Kennedy’s hand slides down my chest, slowly tracing my abs, then begins pushing my sweats down over my hips.
“Fuck,” I hiss in anticipation, my fingers leaving her breast to remove the rest of my clothes. Before I've even kicked them off, she’s found my length, wrapping her petite fingers around the girth and sliding them from tip to base so quickly I jerk in pleasure.
Voice foggy with anticipation, she says, “I think I should be on top.”
I grin at her because I already know the answer to my question, “Why’s that?”
Her fingers tighten, and it feels so fucking good. “Because I want to be able to walk tomorrow.” She chuckles when I flip us over.
I can’t think of a witty comeback because her wet panties grind against my dick, and on instinct, my hands find her hips and I buck up against her. She throws her head back, and my lips part as I gawk at her like I’ve never seen something so magnificent in my life. And truly, I haven’t.
She rolls her hips, then bites her bottom lip when she looks at me. I slide my hands over the tops of her thighs, gripping hard and pulling her against me. I still, my eyes taking her in. The contrast of her pale skin under my tan fingers is beautiful. Her abdomen constricts like she can feel my eyes on her skin. I have the urge to sit up and take her pert breast in my mouth, but I resist because I don’t want to stop looking at her.
I meet her eyes when she lets out a breathy laugh and asks, “What are you doing?”
I grin. “Admiring you.”
I expect her to swat at me, but instead she rubs against me, and her smile is so deliciously wicked that I push up into a sitting position. My hands find her hips, and my lips pull her hard nipple between my teeth. I suppose we’re still playing a game, this one’s just more fun.
My name on her lips is somewhere between a whisper and moan as her fingers tunnel through my hair. “Zach, please.”
I reach between us and roughly move her silky panties to the side so I can brush my fingers against her wet core. She shivers as I slide a finger inside her, my mouth sucking and licking her collarbone and neck with such vigor I’m sure I’m leaving marks.
“Fuck,” I grunt out when I try to add a second finger. She’s so tight, and my dick twitches in anticipation. But I need to make sure she’s ready. She moans, throwing her head back, and her nails bite into my shoulders, mixing pleasure and pain. My thumb finds the spot I know will drive her right over the edge, and I’m not disappointed.
She pants out my name as my fingers move more quickly, and I’m begging for her release. She clutches me close, grinding down on my fingers, and I can feel her legs begin to shake. My mouth hovers over hers, and I watch as her lashes flutter closed and her orgasm rolls through her.
“That’s my girl,” I tell her, my lips grazing hers, but I’m too selfish to lose myself in a kiss when I can watch her fall apart for me.
“I’ll never get used to that.” She chuckles, but her voice is shaky with anticipation. She doesn’t waste any time moving against me, letting me know she’s ready.
I reach over and grab the condom, ripping the foil packet with my teeth and haphazardly tossing the wrapper on the couch along with our clothes. I use my free hand to cup her jaw and give her a quick kiss. “You’re sure? Last chance.”
“I’m going to tell everyone the rumors aren’t true if you ask me that again,” she says, and pointedly looks down between us, then giggles before pressing her forehead to mine. I can only force a scowl because she’s ridiculous, and she’s mine.
I lift her up off my lap so I can roll the condom down my length, and she uses one hand on my shoulder to brace herself while she adds her panties to the pile of discarded clothing. Before she can seat herself on my lap, I yank her forward and kiss her stomach, and lick down until I can nip at both of her hip bones.
I want to taste her, but she’s impatient. Her fingers tunnel in my hair as she kneels down and takes my hardness in her hand, lining it up with her opening. She leans in and brushes her nose against mine and kisses me as she sinks down, taking just the head inside her.
Her breath wooshes out when my hips instinctively jerk up, and I sink halfway in.
“Ouch!” she smacks me on the back, hard, and buries her face in my neck.
“Sorry, I’ve never done this!” I hiss, because I really can’t take responsibility in this situation. I’ve never been someone’s first, and I’ve never cared how good the sex was for the other person.
