The First Time at Firelight Falls

by Julie Anne Long

  And apparently that was the end of verbal conversation. A lot of other silent things were being said, however. The air practically shimmered with heat.

  Finally he said, almost idly, “You on your way out?”

  “Yeah. I left Danny in charge of the shop. I have a mother of a bride and the bride coming in to go over some floral options in about an hour.”

  “You going out via River Road?”

  “Yeah.” Was there another way?

  “You know . . . that unpaved bit before you hit River Road? It can be tricky. I got a flat tire out there one day. Down by that lookout. Off River Road. You know how there’s an overlook well off the road? I was down there.”

  This seemed like quite a detailed narrative for a story about a flat tire. Not that she was unsympathetic. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. A flat tire. In a secluded spot. A flat tire can really hold a person up.” He said all of this slowly and carefully. “You could even be loud and no one would hear it,” he prompted.

  Realization and lust whooshed through her with such tidal force she dropped her keys.

  Gentleman that he was, he stooped to pick them up.

  He placed them into her outstretched palm, and his fingers lingered there for a millisecond, transferring about three billion kilowatts of desire along with it. (“Lust isn’t measured in kilowatts. For Christ’s sake, Eden.”—Dr. Jude Harwood.)

  And held her gaze.

  “About how long does it take to change a flat again?” Her voice was a little shaky.

  “Oh, twenty minutes or so, give or take. If you’re really slowing down and doing the job right . . . thirty, even.”

  Her head went light. “Well, that’s very interesting.”

  “Isn’t it? Well, I’ve got to get going.” He opened his truck door.

  “I’ll be leaving in a few minutes, too. Right behind you.”

  Behind you . . . behind you . . . behind you . . . echoed in her head.

  She could just picture him behind her a little too well.

  What felt like a veritable carpet of heat unfurled across the back of her body.

  “Bye!” she bellowed at Avalon, who had peeked out the window at the sound of their voices, and leaped into her car.

  And peeled out of there so fast gravel spit.

  Heart pounding, she slowed her car as she approached that River Road overlook. Hands already trembling. She braked to send a text to Danny.

  Danny, I think I have a flat. I can fix it. But I might be just about fifteen minutes later than I anticipated. Sorry!

  She coasted forward around fifty gently curving feet until she was just off the road.

  And pulled up alongside Gabe’s truck.

  Clever spot. They weren’t visible at all from the road.

  She opened the car door with trembling hands. Climbed out and stood against her car for a moment.

  Gabe rolled down the window of his truck. “Trouble, miss? Need a . . . ride?”

  “Wow. Cheesy and hot . . . two of my favorite things.”

  He pushed open the door to the truck and tilted his head, beckoning her inside.

  She gave her van door a hip bump to close it.

  She climbed into Gabe’s truck and pulled the door closed behind her. It smelled like leather and Armor All and a little bit like sweaty man.

  From now on, lust would smell like leather and Armor All and sweaty man to her.

  There was a condom on the dash. Ready and waiting.

  It was almost funny. Never had efficiency been so erotic.

  They smiled at each other.

  Something joyous bloomed inside that little cabin. Funny how it was so like the space she’d imagined carving for them.

  “I texted my assistant,” she said. Already going breathless, thanks to her heart rate. “I bought about thirty min—”

  He looped a hand around her neck and kissed her.

  The kiss was leisurely, but the hand clambering down the buttons of her shirt was patently not.

  In seconds flat, daylight and cool air touched her skin. And then his hot hands were skating over her skin and up over her back, because, silly her, she’d worn a bra that clipped behind and not in front. Such was her impatience she would happily burn all the ones that clipped in the back. What a waste of time!

  He got it unclipped. She shrugged out of it with practically unseemly eagerness.

  She snaked one arm around his neck to pull him closer, and the kiss got deep and hot and dirty as his hands closed over her breasts and he stroked. No subtlety, just fingers heading straight for the nipples and making her wild within seconds.

  “Oh God. Gabe . . . holy wow . . .”

