‘Do you know what it does to me, when you say things like that?’ Max groaned and Neve simply smiled because she could see exactly what it was doing to him, could feel it beneath her fingertips.
‘Well, what’s it to be?’
‘Do you want to try something new?’ Max asked, prising away her hand, one sticky finger at a time. ‘But we can only do it for a little bit.’
‘Do your worst,’ Neve said, because as long as this new thing ended with her eyes rolling back in her head and her heart pounding furiously, she was up for anything that Max had in mind.
What Max had in mind was torment, pure and simple. He fitted himself between Neve’s legs again and very carefully, very slowly brushed her clit with the head of his cock again and again.
Then she’d move, because how could she not? And then Max would stop, head thrown back, face set in a grimace and say, ‘You have to stay absolutely still, Neevy, because I swear, I will lose it in a minute.’
Neve wanted him to lose it. She wanted it more than anything else in the world, and when he started moving again, always just a few slippery centimetres from where she really needed him, Neve canted her hips and the tip of his cock slipped inside her for a blissful moment that was enough to have her riding out one very tiny, very unsatisfying orgasm.
Max lunged back and she didn’t know how he could control himself, when she was one breath away from pinning him to the mattress and riding him to the finish line. She struggled up on her elbows and pushed her tangled hair back from her eyes.
‘You owe me for that last bloody game of Scrabble,’ she panted. ‘No questions, no arguments, no faffing.’ Later she’d be impressed at her verbatim recall under extreme conditions, but not then. ‘I want you to make love to me.’
‘We are making love, there doesn’t have to be pene—’
‘Don’t you dare use semantics on me,’ Neve argued. ‘Or come up with any more lame excuses. This is not payback for making me get naked and it’s not because I feel sorry for you and it’s not because of him, it’s because I will die if you don’t. Just once before this is over, I need you inside me.’
‘You said, right from the beginning, that you couldn’t—’
‘Wouldn’t!’
‘OK, that you wouldn’t have sex. That was your one rule because … because …’ Max would have sounded much more convincing if he could even remember why Neve had instigated her no-sex ban and if he wasn’t fisting his cock and staring at Neve’s pussy.
She spread her thighs a little wider. ‘OK, look, if I’m giving up a rule, then you can pick a new rule to make up for it. That’s fair, isn’t it?’
‘Well, no, not really. What if you change your …’
‘I don’t care about that stupid rule any more. Pick. Something. Else.’ It wasn’t a suggestion; it was an order.
And given the sexual tension that permeated the air like dry ice and the way both of them were breathing heavily, Neve was more than a little surprised when Max gave her a sly, calculated smile. Like he was still capable of not just rational thought, but sneaky, devious thoughts too.
‘You have to promise you’ll respect my new rule ’cause it’s completely non-negotiable,’ he drawled, dipping his head down to give her nipple one hard suck, then retreating before Neve had time to cup the back of his head and keep his mouth busy.
‘I promise!’ He was going to insist that they held hands; she knew and she didn’t care.
‘I don’t want to hear another self-deprecating word come out of your mouth ever again,’ he said flatly, as Neve gave a surprised grunt. ‘I’m tired of listening to it.’
At any other time, that would have been Neve’s cue to let loose a whole stream of self-deprecating words, but Max’s hand was between her legs making all those nerve-endings sing again and so she just sighed, ‘Fine, whatever. Now, come here,’ and she pulled him down on top of her.
There was five frantic minutes of grinding and groping, though it wasn’t like either of them needed any more fore-play, and when Max went to the bathroom to get a condom, Neve went with him, plastered against his back, her hand wrapped round his dick again, because she couldn’t bear not to touch him.
Even the sound of the foil ripping cranked up the heat and when Max was sheathed, Neve was done waiting. She launched herself at him, ending up in his lap, legs splayed on either side of his, and paused with his cock nestled against her clit and Max’s lips pared back in a snarl, because payback was a bitch.
