by Elena Armas
God, I sucked so much.
Aaron continued, “Come out, and let’s go get something to eat. You pick.”
My jet-lagged stomach grumbled at the thought. “Even fish tacos?”
“Especially fish tacos.”
Dammit. He was really going after my heart.
“Okay, one minute!” I called as I typed another message to Rosie.
Lina: Gotta go. We are picking up takeout.
Rosie: Okay. But tomorrow, you and I. We’re talking.
Lina: Sí, señorita.
Rosie: And, Lina?
Rosie: It doesn’t have to be a dream you need to wake up from.
With that thought—no, with that hope because that was exactly what I felt as I read my friend’s message, foolish hope—I left my luscious and tiled hiding spot and went hunting for Aaron.
I found him standing in his living room, looking out the industrial-style windows facing the waterfront.
Aaron’s apartment was in Dumbo, an area of Brooklyn I wasn’t all that familiar with but I was starting to love more and more. The place was incredible. Spacious and stark, elegant but simple.
Walking up to him, I peered out the massive windows myself. “These views of the East River are breathtaking.”
“I’m very lucky to be able to afford all this,” he said, and he sounded thoughtful. More than he usually did.
Turning and angling my body in his direction, I laid my back on the windows and faced him. How could I tell him that this view—him—was just as beautiful? One simply didn’t say stuff like that. So, I limited myself to look and soak it all up.
Aaron stared into the distance, the sunlight coming through the glass of the windows and kissing his skin. His blue eyes glinting under the light.
But there was something on his mind. I could tell.
“Is everything all right?” I reached out and placed my hand on his arm.
Only then did he look at me. “Come here.” In a swift motion, he had me tucked against his chest. He squeezed me, swaying us. “Better. Now, everything is much better.”
I couldn’t disagree with him. Anything that involved being in Aaron’s arms was far better than anything that didn’t. I let him tug a happy sigh out of me, and I relished in the way he hummed when I squeezed him right back.
When he finally released me, his gaze wandered out of the window again, but this time, it did with a small smile on his face.
Baby steps.
My eyes somehow ended on an industrial-style console that perfectly complemented the vibe of the windows—and the rest of the place. The only items on its surface were a framed photo and what looked like a textbook.
Feeling curious about who was in that photo, I walked up to it and picked it up. A woman. A beautiful, blue-eyed woman with raven hair and a smile I was starting to need to breathe a little easier. My heart warmed.
I felt his arm come around my shoulders, and then a kiss was brushed against my hair.
Letting my body fall into him, I asked, “What was your mom’s name?”
“Dorothea.” I felt his voice rumbling in his chest, right against my back. “She used to complain about it constantly. She made everybody call her Thea.”
“Tell me more about her, about your family.”
He released a breath, and it hit my hair with a puff. “It was her grandmother’s name. ‘A pretentious old lady’s name,’ my mom would say. Her side of the family was very wealthy but always unfortunate when it came to their health. They called it a curse.” He paused, sounding a little lost in his memories. “When I was a kid, my mom was the only living member left, so I never met my grandparents. And when my mom passed away, the last one of the Abbots became me. So, I inherited everything. That’s how I can afford this place.”
“That makes sense,” I murmured. I considered myself lucky to work for a company like InTech. For having a good wage coming in every month. But this place belonged to a whole different kind of life. One where studio apartments could fit in bathrooms. “So, you don’t really need to work a nine-to-five job.”
“No, but I love what I do. Even if some might call me a workaholic cyborg.”
I snickered. “Oops, I deserved that.”
I didn’t think anyone at the office knew about this. Aaron had always been so … private. But the fact that he didn’t need to work and yet worked harder than the vast majority of us was commendable. It made me love him—
Whoa. I shook my head.
“I have always admired you, you know? As much as I’ve bugged you for being so pragmatic and hardheaded, I have always, always admired you.”
“I …” He trailed off, sounding at a loss for a moment. “Thank you, baby.”
My lips curled up as I put the frame back on top of the console. “Your mom was beautiful. I can see where you got your looks from.”
Aaron chuckled softly. “You think I’m beautiful?”
“Of course. You are more than just beautiful. Don’t sound so shocked. You know you are.”
“I do, but I never thought you were all that attracted to me. Not for the first few months at least.”
I snorted. If he only knew. Then, I thought about how he had phrased it. “What gave it away? What changed after that time that made you realize I was not made of steel, Mr. Oblivious?”
His hold on me grew a little tighter, and then he exhaled. “Remember that colloquium InTech hosted for high schoolers a few months after I started? We realized there weren’t enough chairs when the kids started filing in. I saw you sneaking out, and somehow, I knew where you were going.”
I remembered that day. Jerkface Gerald had miscounted the number of attendants. “Folding chairs.”
“Yes, you shot out of there to fetch the folding chairs we kept in storage.”
Aaron had appeared out of thin air that day, exactly how he always did. Then, he had given me shit about wanting to carry the chairs on my own, that it wasn’t my job to do that.
“So, what gave it away? Was it how I almost smacked you with a chair for being an overbearing jackass?”
