by S. Ann Cole
The water beat down on us, washing off the soap.
Reaching up, I put my arms around his neck, and he surprisingly let me. Water droplets dripped off his long lashes, his hair was plastered to his forehead, and his full, sculptured lips were parted, as he seemed to be recovering from something, somehow.
He was beautiful. Did he know I was in love with him? Obsessed, even?
I wanted to hug him until we became one, crawl into him, feel everything he was feeling, make our hearts coalesce and beat as one. How was it possible for me to love him this much when we have few to no moments together? When I knew not much about him, except the obvious? When we haven’t shared much of ourselves with each other?
Was it him I was in love with? Or was I obsessed with the idea of being in love with him?
As he watched my lips, I could see the deliberation going on in his head. He wanted me, too. Of course he did. His cock said it all. But for some unknown reason, he was holding back. He wanted me, but he didn’t. He wanted me, but he wouldn’t take me. Not even for casual sex. He offered casual to others, and offered me platonic. Why?
“I want to suck you off,” I blurted.
He didn’t seem surprised. “Platonic.”
“Okay, well, I want to kiss you.”
“Platonic.”
“Just one, small, tiny kiss.”
Clamping down on his bottom lip, he tried to hide a smile. “Oh, one small kiss can go a mighty long way…”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “You kissed me last week, remember?”
“That’s different,” he countered, “Now we’re naked. Wet. Aroused. Nothing’s stoppin’ me from sliding right inside you.”
Oh. God. That sounded so good. Tempting. The heaviness between my thighs grew more unbearable by the minute.
Sighing, I looked down at his live and erect cock nestled between us. The sight alone made me feel like climaxing. “Aren’t you afraid of getting blue balls?”
At that he chuckled, his smile so radiant that I had to smile too. “Sassy, every time I walk away from you, I walk away with a raging hard-on. So I’m used to it by now.”
Frowning, I chewed on my lip as I thought about this.
Okay, so he wanted me, like, really wanted me. But he was denying himself. That was the baffling part. I wasn’t playing hard to get, I was more willing than a hooker on the street side.
Because I was tired of busting my brain, I just asked him, “Why, JK? Why won’t you sleep with me? What’s the big deal?”
Moving in even closer so his body was flushed against mine, he answered, “For me, you are a big deal.”
Huh?
Before I could get another word out, he spun me around in one quick motion and backed me up against the marble-tiled wall, moving in so his dick glided along my folds.
“Hmnh,” I moaned.
Him, against me, wet, sliding…felt amazing.
“I’ve got a confession to make,” he whispered.
“Yeah?”
“I’m obsessed,” he admitted even quieter.
With me? Ohmigod, with me? “With…?”
Tilting up my chin, he studied my lips, passing his thumb across them. “Your lips,” he breathed out, “I love them. I’m tortured by them.” Touching a finger to the centre of my top lip, he continued, “This little pointy pout here, it does things to me. Especially when it’s wet, like now.”
He leaned down and kissed the spot he touched, then drew back and watched it in fascination as if waiting for something to happen.
In this case, I wasn’t sure what Jahleel expected to happen. They were just lips, and they wanted more of his kisses.
The thought was barely completed when he dropped his lips back down on mine. Hard and ravishing, his tongue chased around mine, and applying more pressure, he kissed me even deeper as if he couldn’t contain himself any longer. Cupping my face and holding it in place, he made my mouth his.
Oh God, yes. I’d never been kissed like this before, hard and controlling, but profoundly passionate.
Undulating my hips, I rubbed my centre up against his erection, moaning in his mouth as pleasure heightened and intensified in my veins.
With a deep, throaty groan, he slowed the kiss, bit my lip, hanging on to it for a bit before he released it and dropped his forehead to mine. “Because I’m not ready to be owned yet.”
Lost and confused, I stared up at him, wondering what he was talking about.
“That’s the answer to your question,” he filled in, pushing away from me. Far away.
