Chapter Eighteen #2
I roll off him and onto my side, pulling him to face me so I can take him in hand while he takes me in his.
Not because I want things to be even, but because I want to hear him make that low, strangled sound and see his eyes go dark and fucked-up when I change the pressure, then change it back.
He doesn’t tell me I don’t have to, doesn’t try to stop himself from having this.
The moment takes us both in a stomach-dropping sweep, like a tongue of blue-green water whose smoothness disguises its elemental power.
It’s never been easy for me to get out of my head at this particular moment of sex, when it’s too soon to know if a climax will happen for me.
One-night stands made that easier sometimes.
I knew I wouldn’t have to have any uncomfortable conversations beyond You go ahead, I’m fine .
I wouldn’t worry I’d be caught and released by someone I wanted to keep.
A single night could still be fun even if I didn’t hit the biggest waves.
But this isn’t like the sex that came with expiration dates. Before tonight, I’ve never been afraid of endings. If this means something, but I can’t be the person he’s expecting, then what?
“Hey,” he whispers, pulling me back into the moment. “Where’d you go?”
The urge to say “nowhere” pushes in my throat. It would be safer than honesty. But to say “nowhere” here, now, to this man, would dishonor what’s happening.
“Sometimes I don’t… get there. I don’t want you to think it’s because of you.”
His eyebrows draw together, one perfect, one marked. “Last time, you didn’t?”
“No, no, I did.” My cheeks and chest heat with the memory. The moment I thought I wouldn’t, he hitched my thighs higher over his arms and gave me patience, creativity, the willingness to try . More than enough to make me scream for real.
“Well then,” he says, with a smug smile I’ve never seen on his gentle face, and I can’t help but laugh. “Does this feel good, what we’re doing? You want to keep going, stop, try something else?” The crease between his brows is curious, not judgmental. It’s shockingly hot. I lo—I really like him.
I like him so much, and I want this to be something . I want to hold on to this, and him, and myself, and not let the fear of losing it stop me from reaching for it anyway.
“Keep going. I could do this for a long time, even if nothing else happens for me.”
“I would literally love to do this with you all fucking night, Stellar.”
I can tell when someone’s rushing, trying to get me off so they can tick a box.
But Lyle’s face, his eyes, his sounds—he really means it.
The way he touches me feels like it’s for both of us.
Like he gets off on the drift of his hand across my belly, thrills at the way my abs jump at his touch, loves the evidence of my pleasure soaking his fingers.
This is enough. More than enough. This sparkling current I’m riding is steadier and better than a lot of orgasms I’ve had with people who said they loved me, and I want to feel the hell out of it for as long as I can.
I can tell by the rasp in his breathing and the glitter in his eyes that he’s here with me. “You good, Stellar J?” His eyes flutter closed as I give him a double tug that makes him arch and thrust into my hand, but he has the trick of me now, and he doesn’t waver.
I don’t realize how far gone I am until I try to answer and what comes out is, “Don’t stop. Don’t stop.”
“I won’t. But you can’t do that ”—he gives me an eye-crossing double tap, calling back to what I gave him—“anymore. For the moment. If you want. Not to stop,” he gasps, breath breaking in time with my hand. “In fact. Let go, maybe? Just for a minute.” He nudges my arm.
I take my hand away, letting him touch me without touching him in return, and it feels terrifying and amazing. What if I wasn’t in control? What if I really let go? I could let him steer us through this current, keep me safe, care for me. Take me over the edge and back again.
For a moment, I’m dizzy with desire and fear.
He must see something change, because he brings his face to mine. His lips trace a curve behind my ear and down to the corner of my jaw. “Hey. Stellar J. It’s you and me. We have time for whatever we need. Let go. Let it go now.”
Everything’s surging inside me, pushing hard and high like a flood, sparkling like sun on water, and I want to believe him. I want to believe in whatever this is.
“Okay,” I whisper, drawing out the word. It’s not agreement so much as surrender, letting myself have without fretting about the cost. Letting him give.
He turns me to my back, hooking a thumb in the waistband of my boy shorts, waiting for me to raise my hips before easing them down to my thighs, my knees, my ankles, the floor.
And when I have nothing left to hide behind, he pulls me back on top. I close my eyes and forget the math, leaning for ward to brace against the soft solidity of his chest, pushing until he pushes perfectly back.
