“No,” I said. “It’s where I get another taste of that cherry pie, even if I have to undress you with my teeth.”
“You already took my cherry, remember?”
“My memory is hazy. Maybe we’d better reenact it to refresh me?”
I flipped her over to her back and smiled down at her.
“Or maybe I should do that thing you liked again?”
“Oh. Oh.” I half-way threw myself off her, flopped on my back, and started tugging at my pants.
She laughed. “Mr. Eager, aren’t we?” Hailey got to her hands and knees, crawling toward me. “What was it you said again?” she lowered her voice in a horrible impression of me. “A good blowjob is all about the teeth.” She chomped her teeth at me as she came closer.
I laughed, crawling backward a little. "Actually, no. Pretty sure that wasn't what I said."
She licked her lips and crawled closer. I leaned back on my elbows, making sure I had a front-row view of her going to work. She’d given me her first ever blowjob last night, and it was admittedly going to be a work-in-progress, but I was going to enjoy the hell out of watching her learn.
She wrapped her lips around the head of my cock. My whole body twitched in response. Her lips were warm and wet, and I could feel the tip of her tongue poised against me. “You sure you don’t want some teeth?” she asked, holding my cock and talking into it like it was a microphone.
I laughed. "I've never been surer of anything in my life."
She brought her face down to the base of my cock and licked all the way to the tip with the flat of her tongue, then kissed me there, smiling. “I feel like these moves you taught me should have names. We could call that the highrise.”
I put a palm to my forehead. “Okay, if we’re naming moves, why don’t you show me the she can’t talk anymore because there’s a dick in her mouth.”
She opened her mouth and rested her teeth on my cock, applying gentle pressure. “Ooh be’hur be ‘ice ooh ‘eeh.”
I gave her a long, amused look, and then she moved her mouth away from my cock and cleared her throat. “I said you’d better be nice to me. Regret is just one chomp away.”
“Great thought to go into this blowjob with. You know what, maybe we should just pack it in. Head home and skip to the old married couple part of our evening. We might be able to catch some reruns if we hurry.”
Determination sparked behind her eyes and a sexy little smirk played across her lips. Then she set to work. There was no hint of teeth as she bobbed her head up and down my length, gripping me in her hand and swirling her hot, wet little tongue around me.
“Let me see your eyes,” I said.
She looked up at me with my cock still in her mouth. Those big eyes and those full lips wrapped around me were too perfect. “Fuck,” I groaned. “Did you reconsider the whole not cumming in your mouth thing?”
“No,” she mumbled against me.
I laid my head back and smiled. She’d said it was demeaning if I came in her mouth. Hah. She could tell that to the poor souls of all my sperm who were going to be wasted out in the grass here. Millions dead. It was genocide, practically. But I wasn’t about to push my luck. It was oddly hard to feel too upset when Hailey’s tongue and lips were all over my cock, surprisingly enough.
She started to get the rhythm of her hand just right and I pressed my head back into the grass, squeezing my eyes shut. Goddamn, I wanted to cum in her mouth. There was nothing in the world that could make me want something more than being told no.
“You sure?” I asked. My voice came out a little hoarse, but I knew she heard me, even though she didn’t answer right away.
She pulled back, gripping my cock and lowering her lips to it like she was speaking into the mic again. “No further questions. Thank you,” she said in a formal tone, and then dove back down to work.
Dammit.
My body was practically on fire from the inside out, and I knew I wasn’t going to last much longer. She was a fast learner, apparently.
I closed my eyes again and let her knock the sense out of me, one stroke at a time. My brain went fuzzy and it felt like I might start levitating off the ground at any moment if it started to feel much better.
“Okay,” I said. “Fuck, I’m going to cum,”
But she didn’t pull her lips off me, instead, she just locked eyes with me and made me fall in love all over again. Soulmate. I knew it. The woman was my fucking soulmate.
She increased her pace, and my whole body tightened before I came. She paused while my orgasm raced through me, lips locked tight around my length and eyes slightly wide with shock, horror, or awe—I wasn’t sure which, but I was going to bet on awe.
Then she sat up and rocked back to sit on her heels. I watched, waiting to see if she was going to spit it out or swallow. And waited.
“You either spit it out or sw—” I started, but she leaned over and spit into the grass before I could finish, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
I grinned. “Or swallow.”
“Oh,” she said, then looked at the back of her hand. She raised an eyebrow, brought her hand to her mouth again, and licked it clean.
“I love you,” I said.
“You’d better. Since the first time I heard about blowjobs, I always said I’d never let a guy do that in my mouth.”
“I’m honored, but you have to say it too, or I’m going to get insecure.”
“I love you too, and you’re cute when you’re desperate.”
“Correct. And now it’s your turn to be rewarded.” She only had time to raise her eyebrows before I pushed her down into the grass and got to work.
15
Hailey
I walked into the bakery a little before five in the morning. I took a sour look at the sign I had posted on the door a few days earlier:
Unexpected circumstances: The Bubbly Baker is going to be closed until further notice. Don’t miss us at the Sheffield Fair, though!
