“Mmm…” She purred. “How? Tell me.”
Chase licked his lips, eyes lowering as he felt a blush heat his cheeks.
“Come on,” she said.
His eyes met hers, again.
“Do you think about kissing me?” she asked.
His face was serious, once more. “Yes.” He barely croaked out the answer, his voice having gone lower than even a whisper, coming from somewhere in the deepest part of his gut. The same part that seemed to be in control of his rapidly hardening dick. “Yes.”
“Do you think about--”
“What it’s like to be inside you?” he finished for her. “Yes. What your pussy looks like? Yes. What it tastes like? The look in your eyes when you cum? The sounds you make when you cum? Yes, Lila. Okay? Yes. All of it. And more.” He held his hand out, looking away from her while swallowing thickly. “More than you’ll ever know.”
“So let’s go.”
His eyes shot back to her. “Excuse me?”
“I’m tired of hula-hooping around this thing.”
“This thing?”
“I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to call it. I just know it’s there. It’s alive, and it’s right there.” She pointed to an area in the middle of the table, where they were now leaning into each other. “Right there between us, always on the brink of explosion.”
Chase knew exactly what she was talking about, even if her drunken ramblings were almost indiscernible. He understood. “I know it’s there, Lila. It’s been there since I was sixteen. Can I take you back now, please? I’m exhausted.” When she didn’t budge, he couldn’t help a smile. “You’re gonna hate yourself tomorrow. You realize that right?”
“It is tomorrow.” She suddenly squinted at him. “Is this one of those… you want me until you know you can have me, kind of things? Is that what this is?”
“You’re really saying I could have you?” His eyes came to life. “Right now? Tonight?”
Lila sputtered, and then looked out of the window with a roll of her eyes.
“I accept,” Chase said. “In fact, I’ll take two. Three. Hell, I’ll take ten.”
“Stop. Now you’re making fun of me.” She finally looked back at him and shifted in her seat. “I don’t like it.”
Chase remained still, leaning coolly against the table. “I will always want you. You is kind… you is smart....” His joking smile fell away after playfully quoting the movie they’d fallen asleep to that night. “You’re so beautiful it’s ridiculous…”
“Go on…” She grinned.
“And, yeah, I think about you a lot. Sometimes in really filthy, disgusting, inappropriate ways.” He tilted his head, studying her intensely before nodding her way. “Do you think about me?”
Lila shifted, again.
“Do you think about me sometimes, Professor?”
She sighed. “Of course I do.”
“No. Not ‘of course I do’. That’s not what I’m asking you.”
She closed her eyes momentarily, and when she reopened them, she was shaken by the look in his eye. “Yes, Chase. I think about you.”
“When you’re alone?”
A smile teased her lips.
“I think of you the most… when I’m alone…” he said.
“Stop.”
“In the bed…”
“Stop.”
“At night.”
“I got it.”
“This isn’t a recent turn of events.” He raised his eyebrows. “This has been six years in the making, alright? So, I’m sorry that you’re feeling a certain type of way about how I’m handling you right now.”
“Handling me?” She beamed. “There’s no handling going on here. You’re playing with me. For your own amusement. It’s like you’re trying to bestow some sick payback on me.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I just offered you some booty, and you shot me down--” Lila tripped herself up. “I hate the words that are coming out of my mouth.”
“Really? You do? Because I think I’m in love with them.”
She shook her head at him before finishing off her shot. Catching eyes with the server, she gave a small nod of her head and held up her empty shot glass with a polite smile.
“You’re reading me wrong,” he whispered.
She slammed her empty glass on the table, giving him a look. “I don’t know how to read you wrong.”
He searched her eyes. “Are you so used to men fucking you senseless the moment you give the word, that you’ve forgotten what everything else looks like?”
Lila faltered.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I want to enjoy this,” he said, motioning between them.
“Enjoy what?” Lila asked. “Torturing me?”
“Lila, I don’t just want to be inside you, in the sexual sense.” He leaned in closer and made a claw with his hand, pressing it over his heart. “I want to be inside you.” He tapped his clawed hand against his heart. “I want in. I want all the way in.”
“Your honesty is unsettling sometimes.”
“I don’t know how else to be with you.”
“Likewise.”
He squinted softly. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He leaned back in the booth, picking up his water as he nodded his head, taking a small sip. He let it chill his teeth. As he set it down, he cleared his throat. “Did you fuck Jack?”
Lila’s buzz vanished. “No!”
His eyes rose to hers.
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
He studied her face but didn’t answer.
“Stop asking me that.”
“Okay. I apologize. I don’t want you to get upset.” He reached across the table and covered her hands.
For the first time, their live wires touched and then detonated.
She tightened her fingers around his. To her shock, she survived the blast. They both did.
Barely. Her heartbeat tripled in pace as he intertwined their fingers, running his thumb gently along her palm. It felt like he was touching every part of her, inside and out.
--
They didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, spending the entire time talking at the diner until they got the shock of their lives at the sight of the sun rising.
