“What do you mean it’s the main milestone of any relationship?”
“The first ‘I love you’ is one of the most recognized moments in a romantic relationship. People remember where, they remember when, and they remember how that special person first made it known that they were their world. Love, and the expression of it, is usually the backbone of familial relationships too. Hell, personalities are even shaped by the frequency with which your parents tell you they love you sometimes. That kind of power in a word is crazy.”
“You’re kind of philosophical. It’s kind of freaky coming from someone as good looking as you.”
“Sometimes beauty comes with brains,” he joked with a wink, his handsome grin extending through all of his features and bringing a light to his eyes despite the dark of the hour.
He was so expressive, open and welcoming, practically propping open the door to his soul and inviting you in to feel all of his emotions right along with him.
“But really, no other word brings that much pleasure when it’s shared between two people. That’s why I like it.”
My snark reared its head as I countered, “I can think of a couple of words that normally bring pleasure between two people. Harder, faster-”
“Which one of us is the guy again?”
“Hey, I just tell it like it is, Mill.”
“Good,” he praised, letting me feel it in the grip of his strong hands. “That’s one of my favorite qualities in a person.”
When you spend most of your life pushing people away, living the life of a loner and liking it, the urge---the complete want---to let someone in is such an obscure but powerful feeling it almost knocks you over.
I wanted Miller to know me and like me and seek out my company. I wanted to like him and hoped that the more details I found out about him the more positively I would view him.
It was the complete opposite of my normal, and it felt so good that I seriously started to question the way I had lived my life up until that point.
Could I have had this with more than just him? Did I miss out on friends and memories that I shut out out of habit?
I didn’t know. And I figured I never would. But I was here now, and so was Miller. I was determined to open myself up to any and all possibilities.
Miller
The warmth of her soft breath against my neck was still cool compared to the summer night air, and the feeling of her thighs wrapped around me catered to a physical closeness I wasn’t familiar with.
Not only was she wrapped around me literally, but she was also weaving her way into the contours and valleys of my mind, searching for the root of all things Miller. In turn, she was leading me inside of herself, shedding light on the metaphorical skeleton of Zoey---the values that supported her and the notions that made her fundamentally her.
And she was doing it in a totally wacky way.
I had never been asked such a meaningful set of random questions before. They weren’t the normal and they didn’t follow protocol, but they still told a story about each of us.
Zoey Kapernack.
I still couldn’t believe she was the one who had stumbled into my field, and that I was lucky enough to catch her. I hadn’t been kidding when I told her I’d thought of her some. I had wondered how life was treating her, if she was getting everything out of it she wanted, and if she had found peace with her destiny.
Basically, I focused on all of the things that plagued me, and then transferred them over to her, a kindred spirit.
We hadn’t been close, but it was one of those things I had always wondered about endlessly.
Why hadn’t we found each other more frequently in our younger days? What was it that kept our interactions to superficial pleasantries?
We had a rapport, and I always knew we had, even with the little amount of interaction we had logged.
It was never awkward or forced, and we had undeniably similar backgrounds. Single fathers. Only children. A jaded, sometimes antagonistic outlook on life’s plan.
But we walked on different planes, just waiting for them to intersect. At least, that’s what it seemed like.
“Where do you want to visit the most?” Zoey asked, her slight chin on my shoulder, her hands caressing my arms with a tenderness I had never experienced.
I already mentioned that my father wasn’t big on physical affection, and I had never spent time connecting with a woman. Carnally, yes, but nothing deeper than that.
“Out of anywhere in the world?” I responded, seeking clarification. The question was broad, and I had a lot of different answers I would have been happy with, but I wanted to pick the one she was looking for.
It was a classic douchecanoe move, but I wanted to impress her.
“Yep, anywhere. No limitations,” she said, folding her arms around my neck and, sadly, depriving me of her pleasurable petting.
I took a minute to ponder, and then laid it all out for her, eager to hear her opinion on my answer and knowing that honesty was the only way to go.
“I want to visit all of the places no one else wants to visit. The places long forgotten by most, lost in the monotony and expectation for speed and convenience. Everywhere has something to offer, especially small towns.” Her bright eyes held mine, searching, delving their way deep into my soul and pledging to stick around for awhile. Her face was serious though, so I couldn’t tell how she felt about my beloved forgotten towns. “I guess Jason Aldean would refer to them as “Fly Over States”,” I added with a chuckle, trying to bring some levity to the conversation, and maybe, if I was lucky, a smile to her face.
She still didn’t speak, the whiskey of her eyes sparkling just like the liquor they resembled as they moved minutely back and forth, diving deeper and deeper into the depths of my green ones.
Breaking the silence, trying to bring the conversation back around, I turned the question back to her. “What about you? Where do you want to go?”
“At this moment,” she started, a sweet smirk curving the right corner of her mouth upward, “I’m kind of liking being right here.”
