Dream Maker

by Kristen Ashley

  He then pulled out a ribbon of condoms that, in the shadows of the rising sun (it was dawn, I still didn’t care), looked about a yard long.

  I would have laughed.

  But I was too focused to laugh.

  I took them from him, tore one off, released it from its sleeve and took my time at his cock, gliding it on, among other things.

  “Jesus,” he groaned, his hands now at my hips, thumbs digging into my hip bones, his gaze hot and bothered and roaming all over me. “Taste you. See you. Feel you. Smell you. Too much. Stop playing and claim that, Evie.”

  He was good with his mouth, I wanted to give him good with my hand.

  But his dick was so hard, so hot, it felt so damned good, I knew it felt even better inside, so I wanted to claim that.

  Claim him.

  So I did.

  Positioning him, I bore down and as I did, his hips surged up.

  Powerfully.

  Whoa.

  Wow.

  He felt amazing inside, the way he filled me.

  Beautiful.

  I rode him and I clenched him, and I touched him with a single-minded purpose.

  Mag was about dual purpose, however, his thumb finding my clit.

  I bent over him again, moving on him, and shared, “I wanna watch you come.”

  “Yeah, and I wanna watch you come.”

  “But if I come before you come, I won’t be able to concentrate on watching you.”

  His words were deep, a little rough, but amused when he noted, “This isn’t the last time we’re gonna do this, baby.”

  Oh.

  Right.

  Well then.

  Onward.

  My clit was still so sensitized by him going down on me, not to mention the friction against his cock and the banging at the base, in the end, I came before he did, and I missed his show.

  But.

  Whatever.

  I’d have another shot.

  I was careful not to collapse on him when it was over. I just rested against him, making sure to shift my weight to his healthy side.

  Though I did burrow my face into his neck since he smelled good.

  “Your arm?” I asked.

  His hands felt nice, light, sweet, and tender as they roamed my skin and he answered, “Weird, I don’t feel it when you’re fuckin’ me or I’m eating you.”

  I giggled into his neck.

  Then I got serious.

  “You need to put the sling back on.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Danny—”

  He wrapped one arm around me and gave me a squeeze. “In a minute, Evie. All right?”

  I drew in breath, held it and let it go.

  It was hard, letting that breath go, and with it, letting the conversation do the same, seeing as he hadn’t sprained it, he’d been shot, and we really shouldn’t be engaging in these activities so soon after that occurred.

  Engaging in them repeatedly.

  But he was a grown man.

  And it was his decision.

  That was something I’d learned the day before.

  My decisions were my decisions.

  And the people around me made their own decisions.

  And those were theirs, and whatever came of that, I had to let it go.

  He didn’t say anything.

  I didn’t say anything.

  And all of a sudden, I felt weird.

  We were just lying there, still connected (though I was losing him), post sex.

  Good sex.

  No, great sex.

  Sex during which I hadn’t thought for a second about if I was doing something he liked (or not), what he thought of my body…nothing entered my head at all but enjoying him, giving him me…

  And connecting.

  I knew he liked it.

  I definitely knew I liked it.

  It was natural.

  It was like bickering with him practically the minute he first walked into my apartment. It was like giggling at him being sexy and flirty and playful over brunch. Or sitting next to him at Mexican last night, Mag with his good arm around my chair, both our chairs tucked close, me with my boyfriend, him with his woman, and we’d only really had one date.

  It was us.

  I didn’t know if I’d ever been an us with anybody, not even my ex.

  But Mag and I had been us since the beginning.

  On this realization, I relaxed against him and enjoyed the moment.

  That was, I enjoyed the moment until he tightened his arm around me for a second and muttered, “Gotta clean up. Be back.”

  I slid off and he slid out of bed.

  I found my panties in the sheets and had them on by the time he got back.

  He stood, naked and beautiful, in the dawn’s early light beside the bed and donned his shorts and sling before he got back into bed and claimed me, pressing me down his healthy side.

  “Do you need a pill?” I asked.

  “No. Before bed only,” he answered.

  “But if you’re in pain…” I let that trail.

  “Got a high threshold for pain,” he told me. “But even if I didn’t, I need sleep to heal, I need the pain gone to sleep, so before bed only and only for a few nights. Painkillers will fuck you up and my life just took a good turn, not gonna let dick fuck it up.”

  Oh my.

  He’d been shot yesterday, and he thought his life had taken a “good turn.”

  That turn being me.

  Oh man.

  I liked that.

  A whole lot.

  “Okay, then I’m going to make breakfast in bed for you.”

  His body started shaking so I took my head off his shoulder, pushed up and looked down at him.

  Yes, he was laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “No fair. I get shot for you, and you get a leg up on the breakfast game.”

  My face must have registered my thoughts because his arm moved in its sling, he winced, then he took his other arm from around me and cupped my cheek.

  “You didn’t shoot me,” he said softly.

  “Danny—”

  “Stop it. Now.”

  I closed my mouth.

  “I don’t blame anyone but Fletcher Gumm for this,” he declared. “And I won’t ever blame anyone but Gumm for this.”

