“Smart,” he says simply. “You knew, on some level, you couldn’t trust him.”
“But why do I trust you? I barely know you. We aren’t even—” I look away. It occurs to me he might see this as a step in the wrong direction, an intimacy that goes beyond what we agreed to. “It doesn’t mean I—”
“What if it does mean something, Amelia?” I turn back to him. “You do know me. We’ve been honest with each other from day one. That’s why you’re comfortable doing this. You know where I stand. I know where you stand. There’s no secrets between us.”
Andrew would hurt me now to save me later. Maybe that’s why I trust him. I’d do the same for him. I get up onto my elbows and crook my ankles around the backs of his thighs to pull him to the edge of the bed. “Get rid of the condom.”
He arches an eyebrow at me. “You sure?”
“I want to feel you. Are you clean?”
He nods. “I haven’t gone without a condom since Shana, and I was tested after she left. Just to be sure.”
“Same with me and Reggie.”
With a grin, he tosses the wrapper over his shoulder and pulls my skirt down my hips, discarding it on the ground. I retreat on the mattress as he crawls toward me. “I told you I was an ass man.”
“I’m not sure if I’m an ass girl.”
“You will be when I’m done with you.” When he’s above me, he lowers his mouth, ghosting it over mine. “Then we’ll be a match made in heaven.”
“I don’t know about that,” I tease, then raise my lips to his.
He cups the back of my head and eases his weight on me. Leisurely, I slide my tongue over his, deepening the kiss. He curls his fingers into my hair and groans, grinding his hips against me. “I’m going to make you feel so good. Flip over, babe.”
He lifts up to give me room, his bicep muscles bulging. When I’m on my stomach, he sits on the backs of my thighs, straddling me.
I hear the cap of the lube pop open. My insides clench before he even touches me. Since I can’t see, I’m forced to fill in the blanks as I listen to him squirt lube into his palms, the gooey sounds as he rubs his hands together.
“Your ass was one of the first things I noticed about you,” he says, spreading my cheeks apart with sticky fingers.
“It’s the first place I—” I suck in a breath as he slides his fingers up my crack, “—first place I gain weight.”
“Thank God,” he says through a chuckle. He grabs both my cheeks, kneading them. “Otherwise I might’ve missed you.”
I’m more turned on than self-conscious, so I push back against his hands. “Patience,” he says. I hear the grin in his voice. “I can’t exactly dive in.”
I search for a witty comeback but lose my train of thought as he starts to explore. He teases my clit with his thumb as he presses one finger into my anus. “If at any point I’m going too fast—”
“I’ll tell you,” I promise.
He works it in to the knuckle. Since we’ve done this before, and he’s nice and slick, it doesn’t take long before he’s adding a second finger. I breathe evenly against the bedspread. My hairline prickles, my body warming with each stroke.
“Good?” he asks.
I answer by gyrating up into his hand.
He stills me. “Not yet. Give me control of your orgasm. I promise it’ll be worth it.”
I try to swallow, but my throat is suddenly dry. I relax back into the mattress. It takes all my concentration not to hump the bed. Without warning, he slides his thumb in my pussy and before I know it, he’s thrusting three slippery fingers in and out of my asshole.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “You should see yourself. You’re making me hard as a rock.”
Flooded with sensations as his fingers work me from both ends, I plead, “Then fuck me. I’m ready.”
He stops massaging, stops searching, and a second later, cool metal slides along the back of my thigh. Will it hurt? Would I mind if it did? He pulls one cheek aside, draws his fingers out, and replaces them with the tip of the plug. He doesn’t linger, but starts working it in, slowly, but without hesitation. He spreads and stretches me. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but not enough to ask him to stop. “Is it in?” I ask.
“You’ll know.”
He’s right. After a few more pushes, an acute pinch takes my breath away, and then there’s a pull within my body as it accepts the plug. I gasp as my muscles contract around it.
“There,” he murmurs. “Still good?”
