by Tilly Delane
It doesn’t occur to either of us not to follow her instructions. And we are rewarded handsomely.
Above us, a gazillion stars are visible through the skylight.
We stay silently on our backs, slowly drifting until everything’s gone quiet and all the ripples in the water have smoothed out.
“Wow,” Tristan whispers after a while, and it makes me smile.
“You said it, mate,” I whisper back.
And it’s then I feel the small hand of the woman floating next to me slip itself into mine.
She squeezes it gently and I feel like a giant.
In all the best ways.
Raven
The three of us remain quiet as we pad along the grass on naked feet, boots in hand.
The nightfall has cooled down the temperature a little, but it’s still warm and it’s nice to feel the gentle breeze in my damp hair. I look over my shoulder at Tristan behind me, and Rowan behind him, and feel a strange sensation. Of belonging, camaraderie, invincibility. And then it hits me like a freight train. Friendship. For the first time in my fucking life, I feel that thing that all the other teens felt when they were out and about, horsing around with their friends.
Michael was like a pet puppy.
The others at the group home were my fellow sufferers who’d finally landed on their feet.
My cohorts in nursing school were my study peers.
Christine, Elias et al are colleagues.
But this?
This is friendship. Inappropriate but true.
Unbidden tears shoot into my eyes when I realize that I had to get to twenty-eight before catching a glimpse of what other people take for granted.
I wipe them away with the back of my hand as we arrive at the house and slip in quietly.
Soft acoustic guitar chords greet us from the living room. When we stick our heads around, we see Charlie sitting on the sofa, cross-legged and so blissed out by his own music, he doesn’t even acknowledge our arrival.
Tristan slips past me into the room to sit by Charlie’s feet and starts watching him raptly with chlorine red eyes. He looks tired but happy.
I remain in the door with Rowan behind me as he radiates heat that crawls up my spine. It crawls up and then down my back, sprawls around my rib cage like a hug and reaches inside of me with invisible tendrils, all the way into my core. My pulse speeds up as I allow his presence to infiltrate me. He is so close I can smell him. He smells of pool and lemongrass and man.
Heat blooms between my legs. He’s not even touching me and my pussy starts clenching at the thought of him and at the memory of the orgasm he gave me too many nights ago. The memory I’ve been reliving every day since, with my fingers on my clit and dipping in and out of myself, but never quite reaching. Never quite feeling what he made me feel, any climax I bring on myself being a mere shadow of what he teased out of me.
I shiver at the thought and suddenly I hear his voice rumble in my ear, so hushed it could be a figment of my imagination.
“Yeah, I can’t forget either. You want more, don’t you, Raven? When all is said and done, you still want me to fuck you till kingdom come.”
It is so fucking corny and it should turn me right off, but it doesn’t. Not even close.
I feel a glut of my juices slipping down my insides, my insides clenching. I swallow hard at the realization that there is just no fighting this.
I need this man.
Fuck knows why or why him.
But it doesn’t stop me from freezing at the fact that we’re still looking into the living room, and though Rowan is mostly hidden in the shadows of the dark hallway behind me, Tristan and Charlie could still hear. Or sense. I feel like it’s impossible they wouldn’t feel what’s going on, considering the pure energy vibrating between Rowen and me. But Rowan disagrees.
“Look at them, they’re completely oblivious,” he murmurs then takes my hand off the door handle that I’m still clutching.
He bends my arm back to press my palm against his erection. My fingers instinctively curl around his length as much as the confines of his denims allow and a low hiss escapes him. He pushes my hand up and down over his thick shape.
“He’s been standing for you all week, Raven.”
His words turn my knees to jelly, and I want to double over to contain the liquid lust dripping from my core. I’m wetter than I’ve ever been. So wet, I fear it’ll be audible when I move.
Then he serves the final blow.
“I can smell you, lady. All the way up here. Through your clothes. I can smell your honey. You’re wet for me. And I can’t wait to taste you. Now say goodnight to them.”
He releases my hand and falls into chorus with me when I brightly say goodnight into the living room, loud enough to be heard over the guitar playing. Tristan waves, and even Charlie stops looking down at his instrument and gives us a nod.
