He gets the big things.
Confronts them.
He stops at his van and lets me in, and then runs around to the other side. When he’s in his seat, and the packages dumped between us, and the door’s closed, he turns toward me.
For a moment, maybe I take a breath, but just one.
He’s looking at me, all over, not in my eyes.
I am wearing my giant green coat, but the way he’s looking at my body my coat seems to have burst into flames and I am actually naked, framed in fire.
Then he grabs my hand and pulls me to lurch after him into the bench seat directly behind the captain’s chairs. I start to settle next to him, trying not to tangle myself in my own legs, then he turns to face me, and reaches across and grabs my thigh, right by my butt, and then he freaking jerks me around with one of his long arms and big hands into his lap.
I am straddling Evan Carlisle, and he yanks on my coat until we’re chest to chest, and then he’s unsnapping my coat, watching my face.
“Okay,” he says, “just so we’re clear, I’m no longer your occupational therapist.”
“Huh, but aren’t you the best one?” He widens his thighs, and I notch close. My hotness pressed against him makes my eyes feel heavy.
He puts his hands over the tops of my thighs to adjust me on his lap, squeezing, hard, digging his fingertips in, watching his hands, and it feels so good, and unexpected, and I realize it’s been so long since I’ve felt the simple pleasure of human touch, let alone this insane agony of Evan’s unhesitating hands.
He slides off my coat.
“Tell me what you want.”
We’re both tall, so in his lap, we’re pretty much eye to eye. The bow of his top lip is swollen from my mouth, his blue eyes are bright and looking over my face. He has been so careful with me.
“I want you to do exactly what you’re thinking.”
His eyes rest in mine. I can’t breathe, hardly. “I’m thinking some pretty bad things.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He drags the heels of his hands up my thighs until he has his hands around my hips. I am not a small woman, but the way he presses his thumbs in, on either side of my fly, makes me feel like he’s determined to get his hands on every possible inch.
“How can a nice guy like you think bad things?”
“How can I not when you look like you do? When you’re so fucking smart? The things I wanted to do to you watching you prepare that slide in your lab, God. I think I broke something.”
I have to close my eyes for a minute.
I’m in his lap, his hot hands around my hips, and I feel the burn of tears in the sides of my nose, in a painful thickness in my throat.
I open them, to look at him. It’s hard to look at him. He’s breathing hard, he’s watching me, he’s risking, for me.
So a tear falls, so what? He’s seen it all, already. It seems completely right that he should see me unsnap his coat while tears fall, while my hips rock in his hands, while my breath hitches.
He lets go so I can slide his coat from his arms.
Then I unzip his hoodie, take that away from his body.
Then I pull my sweater over my head and close my eyes again because he whispers, God, Jenny.
The van is cool, but the air just around our bodies, in our thin T-shirts, is warm.
I kiss him once over his lower lip, chaste and lingering, then I brace my hands on the seatback at his shoulders and close my eyes and kiss his neck, just under his ear.
His hands move to my back, as he takes this big breath.
“Tell me what you want to do with me,” I whisper.
“Your mouth,” he says. “I want more of that.”
I want to feel the skin of his neck against my tongue but after the undressing, I suddenly feel a teeny tiny bit shy, so I smooth my hands over his cheeks and kiss him with my eyes closed.
Inside the van, our breath is loud, the sounds of our kissing, too.
He keeps his hands on my shoulders, except when he lets go to gather my hair where it has fallen over our faces and to drape it over my shoulder, like he needs a little room to do this, to kiss me.
Every time his mouth moves over mine, every time our tongues touch, I feel like I’m getting squeezed tight all over and need to escape by rubbing all over him.
I make myself keep my hands on his face, his neck, soft and light, meet his kisses, his mouth as softly as I can stand it.
I want this to last.
The heat of him, those shivery moments where he moves my hair aside so gently, the sound of his breath almost voiced in his throat.
We open our eyes, sometimes, between kisses, and every time we look at each other, he gives me that almost smile that I realize, now, was always, always, for me, and disguised his thoughts of touching me, just like this.
Underneath that smile are his hands, restless over the places he’s letting himself touch me.
Underneath we are stirring, tangling, waiting.
Evan gets his hands around my hips again, the same kind of grab that puts a big black line between then and now. He should get a job getting his hands around a woman because he does it all serious and professional, like he’s competing for the best way to hold a woman and showing everyone that he knows we like it when hands press and shape and fingers dig and thumbs circle.
I open my eyes, and catch his again, and that’s so hot, I think because by looking at each other, we have to admit what we’re doing. We’ve caught each other doing something kind of dirty, but neither one of us is stopping.
In fact, I raise a little and move my hips closer, until he closes his eyes because it feels so good. I have to close my eyes because it feels so good.
I have to let him hold on to me because kissing him and straddling him finally breaks something inside me and all I want to do is move on him, against him, even though I’m keeping my kisses sweet, just pressing them on all the places I’ve been looking at for so long—his worried eyebrows, his dark whiskers, his smiling mouth.
Then his neck, where I end up just resting my face because he smells good and I’m breathing hard, and my heart is pounding between my legs.