I inhale deeply, adjusting to the feeling and the knowledge of getting plumbed by an alien object. He doesn’t give me a chance to think too hard about it. Rising, he guides me up with him until I’m on all fours. I’m about to ask what he’s doing when there’s a familiar pressure between my legs.
“Relax,” he says—I’ve tensed up. “I’ll do all the work. I’m going to make you feel so good, baby. You’ll come apart at the seams.”
“And you?” I ask, taunting him.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get mine too.” He tugs me back onto him by my hips, filling me gradually, absolutely. I’m fuller than I’ve ever been, unnervingly so, but as he withdraws and slides back in, pleasure overtakes everything else. “Fuck,” he says.
“What?” I ask, alarmed by the intensity in his voice.
“I can feel the goddamn plug,” he says. “It’s bulging right against my shaft. I’m trying not to come like a fucking teenager.”
I’m distracted by the roundness inside me and the sharp awareness that Andrew’s controlling both of my holes right now. I drop my head between my arms, but he pulls it back up by my hair and his control begins to slip. Skin on skin, the both of us covered in lube, he gets faster, slicker, relentless, until he’s slamming into me, and my entire body is shaking with the need for release.
“Normally, I’d make you wait for your climax,” he says, panting. “But the more relaxed you are when I fuck your ass, the better.”
He takes me right to the edge with his unyielding thrusts and then shoves me over so I’m climaxing mercilessly. At one point, I can’t even hold myself up anymore, and I fall onto the mattress, spent.
“Good girl,” he murmurs, slowing down. “I didn’t even have to put you into position.” Still hard as a rock, he slides out of me while working the plug free. I writhe underneath him with the strangeness of being deflated, emptied after I was so full. He squeezes more lube between my cheeks. “Feels so goddamn amazing to be back inside you,” he says. “I’m barely keeping it together. Don’t worry, I won’t last long.”
Because I’m so turned on, my instinct is to tell him it’s okay if he lasts until the sun rises and sets again, as long as I can come a third, fourth, fifth time—but what if I’m not able to handle it more than a few seconds? What if I can’t reach another climax because it hurts? For a split second, unable to see his face, I’m terrified he’ll be so far gone, he won’t be able stop.
“You must be nervous,” he says. “I’ve never heard you this quiet.”
As soon as I hear his voice, my panic subsides. This is Andrew. He hasn’t given me any reason not to trust him. If he had, I wouldn’t be here at his mercy. “I’m ready,” I say.
“I’ve got you,” he says, somehow knowing what I need to hear. “Remember, if it’s too much . . .”
“I’ll stop you.”
He massages my anus, inserting a couple fingers again, loosening me up even more. Even though I want to stay where I am, spent and wobbly, he positions me back onto all fours. By the time he’s pressed up against me and pushing inside, my face burns hot. This feels wrong—forbidden but also physically wrong. A cock like his is too big for such a small hole. It sends a thrill down my spine that I’m doing something new with him, something so wicked, so outside my comfort zone. Andrew pulls me apart, probing me—huge, foreign, determined. He enters me so slowly, it must take every ounce of his restraint as he slides out a little and back in, slightly deeper than before, breaking through my barriers.
I do what he says, as if I’d forgotten something so basic. Maybe I had.
“Now exhale,” he instructs.
I blow out a long breath, and it moves through my entire body.
“And repeat. Just like that,” he says. “Like when you do yoga.”
“Yoga?” I can’t help snickering, and after a second, he laughs with me, deep and reassuring. I relax around him, and he slips deeper, causing me to gasp.
“Tell me when you want it,” he says with a few short, shallow thrusts.
If his plan is to go so slow that I get more impatient than afraid, it’s working. “I want it.”
“No,” he says, massaging the base of my neck. “Tell me when you really fucking want it. When you need it.”
I nod, and remind myself to unclench. His words alone loosen anything I’ve been holding on to. With a control I can feel in his every movement, he works me open. Soon, I’m taking him all the way, morphing from anticipating each intrusion to craving it. My body accepts more and more of him. After two orgasms already, I should be sated, but they seem to have made me more feverish. I hunger for another one like I’ve been on the verge of it for months. I want to know how good it can be to let him loose.
