18. Zack
18
ZACK
T he second the elevator doors closed, I backed her against the metal wall and slammed my mouth to hers. Her head fell back on a gasp and I took full advantage, sliding my tongue against hers.
“Zack.” She said my name like a plea and pressed her hips to mine.
I took that as an invitation and slid my thigh between her legs and shoved her up against the metal wall of the elevator. She swiveled her hips, grinding her pussy down on my thigh.
“What a terrible time to not be wearing a skirt,” she muttered, right before grabbing fistfuls of shirt and dragging me in for another kiss.
I laughed against her mouth, my shoulders shaking. “I take back everything I’ve ever said about how you dress. I love your skirts.”
The elevator dinged and a woman got on. I cupped the back of Hannah’s head and tucked her out of view against my chest. “Ma’am,” I said politely.
Her eyebrows went up, but then the elevator lurched and she lurched with it. “Oh,” she said with obvious surprise. “I thought we were going down.”
“I’m about to,” I promised. Hannah made a muffled squeak into my shirt and I grinned.
The next floor was ours and I hauled a mortified Hannah out of there, still grinning at my joke.
I barely got us into our room before she launched herself at me.
She liked this, going fast. It was like she was trying to outrun her demons. Get to the finish line before they could stop her. But I had the feeling it wouldn’t work any better this time than it had in the past, and if I let her try, we would end up in the same place as before, with her getting herself off. Which would be fine, if I thought for even a second that was what she wanted.
But it wasn’t.
Running from her demons hadn’t ever worked. She needed to turn and face them head on. We needed to try something different. And that meant slowing down.
So even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I eased out of her embrace and took a step back.
“Do you want a glass of water?” I asked.
She stared at me with glazed eyes, her glasses askew, her hair mussed from me tangling my fingers in her braid. Not pulling her back into my arms was the hardest thing I’d ever done. “Water?” she echoed.
I grabbed the two disposable cups from the tray next to the coffee maker and ripped off the plastic, then headed into the bathroom to fill them up at the sink. “Yeah, honey. Water. Gotta stay hydrated.”
“Hydrated?” she repeated. It gave me deep satisfaction to know I had kissed her senseless.
She was standing right where I left her. She hadn’t even righted her glasses. I handed her one of the cups with a smirk. “You’re going to need it.”
I downed the full cup in three long gulps. Hannah took a small sip from hers and then set it aside. She fixed her glasses. Her hands dove for my belt buckle, and I barely managed to shackle her wrists before she got it undone.
“No, darlin’.” I pulled her in closer and brought her hands behind her back. “My pants need to stay on for now.” Otherwise, I didn’t have a prayer of slowing us down.
“How inconvenient.”
My laugh ended on a groan as she dragged her lips up my throat and sucked at the pulse point beneath my jaw. I was such a sucker for neck kisses.
“What, exactly,” she murmured between kisses, “are you planning to teach me? I promise I’ll learn a lot faster with your jeans off.”
I looped her arms around my neck. “Maybe, but this lesson is for both of us. My brain doesn’t move as fast as yours, so we’re going to be slow and thorough about this until I’ve learned every”—I kissed her right cheek—“inch”—I kissed her left cheek—“of your body”—I finished with a peck on her nose.
She pulled her head back to glare at me. “Don’t you try that gee, shucks, I’m just a dumb cowboy routine with me, Zack Hale. I know you’re not dumb. You’re just…” Her nose scrunched as she tried to figure out my game plan.
“I’m just what?” I goaded. “Making up reasons to spend all night worshipping your body? Damn right I am.”
“We don’t have all night. We have to sleep so we can drive tomorrow,” she said, ever practical even when horny, and honestly, that only turned me on even more. It was just so Hannah .
“I’ll take the first shift,” I told her. “You can sleep while I drive.”
I could tell from her mulish expression she was about to argue some nonsense about me needing more rest than her and insist on taking the first shift herself, so I pulled my shirt off over my head. The distraction worked like and charm and the only thing that came out of her mouth was a happy sigh. Her hands went to my abdomen like they were pulled there by six magnets attached to my muscles.
