Reawakening

by Stein, Charlotte

  Better people had been worn out by less.

  “You ready?” Blake asked, and once she’d traded pajamas and her jersey for a t-shirt and sweatpants, she was. She was also made very aware of how far she’d come, because it didn’t seem to matter at all that Blake watched her strip down to nothing with a brightly amused look on his face.

  “You look even better than I remember,” he said, and she swatted him on the way out the door.

  Of course, she didn’t quite mean it in any kind of sexual way, and yet somehow the swat landed on his ass just the same. And he looked at her with the same kind of eyes Jamie had, briefly, so that the humming feeling returned between her legs.

  In truth, she wasn’t really sure it had ever gone. It ate up the feel of his too-firm butt and reminded her that she wanted to do something other than run, then suddenly her mind was on things that could be done outdoors.

  Maybe they could see how the vegetable patch felt about people fucking in the middle of it. Did he have the same thing in mind? She couldn’t tell by looking at him, though looking at him sure did prompt some deeper, hotter tingles in her still tight nipples and the heated bloom of her sex.

  He’d decided to do some stretches on the porch before they set off, and it was fairly obvious that he knew how he looked while doing them. It wasn’t really a surprise that she’d swatted his ass when it curved that way beneath material too tight for it. Was he aware how clingy those sweatpants were?

  Probably. Probably.

  “You not going to limber up, honey?” he asked, and he sounded sincere. He really did. There was no hint of sex in his voice and, in all honesty, it was kind of weird that her mind kept going there.

  “Uh, no. No, I just want to get going,” she said, and that was true. Even if she chose that moment to realize the hairband she usually wrapped around her wrist wasn’t there. She’d left it on the sink, and now her hair was going to be all out and in her face and ready to catch on zombie fingers.

  “Shit.”

  “Hair thing?”

  Christ, they practically had a routine. When had that happened?

  “I came this close to handing it to you.”

  “I gotta go back and get it,” she said, but unfortunately flashed on Jamie, all sprawled out in bed when she did so. God, he’d looked good like that. Face pressed into the crook of his arm, body all lean and long and oh, she hoped she could resist suddenly going down on him when she got back to the bedroom.

  “Catch up, okay,” Blake said, and for a moment she contemplated suddenly going down on him. He ran backwards down the steps as he spoke, which somehow only made him look hotter. Probably a competency thing. A running competency thing.

  Not to mention the fact that he hadn’t turned her down.

  “I will,” she said, then turned for the entryway. Took the stairs two at a time. Found herself standing by the barely open bedroom door, unable to go in.

  Of course, the bathroom had two entrances. She could have just taken the one to her left and bypassed the bedroom altogether. But there was something almost impossible about that when she could see Jamie jerking off through the little gap she’d left as she’d exited.

  And it wasn’t as though it could be denied. He hadn’t decided to halfheartedly do the job, oh no, no, no. He was fisting his cock roughly, and if that hadn’t been enough on its own, she could see the way he’d pushed his face into the pillow. Head turned to one side, mouth open, eyes closed.

  Lord, it was a sight. She was only thankful that she’d caught him now and not during that long low drought when all she’d done was dream about them and pray for them to make a move. Though seeing him do it like this—right after claiming to be too tired—wasn’t exactly the delight of her life.

  Or it was, just in a slightly different way to the delight she’d hoped for.

  He looked so lost in it. He hadn’t even heard her come up the stairs and he definitely wasn’t sensible of her presence—though usually she knew he would have been. No, he thought she was out running with Blake and so he’d decided to put on a show for absolutely no one.

  What a fucker! Did he not even get that she’d have been happy to watch him do this, if this was all he wanted? Surely he could have still thought of someone else while jerking off in front of her.

  And that way, she could have been a legitimate witness to his hand running up and down his gorgeous cock. There’d have been nothing furtive or weird about it. She could have just laid there and watched him buck into his slick grip—and oh, it was slick. Like maybe he’d climbed out of bed and got some of that moisturizer Blake used on his fucking elbows to give himself a little extra sensation while masturbating.

  Jesus, even the word made her wet. Even the idea of him doing this while no one else was around. Somehow she’d imagined that they didn’t—that they hadn’t, in all the time she’d been here—but now she could see thinking something like that was insane.

  They probably did it all the time. In the shower, in the bed, on the couch. They were probably licking their palms—oh God just like that, yes baby, just like that—and stroking their cocks left, right, and center.

  Before saying her name, right when she least expected them to.

  He didn’t say it loudly, but she knew that’s what he’d said. And his hips jerked upwards when he said it, too, as though just the sound of that syllable got him going.

  Other things apparently got him going, too. Like saying other words, lots of words, all of which made her very confused about the whole “I’m tired” thing. Why had he said that, if he just wanted to come in her tight pussy?

  Because that was definitely amongst the horny things he was saying. As was—

  “That’s it, baby. Fuck yourself on me.”

  Though she suspected she might have translated wrong from horny to English. The huge sweep of arousal that went through her—that always went through her whenever he talked dirty—kind of knocked out her ability to comprehend words.

