“Do you mean, am I going to have sex with you, Zenny?” And once I say it, I hear it—the voice thing she mentioned in her message. My words have gone all husky and a little dangerous. “Am I going to fuck you like you asked me to?”
Her tongue peeps out to lick her lower lip, pink and wet, and she breathes hard. “Yes,” she whispers. “That’s what I mean.”
And here we come to it, the thing, the reason she’s here tonight and the reason I couldn’t sleep after Family Dinner and the reason I spent today punishing myself in the gym and later in the office.
I don’t know what a good man would do in my shoes.
I can only guess at what an unafraid one might do.
I walk around the island to her, taking the back of her chair and turning it so that she’s facing me. I brush the curls away from one side of her face so that I can cup her cheek and lean close. “Yes,” I breathe against her lips.
“Yes?” she repeats in a trembling voice, as if she doesn’t quite believe me. She pulls back the tiniest bit to search my eyes. “Really? Yes?”
“Yes. For the next month, my body is yours.”
“Oh, Sean,” she murmurs, throwing her arms around my neck. Her lips are against my cheek now, impossibly soft, impossibly tempting, and my cock surges against my pants, reminding me that I’m only a half-step away from being able to grind against her inner thigh. Against the place where the denim seams meet right in front of her precious pussy.
“Thank you,” she says, kissing my cheek. “Thank you, thank you.” And then she turns her head and finds my mouth with her own, and my world catches fire and burns into a shrinking nothing; her mouth is all that’s left, her yielding lips, her searching tongue, her sweet taste.
It’s so very, very cliché, but kissing Zenny makes me feel younger, reminds me of the incendiary kisses one gets as a teenager, when every touch, every lick and caress is so fucking charged with excitement. As an adult, kissing can fade into something perfunctory, the prologue, the necessary foreplay to get a woman wet and squirming for what I really want—but as a teenager, I lived to kiss. Lived to make out. Even came in my pants once making out in a movie theater with a girl named Giana Saviano.
I’d forgotten how fucking incredible just kissing is.
God. I want to scoop her up and carry her to my room and kiss her there forever. With her body nestled against mine and my arms around her and our legs tangling. Just kiss and kiss and kiss—
My cock is not getting the just kissing memo, though, nudging against my pants and aching with the need for attention, and if I keep kissing her, I’m worried I’ll push us too far too fast, that I’ll spread her out on top of all this flour and fuck my fist while I eat her pussy and then we’ll have jumped right into this without doing what needs to be done first.
Which is talk.
Reluctantly, I pull back, surprised at how hard and fast my pulse beats through me. Zenny’s body makes my own feel like it’s running a race, all hot and breathless and ready to sweat.
“What is it?” she asks, her nervousness creeping back in. “Do you not want to…you know, is kissing not on the menu of things we can do?”
“It’s on the menu,” I growl. “Everything’s on the fucking menu.”
She visibly relaxes.
I touch her lower lip with my thumb, then move to trace that slightly plumper upper lip. “This mouth. I want to eat it and fuck it and worship it and abuse it.” I let my hand slide down, brushing my fingertips over the pebbled stiffness of her nipples. She’s wearing some kind of flimsy bra that allows me to pluck at the sweet furls. “In fact, that’s how I feel about all of you.”
Her lips are parted now and she’s not looking at me, she’s looking at my fingers teasing idly at her nipples through her T-shirt, as if she’s never imagined such a thing, as if she’s never known the sight of a man’s hand big and knowledgeable against her body.
“But,” I say, dropping my hand and nearly losing my load at the sound of her disappointed whimper, “we have to talk first.”
“Talk?”
I step back. I step back again. Each step away from her perky tits with their firm little nipples is killing me, but it has to be done. “Talk,” I confirm. “I almost said no, Zenny, and the only reason I can say yes is because I promised myself I’d do this right. So please let me do this right.”
She nods. I don’t miss the little squirm she makes in her chair though, like she’s trying to relieve an ache between her thighs, and I almost run back over there and relieve it for her. Just two fingers would be all I need, right down the front of her jeans. Two fingers and two minutes, and I’d make her feel so much better.
Bad Sean. Focus.
Pastry folds and conversation.
“So is this going to be like a business negotiation?” Zenny asks. “We hammer out the fine print?”
I pick up the rolling pin again, mostly to give my hands something to do other than rub Zenny’s cunt until she gasps out my name (although I do distantly remember that dinner is still in various, messy stages around my kitchen). “A business negotiation was my first thought,” I admit to her, rolling the piecrust dough. The way her eyes watch my forearms as I work the rolling pin and the dough is not helping my self-control at all. “But the thing is that business negotiations are kind of shitty, when you think about it. It’s all about what you can get from the other person while keeping what you want to keep. And that’s not how I want this to go between us.”
That seems to touch something inside her thoughts, because she looks up at me and there’s trust shimmering in her eyes while the rest of her face goes slightly guarded. Her contradictions—trust and armor, bold and shy—they’re like catnip to me, yanking at parts of my mind that I didn’t even know I had. Pulling at something in my chest that I can’t identify.
She fucking fascinates me.
“So not a business meeting,” she says.
“No.” I roll the piecrust over the rolling pin and it promptly tears in half, which makes Zenny laugh. I give her a playful glare as I try to arrange the dough pieces in a casserole dish. “No business meeting. How about a palliative care appointment instead?”
She tilts her head a little, waiting for me to elaborate, which I do.
“Obviously, we’re not here because we’re dying, but when my mom went to visit her doctor, the way they talked really stuck with me.” Vegetables finally roasted, I set the dough-lined casserole aside and start mixing together the filling. “I thought Mom would go in and they’d have this transaction about pain levels and side effects and stuff like that, but instead, they talked about Mom’s goals and priorities. What was important to her in her last days. How she imagined her death.”
I pour the filling into the casserole, top it with the maybe-underfolded puff pastry, and slide it into the oven. Then I face Zenny, who is watching me attentively.
“Was it hard for you to listen to?” she asks. “Your mom talking about her death?”
I can still remember the doctor’s office—not an appointment room, but a true office, lined with books and pictures of his family. I just don’t want to be in pain, Mom had said, her voice cracking as my father put his face in his hands. That’s all.