by Selena Scott
“Oh. Right. Well that’s a lot easier.” Not appearing to be flustered at all, Raph simply lifted his hands apart from one another, showing some rough dimensions.
Nat’s eyes widened. “Um. Wow.”
He studied the distance that his hands were apart. He inched them closer together. “This is when he’s resting.” Then he pulled his hands apart again. “This is when he’s partying.”
Natalie, an involuntary grin on her face, couldn’t help but shake her head. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Me either.” He dropped his hands. After a second, the mirth slid from his face and a serious expression took over.
“What is it?”
He was quiet for a second, looking to the side, and Natalie listened to the comforting scritching sound of his hand over his stubble. “I think I’m just kind of thrown that you have a birthmark that you’re not comfortable showing me. It’s arrogant, but I kind of thought we told each other everything.” Raph kicked at the ground. “I mean, I tell you everything. Not that that means you’re obligated to tell me everything, by any means.” His eyes searched hers again. “I just hope you know that I’d never judge you, Nat, or think bad things. No matter what happens between us, I want you to be comfortable with me. That’s the most important thing. That we trust each other.”
“Oh, fine,” she said, her fingers going automatically to the buttons on her shirt. “I’ll show you. It’s not that big of a deal. And like I said, I’m not embarrassed of it. I just know how beautiful you are under your clothes and wanted to, I don’t know, acknowledge that I have this thing. So. Yeah.”
She unbuttoned her silk blouse to just above her navel, not looking up at Raph even once, but she could feel his gaze on her body.
As clinically as possible, she pushed her gaping blouse off one shoulder to expose one cup of her bra. Nat was thin, with high, small breasts that barely needed a bra. But she’d always enjoyed pretty things. The bra she wore right now was a blue satin bralette with no underwire, so it was easy to slide off of her breast. First, she slid her hand into her bra, to cover most of her breast and then she slid the cup halfway down, so that her fingers still covered her nipple, but Raphael could get a good look at the port-wine stain.
Instead of looking at him, she looked at her chest, trying to guess what he thought when he saw it for the first time. The port-wine stain was a deep red and started half an inch from her armpit. It splashed across the mound of her breast, covering most of the underside of it. In fact, it colored the bottom half of her nipple as well, deepening the color, but he couldn’t see that with her fingers in the way.
“That,” he said from across the room, a curious roughness to his voice, “is not ugly. That is unbelievably hot.”
Natalie’s eyes shot up to his, still holding her breast in one hand and what she saw really surprised her. Raph’s arms were crossed over his chest, and he leaned back on the sink still, but she got the distinct impression that he was holding himself there, instead of relaxing. His eyes were no longer lazily mirthful; instead they were half-lidded and bright. There was an electricity in his gaze that reminded Nat of the electricity she’d felt on her skin earlier in the conversation.
She dropped her eyes from his and carefully put her bra back in place, buttoning up her shirt again.
“Okay,” she said, gripping the edge of the counter that she sat atop. “So, we both think the other one is hot. Check.”
His arms still tightly crossed over his chest, Raph was looking at her like she was an ice cream cone that he wanted to lick the drips off of. “Actually, that’s the first time you’ve said that about me.”
“That I think you’re hot? Don’t fish for compliments, Raph—you know you’re gorgeous.”
He was quiet, absorbing her words and watching her. She knew, without having to ask, that he was still thinking about her body, her port-wine stain. A zipping pleasure warmed her. Because she also knew, without having to ask, that he’d been deeply attracted to it. To her. He hadn’t been lying when he’d looked at her skin and said ‘unbelievably hot’.
“So,” he said after a minute, clearing his throat. “What comes next?”
It might have sounded like a proposition of some kind if not for the fact that Nat knew him so well. He was genuinely asking. They both wanted to check all the boxes before they moved this thing forward. It was too important to rush.
“Well,” she said, trying to think clearly. “We’ve established that there’s a reason for any potential, um, canoodling. It’s not just because we’re bored, it’s because we genuinely fit a need for one another right now.” She cleared her throat and kept listing things. “We’re almost positive that even if things end up weird, we won’t be ruining our friendship.”
“We’ve established that we’re attracted to one another.”
“Right.” Nat’s eyes caught against his for a second, but that lit-from-within brightness in his gaze was a bit too frenetic for her not to glance away immediately. She tried to think of what other bases they needed to make sure they covered. “Would we keep it a secret?”
That seemed to jolt him a little. “I… guess. I mean, not because we were ashamed. But, do we really want anyone else to weigh in on it? You know my family and Kaya would have unending opinions.”
“Right,” Nat agreed. “So, a secret, then.” She paused. “And what about, like, a timeline?”
“You mean how do we know when it’s over?”
She nodded.
“I guess,” he said carefully, “whenever one or both of us wants it to be over. Like if one of us meets somebody for real. Or if it starts getting messy?”
“Yeah. That makes sense.”