Then she lowered herself carefully so just the tip of Max’s cock was inside her and this was where it usually went horribly wrong, but this time it felt so good, and carefully Neve sank down, until he was all the way inside her. Then she stopped.
Max lifted his hips and Neve’s eyes snapped open. ‘Don’t move,’ she said breathlessly.
He froze. ‘Oh God, am I hurting you?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Just … I don’t want to rush this.’
Neve breathed in and out slowly and it was the oddest, strangest sensation but she could feel herself fluttering around his cock, as if her body wasn’t bothered about taking stock of the solemnity of this occasion but was going on ahead without her.
‘You’re killing me,’ Max groaned, his head resting against her shoulder.
‘Poor baby.’ Neve stroked the back of his neck, then grabbed a handful of his hair as she lifted herself up and then ground back down, because she couldn’t help herself. ‘You can move. Please. Now.’
‘Bloody backseat driver,’ Max muttered, his hands cushioning Neve’s buttocks as he put her on her back. ‘Wrap your legs round me. Tighter than that.’
Neve had always had this vague idea that sex was a spiritual experience that evoked waves crashing on sandy shores and flowers slowly unfurling their petals, but the actual reality was so much more visceral than that.
It was as if each one of her five senses had been designed specifically for sex. She tasted salt in her mouth as she bit Max’s shoulder when she told him to go faster and he began to thrust harder and deeper than he had before. And she could hear the headboard of the bed banging against the wall in time with the beat of her heart. Then there was the smell of sex – musky and ripe – and she could see the little beads of sweat on Max’s forehead and the sheen across his chest as she looked up at him – Neve knew that she should shut her eyes but she didn’t want to miss a thing. But mostly there was touch; their slick bodies moving greedily against each other and his cock rubbing against that spot deep inside her that his fingers knew so well, and then Max told her to touch herself because he was close and Neve wormed her hand between them and she could feel where they were joined, but only for a moment because her fingers wanted to press and rub and then she had to close her eyes because she was coming in white-hot bursts of heat and light and her last conscious thought was that everything that she thought she knew was wrong.
*
Then it was later, much later. They’d showered together, even though Neve had had an inhibition relapse but Max had clamped a hand over her mouth when she tried to tell him that. They’d remade the bed because the duvet had been thrown on the floor and someone had pulled the sheet off the bed. And Neve had slipped into her red silk nightie because Rome wasn’t built in a day and she couldn’t simply sprawl lazily on the bed stark naked now that all her urges had been thoroughly sated.
‘So, Neevy? You having fun yet?’ Max asked with a grin, which quickly turned into an, ‘Ouch! Why the fuck did you do that?’
‘I’m offended that you even need to ask,’ Neve said, as Max rubbed the spot on his arm where she’d just punched him.
‘I suppose it did go pretty well,’ Max said, popping a strawberry into Neve’s mouth. They were working their way through the platter of chocolate-covered strawberries; Max biting off the chocolate and passing the strawberry to Neve when he was done. ‘And I have to say, Neevy, you have some mad skills, and as an added bonus, you haven’t asked me if I can introduce you to a publicist I
know, or set up a little shoot with Skirt.’ Max leaned back on his elbows. ‘Once, before I’d barely pulled out, this woman said that it had been very nice but she had to get going because she’d left her husband baby-sitting.’
Neve’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s not … good.’ She bit her lip. ‘Do you think that you’re less scared of commitment now?’ She didn’t know why she was holding her breath as she waited for Max to reply, and it seemed like a strange conversation to be having after what they’d just shared, but maybe they both needed a reminder that this wasn’t a for ever kind of deal. It was an eight weeks and counting sort of deal.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I mean, yes, we’ve been dating for a couple of months but it’s pancake dating and maybe I’m cool with that because I know it’s not going to lead to picking out china patterns and making plans to move in together, is it?’
She knew that, but Neve still felt a pang of regret that Max wouldn’t be in her future despite the fact that he was her first lover, the first man to see her naked, the first man to tell her she was beautiful when she was all dressed up or all dressed down or trembling from the ferocity of the first time they’d made love. How peculiar that people could make love, then never see or speak to each other again.
