by Lauren Wood
I stepped closer, gravitating towards her warmth in the cold. “Yes? Go on.”
“Is that...well...they don’t end with the most important part. Your dates are storming off before…”
Without saying another word, she stood on her tiptoes, stretching up for my mouth with her eyes closed. Instinctively, I wrapped my hand around her arm and pulled her in closer, meeting her lips with my own. I collided with the softness of her kiss and tasted a mouthful of the mint she ate after dinner, mixed with the remnants of red wine. Deepening the kiss, I tilted my head and rolled my tongue across hers.
Making out was not the determining factor in my verdict on dating. But she was right. It was a lot more fun when the night ended like that.
7
Camille
I don’t know what I’m doing. It wasn’t until Mark’s brows furrowed that I realized I’d said the words out loud. But since they were out there, I figured I might as well go ahead and say them again.
“I don’t know what I’m doing!” I repeated, shriller this time, flailing my arms as I started to manically pace the sidewalk. “You were right. I was never supposed to come see you in person in the first place. I was never supposed to try and set you up or follow you around like this. We certainly weren’t supposed to have dinner and let it spiral into…” I stared at his lips, suddenly longing to shrink away their absence. I wanted them back against mine, where they were moments ago.
“It wasn’t supposed to spiral into that,” I concluded more calmly, feeling embarrassed.
Mark simply smirked. “Do you want to go somewhere more private to talk?”
Just as he said it, a couple awkwardly navigated their way around us on the narrow sidewalk, looking painfully aware that something serious was going down between us.
“No,” I hissed, whispering as if the strangers could hear us...even though they had quickly scrambled on. “I know what that means. You’ll lure me off somewhere with the promise of talking. Then we’ll get there and we won’t talk at all! It will just be more of...that!”
“Kissing?” he offered. “You can say it, you know. It’s not a dirty word or act. We just kissed. So what? You’re the one who pounced on me.”
“I didn’t pounce!” I scoffed. “Jeez. You make me sound so predatory. And anyway...it was your fault. You asked to take me to dinner and got me half-drunk. I wasn’t thinking. I felt bad for you. All of your dates end in disaster and I...well, I haven’t been on a date in a long time myself...if I’m being honest.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” he said softly. “Listen, I just want to talk. If anything more than that happens, it’s on you. I’m keeping my hands to myself.”
I stood there for a moment, pouting like a child. God, I wanted it to happen again. But it couldn’t! He was the enemy! The man who was single-handedly trying to destroy us! He gave a convincing argument for me to trust him, and I guessed the real question was...could I trust myself?
“Fine,” I huffed, crossing my arms. “We should talk.”
Without hesitating, Mark went to the corner and flagged down a cab. “What’s your address?” he asked as we climbed in.
“I’m not giving you my address!”
His brow furrowed. “I don’t see what you’re so worried about. You’re the stalker here, not me. I just don’t want you to have to worry about getting home alone late at night when we’re done talking.”
The cab driver shot us a funny glance from his rearview mirror, putting on the pressure. At least Mark’s offer made me feel more confident that nothing would happen between us, and I was getting tired. It would be a relief not to have to make the long trek back after we’d finished talking at his place. Finally, I caved and leaned forward to tell the driver our destination.
As I showed Mark into my apartment, he immediately started walking around—studying everything I owned. I excused myself into the kitchen. This conversation required more wine. And it was better to keep drinking than to let my buzz wear off into a headache.
I emerged with two full glasses, handing one to him. He was examining a mantle of framed family photos. I hated seeing him so close to the images of my siblings. It was an unwanted reminder of what had really brought us together...what was really at stake if I couldn’t convince him to stop his crusade against us.
“Right then,” I sighed, taking a sip. “So...let’s talk.”
“This is a nice place.” He nodded, looking around. His eyes landed on a pile of laundry in the corner. “It’s messier than I expected.”
“I told you. I work a lot.”
“Yeah, but I figured you were too type-A to survive in a place that wasn’t perfectly clean.”
“You’ve passed an awful lot of judgements on me.” I rolled my eyes.
“I could say the same of you.”
“I don’t have to pass any judgments on you,” I argued. “You’ve made your intentions plain and clear with all your crappy dates and bad reviews. My job is to make you stop.”
“And your plan for doing that was...to kiss me.”
I let out a flustered growl under my breath. “Yes.” I exhaled. “In my own weird way...setting you up didn’t work. So, I thought maybe kissing you would. I thought maybe you’d remember what you were missing out on and actually give your next date an honest try.”
“Who says I miss out on anything?” he teased, raising an eyebrow as he stepped closer and closed the gap between us. His voice dropped down painfully low, to a deep, sexy tone that resonated between my legs. “Just because I’m not a romantic...doesn’t mean I don’t have other needs. Ones that, believe me, I have no trouble getting satisfied.”
I bet he didn’t. I felt myself swaying towards his intoxicating closeness, our eyes locked. We were dangerously close to making the same mistake all over again. And once again, I didn’t seem to have the willpower to stop it.