I ran my hand across the countertop as I came in, letting my mind wander over all the dreams I’d had for this place. It should have felt like a funeral, but a spark of hope still flickered inside me. Maybe it was just hormones from all the time I’d spent with William—it was hard to feel much of anything except amazing after being with him, after all. His way of brushing off the world was contagious, and the more time I spent with him, the more I felt able to just roll with whatever punches were thrown my way.
We had hardly spent a minute apart for three days, so the night apart from him and the half hour I’d been awake this morning already felt like too long away. I could even feel a little of his magic wearing off as dread about my life and my problems crept back into my brain.
I could have a “who cares” attitude all I wanted, but the reality was I had bills and not enough money to pay them. William had offered to help me, and he had tried to make it less pathetic by joking that he’d pay me ten thousand dollars every time I slept with him. Leave it to William to think joking about paying me like a prostitute would soften the truth enough to let me take his charity. I’d laughed, but I knew this was a problem I needed to figure out for myself.
I already felt way more fortunate than most, because deep down, I knew William would never let me go homeless. No matter what happened between us, he was a good guy, and he’d stubbornly find some way to keep me at least from becoming destitute.
Letting him bail me out would be giving up. Even if I was able to rebuild my business with his help, it wouldn’t be mine, not in the way I wanted, at least. So instead of my tried and true cookie recipe that I’d spent two years perfecting, I was going to take a page from William’s playbook and risk something crazy. Baking had always been about perfection to me, but maybe my baking was missing a little bit of spontaneity. A little fun.
When I got to the back, I stood, looking at the ingredients I had on hand. I'd already told Ryan he didn't have to come into work anymore, but he had offered to help me prep for the con
test for no pay. I wanted to be generous and offer to pay him anyway, but I knew every dollar I spent was adding to my debt at this point, so I had to settle for making a promise to myself that I'd find a way to pay him back when I could.
He showed up about two hours later, bleary-eyed and yawning.
“Morning, lovebird,” he said.
“I have an idea…”
He looked at me, noticing the chocolate I had smeared on my face and the melted marshmallow stuck to my shirt. He frowned in confusion. “What, like you’re going to try a rounded scoop of sugar instead of a level one?”
“No. Not the normal kind of experimenting. I tried something totally new.”
“Okay…” He followed me to the back. “Damn. Since when do you make such a mess when you work?” Ryan kicked at some dough I’d accidentally dropped on the floor and hadn’t had time to pick up.
“It’s the creative process, Ryan,” I said. I almost cringed when I realized how much I was acting like William. The man was like a virus, but the best kind.
“I think I get it,” he said, nodding. “We trash the place because screw that Smith guy, right? Want me to put some holes in the wall?”
“No. I’m serious. Just a couple more seconds and…” I grabbed a mit, pulled open the oven, and brought out two baking sheets. “These are the s’mores cookies. Not groundbreaking exactly, but I had the idea to do it like this, see?” I held up the cookie and broke it in half. The top was a thick, puffy cloud of melted marshmallow. There was a chewy crust of cookie surrounding an inner layer of melted Hershey’s chocolate that stretched out in glorious ribbons of gooey glory as I pulled the cookie apart.
“Looks good,” said Ryan.
“And then I tried these,” I said, showing him my other idea.
“They look… kind of normal?” he said, picking one up and biting into it. “Is that cherry filling?”
“Yes, but wait. They’re not done.” I picked one up and rolled it in crushed almonds, then stuck a kebab stick in it.
Ryan watched me a little warily, like he thought I might’ve lost my mind.
I went over to the deep frier and stuck the cookie inside the oil. I turned to grin at Ryan.
“Deep fried cookies. Paula Deen would love you. Maybe we can melt some butter over it when it’s done.”
“Not butter,” I said.
When I pulled the cookie out, I set it down on the baking sheet, grabbed a can of whipped cream, and topped it. For the final touch, I dropped a chocolate-covered cherry on top.
“Tada!” I said. “Try it.”
He picked it up, then took a bite. I watched as he chewed and his eyebrows slowly raised. “Wow. This is fucking good.”
The Sheffield Fair was held in a wide, grassy field in the New York countryside. Candace, Ryan, and William had all come. The fair itself was about what you would expect: games designed to take your money, rides set up by people with questionable backgrounds, experience, and motivation to keep you alive, and the smell of funnel cake. Being only an hour from New York City meant it was always packed with people.
William and I walked together just behind Ryan and Candace, who were having an argument about some movie. Ryan thought it was a masterpiece and Candace claimed she fell asleep ten minutes in. The contest didn’t start until the evening, so once we finished bringing all the supplies needed to bake our cookies—the contest provided ovens, so we just brought the dough and refrigerated it on site—we had a few hours to enjoy ourselves.
William wrapped his arm around my shoulder and held me as we walked. I smiled up at him. “You know, you didn’t have to come.”
“No, but I wanted to. And have you ever tried to stop me from doing something I want?”
“Once or twice.”
“How’d that go for you?”
