Chapter Fourteen #4
It didn’t. He carried on in that same low voice.
“Because of me. Because of what I did to you back in college. All that stuff you said on the stage.”
“You didn’t do anything to me back in college, all right.
I just thought you were different from other men, that was all.
I thought you were something else. It’s my own fault that I put that on you, and then let it affect me too much when you were just …
the way you are. When we are just very different people. ”
“That’s a generous way to look at it.”
“Even if it wasn’t, you didn’t make me feel embarrassed, sex-wise.”
“So who did, then? Christian? The other guy—the man bun?”
She thought of both men when he said it.
Christian, almost as big as Miller but slyer in the face, more washed-out somehow, hair less thick, stubble less lush.
Handsome, she had thought him at the time, but now when she looked back he seemed faded.
The kind of thing you loved when you weren’t sure you had options.
And Derek—he was even worse that way.
She could barely remember his face, even though he’d been the first. Her first college boyfriend, her first anything boyfriend, really, and now here he was consigned to one single sad, embarrassing memory.
Him saying she got too excited, for a girl.
“Yeah, he kind of … he thought I was too much, too,” she said, finally.
“And that’s why you think you should never let anyone else hear.”
“I never even like hearing it myself now. In fact I can’t recall the last—” she started to say. Then realized what she was saying and tried to stop. To go back, before he imagined she meant the last time I masturbated.
Though if he did think so, he didn’t let it stop whatever he was driving at. And he was really driving at it now. “But something about this situation is bringing it out of you anyway.”
“It doesn’t matter if it is, it’s just pretend. All of your softness is pretend.”
“So it is that, then. Someone being good to you. Making you feel like goodness could be a thing. Encouraging you to love what you love and be the way you are with them. Be yourself, no matter what.”
She face-palmed in the dark at that.
Because god, it sounded weird. She was a weird, messed-up loser who let arguments and relationships from ten years ago get in her head, while getting excited over the tiniest sip of the milk of human kindness.
“That is not a thing that should turn anyone on,” she groaned, fully expecting him to agree.
And instead she felt him shrug.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Because it’s ridiculous. And not happening.”
“But it is, though. I know it is. I can hear it when you move, Emmie. When you rock your hips. When you press your legs tight together to try to stop the feeling. The one that happens when I talk real gentle like this. That got worse when I said moan and come,” he said, and all she could think about, once he had, was what he’d called her.
That new almost nickname. Emmie, he had said, far clearer than it had been at the truck.
Far softer, too. And oh, every word around it.
Her face heated over hear it when you move.
Partly because even without thinking about what it meant, it sounded so utterly rude.
But mostly because of what it probably did mean, underneath.
A nice, pretty, polite way of saying she was wet.
She was wet, and he knew it. And the worst bit about it was: he wasn’t even wrong.
She was so slick between her legs she could hear it herself, despite her best efforts not to.
And she knew it wasn’t just him talking like this that had made it happen. It was his hands on her waist, his hand on her shoulder, his hands on her ankle. Maybe even before all this, maybe so far back it would make his head spin.
Though she tried to dial it down anyway.
“Well, they’re dirty words.”
“I don’t think it’s the dirtiness that did it.”
“Then what do you think it was? Your gloriousness?”
“The fact that I’m so ornery, so uptight, and I said it anyway. I encouraged you,” he said, and oh god, she couldn’t even deny it. He was kind of right. Every time he’d said a word of the sort he wouldn’t usually, it had knocked the wind out of her.
But she couldn’t wholly concede.
“You were just saying facts. You weren’t trying to say it’s okay to be that.”
“It is, though. Even though you feel nothing for me, and you think I feel nothing for you, there’s nothing wrong with finding something hot if it’s the kind of thing you’re into.
Just on a practical, objective level, it’s normal and good and I would never want you to think otherwise.
Never. The opposite, in fact. I’d want you to indulge it to the greatest possible degree you could. ”
“You goddamn liar.”
She practically spat the words at his still turned back. Then expected him to turn and spit back. Now it would be enough, it felt like. And instead, he stayed exactly where he was, shrouded in gloom. Then his voice, dark and steady.