The longer his eyes burned into mine, the more my cheeks flushed with heat. The same wave rippled through my body, making my clit throb.
“I have to confess something,” he rasped. “I want to be clear that I haven’t made any moves here. But…” His eyes dropped. “You seem to have a certain effect on me.”
I glanced down and immediately noticed the bulge in his pants. The rather large bulge in his pants. Oh my god.
All at once, we crashed into each other again. I have to admit, it may have been me that made the first move...again. But I didn’t care this time. We were like a speeding train with too much inertia built up behind us to stand any chance at stopping now.
His fingers worked their way up the buttons of my blouse, sliding each sleeve down my arm with my bra strap sliding down with them. An awareness prickled through my body with the chill of the air against my bare skin. My nipples pointed in the openness, and he rolled each one between his fingers as our kiss deepened.
He dropped his kiss down to each breast, swirling his tongue around in all the perfect places. I barely noticed his hands moving down to my skirt, letting it fall in a pool around my heels along with my panties. Suddenly, I was standing there naked in nothing but my stiletto pumps.
“Your body looks even more fucking amazing than I imagined,” he whispered, trailing down my stomach with kisses.
“You imagined me naked?” I laughed with a gasp.
“The real question is...have you imagined me naked?”
“I’m not telling you until you strip.”
He stared up at me and flashed a smile. Standing slowly, he started working on buttons and zippers, pulling and tugging until the entirety of his dark, muscular body was in plain view right in front of me.
I looked him up and down and tilted my head. “Huh.”
He smiled wide. “Oh, yeah. You’ve imagined it. So, what’s the verdict? Better or worse than you pictured?”
My eyes diverted to the huge, perfect rod sticking out from the middle of his sculpted body. I wasn’t about to indulge him with compliments. I had something better in mind.
I dropped down onto my knees with my eyes glued to his throbbing hardness. I flicked my tongue around the tip and relished in the drop of desire that seeped out. I moved my eyes up to his and stroked him, slowly rounding my mouth around the length of him. His hands spread through the back of my hair as he thrust into my bobbing motions.
Pulling out, I stiffened my tongue and trailed the tip from his base all the way out. He started breathing raggedly, interspersed with low growls.
“I have to be inside of you,” he begged. “If I’m being honest, I’ve wanted that from the moment you first showed up outside my door.”
We crumbled down to the floor and before I knew it, he was on top of me...kissing every inch of my body while his fingers slid inside of me. His touch felt so good, I didn’t notice he had kissed his way down to where his hands were. I didn’t realize it until it was his tongue plunging inside of me. I cried out and writhed against the carpet, bucking myself harder against his mouth.
I didn’t want it to stop, but I was also controlling and impatient. Not even the most skilled oral sex could overpower that. I tugged at his shoulders and reminded him, “When you said you wanted to be inside of me, this isn’t what I thought you meant.”
“You never just let go and let things happen, do you?” He grinned, crawling his way back up my body.
“Now, if that was true, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
My words were met with the roll of his tongue across mine, and I could feel the teasing tip of his cock against my wet folds. All at once, he pushed hard and deep inside of me. I sucked in a deep breath, but with our mouths still so close, it felt as if I was breathing in air straight from his lungs.
It didn’t take long for him to coax the orgasm out of me. I clenched around his steady thrusts and felt the pleasure build and build until it broke, sending me into a shivering, whimpering limpness beneath him. He watched me intently as I came, but didn’t break stride. He waited until I was finished before moving faster, harder.
He pumped into me until he was spilling out inside of me. Thank God I was on the pill, because neither of us seemed to have enough self-control to talk about that beforehand. He filled me completely before pulling out and rolling to my side.
I curled up on the carpet with a pleased smile and felt him inch up behind me, his rock-hard abs and warm skin cradled against my back.
“Fuck,” he exhaled.
His half-hard cock pressed against me, making my grin spread wider. He felt like he could go again after just a few minutes...but we definitely couldn’t do that, could we? Once was bad enough. No way was I about to let myself give in a second time. We had gotten it out of our systems, and that was that.
8
Mark
It didn’t matter how much I had secretly thought about it. None of that was ever supposed to happen, and that was the only glaring thought in my brain when I woke up in the middle of Camille’s floor. Thankfully, from the bashful, awkward look on her face...it was safe to assume she felt the same.
“Oops,” I murmured, scratching my head as I looked around at our piles of discarded clothes.
“Yeah.” She laughed uncomfortably. “Oops.”
She snatched up the closest shirt in her reach and used it to cover her breasts. But just the sight of her legs curled up against her with her ass cheeks poking out underneath was enough to get me going again.
“I should get going!” I blurted out, quickly grabbing my boxers and jeans.
I could have sworn I felt her watching me from behind, shamelessly taking in the view as I put my clothes back on. That turned me on even more, and it felt urgent to get out of there as quick as I could.
But when I went to pick up my shirt, I realized I was reaching towards a pile of her clothes—not mine. That’s when I realized it was my shirt she was using to cover her body.
