16. KAI
KAI
A Real Date
Her mouth. That's what comes first in my dream.
Not her face or her name or the sound of her voice. Just the wet heat of her mouth dragging across my collarbone while her nails score down my chest.
The next part is Ava on her back in my bed.
Her spine arches when I push inside her for the first time. Her thighs clamp around my hips. The sound she makes is not a moan exactly, more like the air being torn from her lungs.
My hips are rolling into hers. Slow. Deep. Her hands are gripping my shoulders hard enough to leave marks I find the next morning in the mirror.
The way she looks at me after, flushed and wrecked and trying to reassemble her defenses while I’m already peeling them back again.
I wake up hard.
Not morning-casual hard. The kind of hard that has a pulse and zero interest in patience.
Ava is still in my arms. Her back is pressed against my chest, her hair spread across the pillow between us, smelling like citrus. Her silk robe has ridden up in the night, bunched around her waist. Her bare thighs are warm against mine.
My cock is pressed against the curve of her ass through my joggers. Every breath she takes shifts her body against me in a way that makes my teeth clench.
I don't move.
Not because I don't want to.
My body has drafted a detailed proposal for what should happen next. It involves sliding my hand between her thighs and finding out if she's as wet as she was when I held her last night.
But the woman in my arms chose to stay after I refused to give her the detached, eyes-closed version of sex she wanted. She turned toward the wall and let me wrap myself around her.
That's worth more than anything my cock is currently lobbying for.
I pull her closer. Press my face into her hair and breathe.
This is enough.
I’m almost asleep again when Ava unconsciously rolls her hips. It drags her ass directly across the length of me.
I exhale hard through my nose.
Her breathing has changed. She’s waking up.
But that doesn’t mean this won’t be another time of torture where she wants to fulfill only her physical desires.
She does it again, this time slower. A deliberate grind that has my fingers digging into the sheet beneath us.
Her hand finds my forearm where it's draped across her stomach. Her fingers trace up, nails dragging lightly across the skin.
She pushes my hand lower until my fingers brush the lace edge of her thong. The fabric is damp. Hot.
"Kai, touch me." Her voice is rough, sleep-thick.
Every nerve in my body fires at once.
I press my palm flat against the wet lace and she rolls her hips into my hand, grinding herself against my fingers with a desperation that makes my cock twitch hard against her.
"I've been thinking about your fingers all night," she breathes.
"Yeah?" I slide one finger beneath the lace edge, tracing along the crease of her thigh while my mouth finds the side of her neck. Her skin is fever-warm. "I've been thinking about a lot more than my fingers."
She moans and reaches behind her, finding the rigid outline of my cock through my joggers. She wraps her hand around the shaft through the fabric and strokes.
The groan that leaves me is embarrassingly raw. My hips jerk forward into her grip.
I slip my fingers further beneath the lace. She's soaked, slick and swollen. The sound she makes when I drag two fingers through her folds makes my vision swim.
"I want you inside me, Kai," she says. "I want you to fuck me until I can't think."
I press my fingers against her clit, circling. She bucks against my hand.
"Turn around. I want to see your face when I make you come."
She doesn't turn.
Her hand keeps stroking, then her rhythm goes uneven. Drifting. Her hips are still grinding against my fingers but the motion has turned loose.
"Ava?"
No response.
Her breathing is deep. Slow. Even.
I prop myself up on one elbow and look at her face.
Her eyes are closed.
Not squeezed shut with pleasure.
Closed the way they close in deep, genuine sleep. Her lips are parted, her expression slack. A strand of chestnut hair is stuck to her cheek.
She's asleep.
This woman is asleep, grinding on my hand, stroking my cock through my joggers, and telling me she wants me to fuck her.
I drop my head back against the pillow.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Carefully, I slide my fingers from between her thighs. Pull my hand away from the wet lace and place it against her hip instead.
The loss of her warmth against my fingers is its own kind of torture.
She whimpers in protest. Her hips push back, searching for the contact I just removed, and the curve of her ass presses firmly against my erection, making me bite the inside of my cheek.
I reach down and gently peel her fingers from my cock. The loss of her grip is physically painful. I set her hand against her stomach and hold it there.
"Kai." Breathy. Needy. Her hips roll again. "Please, I need your hands on me."
I close my eyes.
She's begging me in her sleep.
The woman who refuses to show emotion during foreplay is lying here in my arms, completely unguarded, and her unconscious mind is asking for exactly what her waking mind refuses to admit she wants.
I'm not going to touch her. She can’t consciously want it and ask for it herself right now.
But I can’t stay silent either.
“I hope you’re dreaming about me fucking you, Ava,” I murmur against her hair, keeping my voice low.
"I want to feel you," she whispers in a wrecked voice. "All of you."
"If you were awake right now, I'd pull that thong to the side and slide two fingers inside you until you’re dripping down my hand and begging me not to stop."
She whimpers. Her thighs press together.
"You feel so good," she murmurs, her voice thick. "Don't stop. Harder."
"I'll curl my fingers forward and find that spot that made you shake at the lake house. I won't stop until your legs give out and you can't say anything except my name."
