by L. L. Ash
I didn’t have to wait, though. Ivy’s hands circled around my head and pulled me the rest of the ‘Hitched’ ten percent and my mouth was instantly fucking hers.
A long, low groan moved up her chest and echoed into my mouth. I met it tit-for-tat, letting her know just how fucking much I was enjoying kissing her, too.
With a moan of my own against her lips, I drew long, savory kisses from her, my brain begging for more while at the same time I was praying to God that it didn’t ever end.
“What are we doing?” she asked eventually, her lips brushing against mine, breath smelling like chocolate and the dregs of whiskey.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, swallowing my pride, “but I don’t want to stop.”
“Me either,” she whispered, then moved her arms around my neck and pulled until she was on her back and I was hovering my ass above her, knees rubbing up against her naked thighs.
“Will you regret me if I fuck you?” I asked.
Fuck knows I couldn’t have her angry at me again because I pulled an asshole move and had sex with her when she wasn’t ready for it.
I couldn’t promise her anything except for a good time, and this time, she knew that.
Lips still tickling mine, she panted into my mouth while her head gave a hesitant nod.
Well, shit.
I started to move back, but she cinched her arms tighter around my neck until we were nose to nose again.
“Probably,” she breathed. “But I want you, too. Just don’t walk out on me again.”
I made that mistake once, and while I was a dumbass sometimes, I wasn’t a total idiot. I was going to absorb every single moment she was going to let me have.
“Deal,” I agreed before dropping my mouth back to hers and soaking in her abundant, wild sweetness.
Ivy wiggled against my chest while I hovered above her, grinding my thigh between her legs.
“Help me,” she said, reaching her arms around her back while still trying to steal frantic kisses from me.
Kisses I happily gave, FYI.
My hand lifted from the mattress and I slipped it behind her where she was struggling with her bra latch. I grabbed it between three fingers and expertly dragged the edges toward each other, then let them go to unhook it. Her shoulders shimmied and she managed to get her arms out of her bra before she grabbed it and literally flung it away.
There they were. Those beautiful tits that I’d missed out on the first time. Small, firm, and tipped with adorable little dusky pink nipples. They were everything I dreamed they would be. The perfect handful.
“You’re beautiful,” I whispered against her neck, nibbling a line down because I was on a direct mission to get those nips into my mouth.
“Get naked, or get off me,” she told me while I felt her shoving down her own underwear.
A lady shouldn’t have to ask twice.
With the fingers of my free hand, I bit down on her neck while shoving my hand into the band of my boxer briefs to slide them down my thighs.
It was the first time we’d ever been naked together, and for some reason, I felt like a fifteen year old boy again, losing his virginity to the most popular girl in school. She was all lust and femininity and pure, unadulterated, Aphroditian perfection, and I was a fumbling mess, just trying to get my cock into the right hole. If this was how the mighty fell, just call me Achillis and I’ll show you my heel.
- 33 -
Ivory
Am I really doing this?
The teeth nibbling on my breast told me that, yes, I really was.
Oh God… He was absolutely perfect.
My fingers slid up his rippling abs as one of his hands reached down and cupped my ass. Pulling me up, he ground us together while sucking my nipple and humming his pleasure.
That hard cock of his was stabbing me, and I literally felt like I was going to explode or internally combust if something didn’t get inside me.
My legs curled around his hips and I used him as leverage to grind back, which just made him sing louder.
“Fucking hell,” he barked, thrusting back, even though he wasn’t actually inside me.
I fucking needed him inside me.
“You on the pill?” he ground out, shaft now dragging against my clit and spreading my own moisture around until we were both a damp mess.
I didn’t get more than half a nod out before he was adjusting himself and sinking into me.
“Yes!” I yelped, breathless and hot and prickling with sweat. “Fuck, you feel good.”
He chuckled, but drew out and thrust again, harder the second time.
“Shouldn’t I be saying that to you?” he asked.
I lifted my hand, pausing on manhandling his tan muscles, to grab his chin until he was looking at me.
“Say whatever you want. Just be real,” I warned.
Although, to be fair, even if he said he was just kidding and that this was a birthday prank, I wasn’t about to stop riding him.
He chuckled and his hips slowed, head moving until our cheeks were lined up, my soft, full one against his sharp, stubbly one.
“You feel so fucking amazing,” he groaned into my ear, breathy and dripping with lust. “I want to feel you come around my dick until neither of us can breathe anymore.”
Dangerous, but hell, if I didn’t want the exact same thing.
Lifting my hips, I felt him sink further in, his balls slapping my ass while his abs flexed and rolled.
Digging my nails into his perfect ass, I encouraged him to move, driving him faster and faster until I was shaking, knees trembling and toes curling.
“Touch yourself,” he whispered between brutal thrusts. “I want to feel you come.”
Snaking my hand between us, I managed to slip my fingers between our pelvises until my first and middle fingers were trailing circles around my clit, driving that hot feeling right to my very bones.
