I considered his revelation. “But you were tryna fuck last night, though.”
His gaze dropped and pinned me to the bed. “I brought you to my home and introduced you to my family. That wasn’t some casual shit. Not for me. Not by a long shot.”
“Oh…” I couldn’t even say that I didn’t know because I was unsurprised to hear that. Even without doing an internet search on him, the reactions of his family told me that my presence was something out of the ordinary. Everyone had been genuinely nice to me, and I’d dipped out like I was trying to avoid paying my taxes. I felt like shit all over again.
Jermaine shifted from underneath me and I panicked.
“Wait!”
He tried sitting up, and I pushed him back down to the bed and was practically sitting on top of him to prevent him from leaving.
“Look, I’m not trying to force anything on you. You’re still getting out of a marriage, and I get it; you’re not trying to do anything serious. I get it. But I know what I felt when I first laid eyes on you, and that shit was as serious as a heart attack.”
My heart did to me, at hearing his words, what I’d just been doing to his dick. It squeezed then froze and restarted, beating doubly fast. I wanted to feel giddy, but I couldn’t trust my reaction. Only hours earlier, I was lamenting the fact that we couldn’t be anything real because I wasn’t yet divorced.
“It’s not that I’m avoiding getting serious again; it’s just…if we went there, it wouldn’t be fair to you. I’m basically on the rebound.” I expected him to nod and agree; instead, he gave me a disbelieving look.
“Did you know that I led the league in rebounds three years in a row?”
My neck whipped back. Was he being serious? He stared up at me unblinkingly. He was serious.
“What?” I didn’t even know how to respond to that.
“I catch rebounds for a living,” he deadpanned.
I burst out laughing and he sat up fully, moving me off his chest and onto his lap.
“I’ve made a career out of rescuing something that has hit a backboard, which is often an event there is no coming back from.”
I stopped laughing. He actually equated what he did for a living to put our situation into context, and it was working. We were face-to-face and I could clearly see the sincerity in those chestnut orbs of his. His hands framed my face.
“I’ve spent more than a decade preparing for you.”
My eyes burned with tears at his declaration. “I’m being serious.”
He nodded. “Do you want to see my stats?”
I sputtered, half-crying and half-laughing, and pressed my lips against his, morning breath be damned. He returned my kiss without hesitation as if he’d been waiting for me to make the first move. His hands dropped from my face to my hips as he lifted me effortlessly and maneuvered me so that I was straddling his lap.
I settled heavily on him, pressing down as if I was trying to melt into him, and the new position brought a different dynamic to our kissing. Suddenly, I needed to feel him everywhere, and the way he rocked my hips back and forth across his hardened erection, it was evident he had the same need. He released my hips and trailed his hands up my sides, bringing my shirt with him. I lifted my arms, allowing him to pull the material over my head and toss it behind me to the floor.
The reverent look in his eyes as he drank in my naked breasts made me gush, flush, and clench. He grabbed both of my breasts in his massive hands and lowered his mouth, sucking both nipples into his mouth at once. I moaned in appreciation as the sensation shot straight to my core, causing me to release even more slickness. I needed him inside of me like yesterday.
Reaching down between us, I grasped the elastic waistband of his shorts and pulled it toward me, shoving my hand inside and gripping his dick. He groaned around the titty in his mouth. I shifted my hips back and pulled the silky steel out of his shorts. There was already a bead of pearlescent fluid emerging from the slit, and I swiped my thumb across it and brought it to my lips, licking the saltiness away. Soon, I would swallow his lengthy thickness down my throat but right now, I needed a pussy massage in the worst way.
I rose to my knees and started to slide the seat of my thong to the side when Jermaine quickly released my breasts and gripped the side of my panties with both hands. Before I realized what he was doing, I heard the sound of seams popping, and he was tossing my ruined panties in the same direction of my shirt. He grabbed my hips and lifted me up so I could position him at my entrance. Moans fell from both of our mouths as I sank onto him.