  “It could have been worse.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “It could have been catastrophic.”

  He slid his fingers back into my hair, pulled my face to his and said low, “It wasn’t.”

  I took in air and nodded.

  “We done with that?” he asked.

  “I reserve the right to feel bad, freak out or otherwise react to it for the foreseeable future. Though you’re allowed to get angry about me doing that if that lasts longer than, say, ten years.”

  He burst out laughing, doing so pulling my head further down, which meant my body went down with it, and he tucked my face in his neck.

  He then rounded me with his arm, tensed it and kept it that way to hold me close.

  When he got control of his hilarity, he agreed, “Okay. Ten years. Starting now.”

  I smiled against his skin.

  “So, today, breakfast, your turn ’cause I wanna make a few calls, and you’re right, I should take it easy. Then we’ll hit your pad to get your vinyl and anything else you wanna grab—”

  “Danny—”

  “It’ll fuck with me, but you can carry,” he grunted.

  Okay, I could do that.

  I said no more.

  “We’ll grab some lunch, hit the grocery store and stock up then back here to take a load off.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Evie?” he called.

  “Hmm?” I answered.

  “Baby,” he said in a much different tone, and I closed my eyes. “You had a big day yesterday.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “You wanna talk about it?”
<
br />   “I…don’t think so.”

  “If you do, not sure you can miss it ’cause you’re layin’ on me, and I won’t be much farther away all day, so just sayin’, I’m right here.”

  God.

  He was just…

  So nice.

  I turned my head, pressed a kiss to his shoulder, then pushed up again to look down into his extraordinary eyes with his amazing curly lashes.

  “It’s soon,” I whispered, “but I don’t care. Fair warning, if by some awful happenstance Lottie needs a kidney, I’m giving her one of mine.”

  “Only if mine isn’t a match,” he whispered back.

  Oh boy.

  Yeah.

  I liked that too.

  A whole lot.

  There he was, my boyfriend.

  There I was, his woman.

  This being so, I kissed him.

  It was sweet, and it was wet, and it lasted a long time.

  But it didn’t go anywhere.

  Because Mag had been shot the day before and we’d been active enough since then.

  It was time to make breakfast.

  I was hungry.

  And I had to take care of my boyfriend.

  Late that afternoon…

  After breakfast.

  After going to my pad to pack some things (the blood splatter was still there, but I was pretty proud of the powers I’d discovered I had that I called on to ignore it).

  And after unloading my stuff at Mag’s, going to lunch, the grocery store, and back to Mag’s, whereupon I made a double batch of my cinnamon marshmallow clusters as a thank-you to the boys for throwing smoke grenades and rescuing me.

  After all of that, I walked out of Mo’s old room where I’d gone to use the bathroom to see Mag stuffing his face with marshmallow clusters.

  I also looked down at the cookie trays (Mag had cookie trays, I’d found, because, in his words: “I kick chocolate chip ass”—something I was keen on discovering), and I saw one half of an entire tray was decimated.

  Such was my surprise, coming to a stop beside the island, I asked the question no girl should ask her brand-new boyfriend.

  “How long was I in the bathroom?”

  “Babe,” he said in a garbled way, seeing as his mouth was full, but even so, he had another cluster on deck in his hand to shove into it, “these are outstanding.”

  “I can tell. You’ve eaten a quarter of them,” I remarked.

  He grinned, cinnamon-marshmallow-toothed and not caring. I knew this because he shoved the next cluster in.

  “Danny!” I snapped. “Those are for the boys!”

  “Make more,” he replied, still with mouth full.

  “I can’t. I’m out of cereal. And marshmallows. And butterscotch morsels.”

  Though, not chocolate ones, we’d bulked up on those for future chocolate chip goodness.

  “We’ll go back to the store.”

  Yeesh.

  “Danny, it boggles the mind I have to keep reminding you of this, but…you were shot yesterday.”

  “So?”

  So?

  “We’ve been busy all day. You need to rest.”

  “I can rest when we get back from the store, while you’re making more of these,” he replied, grabbing another freaking cluster.

  “Danny!” I cried.

  “Get over here. You’re bein’ cute. I need to kiss you,” he demanded.

  “No.” I shook my head. “No way. You’re going to taste like cinnamon and marshmallow and butterscotch and chocolate and you and all of that in a kiss is going to mean we’ll do other things that don’t include you resting.”

  He gave me a look that was a combo punch of sweet, sexy, playful and incendiary before he declared, “Now you really need to get over here.”

  “Stop being sweet and hot,” I bossed.

  “Stop being cute and fuckable,” he retorted.

  “I see we’re at an impasse,” I remarked.

  “Yeah, it’s impossible for you not to be cute or fuckable.”

  “And it’s impossible for you not to be sweet and hot.”

  His expression changed again, and it was not one that made my panties catch fire.

  It was one that made my heart squeeze.

  “Baby, come here. I promise I won’t do anything that will end up with us on the floor, goin’ at it.”

  I studied him closely, and only after I ascertained the veracity of his assertion, I went there.

