by Lisa Levine
I turned around and was surprised to see him there and was equally surprised that he was able to find me in this corner of the store so quickly. He would have had to have almost run in order to be right behind me without knowing where it was beforehand.
"Why do you care why I left?" I responded to his question with one of my own. I didn't mean to sound angry or argumentative, but I was just tired of all the tension and the strangeness between us. It just felt like water pressure that was building up behind a damn that needed to be released. Besides, I didn't want to get dragged into his little lover's quarrel with Layla. I had gotten my full share of dealing with his friends at the nightclub already.
I set down the duster and stared at him as if we were waiting to see which one of us was going to win this little spat.
"What, do you have a sudden problem with me caring about you now?" he asked. His voice sounded just about as frustrated as mine did.
"No, I'd just like to know why it was that important for you to track me down to this corner of the store while I'm working, instead of staying with the woman who obviously wanted your attention at the other end of the bookstore," I shot back at him.
"I don't want to be at the other end of the bookstore," he said, looking increasingly exasperated.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Dammit, Ivy," he said as he took a quick step toward me, "because I want to be with you,"
Easton grabbed me by both of my wrists and pulled me toward him. He put his mouth over mine and kissed me, pushing his tongue immediately between my open lips as if he were trying to control himself but couldn't. He brought my wrists up against his chest and let them go as he reached his hands to hold both sides of my face while he kissed me. I opened my hands to press flat against his chest and let myself fall into this moment with nothing else in the world mattering to me right now.
This was the moment that I had been waiting for and yearning over for years. Easton pushed his body against mine, and I stumbled backward until we fell against the bookshelves on the wall. He pressed his waist and his chest against me, and I felt as if I could get close enough to him, even though there was no space left between our bodies. I grasped his shirt and tried to pull him closer than was physically possible. I never wanted him to stop kissing me, ever.
All of these years together, Easton was the one person in the world I was the closest to; but I had never been close to him like this.
The kissing lasted until I felt like my lungs were on fire, and my mind was racing out of control. I felt my heart pounding against my ribcage as if it were trying to crack through bone to get out. I felt the heat between my thighs as my legs started to shake and get weak. And I felt Easton, his pulsing and swollen cock pressing up against me in an undeniable display of desire, a desire that he had for me.
"I don't want to stop kissing you," he whispered in heady breaths as his tongue was still inside my mouth while he spoke. "I know I have to, but I don't want to."
I wanted to tell him not to stop. I didn't want him to stop. But I also knew that we were still standing in the bookstore and that Ben and Bridget, and hell, maybe even Layla, were probably either already staring at us or on their way to find out where we had gone.
"What have you done to me?" Easton asked as he pulled slowly away from me.
We stood there, with only slightly more space between our bodies than the nonexistent amount that was there a moment ago. My hand was still on Easton’s chest, and his hand was on my face. He was breathing so heavily that I could see his shoulders heaving up and down at a quickened pace.
"What do you mean?" I asked. I was so overwhelmed and so consumed by him that all I could think about was wanting to kiss him again.
"I thought we were friends," he said.
13
Chapter Eight (Easton)
What was happening to me?
I paced my office for the entire rest of the week like a caged animal and couldn't think straight. After I had left Ivy at the bookstore, I went straight home and paced every room of my apartment just the same. Considering my penthouse was huge, it was exactly like being a caged animal in a very luxurious and expensive cage.
I hadn't even wanted to leave the bookstore without her. I wanted to take her home with me. But by the time I had tried to calm myself down enough to leave the little corner of the store that we had been in, Ben and Bridget were already staring at us suspiciously, and Layla was only about a second or so away from spotting me from her seat at the café. I turned to look back at Ivy again, and I was so overcome with a carnal desire for her that I just had to get out of the store. I felt like I was going to scream or punch something, or maybe just rush up to Ivy again and kiss her until we ended up making love on the floor in front of everyone there. So yeah, I needed to leave.
I had rushed out of the store with my keys in my hand, ignoring Layla calling after me and Ben's shout asking me what I wanted to do with all of the books they had pulled from the shelves for me. I just had to get out. I had gotten into my car and sped through the city until I was home, and then when I got inside, I unraveled into a confused and angsty mess.
For the rest of the week, I tried to focus on work, and I stayed away from Ivy. After the impulsive incident at the bookstore, with the exception of a few short texts just to check-in and make sure she was doing okay, I hadn't talked to her at all since then. I didn't know what had come over me. One second we were having some sort of ridiculous little argument, and the next second I couldn't keep myself from having her. It wasn't until my mouth was on hers that I realized how completely and desperately I had wanted her this whole time.
But now what?
She wanted me, too, I thought. I felt her kiss me back, her tongue swirl inside of my mouth, and her hands grab my shirt to pull me closer. I knew that she wanted me, too. How in the hell did we even get here? I felt like my whole world was unraveling. We were supposed to be best friends, as we had always been. We weren't supposed to let feelings like this push into our friendship like weeds through sidewalk cracks and complicate things. I couldn't let anything compromise our relationship; I didn't know what I would do without Ivy. But how could I keep resisting her now that I had crossed that line and we had given in to it?