Her back arches. A moan slips from her mouth that shoots a bolt of heat straight through my cock.
"Then I'll spread your legs open and push inside you so deep you'll feel me for days."
My voice has dropped to something raw that I barely recognize. "No closed eyes. No hiding. You'll watch me take you apart, and you'll let me see every single thing you're afraid to show me."
"Yes." The word is a sigh. Her body writhes against mine. "Kai, yes."
"When you eventually come, you'll say my name because you can't help it."
She goes still for a moment. Then her whole body shudders, a rolling tremor that ripples from her thighs through her stomach. A sound leaves her throat, low and desperate and unfinished. Her hand fists the sheet so hard her knuckles blanch white.
Then her breathing slows. She melts back against me, boneless and warm and completely unaware of what just happened.
My cock is so hard it hurts. My pulse is everywhere. My skin feels too tight for my body.
I don't move. I lie there and let the ache settle into something I can manage.
Hours pass. My breathing steadies.
Early light bleeds through the curtains of Ava's bedroom, catching the dust motes and turning them silver. Biscuit snores from her spot by the door, one paw twitching.
Ava’s breathing is even now. Her hand has found my forearm again, holding it against her chest, fingers curled loosely around my wrist—as if even in sleep, she refuses to let go.
This woman just had an orgasm with me in her sleep, and she doesn't even know it.
But that's the thing. That's the piece I keep circling back to.
Her body is honest in a way she won't allow herself to be when she's awake. Asleep, there are no rules. No walls.
Just Ava wanting me so deeply it comes out of her when she can't control it.
And I involuntarily dreamt about driving my cock into her.
Yet I've been treating what we have like an arrangement.
I look at the training plan still open on her laptop across the room. She typed it while I talked. Every strength I named, every gap I admitted was formatted into a system I can follow.
She didn't just listen to me fall apart last night. She built me a way back.
I think about the ceramic bowl on my entry table and the way Ava told me keys go there every time, no thinking required.
The championship photo on my mantle that she placed in a timeline of a life I can't remember so I could picture it myself.
The way she showed up at the hospital for a man who didn't know her face. The food she brought every visit. The nights she sat on my living room floor going through my phone, reading my own life back to me with a patience I never earned.
She reorganized my closet.
Nope, my life.
She called all of it helping and friendship.
I've been calling it the same things because the real word required admitting something I wasn't ready to face.
I'm falling for Ava Hartley.
I've been falling since the day she walked into my hospital room while calling it gratitude, convenience, attraction, a fake arrangement that serves us both.
I let her draw the lines because it was easier than admitting I want no lines at all.
She’s done more for my recovery than my doctors, my family, my teammates. She asked for nothing back. Not once. And I've been too consumed by my hockey career and my own fractured pride to count the cost of that.
I'm done. Fake dating is over.
I want to take Ava somewhere she loves and pay attention to the things I should have been paying attention to all along.
Her favorite restaurant. What she orders when she's not curating for a client. What it costs her to keep showing up for a man who's given her nothing but borrowed time.
I'm done with borrowed time.
I'm still mapping out the details when Ava stirs against me.
A slow stretch. Her spine lengthens, her toes curling against my shins. She turns onto her back and blinks at the ceiling.
Then she turns her head and finds me watching her.
There's a crease on her cheek from the pillowcase. The lace bralette has shifted, one strap fallen off her shoulder, the swell of her breast exposed above the fabric.
She's beautiful.
"You're staring," she says, voice hoarse.
"I've been staring for a while."
She stretches again, arms above her head. The motion lifts her breasts and the robe falls open. She catches it too late, pulling the silk closed with a huff.
"How long have you been awake?"
"Long enough."
She narrows her eyes. "Long enough for what?"
"Long enough to know you talk in your sleep."
A flush starts at her collarbones and races upward like brushfire. Her lips part.
"What did I say?"
"Enough."
"Kai. What did I say?"
“You asked me to make you come. To drive you mad with my touch.”
Her flush deepens to crimson. She presses both palms against her cheeks.
"Oh no."
"Oh yes."
"I didn't... I wasn't..."
"You were, very clearly and very specifically."
She rolls onto her stomach and buries her face in the pillow. Her groan is muffled by the cotton.
"Kill me."
"Not a chance." I pull the pillow away from her. She glares up at me. "I have plans for you."
"Plans?"
"Go on a date with me."
The glare falters. Raw, unguarded desire crosses her face before the walls start going back up.
"We're already fake dating, Kai."
"This isn't fake. I'm asking you to a real dinner at a real restaurant, where you’ll wear something that makes you feel good and I spend the whole night trying to deserve your company."
She stares at me. "You don't have to try to deserve anything."
"That's not a no."
She presses her lips together. The flush is still blazing across her cheeks. Her fingers twist the edge of the silk robe.
"Fine. One dinner."
"Friday."
"Friday," she repeats, like she's testing the weight of it.
I lean down and press my mouth against her forehead.
Her eyes close. Her hand comes up and finds my jaw, holding it there for a long moment, her thumb tracing the edge of my beard.
When I pull back, she's looking at me with a terrified expression I haven't seen before.
It looks exactly the way I feel.