  He was going to come pretty soon—she felt sure he was. He’d started biting his lip, and that bead of liquid at the tip—it wasn’t anything he’d rubbed all over himself. She could see it clearly and watched it, mesmerized, as it welled and finally slipped in a thin strand down over his working fist.

  It was almost too hot to bear. She could feel her clit, as hard and swollen as his cock looked, and it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch to just maybe…slip a hand under the waistband of her sweatpants. It was unlikely that he’d notice—he was holding his breath in sporadic starts, and that definitely meant he was going to come—and even if he did, so what?

  She’d only be doing as much wrong as he was. Not that he was doing wrong, exactly. In fact, it looked really right when he thrust into that tight grip and moaned about how good she felt. It just didn’t feel right, when he could have been sliding into the very thing he seemed to want to praise so much.

  Though she found she couldn’t think on it too hard when he suddenly groaned out an ohhh yeah, yeah, I’m coming.

  He wasn’t lying, either. She watched him spurt all over himself, thick jets of come spilling down over his fist and belly. It looked so good she almost went to him right there and then, thoughts of licking all of that sticky liquid up in her probably addled mind.

  But it was done with, now, and besides. She had to take a few steps back in order to let out the breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. She had to breathe for a second and compose herself, though doing both things told her clearly how she felt about what had just happened.

  He hadn’t wanted her to see. And apparently, neither did she.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There were several things she wanted to say to him after the run with Blake had cleared her head. But all of them fell short of the mark. Do you just not want me sounded too pathetic and self-absorbed, is this something to do with overhearing me and Blake sounded somehow insane. What kind of person turned down a roll in the hay because of some love conversation they’d
overheard?

  She couldn’t even be sure he’d heard it, anyway. And even if he had, there’d been those words at the start. The ones that contained things like you and Jamie have something special and Jamie puts great big giant love hearts in my eyes.

  Which just left the idea that maybe he didn’t think they had something special, at all. Could be that the whole thing just freaked him out, and those words he’d said—they weighed heavy on him, now. Just because it was the end of the world, didn’t mean that love stopped having such heavy connotations.

  Such as—what if you loved somebody, then said somebody went and got themselves killed? Yeah, that seemed pretty heavy to her. Like when she went to see where he was and found him in the storeroom, clanging on the generator. And he told her not to worry, because there were four backups but even if there hadn’t been—he’d made her a friendly little How To manual. Just a friendly little thing with cartoons and funny quote bubbles, about how to fix the solar paneling or make sure the water purifier was working correctly.

  Only all she could think once he’d given it to her was—you made this in case something happens to you. You made this in case you die and leave me on my own out here.

  And oh, that weighed her down almost through the floor. It weighed her right down to the center of the earth, where the idea of him not wanting to have sex with her seemed like the least of her concerns.

  “You okay, bug?”

  So it was just bug, now. No June at the front—though when she really started thinking about it she had no idea why there’d been a June at the front, anyway. It always made her think of the movie starring Amy Adams, but she knew for a fact she was nothing like Amy Adams and even if she had have been, there was probably a far more random reason for the nickname.

  For God’s sake, it was Jamie she was talking about. He probably thought her toes looked liked insects, or something similarly weird.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  No, I’m not. Please don’t die. And also—if you could not jerk off secretly as though that’s just what you have to do, that would be great. We’ll call it an added bonus.

  “It’s just in case we come down with a searing case of man flu or something like that. No cause for alarm,” he said, but she doubted he was even convincing himself. After all, anything could happen at any given moment. He could get cancer—a weird and hidden cancer that killed you without showing up on any of the equipment they absolutely didn’t have. Hell, he could get appendicitis and die with her standing by just as helplessly. It didn’t have to be something huge or horrible, like a sudden reoccurrence of bubonic plague.

  A rusty nail could kill him. An infected splinter.

  “Want me to show you where the gas goes?” he asked, and she appreciated his attempts at distracting her, she really did. But in all honesty, it was too late for anything like that. She’d already seen him die because of a splinter, behind her eyes.

  “Come on over here,” he said, which worked better. Mainly because he pulled on her arm as he said it, and his touch was always a good grounding sort of thing. It almost immediately sent her back to when he pushed his fingers through her hair—or even better, him getting a handful of her left breast.

  It wasn’t as though it was a stretch to remember the sensation. The whole thing had only happened a few hours ago, and when he had a hand on her like that she could remember it almost exactly. Firm pressure, not too hard, not too soft. Then that little tug on her—

  “Hey—you with me?”

  He sounded more amused than sharp over her sudden lack of attention—which made her believe he understood what she’d been thinking about. But then she glanced over her shoulder at him and his expression was all innocence. Totally not bothered by their sudden proximity.

  And it was proximity, too. Kind of shocking, after the whole maybe I’m not that into you thing. She didn’t think he’d meant to drag her all the way in front of him—as though maybe, oh sweet Lord, maybe he was just going to take her from behind—but it ended up that way all the same.

