by Bec Linder
“You look incredible,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss my bare belly, just above and to the right of my navel. The feeling of his lips and the light scratch of his beard stubble sent tingles running through my body. “You’re a wet dream. Holy shit, Beth. Did you always look this good?”
I laughed, my hands on his shoulders. The damp fabric of his rain jacket crinkled at my touch. “You’re laying it on a little thick.”
“No such thing,” he said. “Women love being told how glorious they are.”
“Did you read that on the back of a cereal box?” I teased. I felt giddy. My cheeks hurt from smiling. I was with him again—with him for real, not the fake togetherness we’d been miming so far, distrustful and suspicious.
This, now, was so much better. He kissed my belly as he unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans, and I felt every brush of his lips kindle a fire in me. I had expected to feel cautious with him, but it wasn’t like that at all. Our bodies remembered each other.
“Hmm,” he said, dipping his fingers inside my jeans and tracing along the elastic edge of my underpants. “What’s this? Matching panties? I thought women only wore matching lingerie when they expected to get laid.”
“Who says I didn’t?” I asked. “You have a lot of strange ideas about women. If things didn’t work out with you, there’s always the bellhop.”
“Big talk from a small woman,” he said. “Let’s get you out of these jeans.”
We worked together to peel my jeans down my legs. Skinny jeans made my butt look good, but they were difficult to remove gracefully. Once I was naked aside from my underwear, Max reached for the clasp of my bra.
I took a step back. I didn’t want to be the only one who was naked. “Now you,” I said.
He grinned. “My pleasure,” he said, and immediately began squirming out of his raincoat. He tossed it on the floor, and then stripped off his sweater and T-shirt and added them to the pile. I watched eagerly as his bare torso was revealed, lightly tanned and muscular. He bent down to remove his socks, and then lay on his back on the bed to shove off his pants. He wore dark boxer-briefs underneath, made of soft cotton that clung to the shape of his erection.
I blushed and looked away. How ridiculous, to be embarrassed now. It wasn’t like I had never seen his dick before.
“Shy?” he asked me, the word dripping with amusement.
I folded my arms. I needed to defend myself. “I just think it’s obscene. Men shouldn’t be allowed to wear boxer-briefs like that. It’s so—so—”
“Erotic?” he asked. “Why, Beth. I had no idea you liked my shorts that much.” He was still lying on his back. He ran one hand down his chest, over his defined abs, and cupped his hand over the bulge in his briefs. He closed his eyes for a moment, either overwhelmed by the sensation or feigning it perfectly, and then looked at me again and winked. “Want to give it a try?”
Oh, he was so full of himself. It would have served him right if I put my clothes back on and left the room, but that would be cutting off my own nose to spite my face. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to climb on that bed with him and put my hand over his and feel the heat and life of his body.
So I did it. I lay beside him on the mattress and touched his shoulders, his chest, his abs. “I don’t remember you looking like this,” I said.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I was a skinny bastard. I had a college roommate who was an amateur bodybuilder, and he got me into working out.”
“Send him a thank-you note from me,” I said. “My goodness.”
“I’m sure he would be glad to know that his efforts haven’t gone unnoticed,” Max said, smirking. He raised his arms above his head and flexed, the vain creature, but I didn’t complain. It was a nice view.
His hand was still resting on top of his hard-on. I slid my own hand down and twined my fingers through his. I felt his hard cock leap at my touch, and felt an answering surge of lust in my own body.
“I changed my mind,” he said. He flipped his hand over, grasped mine, and drew it away from his body. “Any more of that and we’ll be finished before we’ve started.” He turned onto his side and faced me, his eyes dark and heavy-lidded. “Now, what am I going to do with you?”
The question proved to be entirely rhetorical. He ran a hand along my side, and then curled it around my back and unclasped my bra, somehow, one-handed. The tight band opened, and Max shoved the cups up and out of the way and bent to put his mouth on my breasts.
He didn’t go directly for my nipples the way I expected him to. He spent a long time kissing the underside of my breasts, very slow and deliberate, a ticklish sort of feeling that made me squirm on the bed and squeeze my thighs together. By the time he did finally move upward and suck one of my nipples into his mouth, I was so tense with anticipation and desire that my back arched right off the bed.
He backed off, chuckling. My bra straps had slid off my shoulders, and he drew them down the rest of the way and tossed the bra toward the end of the bed. “Too much?”
“Not enough,” I said, and reached for him.
We kissed like it was going out of style, rolling around on the bed together in our underwear. Max’s hands were everywhere: my breasts, my waist, my ass. He groped me so shamelessly that I had to laugh, smiling with my lips still pressed against his.
“What?” he asked. “What’s funny?”
“You’ve got eight arms,” I said. “At least eight.”
“The better to squeeze you with, my dear,” he said, and kissed me again.
