So I answer.
I kiss her again, and this time her lips mold softly and press on mine. I run my hands down from the round of her knees to the tops of her thighs and squeeze her hips, pulling her tight against me. She knocks over the bag of groceries, and a few apples roll out and bob into the water.
My arms circle her waist, my tongue licks at her lips and persuades them to open, teases her tongue to lick back. She does, a sweet moan rising from the back of her throat and echoing in my mouth. She knots her fingers behind my neck and rises up on her knees, making clumsy movements in my direction until she knocks me back onto the stone. The back of my head hits hard enough that pain shocks though my brain, and she pulls back, her mouth open, I assume to apologize. Before she can say a word, I pull her on top of me with a grunt and cover her mouth with mine, kissing her lips, along her neck, down her shoulders, and back up behind her ears until she pants fast and fierce.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” I growl low, sucking her lobe into my mouth and biting down on it gently. “I know I should stop. I know you and I make no sense.”
I say those words, but I can’t quite convince myself. My hands race over her body, rumpling her clothes and wanting to skip the part where I have to be patient and slow, because it’s killing me to not be able to touch her bare skin, hot and flushed and pressing up into my hands.
“I wish…I wish we did make sense,” she says, her voice a hiss from between her teeth. Her small fingers link around my wrist and tug my hand up under the hem of her shirt, letting the rough skin of my palm glide over the long, flat stretch of her stomach and pressing my fingers up to the swells of her breasts.
My thumbs trace under the curves of her breasts and the callouses on my fingers catch on the thin lace of her bra. My head spins when I feel her nipples tighten under my fingers.
“We might make sense. Maybe not to get married. Maybe not forever. But right now…” I still my hands, even though I want to squeeze and press and make the moans come out of her mouth without interruption until her entire body shakes under my touch.
But, honestly, I expect her to recoil at my words. They’re not reflective of all I want from her. Not that I want marriage. But I definitely don’t want this to just be some kind of groping in the woods. I want…her. As much as she’s willing to share with me. However she’s available. And I guess that means I’ll have to be content with less than what I may have ever imagined.
“I want marriage.” She closes those eyes, sky blue, water blue, immensely and overwhelmingly blue. “But I want something of my own before I get married.”
She pushes closer to me, and the soft swell of her tits fill my hands and almost override the stretch of my fingers. It’s perfect, it’s all I want.
And nothing I want.
“Before you get married?” I ask.
She nods, dark hair falling over her breasts and tickling my forearms.
“I need to go ahead and do that. But…” She screws her eyelids tight. “But, before I do, I need to have something that’s mine. Something that I’ll be able to look back on over the years. Something that’s my secret. Only mine.” When she opens them again, her eyes ping-pong everywhere but on my face and, when she bears down against me this time, it’s with less passion and more desperation.
I savor one final second of contact with her perfect breasts before I draw back, so there’s more distance than I ever would have thought I’d willingly put between our two bodies again.
“Is something wrong?” Benelli asks, blushing a hot, quick red and placing her hands protectively where mine were possessively just moments before.
“Not with…” I gesture at her chest and summon my lagging courage. “Your breasts are perfection, Benelli. There’s this rumor that Helen of Troy’s breasts inspired the champagne glass. Which is ridiculous, since champaign was developed in France in the 17th century, and, besides, a flute is a much more reasonable vessel for champaign enjoyment.” Her expression is mostly unreadable, but the emotions I can decipher aren’t remotely happy ones, so I rush to the point. “The point is, if any one woman’s breasts were going to be used as the template for a champagne glass, yours would be the best choice, hands down. Because they’re completely, absolutely perfect.”
She nods, but her brow is furrowed and her hands are squeezing her own tits in a way that goes past alluring and makes me wince. “But, you don’t want to touch them?” Her voice parades right around accusatory.
“I don’t want to be your dirty little secret,” I explain, and I expect her to ask me to explain. I have an entire explanation at the ready, all drawn up and hammered out with details I continue to finetune as each second ticks by.
