Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“Shh, Mattie.” Campbell cups me through my underwear—the warmth of his palm, the heel of his hand pressing exactly where I need it. I can feel the cool whisper of his ring against the soft skin of my inner thigh. “Can you be quiet?”
“I don’t know,” I say, strangled, as my head drops to his shoulder. I squeeze his arms and he presses in closer, using the hand on my back to rock me against him.
“Can you try?”
I bite my lip instead of answering, and Campbell kisses the curve of my neck.
“After yoga—” he says. “After seeing you walk into that meeting in this skirt…if I didn’t get to touch you, I was going to lose it.
” He squeezes me, gently, and I bite off a moan.
“Lose my mind, lose my grasp on reality.” He swallows so hard that his throat clicks. “I still might.”
Campbell’s fingers slip just below the waistband of my underwear—slowly, as if he thinks I might stop him. His eyes lift to mine, just like that moment in my room last night. A narrowing of the world to only the two of us. But I don’t have it in me, this time, to hide how gravely I want him.
“Please,” I whisper, and Campbell kisses me. Open-mouthed and uncontrolled and heady. His tongue grazes mine at the same moment his fingers brush against me. The sharp, helpless sound I let out is enough to make him freeze.
“Please what, Mattie?” Campbell’s voice is impossibly low. His hand has stilled. “What do you want?”
I make a frustrated sound, and he brushes his fingertips against me—just once.
I tilt my head back and Campbell’s mouth lands on the curve of my neck. “I want to hear you say it,” he murmurs. “What do you want? Is it me?”
“No,” I say, automatically.
Campbell starts to pull away, and I jerk down to catch his wrist. Our eyes meet, and he smiles. He knows—god, of course he knows. The upper hand he’s always tearing back from me.
“Yes,” I grind out. Like it wasn’t already obvious: my hands gripped into him, the way I said please. “Embarrassing.”
“Mm.” Campbell slides one finger inside of me, then another—slow, and slick, and full. The heel of his hand gives me just enough pressure. My eyes flutter shut. “I love embarrassing you.”
My face floods with heat as I say, “You don’t have to do this.” The thing I just begged him for, the thing I so clearly want—and still, something in me needs us to be even. Can’t help but resist this moment where Campbell’s giving and I’m taking, slack in his arms.
“Do what?” he asks, quietly. His voice nearly disappears into the infinitesimal space between our bodies.
“This,” I manage. “For me.”
Campbell’s fingers curl, and I make a sound so unreasonably loud that he covers my mouth with his own. He leans me into the wall of towels, bracing one hand beside my head and pressing his body in against mine. I can feel the hard line of his erection along my hip.
“I’m doing this for me.” The grit of his voice is hard to make out. “I’ve spent too long sitting in meetings with you, not being able to touch you. I want to watch you come apart.”
I whimper, and he sinks an open-mouthed kiss into my throat. “I want you to come on my hand, and then I want you to go back to that meeting, and I want you to think about me.”
My legs sway, and he loops an arm around my waist to hold me against him. I fold my arms over the tense lines of his shoulders. We have maybe five minutes before someone comes looking.
“I want to make you feel good,” Campbell says. His eyes are closed, his eyelashes feathered over his cheeks. “Maybe then, you’ll like me.”
“You could never”—I choke out—“make me like you.” But then he catches onto the rhythm, and my body starts moving against his hand without the permission of my brain.
“There she is,” Campbell says. So gentle, and so close. His lips brushing the skin above my pulse point, his hand on my back holding me in place. His own hips stuttering against me as his fingers move. “That’s it, baby.”
When the orgasm floods through me I have to bite my wrist—right there in front of my face, braced over Campbell’s shoulder—to keep quiet. Baby. The hot slide of his fingers, working me through it. There she is.
Carefully, Campbell slips his hand out of my underwear and pulls the fabric back into place. He rights my skirt, straightens my shirt, brushes the unkempt hair out of my eyes. I’m trembling and unsteady.
“Never?” he asks, softly. When he looks me full in the face, it’s devastating—I want him inside of me; I want to swallow him whole; I want so many things that are so dangerously far past liking.
It’s only ten days.
“Maybe never was harsh,” I whisper. I can’t bring myself to say the truth, that it’s already. I like him so unspeakably much—as he smiles under the yellow closet lights, as he lifts my wrist and presses his mouth to the white circle of a bite mark I’ve left there.
“Use me next time,” he says. And then, before I’ve had time to deal with the image of biting Campbell while he’s inside of me, he’s reaching for the door handle.
“Go on, then.” The grit of his voice, his dark eyes holding mine. “Get back to your meeting, French.”