“It was how you shivered when I came behind you to help you with one that had been stuck to a shelf. You know, right before you pulled again and went toppling down to the floor.”
Oh. Oh yeah. I remembered that precise moment exactly.
I had felt his body behind me. His arms came around me without touching me, and I stared—and shivered and flushed and gotten all worked up—at how they flexed under his dress shirt as he tried to disentangle that damn chair. It had been like a slap on the face, how hot and bothered that left me.
“That gave it away. I just knew that the red spreading through your neck and cheeks had nothing to do with you calling me a stubborn, heartless robot.”
“Did it …” I trailed off, unease growing in my stomach. “Did it ever bother you, everything I called you? Everything I said when we butted heads?”
My heart raced, as I feared his answer.
“No,” he said simply. “At that point, I took anything you were willing to give me, Catalina.”
Something staggered in my chest.
“The story I told your sister about how we met? I was only speaking the truth.”
My eyelids fluttered shut, and I thanked the heavens I was currently leaning on Aaron, that he was holding me against his chest, because I would have tumbled to the floor otherwise.
“By the time I realized how much of an idiot I had been by pushing you away, you already hated me.”
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. “I heard you talk to Jeff. Accidentally.” That knot wouldn’t go away, squeezing my throat tight. “You said you’d work with anybody else, anybody but me. And I felt as if you had just pushed me aside. Deemed worthless as a professional because you didn’t like me. Because I had crossed some line I hadn’t known existed. I … how could I look at you and not think about it after that? I blacklisted you.”
“And I deserved it.” Aaron turned me around delicately, f
lushing our chests together very slowly. He looked down at me. “I meant what I said. When you brought that welcome gift to my office, something tore inside of me. You … distracted me. You stole my focus, Lina. Like nothing I had ever experienced before. So, I panicked. I refused to let that happen. When Jeff suggested I work closely with you, I convinced him that it would be a bad idea. I convinced myself of that too.
“But then I got to know you.” Aaron looked down at me intently, something weighing behind his eyes, pushing me—pushing us—closer and closer to an emotion that took more and more room in my chest with every second I spent looking into his eyes. “I watched you work, laugh, be this bright and kind woman that you are. And the crack that had opened that first day widened. It only kept growing. Making me realize how much of a fool I had been. By the time I knew I didn’t want to push you away anymore, that I couldn’t do it, it was too late. So, I took whatever you had for me even if that was hatred, antagonism, your obvious dislike, anything if that gave me a few minutes with you every day. If that put me on your mind, even for a little while.”
“Aaron …” I trailed off, everything inside of my chest, my head, my memory stirring into a loud and raging thunderstorm. “All this time.”
“I know.”
I watched his jaw twitch, his features hardening impossibly.
“You let me antagonize you. All this time, you sat there and let me do that.” My voice shook with emotion. With the loss of a time that we could have had. But it also shook with the lie that hid in my own words.
Had I really hated him at all? It didn’t seem possible at this point. Hadn’t I done the same and convinced myself of that because he had hurt me?
“Why?” The question left my lips in a whisper, for him but also for myself.
“Because it was all you were willing to give me. And I’d rather have you hating me than not have you at all.”
My body trembled; it shuddered under the weight of his words. With the truth underneath the ones rising to my lips.
Love. It had to be love—the uproar causing havoc in my chest. Realization grew in me as quickly as lightning hit the ground.
“I didn’t hate you,” I breathed. “As much as I wanted to, I don’t think I ever did. I was just … hurt. Perhaps because I had always wanted you to like me, and you made me believe you didn’t.”
Something flashed across Aaron’s face. The space between our mouths crackling with electricity and an emotion I had never, ever felt before.
“I want your heart, Catalina.” Both of his hands rose to my shoulders, trailing up my neck and cupping my face. “I want it for myself, just how I have given you mine.”
It’s yours, you beautiful and blind man, I wanted to tell him. Take it. I don’t want it anymore, I wanted to scream at him and anyone that would listen.
But I didn’t. I didn’t think one could be petrified by pure, sheer joy. It never seemed a possibility. Yet there I was, standing in front of him, just as he laid his heart in my hands, and all I could do was stare at him with a thousand unsaid words waiting on the tip of my tongue.
So, I showed him. My hands reached for his face, just as he had been doing, and I brought him to my lips. I told him with a kiss that I was his. Gave myself to him with those lips that didn’t seem capable of articulating any words.
Aaron lifted me off the floor and took me in his arms with a tenderness, a reverence that left me breathless, just how I imagined him doing with my heart. My legs went around his hips as his lips parted mine, his tongue taking, governing mine.
With long strides, he crossed the open space in his loft, carrying me in his arms as neither of us came out to breathe. He placed me on the countertop of the kitchen. The cool granite caressing the part of the backs of my thighs that weren’t covered by my shorts.
Aaron’s mouth dragged down my neck, his teeth scraping my skin, finally catching on the neckline of my tank top and pulling it down until revealing my bra. He grunted, and I felt the noise reverberate against my skin.
Hands on my hips shoved me against him with roughness, leaving me right on the edge of the counter. God, he was unleashed. My man was ravenous as he pulled at my top, briskly tugging it down to my waist, and then popped open my shorts, almost bursting the zipper. He didn’t care, didn’t seem to realize he had come undone.