‘No, but we’ll be friends after this, won’t we?’ She prodded Max with her finger when he simply grunted. ‘You won’t get rid of me that easily. I know where you live, Max.’
‘Let’s see how you feel when you’re bedded down with Mr California,’ Max said, not looking at Neve as he picked up the last strawberry.
‘I’ll feel exactly the same way,’ Neve protested. ‘And don’t call him that.’
‘Sorry,’ Max said, though he didn’t sound the least bit repentant. He held the last strawberry just above her mouth so Neve had to lever herself up, one hand on Max’s shoulder to reach it. Which meant that she was back in Max’s arms before she’d even had time to chew and swallow. ‘The post-orgasmic glow looks really good on you.’
‘By post-orgasmic glow, I take it you mean red-faced and blotchy … Ow! What the hell did you do that for?’ Neve spat, rubbing the spot on her bottom that Max had just smacked.
‘I had to.’ Max kissed the corner of her mouth. ‘You were being self-deprecating and we have an agreement about that now.’
Neve sighed. ‘If you’re going to smack me every time I forget, then I’ll be black and blue in an hour.’
‘You’ll just have to try harder,’ Max said unsympathetically, his hand sliding up to cup her breast. ‘Because I have plans for the next hour that would be spoiled if your arse was too sore for you to lie on it.’
Neve looked down. Then her hand did a quick sortie to make certain that it wasn’t just the way that Max’s shorts had rumpled. ‘Again?’
Max was already lowering her down on to the bed. ‘We’ve got a lot of lost time to make up.’
Chapter Thirty
It seemed to Neve that the world had split in two. There was the world that had Max in it, where she seemed to spend most of her time naked, but Max was naked too so that worked out rather well.
Then there was the other world that Neve stumbled through, always tired and blinking her eyes in the brilliant sunshine that she couldn’t get used to after a cold, grey spring. It was as if she were sleepwalking; only the ache between her legs and her kiss-bitten lips felt real.
When she wasn’t with Max and when she wasn’t thinking about Max, Neve was glad that she’d waited this long to have sex. Not just because she was old enough to have skipped all the teenage groping and fumbling that other girls went through to get to the good stuff, but because she’d never imagined that she’d be so insatiable.
She should have known really. She was the kind of girl who could never have just one chocolate biscuit, not when there were another twenty-nine left in the packet. When she’d kicked that, she’d got such an endorphin rush from exercising that the staff at her gym had actually staged an intervention because she was in danger of becoming an exerexic.
So it was just as well that she hadn’t started having sex at sixteen like most of the girls in her class, because if it had been this good, then Neve suspected that she’d have given up on her GCSEs, never bothered with A-levels, and a degree would have just got in the way of her orgasms.
The only reason she got out of bed to go into work where both Mr Freemont and Rose were finally united in their disapproval of Neve sitting in her back office in a day-dreamy, absent-minded sex-haze, was because Max had to get out of bed. And the only reason that Max got out of bed was because he had an agent, and a book editor and a magazine editor who phoned to shout at him about all the deadlines he was missing.
‘I think I’ve worked out why we’re at it like rabbits,’ he’d said to Neve one morning, when they’d decided they had time for a quickie, even though Neve was already an hour late for work. ‘We wasted two months not having sex and even if we’d only had sex once a day, that’s at least sixty orgasms that we’ve missed out on. We have a lot of catching up to do and we haven’t got much time left to do it.’
Neve still managed to make her three weekly sessions with Gustav, because he’d have hunted her down if she didn’t, but she yawned her way through them and didn’t have the stamina that she used to. ‘It’s that boy,’ Gustav would mutter darkly, when Neve collapsed after five girl press-ups. ‘I knew this would happen.’
