She’d promised herself she wouldn’t drink much, despite copious amounts of peer pressure, in case she decided to drive there after all. Many people were coupling off, engaging in tongue-filled make-out sessions masquerading as slow dances. The year’s undisclosed attractions coming to fruition beneath a bright wedge of moon and a star-spangled sky, thanks to liquid courage and the likelihood the participants wouldn’t see each other again before the first uneasy class reunion, graduation-night indiscretions forgotten until the vodka started flowing. So many of her peers were doomed to wake up tomorrow morning cloaked in booze breath and regret, faced with the judgmental light of day and vague mental snapshots of embarrassing sex in the basement of Hailey’s parents’ house.
Anya, however, was sick of regret. She set her half-empty Solo cup of ginger ale on the makeshift bar—a folding cafeteria table swathed in white cloth—and strode toward the back gate.
“Anya! Where are you going?” Hailey jogged up to her, breathless with too much to drink, boobs heaving beneath a bodycon denim dress unzipped to the bridge of her bra. If she’d been wearing one.
“It’s Lucas. He’s in town until tomorrow morning.”
Her pink lips formed a perfect O. She shooed Anya off. “Go, then! Why are you even here in the first place? Oh my God, I wouldn’t come to your party if I could be spending the night with him—no offense. Not if I could be groping that ass.” She teetered to one side but regained her footing with Anya’s help. “I knew by the way he was looking at you at prom, you guys were, like, meant to be together.”
“I don’t know about that. I think he met someone up in Boston.” Anya hugged her. “Have fun, and be careful.”
“I will, I will. But oh my God—call me tomorrow and tell me every single, sweaty detail! Especially, you know…” Hailey spun a finger around the general area of her crotch. “What’s he packing down there?”
Laughing, Anya fell into one more embrace. “’Night, Hail.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Anya
Acid had been building in her stomach and throat the entire drive to the hotel—and okay, she’d had that one shot appropriately titled “Motor Oil” Hailey’s brother insisted all the girls would love, because peppermint and cinnamon schnapps! Also, coconut rum and Jägermeister, a horrific combination, and now her stomach was making an appalling noise not unlike an engine trying to turn over.
She opened the car door in time for the most violent hitch yet, threw up a shocking puddle of dark brown goo, and shoved a tab of Eclipse peppermint gum into her mouth. Not an indication of how the night would turn out, she hoped, or she’d rather drive home and walk in on Dad and Hannah. Anya entered the lobby through the revolving doors and made a beeline for the women’s bathroom, where she swished cold water around her mouth, spit, and munched another tablet of Eclipse.
Seventh floor. Too much time alone in the elevator to rethink this. She didn’t want to know if there was someone else. She wished him all the happiness in the world; he deserved it. To pretend she was fine with not being the source of it would be as transparent as amber, her love for him fossilized at its center.
Anya paused outside the door, her fist suspended in mid-air, poised to knock. It was going on midnight. He invited me. I’ll say what I need to say and move on.
She knocked. Seconds passed. Muffled footsteps padded across carpet, then the door opened. He was wearing nothing but lounge pants as he rubbed a towel over his damp hair, drawing her eyes to his bicep and the contours of his pecs. He’d waxed from the chest down, even his arms. He really was swimming again.
“Hey.” A tiny smile. “I didn’t think you were coming.”
“I didn’t want you to go back without…Okay, look.” Anya stepped into the room and closed the door. “You said you met someone, and I’m happy for you, but—”
Lucas tossed the towel onto a chair. “Yeah, I did. Almost ten months ago. Did you honestly think I was talking about someone else?”
“I…” Anya fumbled for words. The looseness at the crotch of his pants, the obvious lack of underwear, kept sidetracking her. “Yeah. You were seeing other people. And your job…”
“So you thought I’d come all the way out here for one night, your graduation night, no less—” He closed the space between them. Water droplets trickled down his chest, and heat emanated from his freshly scrubbed skin. “To tell you I met someone else?”
Well, it sounded stupid now.