I know she’s ok because after a moment, she sinks lower, and I feel her mouth open against my neck. I let the fingers of one hand dig into the flesh of her ass while my other soothes down her back as she takes me all the way to the hilt. I have never felt pleasure like this before, and I’m finding it difficult not to pull out and slam back into her heat.
I string together a few unintelligible words when she lifts up and then slowly slides back down. I move my hand to the back of her head so I can twine my fingers in her hair, and bury my face in her cleavage, finding her nipple and sucking hard. Her hips buck in response, and I tighten my grip on her hair. I let her set the pace, and its equal parts excruciating and pleasurable because I so badly want to flip her over and pound into her.
“You’re fucking beautiful,” I tell her, lifting up to meet her pace as it increases. I reach between us and work my fingers against the spot I know will have her clenching around me.
She looks me in the eyes and whispers, “Faster, and I’ll cum for you.”
Holy fuck.
I oblige, arching up, thrusting into her heat over and over until she throws her arms around me, pressing our chests together so tightly I can feel her heart thrumming against mine. The exact moment I feel her convulsing around me, I feel her mouth on my ear, tugging the lobe between her teeth.
That’s all it takes and I’m flipping us over, pulling her leg up over my hip and losing myself inside her. I collapse on her, wanting to feel every inch of our bodies touching.
It could be minutes or hours later, I’m not sure. I’m so exhausted and sated that the thought of moving off of her physically hurts.
“Are you okay?” I lift myself partially off of her and rest my weight on my forearms next to her head. I’m not really sure why, but the question sends a wave of embarrassment through me. She grins up at me, the heels of her feet still pressed into my lower back. She bites her bottom lip, and I know that means she wants to giggle at my expense. “Jeeze, Kenney. I’ve never done this before, all this...lovey-dovey shit. Do you feel okay?” I ask her again, and she full-on laughs this time, in that sweet melodic way she does when she’s genuinely happy.
“I’m better than okay,” she says, moving her hands to my shoulders and rubbing them down my arms until she reaches my wrists. She toys with the friendship bracelets she finds, fluttering her long lashes up at me, an inquisitive expression lurking behind contentment.
I lower myself a fraction to kiss her lips. “I’ll replace it with something a little more serious,” I say because the worn braided strands don’t do her or our evolved relationship justice.
She shakes her head in the negative, cupping my face and pulling me down for another kiss. Her hand finds my wrist again, tracing the bracelet she’d worn around her ankle since she bought the set for us. “This will always mean the most. This will always be us.”
I watch as Kennedy busies herself tidying up my room, I guess it's our room now. I need to ask her about that, but she’s fresh out of the shower and only wearing a fluffy pink towel, one of the ones Everly deemed the ‘fancy’ towels that us guys aren’t allowed to touch.
Her wet hair is pinned up, and she’s making up my messy bed even though we’re about to get in it for the night. I lean against the doorway and watch her, the same way I did when we first met. All this time later, and she can still capture my attention no matter what she’s doing. It feels surreal, the fact that less than an hour ago I made love to her. I told her I was all in, and I am. But before she can be all in with me,
she needs to know everything. I’m going to tell her about my dad and the reasons I’ve kept her at arm’s length. I’m going to tell her why my mom is blind, why she doesn’t look anything like she did when I was young.
“Um, Zach, if this relationship is going to work out, this is not going to fly.” She’s pinching her nose with one hand, and in the other, she’s holding one of my discarded socks that I probably kicked off in bed.
“That’s your limit? Dirty socks?” I tease.
She only rolls her eyes and I chuckle and cross the room toward her. Tossing the offending sock over somewhere near the hamper, I envelop her in my arms and kiss the top of her head. She rubs her face against my bare chest and wraps her arms around my hips, which are covered with the white towel that is Everly-approved for male usage.
I tip her chin up and study her face for a moment as she smiles up at me. Brushing my thumb along her bottom lip, I tell her, “I’m sorry if I ever made you doubt how important you are to me. There’s nothing else. Just you.”
