by R. C. Martin
“Yeah,” I barely manage, my head growing foggy with desire. I can practically feel Brandon's body still pressed against mine like it was on the dance floor. Then I let my thoughts take me back to this morning.
His tongue sliding in and out of me. The hair on his face scrapping against the inside of my thighs.
His cock filling my mouth. The way he gripped my locks between his fingers as he said my name over and over.
His body covered in soap. My hands washing him clean.
His fingers rubbing slow circles around my clit. He whispered in my ear as I held onto him, telling me he needed to see me unravel at his touch just one more time before—
“Sarah Prescott!” Aria gasps. “You’re thinking very naughty thoughts. Your burning cheeks are telling your secrets.”
“Fuck,” I murmur, clapping my hands around my face.
“Yes,” Aria laughs. “As in, I hope he fucks you. And by fuck, I really mean I hope he makes sweet love to you all night long, girl. I can tell by the way he looks at you, he’d make your first time really special. Every woman deserves that. You got yourself a good one,” she says before disappearing into the next available stall.
While I wait for Aria, her words circle their way around my brain. Brandon hasn’t actually told me he loves me. Then again, I haven’t spoken of my love either. Though, there’s something to be said for all that we have said to one another. He knows he has my heart and he’s told me that I have his. This morning, he told me that I was his favorite person in the whole world!
Me. His favorite person.
Over the last two weeks, he’s brought my body more pleasure than anyone ever has. I love the way he touches me, the way he acts as if it is his sole mission to ensure that I’m sated. Every time he’s near me, he makes it known how he’s aware of me. He’ll wink at me or press a kiss against my forehead in passing. He’ll glide his finger across the small of my back or take my hand in his. Whether he’s across the room, or the glorious weight of him is pressed down on top of me, he’s got this way of making my every nerve respond to him.
If I’m being honest—it’s not just my heart that he’s got. My whole body belongs to him. So why not let him have it all?
By the time Aria has finished her business, I feel like I’ve been away from my man for as long as I can stand it. When we come out of the bathroom, I practically sprint back to our table. Brandon reaches for me as soon as he sees me, pulling me back into his lap. He slides his hand around the back of my neck, sinking his fingers into my hair as he draws me in for a kiss.
And this is no small kiss.
It’s hot. It’s wet. It’s greedy.
He consumes me as if I’ve been gone for hours instead of minutes.
I love every fucking second of it.
“Alright, alright already! Christ—you two need to get a room,” cries Millie.
I part my lips from his but he doesn’t let me get too far. I don’t know how long we stare at each other before I just can’t take it anymore.
I want him. I want him inside of me.
Not his fingers.
Not his tongue.
Him. Brandon.
I want every bit of him to stretch me open and fill me up.
“Take me home,” I whisper. At first, I’m not sure if he can hear me over the music and the sound of the bar’s patrons, but then he’s helping me out of his lap and leading me toward the door.
There are no goodbyes.
There are no over-the-shoulder glances.
It’s just him and me.
Neither of us looking back.
I WANT TO LOSE myself in her. I want to be so deep inside of her that neither of us can tell where I end and she begins. I want her wrapped around me, body and soul. I want to consume her and I want her to take me captive. I want to make her mine, now and forever. I don’t want her to ever let me go. I want it so much, my chest feels hollow. I need her. I need her to fill the void.
Sarah. Only Sarah.
She’s squeezing my hand so tight, it’s like she wishes we could be fused together. Her unspoken desire increases my longing. Before either of us climbs into the Camaro, I know that I have to kiss her again. Until I do, I can’t even think about driving. I press her up against the passenger side door and she hums her understanding as she circles her arms around my neck and thrusts her tongue into my mouth.
The growl that forces its way out of my throat won’t be silenced.
I need more.
More Sarah.
So much more.
I press my erection between her legs, wanting her to feel just how much she effects me. She hooks her leg around mine, beckoning me closer. It’s time we got the hell out of here. As soon as I break our kiss, she spins around and reaches for the door handle.
“I got it, babe,” she assures me, granting me permission to slack on my gentlemanly task so that I can get to the other side of the car and jump in myself. I can’t say for certain what’s going to happen when we get home. Until she says the words, I won’t dare to do more than imagine what I’d like to do. She sets our pace. She has the power and the right to say no at any time; but the electricity that’s charging between the two of us is outrageous, and it’s propelling us forward at a speed that feels unstoppable.
If she’s ready—I’ll make love to my sweet girl, my Sunshine, all damn night.
Just thinking about it makes my dick ache. I want inside of her so badly.
The drive across town is the longest fucking twenty minutes of my life! Neither of us speaks a word. We fill the car with the sound of our breathing. There are no words for this moment. No words that would make this wait any more tolerable. We suffer through it in silence—my hand gripping her thigh, her fingers tracing anxious circles around my wrist.
By the time we’ve arrived, the atmosphere has changed. Now, I can feel her nervous energy. I give her leg a gentle squeeze and she looks at me bashfully—those blue eyes bringing back the fucking butterflies. Now I’m nervous, too. If this goes where I think it’s going—dear Lord, please let it be—I want it to be perfect. She’s waited for this moment and if she gifts it to me, she deserves as close to perfection as I can possibly give.