For the first time in her life Neve wasn’t hungry so it didn’t really matter that her exercise and training regime had fallen by the wayside. She could just about manage lunch, but having breakfast would have meant getting out of bed half an hour earlier and dinner never seemed to happen because as soon as she got home from work, she was either going round to Max’s, or he was on her doorstep and there was just enough time for one of them to say, ‘Did you have a good day?’ before they were kissing, and kissing just wasn’t enough any more.
They’d emerge from under the covers at around eleven to walk Keith to the nearest convenience store to buy a loaf of bread and something to put on it. Neve was existing on a diet of sex, black coffee, spaghetti hoops on toast, cheese on toast, peanut butter on toast, anything as long as it could be spread, heaped or smeared on two pieces of lightly browned bread.
It was four weeks of being joined at the hip (and other more pleasurable places) until they had to do the unthinkable and spend a night apart. Max had a meeting with a publicist, then an awards dinner, and Neve had to catch up on her laundry and spend quality time with Celia. Though spending quality time with Celia meant facing a barrage of questions that made the Spanish Inquisition seem like light relief.
‘What has happened to you?’ Celia burst out as soon as Neve opened the door. ‘I haven’t seen you in weeks and I heard Charlotte screaming at you about your bed banging against the wall, and since when do you pad around in a vest and knickers, and you have three – no, four – lovebites. How did you get a lovebite just above your knee?’
Neve knew that she should shut Celia down, but when she opened her mouth the only thing that came out was a yawn. So, as she lovingly hand-washed her silk slips in the bathroom sink, Celia perched on the edge of the tub and lectured her about just how stupid she was.
‘I know what’s going on,’ Celia railed as she worked her way through a bag of prawn crackers. ‘You and Max are totally doing it. I thought you were doing it before, but now I know that you weren’t, because you are totally and utterly doing it now.’
‘Celia, don’t you ever need to pause for oxygen?’ Neve asked, as she hung her midnight-blue nightie over the clothes-horse sitting in the bath.
‘Oxygen is over-rated,’ Celia said dismissively because they were going off topic. ‘This is more than just the two of you bumping uglies. Max doesn’t even flirt with the beauty girls when he comes into the office any more and you smile in this sappy way every time I say his name. You’re both completely loved up and so, like, is this still a pancake relationship? Or are you serious about each
other? Are you going to tell Willy McWordy he’s history? What’s going on?’
It was actually a really good question: what’s going on? Neve didn’t know because it wasn’t something she and Max talked about. They talked a lot about how many days they had left and how much of that time they could feasibly spend horizontal. And they murmured words against each other’s skin but they didn’t talk about what they were doing and the consequences of what they were doing and whether they should even be doing it in the first place. Which suited Neve fine because she’d spent her entire life pontificating and hypothesising and it had never got her very far.
So she simply turned to Celia and shrugged. ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she murmured. ‘I mean, like, whatever.’
As long as she lived, Neve would never forget the look on Celia’s face, just before she choked on a prawn cracker. She hadn’t even looked that shocked the time she’d discovered that Charlotte had bought the same Chloe bag that she’d spent months saving up for. ‘Oh my God, Neevy!’ she gasped once the power of speech had returned. ‘You’ve turned into me!’
It was on the tip of Neve’s tongue to point out that in order to turn into Celia she’d have to grow seven inches and lose three stone, but she could just imagine Max’s reaction, then the sound and fury of the flat of his hand connecting with her arse and she shivered, a good kind of shiver, and smiled. ‘Does that mean you’re turning into me then, Seels?’ she asked mischievously. ‘You read any good books lately? And no, the latest issue of Vogue doesn’t count.’
‘Stop smiling like that and don’t make jokes about Vogue – you’re freaking me the fuck out,’ Celia moaned, but she seemed to like the new laid-back Neve, even though she was very peeved that new laid-back Neve didn’t have a fully stocked fridge and wouldn’t dish the dirt on her love-life.
‘But is it bigger than a bread-bin?’ she demanded after what felt like hours of cross-examination. ‘Well, obviously it’s not bigger than a bread-bin, but is it bigger than a king-size Snickers bar?’
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