Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  She heard the bathroom door open, and she walked toward him, her bare feet sticking slightly to the wood floor.

  He came out, saw her, and stopped.

  She didn’t know what to look at first, there was so much of him on display. The slate-colored towel low around his hips, tucked in place, and drops of water gleaming on his bare shoulders. The dark hair on his pecs arrowed down toward his waist, unsettlingly masculine.

  “You have chest hair,” she said, waving her hand stupidly. Because she hadn’t imagined him with chest hair. Dan was Nordic, his body virtually hairless.

  “Give me ten minutes, I can shave it off.”

  She had to look at his face to decide if he was kidding. Yes, according to his lips. No, according to his eyes.

  His eyes promised he’d give her anything she wanted.

  “Tell me something,” he said.

  She gave a little nod.

  “You weren’t headed for the shower, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You were headed for me?”

  Another nod.

  “That’s good.”

  He stepped closer.

  “Really good,” he murmured.

  She backed up, but he was coming now, and one hand reached to trace over her almost-bare shoulder, catching at the strap of her bra.

  Ben toyed with it. He kept inching closer, and she’d been inching away until she bumped into the wall. Now she had nowhere to inch to. The moist heat of his skin surrounded her, a physical sensation like stepping outside on a too hot, too humid afternoon.

  “I should take a shower.” She didn’t even know where the statement came from. It bubbled up in her nervousness and flew from her lips, one more manifestation of her deep-seated sense of physical inadequacy.

  She was supposed to smell like flowers and spring rain, but she didn’t. She didn’t at all.

  He lowered his head and licked her collarbone. His wet hair brushed her chin, and for some reason that was the thing that made her nipples stiffen. Not his tongue on her body, damp and unfamiliar, but the light, cold tease of his hair. He could brush her whole body with it, and she’d die happy.

  Go ahead and ask him to. “Let’s go in the bedroom, and you can feather your hair over me.” I’m sure that will go over big.

  Her hands curled ineffectually at her sides. She wasn’t cut out for this. She was embarrassing herself, and they’d barely even started.

  “You don’t need a shower.” He slid one finger under her bra strap and pushed it to the side, and then he kissed her shoulder, right there. “I think you taste good the way you are.” His mouth moved higher, to her neck. Behind her ear. “I’d like to taste a lot more of you.”

  She stiffened.

  “Right here, for instance,” he said, with another kiss. His hands moved down her shoulders, over her arms, to her wrists. They found her waist. They cupped her breasts. “Here.”

  One hand slid to her hip. Along the outside of her leg. It skated across the top to the inside and coaxed her thighs apart. Her mouth opened when his fingers pressed against her through her panties, an invasion she’d fully expected but somehow hadn’t anticipated. “Here.”

  “You can’t,” she croaked.

  “Can’t I?” The thought didn’t seem to faze him. His hand lingered for a moment, then passed upward to her stomach. Somehow more intimate than having his hand between her legs, because he would feel—

  “So soft.”

  That. Exactly that. Her soft, imperfect stomach. Should have had salad for dinner, her asshole inner critic whispered.

  This was harder than she’d expected. She wished he would kiss her so she could get swept up in it and stop worrying. It was awesome that Ben could walk around in a towel and be totally comfortable with himself, but she wasn’t built that way. She felt rigid as cardboard, her utilitarian body highly functional but not worth fussing over.

  She felt faintly embarrassed for him, for doing the fussing.

  His head was lowered, tracking the progress of his hand, but she couldn’t watch. She looked away, down the hall. She wondered what the monthly rent was on this apartment. She wondered why she was so bad at this when, in fact, she liked sex. She liked it a lot. If they could skip to the bit where it was dark, and they were under the covers with him buried inside her. The grunting, frantic part—that was the bit she liked.

  The tricky thing was how to get there from here.

  Kiss me, she thought. Kiss me.

  He kissed her neck and stroked her stomach. He kissed her jaw.

  She exhaled, and it came out jerky and wrong.

  Ben lifted his head.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, something is. You’re not into this.”

  “I am. I’m just …”

  The internal censor piped in to ask, Just what, May? A freak?

  But damn it, this wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t Ben’s, either. It just was. She didn’t have to beat herself up over it.

  “I’m nervous,” she admitted.

  “Is it too soon?” He removed his hand. “I heard you talking to your sister.”

  When he eased away, the air changed without his skin in it. She felt it as a loss, her whole body pleading for his return.

  Huh. Maybe she hadn’t been as not-into-it as she’d thought. A rapid scan told her that her nipples ached, and she was damp between her legs. It was only her head that needed to get with the program. Her head was the freak.

  And Ben was getting away, his eyes gone cool and cautious because he’d heard about Dan being in Michigan. Damn it.

  “It’s too soon,” he confirmed. “I shouldn’t have …” He lifted one arm and raked his hand up the back of his head, exposing the dark hair under his arm. His shoulder and bicep muscles bunched, and her lower abdomen filled with heavy, liquid heat.

