by Cara Bastone
This time, they kissed right through that preliminary static shock, groaned into it instead of recoiling. They were in a pile on top of one another, her legs knotted underneath him and one of his feet on the floor to keep them both from tumbling into the coffee table.
Admitting to him that she liked touching him had popped some cork inside of her. Fin felt a rather giddy freedom when she tugged at his hair, used her thumb to trace the whorl of his ear, went palm-flat against his neck. His energy pulsed into her, so Tyler, so kind, so orderly, so unbelievably desirous of her.
She gasped and dropped her head back as his mouth opened up just below her ear.
Always, her whole life, she’d known that when a man wanted something, he took it. But today was different. Today she could feel the tremulous tornado of feeling that Tyler had for her. It was blustery and growing and sweeping them both away. But yet, he wasn’t taking from her. No, his warm mouth was tracing a pattern against her pulse point; he was groaning into her skin, keeping his weight mostly off of her. She felt the slope of his nose against her chin. And then his cheek against hers.
Had he?
Yes, he’d just stopped sucking on her neck in order to give her a quick little hug and... Fin. Was. Finished.
She planted her palms on his shoulders and pushed at him.
He folded back immediately, his weight and heat lifting off of her and making her feel like she might float straight to the ceiling if she wasn’t careful.
“All right?” he asked, panting and sliding a palm across his own chest like he was checking to make sure his heart was still working.
“Yeah,” she panted back, unknotting her legs and propping her knees on the outside of his hips. “Sometimes you throw me off when you’re so sweet. Like with that hug you just gave me.”
“That throws you off?”
“Yeah.” She shifted a little. “Most guys don’t do that. Hug in the middle of making out.”
“Too busy trying for a homer?”
“Something like that.”
Tyler stared down at her, his palms on his thighs, his eyes both seeing her and not seeing her as he worked his jaw, deep in thought.
After a moment, he disentangled them and went to stand, his hands sliding into the pockets of his slacks. Much as he had yesterday, Tyler made a circuit around the living room, touching the crystals she kept on the bookcase, running a hand over the top of one of her photos on the wall. He flicked on a lamp, looked out the window and then turned back to her, his hands back in his pockets.
“I like you, Fin. In a big way.”
She could taste the bright, metallic electricity of his nerves all the way across the room.
“I’m not trying to take something from you. I wasn’t back then and I’m not now.” He cleared his throat and leaned against the window. “At some point, I hope you’ll get used to that.”
Fin sat up slowly. Her hair cascaded around her shoulders, and because she was immediately too grateful for the curtain between her and Tyler, she started braiding it back, knowing instinctually that she needed to be open now. Bared to him.
“Tyler, are we going to tell her?”
“Kylie? Yes.”
Fin tossed her braid back over her shoulder. “You want to tell her tomorrow?”
He shifted against the window, hands still in his pockets. “Yes.”
“That what? That we’re together?”
He took a big breath, strode across the room, slid onto the couch and used one hand to hoist her legs over his lap. It was like he was using her body to pin himself down to the furniture. “Only if it’s the truth,” he said quietly.
Cocking her head to one side, Fin regarded him. “Maybe we should sleep together before we decide what this really is.”
Tyler stilled, his hand on her knee, his brow furrowed. “Fin.” He paused for a second, seemingly needing to gather his thoughts. “Are you asking me to audition?”
She burst out laughing. “No? Yes? Kind of? Sexual chemistry is important, Ty. What if we tell Kylie, and then realize that this whole thing is a big fat nothing? Not worth it.”
“Fin, you literally shock me every time we kiss. You think this thing is going to fizzle when we get naked together?”
She paused. “I’m not saying—What are you doing?”
He’d stood up and was yanking buttons on his shirt, untangling his belt from the waist of his slacks, tossing it aside. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You’re getting naked.”
He bent down and divested himself of one sock and then the other. She knew how much he meant business because one of them flew over one shoulder and the other across the room.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve been offered the chance to get naked and show you how I feel. So, I’m freaking taking it.”
His shirt agape, barefoot, Tyler leaned down and then Fin was wrapped around him again and lifted into the air. “Ty!”
“No?” he asked, pulled his face from the crook of her neck, his eyes clear and calm.
She grinned. “Yes.”
He strode forward into her room, his mouth pressed against hers, his tongue doing this slow slide that made her lose the feeling in her legs. She was snaked around his body, his hands leaving a permanent imprint on her ass.
His shoulder knocked against the doorjamb and then her back was pressed, rather too firmly, into her dresser. He whirled around, and his shin banged the chaise longue.
“How is your room even put together?” he asked, panting, as he yanked his mouth from hers. “It’s a freaking corn maze in here!”
She couldn’t help but laugh and then even harder when he turned them sideways again and banged his elbow into her dresser, making all the jewelry tremble on the jewelry trees.
“There.” She pointed over her shoulder.
“The bed,” he sighed. “Safety.”
He launched them sideways and they landed in a heap. But it wasn’t quite the proffered safety he’d hoped for because her leg got caught in his leg and her knee jammed hard into his thigh, dangerously close to the goods.