“Um, I kind of need that.”
“Oh!” she realized. “Can you...can you just turn around for a minute?”
“Sure.” I nodded. “But it’s not like I didn’t see it all last night.”
“You were in just as big of a hurry to get your own clothes back on,” she argued to my back, but her voice drifted off from a different part of the apartment...one that we hadn’t made it to the night before.
She returned a moment later in a fresh pair of sweats with my shirt in her hand, which she swiftly tossed in my direction. I was shocked for a moment at seeing her so dressed down.
“That’s a far cry from the skirts and suits I usually see you in,” I remarked. How was it that she was even more gorgeous in leisurely PJ’s than she was in her regular clothes?
“I am a human.” She shrugged sarcastically. “I do all the same things as you...like eating, sleeping, relaxing.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Okay, maybe I don’t relax quite as much…”
We both seemed to slip into unwanted memories from last night...when she was relaxing against my mouth and again with me inside of her. In fact, if I recalled correctly...she’d been relaxing right along with me until the early hours of the morning.
Her brain had to be traveling to all the same places as mine, because right at that moment she stopped suddenly and made a mad dash for her phone. “Fuck! It’s early noon! I was supposed to be at the office hours ago!”
“It’s your family’s company,” I argued. “Surely you won’t get in trouble.”
“It’s not about a standard they set for me,” she huffed. “It’s about the standard I set for myself.”
Our eyes met and I could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t just talking about being late. By sleeping with me, she had let herself down. The impulsive, playful woman who came out the night before was long gone.
“It’s fine,” she decided, adjusting the frazzled bun on her head. “I’ll just work from home. But you really should go.”
“Scared I’ll leak all the inner-workings of Heartstring to the rest of the world?” I remarked.
The expression on her face darkened even more, letting me know that I had said the worst possible thing. “Yes,” she snapped. “Yes, exactly. You’ll leak everything to all the gossip columns. But wait—you already tried to do that, didn’t you?”
“Look, I’m sorry...but did I miss something here? You were the one who threw yourself at me, not once but twice last night.”
“Is that going to end up all over the internet tomorrow, too?” She sneered.
“I may be causing you and your company some trouble,” I admitted. “I get that. But I’m not that big of an asshole.”
She looked down at the floor, shifting her feet. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”
“Okay. I’m really going to go now,” I decided, looking around for the rest of my things...like my wallet and phone. I gathered everything and headed for the door. Camille did nothing to stop me or change my mind, much less apologize for the rude awakening. I guess I should have expected that.
Just before I reached her front door, I stopped. “Just in case you still had some questions about why I hate relationships so much...this morning is a prime example.”
I stormed out, slamming the door behind me. I hadn’t made it halfway back to my place before I regretted how everything went down. It made no sense, how everything seemed to change overnight, but that truly was what I hated about love. That was how it happened. Things morphed in an instant, with no warning. Moods, feelings, and people changed just as quickly as the tides of a stormy ocean. There was no stopping it, no predicting it.
The only way to stay safe was to avoid it altogether. But once the wheels were set in motion, it was impossible to just shut it off. And that was the part that bugged me the most.
I restlessly paced through my house, mentally retracing our steps from the night before. Her scent lingering on my body only made it harder to see through to my logic...the rational part of my brain that could overpower all the chemicals firing off.
There was one way to fix
it. A foolproof method for erasing a lover was to go find another one as quickly as possible. One that stood no chance of doing anything more than making you forget about the last one.
I sat down at my computer, on a mission to do just that. My dating vendetta had turned into compulsive dating...like a drug. I could see it all happening right before my eyes, but couldn’t do anything to stop it.
I went through the motions. Picked a pretty girl from the messages waiting in my inbox. We made dinner plans for that evening. I showed up, gave my speech, pissed her off, watched her march off....
Camille was right. Dates were better when they ended with a kiss...and then everything that came after. I’d considered laying on the charm real thick and seducing the woman. But that was a gamble I had taken the night before, and all it did was bite me in the ass.
By the time I made it back into my own bed that night, the uneasy feeling in my gut hadn’t subsided one bit. I kept replaying that morning with Camille in my brain over and over again.
What would have happened if I’d tried to convince her it wasn’t a mistake? If I had been sweet and invited her to breakfast or offered to cook? I could have talked her into taking the day off and maybe the same events would have played out all over again.
I rolled over in my bed, feeling sick. Having her naked body next to mine again would have been a million times better than sulking alone with my old resentment.
Since nothing else I had done that day seemed sufficient to shake off all the gross feelings that were settling in, I resorted to reaching for my phone and pulling up her name in my contact list. I had saved it from the time she called to set me up on her hand-picked dates.
Mark: I’m sorry. I’m not a morning person. Maybe I can make it up to you sometime?
I cringed the moment it was sent. What was I doing? This couldn’t lead anywhere good. But that didn’t stop me from jumping at the chime sound, signaling her response.
Camille: I know the perfect way for you to make it up to me: get off our app and leave us alone.