Finding Us

by Allie Juliette Mousseau

  “Mmm …” The vibration hit me in my core. Next he darted his tongue over my top lip then fitted his mouth over mine as he drove his tongue into my mouth. The taste of him doused in vodka was making my center ache.

  But all too soon he pulled away, grabbed the glass, winked and held the liquor over my breast, letting a small stream run over the sensitive nipple.

  I gasped at the intrusion. Quickly, he bowed his head and caught the liquid dripping off the side of my breast. He licked and lapped at my liquor soaked flesh up to my nipple, which had chilled when the air met the liquid there. When he pulled it into the heat of his mouth and began sucking, the sensation sent me spiraling.

  “Oh, Nate,” I moaned.

  “Julia, I’m going to treat your body so right.”

  At his words, my back arched on its own, as if my breasts were angry at the absence of his mouth. He must have liked my reaction, because he smiled before he spilt more vodka over the other breast then flicked his tongue against the needy peak. I wove my fingers into his hair and pressed his head against it.

  He was winding me up as tight as a top. I didn’t want to wait any longer and I didn’t want to play games. My hand searched up his thigh, reaching for his hot shaft. Nate felt my urgency.

  “All in good time, baby. Slow down.” He stayed my hand. “What is it you like to say? Don’t think, just feel?”

  Clever, using my own words against me.

  “Close your eyes for me,” he said, and I did. “Now just feel the sensations.”

  The fingers of Nate’s right hand made lazy circles as they tickled down my stomach to the thatch of curls that waited between my legs. He was so close!

  Please, just a little closer. But he didn’t touch the place that ached and begged for him; instead he teased me, staying on the fleshy skin that walled my clit, just tracing my outline with his fingertip.

  “Oh, you’re so soft,” he said as he ran his tongue over the curves of my ear. Then as he pulled my earlobe between his teeth, he slid his fingers up through my soaking wet, pleading folds. The second he hit my clit I jumped and squeezed my legs together, trapping his hand in place.

  “Do you want me to stop, love?” He gently sucked on my ear lobe.

  “No,” I panted. “Don’t stop.”

  “Then you need to let your legs fall apart.”

  I was falling apart alright! “I can’t make my legs relax.” I started to panic.

  That figured.

  “Don’t worry, we can handle this.” He shifted his entire body off of me so he was now sitting before my tensed thighs and began to gently massage them until they relaxed. He spread my legs and said, “Better?”

  “Better.” I tried to keep the nervousness from my voice.

  He chuckled lightly before his hands touched the aching flesh between my legs. His fingertips worked through the folds, expertly missing my swelling clit.

  “You’re so perfect and so very wet. Do you want me, Jules?”

  I squeezed my eyes closed, feeling insanely needy but shy.

  Nate didn’t seem to mind. “Tell me if you like the way this feels.” He swirled his index finger around the inner rim of my opening.

  It was slow torture. I quivered at the prospect of his fingers inside of me. I rolled my hips in an effort to make him give me more.

  “Almost, almost … but first.”

  I gasped as he poured a stream of vodka into my belly button. I peeked between my lashes as he bent in to lap the liquid out of the crevice at the same time he gently pushed his finger inside of me.

  “Oh yes,” slipped from my lips.

  Nate sucked out the liquid then poured a line of vodka down my belly, pursuing it as if following a line of gunpowder. His mouth was the fire, getting closer and closer to the charge.

  “Do what I say and keep your legs spread apart, baby.”

  I knew what was about to come next and I yearned for it. The liquor splashed over my wet heat. A guttural moan ripped from my throat as Nate’s moist tongue plunged up and over my clit until I was rolling my hips.

  “Mmm, does that feel good?”

  “Yes!” My legs and belly tingled as I rode higher. His mouth was hot and wet, and his tongue was thick and soft as he twirled it around the bundle of nerves that screamed for more and pleaded with him for release.

  “You’re going to come hard for me, pretty girl.” He pressed my thighs down and apart, spreading me fully open before him, making my body even more sensitive to him as he continued his sweet torture.

