CHAPTER 3 NORA #5
“If we don’t hurry up,” he says, “one of us might turn into a pumpkin.” But other than sliding his palms up and down the backs of my calves where they hang over the edge of the bed, he waits for me to make the call.
I scrunch the sheets and comforter in my hands. It’s nerve-wracking to sit like this, legs spread, pleasure cooled, to know I’m leaving things unsaid between us, and that he is letting me. “You don’t have to,” I say, though I really, really want him to.
He scoffs, leaning forward to kiss my thighs, to play with the waistband of my underwear. “And let you tell Bea I don’t eat pussy?”
“I wouldn’t tell her that,” I say softly.
“Best not to risk it though.” Finn’s hair gleams in the moonlight as he lowers his head, pressing his face to the apex of my thighs, then pulls away to look up at me. Another check-in. “Okay?”
Of course, it’s okay. Of course, except I’m thankful again for the way the moonlight washes all the color from the room, and I whisper even if there’s no one to hear us, “It can be hard for me sometimes.” I play with his hair instead of looking him in his eyes.
“And I don’t want you to feel like you have to… um…you know…”
Turns out an unforeseen consequence of hooking up with your frenemy is having to admit to him that you suck at coming.
That it wouldn’t have been dramatic to call what he did to me last year, in that short amount of time, standing up, miraculous.
That all those times I’ve imagined tonight, with him, it’s taken time.
A long time. That coming, for me, is sort of like everything else: It requires hard work, specificity; it’s serious. It’s difficult.
“I’m…difficult.”
Finn sighs. Sweet sigh. He tucks my hair behind my ear, and I do his.
“Nora.” He kisses my knee. “Baby.” My fingertip.
“Respectfully.” He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my thong, the one I wore just for him, and waits.
I lift my hips, relishing the drag of his fingers, the fabric, down my legs.
“You’ve always been difficult.” He drops my panties on the floor and settles himself back between my legs.
His hands warm my skin as he pushes my knees apart, as he takes my hand and puts it on the back of his head, our fingers entwined there, in his hair, for a moment.
He blows across my exposed skin, where I am wet but still cold, and I whimper. Like an animal. “But if you think I am kneeling here just to make you come—if you think that is my endgame—you are sadly mistaken.”
“Isn’t it though? Coming?” Maybe that’s why sex with Finn feels safe, because if it doesn’t go well, it doesn’t really matter. We can go back to being frenemies, nothing will have really changed.
Nothing, except I think if I heard one of his frustrated sighs from between my legs, my chest would cave in.
“Isn’t that endgame?” I ask.
“With you?” He looks down at where his thumb makes gentle circles on my inner thigh.
He shakes his head forcefully enough that he dislodges my hand.
“I’ll kneel here until I need knee replacement surgery if it feels good to you, Nora.
I don’t need you to come, I just need—I want—to make you feel good. ”
“My pleasure is your pleasure?” I ask, a little teasing, except I don’t really know why. It’s not funny. It’s hot.
He shrugs, his focus shifting as he shoulders my thighs farther apart, his thumbs gliding closer and closer to where I am desperate for him. “Good enough way to end the year.”
I laugh as he dips his head. “Good way to start a new one.”
And the first time Finn Collins kisses me between my legs, with that wide, generous mouth, it’s with a smile.
The force of his eagerness almost pushes me back on the bed, if it weren’t for his hands pinning my thighs to the mattress. When I lean back on my hands and close my eyes, he grunts, taking my hand in his and bringing my palm back to—its apparent home—on the back of his head.
He was right about the mirror. It’s…unreal. To see him laid out like this, a map for me to travel, his wide, sloping shoulders, the valley of his spine and the taper of his waist. His dark head moving between my legs.
He sucks on my clit, on the delicate skin of my inner thighs.
He pulls back to paint me with my own wetness, down my thighs, into the curve of my ass, and when he slides his fingers into me, it’s not that I’m surprised, that it’s not expected.
It’s not that my legs aren’t spread wide for him, my eyes large with anticipation.
But I cry out, a sound I quickly muffle against my palm, because somehow, it’s fuller but not enough.
I’m wetter but want to soak his hand. Somehow, it’s better than I remember, than I could have possibly imagined.
“Good?” he asks, his eyes on my pussy, on the place where two of his fingers disappear up to his knuckles.
“Yes.” And gasp as he pumps inside me, dips his head for another taste.
