by Alex Lucian
“Perfect.”
We stood from our sides of the car at the same time, and I knew she was expecting to me to go back home. But I followed her instead.
“Leo,” she said on a sigh, then stopped and turned to face me. I pretended to stop too late, bracing my hand on her hip so as not to run into her. She swallowed and looked up into my face.
“You didn’t say no. That’s as good as an invitation.”
“Is it now?” she said with a smile.
I nodded, keeping my eyes straight into hers. Maybe she expected me to look down at her mouth, at her tits, but I kept locked onto her face. Then I curled my fingers where they still laid on her hip, let them dig into the flesh where the curve of her ass started.
“Can I come inside, Scarlet?” I whispered, shifting closer by a couple inches. If I’d taken a deep breath, the front of my chest would’ve brushed hers. It was her turn to nod, giving me a silent response so laden with sexual tension that I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
The moment snapped when she backed up and my hand fell away from her body. She blinked a few times, then turned around to walk to her front door. We walked in silence, both of us leaving our bags on the floor by the staircase.
By this point, I felt comfortable enough to grab my own drink from the stainless steel fridge. Snagging a water bottle from the second shelf, I saw a carton of strawberries and contemplated grabbing those too, but eh. Too cliché.
“Want one?” I asked, holding up the water I’d taken for myself. She nodded from where she was turning on the large screen tv they had on a wide mahogany cabinet. While she was pulling up Netflix, I settled on the floor in front of the generic tan micro suede couch.
“So, what are we watching?” She went to sit on the couch behind me, but I grabbed her wrist and directed her to floor in front of me, between my legs. I expected at least a token argument, but she just shook her head and did it, leaning her back up against my chest. Her hair, which was down and slightly curled, smelled clean and sweet when I pressed my nose against it and inhaled. I took one hand and swept her hair so that it laid over her right shoulder. “Leo, what are you doing?”
“Making sure all your hair doesn’t obstruct my view.” I took the remote from her hand and aimed it up to scroll through the options. Truthfully, I didn’t care what we watched, but I wanted something sexy in the background. Scarlet dropped her head back on my shoulder, but kept her hands folded in her lap. My legs were stretched out on either side of hers, and the width of my shoulders dwarfed her frame. After I’d settled on a movie called Adore, one that Adele had told me that she and the Professor had watched, Scarlet shifted her head so that she was looking at me.
Given how close together our faces were, if I made the same movement, we’d be kissing. Not yet. “Just watch, Scarlet.”
I wasn’t paying attention to it as it started, because Scarlet held all my interest. Whenever I’d move my face, or took a deep breath next to her ear, she’d shift in front of me. The movement was torture, taking the semi that I’d had all day and teasing it into a full-blown erection. There was no way she couldn’t feel it, especially not after she did the little move of arching her back, which pressed her ass right up against it.
I pulled my arms up in a stretch, forcing my chest harder against her back. When I dropped them back down, I slid my hands from the tops of her shoulders down the length of her slim, soft arms until my hands covered hers where they still lay sedately in her lap.
Scarlet shifted, but didn’t protest. For a while, I left my hands like that, just resting on top of hers, because that meant the inside of my biceps rested against the outside of each breast. I started small, dragging my fingers along the length of hers, stopping at the top knuckle and then going back to the tips.
Her chest heaved with breaths that became increasingly deeper. From over her shoulder, all I had to do was look down and I could see the edge of her bra where it cupped her tits underneath the simple white V-neck shirt. She always wore solid colors, I noticed, but it didn’t diminish from how beautiful she was. All it did was put her bright hair on display, not distract my eyes from any part of her body.
The dark denim skirt she had worn today had slightly frayed edges along the hem, and I wanted to play with them, but this wasn’t my show. I needed her to want to touch herself, take herself over the edge to ease the pain.
When her hips kept shifting and there was a slight red flush climbing her chest, I ran my nose around the shell of her ear.
“What is it, Scarlet? What do you need?” Almost immediately, she stopped moving and sank back against me. “No, no, no. Don’t do that. Just let me help.”
Her legs fell open, leaning more heavily against mine, and I let out a pained laugh.
“I mean, let me help you.”
Scarlet groaned. “That’s what all this has been about, hasn’t it? The texts? The touches?”
She started to move and I clamped my arms around her in a vise, shushing quietly in her ear. “No, don’t. Just stay here.”
Both of her hands came up, and I braced for her to pull my arms down, but they didn’t. She smoothed them along my forearms, making light scratches with her nails.
“I’m not going to touch you, Scarlet. You’re going to do it.”
Of course, she made a sound of protest and I bit down on her earlobe, a soft nip to quiet her, and it worked.
“Maybe you can touch me a little?” she asked, the bright hopeful tone in her voice making me laugh.
“Nothing below the … hmm, below—”
“Below where my bra stops?” She cocked her head to the side so our eyes met. I dropped a light kiss on her lips and nodded.
“Fine.”
“Did I kill the mood?”
I trailed the tips of my fingers along her collarbone, the thin, hard line of bone under her practically translucent skin. Like I was pulling a string, Scarlet’s hips lifted up with the movement. “No, not for me.”