He grunted, shot her a glare and pushed her knee away. He rolled to his back with a laugh. “Holy crap, that was close.”
Her heart galloping, turned backward and upside down in this new position it called home, she crouched over him, eyes wide. She was torn between laughing and begging for forgiveness. Fin opened her mouth to apologize but found herself already tugged over top of him again, their mouths clashing and opening, those lazy, half-open eyes of his just doing things to her. She twisted herself on top of him, pushing against his hardness at her belly, wanting more more more of everything.
“More,” she told him, feeling suddenly like it was the only word in her vocabulary. And what a useful word it was, covering such a wide manner of sins. More skin. More tongue. More bed-creaking grinding. More moaning into his mouth. More. Of. Everything.
His hands were tight on her back, pinning her down to him, twisted in her clothing. She had to push back hard against his grip to sit up. Once she was there, she grinned down at him. He looked wrecked, and she liked it. The most disheveled she’d ever seen him.
She reached down and yanked her tunic off over her head, tossed it aside.
“Holy mother Bethlehem,” he groaned, his eyes as wide as daisies as he looked for the first time at her chest, naked except for a bra. “I didn’t know. You always wear such loose clothes. But fuck. I—had no fucking—”
He stopped talking and sat up, his hands automatically tracing the hourglass of her hips and his eyes bottoming out on her breasts.
Okay. So apparently he was a boob guy. Which she’d never really known because of her clothing choices. He dropped his forehead against her breastbone and, for just a moment, pushed his whole face into her cleavage.
She couldn’t help but laugh.
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“Okay, so you’re really a boob guy.”
“You have no idea.”
It was then she registered the scrabbling fingers at her back. He was yanking at the clasp of her bra, and she could feel the tremble in his hands. He put his arms all the way around her, hooked his chin over her shoulder and peered down her back. “Who the fuck designed this bra? The military?”
It was then, pressed flush against him, that she felt the wild, almost rabid, beat of his heart. With just one wincing snap, he finally stripped her bra off of her. She pushed him back, so that they were both on their knees on the bed. She grabbed two handfuls of his open shirt and yanked it over his head. But she pulled too fast, and his armpit and wrist got caught.
“Wait. Oomph. Crap.” He pulled it off himself, and then there was nothing left to do but just look at one another.
His chest was wider than she’d thought it would be. It was covered in a mat of light hair, muscular but not bulky. He still had that same dancer’s build as he’d had in the videos she’d seen. His shoulders capped his body off in a round, strong way, rolling sinuously as he leaned forward. He balanced on his knuckles, kissing her again. She noticed that he was keeping his hands to himself, and so she did the same. She could feel the raw heat from his skin, but their only connection point was their mouths. When he pulled away, his eyes were even lazier than before, somehow relaxed and urgent at the same time.
“Let’s each do our own pants,” he suggested, which she thought was a grand idea. They both flopped onto their backs to lift their hips and shimmy their pants down in identical fashion. They peered sideways at the exact same moment and burst into laughter.
“This might be the least smooth seduction I’ve ever been a part of,” he muttered to himself.
“Including when you lost your virginity at a party and a drunk kid saw your butt?”
He laughed. “Why did I tell you that? And yes. Less smooth than that.” Both of them pantsless now, he rolled over her, and her braid got caught under his weight.
“Ow.”
“Sorry.”
Shaking his head at himself, he rolled again, pulled her on top of him and let their bare legs tangle together as her weight settled onto him. He groaned and planted his hands over his face.
Huh. Sitting up so that she straddled his hips, his hardness pressing quite firmly into her panty-covered ass, she tugged his hands away from his eyes.
“Everything all right down there?”
He let out a long breath, his eyes stuttering on her chest, his hands compulsively going to the dip at her waist. “I just want you so badly, Fin. And you’re so—so—you hurt to look at. You’re like Helen of Troy or something. Seriously, if you’d been born in an earlier century, people would have worshipped you.”
She frowned.
“But that’s not even—” He tried again. “Fin, I’ve wanted this for a really, really long time with you. I had that major crush on you for so long. And then that went away. But then I got to know you again, and I wanted you in a different way. A stronger way. But I don’t think I even realized it. Because I wasn’t letting myself hope for it. I wanted it so badly that I knew it was idiotic to hope for it. And now I’m here and you’re naked and sitting on me and looking like that and, yeah... It’s a lot.”
It never ceased to amaze her, the kind of personal magic that words held. As soon as he said the words out loud, she could just stop guessing about it. His heartbeat had told her he was nervous, but now that she knew for sure, it was easier to understand. To quantify. And she could admit it herself.
“For me too.”
In case he didn’t believe her, she lifted his hand from the curve of her waist and pressed it to her chest so that he could feel her own heartbeat.
“I haven’t had sex in a long time,” she admitted to him, and then, deciding that since she was already straddling him, almost buck-ass naked, there wasn’t much point in holding back. “And I’m not sure I’ve ever had sex with someone who makes me feel...this.”