The last time we did this we were in public, but that empty hallway has nothing on our exposure here, from our reflection in the mirror, our state of undress—one I improve by pulling down my top so I can touch my nipples to the soundtrack of his approving moans.
We’re alone in this room that’s surrounded on all sides by people who know us, who can hear us.
It’s too good, too much. Unfair that on top of everything else, Finn’s tongue has the capacity for all these different types of wickedness.
The worries I normally have, Is he bored or Can he breathe?
They’re still there, anxiety like a fever simmering beneath my skin, except of all the people who’ve ever eaten pussy before, I trust Finn to tell me if he wanted to stop, just like I trusted him to tell me whether he wanted to kiss me or not.
So now, even if I think those insidious little thoughts, I can flick them away like a bead of sweat on my collarbone.
He nips at my thigh. “Nora?” he asks, holding up three fingers.
I nod. I whine. I push his head back down, push my hips up to meet him, and he laughs into my clit, his fingers stretching me.
“Shut up,” I moan, without heat.
But, of course, he does not. “You taste so good, Nor,” he murmurs.
I agree just to agree, as long as I get to feel the drag of his fingers inside me again, again.
Finn is slow, patient. He coaxes me as the pleasure builds and builds and inevitably ebbs, but he doesn’t sigh or stop other than to check in, Do you like this? or Do you want more?
I can taste my arousal at the back of my throat, like it’s lingered on my tongue since I had him in my mouth. But I know my body pretty well and it’s probably not going to happen tonight.
“Finn,” I say. “Finn.”
Even in this stark, sterling night, when he looks up at me I can see his lips glisten. It’s almost hot enough to send him back down. “Okay?”
I shake my head, hide my face in the crook of my elbow. “Can you…can you come up here?”
He moves slowly, pressing a sweet, purposeful kiss to my clit that I can’t help but feel is meant to convey that this particular bundle of nerves did a wonderful job tonight. The speed, the pressure, causes a new bolt of heat to move through me. He crawls up my body, kissing my tummy, my nipple.
“How do you feel, Nora baby?” he asks, but before I can answer he drags his mouth, his tongue, up my throat. His hand is still between my legs, petting me tenderly, the way he would if I’d actually come, if he was coaxing me through it to the very end.
I close my eyes, pull his mouth to mine, his lips salty and warm, and there’s kissing Finn in my parents’ kitchen, in a hotel hallway, at midnight in the living room downstairs, and then there’s kissing Finn with his fingers still inside me, my taste painted across his lips.
I moan around his tongue, pull his chest to mine, hook my leg around him to pin him to me.
I grab at him as his body, his patience, stokes the pleasure I thought was inert.
But Finn won’t be rushed, kissing me slow, murmuring I’ve got you and You’re so good, Nora.
You’re doing so good. I rub myself against him, my pussy so wet that it’s nothing for me to fuck his hand.
And he rubs himself on me too, the rigid shape of him hard and hot through the tight cut of his boxers against my hip.
“Nora. Oh fuck.”
We’re just bodies and nerve endings and come now.
Just muscles straining and shaking. We’re pulled tight, so tight, and I cannot let go of him, not as his movements start to stutter against my hip, as his hair falls around us, a cocoon to catch my breathless sounds.
He fills me so full with his big hands and his tender words and—
“I’m coming,” I tell him even though he knows, he knows, because my pussy cannot let go, back arching off the bed, his mouth catching my moans, then giving them back to me as he presses me back into the mattress, a bloom of wet heat spreading in his underwear between us.
I start to shiver the moment he’s finally able to peel himself off me.
Which is quite a while, honestly. I almost don’t let him leave; it’s better if we just fall asleep like this, wrapped around each other, halfway off the bed.
He comes back an immeasurable amount of time later, after closing the bathroom door behind him, the water running for a while.
His pants are back on, but not his boxers, and somehow I am scandalized by this fact even though it felt like he just put his whole big hand up my vagina.
He’s also rummaged through my toiletries bag and stolen my scrunchie. He smiles indulgently as he stands over me at the foot of the bed. “Have you moved yet?”
I stretch; that counts as moving.
He huffs, but flops onto the bed beside me. He wraps his arms around me and hefts me up the bed with him.
“Excuse me!” I mock squeal as he handles me like luggage.
He ignores me to pull at the covers, lift one of my legs and tuck it under, then the other.