  When I got there, he rounded me with an arm, which was good, seeing as his other one was in a sling and this meant he couldn’t eat more clusters.

  For my part, I rounded him with both arms.

  “Where’d you get that recipe?” he asked.

  “I made it up.”

  His brows rose. “Seriously?”

  “I wanted something sweet, I didn’t have the patience to make cookies, and I didn’t have Rice Krispies to make treats, but I did have the marshmallows, morsels and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Those clusters are proof necessity is the mother of invention.”

  “No, they’re proof you really are a genius.”

  I grinned up at him.

  He stared down at me.

  He then stated, “Okay, I lied. I’m totally gonna start something.”

  I frowned and began to pull away, warning, “Danny.”

  Even one-armed, he was stronger than me.

  That said, he also had other tools to use to get what he wanted.

  And he used them, saying, “Baby, you pulling hurts my shoulder.”

  I stopped pulling immediately.

  He cinched the arm he had around me tighter, pressing me to him.

  But I saw the satisfied look on his face.

  “Was I hurting you?” I asked dubiously.

  “Not really, but just to say, I have no shame using guilt if it means I’m gonna get laid.”

  I felt my entire body twitch in surprise at his words.

  This was before I dissolved into laughter.

  “Christ,” he whispered in a way that made my laughter fade to just giggles. “You’re pretty normally, but when you laugh, your eyes make these little upside-down crescent moons and I’ve never seen anything so pretty.”

  I stopped laughing altogether.

  “Danny,” I whispered back, feeling things, many, many things and feeling them deep.

  “Even banged up, it’s gorgeous.”

  I melted into him, repeating my whispered, “Danny,” and getting on board with the notion of starting something.

  His head was coming toward mine, this already my most favorite thing I could see, when a knock sounded on the door.

  His head went right back up (not even close to my most favorite thing), his eyes went to the door, and I fought shifting out of the way in case electric-blue bolts of lightning shot from them and annihilated the door.

  “Group text,” he growled at the door. “I’m gonna tell all of them at once we did it so they’ll stop fucking with us.”

  In another life, say the one I’d been living about five days ago, I would balk at a guy I was seeing stating he was going to send a group text to our friends to share we’d had sex.

  In this one, in order to stop the interruptions, I was totally down with it.

  He bent again, this time damnably quick, kissed my forehead then let me go and prowled to the door.

  He looked through the peephole.

  Then he did something bizarre.

  His long body swayed back, like he was trying to avoid a blow.

  Oh no.

  “Who is it?” I asked carefully.

  His head turned to me and he didn’t answer.

  He said, “I’ll get rid of her.”

  Her?

  Her who?

  He repositioned so when he unlocked and opened the door (and he did this last not very far), he hid whoever was out there from view.

  “Now’s not a good time,” he said, his voice void of, well…everything.

  “Oh my God, Mag!
It’s true! You have been shot!” A woman exclaimed with unhidden shock and panic.

  “I’m fine, Nikki. But now is—”

  Nikki?

  His ex?

  That sway from the door like he was trying to escape pain.

  His ex was outside.

  And seeing her brought him pain.

  It felt like my insides had started shriveling.

  “Why are you up? Why aren’t you resting? And don’t give me any of that macho shit. You need to lie down. And I’m going to make that so. Get out of my way.”

  “Nikki, dammit—”

  “Out…of my…way,” she demanded, he abruptly pivoted, and he did so because she was pushing in.

  Oh yeah.

  My insides were shriveling.

  Mag might think I was pretty.

  But she…

  Nikki…

  His ex…

  The one he loved who broke up with him and it sent him into a tailspin…

  She was a knockout.

  Tall. Blonde. Blue-eyed. Perfectly symmetrical features. A hint of a honeyed tan even if it was February, which meant she probably skied or snowboarded or was a runner or a rock climber or something interesting and outdoorsy.

  She was trim, long-legged and had some serious flesh up top.

  And she was totally put together.

  She didn’t look like she was about to walk into the Met Gala.

  But for a Sunday afternoon, she was something, with a skintight tee and high-waisted jeans, a kickass bulky knit cardigan that only served to show how slender yet busty she was, tasteful jewelry and high-heeled booties.

  She was also, outside the tall part, everything I was not.

  For instance I was in a pair of vintage, low-rider jeans Roxie had bought for me, my baseball tee (that I was thrilled had survived) that had a snarling kitty on the front peering up through water at a tiny swimming mouse with PAWS at the top, and my bright red Chucks.

  She was further, I realized at that juncture, frozen to the spot, staring at me.

  One thing we had in common. I was doing the same at her.

  Then her face got hard, her lips started to sneer, and she didn’t seem as beautiful anymore as she did a sweep of me with her eyes and then turned to Mag.

  “Really? Another one? The day after you took a bullet?” she derided.

  Mag stood there for a second, staring down at her.

  I stood there for that second, staring at the both of them, realizing, physically, how utterly perfect they were for each other.

  Nikki stood that second too, glaring daggers up at her ex-boyfriend.