by Amelia Wilde
“I need to be fucked.”
I feel the hard length of him against my entrance, and I arch my back a little farther, opening as much as I can. It’s not how I normally am. It’s not how anything normally is. But here, in this room, with Ben, I’m getting exactly what I want.
To hell with the consequences.
He pushes in another few inches. I’m sopping and swollen and I feel his groan right in the center of me. “That’s good. That’s so fucking good,” he growls.
“Harder?”
“You’ll take what you’re given and you’ll like it.”
My nipples tighten at the words.
“Christ, you liked that,” he says, his voice rough. “You got even wetter.” His hands are still down between my legs, fingers still circling my clit. “I love how your face gets red when I tell you these things.” Ben shoves in the rest of the way, our bodies obscenely connected. “Are you ashamed to be fucked?”
“No,” I breathe.
His fingers press harder, and I’m on the precipice of a vicious release. This one’s going to be the last one for at least until evening. It’s brewing like last night’s storm, and with Ben filling me so completely, there’s no room for anything but heat and desire.
“Then what are you ashamed of?”
“You’re going to make me come like this?”
“Yes. I’m going to make you come while you’re impaled on my cock, totally exposed to me, totally under my control.” He grips my hip, tugging me back against him. It’s like a gate has slammed open, and I’m totally wanton. I need these words from him. I need him to tell me these dirty things, because—
“That’s what I’m ashamed of.” I get the words out through clenched teeth, because oh, when this one comes, it’s going to be….
“Being fucked like this?”
“Being seen.”
Another whisper, close to my ear, and I have never been so aware of how open I am, how every shift of the air against my skin is as thick as a sheet—
“I see you.” Ben’s voice is almost too low to compete with the ceiling fan. “And I’m not going to look away.” His fingers, circling, circling, and the rock of his hips that pushes him in, and in, and in. “And here’s the filthy truth, sweetheart.”
I open my mouth to say what? And all that comes out is a moan.
“You say you’re ashamed, but you love it. You fucking love it. You’re wetter than you’ve ever been, and I can feel all of it. I can see all of it.”
Maybe he keeps talking. Maybe he stops. But all I know is that the wave of release breaks over me in an enormous jagged rush of pleasure that explodes outward from the core of me, all the way to my fingertips. Is it me making that sound? It’s definitely Ben pinning my hips in his hands while I rock and shudder and cry out. At some point, I can’t tell when, he falls into his own release, fucking me with all the power he has in his body. My hands hit the headboard. I brace myself. I hold on.
And when it’s over, I’m a puddle.
That means I have no fear of the consequences when I say, to his warm and breathing self with one arm thrown over my waist, “Tell me a secret, Ben. Just one.”
14
Bennett
It pulls a laugh right out of me. I’ve melted her mind. She’s just deflecting. Eva must be an open book, ready to tell me anything, and some part of her—some animal part, deep down—is fighting it.
“I don’t have any secrets.”
She opens her green eyes and pushes herself up on one elbow. “We both know that’s not true.”
I give her a look. “Are you secretly in the CIA? Because if you are, you should tell me.” I narrow my eyes. “Or maybe...you can’t.”
Eva is flushed and pink, eyes shining. “I talked to Whitney this morning.”
“Oh, yeah? What does Whitney have to say about me?”
Eva reaches out and walks her fingers all the way down my abs to a spot that’s dangerously south. “She mentioned a certain...crowd that you’re part of.”
I have no earthly idea what she’s talking about.
“A...group,” Eva prompts. “That you didn’t ever tell me about.”
Oh. Oh. “Wow. I can’t believe she revealed the secret of my veterans support group. Which is not a secret at all.”
“You didn’t say anything about it though.”
“When would I have slipped that in? In the middle of fucking you? ‘Oh, by the way, twice a month I hang out with a group of vets and we call ourselves the Warriors’?”
“You have a name for your group?” Eva’s eyes are wide.
“Would you want to reserve a room under the name Veterans Support Group? It sounds...sad.”
“It does, kind of,” she admits. “But why didn’t you tell me about the meet-up?”
“You’re going to have to help me out here. What meet-up are you talking about? Hey.” I narrow my eyes. “Are you in the support group? Is that how you have all this insider information?”
Eva rolls her eyes. “No. Obviously, Wes is in the support group. You know. Wes. Your friend. For an undisclosed amount of time....”
“Since we were in the army together.”
She flicks her gaze downward. “Just at the same time, or...?”
“We were in the same unit. We were deployed together.” The hairs on the back of my neck rise. “Has Whitney ever told you about what happened to Wes in Afghanistan?”
“Some of it,” Eva says. “An IED and a Humvee. I guess it got to him after a while.”
“It got to all of us. In different ways.”
“Everyone in the unit?”
“Everyone in the Humvee.”
Eva’s green eyes fly back to mine. “I knew you were in the Humvee. I didn’t know it…got to you like that.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”
“We’ve spent far more time discussing her love life.” Eva raises her eyebrows, a little color coming to her cheeks. Whitney must have described some pretty wild things if Eva is embarrassed after what we just did.