We retreat into the hallway and up the stairs. Rowan walks behind me and I can feel his eyes on my butt. We cross the first landing and I note that there is no light strip under Simon’s door, indicating he’s gone to sleep already.
As soon as we get to our floor, Rowan grabs me by the shoulders from behind and steers me through the door to my room. His grip goes firm, a silent command to stay put when he releases me briefly to shut and lock the door. He switches the lights on but dims them to a soft level. Then his big hands land on my hips and he pushes me along to the bed.
My legs hit the bed, and he slides his hands around and under my tunic until his fingers find the button atop the zipper of my jeans. He pops it and slips a hand inside to shield my mound while he pulls the zipper down with the other one.
In all my heat, my heart stills for a moment with the knowledge that he’s observant enough to remember I’m pantyless. We left our swimming gear behind in the pool to dry and he must have noticed that I hadn’t brought anything for afterwards.
I melt in more than one way at his thoughtfulness, while he starts grinding his erection into my ass. He likes being behind me. And to my astonishment, I realize I like it, too. It’s nuts. I’ve never trusted anyone enough not to face them while we were fucking, and when I do, they have to be under me, or I go frigid.
“Quit thinking,” Rowan commands and gently starts peeling my jeans down until they are by my calves and he’s slithered down onto his knees.
He taps my right leg.
“Lift up.”
I follow his instruction, and he pulls the rest off. He repeats the same thing on the left and when I’ve got both feet back on the ground, he skitters his palms up the side of my legs before they land on my ass cheeks.
He kneads my buttocks lovingly for a minute, the movement tugging the muscles and pulling all the way to my clit. A whimper escapes me. He kisses the dimple at the base of my spine then rises back up.
Once he towers over my back again, he brings his left hand to my front and ghosts it over my mound, giving me another delicious shiver, before he takes my tunic by its sides and pulls it up. I lift my arms, and he gets it off me easily, throwing it the way of the jeans.
I stand before him completely naked, but he’s still fully clothed and that reminds me of things I don’t like reminding of. As if he had a sixth sense about what’s going through my mind, he envelops me in his arms and hugs me hard, pushing the whole length of my back against his shirt-covered front.
“It’s me, Raven,” he says, in a normal tone, not hushed, not growled, just matter of fact, before he cups my breasts and begins massaging them.
It’s the weirdest, most delicious combination of feeling held and having arrows of electricity shoot through me each time he squeezes the nipples just right. Again, there is something tethering in the way he holds me, and the unhappy thoughts get blown out of the water.
“Is that good?” he asks me.
“Yes,” I pant.
“Tell me how good it is.”
“I fucking love it,” I whimper. “Don’t stop.”
I feel st
range saying those things. I’m not a talker. I’m not a screamer. I take what I need, that’s it.
“Who?” he asks, and for a moment I’m not sure what he wants.
He pinches my left nipple hard.
“Don’t stop, who?”
“Don’t stop, Rowan,” I answer, and a low growl of satisfaction escapes his throat just before he lowers his lips to the slope where my neck meets my shoulder and bites down.
Like a stallion holding his mare in place.
I saw it once in real life. My mother shacked up with a cowboy for, like, five seconds when I was in elementary school. Until she realized drugs were hard to come by in Montana. Salt of the earth type. Had a ranch, bred horses.
Rowan licks over where he’s just sunk his teeth into me and puts his mouth to my ear.
“I said, quit thinking, Raven. I’m gonna eat you out tonight until you forget every last one of those bad memories that haunt you. Until the only thing that matters is my tongue in your cunt and my lips on your clit. You hear me?”
He bites me again, sharper.
“I said, you hear me?”
“Yes,” I press out.
He stops kneading my breasts for a second.
“Yes, who?”
I reach up to push his hands back down on my tits as I answer.
“Yes, Rowan. Don’t stop.”
He starts up again and suddenly his voice turns serious in my ear.
“You clean? Or am I gonna get me a dose of syphilis if I suck you up?”
The nurse in me smiles at his knowledge. Not many people know that oral can give you such delights as syph, the clap or herpes. Not to mention pretty much everything else. You just have to be unluckier for everything else. Syphilis, gonorrhea and herpes, they love a bit of tongue action.
“Yes. Hundred percent. Are you?”
