by Parker Grey
I could say that I had innocent intentions when I woke up, but I’d be lying. Before my eyes even opened, I was thinking of all the ways I could make Ruby come twice before she even got out of bed, but then all my good plans were spoiled when she wasn’t there.
Luckily she didn’t go far, and I found her half-naked in my kitchen, doing something or other with a box of pancake mix.
I’ll figure out what she’s doing later. I’ve got some ideas first.
“I don’t remember saying you could use my stove,” I say, my thumbs underneath the elastic of her panties, my fingers gripping the soft skin of her inner thighs.
“I didn’t know I had to ask permission,” she says, tilting her head as she does, giving me better access.
I take it, biting her softly and then sucking at the same spot. I get a quiet moan out of her, and she rises onto her toes. Looking down, over her shoulder, I can see her stiff nipples poking through the t-shirt she borrowed from me, and the sight makes me even harder.
“I’ll let it slide this time, sweetheart,” I say, gently pulling her hips back against my dick, holding my breath against the rush of pleasure.
She arches her back against me, rubbing me through the flannel of my pajama pants, and I bury my face in her neck, biting her harder.
“But you’ll have to pay the price,” I finish.
I reach in between her legs and find her soft and wet, my fingers instantly slippery. I slide them between her lips and she groans, bending further over the stove and pushing her hips back against me, my stiff cock between her buttocks, two layers of clothing separating us.
“This wet and you still got out of bed this morning,” I growl into her neck. “I must be doing something wrong if you didn’t want to wake me up.”
She stifles another moan, biting her lip as I circle my fingers around her clit. I can feel the tremor it sends through her body, and it makes me suck in my breath, every nerve suddenly aflame.
“I wanted to surprise you,” she says, her voice breathy with lust. “Did it work?”
“I’m surprised, all right,” I say.
Ruby makes another little noise in her throat, her chest heaving against the thin material of the shirt she’s wearing. I can’t believe how sexy she is right now — even though she’s standing in front of a stove, her hair wild with bedhead, wearing nothing but an old t-shirt of mine, I might want her right now more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
Something feral is rising inside me, something animalistic and wild. I have to force myself to stay calm, to only grab her hard and grind my cock against her instead of bending her over the kitchen counter and taking her hard and deep right here, right now.
But that can’t be her first time. Not like that.
So instead I lift her, draping her arm around my neck. She yelps as I do it, then laughs, nuzzling my face with hers.
“I was cooking,” she says, her voice teasing.
“Are you sure?” I say. “Was that food?”
I carry her to one of the wooden chairs in my kitchen and sit, putting her on my lap. She kisses me instantly, her hands in my hair, and I open her mouth with mine and claim her.
I want to do more than just taste her. I want to be the last man she ever kisses, the first thing she thinks about when she wakes up. Ruby is it for me and I’ve known that for a long time.
It’s kisses like this, wild and passionate and all-consuming, that let me fantasize that maybe, maybe I’m it for her, too.
In a flash Ruby’s straddling me, her face above mine, her arms around my neck. The chair creaks slightly under our combined weight but I built it, so I know it’s not going anywhere.
I grab her ass with both hands and squeeze. She’s so fucking perfect that I can’t stand it. The way she moans softly, her forehead against mine as she rolls her hips, makes me just about ready to explode.
“Jax,” she says quietly, the word half-moan.
“Yes, sweetheart?” I murmur.
I grip her tighter, and Ruby’s thighs lock around my hips. My cock is right up against her heated center, and she grinds herself against me slowly, eyes fluttering closed at the pleasure.
“This is better than pancakes.”
I chuckle, pulling her in, letting her ride me. The friction of her heat against my stiff cock is electric, so perfect that I couldn’t bring her to stop even if I wanted to. She keeps moving, rolling her hips against me. Ruby’s using my body to get herself off, and I can’t think of anything more beautiful.
She keeps going, her whole body rocking with this perfect, sweet rhythm as she leans into me, silently demanding more. I slide my hands under the shirt she’s wearing, brush my work-roughened palms over her stiff, puffy nipples.
Ruby groans, and I do it again. I’m trying to ignore the building tension in my cock and the fact that I might be about to come in my pants for the first time since I was a teenager, and I draw tiny circles on her nipples with the pads of my thumbs. I listen to the way the timbre and rhythm of her moans change every time I do, like I’m playing an exquisite instrument.
And I keep watching her build until she can’t control herself, her fingernails biting into my shoulders, her body shivering and shuddering at my touch. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to ignore my own physical response and focus on her.
Suddenly, she whispers something I can’t quite hear.
“Again,” I tell her, rolling her nipples between my fingers.
Ruby opens her mouth, but no sound comes out as she bucks against me slowly. I can feel the tremor that goes through her as her clit rides the length of my shaft, and she swallows hard.
“Be my first,” she whispers.
I don’t answer her. I can’t. I can only grab her by the waist, cover her mouth with mine, and pull her body to me.
“Please, Jax,” she goes on, still whispering. “I want it to be you.”
She grinds against me again, shuddering, a moan escaping her lips.
