Chapter Twenty-One #2
“What if,” she said, an idea cutting through the complication, simple and beautiful and inevitable, “we do what we did today?”
He furrowed his brow, frowned down at her.
“Keep…walking?” he said, so disbelieving that she had to bite her lip to keep from smiling.
He lifted the hand that wasn’t still holding hers, set the pad of his thumb on her chin and pulled gently, watching intently as he freed her lip, as she ran her tongue quickly across it.
“Wandering,” she whispered. “Like we did today. We go back to my room and we…wander.”
She held her breath as she waited, hoping he would understand—that he would play back the day and know what she meant.
Do you like—?
Can we stop—?
Want to try—?
He moved his thumb again. Across her cheek, behind her earlobe, along a cord of her neck until he reached the edge of her summer turtleneck, which she absolutely hated right now, and so did he, judging by his huff of frustration, his redirection—across the line of her jaw, back to her bottom lip.
He pressed lightly, right in the center, and watched, transfixed, as it plumped back into its natural shape.
She would die if he didn’t kiss her again.
If he didn’t say yes.
He said, “No.”
But also, he kissed her. A soft brush of his mouth against hers, a slip of his tongue against her lip. He whispered his real answer against her mouth.
“My room,” he said.
* * *
When they got there, he got her against the door again.
Not pressing against her, not yet, but only caging her in: one hand on either side of her tipped-back head, a papery crinkle on one side as the small bag he carried pressed against the wood.
Both of them were breathing heavily—not from the trek back, but from the exertion of this interminable wait, as though all the hours between their kiss last night and this hotel room tonight had squeezed together and settled into their lungs as they walked the remaining way, as they stopped to duck through a set of glass doors beneath a lit-up green cross, as they moved quickly through the aisles to find what they needed, as they finally made it through the threshold of the hotel and crossed the lobby to the elevators.
As they rode up, side by side, staring at each other in the mirrored surface.
Her cheeks pink, her lips restless for the pressure of his mouth.
His eyes dark and roaming, as if he was making a plan.
Now that they were finally, truly alone, he leaned into her, set the right side of his face against her cheek, scraped her deliciously with his stubble, and breathed her in.
He said, “I hate this shirt,” and dropped his head to catch at the high collar with his teeth, pulling it off her neck and stretching the cloth away from her skin for a cooling, freeing second before letting it snap back against her.
She thought she might slide down the door.
“I’ll take it off,” she said, but he shook his head, his forehead against her shoulder, his warm breath pulsing through the fabric of her shirt, making her nipples peak and ache.
She felt strangely, unfamiliarly sensitized, like she knew now what the lightning bolt effect of him was for—to turn her into this, to change the way her skin experienced every touch, even the indirect ones.
His eyes on her, his breath on her, his mouth moving while he spoke.
“I’ll take it off,” he said. “In a minute.”
Then he lifted his head and kissed her. Not soft this time: all the pressure she’d been desperate for, his tongue licking into her, his teeth back on that bottom lip sometimes in a way that told her, without words, that he loved that part of her, that he could not get enough of that part of her, that he was not yet ready to move on to all the other parts that had always seemed, before, to be the end goal of sex.
Layla Bailey, she thought as she kissed him back, triumphant and happy and more aroused than she could ever remember being in her life.
She lifted her hands, desperate to touch him—Griffin Testa, his name like an overlay of her own—but caught herself, her fingers curling into her palms. He would have to stop kissing her if he wanted this wandering to be mutual; he would have to give her enough air to ask if he liked, if he wanted to try; he would need to be able to say if he needed to stop.
He noticed, even through the kiss, dropping his hands from the door, the bag from the pharmacy hitting the floor.
With his right hand—was it shaking, maybe?
—he circled one of her wrists, more slowly bringing up his left to take the other.
She knew that now—his right hand always first to touch something, his left tentative.
She wanted to say, I noticed that; you can trust me; you can tell me; I’ll make this wandering work for us both.
But he spoke first—against her lips, a soft secret.
“I need to build up my confidence first.”
She leaned her head back against the door, looked long at him.
He let her do that more now—no ball cap, no turning one side of his face away, and while she wouldn’t interrupt him in this moment, she made a promise to herself to tell him later: You’re so handsome.
I’ve always thought so. From the very first second I saw the whole of you.
“If you’ll let me see you. Touch you. Find out what makes you feel good, first. That’s what I need, before I—” He broke off, dropped his left hand from her to curl around the hem of his untucked shirt.
Before he let her see him, he meant.
She searched his eyes. His gaze on her was the perfect mixture—pleading and honest, but hot and hungry, too.
“Can I touch you?” she whispered back.
“Right side, for now,” he said, against her mouth. Another kiss. A press of his hips into her, their joined hands trapped between his hardness and her stomach.
“Not too much touching this yet,” he added gruffly, pressing his length once against her hand, but when she snaked her tongue out, she could taste the shape of that Versailles quirk on one side of his mouth. “I gotta be able to focus.”
He lifted his head, looking at her again, waiting for her answer. One hand gripping hers, the other still fisted in his shirt. Intense and beautiful. A column of smoke clearing her mind, a prince bargaining for a piece of her soul, a sculpture holding out his own broken heart.
A man who’d helped her get herself back today.
“Okay,” she said.
He moved fast then—breaking his hold on her hand to grab her hip, to pull her off the door and onto his mouth.
He spun her, still kissing her, backing her into the darkened room, a pale glow coming from one side, but Layla didn’t bother looking around.
She had her hand on him now: right side, like he’d asked, beneath his shirt, on the warm skin of his ribs, her fingers fitting into each space, his pulse drumming insistently there, too.
