What Comes After Dessert

by Ren Benton

  She hurt right now.

  She’d asked him if there was a woman in his life because she wanted him to say, I’m between the last one and the next one. I won’t be betraying anyone if we pretend real life doesn’t exist for a while.

  Which, basically, he had.

  She tapped the brake, turned in the drive of the abandoned Ware farm, drifted to a stop, shut off the lights, killed the engine — a series of choices she could put a halt to at any time. An inexplicable twenty-second detour wouldn’t be the oddest thing she’d done in the past couple of hours. Ben would know better than to question her, or to expect an answer if he did.

  The keys dangled from the ignition, waiting to be turned. Any time now.

  The air emptied from her lungs to make more room for her heart to ricochet around her chest.

  “Are you kicking me out after all?”

  What a great idea. She should do that before she made another disastrous decision, like agreeing to take him to Sterling with her and not thinking to say if he gave her a five spot, she’d bring him a gallon of gas and change. His mom could have driven him. And dammit, hadn’t Shane said he was bringing gas in the morning? He didn’t need her. He had other options.

  Of all the times to blow a know-it-all fuse.

  She’d been doomed to make disastrous decisions as soon as Ben set foot in the bakery. It had always been so hard to see any path that didn’t lead her straight to him. He was a beacon in the blackest night, and she ran to him again and again because there was no welcome for her anywhere else.

  He had always made every other part of her life seem unbearable, even if she’d been bearing just fine in his absence. He made her yearn for better.

  Ben was the only better that had ever been within her reach, and here he was again, close enough to touch, when the rest of her life was unbearable.

  She closed her eyes, sighed, and used the tail of her last breath to ask, “Wanna screw?”

  Chapter 13

  One part of Ben’s body responded to the question with an enthusiastic Yes, now, please.

  His brain, ever the killjoy, cautioned, This will not end well.

  His dick, oratory skills at full strength, countered, She always ends well.

  His mouth, caught in the middle and forced to play spokesperson, produced only an inarticulate “Um.”

  Tally reached for the keys. “Okay, forget I asked.”

  She had to be kidding. “When I’m ninety, I’m not forgetting that. My incurable hard-on will be the talk of the nursing home, but I can’t help but wonder how you got from refusing to speak to me to wanting to screw.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Even his dick sensed something amiss now — not that it wasn’t willing to dive in headfirst and give its life for a good cause, but it would respect the reservations of his less single-minded parts for the time being.

  He wished she’d parked where the moonlight fell through her side of the windshield so he could see her face, in the unlikely event it held a clue to what she was thinking. “You had a rough day. I don’t want to be one more thing you regret in the morning.”

  Her shoulders curled forward until her forehead met the top of the steering wheel. “You were always so careful to not make bad worse.”

  At some point, he’d worsened bad sufficiently to make her leave him, but one thing had been true since the moment he laid eyes on her the first day of kindergarten, when she’d looked utterly alone in the midst of two hundred kids, parents, and teachers swarming the campus. “I’ve only ever wanted to make things better for you, Tally.”

  The center of the steering wheel absorbed much of her shaky whisper. “I need to feel better for five minutes, Ben.”

  The way she’d cracked open suggested that need had been building much longer than one rough day. He’d never seen her cry before, and god knew she’d had reason to. He hadn’t thought her capable of it. She was every bit as much of a rock as his mom or Stella, steady and enduring in the face of any hardship.

  Yet some form of continuous abrasion had worn her down until she was brittle and fracturing, until she had to ask for a reprieve.

  More than he wanted to touch her again, he wanted to be that reprieve. “If you’re sure, ask me again.”

  She took two unsteady breaths, unfastened her seat belt, and twisted toward him, one knee coming up onto the seat.

  He untethered himself and turned to face her. She planted her hand in the triangle formed between his thighs and used it to support her weight as she leaned into him.

  The armrest biting into his spine faded to insignificance as the hand and the lips that were so close to touching him dueled for his attention.

  Now that she’d come over to his side of the truck, he retracted his parking wish. Dark velvet shadows reigned in her eyes and elsewhere the night maintained possession, but her skin gleamed like pearl where the moonlight graced it — cool, flawless.

  Now he wished to be less damn hot before he sweated a river that swept her away.

  “Do you—”

  Yes, now, please.

  “—have a condom?”

  Shit.

  When he shifted to get at his wallet, his thigh touched her wrist, sending a punishing jolt of electricity to a region that needed to pull the plug because what were the odds that a guy who wasn’t getting sex on a regular basis and wasn’t actively looking for prospects had the forethought and the optimism to restock the prophylactic inventory, just in case the girl he never expected to see again and would never say no to invited him to use one?

  He dropped the wallet and its disappointing contents on the floorboard and slumped against the door in defeat. “Shit.”

  “It’s not the end of the world.”

  Her thumb brushed the inside of his thigh and set off a personal apocalypse. “That’s cruel, Tal.”

  “We did a lot more than hold hands without invoking a rubber.” The hand he’d been ignoring in favor of its thigh-touching cohort snuck under the hem of his shirt, searing a trail from hip to navel, making his abdomen clench. “Do you want to get each other off for old time’s sake?”

