I draped my hands on his shoulders. “You’re right. They won’t be the same. My father is gone, so is yours. Louisa is gone. But we’re still here, and we can work to make the future bright.”
He cleared his throat. “You said something the other day. And I can’t stop thinking about it,” he said.
“What did I say?”
“You said, ‘are you happy here?’ You know what my immediate thought was? Hell no. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to think of the things that do make me happy here.”
“Are there any?”
“Yes. Coaching the hockey team. Taking care of my mom--she was in relapse when I came back last year, and she’s doing a lot better now. And--there’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The possibilities of this.”
Gripping my hair, he pulled me in for an unexpected kiss. My body tingled everywhere from my toes to my nose.
They say if you want to know how your relationship really is, you can tell by the kiss.
Well, this kiss was nothing like the ones before.
I could feel a new swirl of complexity now as our lips touched.
Yesterday--heck, even earlier today--had been a kiss of blind bliss and need.
I moaned. He growled.
This kiss was honest.
He pulled my hair a little harder than he had.
This kiss was angry.
My hand landed on his chest, and I felt his heart beating like crazy.
This kiss was more passionate than anything I’d ever experienced.
Our tongues battled, and my mind raced.
This man had admitted to throwing around a kidnapping plot for me, I reminded myself.
Yet I couldn’t stop wanting him.
He pressed my body forward into the couch, so he was on top of me.
“I want to learn all about you, Florida. Tell me what you like.”
“I like you,” I mewled as our hips ground together.
“Tell me more,” he growled. “Tell me what you were thinking about when you touched yourself in my bed.”
“I thought about you seducing me,” I started, smiling. “I thought about you coming into my room late at night in a Santa Claus suit and beard.”
He chuckled, and wiggled his eyebrows. “I mean I have a suit upstairs. If that’s what’s going to get you off.”
I giggled, then grabbed a tassel of his hair and pulled his ear to my mouth. “I thought about you just taking me.”
“Is that what you want? For me to take you?”
“I like it when you take charge.”
“You know what I want to do?”
“What?”
“I want to carry you up the stairs to my bed, and fuck you again.”
My stomach clenched.
“Can you handle that?”
I nodded, and he swept me off my feet.
23
Shane
After session number two, we headed back downstairs and put our dinner, a frozen pizza, in the oven.
I pressed her into the wall and kissed her deeply while we waited for it to cook.
When we were done kissing she held her hand tight on the back of my neck.
“Wait. Do you do that a lot?” she asked.
I smirked. “Cuff a girl to the bed and take her virginity?”
“Yes,” she nodded, her face turning red. She averted eye contact.
“Oh yeah,” I grinned. “All the time.”
She rolled her eyes, and I ran a hand through her hair. “I’m being serious. I want to know.”
“Nope. Just you, Florida. I told you, I’d never had sex with a virgin before.”
I tipped her chin up so she would kiss me again.
“And what about those handcuffs?”
“What about them?”
“You had them for a while. You’ve used them before?”
I threaded a hand through my hair. “In college, I thought I was on the path to sexual enlightenment with my girlfriend at the time. So I bought a few pairs of those. Turns out, she was on the path to sexual enlightenment. Just not with me.” A fluttering feeling racked through me. This was in the category of things I didn’t like to reminisce about. I hadn’t talked about my ex in years.
Natalie jerked her head back. “That really sucks. You must have been heartbroken.”
I shook my head. “Maybe for a day or two. It was good riddance, though. I’m glad I found her out. Everything happens for a reason. I’m glad I had those handcuffs on hand.”
“They certainly served their purpose.”
“Would you have run away last night?”
“I think so.”
“Where would you have gone?”
“The church, probably.”
“Points for honesty. How about now? You going to run tonight?”
She bit her lower lip. “Yeah. I think I might.”
I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively. “Well I just might have to chain you up again, then.”
I trailed my hand down the front of her stomach until my fingertip reached her clit. “Because you’re mine now, Natalie.” I wrapped my hand around her neck, not tightly, but tight enough. “You belong to me.”
I felt the tension in her body as she swallowed.
“Pizza looks like it’s done,” she croaked.
We ate, it snowed, and for the first time in who knows when, I forgot where I was, and the depression that had tailed me since I was a teenager.
And by depression, I don’t mean that in the clinical sense. I just mean, since the deaths of my father and sister, a dark cloud always seemed to float above me, no matter what I did to stop it.
Natalie used my phone to call her mom since her phone was in the rental car and buried under all that snow.
Then we sat idly on the couch, eating, kissing, watching some old Christmas movies that were playing in the background, Home Alone II and then Love Actually.
“Did you think your first time would be like that?”
She took a sip of the hot cocoa I’d made her. “I thought it would be much more anti-climactic, to be honest. So you’ve never been with a virgin before?”
I shook my head. “Never.”
“Was it different?”
I gripped her calf muscle and moved my hand slowly up her leg.
“This was different, yeah. But not because you were a virgin. It was different because…” I twisted around and considered for a moment. There were a million ways Natalie was so different than anyone I’d been with.
“Yes?”
I studied her. Nervousness was written all over her face, like she was about to get a report of how she’d done.
“What to say, what to say…” I ran a hand over my blond stubble. “I could say your skin felt softer than anyone’s I’d ever felt. That I loved studying the freckles on your face when we did it in the beginning. And that I now have a fascination with the birthmark on your lower back.”
I squeezed Natalie’s thigh under her pajamas, and I could sense her body stiffening.
“I could say it was different because I’ve never felt a pussy so tight, that made me so hard. That got so wet for me. Sure, I could say those things, but that would just be scratching the surface.”