“Well I can feel that. Unless you shoved a baseball bat down the front of your pants.”
My laughter was low, and it made my forehead drop down to her neck. “Do you know that since that first night together, I feel like I’ve been walking around like this every damn day. Every time I saw your hair or your legs or your mouth.”
“Really?”
“What does that do to you? Knowing that?”
She hesitated, and I pulled my hands off of her. “No,” she groaned. “Wait, okay. I can’t do this if you’re not touching me too.”
“Then tell me,” I relented, dropping kisses along the side of her neck.
“Leo, I don’t know if I can talk dirty.”
“Then I’ll talk. And if you like what I’m doing, then you keep touching yourself, but you do it harder or faster.”
Scarlet breathed out a moan, and she flexed her fingers out, like she was warming up. Good thing she couldn’t see me, because I grinned. But the smile dropped when she slid her hands up and down along the insides of her thighs, not going past the hem of her skirt.
“There you go. Good girl. Feel how soft your skin is. Pay attention to what your body likes.” I nudged her forward, and when she complied, I grabbed the hem at the back of her shirt and pulled it up over her head. After I tossed it aside, she sank back against me again.
The tips of her fingers disappeared, and I rewarded her by tracing along the lace edge of her bra.
“You don’t even have to have anything to fantasize about, if you don’t want to. I think that might be what’s tripping you up. All you need is to think about how good your hands feel. How wet you are, how hard your nipples are when you drag a thumb against them.”
I did that when I said the words, catching the hard edge through the material of her bra. One of her hands went in further, and her hips lifted in response.
“How does it feel?”
“Leo,” she begged, voice full and tight with frustration.
“It’s probably wet and so
ft around your fingers. That’s how it felt for me. And your clit is so hard when you’re close. Rub little circles around it, use the flat of your fingers. You can’t do it too hard, trust me.”
Her forearm flexed and she let out a raw groan that made my own hips push up against her back.
“There you go. Fuck, Scarlet, you look perfect. Bring your other hand up, put it under your bra.”
She did, dragging her hand against her stomach on the way up. Instead of dipping in the front of the bra, she pushed it up the bottom, shoving the material out to the way. Without me saying a damn word, she cupped her breast, pushing her thumb in circles around her nipple.
“That’s it, honey. Your tits are incredible. Feel how full they are in your hand.”
“Leo,” she said again, this time her pitch rising.
“You know what I want to do to them?” I leaned in, licking along the outer edge of her ear. “I want to fuck them, see my cock pressed in between them.”
She exploded, arching her back and clamping her hand between her thighs. The long, soft sigh that came from her mouth made me smile, as did the way she sagged back down on my chest, one breast still cupped with her hand.
“Wow,” she said after a few seconds. “I should have been doing that for years. I would have been so much less stressed out.”
I laughed, pulling her hand out from underneath her bra. When I brought it up to my mouth to kiss the palm, she looked over at me, the flush from her orgasm still bright on her cheeks.
“That was a fun one, huh?”
She nodded with a shy smile, then leaned forward to grab her shirt from where I’d tossed it. The moment had passed as soon as she moved away from me, but I wanted to follow the line of her spine with my fingers before she covered it up with the white cotton.
Then she stood, smoothing her shirt down after she covered herself again.
“Do you want me to like, order a pizza or something?”
“My payment for a job well done?”
“No,” she shot back. “I did all the work, right?”
I laughed. “I suppose you did.”
She smiled at me. “So? Pizza and we can finish the movie?”
There was no ulterior motive hidden in her eyes, nothing else we needed to accomplish, with the exception of me needing to go into the bathroom and alleviate the blue ball situation currently prohibiting me from standing up. And she was the one asking me to stay. Maybe it was pathetic, that this little scrap from her felt like a feast to me. Then I guess I was pathetic.
“Sure. Sounds good.”
The answering smile she gave me told me she just might feel the same way.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I was legitimately starting to think that I was losing my mind. Actually, Scarlet was making me lose my mind. There had been a couple girls before, where I’d convinced myself that I was feeling something serious for them, but in retrospect those relationships could barely even be classified as lust.
Convenient was one word. And when they either turned out to be crazy or attached, then convenient didn’t even work. But not once, with any of the girls that I’d dated or hung out with or even spent an evening flirting with, had I felt such an overwhelming and exhausting sense of infatuation.
Not like this.
On the days where Scarlet and I slipped back into our routine of driver and passenger, like we were starting to do for a few days after we crossed some physical line again, I dissected her eye contact, whether she watched my mouth or if she played with her hair while I looked at her. When she started telling me about things that happened in class or the rescue she volunteered at, I couldn’t stop staring at her lips when she talked, or the way she flipped her hands around to prove a point, or the way her eyes brightened up when she told me about an animal at the rescue.
And she was smart. Scarlet was so fucking smart that it probably should have intimidated me. But it didn’t. Not like it used to.
Probably because she didn’t lord it over me, or dumb down the things she talked about. Occasionally, I pulled up my dictionary app, like if I wasn’t sure what supercilious meant, especially not when she was talking about one of her profs. Suffice it to say, I now know that Scarlet used to give me supercilious looks all the time.
