Can't Help Falling

by Cara Bastone

  “Exactly,” she gasped. He lessened the pressure against her but she chased him forward with her hips. “More.”

  He didn’t need more urging than that. Tyler’s hand slipped up her stomach, his fingers pressed to that temptation of a line where her underwear cut across her skin.

  “More?” he whispered.

  “More,” she answered.

  His fingers slid underneath her underwear and found her wetness. “Ohholymotherfuckdammit.”

  She would have laughed if she hadn’t been too busy twanging with energy and sensation, her body coiling against the place his fingers rested. She hadn’t expected him to be so cursey during sex. It charmed her.

  His fingers slipped, not making a pattern so much as exploring her. Her eyes were glued to the sight of his wide hand underneath her tiny underwear; she knew he was looking in the exact same place.

  Her hands came down from his hair, releasing him, and she planted them onto his legs, feeling his coarse hair, the heat, the tensing of his muscles.

  He let out a long breath she hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and this time, his fingers did trace a pattern through her wetness. A sort of figure eight that had her pushing forward, her eyelids heavy, her chest heavy with breath and heartbeat.

  “Wow,” he whispered. “Wow, dammit.”

  He started a soft little strum with his thumb, and she let her head fall back. He caught her eyes for a moment and then directed his gaze back between her legs. He was touching her softly, learning her.

  “I—” She gasped. “Take work,” she warned him. “Don’t have—” She gasped again. “A quick trigger.”

  He grinned. “You act like I don’t know you, Fin.”

  And the featherlight butterfly of his touch didn’t increase in pressure but it did increase in speed. He was teasing her, his fingers tracing her, guiding her. She was chasing that feeling, rising. This didn’t feel anything like it usually did when she touched herself, but she couldn’t stop her eyes from rolling back.

  She was losing herself in the touch of him, choking out his name when he pressed two fingers inside of her, his thumb still strumming. But she hadn’t lost track of time; she never did during sex.

  She tried to turn, to press against him, move to the next act. But he put one hand on her hip and held her still.

  “You’ll get carpal tunnel,” she protested.

  He tilted her chin, looked in her eye, searched her expression. “Does it feel good?”

  “God, yes.”

  “Then be patient.” He pressed her back down and resumed, his fingers scooping inside of her, his thumb strumming, his breath hot on her neck, his hand sculpting her breast.

  And again Fin was chasing sensation, losing her breath, gasping, writhing against him, one of her hands in a fist in the sheets, the other gripping his knee.

  But again, time got its nails into her hair and Fin felt herself yanked back to reality. She tried to twist in his arms for the second time and this time he let her. She panted as she straddled him, her panties soaked, her mouth seeking his. He kissed her fiercely for a moment before he tugged his head back and searched out her eyes.

  “What just happened?” he asked gently.

  “Um, foreplay?” she said, a little bit of snark racing in to cover up the nerves that had started to wake up again in her gut.

  “No. Why’d you have me stop? It felt like you were close.”

  She cleared her throat and tried to lean in for a kiss again, but he raised his eyebrows. She held, just a breath from his lips, and sighed. “I told you I’m not a quick trigger. It can take a really long time to get me there.”

  His hands traced the hourglass of her, a small smile making the corners of his mouth catch the blue in the waning late-afternoon light. “Good thing we have a long time with no obligations right this very second.”

  His expression, light and sweet, clouded a moment later as he read the look on her face.

  “Hold the phone. Are you saying that you don’t want me to even try to get you off?”

  Fin felt her mouth twist up. She resisted the urge to slide off his lap and get under the covers, where she wouldn’t be quite so naked.

  “It’s...been the source of a lot of frustration in the past.”

  His brow furrowed. “For you?”

  After a moment, she shook her head. “Usually for the guy. They get irritated when nothing they do works. But it’s not that big of a deal. I can almost always get there by myself during sex.”

  Tyler’s mouth dropped straight open. His eyes went wide as he flopped backward onto the bed, his arms flinging up over his head.

  “Wow,” he murmured to the ceiling. “Wow. It all makes sense now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “WHAT MAKES SENSE?” Fin, still straddled across Tyler’s lap, poked at his chest. He gritted his teeth because she was extremely wet and extremely warm and even through their two pairs of underwear he could feel her in excruciating detail.

  “You,” he told her honestly. “No wonder you had no interest in me pursuing you. No wonder you distrust guys who want you so badly. Because they pursue you relentlessly, usually insulting you if you turn them down, and when you do say yes to one of them, apparently he’s not even patient enough to get you off? Jeez, I’d have kicked my ass to the curb too, if that had been my experience.”

  Her brows were down, watching him like he was some alien creature who was trying to communicate in another language.

  “You say that now...” she said after a minute. “But forty minutes of fruitless canoodling later, and you might be singing a different tune.”

  He sat up so that they were nose to nose. “Absolutely zero canoodling is ever fruitless. If I wanna canoodle you, trust me, I’m doing it for the sake of canoodling. And orgasm should not be viewed as the only destination. That’s a total orgasm killer.”

  She cocked her head again to the side as if she were still actively trying to figure out what language he was speaking. “You’re serious.”