“Now,” I beg. “I can’t wait anymore. Make me come.”
He doesn’t question me, just pulls out almost all the way and adds more lube. He grabs my hips in both hands and eases in, slow but firm, all the way to the hilt. The pinch of pain from taking him all at once provokes a guttural noise from the back of my throat.
In response, he reaches around to play with my clit. “Help me make you feel good, babe,” he says. “Stay steady.”
I move down onto my forearms to brace myself, keeping my lower half propped up for him. He moves faster. If he was taking my ass before, now he claims it, fingering my pussy at the same time, spreading my wetness around my clit, dividing my attention. My body shudders, overwhelmed, sucking his fingers deeper while both fighting against and accepting his cock.
I pinpoint the exact moment he lets go—he begins to slip and slide out of me, sloppy, no longer self-possessed as he digs his fingers bruisingly into one hip. His hand between my legs gets frantic, searching, vibrating, plunging. Just sensing his control fall away makes me crazy. I push back, and his answering groan is strong and primal, not only filling my ears but rattling my body.
“That’s it,” Andrew grunts, fucking me through the first wave of my orgasm. “Come on, Amelia.”
I dissolve into it, breaking piece by piece, with no choice but to submit to the intensity of my climax. As I finish, Andrew closes his front over my back, pushing even deeper into me as he breathes hotly into my hair. He doesn’t last long in that position and within seconds, he rips at the comforter with two desperate fists and explodes inside me.
He’s out of breath, muttering inaudibly into my ear over and over. My back, damp with sweat, sticks to his chest. He drops his forehead to my shoulder and with a few wet kisses on my sensitive skin, I shudder.
“You loved every second of that,” he says.
“It wasn’t what I expected,” I admit.
“But it was good?” he asks.
I sense a hint of doubt in his voice. I want to reassure him with a look, but we’re in no position to see each other’s faces. “Incredible,” I say. It feels weird to be grateful to him, but I am. He doesn’t know, couldn’t know, how far I’ve come in the last two weeks thanks to him. I thought sex had to come with strings. The last few times I did it before Andrew, it was a weapon, not pleasure. “Thank you.”
“For what?” he asks. “I should be thanking you.”
“Thanks for, you know, being present. And conscious of what you were doing.” It hurts me to say. I never thought I’d be the kind of woman who allowed a man to break her, but I was on the verge of that a year ago. “Thank you for thinking of me first.”
“You’re always first,” he says as if it’s fact. “That’s how it should be when you let someone into your bed.”
I’m suddenly painfully aware that he’s about a thousand pounds of pure muscle on top of me—and that he’s still inside me. “We should clean up,” I say, shifting to get free, “and if you think about it, there’s really only one sensible way to do that.”
“You don’t mean . . .?”
“I think I have just enough Tahitian crème left to make it a good one.”
“Mmm,” he responds. “Well, if taking a bubble bath is the only sensible thing to do, then I guess it would be foolish not to.”
TWENTY
Andrew rests as I head into my bathroom, working the aches out my arms and legs. Once I’ve cleaned myself up and started the tub faucet, I catch a glimpse of my reflection. I’m red in the face, as if I’ve just done sprints, and my hair is tangled and damp around my neck. I look owned, as I wanted to be, and I know Andrew likes that, so I resist the urge to fix myself up.
I pass through the bedroom, where Andrew lies on the bed with his eyes shut, to the kitchen. I pour two drinks before dropping them off in the bathroom.
Andrew’s clearly passed out, but he knows the rule about sleepovers, so I don’t feel bad waking him. “Your bath is ready, sir.”
His answering sigh turns into a soft laugh, but his eyes remain shut. “I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Sure you weren’t.” I smile, return to the bathroom, and shut off the faucet.
“Or maybe I was,” he says as he comes in, scratching his hair, mussing it in every direction. “Was it a dream?” he asks. “Or was it really that fucking good?”
Something about seeing all of him in the dim lighting, his tall, broad-shouldered frame and colorful torso, makes me warm and fuzzy inside. I put my arms around his middle. “The second one.”