They made it back to the house just in time to see her mother and father on their way out. Paul had planned an entire day for just the two of them, a day that spanned Central Park, all the way to the Statue of Liberty. Only a New Yorker, who’d been there for many decades, could claim they’d never seen Lady Liberty up close, and Lila’s parents were among them. She knew her father only wanted to help her mother forget, to distract her mind, and she hoped it would work, at least for today.
The goodbyes hadn’t been tearful, but loving and optimistic.
For the first time in a long time, Lila was happy she came home. She was even happier that the man sitting at her parent’s dining room table had come with her.
Freshly showered and dressed, Lila approached the table, taking one of the chairs in the back of her hand.
“I was gonna go for a quick walk before we leave for the airport…” She dragged on. “Do you want to take a walk with me?”
Chase looked up from the pile of books he’d been surrounded with since he’d finished his shower, and Lila felt like she’d been rocketed back to five years ago at The Dalton School. As he blasted her with those powerful eyes of his, eyes that only seemed to grow more powerful each time he hit her with them, she felt her stomach come to life. She had to take a deep breath to calm it.
“Yeah,” he smiled. “I could walk.”
Ten minutes later, they were still walking, side-by-side, quietly, enjoying the beautiful Brooklyn morning. It was extremely early, so the streets had quieted down. Every once in a while, their arms would brush as they moved, igniting that invisible pulse, and Chase found himself looking over at her when it happened for what had to be the hundred
th time.
“Lila--” He stopped when she suddenly took his arm, pointing to a building behind him. He followed her finger, taking in the sight of a long brick building.
“I used to go to that school. Holy crap, I almost forgot about this place.” She laughed softly. “I think I must have completely exorcized it from my memory out of sheer trauma. Holy crap,” she said, again. “Now I understand what old people are talking about when they say time flies.”
“Old people? So you mean people like you, right?” He smiled when her elbow came flying into his gut.
“Asshole,” she whispered.
He looked back at the building. It seemed small for a school.
“The Remington School for Gifted Girls.” He read the sign that was right over her shoulder. “Gifted girls? Gifted, as in…”
“Violent? Unlawful? Angry? So many possibilities beyond those doors.” She sighed, dramatically. “Those were the days,” she sang.
“Are you telling me you were a problem child? I’ll never believe it.”
“I was a terror. The kind of kid most parents have nightmares about.” She thought about it. “I wasn’t so different from you, actually, back when I first met you.”
Chase covered his heart. “You would have never found me roaming the halls of The Remington School for Gifted Boys. I was an angel from heaven.”
“Sweetheart, on what planet? When I found you, you were on a one-man mission to burn Manhattan to the ground.”
“I was pretty angry. At everybody.”
“And everything.”
“Then you showed up.”
“And it took three years to calm you the hell down.”
“That’s not how I remember it. You know, I still remember the first time I saw you. I was sitting in your office with Jack …”
Lila nodded.
“He and I were at each others throats about some bullshit I can’t remember. And then you walked in…” Chase suddenly took a deep breath. “And I looked over…”
Lila’s eyes went to him, waiting for him to finish.
“It’s crazy.”
“What?” she asked.
“How you can be living inside a moment that’s going to completely alter your life… and not even know it.”
Her eyes ran his face. “You know, this is the school where I met my first love.”
Chase’s eyebrows jumped. “Your what?”
“I saw him in the halls on my first day. He saw me. That was definitely one of those moments. The kind that you don’t even realize is going to be a moment.”
“You’re telling me that there’s actually a man out there who you haven’t chewed up, and spit out? If I was setting the town on fire over in Manhattan, it was only because you’d already beaten me to the punch in setting fire to every poor bastard who threw you a passing glance.”
Lila’s mouth dropped open.
“So who was the guy? Who was the one guy, on the planet, who managed to steal the heart of Lila James?”
“He was my English teacher.”
That got Chase’s attention. “Stop.”
“It’s true. I was sixteen, and he was… twenty-five? Twenty-six?”
“And you went after him?”
“Relentlessly.” She laughed. “He fought me for a while--”
“A fool’s game.”
“For months. He fought me hard. Then, one day, in after-school detention…”
“He finally bent you over?”
Lila cut her eyes at him. He’d actually done just that, against the chalkboard, but she stopped herself from indulging that fact.
“And you let him?”
“Chase,” Lila said, mocking impatience. “I loved-ed him.”
“Oh, you loved-ed him?” he repeated, laughing. “My mistake. I didn’t realize you had loved-ed him.”
“Mmm… I did. For a whole year, we had our secret rendezvous. I thought we’d be together for always.”
“So what happened? If you loved-ed him, why isn’t he here now?”
“He said it wasn’t right. Said I was too young. He said I would look back one day and hate him.”
“And do you?”
Lila thought about that, before whispering, “No.”
“Where is he now?”
She looked to him. “I don’t know.”
“What was his name?”
“Josh.”
“No last name?”