We were sideways on the bed by that point. The mattress was the approximate size of the Atlantic Ocean. I had felt a little adrift the night before, sleeping in that huge bed all by myself, but I was glad for it now, with Max’s long limbs taking up acres of space. My skin tingled each time he touched me. Our feet brushed together as we kissed, and even that mundane touch made my nerve endings light up. I kept telling myself that things were exactly the same as they had been when we were seventeen, but that wasn’t entirely true. We had both grown up, and although Max had been a careful, considerate lover as a teenager, time and experience had given his caresses a confidence that was slowly turning me to incoherent mush.
Max cupped my face in one hand while he trailed the other down my body, moving slowly but unerringly toward the waistband of my panties. He tucked his fingers beneath the elastic and moved even lower, his palm crafting trails of fire against my bare skin. I was so swollen and wet and eager that I thought I might explode at his first touch. I closed my eyes and braced myself in anticipation.
But then he stopped. I opened one eye and looked at him. He was hovering above me, smirking, his hair falling in his face, his hand tucked between my thighs and almost but not quite where I wanted it. I swallowed to create some moisture in my mouth and said, “Why did you stop?”
“Because I want you to be looking at me when I do it,” he said, and moved his fingers that last crucial inch and was there.
My eyelids slid closed again. His fingers were big and firm and—serious, was the word that came to mind. They meant business. He intended to make me come, and he was going to get his way.
Oh, God.
“Do you like that?” he asked. The amused edge to his voice made me crazy. I opened my eyes and glared at him. I wanted to wipe that smug look right off his face.
“I don’t remember you being like this,” I said. “You were always so—” He moved his fingers, and my breath caught. “So nice to me.”
“I was seventeen,” he said. “I’ve changed.”
Had he ever. I was going to shake into pieces and possibly die, right there on the mattress in the most expensive hotel I had ever stayed at. But what a way to go.
I lay there while he stroked me and kissed my breasts and neck and face. He made me feel precious. That hadn’t changed. He had always touched me like he couldn’t quite believe he was allowed to do it, and despite his smirk and his confident hands, I knew just from the way he moved his hands on my body t
hat he was wholly there with me, in that moment, not thinking about anything else, not worrying or distracted. Just there, loving me.
Love was a big word. A scary word. But it was what I felt, right then.
“You like this too much,” he said. ‘Don’t you? You can’t help yourself. You’re going to come before I want you to, like a very bad girl. And you know what happens to bad girls.”
“No,” I said, breathless. “What?”
He laughed, and bent down to kiss my neck. “I’m not sure. Maybe my dirty talk needs some work. Spanking? I guess that’s what happens to bad girls.”
He was teasing, but I sort of liked the thought: me bent over his lap, my ass in the air…
I quivered. My pussy clenched. Not tonight, but maybe soon. I might like it. We could find out.
“Try it,” I said.
“You’re not a bad girl, Beth,” he said. “You’re a good girl. You’re the best girl I know.” He kissed my cheek and my temple and then my mouth, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and didn’t tell him that I had meant it not as a dare but as an invitation.
We had time. We were back together, now. We had all the time in the world.
I would love him until I died. That was the simple truth of it. My heart would beat in time with his until they put me in the ground.
“I’m going to make you come,” he said, apparently taking my silence as agreement, “and then I’m going to fuck you, and then I’m going to make you come again. How does that plan sound?”
It sounded like I was definitely going to die. “Fine,” I said weakly. “Good.”
“It’s hard for you, isn’t it?” he asked. He kissed my throat. “My poor Beth. Too worked up from being fingered to form complete sentences.”
He was right, but I would never admit it. I struggled up through the haze of desire engulfing me and said, “Are you just going to talk about it or are you actually going to do it?”
He laughed again, pleased with my complete surrender or with his own manliness or maybe both. And then he moved his other hand to join his first and pressed a finger inside of me, or maybe two or three—I wasn’t entirely sure—and rubbed his clever fingers against me even faster, and I shuddered and clutched at his strong arms and dug my heels into the mattress and squeezed around him and came like a freight train.
“Beth,” he said, “Beth,” and kissed the side of my face while I panted and tried to remember my own name.
I opened my eyes. He was gazing down at me, with a look on his face that terrified me and turned my heart into a messy little knot. “Stop,” I said. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m just looking at you,” he said. “You’re so—Beth. Christ. I’d like to play it really cool right now and act like I’m a slick bastard who’s totally in control, but I’m not cool, and I’m not in control, and if I’m not inside of you within the next thirty seconds, you might have to call an ambulance.”
I probably shouldn’t have found him charming, but I did. I reached up and stroked his messy hair out of his eyes. “If that’s the case, I hope you have a condom.”
His expression turned to one of absolute dismay. He got off the bed and went into the other room, where I heard him fumbling around in his suitcase and swearing softly. I laughed until my belly ached. I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it. I was glowing and satisfied in the aftermath of my orgasm, and Max’s distress struck me as funny rather than urgent.
And soon enough, he appeared in the doorway with a condom in his hand, so all was right with the world.
“Well?” I asked. “What are you waiting for?”
I meant it as a challenge, and he took it as such, because he was on top of me in a flash, rolling the condom onto his impressively hard cock and lifting one of my thighs out of the way.