He slides his hands under my T-shirt, to rest against my bare lower back, and God, I can feel his hands shaking, and I involuntarily push back a little, a reaction to the skin on skin, and he presses back, guiding my movement, and then we go still because, fuck, this is dry humping, tipping my hips up and back like that.
“Wait,” he whispers, and then he tips his own hips up while driving me into a new position with his hands at my waist; he arranges something about how he’s sitting.
Then, he presses against my back again, and now I feel him, so hard and so thick inside his jeans; I feel him against where it seems like the entire pulse of my body has gone.
I put my arms all the way around his shoulders, rest my cheek against his, and let my hips go loose, let myself move how I want to.
It makes my eyes roll, it makes my body restless, it makes my breasts feel tight and heavy, and my arms and legs feel light, almost disconnected.
It makes me feel so swollen between my legs that I start to take slow breaths; I still want to draw this out, and if I don’t think about how I am breathing, I’ll stop thinking, entirely, and come all over him.
“Jenny?”
I try to answer, but answering would change how I am breathing.
And even though he’s so hard and his hands are digging into my spine so tight, his showing me, silently, how turned on he is makes him seem so vulnerable, like he wants me to tell him what to do, for once.
Like he doesn’t know what to do about it but tell me, like he told me I was beautiful, like he told his boss he wanted me, like he doesn’t even know what to do except keep himself in check because he’s been keeping himself in check for so long.
I don’t think, either, given his confidence in his work, his unstoppable competence, that he’s very used to not knowing what to do.
&nb
sp; I shift against him and his hands clench into fists at my back.
He does know what he wants, though.
So now I’m grinning, because I just—feel like myself, like Jenny who is a little crazy about someone and loves holding people and could stand to lose a little time to kissing and coming and smiling with a man who thinks I’m beautiful.
Who is beautiful.
Outside the van, all the sounds of the street are muffled. The windows are tinted and it’s started to snow again, so it feels like we’re the whole world, just us, and it’s even warm enough, because we’ve gotten so hot.
When I kiss up his neck, over his jaw, he starts to buck, a little, but then stills, so I grind back, and do it again because I’ll die if I don’t.
And I want him to know it’s okay.
What we’re doing here, I want it, too.
Then his hands are on my ass, and I’m thinking that’s where he wanted them this whole time, because he is very serious about groping my butt, tracing the seam of my jeans as far as he can reach, kneading me and pushing me against him while he pushes up, just a little.
“Pull your hair back,” he whispers.
I toss it over my shoulder, and then shiver when he starts kissing my throat while moving us together with his hands.
Then I feel his big hands slide under the gap of the waistband in my jeans, and he scratches his nails, a little, over just the tops of each cheek. I shiver.
“Unfasten your jeans.”
I lean up to look at him.
“I want to touch you,” he says, “but I don’t—”
Then I slide my hands down over his chest, and fumble a little at my button-fly. He watches me, his hands moving in little circles over my skin, and as soon as I unbutton enough that I make my tight jeans slack, he’s sliding his hands down.
He hesitates at the lace band of my panties, so I put my thumb on his chin and kiss him, breathe into him, touch my tongue against his.
Even breathing hard, his hips meeting mine, he still has his strange graceless grace. His body feels big against mine, but every time he moves in the bench seat, another awkward part of me finds a place to rest on him, until we have this rhythm, my loosened jeans gliding along his erection, our soft T-shirts bunching, my arms crossed behind his head, our mouths kissing, our throats humming.
When he sweeps over both cheeks of my ass, first it’s so deliciously gentle, and I get that warm, pin-prickle sensation all over the skin of my back, over the skin he’s exploring, all the way over my thighs.
Then he says my name and spreads me with both hands while pushing me against him. He feels between, skidding through sweat there, his fingers so, so soft, not hesitant, teasing. Teasing just around there, kicking up such impossible, dirty, unexpected pleasure, my brain goes dark.
I still, and hold my breath, bury my face in his neck, the rich, perfect pin prickles get intense, almost like something I could hear, and they’re washing over me, hot, sharp, millions of them, while he explores me, his face in my neck, his heart pounding against my chest.
It feels so good, and I want to keep still but all this sensation is gathering and distracting me so I kind of wallow all over him, to feel his warm body all along mine, and I push my ass up into his hands, and for a moment, one of those hands travels low, finds me wet, so obviously swollen for him that his firm, slippery touch makes me moan and push and feel like begging.
“Evan, Evan,” is how I beg, then his hands are stroking up, over the curve of my sensitized bottom, back over the loosened seat of my jeans where he squeezes, like he’s thanking me for letting him turn me on beyond all possible reason.
“You’re so beautiful,” he says, and I am glad his voice is all fucked up and when he says it his hips bump up, hard, into mine, and I’m glad, too, that the grip of his hands gets too tight on my ass, on my hips, because I want his awkward, unchecked desire rubbing against me.
My thighs are shaking, hot, and so he thrusts against me harder, and he feels even bigger, or maybe it’s that I’m so swollen—so wet I’m sliding against my underwear with these explicit little yanks in the opposite direction of our hips.
