basement, boxing and blasting his favorite pop songs. When Felix returned upstairs, shirtless and glistening with sweat, he would offer her his hand and ask her to join him in the shower. Jo always said yes.
And every day, she thought of the words he had whispered to her in the dark. Words he repeated often. Words that ran through her mind like a refrain from the most beautiful song in the world. He loves me.
When she woke in the morning to find Felix sound asleep, with tousled hair and Merry curled up behind his knees—he loves me.
When they took Tito to brunch together, and Felix blushed at the embarrassing stories his grandpa told about him—he loves me.
When he kissed her and touched her until she fell apart in his arms. When he called her a good girl and let her tend to him -afterward—-he loves me.
When she got her period and he brought her dinner, made her herbal tea, and cuddled with her and Merry on the couch to watch their favorite comfort movies—he loves me.
Jo never said it back. There was a part of her that wanted to, but her feelings for Felix were unlike anything she’d ever known. How was she supposed to classify them as love or lust or infatuation or just plain desperation if she had no point of reference for them? She knew Felix wouldn’t wait around for her forever, but she couldn’t say it. Not yet. Not until she was certain.
And then, of course, there was that deep-seated voice that still wormed its way in, trying to convince her that she was going to fuck it up. She talked things through with Aida more than once, but even her best friend’s reassurances never lasted long. More often than Jo cared to admit, that voice, a voice that sounded an awful lot like her own, clouded her happy, sunny days, coiling like a knot in her stomach.
It doesn’t matter if he loves you, Jo, it whispered, countering that lovely refrain. Jeremy loved you, and he got sick of you and your obsessions eventually. Felix has only known you for a few weeks, after all. It’s only a matter of time…