  She had made a study of reducing him to a boneless, brainless puddle of raw nerve endings, but she never allowed him to touch her below the waist. The girl who tutored him from a D to a B-plus in biology knew everything about the reproductive process, so her fear of getting knocked up before she could escape from Westard didn’t hold water. More likely, she hadn’t trusted him to keep his dick out of her if she granted him even limited access.

  Even as a horny teenager, he’d recognized the unfairness of the one-sided payoff, but he accepted her no as no and accepted her yes with yes, now, please because he was a horny teenager.

  His age had changed, at least.

  Before going any further, he wanted to be clear about the reciprocal nature of the proposed off-getting. He was in debt to her for eight months of mind-blowing orgasms already, and he had no intention of borrowing further.

  He pressed his hand against hers to stop the tips of her fingers from dipping any further beneath the waistband of his jeans. “Not like old times. I’m touching you, too.”

  The moon gifted him with the luscious curving of her lips. “Yes, you are.”

  Then those lips were against his skin, sparking against his jaw, and it was his turn to grin because she still didn’t go straight for his mouth, as if he were a wild animal that had to be acclimated to her kiss in increments before she let him have the real deal.

  He’d had the real deal. He knew to expect the loss of his soul, one sip at a time, when she put her mind to kissing, and he’d sit up and beg to be lost if he had to wait much longer. His fingers slid up her back to burrow in the base of her braid, holding her head in place while he sought her lips with his.

  She ducked her chin to evade his kiss and gave him just enough time to worry she’d rescinded the offer before coming back to meet him, giving his lower lip a quick, hard suck before invading his mouth with h
er tongue.

  She tasted of peanut butter. He added that to the list of things he would never experience without thinking of her and aching, along with marshmallows and cherry lip gloss.

  She yanked her hand out from under his shirt. Before he could whimper in protest of the desertion, she breathed against his ear, “I want your skin.”

  He shucked his shirt and had her oversized flannel up over her head and her body stretched out beneath his with no recollection of the maneuvering involved. They were both too tall to stretch out on the truck’s bench, so he knelt over her with her left thigh pinned between his hip and the back of the seat and her right ankle pretzeled around his knees.

  Her hands claimed the skin she’d demanded, fingertips teasing up waves of goosebumps, flat palms smoothing his flesh and melting the muscles beneath, the occasional nick of short nails making him tense and heavy all over. He felt huge, clumsy, hard-edged, afraid he’d crush her if he laid his freakish weight on top of her delicate, fine-boned perfection.

  He hovered above her, braced on stiff arms, content to look at her. He didn’t know where to begin because every part of her was exquisite. Her excess of clothing might be a complicating factor. He couldn’t make an informed decision with her bra obstructing so much of the view.

  He slipped a hand under her back to right that wrong.

  She flinched away from his touch.

  His hand stilled before he made whatever it was worse. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s fine. I bruised my shoulder a little on the garage door.”

  It hadn’t escaped his notice that she’d skirted around him as if he was wired to explode on contact. “When you were avoiding me.”

  Her fingers curled in his hair and pulled him closer. “I’m not avoiding you now.”

  Every point of contact throbbed in time with his heart in confirmation. Maybe she wasn’t wrong about the explosion.

  He pinched the bra hooks free of their loops and traced the channel of her spine with his fingertips, extracting his hand via a lower route to spare the tender spot.

  The tension in her hands corresponded with the tightening of her lips, as if she imagined he wouldn’t remember how much she hated her breasts being the focus of attention. She’d given him so few words of personal significance, he remembered every one of them.

  I bet you don’t know what color my eyes are, but you and everybody else could pick my boobs out of a lineup.

  He’d been trying to catch her eye since they were five years old; his acquaintance with her breasts began many years later. She’d gone very quiet when he described every fleck and band of color in her eyes, how they changed hue in different lighting and picked up shades from her clothes, the little brown freckle at the outer rim of the right iris.

  She was quiet now, too, raising her arms so he could lift the offending garment away, fists clenched in anticipation of punching him in the head if he had the bad manners to motorboat her.

  He had never given her a reason to make a fist. Either she didn’t remember, or she was confusing him with someone who had given her a reason to clench up, and that bastard needed to get out of her head right fucking now.

  He dropped her bra on the floor with their shirts and beheld the bounty it had been hiding. Her breasts were indeed exquisite — full, round, creamy in the moonlight, capped with darker crests that demonstrated neither excitement nor chill — but no more exquisite than her collarbones or shoulders or belly button or any other inch of her. “You still have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  She chuckled. “Those aren’t eyes, Fielder.”

  Whatever they were called, they did pretty things when she laughed. More importantly, her fists unfurled against his shoulders at the same time.

  Occasionally, being a clown paid off. “Sorry. My tutor’s idea of covering anatomy was more literal than instructive.”

  “I can give you a crash course on the important parts. This is a mouth.” She traced the seam of his lips with the tip of her index finger. “Shut it.”

  Ever the dedicated pupil, he did as directed.