She blinks a few times, but one tear falls, and I quickly wipe it away. “I mean it, Kenney…”
She chuckles, wiping under her own eyes and shakes her head. I know she’s about to say something sarcastic now, just like she always does when the emotions get to be too much.
“Jeeze, we have sex one time, and now you’re a stage five clinger.” She shrieks out a laugh when I grab for her, but she’s too quick, or maybe I just like chasing her. She’s standing on the bed, holding her towel up with one hand and my pillow in the other.
I reach out and circle my fingers around her tiny ankle and grin at her. She shrieks, grabbing my shoulder, but she’s too late. I’ve already tugged her leg out from under her, and she flops down on the bed with a loud ‘oof’.
“What was that?” I tease, letting my hand caress from her ankle up her shapely calf and back down.
“I said what I said.” She giggles, and I let her go long enough to slip her anklet off of my wrist, placing it back on her ankle where it belongs.
I climb on the bed and lie down next to her, letting her draw circles with her finger on my chest. I’ll tell her every dark thing I’ve tried to shield her from tomorrow. Tonight is for this, for sleeping next to Kennedy, my girlfriend, who just so happens to be the best friend I’ve ever had too.
“You’re it for me too, Zach,” she says, scooching over and resting her head on my heart. “You always have been.”
17
Kennedy
When I wake up the next morning, two things are apparent—moving my legs is going to be painful today, and Zach is ready for round two.
He mumbles something that sounds like “good morning” as he runs his hand from just under my breasts down my stomach, kissing my neck like he’s done it a million times. Even though this aspect of our relationship is so new, it feels like we’ve been this way forever, and I like the comfort that comes along with that.
Just as he’s about to dip his hand below the waistband of my sleep shorts, I grip his wrist and nudge his hand back up to my stomach. His eyes shoot up to mine, and his palm flattens, moving soothingly across the skin of my abdomen.
“It feels like someone parked a dump truck up my hoo-ha,” I tell him, and with those words his worried stare changes so quickly that it’s hard to keep a straight face.
“Ridiculous.” He laughs, rolling me on my side and pulling me into his chest. He kisses my forehead and smiles down at me. I don’t see him smile this genuinely very often, but I’m glad me and my sore vagina are the cause of it today. “I need you to tell the guys that analogy at breakfast, okay?” he teases.
I wrinkle my nose because he might have made it difficult to walk, but my brain is just as sharp as it ever was. “You mean the one where we had sex, and I wasn’t sure if it was in?” I ask, wrinkling my forehead in mock confusion. He glowers, and I laugh a little too loudly for however early it is. Patrick is on the other side of the wall, and we all know he needs like twenty-three hours of sleep or he turns into Wreck-It Ralph.
“You’re okay, though?” he asks, and I feel him rest his cheek on the top of my head. I nod sleepily against him, and he wraps his arms snugly around me. I’ve never felt safer or more content in my entire life. I feel my chest doing that constricting thing that only seems to happen when Zach’s around, and I have the urge to blurt out how much last night meant to me, how much I love him, how I’m in love with him. But I don’t get the chance.
“I’ve got to tell you some things,” Zach says, and his voice is hoarse with emotion. I immediately pull back to look him in the eyes. That’s the thing with Zach and me—as long as I can see his eyes, I know how he’s feeling and I know if he’s telling me the truth.
I settle against his chest, kissing a small scar near his collar bone that I’ve noticed before. I asked him once where the scars came from, assuming I’d be rewarded with a drunk frat-boy story, but he brushed it off too quickly for there to be any humor in its origin.
“About what?” I ask cautiously because I always want him to be one hundred percent honest with me. I never want there to be secrets between us, but a small, yet very selfish part of me doesn’t want him to ruin the blissfulness of what we shared.
“About why I’ve been a goddamn coward.” He chuckles darkly and quickly pulls my hand up to press it against his chest. His heart beats against my fingertips, and it’s thrilling and comforting all at the same time.