Lucas worked his fingers into her hair, compelling her to tilt up her chin. “Why do you think I took a job in Boston?” He backed her to the wall, her hip in his possessive grip. Someone on the Moon could have heard and felt each thunderous blow of her heart against her breastbone. “You’re still going there, right?”
She giggled, or meant to, but he was studying her as if unable to decide whether he wanted to protect her or devour her. The same way Dad used to look at Mom.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was leaving. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in over a year.” He brushed his mouth against hers. Her breath became his. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” he whispered. “I never wanted that.”
Her heartbeat marked the passage of minutes in which they clung to each other, anticipating the inevitable interruption, the second-guessing. It didn’t come, and she murmured, “I forgive you.”
“When you get to Boston, I promise we’ll go on an actual date. Lots of them.”
The room spun a little. Anya anchored her hands to his waist. “It’s real this time?”
The wildness in his eyes diminished, if only for a moment. “It was always real.”
No divided attention, keeping one eye on doors and hallways in case someone might catch them. No rushing. Their mouths intertwined in a kiss no longer stolen but which had lost none of its intensity. Lucas glided his tongue over hers, as urgent and thorough in his conquest as the hands operating a reconnaissance of her figure. She hadn’t expected it to be romantic, not after a year of pent-up frustration and mixed signals. She didn’t need it to be. She needed his sharp, burning sighs, his scorching kisses, each ridge and valley of his delicious body.
She needed him inside her.
As if reading her mind, he edged one hand beneath her dress and traced his finger over the crotch of her panties, pressing it into her folds. Into her clit. She moaned; Lucas hitched up her dress and, sliding his hands beneath the waistband, worked her underwear down her legs. Her stomach quivered; everything below it screamed with terrifying need. The black cotton bikini lying brazenly on the floor amplified her consciousness of the wet warmth between her legs and the open hunger on Lucas’s face.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“For what?”
“For being so goddamned stubborn.” He grinned and nipped her lower lip. Then he was consuming her again, exploring her with his silken lips and tongue. He outlined her hipbone with his fingers, trailed the arc downward, her heart a thousand drums in her ears. She’d shaved her bikini area but hadn’t trimmed the rest. No waxing, not even a landing strip. Unadulterated bush. She forgot why she cared about landscaping as Lucas dipped his finger in and out of the slick opening that ached like a bruise, intensified by his hardness against her thigh. Mike had stuck his hand down her pants once, with all the finesse of someone flipping a light switch on and off. She was still awaiting the first orgasm given to her by someone other than herself.
Lucas tugged the straps of her dress down her arms. Her strapless bra followed. He licked her hard-tipped breasts, kneaded each one like soft clay, and sucked at them. Her skin was pure energy, her thighs spreading of their own free will. As he crouched before her, he roamed his hands and mouth up and down her legs. There was something delicious and naughty about standing in nothing but her sandals, and she flushed at the scent of her arousal.
He ran his tongue along the inside of each thigh and finally, dear God, into her slit. She grasped at his hair, her knees quivering. H
er heartbeat accelerated to an absurd pace. He cupped her ass and pulled her closer as though he couldn’t get enough. Slid his tongue up and down and flicked it over her nub, pursed his lips around it and sucked. Her red, overripe flesh dribbled nectar onto his honeybee tongue. Anya hunched forward, tried to squirm away when the first harrowing breaker of euphoria smashed through her then withdrew, leaving behind warm runnels in her limbs and an igneous pool deep in her belly. Lucas held her firm and lapped furiously at her, as though he needed her shrieking and shuddering. He didn’t stop until the final wave and shrill cry receded, and she was gasping for air.
A narcotic haze of lust had slowed time. His hooded gaze drifted to the triangle of black hair between her thighs, and he licked his lips. Then, standing, delved his tongue pungent with her essence into her mouth again. The hardness beneath his pants pushed against her. “You taste incredible.” His hands wandered again, everywhere they could reach. “You’re beautiful.”
