“Yes.” The word is carried on a gasp as his index finger slides inside my shorts. I’m so wet that I can hear it as his fingers glide between my legs.
Air hisses between his teeth. “God. I love that.”
His thumb goes to my clit as he leans down again, sucking my nipple into his mouth, using his teeth in a way that...pierces me. Something in that pleasure with just a hint of pain has me raw and swollen and desperate for more. My nails dig into his back.
“I want you inside me,” I tell him.
“Fuck,” he groans against my skin. “Yes. But this will be over in seconds if we do it your way.” He pushes my shorts off and slides farther down the bed before he spreads my thighs. The first hit of his tongue has me arching off the mattress.
“You don’t need to do that,” I gasp.
I feel his breath against my skin as he laughs. “Gemma, I’m doing exactly what I’ve wanted to do for two fucking years.”
Holy shit.
His perfect tongue continues to flick and my breath grows short. He’s so good at this, so certain of what he wants, and he watches me the entire time, as if nothing matters more to him in the whole fucking world than my reaction. I twist in the sheets, and his fingers push inside me, keeping time with his tongue.
“This has me so hard it hurts,” he says. His free hand slides down to grip himself and stays there. Squeezing, stroking through his boxers.
There’s a tiny burst of sparks at the center of my spine, and I gasp. “I’m close.”
He pushes those fingers inside me again as I unfurl, barely aware of him continuing to draw my orgasm out, barely aware of the way he groans, watching me.
My eyes open—slowly, languorously.
“Jesus,” he grunts, and then he’s reaching for a condom on the nightstand, ripping the packet and rolling it on.
He pushes inside me with a quiet gasp, his eyes closing for a half second before they open again to study my face. He’s making sure I’m okay, that this is still okay, and God, it is. He thrusts harder the second time, his hands sliding up to cup my breasts, then beneath me to grab my ass. Every sound I make is like a trigger for him, his eyes closing, his jaw grinding, as if he’s about to be pushed over the edge.
His mouth is against my ear. “Do you have any idea how many times the memory of you on my desk has made me come?”
I thrill at his words, spreading my legs wider to take more of him. My nails dig into his ass, and his inhale is sharp, surprised. His hips jerk forward and then he’s leaning over me, moving faster. “Oh. God.”
There’s no part of him that isn’t too big for me—his cock, his size, his ego—yet I’m the one making him dissolve.
“Yes,” I whisper, my pulse racing, my body arching off the bed. “Don’t stop.”
My mouth burrows into his neck and he releases another of those sharp gasps. His hands wrap around my wrists, pinning me, and there’s something in that tiny hint of possession and control that makes me come undone.
I bury my mouth against his shoulder to muffle the sounds I make as I let go.
“Fuck,” he says and then he thrusts hard, again and again, before coming with a quiet groan.
We are pressed tight, his chest moving fast against mine, his harsh breathing against my ear. When he pulls out at last, gripping himself to keep the condom in place, the room is silent, and I hear my own thoughts a little too well.
I don’t ever want it to end.
He rises to get rid of the condom and returns, pulling me against him. His mouth brushes the top of my head, but it’s different now...as if I’m someone he actually cares about, as if this mattered. I’m scared I might start to believe it. And he isn’t what I want anyway. I want someone simple, someone who won’t lie to me or eventually change his mind, and I’d be crazy to think that could be Ben.
I slide out of the bed and grab my clothes off the floor.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I have to go,” I tell him. “But thanks.”
He laughs but the sound is muted and unhappy. “I can’t believe you just thanked me,” he says, running a hand over his face. “Get back in bed.”
But I’m already pulling up my shorts as I walk away. “I’ve really got to go,” I tell him, practically running from the room.
23
He’s gone Sunday morning when I reach the buffet.
“What a great guy,” says Nicole. “He flew all that way for one hour at a party.”
I think of him watching my face as he fucked me, his eyes hazy, his jaw clenching as he got close.
“Well, it’s not like he was saving orphans from a burning building,” I reply.
I skip the post-brunch activities, claiming I have work, but the thought of the empty office is just too unappealing, so I go home instead—which isn’t much better.
“Are you busy?” I ask Keeley when I return her call.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m trying to decide if I want Oreos or barbeque potato chips from the vending machine.”
“Are you certain you’re a doctor?” I open my refrigerator, which is just as empty as I anticipated. I should have actually eaten at this morning’s brunch. “Like, was it a real medical school, or was it a strip mall with a handwritten sign out front that just said medical school?”
“Fine, Miss Judgmental. I’ll get the Sun Chips. I’m pretty sure they’re health food because I don’t enjoy them. Anyway, how was sex with Ben?”
I blink. “What makes you think I had sex with Ben?”
“Are we really doing this dance right now? You obviously did. You sound intensely invested, which always means it’s about Ben, but you sound a little horrified, which means you either slept with him or murdered him. I can’t help you with removing the evidence if you murdered him, by the way, because I’m stuck at the hospital until tomorrow.”
I shut the refrigerator door. Clearly, no food is going to materialize through continued staring. “Like I’d ask you to help me remove evidence. You’d leave a trail of Hot Tamales leading right to the burial site.”
“If you think I’d drop Hot Tamales and not eat them straight off the ground, you don’t know me very well,” she says. “Anyway. The sex?”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
She laughs. “Shut up.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Fine. I don’t believe you but I’ll play your game. So what happens now?”
“Nothing, obviously. It’s not like I’d date him.”
“I’m no one to throw stones, but it seems to me your bar for who you sleep with should be set higher than your bar for who you’d date.”
As loathe as I am to accept advice on this matter from a woman who once seduced a monk during a silent meditation retreat, she has a point. “It’s not that he isn’t good enough,” I admit aloud for the first time ever. “It’s that he’s not what I want.”
“Ah, yes,” she says, with a quiet laugh. “You still want flannel boy—the wise, widowed but strangely youthful farmer. I mean, what would you even wear on a farm? Do you own a pair of boots?”