With a grimace, I came, trying to bite back every sound so I didn’t seem like any more of a moany freak than I already did.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he growled out, thrusting once, twice, then barking it out one more time as I felt his shaft throbbing inside me.
We stayed there, perfectly still while our orgasms waned, crashing like waves in the sexiest kind of synchrony.
“Well, that didn’t last long,” I told him, and his eyes narrowed on me.
“First of all, I’m tired and still processing a fucking brewery inside my liver, and second of all, it’s been months, ok?”
He dragged his shaft out of me, and my body ached and cried with every flaccid inch that left me. I wanted it back, and I didn’t want to feel empty ever again.
“Months?” I asked, ‘cause evidently it was the only part of his statement that I cared about.
He dropped onto his back and shoved his hands through his hair.
“Months,” he agreed, then turned to me to look into my eyes.
He wasn’t lying. I could tell. The truth of it was staring me right in the face, and damn, it made me love him even more.
“I’ve got some bad news,” he said, still staring in my face.
“What?” I asked, feeling wariness suddenly clench around my frantically beating heart.
“I might have, sort of, landed my ass right into your cake.”
I just blinked.
My cake?
Oh, right, the cake that we were sharing off one fork right before he kissed me breathless and fucked my brains out.
I choked on a laugh, and his mouth stretched into a grin.
“So, I guess I only get one bite, huh?” I asked him as he started sitting up, looking beneath him.
Right on his lower back was a nice, big, chocolate stain where the frosting had stuck to him. Underneath was the tipped plate and smears of chocolate on the pristine, white sheets.
“They’re going to charge me up the ass for this,” he said, getting up and making his way to the bathroom to clean up.
“Guess it’s a good t
hing they have your credit card and not mine,” I said, following him to the bathroom.
I was really messy between the thighs, and I needed a clean up, too.
“Ha. Ha.” His voice was deadpan, and though he sounded surly, he was amused, too.
“You should really pay more attention where you park your ass,” I added, ribbing him a little more.
“Sure,” he agreed, reaching into the shower to turn the water on hot. “A person could say the same to you.”
I shrugged, feeling totally sober, albeit, very tired, too.
“I have shitty taste in men, what can I say?”
Hunter turned to me, and the smile he gave me was practically glowing, it was so bright.
I heard my phone buzz in the background, and realized that I hadn’t texted Dad yet to tell him where we were.
Hunter got into the shower while I ran back to the room and looked in my discarded clothes for my phone.
When the light turned on, my eyes squinted at the brightness, and it made my head start to ache right between my eyes.
The text wasn’t from Dad, though. No, another man was wishing me a happy birthday.
Jamie: Happy birthday girl. Make a wish.
My palm hit my chest in awe that he'd remembered.
We hadn’t talked a whole lot over the past couple weeks because of the hours he worked, but I’d mentioned my birthday more than a week ago and he still remembered.
Me: Thanks, Jamie
Jamie: You do anything?
Me: Got super drunk, took a nap. Feeling better now, minus the massive headache.
Jamie: Make sure you keep Advil on the nightstand and a bottle of water. Then go out for a super greasy breakfast. Hangover cure 101.
I smiled down at the words, then heard the shower door open.
Oh my God… I just fucked the hell out of Hunter Hayes, and there I was, smiling and flirting with another guy.
When did I get to be such a player?
Did I even want to be a player?
Not that it mattered. I wasn’t about to give up either of them anytime soon, and whatever happened with Hunter would never happen again. Happy birthday to me.
“Ivy?” Hunter called from the bathroom.
My phone vibrated with another message, and I felt torn all over again.
“Can you reach this spot for me?” Hunter called out.
I grinned and without another thought put the phone down, text unread.
Well, maybe the decision wasn’t so hard, after all.
- 34 -
Ivory
My breath legit smelled like ass.
Well, like chocolate ass.
Hunter fucking Hayes was just waking up next to me, naked as the day he was born and rubbing the sun out of his eyes.
“This is the worst part about a bender,” he said, groaning into his hands.
I could understand that. I felt like utter shit, and I could only guess he did, too.
Looking down at myself, I could see that I was naked too, although freshly cleaned from my midnight shower.
“I forgot to text Dad,” I told him, staring at my phone again.
It died at some point, and I couldn’t get it to turn on.
“I texted him,” Hunter told me. “Told him we were crashing instead of driving home.”
“Why didn’t we just get a cab home?” I asked him, wrapping the sheet tighter around my body as he got out of bed and started pulling on his clothes from last night.
“Because I didn’t want your birthday to end with you throwing up and crawling into your childhood bed,” he told me, peeking over his shoulder while he fastened his jeans.
Well, that certainly wasn’t how I spent my night. No, instead I just made ‘The Big Mistake’ part two.
But, he didn’t run away. He held me all night, breathing into my hair, just like we used to.
“So...” I started, but he was turning around, his eyes on me making my mouth stop talking.
“Last night?” he asked, biting on his lip like he was nervous or something.
