3. Lia
LIA
"The front door," I say, against his mouth.
"What?"
"Is it locked?"
"Yes."
"The back door."
"Yes."
"The—are we—is anyone in the bathroom or?—"
"Lia."
"Yeah."
"There's no one in the bathroom." His voice is low and rough and has lost about three layers of control since he kissed me the second time. "It's just us."
"Okay."
"You sure?"
I look up at him. He is six inches away.
He is holding himself off me with one hand on the bar on either side of my hips, like if he touched me one more time right now he wouldn't be responsible.
His face isn't a face I've seen before. It's not the still face from yesterday.
It's not the patient face from my first shift.
It's the face underneath both of those, and it has been waiting for me to say yes since sometime around noon Thursday.
"I'm sure," I say.
He closes the six inches.
His hands come to my waist. They are warm through my shirt and they are huge—both of them together spanning the whole of me, fingers meeting at my spine—and he lifts me.
I'm on the bar before I've worked out that I am going to be on the bar.
He sets me there like I weigh nothing. I'm sitting on the wood where I spent four hours pouring drinks an hour ago, and Wes Maddox is stepping between my knees and pushing them wider with his hips, and my stomach drops through the floor.
"I'm—you're—this is the bar," I say.
"Yes."
"The bar that I was serving drinks at."
"I'll wipe it."
"You'll wipe it?"
"Lia," he says, and kisses me again.
His mouth is hot. His beard scrapes. He tastes like mint—he chewed gum after close, I noticed—and like himself, and he kisses me like he has been thinking about doing it for twelve years. His hands go to the buttons of my shirt and stop.
"Tell me," he says.
"Yes."
"Tell me yes to this specifically."
"Yes to the shirt."
He undoes the buttons. Slow. I expected him to tear it. He doesn't—each button comes undone carefully, his knuckles brushing my skin between them, and when the last one goes he opens the shirt like a man opening something he has waited a long time to see.
He takes a breath.
"God." Low. More breath than word. "Look at you."
"I—"
"Lia." He doesn't look up. He's looking at my chest, my stomach, the soft curve over my jeans. His hands come up and he just—holds me. One hand cupping each side of my ribs under the open shirt. Bare thumbs tracking back and forth over my skin.
I reach for my arms to cross them and he shakes his head without looking.
"Don't."
"I wasn't?—"
"You were." His eyes come up. "Keep your hands right where they are. Let me look."
I put my hands flat on the bar behind me.
His eyes stay on me for a long time. Not rushed.
He has decided to have this moment and he's going to have it at exactly the pace he wants it.
His thumbs trace under my breasts. He unhooks the front of my bra with two fingers—I don't know how he knew it was a front hook, and I don't have brain left to ask—and he pushes the cups aside.
"God," he says.
"You keep saying that."
"I mean it every time."
He leans down and takes me into his mouth and my hips jerk off the bar.
His tongue. His teeth, just a graze. His hand on my other breast rolling my nipple between his thumb and finger in a rhythm that doesn't match what his mouth is doing and the two of them together are scrambling the signal from my brain.
"Wes—"
"Mm."
"Wes, I'm going to?—"
"Good." He switches breasts. "I want you loud."
"It's been hours and I'm already?—"
"Good."
He builds it patiently. He sucks. He tongues.
He rolls. I'm gripping the edge of the bar behind me so hard my knuckles go white.
When I come—just from his mouth, just from his hands on my chest—I make a sound I've never made in my life.
He hums against me. Says "that's one, sweetheart. " Moves to the other side.
I come a second time before I've recovered from the first.
I'm not going to survive this.
"Wes—Wes—I need you to—I can't on the bar, I'm going to?—"
"What do you need?"
"The wall. The floor. Anywhere that isn't where I pour drinks."
He laughs. Very low. I haven't heard him laugh before and the sound goes through me.
He lifts me.
Entirely off the bar, my legs wrapping around his waist, my arms going up around his neck.
He carries me like I weigh nothing. The wall behind the bar isn't meant for this—there's a framed license and a bottle opener screwed in under it—and he takes me past it, into the back hall, and puts my back against the wall next to his office door.
"Better?"
"Better."
"Tell me what else you want."
"I want—I want you to—I want the rest of your clothes off."
"Then take them off."
He sets me down. My knees wobble. I have to grip his belt loops for a second just to stay upright and he grins—a small, stupid grin, the first full one I've seen—and waits.