  Oh, his tongue! This was more incredible than anything I’d ever felt! Maybe I could write a good sex scene, but this was far more sensational then I had ever imagined. I tilted my head back, arched my body and gripped his hair in my fingers. Goosebumps rushed over my arms and legs as my sensual, ecstatic climax built throughout my whole being, igniting that keg of gunpowder.

  “Oh God!” I cried as the tension started low … gathering, pooling.

  “That’s right.” He was sucking and licking, smashing his face against my screaming nerves. “Mmm, baby, you taste like sweet sex and vodka.”

  I couldn’t take it anymore! “NATE!” My entire being flew apart, as if the

  molecules couldn’t handle the pressure and exploded as he brought me higher than I ever knew possible.

  I floated there, weightless and without gravity.

  As my pieces slowly came back together, he stayed where he was, tenderly kissing my oversensitive flesh. His ministrations were so gentle, and it felt so incredibly good, but it wasn’t enough.

  “Now!” I panted. “I need you now.”

  He came up and knelt down at my side. “I’m going to use my fingers now, okay?”

  “Please!” My hips were rolling, begging for intrusion.

  As Nate rolled my nipple between the fingers of his left hand, he worked two of his fingers inside of me with his right; he stroked them in and out with a slow and easy rhythm, massaging my inner walls and driving me into a writhing hot mess.

  “You wanted to touch me earlier.” Nate’s voice was thick. “Do you still want to?”

  “Yes!” I panted.

  “Then holy hell, Jules, do it.”

  Any fear or trepidation I had about touching his masculinity was gone. I peeled down his briefs and found him hard and rigid, begging just as badly as I’d been for my touch to bring him relief.

  I held him in my hand, and the sensation of his shaft there in my grasp added to the sensual equation of his fingers engaging me. I’d read enough of these scenes in books to know how to stroke a man. I wrapped my fingers around his thickness and let my hand massage him up and down his length.

  It wasn’t long before he moaned in a deep gruff tone. “Please, don’t stop.”

  “I promise.” My breathing matched his—labored and shallow and on the cusp of hyperventilation.

  In a moment, the rougher ministrations of his fingers caused me to scream out. I was rushing into another orgasm, but it was an entirely different sensation with his fingers inside me. I gripped my free hand around Nate’s wrist so he wouldn’t stop or pull away.

  That’s when he began to buck his hips and thrust against my hand.

  “Oh, Jules! Oh fuck!” He took hold of his own shaft, squeezing his hand over mine, bent a little and came, with a forceful shutter, down against my side and into the blanket. I felt some of his hot, thick liquid spill onto my skin, and it made me squeeze my inner walls around his fingers. He groaned again and massaged us both gently as we rode out the wave of sensations together.

  When he pulled his fingers from me, we were both spent. He wiped my side with a corner of the blanket, and then dropped down next to me.

  “Come here, sweetness.” He pulled me over so my head rested on his chest.

  I loved feeling the beat of his heart, still quickened.

  “Did you enjoy that?” Nate asked.

  “Yes! It was so much more amazing than I imagined,” I admitted. “And it didn’t even hurt at
all. But, you didn’t …”

  “Oh holy hell, you bet I did!”

  I smiled, feeling a bit of healthy pride. “I know you did that, but—”

  “I didn’t inside of you,” he finished for me.

  “Yeah. Why not?”

  He laughed. “One word: Colt.”

  Chapter 14

  “Just a Kiss”

  Lady Antebellum

  “Colt?! My dad?”

  “Yeah, your dad,” he laughed.

  “So I’m still technically—?”

  “A virgin. Yep.”

  “Nate!”

  “In a few days I’m going to have to face your father after whisking you away, and I need to be able to tell him with all honesty that I did not ruin his baby girl.”

  I moaned and rolled off of him while I held my head in my hands. “So you’re not going to make love to me?”

  “I would call what we just did making love. I was just gentle with you and didn’t break your … feminine barrier.” Nate admitted. “That’s why you didn’t feel any pain.”

  I lay there, stupefied.