He sat up so that they were almost nose to nose. “Makes you feel what?”
Well, she wasn’t quite prepared for those kinds of declarations. She lifted one shoulder and dropped it. “Stuff,” she said stubbornly.
He smiled that easy smile of his and Fin felt some of her nerves abate. “I feel stuff for you too,” he whispered.
“That’s good.”
“I feel—” he held up two hands like brackets “—‘insert noun here’ for you.”
She laughed, cocking her head to one side and slowly unbraiding her hair, wanting to feel wild and unrestrained with him.
“I really really verb you,” she whispered.
They both laughed and he pulled her into an easy hug. Or, effortless, she should say. Because there was nothing easy about the place where their hips were joined, an incredible heat between them, begging for friction.
His eyes dilated to almost completely black and he licked his lips. “I don’t have any condoms,” he rasped.
This bit of information intrigued her. He was a forty-two-year-old sex-haver who didn’t have condoms on him? “Really?”
“Yeah. I used to keep one in my wallet, but then with Ky... Sometimes I’ll ask her to grab some cash out of there. I keep her medical cards in there. It just felt weird.”
Fin face-palmed. “God, you’re cute.”
She hoisted herself off of him and was two steps away from the bed when his arm came around her waist. “Where are you going?”
“To get condoms,” she said, rolling her head to one side when he kissed up, over her shoulder to just under her ear.
“Mmm,” he groaned. “There’s time.”
He tugged her back so that she sat at the edge of the bed, between his spread legs. She could feel his hardness pressed against her ass, straining against the fabric of his briefs. Tyler’s hands started a slow journey down her legs to the backs of her knees. She couldn’t stop staring at their legs pressed up against one another like that.
“You have long legs,” she gasped as he drew a line up the inside of her thigh.
“So do you,” he said, nibbling on the curve of her shoulder. He hooked his chin over her collarbone, peering down her body. “And killer tits.”
Fin burst out laughing. “No. Just no. Never. You are not allowed to say killer tits when you have your hand between my legs. Or ever, for that matter. Strike it from your vocabulary.”
He was laughing too, his smile pressed into the side of her neck. “Thought you’d like that. Figured it would fit my ’80s villain image.”
She turned her head to one side, caught his eye. “You know I don’t think of you like that anymore.”
“I know,” he whispered. “You verb me.”
“I do.”
This time when they kissed, her head twisted, his head over her shoulder, it was slow and long and spanned on and on. He had one hand pressed to the soft skin halfway up one thigh and the other hand palm down over her belly. Fin absorbed the slow, caressing nudges of his tongue, warming her, liquefying her. It wasn’t until she started wiggling in the cage of his arms that he finally moved his hands.
“Tyler,” she whispered, letting her head drop back as one of his warm, rough hands smoothed over her breast. His heart danced against her back.
Tyler weighed her in his hand, his thumb strumming across her nipple once, twice, and the third time she arched her back and pushed into him. His hips pushed forward into her ass and she made a sound she hadn’t expected to make. Turned on, desperate, tight and relaxed at the same time.
“Tyler,” she whispered again and he hooked his chin over her shoulder again. Just watching his hand play with her breast.
“I really had no idea you were shaped like this,” he breathed, letting his other hand come up and join in the fun. He was firm and gentle; he molded her and
plucked and pushed her together, creating a deep crevasse of cleavage that immediately made him groan. He picked up her hands and made her hold her own breasts together while he dipped his fingers into the dark place between. He pulled her hands away and kissed her palms, one and then the next, guided her hands behind her, to his hair, making her body arch like a crescent moon.
“I might accidentally yank your hair,” she whispered, flexing her fingers against his scalp, feeling every impossibly silky strand against her fingers like some kind of liquid fire.
“You just do whatever you need to do, love,” he whispered, one of his hands still plumping her breast and the other one back on her knee. He drew that same straight line up the inside of her thigh and her leg swung free like a door. Knock knock, his fingers seemed to say.
“God, yes,” Fin replied, answering his unspoken question. His hand hesitated only briefly, his eyes still looking down her body, watching himself touch her.
And then the flat of his palm was laid over her, giving her his heat. His energy. She made a guttural sound. The man had no idea how potent he was.
“All right?” he asked, stilling.
“The hands,” she gasped, “have a certain kind of energy. Different than other parts of the body. Can you feel it, Ty? What you’re putting into me right now? God.” She tossed her head to one side. Even through her underwear, his hand over her heat was like mainlining him. It was a river of Tyler Concentrate all streaming in through her body, arousing her, overwhelming her, inundating her. She realized her hands were in fists in his hair, but couldn’t relax against the feeling. “Close your eyes,” she instructed him. “Do you feel it? What’s there between you and me? Even if you don’t believe, can you feel it?”
He did as she asked, his hand still and firm between her legs, his eyes clamped closed. She could feel him trying. Feel him searching. And that too touched her. After a moment, his breath hitched. “Wow. I think... Yeah, I think I can feel it. It’s like a flow. Like a river.”
