Just Down the Hall

by Alessandra Thomas

  I’d tried to keep myself from wondering whether it was intentional or not, as I’d settled into a depressing habit of frozen dinners and West Wing every night. In the mornings, I’d been staying in my room until he was in the bathroom, then slinking out the door, doing my makeup on the SEPTA train. I assumed he’d been pulling the same kind of stuff with me in the evenings. It was ridiculous, I knew - we lived together, and would be for at least another eleven months - but the prospect of hanging out with him and not touching him, kissing him, begging him for a repeat of that night, just felt like too much to handle and not enough to satisfy me, all at the same time.

  I was too chicken to ask if it had been on purpose.

  “Dinner?” I asked, remembering the last time I’d seen him in the kitchen, realizing what an idiotic question it was all too soon. Something smelled incredible in here. I sniffed the air to show him that I noticed.

  “One of my famous dishes,” he said. “Could be dinner, if you want it to be.”

  A growl from my stomach punctuated the silenced. I laughed, nervously trying to gauge the temperature of everything left unsaid between us. Whether there was really anything unsaid at all. “Obviously I’m starved. Did you make enough to share?”

  “With you? Of course.” Everything about Jordan, from his smile to his voice, was so warm. “There’s no point in playing around with delivery in this town when you’ve got something waiting for you at home.” There it was again. Just another turn of phrase that sent blood rushing through the capillaries of my cheeks and the swells of my breasts. “I mean, it’s just nachos,” he continued. “But they’re serious nachos.”

  “Oh, that’s what smells so amazing.”

  I watched as he poured us glasses of water, his eyes flicking to mine between steps. Each glance ratcheted the temperature up a little higher. I didn’t want to be the one to walk away from him but hell, if I didn’t, I’d combust on the spot.

  He sat down beside me, silent.

  I wasn’t sure when the spark had been ignited between us the other night, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to rekindle it. Too many complications, most obviously the fact that I was contractually obligated to date a bunch of different guys in the coming week. Then again, those orgasms he’d given me had been too good to completely forget.

  “What have you been up to the past few days?” I asked, not even daring to look him in the eye.

  I pulled in a slow breath, admonishing myself. This was so not the time, when I was exhausted and starving and confused over what the hell to do about…well, him. TV. TV would be a decent distraction. With a few clicks, Josh and Donna were engaging in some witty banter on the screen, and I pretended to be interested.

  God, my feet hurt. I pulled my feet up to my side on the couch, pressing my thumb into the ball of each one. I moaned again. Jordan pulled a pillow onto his lap. I smirked.

  He cleared his throat. “Oh, you know, just getting some stuff taken care of for starting classes. Student I.D., reading lists…” His voice trailed off as his eyes raked down over my body, so quickly I might have missed it. But I didn’t.

  I grinned and turned to look at Jordan, full-on. It hit me all at once, then, that I hadn’t really looked into his eyes since the moment before he’d pushed inside me. A fuzzy feeling took my head over then, and my hand flew to my neck as I instinctively tried to smother the heat that arose there.

  He was beautiful. Growing from a boy into the model-caliber man he was now may have been the most impressive thing he’d ever done. Besides, you know, getting into one of the most prestigious aerospace engineering PhD programs in the country. It was overwhelming, actually, because thinking about him as a bona fide man made me realize that maybe I was a woman. No, I definitely was a woman, one that Jordan said deserved to be taken care of.

  Nothing had made me feel so grown up, so suddenly, until just now, when I remembered that.

  After a week of careful avoidance, I was right back here in his maddeningly strong orbit. All I would have to do to kiss him again would be to move a few feet. The fact that I really, really wanted to do just that didn’t change the fact that he was my roommate, and my best friend’s brother, and especially that my job for the foreseeable future would be to date anyone in Philly but him.

  The heat creeping over my skin spread, and I didn’t know whether I wanted it to stay or go.