  Nate sat up and steered my head so I’d have to look at him. “Jules, your daddy is an honorable, old fashioned gentleman, and I am not stealing his little girl’s innocence … well, at least not in the fullest definition of the term.”

  A squeak of sorts came out of my mouth and I drew my eyes to the ceiling. I couldn’t get my mind around what he was saying. We weren’t ever going to … dot, dot, dot?

  Nate wrapped my very naked, very happy body with the blanket and then put back on his briefs. “Would you sit up and look at me, please?”

  I rolled my eyes and reluctantly sat cross legged, facing him. I mean really, what could he possibly say?

  “I want to do this the old fashioned way,” he insisted.

  “Old fashioned way?”

  “You don’t get what I’m saying, do you?”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head no. I’d just had the most incredible physical experience ever and was so in love with him, and now he was telling me we weren’t going to actually have sex because of my dad? No, I didn’t get anything he was saying.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say is that you have some decisions to make.”

  “Decisions?” I whispered thoughtfully. The very words sent a tremor of fear shooting through my heart.

  “I obviously have a lot of shit to deal with, about my past, but you just accepted me for who I am and told me we’d learn how to love together. Did you mean it?”

  “Of course I meant it.” Where was he going with this?

  “Are you sure you meant what you said about us being forever?” He didn’t meet my eyes on this one.

  “Yes, Nate, I believe we’ve always belonged together.” I shrugged and found myself smiling a little. “You just had to wait a little while for me to catch up.”

  He took my hands in his. “I just turned twenty-five years old, and I know what I want, Jules. It’s what I’ve always wanted and was too damn afraid to ask for.”

  “What do you want?” I asked in a shaky voice.

  “I want you … forever.” He searched my eyes. “I want to do this the old fashioned way, Julia. I want to ask for your parents’ blessing and put a ring on your finger.”

  “You want to put a ring on my finger?” Understanding was beginning to rise like the dawn. Joy was bubbling underneath the surface, but I could still feel the big question lingering in my eyes.

  “I want to marry you, Julia North.”

  The words sank in one at a time and, as they did, tears welled up into my eyes. Nate took my face in his hands, a look of concern painting his expression.

  I nodded as the tears slipped down my face. “Yes.” It was barely a whisper, but held so much emotion.

  “Yes?” he asked, making sure he’d heard me correctly.

  I closed my eyes and leaned into him, forehead to forehead, “Yes. I would love to marry you, Nathaniel Morrisey.”

  He laughed and scooped me into his lap, wrapping me in his arms. “Oh, baby, you just made me the happiest man on earth.” He kissed me tenderly and passionately.

  I realized that maybe some of our acquaintances might think we were crazy and rushing, but we’d known each other almost our whole lives, and I knew there was nothing more right.

  The next morning we woke early and headed off on the four hour drive to Banff via the Trans-Canada Highway, which offered the most spectacular scenery in the world. The Columbia Icefields were blue and white and bright in the July sun. At a pull off in the park, Nate and I peered through binoculars at the white, long haired mountain goats. It always amazed me how they had no grip, with their small hooves, but were so incredibly agile that they could climb the sheer rock face. Halfway through our journey we got stuck in a fifteen car traffic jam for twenty minutes as bighorn sheep took their sweet time making their way across the road. As an early dinner, we dined at the Fairmont Chateau on Lake Louise with picture windows giving us a view of the most majestic sweeping vistas in North America.

  Once we pulled into Banff, Nate asked me which lodge I wanted to stay in. I chose the truck tent special.

  “I want to sleep and wake up in the wildness of it all,” I told him. “The lodges are elegant but I want to be a part of the natural beauty. What about you?”

  “You’re perfect.” Nate smiled.

  We set up the truck tent and used Nate’s camp heater to keep the dropping temperature outside at bay.

  We lay, warm in each other’s arms, listening to the sounds of the night.

  “No one else has ever slept in this tent besides me until now,” Nate said. “I like you in my tent. I’m almost always alone when I travel around to the ranches to inspect them. You could come with me sometimes, or all the time.”