It was an unrealistic expectation that I could get any work done that week; I didn’t know what I was thinking. I was pretty sure that Janet thought I had some sort of nervous breakdown because every time she knocked on my office door, I looked as though I had just been jarred from a fretful sleep when really, I was just so lost in thought that I couldn't even keep track of what time it was. By the end of the week, I knew Ivy and I needed to talk. If she were going through anything even remotely similar to what I was going through, then she would agree.
I texted her and asked if she wanted to come over to my apartment to discuss what had happened. She did.
I left the office early Friday afternoon, went home, and changed into a pair of cotton joggers and pulled a white T-shirt over my head. This was going to be casual; it had to be. The discussion had to be relaxed and platonic and pragmatic. We would talk about what had happened and what we thought we should do going forward. I pulled two bottles of wine down from the wine rack and set them on the coffee table along with two glasses and a corkscrew. I was half tempted to pull a more potent liquor from the cabinet just to calm my nerves, but I knew that would make staying in control even more difficult, so I stuck with the wine. When Ivy got here, I took a deep breath and went to open the door.
"Hey," I smiled as she walked in. I wanted to hug her; I always hugged her when she came over. I reached out and gave her an awkward squeeze that barely touched our bodies together. Even that felt like too much.
"Hey," she said with a not-so-subtle trepidation lining her voice. "I forgot how massive and lavish your apartment is."
"Yeah, I guess it's been a couple of months since we've hung out here, hasn't it?"
"Yep, time flies when you're working and dating bimbos." As soon as
she said it, she put her hand over her mouth and turned red. "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, Easton. Seriously I don't know what is wrong with me. Everything just feels so off and so strange and out of whack. One minute I'm feeling like I'm going to burst into a supernova of heat, and the next minute I'm crying into my coffee. I just don't know what's going on with us."
Okay, it was already time to crack the wine. I poured us two glasses of merlot, and we went to sit on the couch together.
"It's okay," I said. "I'm feeling the same way. We'll figure it out."
"You are?" she asked with widened eyes.
"Yeah, I am."
We both took a drink of our wine and sat in a suspended silence for a moment.
"What are we going to do?" she asked. "I don't want to lose my best friend. But Easton, I can't stop wanting you to be more than that."
I saw Ivy's eyes start to tear-up, and I set down my wine glass and then set down hers, too. Above all things, I was still her best friend, and she needed comforting. I pulled her into my arms and gave her the hug that I should have given her when she had walked into my apartment. I scooted her closer into my lap and held her and rubbed the back of her head with my hand.
"We'll work this out," I said quietly. "Don't worry. We just need to talk about it, and I'm sure we'll figure out how to get things back to not being so weird and awkward, okay?"
Ivy looked up at me as I held her against my lap and nodded. I stared into her pale-blue eyes and felt the same usurping wave of longing come over me again.
No, stop it. You need to talk to her, nothing else.
Too late.
I couldn't help myself; I couldn't resist her or rein myself in. I couldn't keep myself from wanting her. I leaned my head down to kiss her, and when she tilted her mouth upward to me, I lost every last bit of control that I had tried to hold onto. I pulled her all the way onto my lap, and she wrapped her legs behind my back. I felt her pelvis up against my hips, and it drove me insanely wild with a hunger to have her. I kissed her sweet mouth and felt the pull of our tongues against each other again and was blinded by how much I needed to join my body with hers.
My hands grasped at her shirt until I pulled it off and over her head. In all of these years of knowing each other, it had never been like this. I felt the clasp of her bra come undone, and as I pulled it gently off of her and tossed it to the side, I marveled at how even more beautiful she was then I already thought. I bent my head down and gently kissed her breast and felt the immediate shock of an electrifying physical desire run down through my groin. I was so achingly hard that I felt like I was going to explode. When Ivy rolled her hips against me, I moaned, and she grabbed onto my back as her kisses became more fervent. She pulled at my shirt, and I lifted my arms above my head for her as she yanked it off and threw it out into the room. As soon as my face was free from the shirt, I put my tongue right back into her mouth.
"I want you, Ivy," I said as my tongue traced the top of her lips. "I want to make love to you more than I have ever wanted to make love to anyone in my entire life."
"I want you, too," she said breathlessly.
With that, I picked her up and carried her into my bedroom. This was not the same as all the other women I had taken into my bed. This was so much different, so much more intense and meaningful. I laid Ivy down on her back on the bed and pulled her shoes and pants off until she was the most beautiful vision of nakedness I had ever seen.
All these years, I kept rolling the thought of it over and over in my head. All these years and she's been right here in front of me the entire time.
I slid off my joggers and then crawled on top of her, kissing her skin as I came up to reach her mouth and hearing the small whisp-like moans of pleasure that she made every time my lips touched her. When I reached her face and kissed her again, I let my body press against hers and laid my heavy and engorged cock against her. My hand reached down to part her thighs, but I paused when I felt her legs tremble anxiously. Trembling with desire was a good thing, but I got the feeling that this was somehow more than that. She was nervous.