  “Dead.” He brushed his nose over hers. “Something I learned as I got older and got better at sex is that pressure to perform is not sexy. Ever. Dudes usually figure this out in relation to their boners.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean a watched pot never boils.”

  She threw her head back and laughed and he silently thanked God that the furrow between her eyes was gone. “You mean that if everyone is just sitting around and waiting for the boner to rear his head—”

  “Then six more weeks of winter it is.”

  She laughed again before her smile gave way to an inquisitive look. “You think the same theory can be applied to my orgasm?”

  He gave her a droll look. “Fin, if you’re counting down the seconds to when I’m going to get frustrated and give up on your elusive orgasm, you are literally never going to have said elusive orgasm. Also, if the only reason I’m touching you or going down on you is to get you off, then I’m probably going to get frustrated if you don’t get off. The point is that we’re supposed to be enjoying each other. Reveling in each other. And if we’re doing that, pressure free, then usually that leads to the happy fireworks times.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And if it doesn’t lead to the happy fireworks times?”

  He shrugged. “Then you get yourself off during sex. Or we use a vibrator. Or I give you ten minutes alone in the shower to take care of business. I dunno. I’m just saying that if we’re actually considering having sex with each other regularly, relationship-style, then there’s gonna be times that you don’t come or my boner takes a coffee break or whatever. If we just kind of accept that we can still have good sex even if we’re not checking every box every time, then we’ll actually have good sex. Where I’m not praying for boners and you don’t have one eye on the clock waiting for me to tell you the
re’s something wrong with your hoo-ha.”

  Her face changed from one emotion to the next, but Tyler wasn’t sure he was accurately interpreting any of them. She looked confused. And hopeful. And trepidatious. And excited.

  “That actually makes a lot of sense.”

  He propped his hands behind his head. “You know, I’m not the worst.”

  She rolled her eyes and rubbed herself against him. “So, what happens now?”

  He gulped and pressed his eyes closed for a moment against the image of a topless Serafine St. Romain straddling him. He deserved the medal of honor for having that conversation while she was naked.

  “Uh,” he grated out. “We have sex?”

  She laughed. “Good idea.”

  And then the weight of her was gone as she scampered to the bathroom and back, condoms in hand.

  She held out a hand to him and he took it. She yanked him up to his feet. “I like your theory about pressure. Beds are a lot of pressure. Let’s go to a less sex-havey place.” She tugged him a few feet to the side, and they both sat down hard on top of the chaise longue that took up one wall of her bedroom. It was romantic and curvy and entirely too small for two people. It was perfect. Her body was jammed up between the wall and his body, her breasts in his face, her legs twisted with his.

  Tyler leaned forward and took one of her nipples in his mouth, testing her, suctioning, nibbling. He kept his promise and reveled. He lost himself in the piano keys of her ribs, the plush paradise of her breasts.

  She kissed at his ribs, dragged her hands through his chest hair. Just when he was about to ask her if his chest hair bothered her at all, she rubbed one cheek against it and bit his pec. That was a yes to the chest hair, then.

  They grappled together, sweaty and cramped on the chaise longue. She dragged her foot up the back of one of his legs, pushing her toes underneath the leg of his boxer briefs. He grunted and tucked his thumbs into his waistband, tugging them down over his hips. She reared back and helped him get them the rest of the way down.

  Her eyes landed between his legs, and she surprised him by breaking into a wide, lustful smile.

  “You look like you have some very evil, very dirty plans in store for me,” he said, unable to keep from tracing the shape of her hourglass with his hands.

  “I’m just smiling because your dick kind of looks like you.”

  “What?” Tyler laughed and looked down at the appendage in question. “What are you talking about?”

  She was sitting on his thighs, her hands on his hip bones. Before she answered, she leaned down and pressed a kiss to his tip, almost chaste. Tyler’s hips jutted upward of their own accord and, holding his eye, she gave him one hot, glancing lick before she lifted her head again and answered his question.

  “I’m not sure how to explain it. But he looks like you. Preppy. Masculine. But with all this desire he keeps on a very short leash.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Tyler said, unable to keep himself from reaching a hand down, readjusting himself.

  Fin batted his hands away and reached for a condom, opening it and expertly sliding it down his length. “Sorry,” she grimaced. “I’ll get bigger ones next time.”

  “These’ll do,” he grunted, counting backward from nine thousand at the feel of her tight, confident grip against him.

  The very second she was done fussing over him, he reached up and toppled her back down, over him. He tipped them to the side again so that she was pinned between the wall and him, his body on the chaise longue just far enough not to fall off. Her leg was over top of his hip, her eyes snagged on his, her breasts smashed against his chest. She was completely pinned and open to him with the exception of her underwear.

  Pulling them off of her would require him to disentangle the two of them, and there was not a penguin’s chance in hell of that happening. So, Tyler simply reached down and yanked her underwear to one side, baring her to him. Fin’s pupils dilated and she jutted her hips forward, her light eyes almost hypnotizing him. Tyler found her with his fingers first, and she was the same heaven she’d been over on the bed. Warm, impossibly wet, ready for him. Open and tight and perfect. He guided his hardness straight toward the promised land, pressing himself just half an inch inside of her and waiting, his entire world trembling like those first disorienting few seconds of an earthquake.