And I felt bereft, like I’d lost something monumental here and now.
Jahleel turned and opened the shower door. “C’mon.”
Chapter Fourteen
I stood still with my back against the wet tiles, watching Jahleel through the shower glass as he nabbed a towel from the shelves and began towelling himself, his back muscles rippling with each move, the KINGSTON inked across his upper back unsteady with each flex, his waist slim and narrow, he even had lower back dimples like a bitch. I wanted to lick him all over, suck him, ride him, lock my legs and arms around him… le sigh.
What did he mean by ‘not ready to be owned’? Was he intimating that I had the power to claim him, own him, make him settle? How could that possibly be when I was such a tongue-tied, dim-witted klutz around him? That couldn’t be what he meant. He’d been dropping these confusing lines and signals, making me more and more confused each hour—
“Sassy,” he called, dragging me from my reveries. “C’mon.”
Worn and wearied, I pushed off the wall and went to him. The sound of his voice, I’d follow it anywhere, anytime, any day, even down into the pit of hell. As long as he’d be there, I wouldn’t mind burning in eternal flames.
When I got to him, he leaned back on the vanity, and in one swift go, he wrapped the towel around me and yanked me into him, tucking the towel ends in at the front. Reaching over to the shelf next to us, he grabbed a hand-towel and ordered, “Turn around.”
As I did, he snaked an arm around my waist, pulled me even closer to him and used his right leg to nudge between my legs so they shifted wider apart, causing me to shift down lower, my back to his chest.
Just as I was about to ask him what he was doing, he began drying my hair with the hand-towel. A simple thing it was, yet it made me feel cherished.
“They become submissive when wet,” I heard him comment, dissevering my thick load of wet hair into sections to dry it better.
“What?”
“Your curls,” he explained. “Dry—they’re wild and rebellious. Wet—they’re tamed into finer curls and flow together.”
This moment, I was loving it.
Jahleel Kingston was towel-drying my hair, and most of all, being nice. To me.
“Which do you think suits me best?”
“Both.” I detected a smile in his voice. “When wild, you look like a complete badass. When wet, you look innocent and young and virginal. Makes me wanna fuck your mouth, come on your tongue and dirty you up.”
“Oh jeez…” I muttered under my breath, which had him chuckling.
After a long pause, he divulged, “But neither are my favourite…”
“No?”
“No.”
Tossing the hand-towel on the vanity, he slowly turned me around to face him. “Grammy Awards. Three years ago. You won Best Album. You wore this sexy, sexy red dress. Split came all the way up to here.”
He moved a hand down between us and dragged a finger up my left thigh to remind me where the split had stopped, which was far past mid-thigh. “Your hair was longer than this. It was straightened and parted in the centre so it flowed down both sides of your face. And when you looked into the camera, those striking cat-like grey eyes…” His reminiscing trailed off and he shook his head, while I gaped.
Who knew three years ago he was watching me on television and found me attractive? Who knew he’d even remember, in detail, how I was dressed?
“I
can’t even remember what I was wearing yesterday, let alone three years ago.”
Eyes roaming over my face, they lingered on my lips for a moment before he reached out and touched the same spot he’d touched in the shower. “I do.”
Pushing me back a few feet from him, he turned and took up the damp hand-towel and tossed it in the laundry basket. He also took up my toothbrush I’d left tossed messily on the vanity with water droplets around it, and the toothpaste cap open.
I interpreted his diverted attention as a sign of dismissal and started out of the bathroom as he set my toothbrush upright next to his in the holder, closed the toothpaste cap, grabbed a rag and began wiping down the vanity.
Neat freak.
When I stepped into the bedroom, my suitcase that I’d left open and spilling in the corner was zipped closed and standing upright. My dirty clothes I’d stripped off while heading to the bathroom was picked up off the floor, folded in a neat pile, and placed on the seat of his armchair opposite my suitcase. And the clean clothes I’d thrown on the bed were arranged.