“Shit.”
I dropped my head to his shoulder. This position was a bad idea. I could feel him in my damn lungs. He hadn’t even moved but the ridges of his dick were putting pressure on a spot that was making me unhinged. I was afraid to even twist my hips, but the fear dissipated when Jermaine once again gripped my hips and, instead of lifting me, started to rock me back and forth.
I cried out as the motion caused his dick to repeatedly hit that spot. Not even two minutes later, I buried my face in his neck as my orgasm hit me full force and jerked in his lap. While I was still twitching from aftershocks, Jermaine maneuvered us until I was on my back and he was hovering between my thighs, all while still inside of me. He caressed the skin of one thigh as he lifted it and settled it on his waist. Repeating the tender touch on the opposite thigh, he lifted my other leg, this time, resting my ankle on his shoulder.
Then he went to work.
He worked his hips, sliding in and out of me so easily that I would have been embarrassed if I wasn’t out of my mind with desire. Without a doubt, he had me well lubricated. I arched my back as he grazed that spot once more. After that first orgasm, my pussy was like a live wire. Every sensation threatened to cause another explosion inside of me.
Jermaine rotated and twisted and snapped his hips, and I was delirious. My second orgasm built in my toes and traveled up my body at breakneck speed, causing me to inhale deeply and my back to fly off the bed as I cried out to the heavens.
“Baby, shit!”
Jermaine grimaced as I gripped him like a vise as I came. He leaned down and sucked on the skin of my collarbone briefly before moving my leg from his shoulder to his waist and lowering his chest down to mine. He ran his arms behind me and gripped my shoulders from below, pulling me down with each thrust. His eyes devoured me before his lips descended upon mine and he made love to my mouth. I wrapped my arms around him and cradled his head with both hands. We stared at each other as we kissed, neither willing to miss the expression on the other’s face as we both experienced something that was beyond morning sex.
His movements increased and I whimpered with each thrust. The sound of our flesh slapping together filled the small room sensually. Locking my ankles behind him, I gripped his ears and allowed my eyes to flutter closed as he ripped a third orgasm from my hypersensitive pussy. When I clamped down on him, he groaned in my ear and chased my orgasm with one of his own, releasing spurts of liquid warmth into me. He dropped his head to the mattress and we both panted heavily as we came down from our orgasmic high.
I released his ears and rubbed my hands over his bald head before trailing them down his back that was damp with a thin layer of sweat. Including the head from the night before, this man had given me four orgasms in under twelve hours. I don’t think I would have been able to give him up just yet, even if I actually wanted to.
He tapped my thigh, and I unlocked my ankles, spreading my legs so that he could pull out of me. I moaned when he did so leisurely before sitting back on his haunches and staring down at my exposed center. With a swift lick of his thumb, he massaged firm, deliberate circles into my moistened clit, causing me to whine and my walls to clench involuntarily. Just as I felt the flow of our combined come begin to trickle out of me, he stopped moving.
“Bear with me, I’m about to ask a stupid question.”
“Mmhm.” Even though I had three in the game this morning, my hips moved against him, shamele
ssly chasing a fourth.
“Are you on birth control?”
My previously closed eyes flew open and met his in a panic. I expected an accusing glare, but he only looked contemplative…and a smidgen hopeful. That second one made my blood rush through my veins, and my eyes widened in realization as I instantly remembered that I hadn’t been on birth control since Chris told me that he’d filed for divorce almost three months ago.
I swallowed heavily. Would he think that I was trying to trap him? I had been the one to initiate sex. Hell, I’d basically begged for it.
“Why is that a stupid question?” I hedged.
He quirked an eyebrow. “Well, since I’m watching some of my soldiers march out of you right now, I figure it’s a little too late to ask that. But I’m doing it anyway, just to satisfy my curiosity. I have an idea, but I want to hear it from you first.”