He takes a second to hug me back, an almost imperceptible hesitation. “I hoped I’d end up here tonight,” he says, rubbing my back. “I’m glad I did.”
I smile up at him. “So am I.”
He isn’t smiling. “How glad?”
I loosen my arms enough to pull back. It’s likely my sudden affection has caught him off guard. Me too, a little. It’s hard not to feel closer to him after what we just did—and after spending an evening with his family. That doesn’t have to mean more than it does. It isn’t an invitation to stay the night or anything. I drop my eyes to his chest. “I’m not sure.”
“Amelia.” He waits until I look up again. “It’s okay. I want you to be honest.”
Honesty. It’s what we do. It’s the main reason we’ve made it this far. “Tonight was different,” I admit. “We might’ve broken through a few walls without meaning to.”
He nods. “I think so.”
“It’ll make things harder when we part,” I continue. “Maybe I’m okay with that, though.”
He raises both eyebrows. “You are?”
The alternative is that tonight didn’t happen, and I wouldn’t take it back, so the only option is to be okay with it. “Yes. I mean, it wouldn’t be a good idea to keep going down this path, but—”
“Why not?”
I tilt my head at him. “Because I won’t always be okay with it the next day. We’re already having a nice time tonight, so we might as well just . . . keep doing that. We can’t really go backward, can we?”
He studies me, expressionless. I have no idea if I’ve completely scared him off or if he understands what I’m saying.
I keep talking. “We’ve crossed into different territory. Anything after this would be a conscious choice. I mean there’s family to think about, and work . . .” I’m drowning, and he’s not making any move to join me overboard. With a sigh, I say, “I’ll understand if you want to leave now.”
To his credit, he doesn’t look longingly at the bathtub. I know how badly he wants to get in. Enough to get him to stay? “Do you want me to?” he asks. “Leave?”
I run the back of my hand ov
er my hairline. Our intense sex plus the steam from the bath is making me a bit too warm. “No. Not yet.”
The lines between his eyebrows ease as he nods. “Good. I’m not ready to go. You look hot.”
My cheeks heat, a feat considering I’m already sweating. “Thanks.”
“No, I mean you look hot.” He goes to the bathroom counter and opens the top drawer. “As in, warm. Do you have a hairband or something?”
“Um . . .”
He finds a clip, stands in front of me, and rakes his hands through my hair. He gathers it behind my head, then twists it up to secure it. “Better?” he asks. “And you do look hot, as in sexy, as well.”
I try unsuccessfully to hold in my smile. How can a man of his stature and beauty ever be described as cute? But that’s what he is right now.
Like before, he gets in the tub and pulls me down between his legs, but this time he washes me, dipping my loofah in the water and running it over my back.
“If we were dating,” he says, “I get the feeling we’d be a very clean couple.”
I smile and hug my knees. “It’s nice, though. A bath kind of forces you to slow down. It’s not like either of us gets a lot of free time.”
“I’m not complaining.” He soaps my arms and the back of my neck. “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night. About work.”
“What did I say?” I ask, only partly focused as I enjoy the scrape of the sponge and the goose bumps it inspires.
“That it’s a bullshit industry.”
“Did I?” I close my eyes and sigh. “I was upset. I don’t really feel that way.”
“What about those things you said to Bell earlier?”
“They’re true. Confidence is the main ingredient for beauty. But I make a living convincing people there’s more to beauty than that, and so do thousands of other people in this city alone.”
“Right. Have you ever considered doing anything else?”
“No. Why would I? It’s demanding, but that’s what I want.”
“What if you cut back?”
“For what?”
That shuts both of us up. I don’t blame him for falling quiet. I never used to think hard work and success could paint such a sad, lonely picture. My life is exactly how I designed it. I get to do what I dreamed of as a girl—what many girls would consider a dream job. Fashion, celebrities, parties in New York City. Yet lately, something about the work is missing. It feels less like a dream and more like a job.
The First Taste (Slip of the Tongue Book 2) Page 20