Christ. The guy was a walking, talking contradiction. How could someone who wore ragged ripped jeans, rugged boots or ratty sneakers and T-shirt all the time, rode a bike and drove a roofless, door-less Jeep be a compulsive neat freak? How on earth was that even possible?
I sat at the edge of the bed moisturizing my legs when Jahleel sauntered into the bedroom naked, casual, carefree and comfortable in his skin.
Did he even care that I was an orgasm-hungry woman in the presence of a man I’ve been wanting, dreaming, fantasizing about for the past five plus years?
He made a beeline to his dresser, pulled out white boxers from the top drawer and donned them. When he glanced in the mirror and caught me watching him, the forgotten bottle of moisturizer suspended mid-air, one leg crooked up on the bed and the towel draped between my thighs, a small smirk formed on his lips and he winked at me.
He turned and came over.
Snatching the bottle from my hand, he sat down beside me, squirted some moisturizer in his palm and began moisturizing my leg.
What the hell did I ever do to get on his good side? And how long would it last, exactly?
“You always this easily distracted?” he asked my leg, his fingers doing more massaging than moisturizing.
“If you had any idea how badly I want you, you’d stop being so casual with your dick out.”
“What you gonna do, rape me?”
“Molest, sexually harass, sexually assault, gag, bound… Seriously, don’t tempt a horny woman.”
He chuckled as he raised his eyes to mine. “You need to get over this…me.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
The last of my sentence came out in breathy sigh as Jahleel’s hand smoothed up my inner thigh, causing his thumb to make a light brush against my folds. With his other hand, he tapped the side of my thigh as a signal for me to switch legs.
“You should,” he encouraged.
Contented, I watched as he once again squirted lotion in his palm to moisturize my other leg. “You still think you’ll hurt me?”
Fingers doing that massaging thing on my calf again, he replied, “Didn’t say I think.”
Nodding in understanding, I stated, “You know.”
“You know, too.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, resigning myself to just enjoying this cherishing side of his nature while it lasts.
Abruptly, he turned his head and sneezed, then coughed. He sneezed again, and soon he began coughing uncontrollably. With a grunt of annoyance, he got up and started pacing the length of the room in irritation.
Of course, he’d mistaken his return of vitality as being all better.
“You have to give yourself at least forty-eight more hours of rest,” I told him, getting up from the bed to stop his pacing. “You only started recovering a few hours ago.”
“I fuckin’ hate this,” he carped, flopping backward onto the bed.
Who on earth liked being sick?
Getting dressed in a quick minute, I attempted to distract him, “I’ll go fix you a club sandwich, okay?”
“Not hungry,” he grumbled, then reached out his hand to me, “Come. Watch cable with me.”
“After starving yourself for two whole days, you need to—”
“For fuck’s sakes, Sassy, just get the fuck over here and stop actin’ like my mother!”
“Fuck you,” I spat and turned to power-walk out of the room.
But he was quicker than me. Hopping up from the bed, he caught me around the waist and dropped back on the bed with me.
He swept my hair to the side so his mouth was at my ear, and hissed, “Just so you know, I don’t care for Bitchy Sassy. She makes me want to do wicked, evil, nasty, degrading…things to her.”
I wiggled in his arms and he loosened them only long enough to switch around so he was on top of me, smirking.
“Maybe I should start being Bitchy Sassy more often then, yeah?”
A sudden hardness pressed against me. Hell. He got hard in 0.2 seconds flat. Lowering his face down to mine, he nipped at my bottom lip. “Why?”
Before I could form a cognitive thought, he moved so fast it took me a moment to realize my shorts were off and my legs were forced wide apart.
Taken by surprise, all I could do was stare up at him, panting, anticipating…
“‘Cause you think being Bitchy Sassy will get you this?” He whipped his dick out of his boxers, shifted my knickers to the side and pressed his wide head at my soaked entrance.
“Oh, God…” I mewled, impatient to feel him surge inside me, filling me.