Leaning towards me slowly, her plush lips grazed my cheek with a feminine finesse that solidified my knowledge that I was a straight man. My pants tightened noticeably, and I knew I would have to verbally chastise myself in order to get it under control. Either that, or put some distance between us.
And the latter wasn’t happening.
Fuck.
And then, tilting her nose just enough, she nuzzled it feather light against my cheek, and I heard her inhale, breathing in the scent of my skin. The left corner of her mouth lifted subtly to match her right, her subconscious pleasure sensors reacting positively to the musk of me.
“I like it here too, Zo. Better than anywhere I’ve been in a long time,” I murmured, hoping to give her the security of my emotions but leave her an out at the same time.
Unwrapping her legs from my waist, she hopped down, gave the cheek of my ass a quick swat, and then skimmed her body along mine as she maneuvered us to a position facing one another.
“The forgotten places sound pretty good too, especially with the right company,” she flirted before bestowing a sexy eyebrow waggle upon me.
She didn’t know her own sexiness, and I could tell. She wore her snark well, the practice of keeping people at a distance well oiled and functioning with ease. But this, this one on one interaction, the feeling of acceptance from someone, was completely foreign to Zoey. And she didn’t trust it.
She would though. I would make sure of it. Every woman deserves to be confident in her worth, and Zoey was worth her weight in gold. One day, she wouldn’t hesitate to flash it all around for everyone to see.
Delicately, I moved my lips to her ear, floating them across the skin of her throat as I went. I breathed a little harder, laboring my flow of air in time with her erratic heartbeat that I could see thrumming away in the column of her slender neck. Taking one last gulp of oxygen and giving the strip of flesh exposed at her waist a
gentle squeeze with my fingertips, I exhaled, “Race ya,” directly into her ear before taking off in the direction of town.
It was hard work to extricate myself from the fleecy warmth of her supple body, but I managed, and I could tell she was completely thrown.
But time doesn’t stand still, no matter how much you may want it to, and we were on a schedule. One Last Night was timed, I knew from experience, and I wanted to get to the end of it so I could spend some prank-free time with Zoey.
Plus, I had completely abandoned my girls, cough, cows, in their time of need, dropping them instinctively when faced with a much prettier, biped, human female.
Don’t worry, they would survive until I fed them later, but they probably weren’t going to be happy.
Crickets chirped, frogs croaked, and the sound of Zoey’s smaller, booted feet pounding after me flooded my sense of hearing and pulled focus away from the beads of sweat forming on the hollow of my neck, just instants away from rolling gently across the swell of my collar bone and saturating the cotton of my t-shirt.
Zoey put forth a good effort, but I beat her with ease which played perfectly into my plans.
Sure, I could have let her win, been the gentlemen, but then I wouldn’t have been able to grab the next clue off of the one, tiny, pointless section of unattached fence.
“Hey!” Zoey shouted, exasperated and out of breath from the run. “That’s my clue, old man!”
I shook my head in the negative, tightened the grip of my fingers on the folded piece of paper, and then tucked it into the back pocket of my jeans for safe keeping.
“One thing at a time,” I placated. “We still have to do this prank, and it’s going to take a lot of doing. Why do you need to be distracted by the next one?”
She argued, “I like instant gratification,” almost immediately after the last word left my mouth, and I had to work to avoid swallowing my tongue.
So much innuendo packed into such a little statement. “Anticipation will sweeten the reward,” I whispered into the shell of her ear, tucking my body close and resting the palms of my hands on the cut of her hip bones. “Trust me.”
The jut of her lip that accompanied her pout could have won awards for its effectiveness, but somehow, I held onto my man card and didn’t succumb to her charms.
Instead, I stayed planted right where I was, leaned deep into her body, the subdued smell of apples lifting off of her skin and filtering into the receptors in my nose.
Her teeth dug into the flesh of her bottom lip moments before her eyes left mine, her chin tucked to her body, and her mouth curved into one of her most roguish grins. “I’m more of a proof is in the pudding type of girl.”
My control was fucked.
Zoey
“So I was thinking we should do a penis.”
I can’t even tell you how weird it felt to be having this conversation, particularly since two minutes ago we had been locked in such a hot, sensuous hold that it threatened to burn. It must sound intriguingly unbelievable from the outside looking in.
“You know, if I was a real feminist I would spend two hours arguing with you about how we should be making a vagina in the name of equal opportunity. But really, I just can’t imagine that making a crop circle vagina is all that easy, and a penis seems much easier. And more obvious, and I think that’s what we’re going for.”
“I think you should argue your feminist values a little more just so I can hear you say the word vagina a few more times.”
“Really? I didn’t think the word ‘vagina’ was all that sexy,” I mused.
“It’s not the word, it’s the thoughts it drums up. The pictures and sensory memories.”
“Sensory memories? That makes you sound so pervy,” I complained with a scrunch of my face.
“Zo, all men are perverts to some degree. It’s just on a sliding scale with guys who think about pussy several times an hour on one end and pedophiles on the other.”
“Several times an hour is the low end?” I asked incredulously.