  He was wearing weird overalls, and she could feel the heavy buttons on them suddenly digging into her lower back. Not to mention the thoughts those overalls conjured up in her lust-addled mind.

  Like, for example—I bet he’s not wearing anything under them except that t-shirt. I could just pop those buttons and the whole thing would come off in one big piece. Or he could pop the buttons and get at his cock real easy, incredibly easy, and then he could fuck me over this generator like all of that other nonsense was just a bad dream.

  “Okay, so…” he started out, but his voice seemed to come out a little more wavery than he’d intended. She felt pretty sure he’d just meant to show her where the gas went, but now that they were here and she was all pressed against him, it seemed different.

  Especially as he had to give her a tutorial that featured long nozzles being poked into deep holes. It was so ridiculously suggestive that for a moment she considered the idea he’d known, and wanted things to go this way. Wanted to kind of hint at sex things and maybe get her into a slightly rude position without coming out and saying it.

  But then if so, why hadn’t he just gone for it that morning? She didn’t get him. She didn’t understand what was so hard or why it had to be this way, and all of the above crowded out her higher thought processes until she just had to blurt out—

  “Jamie, I really want to—”

  It was a good attempt, if somewhat interrupted by the feel of his erection pressing into the curve of her ass.

  Of course, for a moment she tried to pretend it was something else. She didn’t want to pretend it was something else but it just felt like the best course of action, all things considered. He was waffling on about pressure caps, he’d already brushed her off once that day—it seemed unlikely that the feel of her body against his had revved his engine.

  Even if it had totally revved hers. Jesus, just the feel of his stiff cock pushing against her…it set her on some impossible edge she was never going to get off of. And she couldn’t even think badly of herself over it, either, because he’d had one go around already today, and she’d had nothing. Absolutely nothing. Running—that’s what she’d had. Blake hadn’t even tried it on with her when she’d stopped to tie her shoelace.

  Though Lord knows she’d wanted to try it with him when he’d stopped to tie his. The sight of his perfect round ass in those sweatpants, all bent over and ready for her to just…

  Oh, both of them making her crazy. They’d opened the floodgates, now, and she’d turned into a crazy sex maniac. Though really, who was the sex maniac? The person who got a bit hot and bothered over the feel of something heavy and hard against their butt, or the person who got the heavy and hard thing in the first place?

  Plus, she could hear Jamie’s voice kind of losing its way. Whenever she moved—and she honestly tried to not move all that much—it went a little high, until one of them definitely had to say something. She could have just not acknowledged it before, but he seemed in no hurry to move away, and she could absolutely tell that it wasn’t just a wrench in his pocket…something had to be said.

  Though it was surprising when he was the one to break first. He backed off abruptly and it was like a pressure valve letting off a great gush of steam—though not exactly in a good way. More like in a now-the-boiler’s-going-to-explode sort of way.

  “Uh, yeah. Sorry. It’s gotta mind of its own, you know.”

  That was all he had to say? He’d fucked her upside down and inside out the other day and he was going with the kid’s schoolbook version of erection getting?

  Plus, he looked so embarrassed when she finally managed to break through the shell of lust around her and stand up semi-straight. As though she’d caught him molesting her underpants or something similarly stupid.

  After all—didn’t he realize that she’d love to catch him molesting her underpants? She would have killed to catch him molesting her underpants back when sex dreams had been her only c
omfort. Now they’d actually had sex, and he was still being all wary and weird.

  “I don’t get why you’re sorry. I told you—I told you to say if you wanted it.”

  He’d backed up against the metal shelving behind him for some unaccountable reason. And he looked…she wasn’t even sure how he looked. Horny—she knew that much for certain. Really fucking horny, as though the morning thing just hadn’t been enough. Not by a long, long shot.

  “I don’t want you to feel obliged,” he said, but the words came out tough and mealy. Like he had to really strain to say them—though she couldn’t think why. What she was going to say next to him? Yeah, that was the kind of thing that made people strain.

  “Is that why you jerked off this morning, instead of fucking me?”

  But he didn’t seize up, the way she expected him to. He didn’t flush red, either. Instead his mouth went open and clear affronted-ness spelled itself out on his face, shortly before he came out with—

  “Oh that ain’t right, bug—you spying on me? I did that in the privacy of my own bedroom…I mean, our own bedroom…I mean, someplace that isn’t private at all. But that’s not the point!”

  She tried not to laugh at the way the words came out. At the way he corrected himself on each totally false point and lost any of his angry steam along the way. By the time he’d gotten to not the point, those little crinkles had appeared around just his right eye. It was always just his right eye, when he was amused. And it always happened before his mouth got around to smiling, too.

  “I just don’t get why you did it! I was right there—didn’t you want me?”

  Oh, that one trapped him. She could see him trying to look to one side for an answer but there was nothing forthcoming down by the sacks of potatoes.

  “It’s not as easy as all that,” he said, finally, though she could tell that even he found it a weak response.