“How does it feel?” I ask seriously, but he knows where it’s going because of who I am as a person. Serious talks, feelings, I’m not good at any of that, so I follow up with, “Finally having your head out of your ass?”
He shakes his head and laughs, but all I can do is smile at him and trace my finger over the scar again. I suspect the scar came from his father, and that’s why he won’t talk about it. And as much as I like to push his buttons, I’d never pressure him to tell me something he wasn’t ready to share.
“You’re not like him, you know,” I tell him as my eyes flick from the scar up to scan his face. There’s pain in his eyes, but also a hopefulness that I catch sometimes when he watches me. Sometimes he looks at me like I’m the only thing he’s got in the world, and that makes me feel like fucking magic.
“I could be,” he says, not elaborating, and I don’t expect him to.
“But you choose not to be. I could be a miserable, guilt-tripping harpy like my mother...but I choose not to be,” I say, touching the side of his face, silently asking him to keep looking at me. “I know I’m not the best at all of this, but you can tell me whatever you want, as much or as little, and I’ll listen.”
He closes his eyes briefly and lifts my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles and then my palm. “My mother was everything to my father. He was jealous of anyone that even looked at her…” He looks away for a moment, cradling my face in his large palm. “Not unlike I am with you. I’ve never been like this with anyone, Kenney. Not even a fraction. What I feel for you…it was instantaneous. I was wrapped around your fucking finger the moment I stumbled into your room that night. I fought it. I fought it hard, and did a lot of things I’m not proud of.” He squeezes my face gently to punctuate the emotion in his raspy voice. “I don’t want to hurt you the way he hurt her.”
I can see the genuine worry in his eyes when he stops speaking, and I reach up, covering his hand that’s still cupping my face. “Then don’t,” I say simply. “You’re not him, Zach.”
“You don’t know what he was like,” he says. I feel his hands shaking, and I’m not sure if it’s anger or anxiety. “He loved her so much that it turned to hate. He was obsessed to the point that if another guy looked at her, he’d turn on her and me. My mom had to have facial reconstructive surgery after she finally got away from him. He broke her nose and her cheek, fucked up her eye so bad she’s legally blind and probably other things that I was too young to realize.”
“We’re all a little jealous sometimes,” I say, and then chuckle when I a
dd on, “Patrick doesn’t count.” Then I swallow hard because I realize that he’s afraid that his feelings for me will eventually sour, turning so obsessive that he hurts me. I give him a slight smile, and I see his expression soften, just for me. The way he looks at me, holds me, treats me...that’s all the insurance I need on our relationship.
“I could have killed that prick you went out with…” he starts, but I cut him off with a quick kiss to his lips.
“But you didn’t. You showed up, acted like a testosterone-riddled donkey, and then we bickered about it like a normal couple would.” I join him when he starts laughing at my recount of the incident. “I’ve never feared you, ever. You got me?” I ask him.
He sobers, sliding his hand up my side and pulling me to him before he drops a kiss on each of my cheeks and then on my forehead. “I got you.”
“I’m here if you ever want to talk about your dad and what he did,” I tell him, snuggling against him. “But I don’t believe you’d be that way with me. If I did, I wouldn’t have stuck around so long.”
“The way I feel about you isn’t negotiable. It’s all-consuming, and I just don’t want to crush your spirit.” He tilts my chin up for me to look at him, and his gaze is intense. “It’s like a war inside me. The urge to own you, break you down until I’m all you can see is fierce, especially when I’m jealous, which is anytime I don’t have your full, undivided attention.”
“And…” I breathe out the words because I want to know exactly how he feels.
“I love you way too much to ever let that happen,” he tells me and then swallows my response by kissing me so passionately that I think my lips might bruise. I thread my fingers through his hair and let him roll me beneath him. He hitches my leg up on his hip and lets his weight press me deliciously into the mattress.
Damaged Elite (The Darlington Elite Book 2) Page 17