  God, he looked really good without any clothes on. Taut and powerful, all that golden skin and the trail of hair leading down his stomach, where he—

  “This is too much for you,” he said.

  But she’d be willing to bet it was exactly the right size.

  She wondered what would happen if she whipped off his towel and took him in her hand. How different life would be if she were the kind of person who could do that. Drop to her knees, suck him off in the hallway. Redirect his attention from her body to his own, until all he could think about was what he needed, and all he could do was take it.

  Ben sighed. Because she’d gone mute, no doubt, while she stared at his crotch. But the sigh made him seem mildly irritated, and she wondered if this was all a performance. If he was only being nice.

  Yeah, May. In Manhattan, all good hosts tell their guests they want to go down on them.

  “I’m going to get dressed.” He started toward the bedroom.

  For two steps, she watched him go. Three. Her heart squeezed hard, her inner asshole chastising her, Stupid, stupid, and then it happened all at once. A bright flash of anger—at herself, at every movie and TV show and magazine, every insidious cultural message that had ever told her that her body sucked.

  It was all a bunch of lies, and she knew that. She knew it. But here she was, letting it ruin everything.

  Stop being an idiot and fix this.

  Get out of your own goddamn way.

  She got indignant in a bright, hot rush, and she moved all at once, with too much force, so that by the time Ben reached the bedroom door she was pushing him, bumping up against him, colliding with his body until he tumbled onto the bed and she fell on top of him.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Jesus, May!”

  “I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t mean to—”

  He flipped over and rose to his elbows. His mouth was scowling, his eyebrows dark and drawn together, just the way he’d looked when she met him. Not the kind of guy a woman wants to pin her hopes and dreams on, she remembered thinking, and now she had him pinned down beneath he
r bare thighs. Right where she wanted him.

  “Is this supposed to be foreplay?”

  “I want you,” she blurted. “I suck at this, but I want you. I’m sorry. It’s not too soon.”

  He didn’t say anything, but his eyebrows relaxed when she reached behind her to unhook her bra. Her fingers stalled.

  “Really,” she added.

  He was staring at her breasts, which, yeah, she could see why. They were trying to fall out of the bra. It was a good bra, the priciest she’d ever bought, and she could appreciate what the view must look like to Ben.

  Also, there were other clues. His hands made fists in the comforter. His jaw couldn’t have been more sharply defined if it had been carved from a slab of granite.

  “Do you want to do this?” she asked. A stupid question. She knew he did. She just needed to hear it again.

  “I jerked off in the shower a minute ago,” he said absently. He was still staring at her breasts like he wanted to eat them.

  The confession hit her strangely. One part surprise, one part maidenish dismay, three parts conflagration in her crotch.

  “What? Why?”

  “Couldn’t help it. Plus, I thought it might take the edge off.”

  “That’s …” She tried to think what that was, other than shocking and unexpected and surprising and wonderful. “That’s really hot.”

  His eyes flicked up to hers. “You think?”

  She nodded, unable to speak because she’d begun melting down internally, turning into a liquid puddle of goo at the mental image of Ben with water streaming over him and his hand stroking himself as he thought of her. Her.

  “What did you … What were you thinking about?”

  He angled his head toward her breasts.

  “Typical.”

  “And your legs.” He shifted his gaze to her thighs. “Wrapped around me.”

  He pushed himself up onto his hands, bringing his face really close. His voice turned dark and dangerous. “How it’s going to feel to be inside you. That’s what I want the most, May. To get inside you. Figure out what makes you moan, how to get you off.”

  “Can you …” She had to stop to take a breath. He was so close, and his words had already gotten inside her somehow and scrambled everything. Plucked the desire from her head and sent it racing through her bloodstream. She was embarrassingly wet and completely discombobulated.

  “Can you go again?” she asked. “Right away, I mean, or is it too soon? Because if we need to wait—”

  He surged up, took her shoulders, and flipped her over onto her back. The towel was trapped beneath her, a damp lump at her hip, and Ben was hard warm skin, pressing everywhere on her at once.

  “You think too much,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “My new purpose in life is to make you stop thinking.”

  “Oh please,” she said, and he finally kissed her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It didn’t take long. His tongue stroked into her mouth, and her brain shut off with such abrupt definitiveness, she thought she might have actually heard it.

  She wrapped her legs around him, brushed her fingers through his cool hair, tangled her tongue with his, her breath with his. They went from awkward to frantic in five seconds as she tried to touch him absolutely everywhere at the same time that he kissed her silly.

  And she did feel silly now, to have worried about this. They’d already done this part, and it had been awesome. What the hell was her problem?

  No more. No more of that, ever.

  He stroked her side, holding his weight on one elbow so he could run his hand down her waist, over her hip, along her thigh to pull it higher and tighter against him. He stiffened against the crotch of her panties, a burgeoning new pressure right where she wanted it.

  He licked over her lip and sucked it into his mouth. She touched his shoulders, his back, the shallow ditch of his spine, the muscles at his hips. That tight ass, performing a gratifying slow thrust against her that made her bite her lip and suck in a deep breath through her nose.

  Kiss my breasts, she thought. Suck my nipples.