“Now,” she murmurs. “Jax, I need you now, I can’t wait—”
I kiss her hard, slide my thumb under her panties. I’m nearly shaking, torn between the animal desire to do exactly what she’s asking me to do and the knowledge that she’s wrong, I’m not what she needs.
I circle her clit twice with my thumb and almost instantly, Ruby lets go, her face against mine as she moans and writhes, her whole body trembling with the release of force.
She moans, she whimpers, she kisses me hard and says my name as she bites my lip. I can feel her pussy clenching and fluttering against my cock, and it nearly sends me over the edge myself.
Before she’s even finished, her hands are moving down my bare chest, over my stomach, reaching the waistband of my pants. She grasps my cock through the flannel and I groan out loud, grabbing her harder than I meant to.
“Come on, Jax,” she gasps, breathless. “Please.”
I want to. Dear God I want to, but it’s not right. I can’t do it like this, on a whim, at my kitchen table. Ruby deserves better than this.
“I promise not to hurt you,” she murmurs, her voice teasing, and I capture her mouth again. As if I’m the one afraid of getting hurt.
She bucks against me, her hand tightening. Then it’s joined by the other and before I know it, she’s pulling at the elastic waistband of my pants and then her hand is around my cock with nothing at all between us.
Ruby presses my shaft up against her panties, damp with desire, and I nearly lose control. She starts to move her panties aside, and I almost don’t stop her. More than anything I want to sink myself into her sweet heat, hear her soft, breathy moans as I fill her up. I want to feel her come on my cock, her legs wrapped around my waist as I lose myself in her.
But instead, I wrap my hand around hers, pull her head down, and kiss her again as she strokes my cock.
I’m already right on the brink, primed for orgasm. She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t beg me to take her again, which is good because my self-control is nearly gone.
I only take a couple of seconds, I’m so tightly wound already. When I come, I come hard, my whole body jerking and shuddering as Ruby keeps stroking me, like she wants every last drop of what I’ve got to give her.
When I finish, I sink back in the wooden kitchen chair and let Ruby’s hand go. We’re both messy, though her shirt got most of it.
She leans in, and I brush the wild hair off of her face before she kisses me, her eyes full of questions. I don’t answer any of them, just kiss her long and slow, letting my hands peruse her body, savoring the warmth of her on top of me.
After a long time, she sits up straight, and she’s just about to say something when her eyes focus on something behind my head and she frowns.
“Is something —" she begins, and then realization dawns over her and she leaps off of me. “Shit! The pancakes!”
Chapter Ten
Ruby
I rush over the stove, grab the handle of the skillet, and dump it into the sink. A single, large pancake slides out obligingly and lands with a wet plop next to a single dirty mug. Jax sidles up behind me, still shirtless, only now he’s laughing.
“Well, I’m surprised,” he admits.
I don’t answer for a moment, examining the pancake in the sink. It’s now slightly soggy, in addition to burned on one side and still raw on the other.
It’s not a good pancake.
“I guess that wasn’t such an emergency,” I admit. “I could have walked over here.”
“I didn’t even think you had the stove on,” Jax admits.
“It was on low,” I say defensively. “Because I didn’t want to burn it.”
He rests his chin on top of my head. After a moment, I realize he’s laughing.
“How about you go clean yourself up?” he finally suggests. “I’ll take care of breakfast.”
Being with Jax is easy in a way I hadn’t expected. Not that I’d expected anything — he was someone I saw once in a blue moon when I made the drive to visit my grandma. Okay, he was someone that I tended to fantasize about, but I never had any reason to think that my fantasies might ever intersect with reality.
And yet, here I am. Eating eggs and bacon and, yes, pancakes at the table where half an hour ago I begged him to be my first.
Somehow, it’s not awkward. Even though he turned me down without actually, technically turning me down. Even though I feel the slightest bit rejected that he doesn’t want me want me.
I decide I’m not going to think about it. And if we do somehow wind up naked and in the throes of wild passion again, I’ll keep my mouth shut and not bring it up again.
There’s no sign of Viper — or Eugene, whatever his name is — again that day.
Jax makes me lunch and dinner, basically not even letting me in the kitchen after the pancake fiasco. He’s a good cook, which surprises me for some reason — I didn’t expect a bachelor who lives alone in the forest to make perfectly-rare steak with a side of braised greens and whipped garlic butter, but he does.
And it’s delicious.
And he has me for dessert, this time on his leather couch in front of a roaring fire. Then he eats me out again an hour later, when we go to bed.
We pass a couple of days the same way. We eat meals that Jax cooks, we hang out in his cabin, we fool around like teenagers on lovers’ lane except way, way better. I don’t ask him to take my virginity again and he doesn’t bring it up, either, and even though every time he looks at me I swear I ache for him, it’s fine.
Really. It’s fine. I don’t feel mildly rejected at all.
The third night, after dinner, Jax answers a knock on his door while I’m washing up. I can barely hear what’s being said and when he gets back, he stares off into the distance for a long time, until I ask what’s wrong.
“That was the police,” he says, sighing.
“Did they find him?”