She sits cross-legged and nods again. “Okay.”
That’s it.
That’s all she says.
Her hand reaches into the bag and pulls out the wine, turning the bottle around and around before she releases a hollow laugh and announces, “We have no corkscrew, do we?”
I’m recovering as best I can from the whiplash of this situation by getting to work solving this very non-emotional, physics-based puzzle. I slide the bottle out of her hands, noticing how carefully she avoids letting our fingers touch, and look it over with focused consideration. I rummage in my pockets and find a few paper clips, a highlighter, a pen, some sticky notes, and a piece of peppermint candy. I hand her the candy, trying not to watch as she unwraps it and slips it between her lips so it disappears into her mouth, where she sucks on it with gentle slurps that make my male mind riot painfully.
Why didn’t she ask me to explain my ‘dirty little secret remark’?
Why can’t I be the type of guy who’s okay with being someone’s dirty little secret?
I straighten two of the larger paper clips and feed them down on either side of the cork, then turn them so the hooks catch on the bottom. I twist the straightened wires on top together and wrap them around the pen until I can leverage the cork and wiggle it out, bit by bit. It pops open, and I pass the bottle Benelli’s way.
“You opened it.” She looks at the green glass for a long few seconds before she sets the bottle to her lips and tilts it back, guzzling a series of long sips. When she pulls it away, the insides of her lips are stained a deep purple and her eyes look unusually shiny. “Thank you.”
She holds the bottle out to me with one hand and wipes her lips with the opposite wrist.
I need a drink. Wine is quickly becoming too tame a beverage for me to consume around her, but our stomachs are empty, and this is a particularly strong vintage, so a few rapid passes back and forth, and the strangled air has loosened and fills with her giggles. What we’ve done and said is softened around the edges, with no more sharp-studded pieces to pierce at us.
“What are we laughing about?” she asks suddenly, the bottle suspended between our bodies, our hands carelessly close to touching.
“The apple that got stuck between those rocks.” I point at the piece of our lunch that got knocked into the water when she straddled me. Saying it out loud is suddenly, soberingly unfunny, and the irony of this crazy non-joke hits us at the same time and jostles out more laughs.
She takes a swig. “This bottle will be empty soon,” she laments.
“Good thing,” I mutter. “Much more and you and I may drown in that creek or fall and crack our skulls before we reach civilization again.”
“I’m a virgin,” she slurs out of the deep blue nowhere of heavily drunk conversation.
“Pardon?” It’s a defense mechanism response, and she knows that and ignores me.
“I’ve done…things. My ex-boyfriend was very…into sex. Very into sex. With…” She waves her hand around, the last of the wine sloshing darkly in the bottom of the bottle. “With whores. Whores who were not me.”
“He was an ass.” I don’t need a single shred of evidence beyond what she just told me to know that for certain.
She wipes her fingers under her eyes with quick, broad swipes.
“Or I was. What would it have mattered? To lose it to him? I may have stayed with him. I might have been able to marry him, and this summer would have been…so damn uncomplicated.”
She flops back, and I try not to bristle over the fact that I’m her complication and that she’s wishing me away by wishing to go back into the past and fuck her two-timing ex.
We listen to the roar of the water, the crow and coo and trill of a medley of birds, and the strong gusts of wind that shake the leaves out of the trees.
“If he was was a cheater, he would have cheated on you whether you were having sex with him or not,” I argue, sliding the bottle out of her hand before she lets it smash on the rock.
“But he would have proposed to me.” She lays the back of her forearm over her eyes.
“But he would have cheated.” Perhaps she isn’t understanding.
“Everyone cheats.” Her voice is stomped on, deflated, and makes my blood magma hot and poisoned.
“What did you say?” I ask, swilling the last of the wine and tossing the bottle into the water with a hard throw.
She sits up quickly at the sound of the glass smashing, and when she sees my face, she points an accusing finger.
