Chapter 8
EIGHT
Annie
I knew that in sharing a bed with someone, there was bound to be some accidental elbow brushing or perhaps a rogue kick.
I expected it, even.
What I did not expect, however, was to wake up draped over my worst enemy’s hard body like a cold, clingy sleep koala trying to get warm.
But apparently, my worst enemy is a human mattress. A wet mattress like the one in our original room, because there is a spot on his shirt that indicates I’ve been drooling here a while.
Did I mention the human mattress inexplicably has faulty hardware, because there is a wayward pole currently nestled in right where it absolutely should not be?
Wow, this mattress feels good. Solid. Supportive.
Extra firm. I grind down just a little bit, just to confirm the firmness for sleep science and also because I haven’t had a human mattress with faulty hardware in over two years, and my eyes roll to the back of my head.
Eleven out of ten, no notes. Or perhaps nine out of nine, now that I think about it.
Nico’s big hands fly to my hips. “Again,” he mutters, sleep in his voice.
I go rigid, because this likely constitutes sexual harassment. I remain frozen, praying he stays asleep so I can peel myself off the hot, firm, faulty mattress.
But because this is the worst day of my life, Nico displays all the telltale signs of waking. His body freezes under mine. His hands fly off my hips and smack flat onto the actual mattress. He clears his throat, which rumbles through his chest like a seismic event.
The sounds of our breathing rip through the silence.
To my abject horror, his hands start to move again.
One shifts up to tangle itself in my hair. The other inches towards my ass… and squeezes when it gets there.
Holy mother of—
“My worst fuckin’ nightmare and my wettest fuckin’ dream,” he murmurs, his lips brushing against my ear.
My body lights up.
He thrusts up once, a tiny, almost imperceptible and unconscious movement, and we both let out unnatural, strangled sorts of sounds.
“Oh, wow,” I squeak. That’s some big, faulty hardware.
“Impressed yet?” he rasps.
“No,” I say, with a small swivel of my hips, just to make sure.
“Lie.”
I tilt my head up to look at him and immediately regret it.
His hair’s a mess and his jaw is shadowed with stubble, his gorgeous, infuriating mouth and the tips of his cheeks flushed a deep crimson.
We search for something, anything, in each other’s eyes before his flick down to my mouth. It’s all too much.
I reach back and throw the shit-brown covers over the two of us, enshrouding us in darkness, because if I can’t see, then maybe this isn’t actually happening.
“Talk to me, Annie.” His voice is gravel and surrounds me in heat.
“I’d rather not.”
He thrusts up once more, and our moans mingle together. I bury my face in his chest.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he grits out, now making small, incremental rocking motions that feel like heaven and hell wrapped into one big, non-faulty package.
“With what?” I grumble, now hating him for literally being the whole package. Smart, hot, rich, well-endowed Nico Giannuzzi. “The tiny sausage you have in your pocket?” I say, now meeting his thrusts with grinding of my own.
“Maybe I should feed you that sausage,” he groans, taking his big hands and running them up and down my sides but over my shirt, along my waist, squeezing and kneading and learning as I all but purr in satisfaction at the feel of it. “Stuff it down your throat and make you gag on it.”
An embarrassing sound, one that could technically be classified as a whimper, leaves my mouth at how much I need that.
“It’d go down easy,” I lie to him, “like a single strand of spaghetti.” We’re fully rocking together now, mimicking fucking without any actual penetration, his dick hitting just the right spot over and over again.
I moan. A line of sweat drips down my back at the heat currently being generated under the covers.
“Want to test that out?” he asks, while inching his hand back down my ass to where I need it most. Oh god.
“Do you really have Hep B?” I blurt out.
His hand stops. “No. I’m clean. You?” he finally says.
“Same,” I whisper.
“Am I fuckin’ you right now?”
I swallow, rubbing along his length. “I’d never fuck an illiterate gorilla,” I tell him, even while reaching down to my own underwear and pulling it to the side.
One layer of clothing now separates us, and it belongs to him.
It soaks quickly while I cover it in an embarrassingly wet glide back and forth.
“Oh god,” I whisper, rocking even harder.
“Perfect,” he grunts, voice strangled now, “‘Cause I’d never stick my dick in crazy,” he tells me, as he maneuvers somewhere beneath me, and I feel a slide of fabric pulling down until I feel hot, smooth, solid steel right between my bare lips.
Our combined moans fill the blanket space.
“Fuck, Annie,” he mutters, a frustrated whisper.
Something tugs at my head.