I reached down and felt the come still oozing out of me. I sucked in a breath and released it audibly. “No, I’m not on birth control. Haven’t been for about three months now.”
An indecipherable look passed over Jermaine’s face before he grabbed his—surprisingly—still hard dick and slid it effortlessly into my dripping opening. The squelch of air being pushed into a hole filled with liquid enveloped the room, and I closed my eyes from the embarrassment even as I moaned in ecstasy, unable to believe what was happening. Was he mad?
He hovered over me until we were face-to-face and I opened my eyes when I felt the heat of his stare. “You know what this means, right?”
I shook my head, biting my lip to keep from crying out as he moved inside of my sensitive canal at an agonizingly steady pace.
“It means you’re mine now.” He grunted and thrust inside of me deeply, hitting the back wall of my pussy, and causing me to hiss. He waited for my eyes to stop blinking and refocus on him before he continued speaking. “I was already prepared to convince you that we’re meant to be together. I knew it as soon as I saw you, but if you get pregnant…” Another slow stroke followed a rigid thrust. “I’m never letting you out of my sight again.” He thrust once more, and tears sprang to my eyes, both from how deep he was drilling inside of me, and the words coming out of his mouth. “Do you understand me?”
I nodded, unable to say a word for the threat of my tears spilling down my cheeks.
“Do you have any problems with what I said?”
I shook my head.
“Say it.”
I shook my head once more.
He pulled my hips down on his upthrust, and I screamed from the fusion of pleasure and pain. “I said,” he growled, “say it.”
The dam broke on both my tears and my fourth orgasm. “I’m yours!” I screamed at him, dragging the yours out until I broke off on a sob.
His lips crashed down on mine, and I clung to him desperately, wishing I could pull him wholly inside of me because that’s how close I felt to him at that moment. We were connected, both body and soul. He pummeled me with several shallow pumps followed by a thrust so deep, I was sure he had rearranged my organs. Then, while our tongues were still entwined, he snapped his hips back and forth until heat bloomed in my belly and stars burst beneath my eyelids. I begged him—for what, I didn’t know—and he responded by murmuring my name just as he crashed into the wave of his own orgasm, once again filling me with all of him.
Exhausted, I fell asleep before Jermaine hit the mattress.
Chapter Twelve
Nedra
When Buying a Vow Doesn't Sound So Bad
“Any day now” turned into a month and a half before I received the call I had been waiting for. At seven a.m. on a warm Thursday morning in April, Danielle—my lawyer—was giddy as she told me that my divorce had been finalized and all of my terms had been approved. For the first time in seven years, I was a “legally” single woman. She reminded me that once our house sold, I would never have to speak to Chris again, and she ended the conversation by requesting that I refer her to my friends.
As luck would have it, the one lesson I had scheduled for that day was canceled and with Jermaine in California for an away game, I didn’t even bother getting out of bed. I needed some time to quietly mourn the loss of my marriage without being bothered, so I put my phone on ‘do not disturb’ and burrowed under the covers.
I didn’t realize I had fallen back asleep until the constant ringing of the doorbell jolted me awake. I shuffled out of the bed and to the front door, groaning when I looked through the peephole. I took a calming breath and opened the door to let my mama inside.
She stepped into the living room, her shrewd gaze quickly observing surroundings and falling on me, no doubt, immediately deducing my melancholy state. She hugged me tightly and kissed my cheek before passing me by and having a seat on the sofa. Instead of sitting next to her or even taking the chair, I sat on the floor. My back had recently started hurting and the floor was the only thing that gave me relief.
“What brings you by, Mama?”
Her amber eyes curiously roved over my frame. “Why are you sitting on the floor?”
I explained my recent pain to her and her eyebrows met knowingly.
“Hmm, have you taken something for it?”
I shook my head. “Not yet; I thought it would eventually go away, but it hasn’t. I’ll probably visit the chiropractor soon. It’s more than likely the bed I’m sleeping in, though.”
“Hmm. If you say so. Well, I just came to check on you.”
