They bickered back and forth for the next hour while Aaron started the fire, after grumbling about kindling. Then Brittany, Des, and Mindy made their way to the beach with plastic grocery bags in their hands just as the sun completely fell behind the horizon and everything darkened. Down the beach, I could see another small bonfire going. I’d snagged a spot on one of the chairs they had brought from the house, rubbing my hands over my calves to warm them up while the fire grew larger. Mindy came over and took the seat beside me, spending almost all her time typing on her phone. As every minute passed, it got harder to accept that this was my last night here without making a big deal about it.
Aaron was in his element with his friends, arguing with Des and Max about everything and anything. I just watched him. At one point, just as they started busting out the bags of marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars, we made eye contact. I winked at him.
“I think I’m gonna go sit… over there,” Mindy said abruptly, getting up without hesitation and going over to the other side.
I watched Aaron smile as he got to his feet too and patted her on the shoulder while they passed each other. Then it was my turn to smile as he came to a stop in front of me, both his hands going to cup the top of my head before sliding down until they rested on my shoulders. “What are you doing sitting all the way over here by yourself?”
I shrugged. “Nothing. The chair was lonely over here.”
He frowned as he lowered himself to his knees on the sand, pushing my legs apart on the way. Aaron scooted into the space, his back against the seat, my knees on either side of his shoulders. His hands went to my ankles, circling them. The side of his cheek rested against the inside of my knee. I could feel his breath on it, and that’s what told me he was talking.
Leaning forward, I moved just close enough to hear him. “What did you say?”
He peeked at me out of the corner of his eye as he took my hand away from where I had it resting on my thigh, bringing the palm to sit right over those perfectly built pecs, the muscle taut, his body warm. But it was the feel of his heart beating steadily that relaxed me. “I said, I could sit right here for the rest of my life.”
“Oh? That’s all you said?”
I could see the corner of his mouth perk up into a slow smile. “Yeah.”
I rubbed my hand in a circle over his chest, feeling more of his body on me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it,” he said into my knee.
“It’s okay.”
He shook his head. “It’s not okay. I’m sorry, Ru. It’s just…”
I moved my hand to smooth over the short hair on his head, and he leaned into me.
“Where I’m from, everybody knows about my family. It’s no secret.”
“I’m sure.”
“No, I want to tell you I just… you live in your family’s shadow for so long, and when you don’t want to be in it anymore, everyone thinks you’re a dumbass.”
“You’re not dumb. Who made you feel like that?” I asked a little defensively.
“Everyone.” His mouth touched the inside of my knee. “That’s why I went into the military. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to go to college and join the family business like my brother had done, and my dad had before him. It’s what everyone expected. It’s what everyone’s always done. Joined one of the family businesses.”
Were there more? But instead I asked, “But you don’t want to?”
One of Aaron’s hands wrapped around my bare calf. “No. Not really.” There was a pause. “I don’t know anymore, Ru.”
“Then don’t,” I told him as easily as he always told me I could do everything and anything. “Or do. This is going to sound really cliché, but it’s the truth: you can do whatever you want. Anything. You’ll figure it out. Just because you didn’t want to go to college years ago doesn’t mean you can’t in the future. You can stay in the military if you want. You can do anything. As long as you’re happy, you can never be a failure. You don’t have to make a ton of money to be successful, you know. Look at me, I’d rather be poor and stressed out than have a steady job that I hate.” I hesitated. “Maybe I’m not the best example. All I’m saying is, do whatever you want to do. That’s what you’re always preaching to me, isn’t it?”
He made a chuffing sound against my leg as he stroked it from the calf down to the ankle and back up. Aaron didn’t say anything for a while, his gaze stayed forward on the fire.
With the hand not on his chest, I touched his soft blond hair and leaned in closer to his ear. “I don’t know what to do with my life either, you know. But someone I know told me not to give up on my dreams. You know I’ll help you figure it out in any way I can, just like I know you’ll help me any way you can. Ruron, remember?”
That had him tilting his face to the side, peering at me over his shoulder thoughtfully. Before I could react, before I could even think, he pressed his mouth against mine. Lip to lip, just a press, then a peck on the corner before he smiled softly and nodded almost hesitantly like he believed what I said but was still a little unsure.
And that was okay. Because I wasn’t going to quit telling him what he needed to hear. Not ever.
Neither one of us talked much as we ate smores roasted over the fire, and hours later, once the fire had finally died down enough for us to smother it completely, we trudged back to the house. My head had been full of all kinds of things I wanted to think about and all kinds of things I didn’t want to think about.
But there was one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about.
And that one particular thought stuck with me as we went back to the house and I detoured to shower because I smelled like smoke. With that same thought still in my head as I got dressed, I told myself that I only got to live this life once. Just once.
And somewhere deep down inside of me, I was the brave twenty-one-year-old who had done something I couldn’t ever imagine redoing. Except this time, it was with someone that every part of me was convinced loved me back. Loved me back and wouldn’t be afraid to hide it, if there was anything to hide.
But there wasn’t.
There wasn’t, but if there had been, Aaron would never make me his dirty secret.
Never.