“Why are you always so mad when I tell you things?” Her words are fuzzy around the consonants and lazy on the vowels. Her drawl is a turn-on under usual situations, but let loose like this, it’s become my own personal aphrodisiac.
“Why do you always tell me such idiotic things?” I grunt and pull the sack of groceries over, rustling through without any real interest.
“What’s idiotic? I’m just…I’m regretful, that’s all.”
I take the last surviving apple out and toss it in the air, letting it smack against my palm with bruising fury over and over again as I catch it in my still-sore hand. After a few repetitions, I’m calm enough to talk.
“You’re regretful? Of what, exactly? The fact that you narrowly escaped being engaged to a cheating bastard? The fact that you wound up here, now, on this rock with me? Some stupid professor with a fucking pen collection and his nose stuck in some stupid ancient story? Some half-assed clown who’s fun enough to hang around with on the sly, but not worth consideration in your holy book of books?”
Benelli leans over and swipes the apple in midair, then hurls it at a rock a good ways downstream. We listen to the smash and she turns back to me, nostrils flared, eyes glistening with that fire I’ve missed.
“You would be worthy of my book if I could choose.” She leans close to me, and I can feel her rough breathing on my skin.
“You can choose,” I counter, putting one had almost on her hip. “You can choose any damn time you want. Just say the word.”
“It isn’t that easy,” she whimpers, and, at the sound, my hand moves up and closes on her arm.
“Yes it is, love,” I say, my voice low, my thumb caressing her in the same place Akos bruised her just the other day. “You can choose. And you can do better than giving your virginity to cheating boyfriends or your hand to abusive assholes. You can choose anything you want for your life.”
She hangs her head and grabs fistfuls of my shirt, dragging me close. Her eyes are wide and unfocused and her breath smells overly sweet with too much heavy wine.
“I can’t choose for my whole life. You don’t understand why, but I can’t. But I can choose this one minute. This one minute that’s all mine, and I choose you, Cormac. I don’t want to be a virgin. I don’t want to talk about my family. I don’t want to talk about getting married. And I choose you right now. You go in the book in my heart, and you’re the only name there.” She scoots maddeningly closer and tugs my hand up, laying it between the gorgeous silky tits I want to run my hands over again, but don’t.
Instead, I pull my hand away and thread it with hers. Her eyes lash at me, bright with shame, but I hold.
“We can talk about this later. Okay? Right now, you need to eat.” I fumble through the bag with my free hand and pull out a roll, perfect for alcohol absorption.
She snatches it out of my hand and shakes her fingers free of mine. She eats, the process awkward because I do nothing but watch.
“We should go,” she says when the roll is gone and she’s wiping bread crumbs off her lap.
I lie back on the rock and reach a hand to take hers. “Come here to me first.”
She stands over me, sun at her back, hair falling in front of her face, and turns around like she’s about to jump off the rock and wade back to shore without me.
“I’m not too proud to beg you to come here to me,” I call. She stands, ice-statue still. “You are gorgeous. You’ve turned me on completely and made me laugh and made me think about things that I haven’t wanted to think about. And I want you. I want you stripped naked right now. Any man with two eyes in his skull would want you. But you’re drunk and even sober you weren’t sure you what you wanted with me, so please don’t ask me to do what you might regret. Please, just come here to me.”
She hugs her arms to her waist. “Why? What do you want?”
“To hold you. To smell your hair and hope you don’t notice and think I’m some sort of psychotic. To watch the way the light moves over your skin. I want you to get chilly and sleepy and need to press your body tight to mine, and I want to wrap my arms around you. I want whatever you write in that secret book of yours about me to be worth all the other rotten shit you’re going to wind up accepting down the line.”
She sways on her feet, and I jump up to steady her.
“That’s, um, that’s incredibly romantic.” She bites her lip and holds tight to the sides of my shirt as she careens back and forth on unsteady legs.
“Romantic words are part of the deal, love. I’m a classics professor. You have no idea how many lines of Sappho I’ve memorized.” Her smile is a bloom, and I babble as it dazzles me stupid. “I had a very romantic Women in Ancient Greece professor as an undergrad.”