  He ducked his head and drew her nipple into his mouth and sucked.

  She thought she might actually faint from the rush of pleasure.

  Her hand fell upon the top button of her jeans, but her fingers scrabbled there futilely, like a spider on ice. “. . . stupid . . . effing . . . pants . . .”

  He reached over and tugged, and the buttons gave way as if they were serrated like a paper towel.

  “My superpower,” he said modestly.

  She thrashed her way out of them in about a split second while he was unfastening his jeans and yanking them down, along with his boxers. She slithered out of her underwear and parked them on the dash.

  And then she closed her hand around his cock in a way that meant business.

  And dragged it up hard.

  “Ohmygod,” he said in an amazed, choked rasp.

  “It’s only a penis,” she murmured in his ear, right before she dipped her tongue onto it. “Nothing to get worked up about.”

  His laugh became a ragged groan of pleasure, and she felt like she had superpowers of her own as he thickened and hardened and arched into her relentlessly stroking fist.

  It really was like riding a bike. A girl just didn’t forget.

  And for a time it was quiet apart from his gasps for breath, his moans, this hiss of pleasure as his hips arched up into her hand. She savored watching him attempt to withstand that pleasure as he swelled into her hand, his breath coming in gusts, his eyes closing and his head whipping back.

  He was half laughing, half moaning.

  “Eden. Christ . . . come here . . . now . . .”

  She straddled him. Rose over him so that her nipples were just about level with his eyes.

  “Wow, look at me,” she murmured. “I have aaaall the control. You’re going to have to ask for what you want.”

  She went for his shirt buttons. She wanted to feel her bare skin against his.

  “That’s what you think,” he said, as he drew his hand up between her thighs, delicately but deliberately, and the vulnerable skin there shivered with pleasure and anticipation as his fingers dipped into where she was wet.

  “Gabe,” she rasped. “Dear God.”

  “You’re going to want to beg me in a second . . .” he murmured.

  He did it again, but no one begged anyone. Suddenly it was too serious.

  They got the condom on him in seconds, and she rose up so he could guide her down onto his cock. Glorious.

  He sighed, muttered an oath of pleasure.

  She closed her eyes, savoring the feel of him inside her.

  She rose up, his hands sliding over her butt. Slowly, they moved, at first, and he began murmuring, the low velvet of his voice nearly as erotic as a stroking hand. “Yes,” he sighed. “God. Picture it . . . we’re fully dressed . . . we have hours and hours and hours . . . I’m undressing you slowly . . . button by button.”

  He was trailing hot kisses over her throat as he said that, and the “b”s made little puffs of air. Surprisingly erotic.

  “Yes,” she urged, on a groan.

  “You are aching for it, begging . . . so I make you wait.”

  He arched up into her, but she kept it slow, torturously, blissfully slow.

  She closed her eyes, drunk with sensation, and tipped her head so he could reach her ear
with his tongue and send those quicksilver shimmers of sensation fanning out to the nether reaches of her body. “More,” she demanded breathlessly. “Tell me more . . .”

  She rose, slowly, her nipples chafing against his chest, maddening both of them.

  “. . . and then I’m peeling your clothes away slowly like . . . like you’re a . . . you’re a . . . delicious fruit . . .”

  He dragged his fingers delicately over the seam of her butt. Oh wow. Oh lovely shivering nuance of pleasure.

  “A fruit?” she whispered hoarsely.

  “Forgive me . . . I’m not . . . Omar Khayyam . . .”

  Pizza would have worked as well as fruit.

  The fact that he knew Omar Khayyam well enough to reference him during sex was nearly as hot as his tongue in her ear.

  “And then . . .” she urged breathlessly. Rising up. Sliding down. Filling herself deeply with him. Watching herself in his eyes. Lingering at the tip of his cock. Teasing him. Teasing them both. Sinking down again.

  “And then . . . I just . . . I just . . . Oh God. Oh God . . . Eden . . .”