“Yeah, Nurse Raven, I am. I’m fully tested. And not counting last Friday’s mucking about with you, gorgeous, I haven’t had sex in any form in over a year.”
I hear the grin in his voice when he adds the next bit.
“Other than with myself.”
That gives me pause. For a moment, I forget what we’re doing here, and I want to turn around, face him and ask why. It so doesn’t seem like him. He chuckles against my throat.
“Surprised?” he asks, and at the same time lets his right hand wander away from my tits, down to the apex of my thigh.
“Yes,” I admit, but the impulse to have this conversation is forgotten as soon as he runs a teasing finger over the soft hair on my mound.
“Crawl on the bed, Raven,” he demands, releasing me out of his tight embrace as he utters the words, and I do as he says. “Scoot up. Front down, arse up, spread your legs.”
I put myself in the position he wants me in. I can sense him step back from the bed a bit, his eyes burning holes into my backside while he undresses himself. I hear him fling his shirt away, unzip his denims and step out of them. Another half a minute goes by while he does nothing but stare.
“Gyrate your arse,” he demands hoarsely. “I can see your cunt. It’s wet, but it isn’t dripping. I want it to fucking drip, Raven. When it drips, I’ll lick.”
Rowan
She starts rotating that delicious bubble butt of hers in the air as soon as I say it, and it takes every ounce of my self-control not to surge forward onto the bed, grab her by the hips and plunge balls-deep into her.
But I know it would be too much, too soon.
In a strange way, she’s almost like a virgin. I can’t put my finger on it, but I just know I need to take this slowly. Get her to trust me, give her time and patience if I don’t want to end up just a means to an end.
And I already know I want to be more than just a hook up.
It’s ludicrous. We’re playing a dangerous game here. She could get fired. And even if we managed to keep it under wraps, what happens when my stint here is finished? This is her last month in Europe. When Simon, Charlie, Tristan and I leave Purbeck, so does she. She says she’ll go travelling for a bit and then fly home.
To take another assignment.
She doesn’t even know where her company will send her next. But still I can’t help wanting to be more to her than just the guest she had an illicit affair with. So I suppress the urge to take her there and then, wrap my fist around my dick and give it a hard squeeze as I watch her.
Her legs are spread, her pussy is glistening and I can see a glimpse of her clit. I buck into my fist a couple of times just because I can’t help it but then I stop, fascinated by how her movement seems to milk the juice out of her.
I fucking love this view.
I see a drop of her cream collect at the end of a hair on her bush and when it falls onto the bed, I’m on her like a parched man in the desert.
I stick my whole face in her sweet, sweet cunt, my nose right in her centre, and then I shoot my tongue out and lap at her clit. She shudders violently and makes a mewling sound to end all mewling sounds. I lose myself in the pleasure of eating her out from behind until I can feel her core starting to tighten.
But I don’t want her to come. Not just yet. This time I want her to look into my eyes when she does. I want to see her face when she loses control. I want her to see me.
I take my face out from between her legs and leisurely slip a couple of fingers along her slit instead while I talk to her.
“Flip over,” I tell her but rather than comply, she stills. “Flip over,” I repeat.
She slowly shakes her head.
“I can’t,” she chokes out.
I run a hand gently up her spine while I crawl up the bed to lie next to her. She remains on her knees, her position unchanged.
When my hand reaches the back of her neck, I clasp my fingers around the tender flesh and force her to turn her face towards me. Though she doesn’t fight me, she hides behind her hair. I let go of her neck to stroke the strands out of her face, and then, finally, those indigo eyes meet mine. She’s flushed and she’s aroused, but she also suddenly looks younger.
Much, much younger. And petrified.
“Hey,” I whisper, and she swallows.
My heart stops for as long as she doesn’t respond, but then it kick-starts again as soon as she returns my greeting.
“Hey,” she says back with a wobble in her voice.
There is no smile.
I tug at her in various places until she finally gives in and lies down on her front. I grab her by the waist and nudge her until she rolls onto her side, facing me again.
I cup her cheeks and start stroking her eyebrow with my thumb.
“I won’t hurt you,” I say, and the whole woman freezes, scrunching her eyes shut.
Shit.
Wrong fucking words.