It’s really happening. Apprehension and excitement sprinted neck-and-neck through her mind, what little of it hadn’t shut off in service to the rapture bubbling up from the untapped well at her core.
Lucas nuzzled her ear. “Do you want to…?” He jerked his elbow at the bed before resting his hand back on her hip. “I want to. But…”
Anya took him into her hands, massaged his straining dick trapped within the cotton fabric.
“Oh,” he breathed. He burrowed his teeth into his lip. “Please keep doing that.” He lunged forward and smothered her with his mouth, rocking his hips in time with her strokes. Iron-hard in her palm. Did it hurt to be so hard? The same kind of pulsating, bursting pain as that at her core, with one antidote.
Lucas guided her to the bed and yanked open the nightstand drawer, then set a foil square beside the lamp. Anya lay on her back, nested in two sets of pillows, with Lucas framed between her legs. She slithered her hands over the range of muscles across and down his back, beneath his waistband, over the curves of his ass. His lounge pants shifted downward, clinging to his hips as she revealed the tuft of brown fur beneath, the only body hair he’d left intact. She would take her time unwrapping this gift. Revel in its beauty.
The pants snagged on his erection before releasing him. He snickered, but Anya was too entranced by the sight of his thick, veiny cock to be embarrassed.
“Care to do the honors?” Lucas dangled the sealed condom between his thumb and index finger. “Mostly, I just want your hands on me.”
So did she. He was hot to the touch and rigid, yet velvety at the tip, a rose whose petals had closed. She wove a path along one side and probed the furrows below the head. Trailed her finger down the pronounced vein in the center. Each time she stroked him, his cock nodded as if in encouragement and grew a little stiffer, a little longer. She couldn’t get the condom open fast enough, and rolled the slippery latex down his shaft.
Lucas stretched out on top of her, his breaths jagged and heavy in the intervals between kisses. Anya bent her legs. His dick throbbed against her belly. Another raw, feral kiss, Lucas moving his hands under her to grip her ass and lift her to him, shifting so his tip prodded her. Teasing. He braced himself over her, fingers sinking into the mattress on either side of her head. He smelled like summer, like fresh sweat—his shower gone to waste—and grass and sunshine on skin. All the things she clung to during the long, dark winter that had not ended since her mother’s death.
Lucas kissed her forehead, her nose, her lips. Placed his mouth over her heart, where her skin ticked with the force of its rhythm. Calmed her with the sleek heat and shielding weight of his body. He ran his tongue up her throat. “Ready?”
She fell for him that much harder. “Ready.”
He guided himself in with one hand, and she spread her legs to welcome him. His slow but insistent thrusts hinted he’d marshalled all of his willpower not to fuck her brains out. He huffed out a sigh. “How do you want it?”
No one had bothered to ask before; they just pistoned her for a few minutes until they came. The price you paid for fucking boys your own age, who’d learned what they knew by breaking into their fathers’ internet porn accounts. She slipped a hand into his hair. “Slow at first. Then as hard as you can.”
“That is…” He moved his hips in a circle, edging deeper into her. His lithe muscles slid over her bare skin. “Fucking hot.”
She clinched tighter around him. She’d been starving all this time, her sustenance always one step out of reach. Anya clawed at his back as their tattered breaths and the thump of skin on skin pervaded the room’s quiet. She swayed her hips and won a guttural moan that rumbled up from the depths of his belly. Hungry for him to penetrate her all the way, she opened her legs as far as she could and hooked her heels into the backs of his knees. He accepted the invitation with an even deeper moan, a primal and barely human sound. Sweat trickled down the side of his face. His tongue found hers again, his body fluidic over and inside her. She circled her arms around his neck, squashing her breasts to him, and Lucas rested his forehead on hers. The grinding of his pelvis, and his fullness inside her, had cast some kind of spell. She was floating, euphoric. And he was gazing down at her, his smile as angelic as his thrusts were sinful.