That’s probably what scared me more than anything, that most of the things I couldn’t stop noticing? They weren’t physical. In fact, the non-physical stuff was starting to affect me just as much as when she leaned over and I could see down her shirt, or if she licked her bottom lip. Her laugh was enough to make me want to bury my head under her skirt now.
It was so fucked up. Wasn’t it?
Or was this what was supposed to happen when you met someone who was available and smart and pretty and kind and mentally stable?
“Earth to Leo,” Scarlet called, waving a hand in front of my face.
“Yeah, sorry.” I gave her an apologetic smile, my eyes sliding over her face and neck. She was wearing a little bit more makeup today, even more than she’d had on this morning on our drive in. Like she’d freshened up before she picked me up.
“It’s okay. It’s not like you have to talk to me. You just blanked out right in the middle of a sentence. You were telling me about the new center that’s going to be on your team in the fall.”
Oh yeah. Holy shit, see? I was losing it. And Scarlet just sat there, looking at me with those big eyes and sweet smile, with no fucking clue that I was over here obsessing about the fact that her lips looked pinker and softer than they had this morning, and her lashes were darker and longer. Or that she’d curled the ends of her hair. I opened my mouth, to … I don’t even know what I was going to say, but I had to tell her something of what was going on in my head.
Then her phone rang. Her eyes lit up when she saw the screen. “Hey, Mom,” she said into the phone after she picked it up. “Oh, I’m just driving home.”
She glanced over at me with a wry smile. It was fucking adorable and it made me want to stab my eyes out because I was thinking about how adorable her smile was.
“Yeah, Leo is here.” She rolled her eyes. “My mom says hi.”
“Hi, Mrs. Jennings,” I said back.
Scarlet hummed in answer to something her mom said, then gave me another quick look. “Yeah, I could do that. What do you need me to do with it once I get it?” She glanced in the rearview mirror and then flipped on her blinker to take the next exit, which was about ten minutes before we would normally get off the highway. “Sure, no problem. I’ll do that as soon as I get home. Yeah. Mmmhmm. Oh, probably another fifteen minutes? Is that okay? All right, bye.” Scarlet tucked her phone underneath her leg and took a right, toward her dad’s church, the white steeple of which I could see down another block or two. “I have to grab some paper that my dad left on his desk really quick. I hope that’s okay.”
“That’s fine. Doesn’t he have a secretary that can send it to him?”
She rolled her eyes at me, but it was tempered by her smile. “Administrative assistant, you mean? And yes, he does have one, but she’s off this week and if someone’s going to go through his stuff, I guess he’d rather have it be me.”
There were only a couple other cars in the church parking lot when Scarlet pulled in. Instead of pulling the car underneath the large white overhang that covered the main entrance to the church, she drove off to the side of the building and parked in an empty spot.
“Is the main entrance locked or something?”
She nodded while she sifted through her purse. “Yeah, during the week, people can only come through this entrance near all the offices. Do you mind waiting in the car?”
“You afraid to bring me into a holy place, Scarlet?” I teased.
While she laughed, she opened her car door. “It’s not about being afraid, Leo. I just don’t think you could physically walk through those doors without being struck by lightning.”
I grinned when she slammed her door shut and walked toward the entrance. The wind
obviously picked up, because her hair swept off to the side of her head, like a bright, copper colored flag against the white backdrop of the church building.
Right before she disappeared through the door, she turned and looked toward the car, pointing a finger in my direction, as if to remind me that I was supposed to wait.
Clearly, Scarlet didn’t understand the power of reverse psychology to a man like me. After I shut the car door, I jogged to the back entrance of the church, praying that it hadn’t locked behind Scarlet. It opened silently, and the dark hallway of the church was just as quiet. No one sat at the reception desk, and muted voices came from the direction of the sanctuary.
I hadn’t been in this church in years, my parents long past the point where they made me go with them on the weekends or school breaks when I was home, but I did remember where the pastor’s office was.
The heavy oak door to Pastor Jennings’ office was halfway open, and when I peeked in, Scarlet was bent over the large, imposing desk, rifling through a stack of papers. She hadn’t turned on any lights, and since the blinds over the massive window were shut, the room was surprisingly dark, considering the bright sunshine outside.
I pushed the door open just enough that I could walk through, and her head shot up.
“Leo, you’re supposed to wait in the car.” When I shut the door with a soft click behind me, she immediately started shaking her head. “No way. You stay right there, mister.”
“No way, what? I just came in to see if I could prove you wrong. No lightning to be found.”
She laughed, then looked back down at the papers. When she found the one she was looking for, she placed the rest of the papers back in the top drawer. I stayed right in front of the door, just like she asked, except when she approached me, I didn’t move.
“Leo, quit screwing around.” The words would have made me get out of the way, but her voice wasn’t annoyed in the slightest. Her eyes were bright, and the way she said them, all breathy and low, kept me exactly where I was.
“Who, me? I’m not.” When she got close enough, I smoothed my hands around her hips, the soft material of her black leggings thin enough that I could feel the heat from her skin.