“Not one I’ll ever tell you.”
Chase’s eyes searched hers, fighting the urge to say what was tumbling around in his head.
Lila came face to face with him. “It’s kind of nice to be away from Cambridge, huh?”
He faced her, as well, his green eyes watching her adoringly. “Yeah, it is.”
“Gentrification has driven away every soul that lived here when I was a kid.” She looked around, shoving her hands in her back pockets. “No one knows us here.” Her eyes met his, again. “We don’t know them.”
Chase didn’t respond this time, but he was suddenly transfixed. When she closed the space between them and covered his lips in a soft, sweet kiss, he was utterly undone. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. When she pulled back, he was frowning at her.
“Thank you for taking care of my mother.” Her eyes shone up at him.
His heart was at his feet. “Lila, don’t start something you can’t finish.”
Lila came to her toes, clawed her nails against the back of his head and pressed her lips to his, again, this time allowing her tongue to dip out and wet his bottom lip before she took it between hers.
He melted. “Oh god.”
She lapped softly at his lips with her tongue, searching patiently for entry, alternating with soft pecks in between.
He came apart, spreading his lips over hers. He claimed her around the waist with a quickness that stole her breath, tasting her lips with his tongue. She swirled her own out to meet his, and he made a guttural sound when she met him in the middle. Their lips danced desperately on the quiet street, his urgent kisses forcing her mouth wider, taking more of her. He reached up to cup her cheek with one hand, keeping her head steady as he sampled her flavor. Tilting his head, he pushed her back until her head was up against the school sign, and then he pressed in hard, diving in as deep as he could go.
Lila pulled her lips from his.
“This is it.” Her gasps came in perfect time with his as she clawed her nails down the back of his head. His soft hairs fluttered between her fingers.
Unable to open his eyes and relinquish the perfection of what was happening, Chase pressed his forehead to hers, licking his lips to taste her before releasing a strangled breath. She was as sweet as he’d always imagined, and his body screamed for more. “What?”
“This is one of those moments, that we don’t know is going to be a moment.”
At that, Chase opened his eyes.
She clutched the back of his neck. “Except we do know it. I know it. I know that this is a moment. It has to be. Right?” She took a deep, uneven breath.
“This is the only moment, Lila,” he whispered. “My life could end right now, right this second, and this would be the moment.”
She gasped as he dove in for more, parting his lips over hers with a passionate groan.
They took their time imparting their deepest passions with their lips, exploring each other with soft sweeps of their tongues, drowning in the newness, and never wanting it to end.
His hands traveled to the small of her back, lingering at the dip before he let them move lower, spreading his fingers wide at the curve of her ass before cupping both cheeks tightly. A groan of torment escaped him as he did, as if touching her so intimately caused him great agony. His kiss intensified as he palmed her, pulling her pelvis hard against his.
With a whimper from the deepest part of her, Lila pulled back, stunned by the persistent tap of his hardness against her stomach. “Wait…”
“No,” he breathed, harshly, his eyebrows clutch
ing together. “Don’t kiss me and then tell me to wait, Lila. I have. I’ve waited my whole life for you, please don’t ask me to wait another fucking second.”
“I just… I have to tell you something before this goes any further.” Lila looked down while licking her lips, jamming her eyes shut when she felt him brushing a stray hair off her forehead before pushing it softly behind her ear. Her fingers dug into the hair on the back of his neck, harder, and she gasped before she said the words she knew she had to say. “I did sleep with Jack. I did…”
Immediately, he stepped out of her hold.
She reached for him, stopping short when she saw the look on his face, so hot with fury that she feared she might go up in flames if she laid a single hand on him. For the first time in a long time, she couldn’t read him. That made her so uncomfortable that she instantly crossed her arms over her chest.
“I lied,” she began, “because I knew it would never happen again. It was just a one-time thing. It didn’t mean anything.” Now that she’d kissed him, and felt the blaze of emotion the moment their lips had met, she knew she had to tell him the truth. Nothing as beautiful as the kiss they’d just shared should start on a dishonest note. There had been nothing dishonest about the warmth of his arm around her waist, his hand on her cheek, his tongue lapping at her bottom lip before he sucked it between his own. It had been the most honest Chase had ever been with her, and he deserved the same honesty in return.
Now that she was watching the rapid change in him, Lila feared the lie outweighed the truth. She feared it was unforgivable.
“It didn’t mean anything,” she whispered, again, her voice shaking this time.
Chase ran a hand down his face as it transformed from furious to completely distraught. “It didn’t mean anything?” he asked.
Lila instantly shook her head.
He swallowed. “So I asked you not once, not twice, but three times, Lila, if you fucked Jack, and you looked me right in my face and lied to me, three times?”
“Yes.”
He motioned between them, voice growing dark and vacant. “So what the hell is this? What has this all been about? Huh? Kissing me? Letting me touch you? All because you’re pissed off at him?”
Thunder Rolls (The Almeida Brothers Trilogy Book 2) Page 16