  The high-pitched drone of the oven timer pulled me out of my thoughts, and up from my seat snuggled on the couch. “I’ll get them!” I called on the short trip to the kitchen, quickly finding an oven mitt and pulling the nachos out of the oven. “I am a woman,” I muttered to myself as I set the pan on the countertop, unsure of exactly what reassurance I was hoping to give myself. I pulled two plates out of the cupboard and started to pile nachos on each one.

  “I already chopped up some toppings,” Jordan called from the couch.

  “M’kay,” I said, wrenching open the door and locating half a dozen bowls filled with cheese, tomatoes, guac, and other goodies. “You want everything?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, and I told myself that he probably didn’t intend for that word to sound dirty. Even though it totally did.

  I set to work layering the cold toppings on each of our plates and shoved a bunch of finely chopped green peppers in my mouth as I did. Only, one and a half chews after my fingers touched my lips, I knew those were no green peppers.

  “Jordan?” I said, the pitch of my voice rising as heat raced over my tongue. “What the hell kind of peppers are these?”

  That was all it took to get him scrambling to his feet and quick-stepping to the kitchen. “Jalapenos,” he said as he rounded the corner. I groaned and clapped a hand over my lips, only realizing as I did that I’d be spreading the peppers’ spiciness there, too.

  “Oh, sweetie,” he said, his eyebrows pulling together as he wrenched open the freezer and rooted around frantically, several long seconds later pulling out half a pint of Haagen-Dazs chocolate I’d stashed there. A deep whine came from the back of my throat as the heat crept toward along my tongue. Jordan plunged his other arm in the space between my hip and the utensil drawer and nudged me to the side, pulling out a spoon. He yanked the top of the ice cream off with his teeth, carved out a spoonful, and wedged it between my lips.

  The frozen spoon stuck to my tongue, stiff and dry and a blessed, perfect relief. “Hold it in there,” Jordan murmured. A tear escaped the corner of my eye, probably a side effect of the shock of my mouth nearly catching on fire, and he reached up to wipe it away with his thumb. The ice cream started to melt, coating the sides of my tongue and pooling beneath it. For the second time that night, I moaned good and loud, and this time, I got a prime view of Jordan’s face when I did.

  I would have bet twenty bucks that his eyelids fluttered just a little when he heard me.

  He swallowed hard, letting his fingers slide under my jaw and brush the top of my neck before dropping his hand. “Better?”

  I nodded, even though I knew my face was still contorted in pain. The horrific burning had subsided to a mere stinging heat.

  “Swallow,” he instructed, his voice just a bit hoarser, and that totally-unrelated-to-jalapeno warmth was back to spreading over my skin. I obeyed, filing away the sound of that word on his tongue for my alone time later. He didn’t break eye contact with me as he dropped the spoon into the ice cream again, digging out another spoonful. “More,” he said. God, I could get used to him speaking one-word commands to me. I opened my mouth and wondered if it looked sexy.

  “Better?” he asked when I swallowed again. I nodded. “Your lips?” he asked, leaning in and peering at them and hell if my lids didn’t flutter a little then. “Do they sting?” he clarified.

  “I…um…”

  But he wasn’t waiting for my answer, not really. He’d already run a finger around the inside edge of the pint and lifted it to my lips, painting chocolate ice cream over them like lipstick. A rough noise came from the back of my throat, and a
breath later, he was back to cupping my jaw with one hand while tilting his face toward mine. I let my eyes close, but instead of the pressure of lips I expected, it was the careful attention of his tongue tracing my mouth, licking the ice cream from every dip and curve.

  I melted into him faster than the ice cream had on my pepper-ravaged tongue. I swept it past his lips, relieved that the burn had quickly faded to an annoying tingle, idly wondering if stroking it along his tongue would scrape away the last traces of heat.

  Either way, the ache of need between my legs was quickly claiming my attention over any jalapeno burn.

  Several scorching seconds later, Jordan pulled away, tangling strands of my hair in his fingers. We both sucked in air, staring at each other, lips parted.

  “Tell me that last week, when we were together. Tell me it was more than nice.” His voice was low and smooth, stoking the spark that had lit deep inside me into a healthy flame.