So when I saw the sliver of light coming in from beneath the doorway of his room, the door slightly cracked, I shook off the tingling coming from my fingertips and told myself that I was a different person than I’d been even just a few days ago.
I pushed the door open a little more, nerves buzzing along my skin trying to convince me that I was scared. I ignored them as much as I could.
If I was going to be brave for anyone, it should be Aaron.
“Yoohoo?” I tried to ask, but it came out like a whisper.
He was kneeling in front of the bed, his suitcase wide open as he rummaged through it, but the moment I spoke, he stopped what he was doing and glanced over, smiling easily. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I said, pushing the door open wider. “Can I come in?”
“You don’t have to ask, Rubes,” he said in a chiding tone. “Like I’d ever tell you I don’t want to see you.”
How did he do this to me? How? Swallowing the knot in my throat, I finally opened the door wide and stepped inside, closing and locking the door behind me. Aaron’s eyes stayed on my face the entire time, obviously aware that I’d just gotten out of the shower from how wet my hair was, up in a knot at the top of my head. I smiled at him as I walked over to his bed, sitting on the edge of the corner closest to him.
“Good shower?” he asked, getting to his feet with a clean shirt and boxers in hand.
I nodded, trying my best to ignore the butterflies in my stomach going crazy at what the hell I was going to say.
Something must have been apparent on my face because Aaron made a goofy expression. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I croaked out.
He raised an eyebrow.
�
��Nothing is wrong.”
His eyebrow still didn’t go anywhere.
“Aaron.”
“Ruby.”
“Aaron, for real.”
“Ruby, for real.”
I groaned and fell back on his bed with a sigh, staring up at the ceiling like it would give me magical steel balls I’d been missing my entire life. The mattress dipped and I didn’t need to see Aaron’s face to know he was right beside me… moving closer to my hip from the way the bed moved and from the heat hitting my skin.
His hand landed on the hand I had resting on my stomach, and he made a little sound. “Tell me what’s up.”
Did I want to look him in the eye as I said what I wanted to say? No. Not really.
Should I?
That answer to that was an unfortunate yes.
Sliding my elbows up over the comforter I’d just realized had been neatly made at some point, I propped myself up and let out the deep breath I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding. I’d brushed my teeth and rinsed out my mouth while I’d been in the bathroom, so there was that at least. Those brown eyes were on me and intent, and his mouth twisted just enough for that dimple of his to pop.
Now or never, Ruby. It was game time.
Swallowing the grapefruit in my throat, I pretty much whispered, “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
Brown eyes blinked.
Now or never, I repeated to myself. The world was for the strong.
So I kept going. “And by sleep, I mean later-later, if you know what I mean.”
He knew what I meant. He always knew what I meant.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I rushed out, feeling my imaginary tiny, balls rolling away and hiding.
Pink and red crept up from the collar of Aaron’s T-shirt, going up, up, up as he sat there on his heels, looking at me like he couldn’t believe what I’d just said. I couldn’t either. Slipping my hand out of his grasp, I raised both my fists to my eyes and let out a moan. “We can just pretend I didn’t say that too. That’s an option. That’s probably our best option. You know what? Let’s do that. Deal?”
His chuckle wasn’t immediate. It took a few seconds for it to rumble out of him, all content like a big cat. At the same time, the mattress sank and shook even more. His body heat reached me from my toes to my hair. My hands were moved away from my face gently, and when I felt the bed dip right beside my head, I opened one eye to find Aaron leaning over me, his dimple all out, basically ready to demolish my life.
And he was smiling even though his neck was pink and he looked like he was torn between several different emotions I couldn’t exactly pinpoint.
It was my turn to blink. “What are you smiling at?”
He laughed. Loud. “Someone’s in a mood.”
I closed my eyes and groaned. “So, how about that bonfire?”
Aaron laughed again, the entire length of his body stretched beside mine, and I found myself peeking at him again. The hand he was holding to prop himself up moved, shifting over to cup my cheek as he kept on grinning, those brown eyes bouncing from one of mine to the next. “Ruby girl, we’re not pretending that didn’t happen.”
“What?”
“That. What you said.”
Keeping my face neutral, I let my eyes completely open and shrugged under his stare. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His chuckling made me smile even though I didn’t want to. “You fried my brain there for a sec,” he explained calmly, smiling down at me like I was the most entertaining thing in the world. Or the dumbest. “You can’t say that to me and expect me to be able to think afterward.”
“I shouldn’t have put you on the spot like that,” I tried backpedaling with an apology. “We don’t have to—”
Aaron kissed me. Not a peck. He went in there. His mouth molding to mine, his tongue lapping at my upper lip for all of a second before I let him in. And just like that, we were making out with him hovering over me. He kissed me and kissed me, going deeper with each movement of his tongue. From one side to the next, kissing and kissing me.
The truth of the matter was: I had no idea what I was doing. What I was supposed to do. I’d kissed other guys before, but it had never been with us lying down. Most notably though, it had never been with Aaron. With someone I was crazy about. Someone I couldn’t stop thinking about. Someone who made me feel alive and special and like I could take on anything.
