CHAPTER 4 NORA #4
I wipe my face against the blanket on my shoulder. God, this is embarrassing. “I’m fine.” But my voice is a bit shaky. I’m not even crying, not really. I’m not sad, these aren’t sobs. I just feel it all. The year spread out in front of me. It’s exciting and scary and just, a lot.
He’s behind me in an instant, his legs bracketing mine, his front pressed to my back. His arms come around my body and he gently rests his chin on my shoulder. “Are you crying?”
“I’m…processing.”
He nods against me. “Do you need…are you…”
I place my hand over his on my thigh. “I really am fine. I just have big feelings.”
“Hmmm…” His voice rumbles against my back. “Yes, I’ve seen those before.”
I make like I’m about to elbow him, but he can feel me coming and shifts out of the way, laughing.
“I like them. Your big feelings. Can I sit here with you?” he asks. “Or do you want to feel them alone?”
Normally, I would be alone. But feeling them with Finn is nice, too. “You can stay.”
And he does, his chin on my other shoulder now, his chest and hips my backrest. We sit watching the slice of city I get to see from my bedroom for a while. Until he starts to shift, trying—and failing—to keep me from noticing the erection growing between us.
I lean back into him. He shifts again.
I drop the blanket from my shoulders, letting it pool around my hips and in his lap. I stretch my arms up, back arched. He sighs.
“Nora.” He sounds almost tortured.
“What?” I twist to blink at him over my shoulder. His hair is messy, pillow marks still visible on one side of his face. He’s perhaps never looked more handsome in his whole life. The crease in his brow appears.
“It’s New Year’s Day,” he says. “This is serious.”
I giggle, turn on the bed to face him fully. His eyes immediately drop to my breasts.
Boys.
“I’m just saying…” I glance meaningfully at his fully erect penis, jutting between us like a flagpole. “It looks like you’re having some big feelings of your own.”
Which has the desired effect of him kissing me, him pulling me down to the mattress.
Finn rolls us over so he’s on top. Our legs tangle, his cock pressed against my hips, leaving a wet stamp against my skin with every lazy thrust. His hands are slow as they cover all his favorite places: the shell of my ear, the corner of my jaw, my collarbone, the sides of my breasts, the crook of my elbow.
He replaces his hands with his mouth at my belly button.
Turns me onto my side to press his teeth lightly to the globe of my ass.
He spreads my legs wide, hands spanning my thighs and sucks at my skin, closer and closer, until I’m lifting my hips to him, whining as his thumb gets closer, but never close enough.
“What’s wrong, Nora baby? Big feelings?”
This is no time for teasing. “Get a condom,” I say, then reach for one myself.
“Let me get you ready,” he says, though he doesn’t try to stop me.
I open the package. “I’m ready.”
I want him.
In less than eight hours from the last time, Finn is inside me again. It’s different this time, in the light of day. There’s no darkness to hide behind, just me and Finn and the sky outside.
He keeps the sheets around his waist, making a tent of his body. His focus drifting from the look on my face to the flush on my chest to the place where he disappears inside of me again and again.
“Is it good?” I ask.
He thrusts, pauses, looks at me. “So good. Can you come?” he asks. “Do you want to?”
“I do. But not like this.”
He pulls out, lies beside me. Turns me like a ragdoll and slides back into me from behind, on our sides.
I press back into him. “So good.”
He slips his hand between my legs, petting my clit in the same slow rhythm that he fucks me.
We move slow, lazily, a perfect morning fuck.
And there’s no way I could come like this, or he could either.
It’s like he wants to remind me that this is the point, the pleasure, the closeness; the coming is secondary.
Eventually, he pulls out, stumbles to the bathroom and comes back condomless, a cloth in his hand.
He wipes the spermicide away from my skin, then wraps his arms around my legs and licks me open.
He sucks my clit over and over just to hear my hitched breaths and gasps.
Soon he is humming his approval as the tension pulls tighter inside me, as I press up into him.
He slips his fingers inside, two, then three, and he talks—he talks—me through it.
“I think you’re close, Nora baby.” He breathes the words against my stomach.
“You’re so wet.”
And, “I’m going to slide right out of you, if I’m not careful.
” He leans back down to suck my clit again, lick me.
When he takes his mouth away, he replaces it with his thumb.
Heat floods my chest, pools low in my back.
My fingers tingle, my toes. My back arches as he strokes me.
I dig my heels into the mattress, fist the sheets.