“Missionary?” I teased. “So unimaginative.”
“I’ll give you unimaginative,” he muttered, positioning himself, and then he rolled his hips and pushed inside me, and I couldn’t think of any snappy comebacks to make after that.
We moved together in a rhythm as old as time. My hips met his with every thrust. We clutched at each other, fingers skidding across sweaty skin. Each motion of our bodies stoked the hot fire burning in my belly, and each brush of his lips against my face served to further crumble my already shattered self-control. His gloating hadn’t been mere boastfulness: I was going to come again, no matter how much I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“Beth,” he said, his voice ragged, and that was what finally did me in: that we were in it together, in joy and ruin.
I came again, shaking around him.
And he groaned and dug his fingers into my hips and followed me into ecstatic collapse.
Afterward, we stayed in bed for a long time, not talking much, just lying in each other’s arms. I reveled in the feeling of Max’s bare skin against mine. It had been far too long since I’d last experienced that simple human comfort. I traced my fingers along his arms and his lightly furred chest, and then down the midline of his body to dip into his navel.
He chuckled. “If you keep doing that, there’s no way we’re leaving this bed today.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said. “Where do we need to go? We can order room service and I’ll make you answer the door wrapped in a sheet.”
“Tempting,” he said. “Okay. It’s a deal.” He rolled over and reached for his phone on the nightstand. I admired the muscles stretching and flexing in his back. “Let me just make sure there’s nothing urgent from the outside world.”
“What could possibly be more urgent than staying here and having sex with me again?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He was looking at something on his phone. I watched his shoulders tense, and my stomach sank. So much for our afternoon.
He set his phone down and rolled back to face me. His eyebrows were drawn together. I waited for the news, whatever it was. Then he smiled, unexpectedly, and said, “I just got an email from my investigator. He’s found Renzo’s house.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Beth
We slept together in the big bed, our limbs tangling together all night, and in the morning we drove south to find Renzo.
I expected another cab, or a car service, but Max led me out of the hotel and directly to a nondescript sedan parked at the valet stand. “We’re going undercover,” he explained, winked at me, and slid on his sunglasses. Right. Secret Agent mode.
We stopped for coffee and croissants on our way out of town. I ate in the passenger seat, crumbling flakes of pastry onto my lap despite my best efforts to be neat. Max ate with one hand on the steering wheel and somehow managed not to make any mess at all. It was black magic.
“Beth, will you take a look at my phone and tell me the address again? It’s the first email in my inbox.”
“Sure,” I said, with a little trepidation, like I would see something in Max’s phone that would unravel our newfound accord. What could it be? Naked pictures of another woman? A text message from his wife? I wondered what I could find that would make me turn away from him.
But there was nothing suspicious when I picked up his phone, just the email as he had described, and an address in Redwood City.
I gave Max the address, and then leaned forward to enter it into the car’s GPS. Men always thought they knew where they were going, but I didn’t want to spend four hours aimlessly driving around Silicon Valley. “Redwood City. That sounds nice.”
“Parts of it are,” he said. “I’m not sure what Renzo’s living situation is. Beth, I want you to prepare yourself. I know you want to think that Renzo has landed on his feet, but—”
“I know that,” I said, annoyed. “I’m not that naïve. I know it might be really bad. I know he might not even want to talk to us. I don’t have any expectations. You don’t have to prepare me.”
“Right,” he said. “Sorry. I know I don’t. I’m just used to…” He trailed off and shrugged.
Used
to what? I wasn’t going to push it. “Okay,” I said. “So we’ll see.”
We drove out of the city the same way we had entered two days before. It was overcast in the city, but the sky cleared as we drove, the clouds parting to let weak sunlight through. We passed the airport and kept going, heading south along the peninsula. The bay appeared on our left and then vanished again, hidden behind low hills. Noise barriers rose to either side of the freeway, blocking my view.
Max exited at last onto a street lined with car dealerships and palm trees. I gazed out the window as he made a series of turns into a residential neighborhood. I tried to imagine Renzo living here, working here, carrying on with a whole life that I knew nothing about. It was difficult. Redwood City seemed too arid and suburban for Renzo, who loved New York and all of the action and excitement of that metropolis. But he had grown up here, or somewhere nearby. He was probably used to it.
The GPS announced that we would be arriving at our destination on the left. Max slowed, searching. The street was lined with small houses, some well-maintained and others in various stages of neglect. A dog appeared behind a chain-link fence, barking at us and jumping at the fence in a lather of rage. A man in a driveway, washing a pick-up, paused to watch us pass. Children playing in the street scattered as we approached.
Max came to a stop and turned off the car. I looked at the numbers on the house. This was the address the investigator had provided. The house was painted white with a cheerful bright blue door, and flowered bushes bloomed beside the front stoop. The yard had been carefully landscaped with a mix of gravel beds and manicured grass. A hummingbird feeder hung from one corner of the roof. The overall impression was one of tidiness and welcome. I would have gladly lived in that house.
“It looks really nice,” I said.