He just shakes his head. I come over to him, sit on his lap, and stroke his hair. Since I don’t have any of my own clothes, I’m borrowing his, and wearing boxers and an old t-shirt about five sizes too big for me.
“At least I get to stay here with you, right?” I say, snuggling into his warm chest.
He strokes my back, seeming a little absent-minded, his other hand on my knee. But for once he isn’t greedily sliding his hand upward, stroking my inner thigh with his rough thumb. He’s just sitting there.
“They want to send you back to your father’s house,” he finally says. “Instead of keeping you here.”
“Oh,” I say quietly.
I know my father is worried, in his absent sort of way. We’ve been texting back and forth since I’ve been here, so he knows I’m alive and safe and perfectly fine. Obviously, he doesn’t know what else I’ve been up to.
“They think it’s safe?”
“That’s what their informant is saying,” he tells me. “Apparently no one’s seen Viper since the incident. They think he ran off completely, to Mexico or Canada or something.”
There’s an odd sadness in his voice, something I can’t quite place, his eyes suddenly far away.
I put my face to his, hold him close.
“Jax,” I whisper. “We can still see each other. I don’t live too far away.”
He smiles, but I can tell that the smile doesn’t touch his heart.
“Of course,” he says. “I know, sweetheart.”
Chapter Eleven
Jax
That night, I just hold Ruby, and that’s all. Even though I still want her more than I can put into words, even though I’m always aching for her still-virginal body, I don’t do anything.
I just hold her, because tomorrow she’ll be gone.
I know she doesn’t live that far away. I know that she used to come into the road house every so often, that there’s no reason we can’t keep seeing each other.
Except that she’s twenty and I’m more than ten years older than her. When she came into the road house, I wasn’t even allowed to sell her alcohol, just the cherry coke she always drank.
Ruby’s going to want to find someone her own age. She’ll go back to school, meet another twenty-year-old, and I’ll be forgotten. I’m just a blip in her past.
That’s why I haven’t taken her virginity. That, and I don’t deserve it.
Ruby rolls over in my arms, sighing in her sleep. She’s so beautiful right now I can hardly stand it. I can’t comprehend how this willowy slip of a girl has taken so much of my heart in the past few days, but she has.
It’s hers. I’m hers.
Before, when I saw her sometimes, I thought I was obsessed. I thought that my yearning for this girl who I barely knew would pass, and I’d get over her, but I was wrong.
I didn’t get over her.
I’ll never get over her for as long as I live. Once Ruby leaves my life, I know that I’m going to look back on these days forever.
It must be one o’clock in the morning before I finally drift off, even though I’m trying not to. I want to stay awake tonight so that I can memorize everything about Ruby.
The way she looks when she sleeps. The way she breathes softly, eyelashes fluttering through a dream. The way she curls onto her side, dark hair fanning over the pillow, the soft skin of her neck beating with her pulse.
I don’t ever want to forget a single moment of this.
I wake up suddenly and completely to dead silence. It’s dark in the cabin, a blackness so thick I feel like I could swim through it, but instinctively I know something is wrong.
I just don’t know what. Ruby’s still asleep in my arms, her face buried in the pillow, limbs askance. She’s taking up at least two-thirds of my king size bed, but I don’t mind.
I just lay there, awake, wondering why I’m awake.
Then I hear it. It’s so faint that I think I might be making it up for a moment, but then I hear it again. The softest, faintest squeak of a floorboard. From the sound, I know it’s one of the ones in my living room — the support beam underneath
is a few inches off of where it should be, so the floorboards there always squeak.
Every muscle in my body tenses, and I sit up silently in bed.
It’s him, I think. It has to be him. He waited until we thought he wasn’t coming, and then he came for her.
There’s another squeak. There’s no light leaking around the bedroom door, so I’m sure he’s not using a flashlight and it’s so dark here in the woods, with all the lights off, that he’s probably stumbling around my cabin, lost, banging his shins on my furniture.
“Ruby,” I murmur into her ear.
Nothing.
“Ruby,” I murmur again, shaking her shoulder slightly.
In the inky blackness I can just barely see her eyes come open, and I hold a finger to her lips. Ruby nods, her eyes wide.
“Go into the bathroom and shut the door,” I say, keeping my voice as low as I can. “And no matter what happens, don’t come out.”
“Is it him?” she whispers, glancing at the door.
I nod. Even if I haven’t seen Viper yet, I can feel it in my bones.
“Jax,” Ruby whispers urgently. “Let me help, I can’t let you—”
I cover her mouth with my hand, and she falls silent.
“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “Go. Now. I know how to deal with men like him.”
Ruby goes without further argument, and I’m glad to see that for once, the bathroom door shuts properly.
But now to the matter at hand. The floorboards have stopped squeaking, but now that I’m listening, I can hear soft footfalls coming slowly closer and closer to the bedroom door.
I don’t keep a gun in the house — I’ve seen far too well what they can do, and I hate the damn things — but right now, I’m wishing I did. Instead I grab the baseball bat that I keep underneath my bed for situations like this and heft it in my right hand.
My back is pressed against the wall. I want to get the drop on this asshole, so I can hit him once and it’s over, so I wait.