  “What?” I gasped as he pulled away just enough to say the words.

  “The morning after. Last time. You said it was nice and then you left for work.”

  At the time, it had been the only thing I felt I could do without jumping on him again and tearing off all his clothes. But I warred in my head over whether I should come out and say that.

  “We didn’t exactly have time to talk about it very much before we…you know,” I managed, dimly aware of my fingers instinctively twist themselves in his shirt. My body was pulling him closer even though my head wanted to put space between us, to figure out what the hell he wanted from me other than this.

  “I thought it was more than nice. Did you?” He leaned into me, just enough to brush his lips against mine, then pulled back again. Not a kiss. A tease. And it was working.

  I moaned into his mouth, and he huffed a small breath back into mine. Still, he wouldn’t kiss me, even though my entire body was practically singing for him and I was sure he could hear it. Hell, the whole city could probably hear it. I should have feigned ignorance, tried to keep some degree of control and dignity over this whole exchange, but I was powerless already. His touch was gentle, his fingertips holding me lightly to him, but the pull of him was so strong that I couldn’t walk away, didn’t even want to.

  By the way he smirked, it was like he knew.

  Dammit, he was still waiting for an answer. “Yes,” I managed breathlessly.

  He slid a hand up the back of my neck, twisting my hair gently through his fingers. He bent my head back and sucked at my pulse point, and I whimpered. “Say it,” he said, his words barely audible as they muffled against my skin.

  “It was more than nice. Incredible,” I managed. “I told you that. When we were…”

  “Right after you came, yeah,” he said, his eyes trained to the floor all of a sudden. “But then the next morning…”

  Was Jordan Jacobs nursing some weird sort of inferiority complex? Did he have trust issues? What the hell was going on? “Listen,” I started. “It’s not you. I just…I don’t know what this is. What this can even be. You know it’s complicated.”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding and looking back at me. “Yeah, it is. Your job, and—”

  “Roommates,” we said together.

  We both grinned at that, like we’d reached some one-word brilliant conclusion. I wondered for a fleeting moment if that was the same look he got when he figured out the answer to some particularly difficult problem for one of his rocket science classes.

  And then I remembered that, if I didn’t want to get attached to him, I really shouldn’t be thinking about those things outside this very moment. Unless I wanted the moment to stop.

  He must have had the exact same thought, because he dropped his hands from my face. One of his feet slid back, then another.

  “Right,” he said, clearing his throat. My heart twisted and started dropping, further down with of his steps backward. He turned to walk out of the kitchen and I had to press my lips together to keep from whimpering. “Help yourself to the…y’know…” He clipped his knee against the wall and swore, pulling in a hissing breath. “I’m just gonna…um. Shower.”

  A few seconds later, the door to the bathroom shut and the shower cranked on with a squeak of the handle.

  I don’t know what I was thinking—maybe I wasn’t thinking at all. We’d just said we shouldn’t be doing this, for so many reasons, and I supposed they were valid. No, I knew they were valid. But my body was already moving toward the bathroom, propelled by the memory of that kiss and Jordan’s clever tongue and strong hands touching every inch of me.

  I’d been doing what I was supposed to do, what people expected of me, for long enough. Now that I could identify one thing I wanted, deep down in my gut, I was going to go after it.

  I laid a trembling hand on the bathroom doorknob. It wasn’t fear, though, that was making me shake now. No, it was imagining how incredibly hot Jordan would look under a spray of hot water, surrounded by steam.

  I held my breath, twisted the knob, and stepped in.

  Chapter 9

  Jordan

  I hadn’t wanted to spend the last week avoiding Liz, but I knew in my gut it was the only choice. Either that, or I’d desperately want to do something that we had both just clearly said we shouldn’t be doing.

  Sure, I could have turned up the heat until I made her want me just as badly as I wanted her. I had no problem acting gruff and alpha when a girl wanted it, but I just didn’t have that great of a read on my new roommate yet. If I turned up the heat between us now, it might reach a point of explosion before our lease was up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what that would look like.