“I see you working for it,” he whispers, his hand smoothing circles on my belly and I nod, teeth clenched, because it’s there, right there.
“I know I tease you about it.” He keeps his hand on my stomach, his fingers stroking inside me.
“But I love how intense you are, Nora. How focused. You set a goal, and you’ll stop at nothing to achieve it.
“Be a good friend,” he says. “You’re locked in.
“Buy your own condo.” He places a kiss on my hipbone. “Done.
“Cook an eight-course meal.” Now, my pubic bone. “Easy.”
“Technically…” I gasp as he licks my clit. “It was family style.” This time he bites my inner thigh, and I moan as he sucks on the spot, tonguing it to ease the sting.
“Either way,” he says softly. “I love that about you, Nora. You work so hard for everything, and you deserve the reward. So, when I say I’ll do this for as long as you need me to, as long as it takes. Know that I mean it.”
I believe him. That’s the thing about Finn, sometimes he’s late, and sometimes he’s silly, but he’s always there no matter what.
And even though what he’s doing with his fingers, his mouth, feels amazing, right now I just want him here.
I replace his hand with mine on my clit. “Get a condom.”
And he does. He settles between the cradle of my thighs, and he’s right, I’m so wet, he slides right in. I anchor him to me, my legs wrapped around his hips, my hand in his hair. His weight is a comfort. Every stroke of his cock inside me exactly what was missing.
“Kiss me,” I whisper against his mouth. I keep my eyes open and so does he, the kiss mostly tongue and teeth.
I say his name as it happens, as every nerve in my body finally fires, like my pussy was waiting to be filled up first. I come around him, on our hands, my hips jerking their own rhythm on his cock.
I bite the meat of his shoulder to muffle the sounds and he pulses inside me, burying his own voice in my hair.
It lasts forever but even when it’s over I don’t let him leave.
I keep him inside me, on top of me, kissing, just kissing.
Because he loves my intensity, my seriousness, and I love that he sees me so clearly yet still doesn’t want to look away.
But I don’t know how to tell him that without saying I love you.
So, I kiss him and kiss him and hope he can hear the words in the silence.
We make it to the bathroom, the shower, and Finn—in an effort to “protect” my “poor knees,”—even attempts to leave the shower, soaking wet, and get a condom from the drawer beside my bed.
But once I assure him that I do not care how strong he is, I won’t let him hold me against the wall and fuck me because those Life Alert commercials traumatized me, we both agree to sacrifice our knees.
Finn gets bored waiting in the spray while I shampoo twice and leave the conditioner in for at least five minutes. He disappears into my bedroom with a towel wrapped low around his hips and another wrapped high on his head.
For a man who seemed to have no experience baking a cake, he flips pancakes like a career line cook.
When I finally make it out of my bedroom, shampooed and conditioned, cleansed and moisturized, he’s already got a stack of them next to the stove on the last clean plate in my whole apartment, surrounded by all the dishes we haven’t gotten around to yet.
“What are you wearing?” I ask, stopping halfway between him and the bedroom door.
He turns, spatula in hand. “What?” He looks down at his body, his pants from last night on but the buttons open and wearing my hot-fox Robin Hood T-shirt that I wear to bed.
“You’re stretching it.” I point to fabric, thinned at his shoulders. It’s too short for him, exposing his midriff.
“Nora, it’s like twenty years old.”
I climb onto one of the two barstools on the other side of the kitchen island, grumbling. “You’re lucky it looks good on you.”
He grins, the towel turban listing to one side.
Part of me wants to reach for my phone to take a picture of this, but maybe it means more as just a memory.
He tries to convince me to do a shot of maple syrup with him before we eat, but when I refuse, he does his and then mine and looks sick for the next half hour.
But that doesn’t stop him from pulling his weight, piling dishes next to the sink, collecting trash from under the coffee table, and making countless trips to the garbage chute.
Then he hangs up the towel and washes dishes while I dry, and it feels like every New Year’s Day has been like this. Us working in tandem, in comfortable quiet, except for voicing our memories of the night before.
“This is nice,” he says, handing me a pot.
I wipe down the stainless steel. “Yeah.”
“Maybe we can do it again sometime.” His tone is so carefully casual, it takes all my self-restraint not to fall on the floor and kick my feet.
“I’d like that,” I say, just as casually. “When’s your next trip to Berlin? We’ll probably have to plan around that.”
Finn is quiet for a beat longer than usual. I look up at him.