It’s not quite enough.
I grab his face again and let us kiss all sloppy, our tongues coaxing, wanting, and that makes it all better and even worse.
His arms come up all the way around me, trace my spine, try to slide under my tight bra strap.
“Here,” I say, and I reach back and unhook the little row of hooks because he doesn’t look like he could manage the structural engineering of a full-figured bra in his current state. He watches me, flushed, while his hands swoop over my skin where my bra is releasing from my back and ribs.
His big hands need no help finding my breasts, and I have to breathe instead of kiss, or I’ll die.
He plays with the sore dents the underwire and straps have left, circling over them while I watch him watch the movements of his hands under my shirt.
Then the cups ease up over my breasts, kind of freeing them all at once with a bounce. It feels good, one step closer to easing this ache.
“Jesus,” he whispers, low and rough, and again, “Jesus,” for emphasis, I think, and then, “How do you like to be touched here? Like this?” He brushes, hardly brushes, over my nipples and I make some kind of sound and I can’t help it, I reach up and under and follow his hands and fingers to feel what he’s doing, because it’s almost a little much.
But could be a little more.
My hands over his have pushed my T-shirt up and my breasts are bared, and even his big hands can’t hold them all, but he is trying, with that almost smile on his mouth, and if I weren’t so crazy-insane with almost coming, I would laugh.
“Like this,” I say, but my voice is all weird as I show him he can press and pinch harder, and he says, “Yeah, let me,” and he rolls both my nipples at once and I put my fingers in my mouth because it looks so good and feels so good I need to bite something, suck something.
“Fuck, Jenny,” and our eyes meet. He’s still pulling, firm and slow, at my nipples, in time to how my hips have started to move, which is a little faster, with intent.
I pull my fingers from my mouth and put my lips at his collarbone pulling aside the neckband so I can taste his skin. “Don’t stop,” I tell him.
“Not ever,” and the way he says it makes me ruck up his T-shirt, I need to feel his skin on my skin, and he’s hot, his muscles tight, when I fit a hand between us, the back of my hand slides through sweat on his belly. I hold on to his nape with the other hand, we’re past kissing, so air hungry, but our mouths at each other’s neck still tasting between our gasps.
I grasp him, and his hands still and then tighten around my breasts. I turn my hand to press where I need to, where we’re rubbing tight together, and he’s hot and hard along my knuckles, and I’m so sensitive, even through jeans, I shudder.
“Yeah,” he says, and it should be so awkward, dry humping, my hand helping us both, his hands softly thumbing my nipples while his fingers play with the goose bumps on my breast, now trying to kiss between breaths like an army is at our door, but it’s beautiful.
We’re beautiful.
This is what was always underneath.
What was over us, concealing, was beautiful in its way—dramatic and endless feeling.
But what’s underneath are the matchbox cars you forgot you left in the grass, the wild violets, the chalky seashells ringing the flowerbeds.
I always love the small things, the wild things, the things that change and adapt, the things you don’t see at first but were always there.
The things I could lose, the things that are most precious and dear and telling.
I come away from our kiss again and rest my forehead on his shoulder. I’m nearly there, and I pull up on his T-shirt more, want him as exposed as I feel.
There’s a tattoo on his rib, on his side.
A black, lowercase f. A number next to it.
I buck out of rhythm, sh
ock like a riptide of cold blood through the chambers of my heart, but I’m already nearly there, his mouth and his hands and our friction are finally enough. “Open your eyes,” I stutter, and he does, and I look and look, desperate, even on the very worst edge of coming all over him, and he looks back, sees something, maybe some of my utter incomprehension, and we try to keep looking at each other, until we can’t, because it’s too good, too awful, because it’s all come to the surface.
I pant against him.
The look on his face when he held C’s picture.
His picture. Evan’s picture.
You’re so beautiful, C wrote to me last night, Evan wrote to me last night, after I sent him my picture.
I keep myself from tracing that f.
I come, shuddering, my arms around him, looking at him, bewildered.
Trying to understand.
Trying to trust my body as it falls.
My heart, beating painfully out of time.
This man I believed never withheld a thing from me.
Now we’re just holding each other, supertight, I let him hold me.
He doesn’t know he’s comforting me.
The snow’s picked up, I can tell even through the fog on the dark windows. Even when I ease next to him, his arms are tight.
We watch the snow accumulate over the windshield, one snowflake at a time.
Chapter Eight
Inches, Drifts, Storms
Dr. Allen is doing her thing, making me look into her instruments and click my remote when I see the wiggling lines, measuring with her string.
“How’s therapy?” she asks.
“I changed therapists, and I’m working with Allie Gould. She took me out in a trainer car yesterday to learn how to use the extended mirrors.”
“You’re going for a daylight license?”
“Yeah, I am.”
She sets down her ophthalmoscope after testing the movements of my eyes. “I think that’s great. Allie’s good.”
“She is. She likes going where I am. She set up software and headphones and a mic for me at work, and she spent a couple hours with the lab tech to learn about the ESEM so she can think about how my bench work would be adapted, if I would need it.”
Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Page 21