The hours I spent working out had always been less about vanity and more about keeping my body strong enough for the brutal rides I asked it to endure and then the healing and recovering from said rides, but damn. Damn . The way Hannah looked at me, like I was the answer to her every prayer, I would happily double my time at the gym and never complain.
“You’ve been driving me crazy all night in this outfit,” I muttered, tugging her t-shirt off. “I’m not used to seeing this much skin from you. It scrambled my brain. I have Hannah overload.” I unhooked her bra and tossed it aside like it had personally offended me.
“ Zack ,” she gasped as I circled her nipple with my tongue, then sucked it into my mouth.
I scooped her up and deposited her on the bed. “How am I supposed to behave in public when you’re out here with bare arms?” I kissed my way down her arm, from her shoulder to her wrist, making her laugh breathlessly. “And your belly? Christ, darlin’.” I kissed and sucked along the waistband of her jeans. “But you know what? I missed your ankles.” I flicked open the fly.
“My…my ankles?” she stuttered, like maybe I had scrambled her brain as much as she had scrambled mine.
I tugged her jeans down her legs, tossed them aside, and knelt at her feet. “Your ankles. Wearing those skirts of yours, you have a tendency to flash me a little ankle now and then. Gets me hard every time.”
She snorted. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m not ridiculous, Hannah. I’m fucking obsessed with you. There’s not a single part of your body I don’t want to explore. That little curl behind your ear, when you wear your hair up? I want to wrap it around my finger. That dimple above your elbow? I want to kiss it. Your pussy? I dream of tasting it. But your ankles, Hannah.” I caught her foot with one hand and lifted it to my shoulder. “I spend so much time fantasizing about your ankles that even the devil thinks there’s something wrong with me.”
I traced the arch of her foot with my thumb, using enough pressure to make it feel good instead of ticklish, and circled her ankle bone. Then I followed that same path with my tongue. And then—because I had always been fascinated by the strong, delicate curve of her Achilles up to her calf, I bit her there.
“Zack!” She was up on her elbows, mouth agape as she stared down at me.
I kissed the top of her foot. “What?”
“I…” She rolled her lip between her teeth.
My eyebrows went up. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you flustered before.”
“Yes, well, no one has ever bitten my foot before. So.”
“Well, hold on to your tits, darlin’, because I’m about to get the other one.”
Hannah giggled and flopped back on the bed. I reached for her other foot and cupped the arch in my palm. She had one arm draped over her eyes, like she couldn’t bear to watch what I was doing to her, but I could see her smile peeking out by her bicep while I lavished her right ankle with the same care and attention I had given the left.
She was relaxed. Happy. And judging from the way she whimpered when I bit her Achilles, still very much turned on. There was no fear right now. No desperation to get through it before her demons caught up with her.
It hit me suddenly, that maybe all this time she had been trying to get out of her head when what she really needed was to get in it and stay in it. It was my job to keep her focus centered on me and her. Nothing else existed here. I’d be damned if I would cede even an inch of that space to anything or any one else.
I kissed my way up the pale slope of her calf, did things to her knees that made her legs shake, and then sucked at the silky skin of her inner thigh. I left a mark there accidentally, but I didn’t regret it. No one would see it, but I would know.
I pushed her thighs wide and her breath stuttered. Christ, her pussy…I thought I had it bad for her ankles, but that was nothing compared to what her pussy did to me. So fucking plump and pretty that my mouth watered. I wanted to do things that made no sense. Squeeze and bite and…
I lost my damn mind and bit my way down her labia, not hard enough to cause damage but sharp enough to make her gasp.
“Zack!” she yelped.
“Too much?” I nipped her again and she bucked. “Sorry, I don’t know what…You know when something is so cute and sweet you want to squeeze the ever-fucking life out of it? Like a kitten or a puppy.”