“Goddamn—”
It’s not Nico pulling at my hair. No. It’s the sudden ring of alarm bells.
“You—”
Not in the room. In my brain. Sirens begin screeching in my brain at the tone of his voice.
Shit.
Shit.
Because it’s the obvious tension and exasperation in his voice that cuts through my horny, mattress-testing haze and reminds me who the fuck this is and how he feels about me and what the fuck and what in the actual fuck am I doing?!
I peel myself off and throw myself on the bed next to him while I try, with all my might, not to scream.
That doesn’t count as sex, though, does it? Right?!
Sister Annie narrows her eyes at me.
Shit. Shit.
With Nico?!
SHIT!
We stare at the blanket still over our heads together, sweating and panting in a horrible, pre-coital silence.
Nico eventually blows out a big breath, one I know has a lot of air, because I am now well acquainted with the sheer size of his chest and its subsequent lung capacity potential. “You are truly Hellspawn placed on this earth to torture me,” he says.
“That’s me,” I say to the blanket. “Lucifer Li.”
He turns his head in my general direction. “That’s literally what your contact is on my phone.”
“Funny,” I grunt, “you’re just Satan in mine.”
“Funny,” he responds, “because you mutter ‘hail, Satan’ in your sleep.”
I don’t answer that.
“That was a huge mistake,” I say after a while.
His big body tenses next to mine. When he speaks, there’s an unnameable emotion that’s threaded through his voice. “Fine,” he says, and something lodges itself in my throat.
We lay in quiet agony, sweating and listening to the murder drips coming from the bathroom.
“What’s our next stop?” I ask casually, as if I didn’t just grind myself against the bare length of my worst enemy’s dick.
He clears his throat. “Richmond, Virginia. One of the fine dining spots down there.” He pauses. “You should come with me this time.”
I shrug noncommittally. “Maybe.” No.
“Why not?”
The back of my neck prickles with residual panic and irritation. “I don’t owe you an explanation.”
“It’s just food. Really good food, actually. Some of the best, according to a random tire company. Also the most expensive.”
It’s not just food. It’s Annie could ruin everyone’s lives including her own, didn’t I just prove that to you? I find myself going on the offensive. “Is that what this all is? Wanna show off how fancy Dr. Nico is now? Rub it all in my face?”
There is a prolonged beat before he slowly sits up, bringing the blanket with him. I’m blasted with fresh air cooling my feverish, sweaty skin, sunlight and reality illuminating my shame. “Huh?” he asks.
I look up at Nico and regret it again, because a messy, sweaty, aroused, hard Nico has to be the most devastatingly sexy things I’ve ever seen.
There’s a wet spot on his shorts above his obvious erection, my wet spot.
What the hell is wrong with me? I have to keep going, a runaway train.
“Not gonna work, dude.” I sit up, too, relishing in the familiar waves of agitation now coming from my left.
“Can take the kid out of Bensonhurst, but can’t take the Bensonhurst outta the kid. ”
“You grew up two blocks away from me!”
“Yes, but I don’t sound like a dollar-slice dimwit.”
“I’m articulate as fuck.”
My mouth twitches.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he demands to know.
“Would you like an itemized list or a brief summary?”
“Gimme a summary.”
I chew the inside of my mouth until I taste blood. Then I look him dead in the eye and say, “I’m a hurricane of serious issues.” The words slip out before I can stop them.
Nico’s whole body tenses. Then—boom.
“Fuckin’ hell, Annie.” His voice explodes through the room. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m so fuckin’ sorry I said that, but I am trying to be polite and apologetic and helpful and you keep twisting it into somethin’ ugly!”
He shoots up from the bed, pacing, running a hand through his hair like he’s seconds from losing it.
“I don’t know what you want from me! I’m trying here.
I’m really, really trying. And we almost just fucked,” he snarls, with a twist in his face that pulls at my heart, pointing at the bed, at where we almost did, “and you immediately regret it, tell me it was a mistake, when I was the one who woke up to you grinding on my dick, and then you immediately insult me?! Why the hell do you always wanna pick a fight for no fuckin’ reason at all? ”
“There’s always a reason,” I mutter.
“Please,” he snaps. “Enlighten me.”
I stare at him, my chest rising and falling and hands clenched into fists. I could tell him. I could rip open every wound, every fear, tell him exactly why I can’t let him be nice to me.
Instead, I say nothing.
He watches me for a long second, then exhales hard, full of something like frustration, like disappointment.
“We’re leaving in thirty,” he mutters. “Get your shit together by then.”
I don’t know if he means my luggage or my entire fucking life. Probably both.