I did that. I cracked him open at the seams.
The same kind of urgency hummed under my skin, under my fingertips, as I pulled at his T-shirt. In a swift motion, it lay on the floor. The warm, sizzling skin of his bare chest came against mine, his hips nestling between my legs, as those strong arms fused me against him, merged me with him.
I whimpered, the rest of my sanity leaving me with the sound.
Wanting the rest of his clothes gone, I tugged at his jeans. Desperately. Just as I arched my back, looking for the friction I ached—no, died—for, Aaron pushed his hardness into me, pleasure shooting through my body, even with the barrier of our pants and underwear.
I felt him hot and thick as he rocked against my center, and that alone made my eyelids flutter, my toes curl, and my world explode. He moved again, creating more friction between us, and I saw myself coming if he did that one more time.
“Again,” I told him, begged him.
Aaron’s hands palmed my ass, thrusting me against him. Then pushing into me harder, ripping a chain of moans out of me. Hustling me closer to the edge.
“God, I haven’t even touched you, baby,” he rasped into my mouth. Then, he took my lower lip between his teeth as he kept moving against me. “Haven’t even been inside you yet.”
His hands took control of my useless body, mercilessly rocking me against him, and my head fell back, a prayer on my lips.
“Come,” he grunted into my ear, our hips moving against each other’s. Fucking each other with our jeans still on. “Come, so I can fuck you better.”
That—that—toppled me over. No, it bulldozed into me. My mind left my body, leaving me behind as I burst into pure, boundless sensation. Not even Aaron’s name left my lips even if I wanted to scream it until my voice grew raw. I was spent, rendered empty. Weightless.
His arms went around my back, and in a heartbeat, I was standing on wobbly legs. My back came against his front, immediately feeling him hot and throbbing with need. The sensation—the knowledge of having the power to do that to him—bringing me back to life.
In another heartbeat, he brought my shorts and underwear down my legs, helping me step out and shoving them aside.
I felt the warmth of his chest on my back, and then his fingers closed around my wrists. “Hands on the counter,” he demanded, guiding my palms to the surface. Then, he widened my stance with his knee, right as he brushed openmouthed kisses down my spine. His hands grabbed on to my hips, one of them trailing down my bare backside. “I should take you to my bed.” He kneaded my ass, and then his palm traveled to my thigh. “I should lay you there and fuck you deep and slow.”
Whimpering, I pushed into his hips. He grunted and then reared back. I heard him unzip his pants. Then, I felt his hard length against my ass. He moved up and down, and I could tell he had just pulled himself out of his jeans, hadn’t even bothered to push them down or take them off.
Madness. It drove me fucking crazy.
“You know the times I have jerked off to the thought of you on your hands? On your elbows?” He passed his shaft along my ass, making me moan in need. “Or bent over my knee after getting all mouthy with me?”
Another moan, this one soaked with agony. Just like I was at the image of bringing his words to life.
“Oh,” he whispered. Then, his voice lowered. “Sounds like you’d love that as much as me.”
One of the drawers opened and closed, and then a foil was ripped open. “This time, I’m prepared. Have a whole box right there. It has been there for months.”
“Aaron,” I begged him. I wanted him now, or I would combust into a cloud of dust. “I need you.” I looked over my shoulder
, eyes ablaze. And saw a feral expression on his face. “Now.” It was my turn to grunt.
The back of his hand delicately caressed my jaw, and then his palm fell on my back. He pushed me onto the counter. “Grab on to the edge,” he growled. “I’m going to take you fast and hard, baby.”
With a deep thrust, he was seated inside of me. I whimpered, feeling wonderfully, heavenly full, and before I could ask for more, for all that he had promised, Aaron pushed out and thrust in again. We both moaned.
One of his hands came around me and landed on the counter, the other one fisting my hair. I’d dissolve. If I didn’t come soon, I’d disappear under his weight, under the rippling pleasure pooling down my belly.
“More,” I managed to say.
And the rhythm of his thrusts increased, pushing me into the granite surface, his grunts falling into my neck.
Fingers gripped my hip. “I can give you more.”
That hand lifted off my skin and fell back with a tight slap on my bare ass. A moan like no other moan to ever leave my lips emerged from my mouth.
“I can give you my all.” Another soft smack. Pushing me down, down, down.
“Yes,” I whimpered.
True to his word, he gave me everything. He thrust his cock into me uncontrollably, the sound of his hips against my ass encompassing our pants.
“Come with me.” His front fell on top of my back, deliciously caging me. Burying me with him. His fingers now rubbing my clit, accompanying his thrusts. “I want to feel you coming on my cock as I go off.”
One more frantic, desperate thrust. That was all it took for both of us to detonate into bliss. Groans equally powerful left both our mouths, our names blessing each other’s lips with them.
Aaron’s hands came around my middle, holding on to me more than holding me to him. Then, he brought us upward, slipping out of me. I turned around in his arms and leaned my chin on his chest, and he brushed a kiss on my forehead. Another one on my lips. Then another one on my nose.