“Put your hand between your legs,” he said.
And oh, she wanted to laugh when he did.
But it hit her way too hard for that. Like lightning, and not just in terms of how terrifying it was. Oh no, no, no—it made her heart start beating like a little bird in her chest. Heat rolled through her, thick and unstoppable and so sweet she didn’t even want to deny it.
My love is like a fever, she thought.
And had to fight to get some sense out of herself.
“Stop it. You don’t really mean that.”
“I just told you I did. Now go on and do it.”
“But—” she started to say, and felt rather than saw him shake his head.
“No buts. No more debating. You want it, and I’m telling you to take it.”
Telling, she thought. Want, she thought.
Take, she thought. Though it wasn’t any of those three things that made the protests die on her lips.
It was the gravity in his voice, the surety of it.
Like he really believed what he was saying.
Like he could just apply his own steadiness and straightforwardness to something as salacious as sex, if he wanted to.
And it worked.
He made it seem so normal to do it, so natural. So like nothing at all, really.
She didn’t have to worry about consequences or consider someone else’s judgment.
He’d run a red line through the idea of anybody minding.
All that mattered was doing it, giving in to it, feeling it.
Letting her body take over—and god, her body wanted to.
Suddenly every nerve ending was alive, every repressed desire was awake.
And every single one of them flowed through her in a hot wave.
Like feeling coming back to a long-disused limb.
It was indescribable. Impossible to stop.
Impossible to resist, too. Her hand was between her legs before she had even really thought about it, shoving under her panties in a way that felt like the right thing to do. Probably he didn’t want her to drag this out. Most likely he could only stretch to something speedily done.
Only somehow, the very second he heard the snap of elastic, he spoke into the heated silence.
“No, not like that. Slow. Slow,” he murmured, so low and soft it seemed to vibrate through her.
And suddenly she was thinking of words like savoring with regard to him.
Despite how impossible the idea of him savoring anything was.
He can’t be, he couldn’t be; it’s incredible he’s even going this far, she thought.
And yet when she protested, when she said:
“But the slower I am the worse I’ll get.”
He didn’t hesitate.
“Good, that’s the way it should be,” he murmured, as firm and sure as before but with an extra something in his voice now.
An urgent quality that she could hardly fathom or stand.
And she fathomed and stood it even less when he continued.
“Take it nice and easy and slow. Hook your fingers into the sides of those tight little panties and slide them off, all the way off. Then when you’re done with that, when you’re all bare, I want you to do something else for me. ”
For, she thought. Me, she thought.
And did her best to scoff at it.
“You don’t. There’s no way.”
“Does it sound like there isn’t?”
“No, but—”
“Then maybe just go ahead.”
“Go ahead and do what?
“Spread those soft thighs.”
Her eyes closed then. Mostly for the word spread, and how incredibly lewd it sounded coming from someone so practical, so committed to never indulging in anything at all. But there was also something about the word soft. Something frivolous about it, a small detail he didn’t need to add, but had.
And of course there was what that suggested.
That he had noticed. Looked over in the car, and seen the way her thighs kissed. Watched the way material molded to the curve of them, slid up and exposed how tender they looked. Maybe even imagined what it would be like to put his hand between and urge them open himself.
Just like in What I Wouldn’t Do.
Just like that, as if he really did know how to be that way.
Yet even these incendiary thoughts couldn’t quite get her over one particular obstacle. “I—I don’t usually do that,” she stuttered out, thinking of her typical dwindled-to-almost-nothing routine. On her side, thighs pressed tight together. Almost like she was doing nothing at all.
But apparently nothing at all wasn’t enough for him.
“Because you hate it.”
“No, it just feels like—”
“Too much? Too like you’re doing something dirty?”
She pressed her lips together to keep the answer in.
It was fine, though. Her silence told him enough.
“All the more reason to. All the better to. Let me hear you do it,” he said, and god, he sounded so close to eager now.
Reined in and dry as dead leaves by anyone else’s standards.
But by his it was almost a symphony. A song of something so close to lust it had her parting her thighs before she’d even thought about it.
Tremulously at first.
Just testing it out.