But he kept nudging me, teasing me, and I kept wanting, needing and wasn’t getting. Come in…Come in…
Lifting my hips, I tried to force him past the entrance, but he swiftly drew back and tucked himself back inside his boxers, then straightened my knickers.
The hell?
“You’re not fuckin’ gettin’ it,” he firmly stated. “So quit being a bitch.”
This man…Arrrgh! “And you need to quit being an arse!”
“It’s ass.”
“Piss off!”
“It’s fuck off.”
I pushed at his chest, fighting to get the arsehole off me, but he wouldn’t budge. “I really don’t like you.”
“And I know a lie when I hear it,” he said, promptly following it up with a deep, long, but torturous kiss.
I simpered and melted into him, my legs submissively wrapping around his waist, hands going around his neck. I could totally do this kind of platonic, as long as it meant I would get unexpected and sporadic kisses such as this.
Too soon, he ended it, pushed up on his elbows and looked down at my dazed face.
“Now,” he whispered, “will you relax and watch crap TV with me? I like havin’ you near me.”
Dumbly, I nodded, and a complacent smile crawled onto his face as he shifted me up further to the middle of the bed, grabbed the remote and switched on the television.
A choking warmth woke me.
Indolently, my eyes whispered open and it took me a minute to remember where I was. And with whom.
I was in a tangled, fever-hot heap with Jahleel Kingston—his right leg sandwiched between both of mine, one arm crooked around my waist, the other hooked under and around my neck, with my face pressed against his chest. I was being held on a tight leash, with little to no breathing space, forced to inhale whatever air he exhaled.
There was no cognitive memory of how we ended up in this heap, except that I’d dozed off watching a Sons of Anarchy marathon with him.
Being as quiet as I could, I untangled myself from the white-hot man-heat, snuck out of bed and sleepily strolled out to the kitchen.
The sun’s glare had faded outside the windows, heralding the inevitable darkness called night, so I decided I might as well start preparing dinner. No matter what the gold-eyed man in the next room said, he had to eat.
It had been a wh
ile since I’d taken care of anyone, what with Ferbie and Timberly not so dependent on me anymore. It was the other way around now, as I had the world at my beck and call. So much that I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed giving, helping, taking care of. Now, I was back in my zone.
As I was sliding a baking tray with two stuffed Cornish hens into the oven, music came on over the integrated speakers. Jahleel was up.
But I didn’t see him until around half-an-hour later when I was striking up a Davidoff while leaning against the kitchen counter. Just as I lit up the cigarette, it was snatched from my fingers. Turning, I saw Jahleel behind me, his fingers crushing my cigarette into a painful mess of tobacco.
“Hey!” I yelled, slapping my palm down on the counter.
“You need to quit.”
“You’re not the one to say I quit,” I shot back. “Look, I only get to smoke one cig per day now with my tour around the corner. Back off.”
“Not while you’re here.”
“Really, JK, I need to take at least one draw or I’ll go crazy.”
“Go crazy.”
Snatching up the pack of cigarettes off the counter, I started moving down the other side of the island to leave the kitchen. “Fine. I’ll smoke outside.”
By the time I got to the end of the island, Jahleel was there, his bare chest in my face. “What about the food? It’ll burn, ‘cause I won’t check on it.”
“Let it burn, then.”
“And what will I eat?” He licked his lips. “You?”
Slowly drifting my eyes from his chest and up his face, I hissed, “You really like to play, don’t you?”
Jahleel was like a heavy-current river you can’t get around, and if you tried crossing it, its depth and wild, swift rush will swallow you up whole and whisk you off to somewhere beyond your control, taking the final decision of your destination out of your hands. No woman stood a chance with him.
Biting his damned lip—which I now realized was a teasing habit of his—he slanted his head to the side, one eyebrow raised, and I stood there wondering what the hell that look was about, until our silence made me aware of the song playing over the speaker: Goapele’s Play.