  Their rhythm was almost wave-like now. Languid, steady, maddening each of them. Eden rose along his lift and plunge, her breath mingling with his. She could watch his gaze go black. The cords of his neck go taut.

  “. . . and then . . .” she all but whimpered. When it came, this orgasm might just kill her with its intensity.

  “I lay you out flat . . . savor you with my eyes . . . because damn you’re so hot . . .” His words were a staccato rhythm against her collarbone, against her lips, against her nipple, as she rose and sank onto him, the blood pounding in her ear . . . “I lick every part of you . . . every hollow . . . every sexy angle . . . I take my, sweet . . . sweet time . . .”

  “Yes . . .” she moaned. “Yes. Time . . .”

  This was what her life had come to: the notion of great expanses of time was basically their version of dirty talk.

  “And you are just writhing . . . moaning from . . . the licking . . .” He was losing the thread.

  His face was sheened in sweat.

  He seized her hips and urged her faster. “Eden, baby, I can’t . . . I’m going to . . . I need you to . . .”

  He didn’t have to ask twice.

  She needed it, too.

  They were colliding together now. She rode him fast, his hips bucking up into her, her body crashing down onto him almost painfully, chasing the insane quotient that would be theirs in seconds. She could feel it pulling back and back like a tsunami, and it was going to break, and she was going to scream.

  She did.

  His name.

  Her consciousness was whipped into the stratosphere while pleasure all but took over with a near violent, indescribable bliss. It racked her body. And seconds later he went still, with a choked roar against her clavicle. She could feel him shuddering beneath her. They clung to each other.

  She tipped her head against his. He kissed her. Drew her hair back with shaking fingers.

  Their bodies heaved together, still.

  “No one has ever called me ‘baby,’” she murmured. Bemused.

  He laughed. Breathlessly. “It just slipped out. I was channeling a swinger. Sammy Davis Jr., maybe.”

  “Or Sonny Bono.”

  “Or Dean Martin.”

  “Or Bob Newhart.”

  He stared at her, openmouthed, aghast. “Bob Newhart was not a swinger.”

  They both laughed absurdly hard at this.

  “Casey Carson once told me that one of her friends yelled ‘ride me, you lop-eared son of a bitch!’ in the throes of sex.”

  He stared at her. “Why’d you have to tell me that? Now I have to top it.”

  She laughed. “Am I squishing you?”

  “I really want to say no, but in about two seconds I won’t be able to feel my thighs.”

  She shifted from him and reached immediately for her pants and her underwear.

  There was no time to linger, to savor every last particle of the feel of him inside her, on her skin, or her lips. It felt wasteful, ungrateful, almost criminal, to partake like that and just leave.

  Suddenly they were both somber; it was silent. She was getting good at wriggling back into her clothes in enclosed spaces.

  He was busy putting himself back together. There was something so frank about the undressing and redressing in front of each other.

  They sat together in silence for a time, staring out through the windshield.

  “This is madness, you know,” he said thoughtfully.

  She knew he meant the Furtive Speed Sex they’d been enjoying.

  “I know.”

  She put her hand on the door handle. Then took it away.

  They had two minutes. She was going to take both of them.

  Three, because she could break the speed limit with relative impunity on this road; it was isolated enough and she knew it well. It would be irresponsible and reckless and apparently that’s what she was now.

  Oh, God, she was someone’s mother. What the hell was she doing?

  Having the best time of her whole life, pretty much.

  “Eden . . .”

  She loved the way his voice emerged from the silence; she loved the way her own name practically caressed her eardrums. In that instant she didn’t want to leave this truck ever again.

  “Yeah?”

  “I like you. A lot.”

  She turned to him and her breath actually hitched, such was the impact when she looked at him after even a short period of not looking at him. Even sweaty, with his hair rumpled from her rifling hands.

  “I like you, too.”

  Honestly. This was the kind of conversation first graders might have while they toed the ground. She felt shy as a first grader. There was some comfort in the fact that he didn’t look much more certain about things than she felt. Simple words, jokey ones, were safer. They buffered the danger of bigger, more adult feelings. The word like was a disguise, a button-down L.L. Bean shirt pulled over the pulsing, secret, sweet terror of that other “L” word.