  “I’d love that.”

  “I was thinking about this writing business you’re involved in.” He turned over so we were laying side by side, looking at each other.

  “You mean my New York Times Best Selling business?” I nodded.

  “Yeah,” Nate answered, “that one. So neither Livie nor your mom knows about it?”

  “You’re the only living soul, so don’t mess up or I’ll have to kill you and make it look like an accident.”

  Nate smiled at my joke. “How are you handling university studies at the same time?”

  I bit my lip. “I’m not.”

  “What do you mean you’re not?”

  “I mean, I had to quit school to keep up with the demand for my books. I don’t know how to tell my mom. Basically, I don’t know how to tell anyone what I do. Dad would freak. My mom I think would be cool about it. But with all the sex stuff … I don’t know, it’s not like I’m writing children’s books.” I shrugged. “I’ve been scared to fess up.”

  “It explains a few things.” He was thoughtful.

  “Like what?”

  “Like how you’re alone a lot. If you’re plotting stories and meeting deadlines I imagine you could get pretty consumed by it.”

  “Yeah. In a lot of ways that’s true, but I can also do it almost anywhere. I just need my laptop … or at least a pad and pen.” I smiled. “What about you? Is it hard when you visit the ranches for days in complete solitude?”

  “It gives me a lot of time to think. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it isn’t.” A shadow covered his eyes, but he warded it away and grinned, touching my cheek. “When I think about you, it’s always good … except when my demons bite and tell me you’re my impossible dream.” The expression on his face said he still partially believed that lie.

  “When you went on that date with Ryan. I was fucked up for weeks. He was the first guy that I knew of that you’d ever dated. The solitude sucked real bad then.”

  “I like to think of the night you took me to Wild’s as my first date,” I said.

  Nate smiled. “That’s what you consider your first date?”

  “Bet your ass I do! I got you to take off m
y coat, you pulled out my chair. Yeah, my first date was with you. That was meant to be.”

  “But when you did go on that date with Ryan …” Nate shook his head. “I knew I was in trouble. I stopped seeing anyone and just poured myself into figuring it all out—you, me, life. But I still couldn’t get a handle on any of it. That made the solitude agony. It pretty much gutted my soul, flayed it, and forced me to deal with my shit.

  “Livie being with Jake has been a huge relief. This past year has been the first time I haven’t been killing myself to protect her and keep her safe. It’s the first year Dillon has been out of sight. I haven’t visited him or called, you know.” Nate shook his head, a look of disgust on his face. “I hate … no, I loathe him. I’m working on forgiving him just so his hate doesn’t burn me up, but even if I am ever able to actually grasp that forgiveness concept, I’ll never try to have a relationship with him. He’s toxic and it was high time to amputate him completely from my life. In fact, after he’d been in the state pen for six months, I wrote him a long, cathartic letter telling him that I disowned him as my father, that he had never deserved that honor or the title. I said a lot of other things in that letter and I don’t regret one word. He’d had it coming for a long time.

  “You know, the first respite I ever had from him was the first year Livie went to UND. That’s when I got that crappy little apartment downtown.” He smiled softly. “I guess with you on my arm, I’m going to have to go house hunting.”

  I realized as he spoke, that he had been healing this past year, maybe even more than I or even Caleb had suspected. All of his actions had been healthy steps away from the damage his dad had caused: moving out, the letter, fighting back. “How did you do it? Know to separate from him like you did and get your head to feel straight?”

  “Your mom and dad.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I’m lucky that they’ve been in my life since middle school. They were the best role models I could have hoped to have. My dad told me I was a stupid piece of shit, and your dad told me I was an intelligent, amazing person who could do or become anything I wanted. My dad kicked my ass, and your dad stitched me up. I’d learned to lie and hide the truth—I always told Colt and school counselors that I fell off a horse or got into fights after school. When Colt realized what was really going on—I was probably fourteen, it had been a little over a year since my mom left—Colt was able to use his clout to scare the hell out of Dillon. That’s when he started shacking up with women and not coming home for weeks on end.