  But he kissed her mouth, and that was a disappointment. It would be so much easier if he just knew. That was the thing about sex that always got to her—that as much as people liked to pretend it was this fantastic melting of one body into another, this full-on mind and body meld, in fact she’d never managed to achieve wordless communication during sex, and she was too embarrassed to say the words out loud.

  Which was sad, now that she thought about it. Would she never be able to say them? At what point in her life did she think it would be time to start saying sex words, if not now?

  Ben rose onto his hands. “May,” he said sternly.

  “What?”

  “You’re thinking again.”

  “Sorry. I’ll stop.”

  “No. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  She could feel her eyes widen, because no. No.

  But that new voice, that get-out-of-your-own-way voice, whispered, Yes. Do.

  “Tell me,” he repeated. “I don’t care what it is. Tell me I’m a shitty kisser or you’re worried my dick’s too small. Tell me you want me to tie you up and lob tennis balls at you. Tell me you’re worried about flesh-eating bacteria. I don’t give a shit what you say, but you’re going to tell me.”

  “Tennis balls?”

  “Tell me.”

  May gathered her courage.

  “I was thinking … I wanted you to kiss my—” She closed her eyes. “My breasts.”

  Silence.

  Her lids opened to incredulous staring.

  “What, is that so weird?”

  “You couldn’t say that out loud?”

  “Well, it wasn’t just that. I wanted you to … suck my nipples, too.”

  He watched her for a moment, and then he sat up to one side. “Take off your bra.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  She obediently lifted off the bed and undid the clasp, then eased it off her arms. When she had it free, she handed it to him. He tossed it over his shoulder.

  “Now your underwear.”

  Heat crept into her cheeks, but she did as she was told, hooking her thumbs into the waistband and pushing. She had to sit up halfway to untangle her feet, which created fat rolls that he must have seen, and she hated that, but whatever. Whatever.

  She handed him the panties. He lifted and inspected them, smiled like an evil, evil person, and threw them on the floor.

  “Say pussy.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Say pussy. Or is that not what you call it?”

  What did she call it? She didn’t call it anything. All her sex words were for other people’s body parts. Ben had a cock, when she let herself think the word, but pussy? In reference to herself?

  “I—I’m not sure I want to.”

  He laid his hand on her stomach and rested it there. Leaned closer. “Say it anyway.”

  This was dumb. She didn’t like it. She wouldn’t say it.

  He couldn’t make her.

  “No.”

  Ben smiled. It was a depraved smile. How had she not realized before how depraved he was? She was in trouble.

  “Somebody really messed with your head, didn’t they, May-Belle?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  He dropped down onto one elbow beside her, propped his head in one hand, and said, “I want to lick your pussy.”

  She closed her eyes, the words like a slap. A sting of surprise, followed by a warm wash of pleasure.

  “Some people would call it a cunt. Do you like that word, May?” She wouldn’t open her eyes, but she felt him lean closer. “No, you don’t. Your forehead got all unhappy. All right, we won’t use that one. We’ll go with pussy. I want to lick your pussy and suck on your clit.”

  He paused, gauging her reaction, which was basically that her hips jerked, and everything that was already wet got we
tter. “I’m going to suck your nipples and bite them, because you liked it when I bit you earlier. I’m going to kiss you over and over again, because your mouth drives me crazy, and then I’m going to sink inside you and fuck you until you’re half blind and begging me to let you come.”

  May gasped. Somewhere in the middle of that speech, she’d lost the ability to breathe. He wasn’t even touching her, but she was dying, dying.

  “But not,” Ben said, “until you start telling me what you need.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “You sure as hell can. You already did. You need me to kiss your breasts, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He dipped his head and placed a chaste kiss on the top swell of one breast. “Like this?”

  “No.”

  “How?”

  “Harder. More …” Oh, damn him for making her do this. Why couldn’t he guess?

  “More wet and … and—Come on, Ben. You know.”

  He chuckled. “Sometimes I know. Sometimes I don’t know. Do you know what I want right now?”

  “You just said.”

  “That was my long-term plan. Right this second, I want to know you trust me.”

  “Of course I trust you.” She was here, wasn’t she? Naked in his bed? Did he think she did this all the time?

  “I want you to trust that you can say anything to me, confess what you want, and I’m not going to judge you. I won’t laugh. I’ll give it to you.” He paused and lifted his head to meet her eyes. “Unless you want, like, three other guys in here with us. That’s not happening.”

  May smiled. “I don’t want three other guys.” She stroked the back of her knuckles over his cheek. “I trust you.”

  “So tell me.”

  She took a deep breath. She could do this. He was right that she needed to. What he was talking about—asking for what she wanted, taking what she needed—that was the foundation of intimacy, and she’d never had it. Not with Dan, and not with the guys who came before him. Sex, yes. But the kind of trust it took to say what she wanted out loud?

  Never.

  This was her chance. The first time in her whole confined, bounded adulthood when she could tell the truth in bed. Demand things.

  She looked at the ceiling. “I, uh. I like it hard.”