I unbutton his flannel. Push it off his shoulders. Under the flannel is a gray t-shirt that I've been thinking about for approximately seven hours. I pull it up. He lifts his arms. I pull it over his head.
His chest stops my breath.
I knew he was big. I've stood next to him for two full shifts.
I haven't been prepared for this. He is broad everywhere, thick through the chest and shoulders, a stripe of dark hair down the center of him that widens at his stomach, and he has a soft layer over the size of him that somehow makes him look bigger, not smaller—a man whose strength doesn't need to be cut to show.
I put my hands on his chest.
"Okay," I say. "Yes. This—this is a lot."
"You're allowed to look."
"I'm looking."
I run my hand down the center of him. The hair is soft. His skin is warm. My palm drags over his stomach and down to his belt and I undo it with my eyes on his face.
"Lia."
"Yeah."
"If you take these off," he says, low, "I'm not going to be able to go slow for much longer."
"Good."
I pull his jeans open.
I push them down. He lets me. I drop to my knees—not planned, my body just decides—and I pull his jeans and his underwear down over his hips together, and his cock springs free, and I stop breathing.
It is the word cock. Not anything else. Not him or it or any of the half-words I would use in conversation with another woman. He has a cock. It is directly in front of my face.
It is thick at the base. Long. Slick at the tip where he has been leaking. Curved slightly, just enough to hit the places in me that are currently going to be reorganized. I wrap one hand around the base—I don't think about it, I just—and my fingers don't meet.
"Lia."
"Sorry. Sorry, I'm—I'm looking."
"Take all the time you need."
I look up at him. He is looking down at me with an expression I don't have words for. His jaw is tight. His whole body is tight. His hand comes up to my hair, rests there—not pushing, not guiding, just holding—and he waits.
"You are not," I say, "a normal size."
"I know."
"I don't?—"
"You will."
"Wes—"
"You will." He pulls me up gently, his hand at my elbow. "Not yet. Come up here."
I come up. He stops me halfway—lifts me back into his arms, back against the wall—and he's kissing me again, hard now, his hands everywhere.
He gets my jeans open with one hand. He pulls them down over my hips and I kick them off my ankles.
My underwear goes next. He drops them on the floor and his mouth comes down on mine and I'm bare against the wall of the hallway outside his office with the largest man I've ever touched pinning me to the paint.
"Please—"
"I'm getting there, sweetheart."
"I can't?—"
"You can. And you will."
He drops to his knees.
Oh.
"Wait, wait, you don't have to?—"
"I want to."
He picks up my thigh. Hooks it over his shoulder. I have one bare foot on the floor and one bare leg draped over his shoulder and my back is against the hallway wall and Wes Maddox has his mouth on my pussy and I'm not, at this moment, in possession of any of my usual thoughts.
His tongue opens me, slow and deliberate.
I clap a hand over my own mouth. I don't know why—there's nobody within a hundred yards of this building—but my body has decided the sound I just made needs to be contained.
He licks up through me, slow, once. Twice.
"Don't muffle it," he says against my skin.
"Wes—"
"Nobody's here. Nobody." His tongue flicks my clit and I drop my hand from my mouth and grip his hair instead. "That's it. Let me hear you."
He isn't in a hurry.
Everyone I've ever slept with has treated this like an appetizer. An obligation. Something they rushed through on their way to the main event because they had decided, for reasons unknown, that this wasn't the point.
Wes has decided this is the point.
His tongue parts my folds and works up to my clit and circles—slow, firm, rhythmic—and when I start to move my hips he presses his forearm across my belly and pins me.
Effortless. Like my whole weight is a suggestion he's choosing to decline.
His free hand comes up and his thumb slides inside my pussy, just one thumb, and I make a sound that's half laugh half sob because even his thumb is a lot.
"Good girl."
He flicks. He sucks. He hums against me and the sound moves through my whole body. He finds what makes me grip his hair and he does that until I can't breathe and then he eases back to something slower and builds me up again. He is learning me. On his knees in his own hallway, learning me.
"I'm—Wes, I'm?—"
"I know."
"Please, please?—"
"Come for me."
I come.
His mouth is locked on my clit and his thumb is deep inside me and I come and he works me through it with small slow strokes of his tongue and he doesn't stop.
He keeps going. I'm still shaking when he builds the second one from the floor of the first and I come again with my hand in his hair saying his name and nothing else, over and over, until my voice gives out.
He kisses my inner thigh.
He gets up.
His face is flushed. His beard is wet. He looks down at me with something fierce and soft at the same time and I can see exactly how much it's costing him to have waited.