I hop out of the car and hurry to her door. When I reach for her hand, I don’t miss the slight tremble she tries to hide. Without a second thought, I scoop her up into my arms, cradling her against my chest. “I’ve got you, sweet girl. I promise.” She holds on to me tightly, pressing her cheek to mine as I carry her up the flight of stairs to the landing just in front of my door.
Once inside, I place her on her feet. Instead of letting me go, she buries her fingers in my hair and pulls me down for a kiss. The instant our mouths collide, it’s as if the spark between us has been reignited. I kiss her slowly at first. Then she kisses me deeper. Then I kiss her harder. My shirt is the first to be discarded. It hits the floor just as she begins to brush her lips across my chest. When she licks her way up my neck and nibbles on my ear, I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop our forward progression. I make quick work of her dress as I encourage her backwards toward the bed. She unfastens the top of my jeans as I unhook her bra. The more we take off, the more frantic we become.
We tumble into the bed and I don’t know how much longer I can last before I lose my ever-loving mind. When it’s just us—her, perfectly, beautifully, flawlessly, and enticingly bare, and me, naked, ready, waiting, wanting—it’s all I can do to hold onto one last rational thought.
“Baby?” I ask between kisses.
“Yeah?”
“What do you want? What now, sweet girl?”
“You,” she breathes. “Brandon, I want you—all of you.”
I move away from her just long enough to reach inside my nightstand to grab a condom from my stash. As I rip the package open with my teeth, I can see that she’s gotten nervous again. “Sarah—are you sure? We don’t—”
“Yes. I’m ready. I trust you.”
I trust you.
She says the words and the unthinkable happens.
I trust you.
In a flash, I’m not here. I’m there. In my room—with the girl who would become my recluse lover; the girl who found her way to me through my opened window.
I trust you.
Those three words were the beginning. They were our end.
You’re my best friend. You won’t say no. You never do.
I trust you. You’re my best friend.
Olivia.
“Fuck!” I push myself up onto my knees and press the heels of my hands against my eyes. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” I try desperately to get her out of my head. To get Olivia out of my head—but I can’t. I fucking can’t.
Now, all I can think about is my first time. Our first time. That night—it changed everything. It ruined everything. It ruined me.
It fucking ruined me!
Now—Sarah’s trust isn’t enough. It’s not even close to enough.
The woman I love is laying here, naked, asking for me, and all I can think about—
You’re my best friend. You won’t say no. You never do.
“Brandon? What’s wrong?”
“We can’t do this.” I drop my hands and look into her eyes. She stares back at me, her brow furrowed in concern.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—” I’m not sure what to say. I don’t know how to begin to explain. I know I’m not making any sense, but how do I tell her that what she’s trying to give me isn’t enough? “I can’t do this.” Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK! “I can’t do this, Sarah. We can’t do this.”
“Stop!” she cries, pushing herself into a seated position. “Stop saying that! Of course we can. I’m ready. I want this.”
I can feel it when my heart cracks open. The devastated look on her face—it’s my fault. I hate myself for putting it there, but I love her and her trust is not enough.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
This isn’t happening, right? It’s not! It’s not happening again. I mean—it can’t possibly…
“You’re sorry? You’re sorry? You’re sorry?”I shake my head, hoping that the act will make me un-hear his words. “You—the man who doesn’t believe in I’m sorries—you’re apologizing to me? Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
He doesn’t speak. Instead, he looks at me as if he’s breaking—as if he’s the one whose heart is literally being ripped into two right now.
How dare he!
I reach for the sheet, suddenly feeling overexposed and far too vulnerable.
My heart sees red!
I’m not angry. It’s not anger that overwhelms me or anger that floods my eyes with tears and clogs my throat with my sob. It’s the realization that I’m reliving the most humiliating moment of my life—except this is worse. When I look at Brandon, all I can think about is that fucking red coat!
“I don’t understand!” I choke. “How is it possible that this could happen to a girl twice? I mean—is there something wrong with me?”
His brow creases in confusion. “What? Sunshine what are you—”
He reaches for me but I shrug away from him. “No! You can’t say no to me and then—”
“Help me to understand,” he pleads, balling his hands into fists, as if it pains him that he can’t touch me. “What do you mean? This has happened to you before?”
As tears spill down my cheeks, words spew from my mouth. My heightened emotional state, coupled with my complete and utter shock, have obviously removed my filter.
“I was ready. One time before now—I thought I was ready. So I showed up to his house. I knew Micah was with his grandparents for the weekend—he’d been talking about his trip for weeks. I thought I’d be fun and spontaneous and sexy,” I cough out a laugh.
“I wore nothing but my underwear and that fucking red coat. When he answered the door—I showed him what was underneath. He’d been begging for it for months. He let me stand there as he stared. He let me stand there long enough for his wife to show up and see me out on their front porch. Like it wasn’t bad enough that he had lied to me, he didn’t even have the decency to reject me respectfully. He didn’t cover me up. He didn’t tell me he was sorry. All he said was, what are you doing here? Like he hadn’t told me he loved me the day before
“His wife, his wife had been out of the country. She was a chef and she had spent half of the year studying out of the country. Then there she was, standing next to him, claiming him. In the blink of an eye, I became the slutty teacher who was trying to seduce her husband.