“Yeah,” he said as he shrugged, resigned and accepting to whatever reaction I was going to bestow upon him.
But I was full of surprises. His little educational ditty didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I thought it was pretty cool that guys had that much sexual freedom. That’s why I had more guy friends than girls.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t the real why of it, but it made it easier. I loved dirty jokes and the way a man’s mind worked in general. So simple with yes or no answers, and right and wrong clearly defined. They either liked something or they didn’t, and that even applied to people.
Women were much more into mind games and reward systems, and to tell you the truth, I had a hard time keeping up with the complication of it all.
“How are we going to do this?” I asked, realizing that I would have been completely fucked without Miller. I didn’t have the first clue about anything I was supposed to be doing. “Do we need some sort of heavy machinery?”
“Nah. We don’t need to make it really big, so we just need a piece of wood and some rope,” he answered me.
For some reason, the fact that he always seemed to have the answers brought out my attitude.
“And where do you suggest we get that?” I asked snottily.
His face beamed with triumph as he pulled me away from the corn and towards the center of town, obviously focused on his task with no intention of cluing me in.
As we rounded the corner onto Main Street, footsteps could be heart plopping softly on the sidewalk, and I found myself pushed efficiently into a small alley between two historically old buildings with the warmth of Miller’s body bathing mine along every inch while it acted as a shield.
His lips hovered a scant millimeter off of mine, the vibrations from his nearly silent, “Shh,” sending a spasm all the way from my lips to my toes.
The man emanated sex. It was crazy, but every innate movement hinted at it, suggested it, and strongly propositioned that it would be the time of my life.
I wanted him right then, in that dirty, dingy alley. I wanted him to lift me up, plant my back against the rough brick wall, and make me his in the most primitive way possible.
Voices hummed along in a muted murmur, just loud enough to hear them, but not loud enough to make out what they were saying, right outside of the shadows hiding us.
But I didn’t care. I had only one thing on my mind---Miller---and only one thing I wanted to do with him.
It was honestly like I was possessed. I’d never felt this urgency, this immediately kindred connection, and a carnal need to have a physical intimacy with another person.
But I guess that was the point. If everyone elicited these emotions, everyone would be special. There would be no monogamy, soul mates, or everlasting love. Everyone would be good enough, and ultimately, that would mean that no one was.
“I want you,” I whispered almost silently, hoping that even if he couldn’t hear me, just putting it into the universe would somehow make it happen.
Miller lifted me up, my legs moving automatically to wrap around his trim waist, the definition of his torso pushing distinctly into my small thighs. His hands settled on my ass, both a caress and a mode of support, so that I wouldn’t have to work so hard to hold myself up.
He had heard my plea alright, and he wasted no time in making it become a reality. He didn’t ask me if it was okay, or if I was sure, he just followed my lead and trusted that what I was asking for was what I truly wanted.
I liked an action man.
My arms settled around his shoulders, my fingertips wrapping around enough to dig into each opposing shoulder.
Our movements were slow even though our intentions were urgent, and it made every move more obvious, intense, and pleasure building.
This encounter probably wasn’t going to be seamless---I was wearing pants for Christ’s sake---but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t romanticized or fictionalized or anything lovemaking is often construed as being.
It was real.
Exploratory.
Educational, as he learned my body and I learned his.
And I was pretty sure, the feel of the brick and Miller’s fingertips juxtaposed burning themselves into my brain, it was going to be really fucking memorable.
Several minutes passed with nothing more than open-mouth kisses, throat nuzzling, and roaming hands, and eventually, the unknowing bystanders to our first sexual encounter started to make their way away from our little alley, but I only noticed in a distracted way.
I was far too wrapped up in Miller, our bodies and the sensations they were experiencing building a steam around us that seemed to emanate its own sexy feeling, expression, and personality.
Unwrapping my arms from his shoulders, I used them to unzip my hoodie, sliding the sleeves carefully up in order to pull it off.
But Mill wasn’t having it. “Don’t,” he commanded almost silently, still conscious of the drifting voices and footsteps.
“You don’t want me to take it off?” I asked, confused and, disgustingly, a little hurt.
But that didn’t last long. “Of course I want to see your skin, Zo. All of it. But not at the expense of your back. The brick will shred every pretty, tan inch in no time, and I expect to need it again later. I don’t want to ruin all the fun now.”
Clearly, he was the more level headed of the two of us, looking further than immediate consequences and rationalizing enough to make the best decision.
I could really learn a thing or two from him, and I was really starting to hope I got the chance.
I prompted him to let me down by unwrapping my legs and giving his shoulders a squeeze. Thankfully, he seemed to speak my body language because he let my body slide slowly down the length of his until my weight rested safely on my feet.
His hand worked the button on my jeans while I toed off the brown boots encasing my feet.
Ideally, I would have prolonged the striptease, sliding my jeans down sexily before dancing my way out of my underwear. But it just didn’t seem practical, and the alley didn’t seem like it mirrored the setting of a strip club.
Southern Seduction Page 35