He sucked at her bottom lip. “I’m going to come in about five seconds, thanks to you.” Lucas pushed her hand into the mattress, his coiled around it as though it were some precious artifact. He pumped faster, deeper. Pillaging. Squeezing her hand tight. Anya dug her fingers into the firm flesh of his buttocks and crushed his collarbone between her teeth, breaking that flawless skin. Lucas pounded her with a final barrage until the mattress springs squeaked and her back chafed from the friction of sliding up and down starchy sheets. Convulsing and groaning, he buried his face in her hair as his dick thumped inside her with its own heartbeat.
Lucas kissed her face all over. Panting, his skin shiny with sweat despite the air conditioner unit’s drone beneath the windows, he pulled out and climbed off her. “Be right back. Don’t go anywhere.” He sauntered around the corner to the bathroom.
She heard the plop of the condom into the toilet, then Lucas peeing. Her breath returned to normal as the excess body heat evaporated. When Lucas, golden in the dim light and his long, lean muscles the work of some divine sculptor, strolled back into the room she grew hot and tingly all over again. Her skin was jumping, singing, and her thighs clasped an exquisite ache between them. Lucas’s scent lingered on her. So this is afterglow. She let out a satisfied little “hmm.” She only regretted not feeling him come inside her.
Lucas straddled her, his flaccid cock lying on her belly. Enticing her to touch him again, and she did. He hissed but didn’t stop her. Sensitive, particularly the satin tip. “Like what you see?”
She snickered. “It’s the first time I’ve cared to look.”
He grinned and bent forward to kiss her. His weight inspired a resurgence of the voracious pressure deep in her belly. “So. Stay here tonight? Unless your father is going to show up with a shotgun.”
“Don’t worry.” Anya lowered her voice. “I’ll protect you.”
“I feel better already.” Lucas pulled back the comforter and top sheet. “It’s been a little while since I’ve shared a bed, so I apologize in advance if I snore or fart or something.”
Anya crawled under the covers, her laugh ripping through the room like gunfire. Any anxiety about spending the night, absurd when they’d already had sex, dissipated.
“See, I have a philosophy.” He tugged the blanket up and, lying on his back, curled his arm around her shoulders. She laid her cheek over his heart. “A man should do at least two things for a woman every day: Make her laugh, and make her come.”
“I can get behind that.”
“The other thing I’ll apologize for in advance is that you might not get a full night’s sleep. Because we’re naked, and it’s our first night together after a really long wait…” He rolled her onto her side and caressed the curvature of her ear with his
tongue, lighting her up all over again. Her skin pebbled. He was getting hard again, rising against her ass.
“We’ll be long-distance for a couple of months. You’re okay with that?”
“Two months. After the past ten? Big deal. Besides, it’s only a seven-hour drive.” Lucas turned her over and kissed her—languid, sensual, hands drifting to the place he’d made tender and wet again. He traced lazy circles around her nipples with his tongue. “So, before I let you take a nap…” He worked his way down her stomach, her muscles twitching beneath his lips. “I want to go down on you again.”
“Poor me.”
Lucas chuckled and mapped the creases of her thighs with his tongue. “We’re going to get along great.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Anya
Rain tattooed windows hidden behind blackout curtains. Anya’s phone was ringing again, despite Dad’s assurances he wouldn’t worry. Though guilt pecked at her, no way was she about to leave this bed.
Which Lucas was not in.
She shoved a tangle of hair out of her face and propped up on one elbow, her pulse double-timing. Wait. His bag was still here.
The door swooshed open and clicked shut behind him. Lucas was balancing a carrier with two cups in one hand and clutching a paper bag in the other. “Morning, sunshine. I come bearing coffee and donuts.” He set them on the table by the balcony doors and climbed back into bed.
“Mmm, my favorite. Just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re wearing too many clothes.”
He sat up long enough to yank off his shirt. “Better?” Cradled between her legs, he smothered her body with his. She reached down to unfasten his jeans. “I ran out of condoms last night,” he murmured in her ear. “So…”
The Pieces Of Us (The Firebird Trilogy Book 3) Page 22