  “More,” she whispered, moving her head so that their mouths were pressed together, not kissing, just smashed together and breathing, her arms around his rib cage, their chests pumping in and out. He planted the flat of his palm against her ass and held her still as he pushed himself forward.

  Not too fast, not too slow. Tyler pushed in halfway, pulled back out and then thrust forward and let himself sink to the hilt.

  He said words. Lots of them. He felt like she was pulling them out of him with those eyes of hers. He had that familiar hypnotized feeling as he felt himself get lost in the light blur of her gaze. Her arms were a hard cage around him, their noses and mouths smashed together. He placed one hand between her back and the wall, reared back and thrusted again. And again.

  The chaise longue scratched her wooden floor as it moved an inch or so at a time. Tyler was dimly aware of planting a foot against the wall for leverage. On their sides like this, they didn’t have a huge range of motion, but neither did they seem to need it. He could feel her pleasure point smashed against his pubic bone, the same way her breasts were smashed against his chest. He could hear her voice, begging directly into his mouth. He reveled in the tight, almost unforgiving clasp of her body. He felt her begin to rhythmically clench around him as she rose, chased her own fire, lost herself the way he was losing himself.

  “Ty,” she chanted. “Ty. Oh, God. I’m gonna—” And that was all the warning he got before her fingernails raked across his back, her arms clamping hard around him, her head getting thrown back as her entire body went tight and writhing and pressure, pressure, pressure around where he needed her the most. White light spread into the corners of his vision as he endured the most pleasurable pain of his life. There was nothing like this. Nothing better than this moment right here.

  He stopped thrusting and just held inside of her, letting her feel him there. He’d been close, but hadn’t come yet and suddenly, he found he wasn’t quite ready to. Though pulling out of her heat went against every law of nature known to mankind, Tyler did just that.

  “Mmm,” she groaned, tossing one arm over her eyes. “That was—” She cut off and looked up when he gripped her knees and swung her around on the chaise longue, opening her up to him where he knelt on the ground. “What? You don’t have to—Oh, shit.”

  He knew he didn’t have to. Which was part of why he wanted to so badly. He hoped that one day she would understand this. That sex without unwritten sexual obligation was the highest plane of adult fun that anyone could ever reach. It was like the secret hidden level at the end of an old Nintendo video game. Not everyone knew it was there, but once you found it, you refused to settle for less.

  He opened his mouth over her wetness, kissed her there like he had her mouth. Slow and unbothered and joyful. He could still feel her aftershocks from her first orgasm and he chased them, used them like a roadmap, let himself find where she was sensitive, where she was too sensitive and which places made her yank his hair. He held her open with his hands and let himself lose track of time. He wasn’t completely converted on this whole energy thing, but he did his absolute best to nonverbally communicate to her that he was having a blast, that she should forget about time, that this was perfection.

  He nuzzled and kissed and nipped. But it was the suckling she liked best. The no-nonsense, concentrated, he-didn’t-come-to-play suction that had her in that crescent-moon shape again, nonsense words that dissolved into a kind of hoarse scream as she trembled, vibrated, clamped down on the two fingers he’d slipped inside.

  She
reared up and he barely recognized her. She’d never looked more like Cleopatra than she did in that moment. She was fierce and glowing with whatever the nonangry version of anger was. She had it in spades. She tumbled forward, off the chaise longue, and knocked him back onto the floor. He caught himself on the heels of his hands, his legs spread out before him with Fin kneeling in the triangle they made. She aggressively ripped the condom off of him, leaned forward and swallowed him down.

  Apparently she hadn’t come to play either. Because did she tease him? She did not. Did she experiment? She did not. Did she play? She did not. She merely attempted to get the roof of his head to blow off in cartoon steam.

  He collapsed backward onto his elbows, thrust his hips up into the fisted hand she’d brought into the mix, and simply stopped holding on to reality. White claimed his vision then as pleasure, needle-sharp and ruthless, was summoned forth from him in an unstoppable cyclone.

  He was shocked to feel echoes of that same palm energy she’d encouraged him to feel earlier. This was like that but multiplied by the earth. This was grounded in pleasure, in giving. He knew, without question, that he was giving something of himself to her. Not just his ecstasy, but a piece of who he was. He was riding on the impossible euphoria of handing himself over to her. Hers for the taking.

  I’m yours.

  The words popped into his consciousness out of nowhere as she sucked him through the most life-altering orgasm he’d ever experienced. And when he huffed and fell backward, and she continued to lap at him affectionately, he knew another truth: wherever this static-shock-having, possibly psychic, magic-doing, potion-brewing witch woman wanted to lead him, he was going. He’d go with her into the beyond. The next world. The next life. Beyond, beyond, beyond.

  TYLER WOKE UP alone on the floor of Fin’s bedroom. The sky outside the window was a deep blue but he lay in a triangle of orange light glowing in from the living room. There was a pillow under his head and a sheet tossed over his hips. He moved one hand down and confirmed that he was still very much naked.