I pulled my tongue from her mouth for just a second as I tried to hold myself still against the usurping desire for one moment longer.
"Are you okay?" I asked as I kissed the top of her nose gently. "Are you nervous about how this will affect our friendship? I don't want to be nervous, Ivy, making love to you won't hurt our friendship; I won't let it. I swear."
"It's not that," she said softly. "Easton, I want you so badly that it hurts."
"I know," I said. "I feel it, too."
I pushed myself deeper into her thighs but felt her tense again. I stared into her eyes, worried that something was wrong as she loosened her muscles and urged her body against me. She reached her hands behind my waist and started to pull me into her. But as my cock just barely touched the opening of her body, and as I was just about to push myself into her, I saw the longing and desire in her eyes and realized that it was mixed with something else too—apprehension.
I stopped and held myself completely still. Ivy was scared. I couldn't even wrap my mind around the possibility of what I was about to ask her. She was twenty-five years old, and there was no way that it could be possible. But I saw something in her expression and felt her trembling beneath me, and so I had to ask.
"Ivy," I said gently to her as she still tried to pull my body up into hers. "Are you a virgin?"
She looked up at me with those big, blue, beautiful eyes that were overflowing with an untarnished innocence. "Yes," she whispered so softly that I could barely hear her.
I couldn't believe it. I couldn't even fathom that Ivy was twenty-five and had never had sex with a guy before. It made me want her even more, made me want to thrust myself inside of her and make her moan with a pleasure that no man had ever given her in the past. But it also made me terrified that I would hurt her and hurt our relationship, whatever that may be now. I didn't think I would hurt her physically, but to make love to her right now while we were still trying to figure things out, to know that she was a virgin and that this moment was a cherished experience that she had been holding onto for her entire life; no matter how desperately I wanted her, I couldn't do this to her now.
I had been with more women than I could even count, and as much as I hungered for her, I couldn't treat Ivy like all the other girls I had brought into this bed. She deserved better than that, and I was afraid that it would end up ruining our friendship in the end.
"Why did you stop?" she asked.
I kissed her mouth softly and tried to ignore the throbbing that was intensifying between my legs.
My God, not only did I want her so badly that I felt like I would die if I couldn't have her, but she was a virgin. I'd never made love to a virgin before.
"I just want to take things a little slower. I don't want to rush anything with you, Ivy. It's important to me that we don't rush anything and that we do this right."
"Is it because I told you that I'm a virgin? I didn't want you to stop; you don't need to worry about hurting me, Easton. If I do something wrong, then you can just show me how to do it better."
I literally couldn't stand keeping myself from her.
For a brief moment, I thought about just shoving my whole cock inside of her in one swift and powerful motion, and then the issue of her virginity would be over. It turned me on so much just to think about it that it was painful.
But fuck me, this time, I was going to do the right thing for once.
"No, it's because I want to make sure we take our time with it. That's not a bad thing. I promise you that when I do make love to you, it will be an experience that will leave you shaking for all the right reasons, okay?"
I rolled over onto my back and pulled her up onto my shoulder, where she could lay her head against my chest. Instead of talking or kissing or anything else, we tucked our ankles around each other just like we did in the movie theater, except this time they were wrapped up in the tangled sheets before we fel
l asleep in each other's arms.
14
Chapter Nine (Ivy)
"Wow, why are you so happy this morning?" Bridget asked as we sat together for coffee on Sunday morning. "Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that you didn't come home this weekend until just now?"
I smiled because I couldn't help it. I couldn't hold in how happy I was. "I spent the weekend with Easton," I said happily.
"And?" Bridget asked with curiosity as she leaned in closer to the table.
"And what? That was it. We spent the weekend together, and I'm super happy about it because we've finally acted on our feelings for each other."
"And by acted, you mean that you two finally had sex?"
"No," I answered. "Not yet."
"Hold up," Bridget said as she straightened up in her chair. "Why not? Didn't you want to?"
"Oh, I definitely wanted to."
"Then you don't think it's a little strange that Chicago's wealthiest and most promiscuous billionaire refused a chance to have sex with you?"
"He didn't really refuse it," I clarified. "He just thought that we should take it slow and make it special since it's my first time."
"Your first time with what, him?" Bridget asked. She looked at me for a long time when I didn't say anything until it clicked, and her eyes opened wide. "Oh my God, you're still a virgin?" she whispered as if it were some sort of shameful secret. "Oh, Jesus, and he didn't make love to you after he found out?"
"What? Is that bad?" I asked, feeling suddenly worried and embarrassed now about why he might have pulled away from me after I had told him.
"No, it's not bad at all. It's just an interesting position to put Easton in, that's all."
"What do you mean?" I had already been worried that he wasn't feeling entirely the same way that I was. Now I was getting even more concerned. I wanted to stay with the happy feeling that I had earlier.