  “I really want to spend more time with you. And that’s not a euphemism for I want to do you again. Though, you know, that stands to reason.”

  She flashed a smile. “Natch.”

  But then he said nothing else. He was waiting.

  She took a breath. “That would be nice. I would like that. More time, that is. I can . . . I can make that work.”

  Funny how halting and inarticulate two intelligent, glib, wildly capable people could suddenly get when it came to asking for things that could get them hurt if it didn’t turn out the way they’d wanted.

  “It’s . . . you know . . . scheduling . . .”

  They both turned to the clock on his dash. And as per their conditioned response, the sex-blurred thoughts sprang to their feet crisped up again, and they began to disperse, to take up their usual burdens of worrying and planning.

  “I’d like to take you to dinner. Dinner at, you know, a restaurant with white tablecloths.”

  She furrowed her brow. “A restaurant . . . with white tablecloths?” she repeated slowly, with faux wonderment, like someone just discovering fire.

  “Oh, the most amazing thing, Eden. We dress up in clothes we don’t wear every day, and sit across from each other in a restaurant that not only has white tablecloths and lit candles and prix fixe menus and sometimes unpronounceable yet delicious food . . . but . . . here’s the best part . . . someone else cooks the food and brings it to you. Someone you’re not even related to.”

  “No! You can’t be serious!”

  “Scout’s honor. And if you can believe it, they don’t even have a kid’s menu.”

  She clapped a hand to her heart. “I swan!” Which was what her great-grandma used to say.

  “And . . . you might want to brace yourself . . . they serve really . . . good . . . wine.”

  She tipped her head and eyed him with great, great skepticism. “Are you sure you aren’t
making this up?”

  “I would never lie to you.”

  It was funny, but that last bit emerged sounding a little less like a joke and more like a vow.

  And Eden knew at once it was true. Guilt pinpricked her. Even though she hadn’t precisely ever lied to him about Annelise’s dad, she was more and more certain Gabe might not see it that way.

  There was a little silence.

  “You know . . . maybe we could go on a picnic?” she suggested, almost shyly.

  Suddenly it seemed like a way to give the arc of their relationship a more gradual rise. Though on the line graph of dating, sex was usually pretty close to the top.

  She wanted to be outside in the wild with him, completely alone apart from squirrels and deer and any other critters that might want to spy on them.

  He was quiet, mulling. “I know this beautiful spot up above Firelight Falls . . . you get a view of the canyon, the falls are close enough to see. We could spend two, three hours? Maybe?”

  She drew in a sharp breath. Of all the half dozen or so lovely falls in Hellcat Canyon, Firelight Falls was her favorite. Not as dramatic as Full Moon Falls, perhaps, what with its proximity to the Eternity Oak, and all. It was a little hidden, more subtle and elegant. The long, long narrow cascade that glowed a deep fiery gold when the sun lowered in the afternoon at a certain time of year—hence its name. She’d always thought it was the most romantic place for a date, and yet no man had ever taken her there. She hadn’t been in years, in fact.

  And . . . oh, wow. Two, three, hours. They could talk. About whatever. Anything they wanted. Anything and nothing. Oh, the untold luxury of goofing off with a gorgeous, funny man, of an hour purposeless apart from impressing and savoring each other.

  They could even . . . oh, maybe hold hands on the way there.

  She’d just ridden him hard and egged on his dirty Time Porn talk, but it was the notion of holding his hand that made her blush.

  She looked at him, and even though his polished leather seats were firm beneath her backside (but not as firm as his thighs), she experienced a peculiar vertigo. That sense of walking along a cliff’s edge, where the view was giddy and vast and the view was of the entire world, and the drop perilously infinite.

  Rediscovering herself as a person distinct from Annelise was messing with her equilibrium in unexpected ways. It was a bit like relearning a skill, like . . . like riding a bike.