“Oh?” That was surprising. “How did you get here?”
“My friend dropped me off.”
I pursed my lips. By “friend”, she surely meant the man she had been living with for the past three years. He was essentially her boyfriend, but she never gave the men in her life titles, referring to them as her “friend” for as long as I could remember. Most of the time, she never even said their names. It used to me annoy me as a teenager, but now that I was in my mid-thirties, I didn’t give a damn.
“That was nice of him.”
“Tish called me.”
Whoop there it is. Tish was Chris and Ashton’s mother. If Tish called my mama, it could only be for one reason. The next words out of my mama’s mouth confirmed it.
“She said your divorce is final.”
I expelled a soft breath. “Yep. I got the call this morning.”
Shocking the shit out of me, she got down on her knees and pulled me into a hug. I was so overcome with emotion at her unexpected gesture that I burst into tears. I cried hot, salty tears into my mama’s cap-sleeved peasant blouse, but she didn’t seem to care. She rocked me back and forth, murmuring words I didn’t understand but soothed me anyway, and rubbed my back in wide, circular patterns.
Finally, the spring behind my eyes dried up, and my mama leaned back to observe me with all-seeing eyes.
“You alright, baby?”
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You go’ stay on the floor?”
I nodded again. It just felt better down here.
“Okay, well I’m gonna stay down here with you. He’ll be back to pick me up in about an hour so I wanna talk to you before he get here.”
I cocked my head. Now that sounded ominous.
“Nedra, baby, I hate that you’re hurting, and I know you gon’ be mad when I say this, but this would never have happened if you had listen to me in the first place.”
She was damn right. I couldn’t believe my ears. Was she really hitting me with an ‘I told you so’ on the day of my divorce? I mean, I wasn’t hurting as much as she might think I was, after all of that crying—and I couldn’t deny that it was partly due to Jermaine’s presence in my life—but she didn’t know that.
My mama continued on as if she heard my thoughts instead of correctly reading the disbelief on my face. “Yeah, I said it. I told you from the get-go that you were too young to be so serious.”
“I was twenty-seven when I married Chris! How is that too young?”
“You might have been tw
enty-seven when you got married, but you were eighteen when you decided that fool was the love of your life. You committed yourself to him when you were way too young to even understand what that meant.”
My lips snapped shut. She was right about that. As soon as Chris kissed me my freshmen year of college, I stopped considering other guys as anything other than a study partner. I looked away from her as I sat without a rebuttal to give. Unfortunately for me, my mama came with intentions of getting shit off her chest this morning.
“I told you being exclusive at eighteen years old was a bad idea. I told you to date, to keep your options open, but did you listen? No! You didn’t want to hear anything I had to say because I wasn’t married like your grandparents had been or like Chris’ parents were. You didn’t respect me or my opinions because I wasn’t in a ‘traditional relationship’.”
She was in full-blown fuss mode, and even though I was grown and now divorced, I had to sit through it because everything she was saying was the God’s honest truth, even though I hated to admit it. As a teenager, I hated how my mama cycled through men. She wouldn’t keep a man around for longer than six months and back then, it embarrassed me. As a frequent visitor to the homes of friends who had what I considered “real families” with both parents in the home, I became a self-righteous know-it-all, and I’d felt like my mama couldn’t tell me anything about something she didn’t know. And to my knowledge, she definitely did not know anything about love or marriage.
Hearing her repeat the arguments she gave me all those years ago only served to piss me off and make me want to fight something or someone. Not her, though. I got my scrappiness from my mama, and I didn’t want her to put those hands on me.
“Mama…”
She held her hand up. “Don’t Mama me! I tried to save you from the heartache you’re experiencing now, and you would still rather listen to my misguided mama than to your own!”
My eyes widened at her allusion. I had never heard her speak ill of my granny, but mentioning her had me recalling the conversation I’d had with Granny a couple of months ago.
To Buy a Vow Page 18