“Are you thinking it’ll be, like, a one and done kind of thing, just to tide us over in the lean times? Or a regular thing?”
She was glad that she wasn’t the only one asking questions. But she wished he hadn’t asked such a hard question.
“I’m not sure. We’ll have to see how it goes, right? That’s assuming that it’s any good between us and we even want to do it more than once.”
“That’s a good point.” Raph kicked at something unseen on the ground. “I’ve definitely been attracted to people that I’ve ended up having zero sexual chemistry with. We might fall flat.”
“Maybe—” Nat started, and then cut herself off, losing her gumption halfway through her idea.
“Maybe…” he prompted, but she could tell that he already knew what she was going to say.
“Maybe, before we agree to anything, we should…”
Try.
The unsaid word hung between them as clearly as if she’d said it.
Raph’s eyes were half-lidded again and his hands gripped the edge of the sink on either side of his hips the same way that Natalie was gripping the counter on either side of her hips.
“Yeah,” he said in that same rough voice from before. “Maybe so.”
Then he pushed off from the sink and took a step toward her.
CHAPTER SIX
Raphael crossed the kitchen in two large strides and then had nowhere to go but into her personal space. Natalie’s personal space was something that Raph had been comfortably invading for years. Neither of them ever really thought twice about it.
But this was different. Extremely different.
She held perfectly still where she sat on the counter and he was grateful. He knew she was giving him the space to get himself situated. Figuring that they should probably work up little by little to heavy petting, Raph anchored his hands on the counter on either side of her hips instead of touching her.
The movement had him leaning into her space. He was tall enough that he could get close to her without having to step in between her legs, which was a good thing, considering he wasn’t sure if either of them was ready for him to part her thighs.
As it was, their faces were ten inches apart, her eyes were huge, her lips were parted, and her breath broke across his face.
But nope. Still Natalie. All the way down to her arched eyebrows, doe eyes, and small, pretty mouth. Proximity to her apparently did nothing to dilute her presence; instead, it concentrated it.
She’d never been more Natalie than she was at that moment. The powdery, familiar smell of her deodorant was light on the air. The freckles on her nose that darkened in the summer greeted him like old friends he’d forgotten about. He saw the tiny white scar on the outside of her left eye which she’d gotten from a Hot Wheels car he’d meant for her to catch when they were nine years old.
“Natalie.” He didn’t say it the way a lover might. He said it as if he were naming her. Identifying her out of all the other women in the world.
And then, with a swooping stomach and a rising swell of ambition, Raphael leaned forward and pressed his mouth against hers.
He waited for a feeling to rocket through him. He waited for any indication that what they were doing was very right or very wrong. The kiss lingered for a second, two seconds, three.
At that point, he realized that her eyes were also open. Though her dark green eyes were blurry, they looked directly into his. Two sets of lips pushed up against one another with the unexpected inexperience of middle schoolers. It was like neither of them had ever been kissed before. Still looking into her eyes, he watched as Natalie squinted infinitesimally in an expression he’d seen a hundred thousand times from her.
That’s when they finally tipped their heads to either side, facing away from one another, and absolutely burst out laughing.
He rested his forehead against her shoulder as they both shook with laughter.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Wow.”
That kiss had not been the stuff of high romance. It had been simply two people touching and waiting for fireworks and decidedly not getting a single one.
He finally straightened up from her, riding a high of relief. He wasn’t about to bone down his best friend. That made things a hell of a lot simpler. “I guess we answered that question.”
“We sure did.”
Raphael removed himself from her space, turning away toward the fridge. He suddenly felt like a beer would be a good idea.
And it was as soon as there was space between them, as soon as her heat was lost, that he felt it. The immediate relief he’d felt evaporated as a heavy cloud of disappointment weighed him down.
I’m disappointed that kiss wasn’t better? Knowing she was sitting right there, watching as he strode over to the fridge, he attempted to sort through his feelings very fast.
Was it her he was disappointed in? Himself?
He set one hand on the metal door of the fridge and a static shock from his fingers had him jumping a little. He yanked the door open and stood in the cool air, looking blindly for something he’d forgotten he’d wanted.
Why was he over here and not over there with her?
That’s when he felt it. There was a rising buzz against his lips. A heat and fire he hadn’t ever felt before. He pressed his lips together, his back to her, and thought he caught the lightest taste of her there. It was a new taste, something unexpected, but still, it was immediately recognizable as her taste. He’d know that flavor anywhere, even though it was his first time experiencing it.
The feeling against his lips intensified, his back to her, in the cold air of the fridge. And now his heart was starting to clang hollowly against his ribs. He realized, in slight confusion, that his palms were sweating.
He stared blankly before him as he realized what was going on.
It was almost as if that kiss had been on some sort of delayed reaction. It hadn’t felt like much while it was happening, but now, every alarm system his body had was ringing its heart out, trying to get him to pay attention.
Off-kilter, like he’d just gone over the big hill of a rollercoaster, Raphael turned back to Nat.