“You look so good when you get what you want,” he says tightly, roughly, his fingers playing me with steady rhythm. “Tell me what you need.”
“Hold on,” I gasp. “Hold on to me.” He wraps an arm around my back, gripping between my shoulders, his fingers splayed behind my heart.
Alive. I’m alive, and I feel everything.
And I let go, let myself break, break, break across his hand, singing like ice in springtime as it comes apart.
As I come apart.
He lets it ride until I’m good and done, more than done, every last drop caught and savored.
I open my eyes. He’s flushed, muscles tensed, agony written across his forehead. I’ve never seen anything so glorious as Lyle McHugh in the palm of my hand.
“We don’t have to do—” he starts, but I’m already reaching back to take him in hand, then taking him inside myself, slow and sweet. The sound he makes—a broken half groan accompanied by a tortured stretch and turn of his pale, beautiful neck—is worth everything to me.
“I get to have this,” I tell him, settling in, rocking in the gentle postorgasmic current. “I get to give you this. It’s a gift to know you this way.”
His fingers tremble on my back. I reach for one hand, then the other, pulling them down to my ass.
I’m rewarded by another one of those sounds, more fragmented words, a rough bump upward that takes us both off the mattress.
He’s trying to watch, but he can’t keep his eyes open; with every few thrusts he gasps, and they fall closed.
He can’t hide a thing, this one. Even the rosy tint of his skin tells me it won’t be long.
“It’s… was it like this… for you? Like this ?” His hips shove up again, harder this time, messier and with less control, and I can’t help the ragged sound I make when he finally takes what he wants.
“Yeah,” I say, and I’m full to flooding with him and with a tenderness so sharp it aches. “It was good like that for me. So good, Lyle. I think it’s because I—”
No—I’m not quite ready to open my hand and let that go. Not yet. “Because I care for you so much,” I whisper.
The impulse to have him for myself, all of him, is unstoppable.
I drape my body across his heaving chest, easing my legs to frame his thighs, moving just enough to make him shake.
I know I’ve done the right thing when I wrap my arms around him tight and he curls around me in return, every muscle tight, burying a hoarse shout in my hair.
Afterward, I scoot down his body and rest my face on the little curve of his stomach, knees bent where my legs run out of cot, feet kicking idly. “Can I?” I ask, nuzzling into his belly.
Lyle snorts a half laugh and busies himself removing the elastic from my topknot so he can spread out my hair, stroking it with leisurely twists of his wrist.
I like it here. His legs are iron underneath my chest, but against my cheek he’s soft and safe.
“What you said, about caring for me,” McHuge says.
“Yes?” I realize I’ve tensed when he gently tugs my hair, encouraging me to relax again.
“You’re supposed to say it’s good with me because I have a monster in my shorts. You’re supposed to tell me my tongue is magic and my fingers play you like a Stradivarius.” I can’t see his face from here, but there’s a smile behind his lazy words.
“If there’s anything big about you, it’s your head right now,” I scoff, more of a bite in my voice than I intended.
“Hey now,” he says, tugging my earlobe with such obvious care I have to shut down the tingling behind my eyes. “I’m telling you I liked what you said. I mean, obviously I did. But if I said ‘I love you, too,’ what would you do?”
Run. I’d run.
“Exactly,” he replies, hearing the words underneath my silence. “So I didn’t say it. We have time. It can wait until it’s not the worst thing you ever heard.”
I press my teeth into his right lower quadrant in reply, and he laughs. I want to drink that sound down and get slowly, grandly tipsy on its sparkle, but his confident We have time triggers an echo in my heart: Maybe we don’t.
The Love Boat is precarious, whether Lyle and I hold on to each other or not. Everything ends, sooner or later.
We can’t waste any of the time we have.
“What if some things can’t wait?” I purse my lips and direct a stream of breath due south. Under my breastbone, there’s a satisfying twitch.
He comes up onto his elbows, still-damp hair in wild ginger coils, the bulk of his shoulders giving way to sharply corded stretches of arm, freckled on the outside, pale and secret on the inside. “I’m thirty-four, Stellar. Hardly eighteen anymore.”
“When do you think you’ll be eighteen again?”
“Hmmm, fifteen minutes?”
“What will we do until then?”
He hauls me up his body, flips us over, and slides down until his face is on my stomach. He grins up at me, a thrilling touch of wickedness glinting from his teeth. “I have a few ideas to bounce off you.”