She sits down in a tangle of long, smooth legs, and I fall by her side when she pats the stone next to her. She presses both hands to my chest and I lie back. She lays her head gingerly in the crook of my shoulder, and my dramatic monologue is realized. And better than I rhapsodized it to be.
“Do you remember any of it?” Her voice drifts up to my ears as she snuggles tighter.
“Remember?” Remember what? There’s little brain space for all my haggard past memories when this perfect present needs to be immortalized.
“The poems? The ones your teacher made you read?” Her fingertips skim along my shirt, bumping over the folds in the fabric.
“Some. Let me see… ‘Again love, the limb-loosener, rattles me/ bittersweet,/ irresistible,/ a crawling beast.’ Sappho was a bit of a sparse romantic. And wildly pragmatic, as it were.”
“Do you agree? With Sappho?” Her voice is syrupy with the sweet rush of sleep coming fast.
“Yes.” I kiss her hair, softly, realizing she won’t feel the press of my lips. “But any love worth writing like that about isn’t going to be easy.”
“Mmm.”
I don’t know if it’s a sound of agreement or contentment or just a sleep reaction, but there are no words from Benelli for a long time. Just the soft rush of her breath and the curl of her limbs closer to my body as dusk begins to darken the sky. I hold her and clear my mind of everything but this moment.
The past is too knotted and the future too uncertain for my liking.
Benelli 4The pounding in my head is jackhammer hard, and it feels like my brain is attempting to pop my eyeballs out of their sockets to relieve some of the pressure. The moon is a sliver away from full and shining with a muted yellow light.
I sit up on one elbow and study Cormac, head bent back, snoring loudly. His dark lashes curl in the dull gold light, and his mouth, finally relaxed and silent, is kissably perfect.
So perfect I lean down and brush my lips lightly over it. His hand flops up to swipe at his nose, and I realize that my hair must have tickled him. I try to ease ba
ck into his arms, but now that I woke up, I can’t get comfortable enough to fall back to sleep.
I think back about what happened before he and I ended up marooned on a rock in the middle of a stream, drunk and lying in each other’s arms. There was the fight last night. When I take hold of his thumb and drag his hand to his chest, I can see it’s still puffy and red, the knuckles bluish with bruising. I trace my fingers over those knuckles, the ones he bashed against Akos’s face in my defense. One eye is still shadowed with bruising from the last punch Akos managed before the fight ended. After the fight was our run, and after our run, there was the endless few minutes I spent wrapped around him, kissing him like he was the cliff ledge and letting go would mean an infinite freefall into nothing.
Then there was the talk with Abony.
Remembering that makes the incessant pounding in my head drum faster and harder, so I skip past it and recall the little apartment, the surprising details of Cormac’s quiet, beautiful life, up in his neat, clean room with all his pens and books.
It was beautiful. Calm and gorgeous and grounded, just like him. Just like the way he makes me feel.
I cringe at the memory of my ruthless jokes, the ones I made because I felt like I didn’t belong. I mocked him because seeing his place, seeing him centered and sure of who he is and what he wants made me crazily jealous and stupidly sad.
I tuck my hands away from his body, because I’m way too messed up for him.
He deserves someone as smart as he is. Someone as confident. Someone who doesn’t give a single solitary damn what anyone else thinks or says about them.
He deserves my complete polar opposite.
I say a quick prayer, thankful that he was too much of a gentleman to take advantage of me when I dangled my desire to lose my virginity in his face. I’m thankful that I only shared a few partial secrets about my family with him and that most of the most revealing confessions were made when I was drunk.
I’m embarrassed about trying to convince him to be my secret side romance. If a man had made the same offer to me, I would have stormed out on him. Cormac would have offered to fight for my honor. Just because I’m a woman and he’s a man, there’s no reason I should have sunk to new lows and offered my body in exchange for his nostrings-attached involvement.
Perfectly Unmatched (A Youngblood Book) Page 10