She had the dim sense of the room’s hugeness, of how long it took for her calves to hit the edge of a mattress, of how the sound of their breathing echoed, of how, when he gently nudged her to sit, there was an expanse on either side of her, so much larger than the bed in her room.
But dim was the extent of it, because he had his fingers curled into the hem of her shirt; he was tugging it up, her arms lifting wordlessly, her neck stretching as he pulled it over her head, her hair lifting and then falling in what was probably a disastrous, staticky tangle around her shoulders.
Except Griffin didn’t look at her like she was disastrous or tangled.
He looked at her like she was the only thing worth looking at in this whole city, his eyes tracking over her collarbones, her flushed chest, her simple, beige bra that was, at the moment, no match for her tight nipples.
He held the summer turtleneck between his hands like he was about to tear it in half, and honestly, she wouldn’t have minded.
She hated it, too, for all the hours it’d kept him from seeing her like this.
He dropped to his knees, the shirt falling to his side, and she could admit, there was a hiccup there—her hand reaching out automatically, her voice saying “Griff,” in a sort of scolding way, her mind on the contracture scarring he told her about, his limp late in the day before they rested, his hand rubbing methodically up and down his leg as they sat on a park bench.
He said, as he gripped her waist, fingers flexing, “I’ll tell you if I need to stop,” and she nodded, murmured “Me, too,” and that was good; that was true and also more mutual.
They were on equal footing here, the way they had been all day.
She toed off her shoes and her socks as he hooked his thumbs into her waistband, as he lifted her enough to slide her pants down her legs, his head bending as he kissed along the top of her thigh, her knee, and oh, god, his hair, the way the ends of his hair trailed along her—
“You’re so soft,” he said against her skin, and she set a hand on his head, right side, her fingers running through the silky, dark strands.
She said, “You are, too,” and he curved his mouth against her, dragged his teeth against her inner thigh, which made her jolt with pleasure. She could somehow sense him filing that away, keeping track, getting answers to the questions he didn’t need to ask out loud.
He came back to her mouth, his lips on hers harder, one hand on the side of her neck as he led her farther back onto the bed, rising up and over her in all his dark, soft, sinuous heat.
Once he had her there—in the middle of this huge bed she didn’t think she could find either edge of, the crisp white duvet beneath her, her skin bared to him and her limbs restless with wanting to be covered in him—that was when he truly started to wander.
Her body a map he was making only in his mind, his mouth and hands surveying her—stopping, staying, when she gasped, when she arched, when she whispered his name.
He said I like this at the join of her neck and shoulder, told her how good she smelled there, told her he could live there, except there were other places he wanted to see, too.
He turned her when he wanted to unhook her bra, got distracted by the line of her spine, showed her a new place there halfway down—she could not remember a single thing she knew, no matter that she had never been anything other than top of her med school class in anatomy—that sparked with feeling when his tongue licked across it, her whole body still buzzing from it when he turned her over again, when he stared down at her breasts and groaned desperately, lowering his head and letting his damp forehead rest against her sternum for a few perfect seconds, his breaths deliberate and determined while he got himself back under control, readying himself to wander again.
New paths, then: her hand back in his hair, down the back of his neck, along the ropy, strong shoulder covered by his shirt while he explored.
The outer curve of her breast, the highest crest of her hip bone, the crease above her thigh where the elastic of her underwear rested, apparently waiting all day, all her life, to be soothed by the breath he blew across it.
She thought vaguely, indistinctly of another night in a Paris hotel room; she thought not of Jamie but of herself, of how badly she wanted to be claimed—a youthful desire, a lonely one, nothing Jamie ever could really understand anyway.
She thought of how this was nothing like that.
She thought of being discovered, not claimed; she thought of being Layla Bailey, of lying beneath a man who could say he was afraid, who could build his confidence not by possessing her body but by visiting it, learning it, liking it, wanting to wander all night in it…
He licked her—right at the wet seam between her legs, and she couldn’t think of anything, anything else.
A groaning, famished licking, and then sucking, like he hadn’t spent half his day tasting some of the best, sweetest things in the world, like he had never tasted anything else at all.
She nearly came off the bed from it, the single-mindedness of it, the whole-bodyness of it—hers, but also his; she could feel that it was also his, and she could see the way he’d let go of something within him, both his hands hard against her now, holding her open, both his shoulders tight against her thighs, his hips pressed tight to the mattress, moving in time with her own.
At some point, probably right about the time he slid two fingers inside her, right around the time she cried out his name—stretching it and transforming it into a swear word she could not ever remember saying out loud at a time like this—she realized she’d lost track of one of her hands.
One was still in his hair, but the other was on what she could reach of his shoulder—over his shirt on that forbidden left side.
She jerked it away, her curse turning into a gasping, “I’m sorry!
” but he didn’t stop—he only lifted his left hand and gripped hers with it, no caution now, and guided it back to his body.
This time, to his skin. To the side he worried so much about.
His jaw, his neck—the whorls of scarring beneath her palm and fingers meaning nothing to her beyond trust, beyond permission, an invitation to start making a map of her own.
The thought of it, of this first indication that his confidence was building, that he would be able to get to that promised next step with her, made her pleasure ratchet higher.
Soon she would be able to touch him, to explore him, to make him feel good the way he was making her feel right now…
She whimpered and squirmed beneath him, desperate to get there, because oh, god, he was so good at wandering, so good that he couldn’t help but find the very best destination, and he knew exactly where—
He curled his fingers.
He sucked harder.
And oh—
Oh, he got her there.