  She took his hand and pressed it against her breast. “This is a breast. Squeeze it.”

  She clamped his hand over the mound until it practically flattened. She ought to know how she liked to be touched, but for the sake of intellectual exploration, he shifted his weight to his elbows so both hands were free, stroked the outer curve of her other breast with a knuckle, and watched as that nipple puckered in response to the light touch.

  “I think you’re giving me bad information.” He trailed his lips along the arc his knuckle had started. “I was taught to squeeze your ass but tease these.”

  A breath caught in her chest, and she released the crushing hand. “I never told you that.”

  “I pay extra attention when you’re not talking.”

  When her breathing grew shallow and rapid, like now, she spoke volumes. He skimmed his thumb across the nipple of the abused breast, and it, too, gathered into a tight peak.

  Occasionally, ignoring the teacher also paid off.

  “Okay, you seem to have that under control. Moving on.” Her fingers traveled to his fly.

  He shifted out of her reach. “I’ve had that under control for years. I’m more interested in what’s in your pants.”

  She indulged his curiosity by undoing the button of her jeans and sliding down the zipper, exposing a triangle of white cotton that glowed in the moonlight.

  If they’d done this when he was struggling with geometry, he’d remember what the hell a hypotenuse was. He traced the edges of the triangle, the teeth of the zipper biting his finger. Her belly tightened the same way his did when she touched him. More tension, or the same leaden, pulsing need he felt, straining for contact?

  He felt seventeen again, awash in the same reverent disbelief that he’d been deemed worthy to touch the girl he’d dreamed about all his life, the same fear of having the privilege revoked if he failed to prove his worth, if he took too much from her. If this was all she offered — one look, one touch, one moment inside those cold stone walls with her — this was already better than any man deserved. It would be wrong to be greedy.

  She pulled his hair, a tug he felt clear to the base of his spine. “What? You’ve never seen ten-for-ten-dollars underpants before?”

  About the same value as her cookies, and he wanted them on his tongue at least as much. “I think you gave me bad information about mouths, too.”

  “If you think you know more about the subject than I do, Benjamin, come to the front of the class and teach the lesson yourself.”

  Lesson? He’d need a semester to cover the basics, a graduate degree program to do justice to the discipline.

  But if she was only willing to audit one class, he’d better make it his best material. “They should be open at least a little bit.”

  He taught her everything he knew about soft, clingy kisses, favoring the side of her lower lip not reddened by her nervous chewing. Slowly, slowly, her residual stiffness yielded. One hand took its time relearning her contours, the little bumps on her ribs, the indentation of her waist, the flare of her hip, before gliding over the swell of her butt and giving it a firm squeeze.

  She moaned into his mouth and reached again for his fly. This time, he let her do whatever the hell she wanted. He couldn’t take too much of what she gave freely.

  At the same time her fingers closed around his cock, his hand slipped inside flimsy white cotton and found her hot and slick, proving he wasn’t alone in want.

  She had never let him in her pants, but once, she ground herself against him until she came. She hadn’t made a sound, as if pleasure was contraband she’d be punished for having if she got caught.

  He wanted her to feel so good, she forgot to be controlled. He wanted her to moan and pant and gasp like she no longer knew what she was doing and couldn’t stop herself.

  He moved his fingers in time with hers, letting her set the pace and intensity, sl
ow and gentle at first. The more she rode his hand, the hotter and tighter her grip on his shaft became. When she lost track of what she was doing to him, faltered, stalled, squeezed, he concentrated on sustaining the touch that had made her feel so good, she no longer knew what she was doing.

  Chapter 14

  Self-gratification was more efficient, but inefficiency wasn’t a bad thing when every extra second included Ben’s weight between her thighs, his skin sticking to hers, and his gorgeous mouth gliding, tasting, and whispering barely intelligible words of approval.

  Not that his fingers weren’t doing a fine job. They had obviously traversed similar terrain and knew their way around, but when he expressed interest in what was in her pants, he meant to explore every peak, valley, and grotto thoroughly.

  His exploration, not his experience, had her writhing beneath him. He didn’t treat her like a collection of generic female body parts. He took the time to learn her.

  And he remembered her. Not just what she’d done to him, but her. He knew how to touch her and where. He used her name. As if it made a difference it was her hand on his dick and not whatever random female happened to be available.

  Damn him.

  She could live without sex. She’d wanted to be touched, kissed, that was all, and sex was the price she was willing to pay. She hadn’t expected the intrusive part to be so... nice.

  She’d started to warm up as soon as he wrapped his hand around the base of her skull and held her. Being grabbed usually made her feel trapped. Instead, the tension in her neck liquefied and drained away.

  Then he took care to avoid her sore shoulder when most men would have been in too much of a hurry to rip off her bra and get at her tits to even feign a second of concern for her discomfort.

  Other than hating confirmation her chest was the sum of her appeal, she didn’t enjoy her breasts being touched. They were heavy and pulled on her chest wall, cystic, sore most of the time. Firm, steady pressure felt better than jiggling around, and that was the best she expected — not Ben giving all his attention to her skin, making it tight and tingly, craving more of his touch.