  Even though I’d last seen Liz when she was a squeaky sixteen-year-old, she was practically a whole new creature now. A creature that I kept fantasizing about throwing on the kitchen floor, stripping naked, and tasting from head to toe. I’d stop and spend lots of time in the most important locations, of course. Like her nipples, reminding me of little bits of hard candy, begging to be licked. Or the more complex sticky sweetness between her legs.

  My cock twitched as I wrenched the shower on and stepped in before it even had a chance to get hot. Calm down, bucko. This is gonna be a long year if you can’t learn to rein it in.

  That was when the bathroom door swung open, displacing the steam with a cool gust of air. Liz was standing there, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth and making me wish I was the one manipulating her mouth. As if I wasn’t having enough trouble getting my cock to calm down.

  When she grabbed at the hem of her shirt and raised her eyes to mine, I practically growled. “Liz, if you don’t want—”

  “But I do want,” she said, her voice barely loud enough to hear over the insistent patter of the water on the floor of the shower. I should have stopped it, so I could really talk to her, should have grabbed a towel and covered myself. But I knew even as I thought that, neither of those things would help this situation, and both of them would suggest that the most basic truth in this whole ridiculous scenario didn’t exist.

  I wanted Liz, naked and slick against me, and I wanted her to want the same thing and I didn’t want to talk about it. Not now.

  “Can I?” she asked. I couldn’t find any more words - couldn’t imagine any that would sound better than her skin would feel against mine. So I just licked my lips and nodded. A week ago, she’d been thirsty for attention from me, but now, I was starved for her. All of her.

  Hell, I’d even go down on her again and stop right there, no dick involved, just to feel her tremble against my mouth.

  Within seconds, she’d kicked her shoes to the side and stripped out of her clothes, leaving just a bra. Holy fucking hell. She hadn’t been wearing panties. Did she ever wear panties? From the moment I said a casual hello to her when she walked in this evening until I’d personally shoved a spoonful of chocolate ice cream into her mouth and licked the extra off her lips, there hadn’t been anything between that delicious pussy of hers and her skin-tight pants. In
the next breath, she shouldered out of her bra, and now she stood before me completely naked. Not bashful. Not ashamed. Just looking right into my eyes.

  Christ almighty.

  She ducked past the shower curtain and into the steam-filled space, standing there with arms crossed, like she was suddenly shy after barging in on a naked guy’s shower and asking to join him. The sight of her was too damn beautiful to ruin and too tempting to keep from touching, all at once.

  Temptation quickly won.

  My hands moved like magnets to her hips. God, it was like they were made for my fingers to rest on them. My palms fit right in spot where they flared out, and her hipbones made the most subtle convex pinpoints at the exact distance the pads of my thumbs could reach. I dug the rest of my fingers into the upper curve of her ass, and she responded with a little grunt and a smirk.

  Being with her while standing let me map her body with my hands in a completely different way than I had a week ago, and I let them skim worshipfully over her front, memorizing the exact curve of her ample breasts over her ribs, weighing them, making myself even more desperate to suck them inside my mouth.

  She was half a foot shorter than me without her work heels on - an unexpectedly huge turn-on. Her height let me control the angle of her jaw and guide her lips to exactly how I wanted them against mine. The water poured over my shoulders and pooled between us in the valley of her breasts; watching each drop plop into that tiny pond made me want to drink from it. I had to get even closer. After all, it was a damn shame that I hadn’t paid those perfect nipples nearly enough attention the first time we’d been together.

  “C’mere, sweetheart,” I said as I moved my hands all the way around to her ass, squeezing and lifting her up in one smooth motion. Liz was not a thin woman, meaning lifting and securing her that fast required a little skill and a lot of strength. Luckily, I’d spent the last few years working out, benching well into the two hundreds, and deadlifting about the same. With her enthusiastic cooperation, Liz’s one hundred and sixty pounds or so was just challenging enough to show off my biceps and pecs, and just easy enough to…well…show off my biceps and pecs.