“Last night,” I agreed, giving a little shrug.
“We making a thing out of it?” he asked slowly, “or just letting it kind of...happen?”
Well shit, I didn’t know.
“Making what kind of thing out of it?” I asked, reaching over the side of the bed to get my underwear while simultaneously trying not to get the crusty chocolate cake on me.
When I looked back up, Hunter was dressed and sitting on the side of the bed, his keys in hand, rattling them around uncomfortably.
“I don’t know, Ivy. I don’t fucking know.”
I didn’t know what to feel. Part of me wanted to toss my clothes and undress him all over again, while the other part of me screamed at me to remember all those moments when he was awful to me. Those moments when I’d felt so lonely that I would cry in my room, under my sheets so Mom or Dad wouldn’t hear me. The moments when I had to mourn the death of our friendship, all without knowing why it had died.
“Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen,” I said eventually, the joy sufficiently sucked out of me with those memories plaguing my brain.
He saw the change, and his smile disappeared, too.
“Ok,” he agreed easily enough, then stood. “I’m going to go check us out.”
Once he was out the door, I got my stuff back on and grabbed my purse, then left the room. Hunter was just handing over the room keys to the person up front when I joined him in the lobby.
“We’re set,” he told me, tilting his head toward the door. “Let’s get back.”
We didn’t say anything else for the rest of the trip. When we pulled up to the house, I hopped off.
Before I could say anything else, Hunter was shooting down the street again, hair slicked back against his head and those dark sunglasses on the bridge of his nose.
I watched until he’d rounded the street corner, then braced myself to go inside and face the firing squad.
There was none, of course, but I did get peppered with questions about Hunter and why he wasn’t home. I didn’t have anything to tell them, because ‘we drunk-fucked and now it’s weird’ wasn’t exactly the best idea if I wanted Hunter to keep his balls.
“I’m just going to go shower and change,” I told Dad and Penelope, putting on a big smile even though my whole body felt melancholy.
I was only halfway through my shower when someone knocked on the door.
“Your friend is outside!” Penelope called through it.
Friend?
I hurried through the rest of my shower, skipping my hair again and opting just to throw it in a messy bun on top of my head, then I stumbled out in some matching sweats to see who was there.
“I’ve been calling you all morning!” Hillary said, waiting just on the other side of the bathroom door and surprising the hell out of me. “You have a lot of explaining to do, girl!”
I jumped back, then threw myself at her for a giant hug that I hadn’t even known I needed until she was right in front of me.
“Let’s go get coffee,” I told her. “We have a lot to talk about.”
“You and Hunter did what?” she demanded for the twentieth time.
I’d just finished telling Hillary about coming home to Dad’s surprise marriage, then the subsequent honeymoon that they’d brought us on. I’d finally told her about the night before and what had happened after we’d gotten to the hotel when she finally broke the stare of shock that had taken over her face for the past ten minutes.
“I know, it’s weird,” I told her, frowning and fingering my empty pocket.
I’d left my phone at home to charge since it was still out of batteries.
“Girl, I just can’t even with you right now,” she said, waving her manicured hand around like I was the most irritating person in the world. “How could you not tell me? I mean, it’s been a month!”
Dammit. Hurt reflected back at me, just like I knew it would.
“I�
��m sorry, I just wanted to tell you face to face, not over text or something.”
“You know they invented video chat for a reason?” she said, blinking rapidly at me.
I gave her a weak smile, and her face wilted into one of worry.
“Ok girl. Spill the rest of it.”
“That’s all of it,” I told her. “Promise.”
“Well, something’s going on,” she said. “Just look at your face.”
“I’m just...processing,” I admitted.
“Well, you’ve been in a constant state of a rel-hate-tionship for the past ten years—”
“Eight”, I corrected.
She eyed me, then sighed.
“Eight years, then. So what changed? How could you let him do that to you?”
“He didn’t do anything to me. Nothing I didn’t want him to, anyway. I might have...maybe...started it.”
She started that blinking thing again.
“So...you guys are like...a thing now?”
“No?” I said, not entirely sure.
“Ok, so, you gotta figure that out, girl. What do you feel? Do you forgive him?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know, Hil. What am I supposed to feel?”
“Well, let’s talk about it. Break it down. The first question. Do you regret it?”
So, we’re just digging down to the meat of it, huh?
“Dammit, Hil,” I groaned, rubbing my hands across my face.
“It’s important!” she said, laughing at my misery.
“I’m still processing!”
“Well, be done processing. Do you regret it, Ivory? Do you wish you could go back to last night and stay home, or get a cab home?”
“No, of course not!” I blurted, and that made Hillary grin.
“So you liked it?”
It was my turn to blink at her.
“Of course I liked it.”
“Not that part,” she said, winking. “I mean the part where you guys spent the night together, and then spent the night together.”
“Well, yeah—”
“I knew it!” she squealed.
“Knew what?” I demanded as a self-satisfied look settled over her face.