She hadn’t noticed him turning, so her eyes were unfocused and looking down. There was high color on her cheeks and she had one set of fingers pressed to her lips, as if she were trying to keep the kiss trapped inside of her. She looked completely different than the laughing, relieved Nat he’d just been kissing.
Raph closed the fridge door and the sound jolted her. She didn’t drop her hand. Just continued to stare, almost blindly, across the kitchen at him.
“Do you feel that?” he asked in a rough voice.
“Yes,” she answered him, guilelessly, honestly. “What is it?”
“Delayed reaction, I think,” he answered, as if it were a thing, as if it made any sense. “I guess twenty years of not-kissing will make the kissing sort of wonky at first.”
“I—do you— should—” she was stumbling over words, as uncertain as he’d ever seen her. She finally dropped her hand from her mouth. “Raph.”
He was hypnotized by the lips she’d just revealed. As far as he could tell, they were the same old lips she’d always had, small but full, lightly pink. The memory of her port-wine stain jolted Raphael as he pictured her mouth painted that same dark, sexy color. He’d never seen a birthmark like that before and it had done something to him. Later, much later, he’d wonder if there was some sort of woman-borne witchcraft in that mark on her skin, something that had cast a spell over him.
But for now, she’d just said his name with that mouth he couldn’t stop staring at and she was getting larger and larger in his field of vision as he crossed the kitchen back toward her.
“Nat,” he told her. “I think you should stop me.”
He was still moving toward her.
“What?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m coming over there to kiss you again.”
“Oh.”
“So, you should stop me if, for any reason, it’s not a good idea. I’m not sure I’m thinking right now.”
“Okay.”
He was all the way to her now, breathing hard, standing directly in front of her. “Okay, stop?” he asked, his body loose and circuiting like he’d just sprinted a mile.
Her doe eyes, so serious until now, as rocked with the implications of these feelings as he was, suddenly warmed, the corner of her mouth tipped up infinitesimally. “Okay, come here.”
This time, Raph didn’t carefully place his hands on either side of her and she didn’t carefully keep her knees closed. They sort of crash/melted into one another, forgetting about their bodies. Forgetting about everything that wasn’t their mouths.
When their lips touched for the second time, there was that moment of familiarity. The Natalie Moment, Raph immediately named it in his head. His world tipped as his brain grappled to combine Friend Natalie with Kissing Natalie, everything sort of trembling, as if trapped in a bead of water. And then the surface tension burst, his brain needed no more convincing, and a flood of feeling swept Raphael away.
He was dimly aware that he was teasing her mouth open under his. One of her warm hands was lying flat and calm against the side of his neck, contented, and the other hand was tightly fisted in the back of his shirt, her nails digging into his back, needing everything.
He was inflamed by this contradiction in her. The idea that there were two sides to her and they each wanted their way. He was suddenly, risingly full with the desire to give her everything. Anything.
Finally, her lips parted under his and Raph grabbed onto her, as if he were about to fall away from her. His arms were fully wrapped around her, one of his hands grabbing her opposite hip and the other grabbing her opposite shoulder, pressing her flat against him.
He didn’t push his tongue into her mouth. Rather, he kissed her gently, openly, their lips sliding and his tongue taking small tastes of her bottom lip. It was her tongue that came to find him.
Raphael jolted at the firs
t touch of her tongue inside his mouth, but she didn’t retreat and neither did he. His arms came around her, even tighter, and her legs hitched up around his waist. He let her tongue sweep across his, exploring him, reveling in the feel of her soft little petting. It was only when she started to pull back, did he push forward, catching her at the entrance to her mouth.
His tongue said hello to hers, their mouths closed against each other, he nipped her lip, she opened, and this time their tongues immediately sought one another.
He was tongue-kissing Natalie Chalk and it made goosebumps race up his arms. He couldn’t help but shiver, pressing forward against her, their heads twisting in concert as they deepened the kiss.
There was more grabbing, more melting. Basically, they were as close as they could possibly be with clothes still on.
His arm anchored around her ass and as he tugged her forward that last remaining inch, suddenly her full weight was against him. He’d pulled her clear off the counter. That was good. He liked that. She clung to him with everything she had, all except that one, unbothered hand against his neck. He’d never really realized how little she was until he held her up like it was nothing.
He took a step back and then another.
Wait a second. Where was he taking her right now? It was hard to think with her sharp little teeth needling his bottom lip, but was he really walking her over to the living room couch? To his bedroom?
No.
He stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor. He knew, without a doubt, that they were not ready for him to lay her down on a soft surface. They might be ready for her weight on him, but they were not ready for his weight on her.
Mind made up, he slid down one of the cabinets, planting his ass on the kitchen floor and letting her settle in his lap.
She straddled him and when he looked down, he groaned. Her smart little pencil skirt had worked its way all the way up to the edge of her blue underwear and as he looked down at her, all he could see was a mile of smooth thigh framed in the softest looking satin he’d ever laid eyes on.