He knew I was pretty inexperienced. I knew he wasn’t. But I wanted him to remember this. Whatever happened.
Hopefully exactly what I’d wanted to happen.
Because that’s what I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about. I’d waited my entire life to have sex once. And now… well, now I didn’t want to wait around. That one time hadn’t been awesome or legendary. It had hurt and been awkward, and it had been rushed.
And it hadn’t meant a single freaking thing.
And Hunter hadn’t kissed me anywhere near the way Aaron was. Like he was taking my life force every time his mouth scraped mine, like he couldn’t stop kissing me. Like he couldn’t get enough.
It was with that thought that I wrapped my arms around him. One hand went to the back of his head and the other went to the small of his back, slipping beneath the hem of his shirt to touch all that smooth, warm skin. He was everything. Everything.
“Jesus, I love your lips,” he whispered, suddenly pulling his mouth away with a gasp. His face was only an inch or two above my own, his chest brushing mine with every breath. Those brown eyes bounced all over my face for a moment before he lowered his mouth again, peppering closed-mouth kisses along my jaw, one, two, three, then down the column of my neck, stopping on the second kiss, giving it a hard suck that had me tipping my head back for more, more, more. Aaron groaned into my skin, his body shifting around until the elbow beside my head moved and a hand slipped under the hem of my shirt, that big palm covering most of the skin on my stomach.
Aaron moved that beautiful mouth across my throat, his lips lingering over the middle of it, alternating between kisses and that suction that had me holding back a whimper each time. The fingers on my stomach moved slowly in a circle, teasing and touching, never going too high up.
All I could do was tilt my head up to catch Aaron’s mouth in another kiss.
I’m not sure exactly who started taking whose clothes off first, whether it was me who pulled his T-shirt over his head or if he did it to my tank top beforehand. All I knew was that in a matter of seconds, we were both in some stage of sitting shirtless. Aaron’s eyes grazed over my chest, his breathing so much harsher than I would have expected.
“I came ready,” I croaked out, gesturing toward my bra-less chest, trying to lighten the mood.
It was like he didn’t hear me, he was staring at me so intently.
I swallowed as his hand reached toward me, cupping my breast in his palm, basically swallowing it entirely in the dark gold of his skin color, making me look almost pale despite the hours I’d spent under the sun this past week. His hand was warm and his movement gentle, but his fingers were the total opposite when his thumb and index finger went to pinch a nipple that had gotten hard the moment he’d started kissing me.
“You’re so damn beautiful, Ru,” Aaron whispered, palming the slight weight of my entire breast again, his eyes going back and forth between my chest and face. “I can’t think when I’m looking at you like this.” He smiled, our eyes meeting again, and he leaned forward to kiss me. “Lie back for me,” he said, pulling away just an inch.
I was a little scared. Just a little. More nervous than anything, honestly, mostly because I was sitting there, practically naked, just saying hello look at me. This beautiful, perfect man, who had more than likely dated handfuls of beautiful women before me, looking at me and only me. No pressure.
But I did what he said. I rolled down flat on my back, watching him as he turned onto his stomach, his palm sliding from where it had been cupping my breast, fingers splayed
, going toward the middle of my stomach and stopping directly over the center of my belly. Aaron was watching me, and he hadn’t stopped watching me, his eyelids going heavy, his breathing getting louder. And he moved, his head hovering directly over my chest, and in one heartbeat to the next, his mouth descended.
He kissed the side of my nipple. Then he kissed the other side. Above it. Below it. His tongue drew a circle around the hard nub, and then, finally, he sucked it into his mouth.
I was arching my back like crazy. Sucking in a breath, a hiss, something, making a noise I didn’t think was possible for a human being to create. I felt him exhale in small puffs against the dampness of what he’d left on my breast. And he did the exact same thing with its sister, that hand of his moving up and down on my stomach, from the space between my breasts, down, down to the hem of the sleep shorts I had on.
“Ruby, Ruby, Ruby,” he whispered, sucking at the nub again, soft and hard, using the tip of his tongue to flick it while it was inside his mouth, and then stopping.
I was squirming like crazy, wanting more, wanting everything I’d seen in movies and in porn before. I shivered, I shook. “Please,” I whispered. “Please.”
But instead, Aaron drew back. He watched me. And he slowly rolled onto his back beside me, his hands going to his hips, and as I sat up, I watched him shove his swim trunks down. I watched a line of light brown hairs emerge and watched as more trimmed hairs appeared, then a fat, cylinder-shaped base, and slowly, inch by pale pink inch, the length of his dick surfaced until it bounced upward, pointing straight into the air. He was long, thickest at the base, and with a deep red head that seemed to have a little white tear at the tip. Those slabs of his abs seemed to heave with a rapid breath I would never have expected from him as he kicked his trunks across the room to lay there naked.
I didn’t know what I’d done in another lifetime to deserve the body lying beside mine, but all I knew was that whatever it was, I would have done it a thousand times over for just one single chance to see Aaron like this again. Those slim hips, the ridges of muscles along his obliques that seemed to point straight at the big penis that was tipping toward his belly button, and that face…
Dear Aaron Page 39