She blinked down at me. “You…you have cute aggression for my pussy?”
“Don’t be so surprised. Have you seen your pussy?”
“No. I can’t say that I have.”
“Well, you should. Because it’s…” I rubbed my thumb over the fading red marks left from my teeth and groaned. “God, I want…” I bit my lip, wishing I was biting her .
“More,” she said. “Do it again.”
I did it again, going up her other side in a line of love bites while she made sounds that made me push my hips against the mattress for relief.
But I didn’t stop there. I lightly scraped my teeth over her clit and then licked it gently to ease the ache. She rocked her hips against my mouth, her hands twisted in the bedsheets, her belly tight with sudden tension. She wasn’t close to coming yet, but she was at that point where she thought maybe she could, if she sprinted.
But I wasn’t going to let her do that. I wasn’t going to let her fail again.
I pulled back. “Hannah.”
“Hm?” Her hips lifted in agitation, searching in vain for my mouth.
“What do you think about when you touch yourself?”
She lifted her head. “I…what?”
“What do you think about when you touch yourself?” I repeated. “Like when I left you alone for ten seconds and you got yourself off. What did you think about? Body parts? Celebrities?”
She stared at me like I had sprouted a second head. “You want to have this conversation now ?”
I raised my eyebrows, waiting.
She swallowed. “Nothing. I…my mind goes blank. I don’t imagine anyone or pretend anything. I just feel.”
I considered that. “Well, then, I’m going to give you something to think about.”
I licked from her entrance to her clit, sucked gently, then licked down again to her entrance. Back up again, licking, sucking, swirling. Her hips caught the rhythm and followed it. She made incoherent sounds of desperate pleasure, and when she dug her nails into my forearms, I eased back.
“No—what—why—” she sputtered, panting. “Why do you keep stopping?”
I laughed darkly and lazily traced her clit with my finger. “Hannah Bell, are you telling me you’ve never been edged before?”
She let out a frustrated growl. “That depends. Is it edging when you’re never allowed to fall off?”
“That doesn’t sound like a good time to me.” I blew gently on her clit.
“I don’t care. Please, Zack,” she begged. “Don’t stop. I don’t care if I stay on that edge forever. It feels so good.”
I lowered my head. Fuck if I was going to leave her there, on the edge. Not this time.
I spread her open with both thumbs, baring every single bit of her to my hungry mouth, and sucked hard at her clit. Her hips canted in invitation and my tongue delved inside her entrance. I wrapped my arms around her thighs and hauled her closer to my mouth and drank from her like a holy chalice.
Suddenly everything flipped. I was the desperate one, desperate and aching, chasing a pleasure just out of reach. I was drunk on the scent of her arousal. The pleading sounds she made. The taste of her like honey on my tongue.
“Wait—oh, god, wait—” she sobbed, and I would have tried, but she gripped my skull with both hands and kept me on her and it was too late for both of us. I couldn’t wait?—
Oh, fuck, I couldn’t wait?—
Wetness flooded my mouth as her inner muscles clenched like a drumbeat. Boom, boom, boom . With each squeeze of her pussy around my tongue, my hips pushed harder against the mattress until I soaked my jeans the way she soaked my tongue.
I still didn’t stop, not until she curled away from me and weakly pushed my head away from her sensitized body. I crawled up her flushed body, panting, and pressed a kiss to her damp forehead.
“You,” she said, her voice thick and stunned. “ You .”
“You,” I said, every bit as stunned.
She didn’t move a muscle, just laid there, completely boneless, watching through half-shut eyes as I took off my jeans and used a dry part of my boxers to clean myself off. By the time I tossed my clothes aside and got us both under the covers, she was fast asleep.
Hannah slept on her side facing me, our bodies interlocked like Tetris pieces. My arm around her neck, her cheek pressed to my chest, my hand on her hip, her leg draped over my thigh.
She snored a little.
Her hair tickled my chin.
My skin itched.
My leg ached.
My arm fell asleep.
I didn’t move.