“And if that wasn’t humiliating enough, if this whole year and everything that I’ve been through, everything that I’ve been trying to overcome, if all of that wasn’t hard enough—now I’m in your bed and I’m telling you I’m ready and I’m telling you I want you and you’re telling me you’re sorry.
“Well, I don’t accept your fucking apology!”
I start to move, wanting nothing more than to be miles away from this situation. I can’t even describe my disappointment. My heart is too broken to even fully comprehend how much it’s going to hurt to leave him behind. I never, ever, thought that this would happen—that he would look me straight in the face and tell me that he didn’t want me. I have never misjudged a situation as devastatingly as I’ve misjudged this one.
I thought he might have actually…
I can’t even think the words. Unrequited love sucks with all of your clothes on. It’s a million times worse when you’re so naked—emotionally, physically—I’m practically transparent.
As I try to crawl around him, he blocks me. I don’t meet his eyes as I try to get around him again. A tearful sigh forces itself from my lips as he takes hold of my chin and lifts my face. I try so hard not to lift my gaze, but then he speaks.
“I’m not him. I’m not him, Sarah, remember? This, this is yours and mine.”
“I thought you wanted me,” I sob, his tenderness confusing me further, pushing me over the edge.
“I do—baby, I do,” he insists, gripping his hands around my face. “That’s why I’m telling you no. God, do you think I want to be having this conversation?”
“I don’t understand!”
His eyes scour my face as he wipes away my tears. I wait for him to say something, but all he does is stare at me. When I start to shake my head in an attempt wiggle out of his grasp, he kisses me. A part of me knows that I should push him away—but I can’t. I love him and I need him to want me in this moment.
He breaks our kiss and I keep my eyes sealed shut, wishing that all of this felt different.
“Sunshine, look at me. Please look at me.”
Reluctantly, I obey.
“I love you.”
My heart skips a beat and then jumpstarts itself, accelerating to the pace of a damn hummingbird’s wings as my skin breaks out in goose pimples.
“What?” I barely manage.
“I love you—I love you so much.”
A new sob crawls it’s way up my throat. “Then why—” I choke. “Why—”
“You said you trusted me. That’s not enough. I need more than that. This cannot just be about trust. I’ve done that!” He lets go of me as he coughs out a humorless laugh. “I kind of get it now. I get it why God created us the way He did. Why He tells us not to sleep around—it fucks with your head. It’s not a rule to punish us; it’s a rule to protect us. Anyone who thinks they can detach their emotions from sex is fooling themselves. It’s bullshit. Absolute bullshit. I don’t care who you are. It’s part of the fabric of our being—sex ties you to a person. Sometimes—” He huffs out a sigh, dragging his hands down his face. “Sometimes the wrong person.”
He looks at me and my mouth falls open, my heart begging me to say something. He just told me that he loves me! I can’t make my brain send words through my lips. His love isn’t the only thing he just spoke about and I’m not ashamed to admit that I still don’t understand what he’s trying to say. So my mouth opens and close
s, but nothing comes out.
He leans toward me and presses a soft kiss on my forehead before he moves to sit beside me. He pulls the sheet over his lap and then slips his arm around my waist. “Come ‘ere,” he says softly. I’m so out of sorts—my mind confused, my heart in pain—I don’t know what to do. As if my muscles are responding to a memory, I let him tuck me against his side. Then I tilt my head so that I can look into his eyes. Silently, I plead for him to do better—to tell me why.
“The first time Olivia and I had sex, it wasn’t about love. It was about trust. Hell, the first dozen times we had sex it wasn’t about love,” he begins to explain. He looks away from me and I can practically see him walk backwards in time. “Then, for me, it changed. When I told her how I felt, she went out of her way to show me that she didn’t feel the same way.
“Over the years, it became an endless cycle. She’d always come back to me. She’d say she was sorry. I’m her best friend. She trusts me. For her, that’s what it’s always been about. For me, I’ve always needed more. I was so in love with her that I didn’t have the strength to tell her no until it was too late and she had hurt me all over again.
“I know I was crazy to wait for her, to think that she’d ever change, but I did. Then, a little over a year ago, she came back. This time, she said she had come back for me. I wanted to believe her, so I did. But then the truth came out. While she was fucking me, she was cheating on her fiancé. I didn’t even know she was seeing anyone! She told me that as soon as he proposed, she thought of me. She said she couldn’t get me out of her head and she thought maybe I’d had it right—that it was supposed to be me and her.
“She left that weekend promising to come back. Promising to break off her engagement. Promising that she wanted me. Then I didn’t hear from her for over a year.”
I reach up, sliding my hand around his cheek, turning his face until he’s looking straight at me. I see, now, that I’m not the only transparent person in this bed. I try my damnedest to grab hold of what he’s just shared with me, to make his confession take away the sting of rejection that still lingers in my chest—but then his words from earlier echo in my mind.