“Not too well,” I admitted. My mind went straight to the blowjob I’d given him by the stream, and my cheeks flushed. It was amazing how quickly my brain could adjust from a life without sex, to one where I was already craving it multiple times a day, if time allowed. I thought I was probably supposed to feel dirty for enjoying it so much, but I couldn’t find a reason to feel bad for it. Love was a word people threw around without much thought. I’d believed I was in love with Harry Styles from One Direction when I was in middle school, and I’d thought I might love Ryan Gosling after seeing Drive as a young adult, but I never thought much about it.
Being with William made me realize something: love wasn't black and white. You didn't magically fall into a head-over-heels love that rivaled what old married couples had. I thought I understood it now. You could like somebody, and it might as well have been a seed taking root in the soil. Until you see it start to grow, you’ll never know how much potential is there. You could mistake “like” for “love” in the early stages, only to realize the seed was growing into something you didn’t expect.
Love though? It was a different kind of seed, and I was as sure as I could be that I’d already felt the difference with William. The thing between us wasn’t small. It wasn’t ordinary. It held a spark of life that I knew was endless. I knew as much as we put in, it would give back, and the feelings between us would grow and evolve for as long as we lived. I thought maybe that was why some marriages failed, because people had never felt the difference. They looked at the little, scrawny plant “like” had grown, or maybe even the small tree, and they figured that was it. Maybe in a few years, I’d look back on my revelation and think I was an idiot to feel like I had figured it out, but I would’ve bet my life that I had gotten to the bottom of it. I loved him. I loved William Chamberson and all his stupid jokes, his kleptomania, and his faults.
"You scheming about world domination down there?" he asked.
"Not exactly," I said.
"I can't remember the last time I thought as hard as it looked like you were just thinking. Maybe when I was trying to figure out if the "s" or the "c" is silent in scent. Or maybe the time I tried to figure out how you throw out a garbage can."
I laughed. "I was just thinking about girly stuff. Don't worry about it."
"Ah, the period? I'll mark my calendar. But I should warn you, a real man doesn't let a little blood stop him. And you've got yourself a real man."
I pretended to gag. "Not ‘the period'. Hey," I said, stopping to look up at him. "If I have to live outside the city for a little while, will you still be able to see me?"
"If you have to live at the center of the earth or on a space station, I'll make time to see you."
"I'm being serious."
"Me too. I've always wanted to know what happens if you spit out the window in space. I've also wondered if you just start floating when you get to the center of the Earth."
I squinted at him. "If you open a window in space… You die. That's what happens. And at the center of the Earth, you would… well, you would—"
"See? You don't know." He crossed his arms like he'd won some kind of victory. "We'll put it on the bucket list."
"Which one? Opening a window and being sucked into our icy deaths in the vacuum of space, or floating around in the center of the Earth, which I'm pretty sure is full of molten rock that would fry us alive."
"Both. We'll put them at the end of the list, since you want to be Mrs. Pessimistic."
"Hailey," said a man from behind us.
I cringed when I recognized it. I turned to see Nathan, who looked out of breath and a little disheveled. "I saw the note at your bakery. About coming here. I'm so sorry you're closing."
"Nathan…"
"Oh, I have a great idea," William said. He grabbed me by the small of my back and bent down to kiss me long and passionately.
It took my breath away. I'd never been one for the whole P.D.A. thing, but given the circumstances, I wasn't about to complain. When he finally pulled back, I saw Nathan, still standing there with balled fists.
"What, are we going to fight now?" William asked. "Because I should warn you, nobody makes me bleed my own blood
."
"Predator quote," I whispered. "Nice." It was a testament to how much I'd already changed since meeting William. I felt completely calm. I knew William well enough to know he was actually going to do what he could to avoid fighting Nathan. That wasn't his style. He could probably talk a rabid bear out of trying to attack him. Part of me was almost glad Nathan had come here, because for once in my life, I felt ready to find the right words to end this once and for all.
"Nathan," I said. "I let you be my emotional baggage for years now. I got hung up on the time we spent together and how it felt like a waste or a betrayal with the way things turned out. I let it scare me away from taking chances and trying new things. You were like an anchor around my ankle, and I let you be. And, well, I think I'm the same to you. You feel like I owe you something because we spent so much time dating, or like there's some final page in the book between us that's still unwritten."
"Not a blank page by the way," William added. "Look at the bottom and you'll see, ‘William was here.' Also, if you look even closer, below that you'll see, ‘William fucked the girl you're stalking. Multiple times. And it was great. And she really liked it. And we're going to get busy tonight, too.'"
"Not helping," I muttered to William.
"Sorry," he said from the corner of his mouth. "Just trying to give you some backup."
I squeezed his hand. "I can do this one on my own." I looked back to Nathan. "Admit it. This isn't about love or anything like that. Your obsession with me is just pride. It's not worth wasting any more of your time over."
Nathan's eyebrows were drawn together as he watched me. I thought he was going to do what he always did and profess his love or say I didn't understand, but he lowered his eyes and nodded. "Maybe you're right. Shit." He ran both of his hands through his hair and blew out a long, slow breath.
William stepped forward and patted him on the shoulder. "It's all good. I'm sure there's a girl out there for you."
Her Cherry Page 15