I resist the urge to change the topic entirely. What happened in the Humvee was something that took over my life for the better part of eighteen months, and that’s not a story I relish going over with her. Not today, and maybe not ever. At any rate, I’ve put it to bed.
I can tell Eva’s waiting to hear more about it, but she just traces the lines of my abs with a fingertip. So casual. So patient.
“I was in the Humvee,” I confirm. “On the day it hit the IED.”
“But you weren’t hurt.”
“No, but that kind of shit will shake you to your core. The explosion was one thing. Seeing my buddies....”
“Dayton.”
“Yeah. He was pretty torn up.”
I keep these memories at bay, where they can’t touch me, but even at a distance, they’re still not the kinds of things I want to think about. The sound Dayton made. The way Wes rushed straight out of the Humvee and around to the other side. Really, the silence was worse, once Dayton stopped making any noise at all.
“It was one of those moments.”
“Yeah,” Eva says, as if she understands perfectly.
I watch the sun play over her hair for a long moment. She looks back up at me, that same light catching in her eyes, and I forget all of it. Afghanistan. The Humvee. The year and a half I spent chasing answers about it.
And I forget it still isn’t enough.
Eva lifts her hand to my face, and now it’s her turn to watch me.
Are the questions I see in her eyes about me, or about something else entirely?
I’ll answer her, if that’s what I want.
But I can smell them in the air around us—her secrets. They’re so close to the surface. I’ve given up one of mine—low-stakes, that’s true—but I could ask. I could find out. I could—
“I’m starving,” says Eva. “Let’s make lunch.”
I sit her at the counter and put her laptop in front of her.
<
br /> “Here’s the deal.”
“Oh?” She gives me a coy smile. “Are we dealing again? Is this another contest?”
“No, it’s actually a deal.” I pull out a frying pan from the cupboards beneath the kitchen island, where she sits on a high-backed stool. “You write, I cook.”
Eva screws up her lips. “This sounds like I won’t get to eat if I don’t write.”
I brandish a spatula in her general direction. “You’re absolutely right.”
She puts her hands dutifully on the keyboard, but I feel her eyes on my back the moment I turn around and start going through the fridge. I had the owners stock it before we came, so there’s plenty here to make meals. I have a feeling we’ll be cooking everything in here, after the near miss with the semi yesterday.
I get three bell peppers out of the crisper, locate a cutting board, and prepare them for slaughter. Eva watches me cut through them. I add a little oil to the frying pan and toss in the peppers. An onion is next.
“I don’t hear typing,” I tell her.
“Where did you learn to cook?” Eva’s big green eyes follow me as I pull out a second pan, melt some butter into it, and produce a package of chicken breasts from the fridge, plus another cutting board.
“We didn’t have a ton of money growing up.” I slice the chicken into strips, cutting away all the weird pieces. Maybe Eva doesn’t mind the weird bits in chicken, but I sure as hell do. “So my dad taught me to cook.”
“Your dad?” She’s tentative, which is cute.
“Yeah, my mom wasn’t around.”
I see Eva’s frown out of the corner of my eye. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be.” I flash her a quick grin, and she smiles back. “She took off when I was three. It was a middle-of-the-night escape. For years, my dad told me that she’d left to find a better job and send money back to the two of us. It was bullshit.”
“Where’d she go then?”
“Who knows?” Somewhere, distantly, it still hurts, like an old stab wound that’s never healed. But I’m not going to let myself get sucked in to that pain. It would be pointless, and it would be poison. “She never sent any money back. My dad was too proud to take her to court over it, so….” I dump the chicken into the frying pan. I’ll brown it on both sides then add it to the veggies. “Eventually, some stuff with bank accounts made it necessary to have her declared dead. She might be dead. I don’t know. I don’t really care at this point.” I wash my hands in the sink and glance back to Eva.
“You seriously don’t care? You’re not curious about it?” she asks. “That seems unlike you.”
“There are other things I’m more curious about. Things that meant more to me over the course of my life than that woman ever did.”
“Like what?” Eva, for all her insistence on keeping everything tamped down, is practically glowing at the thought of learning more about me.
I wield the spatula again, pointing it at her. “You are subverting the rules. The deal is food for words. And you know that means written words, not spoken ones.”
She purses her lips. “You’d really punish me if I didn’t get enough work done?”
My cock is instantly at attention. I’ve never been much for the BDSM scene, but you can be sure as hell that I’d put Eva over my knees if that’s how she’s going to tease. Honestly, her ass might have caused a new awakening in my soul. I want to see it in every possible position, and right now, I wouldn’t mind putting a few handprints—
Eva laughs. “Did I say the wrong thing? I feel like you’re looking way beneath my skin.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “Don’t tempt me with punishment.” The smell of the frying veggies and the chicken waft into the air. “Because if you want to play those games, we’re not going to get anything done.”
I reach for the cabinet above the stove and pull out some Mrs. Dash spice. My dad always used the original kind, so I use the original kind. Exploration is one thing, but when it comes to chicken, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
The dulcet tones of Eva’s keyboard mix in with the crackle and pop from the frying pans. I nudge everything around in the pots with the spatula then turn around to survey my handiwork.
With a face as red as a tomato, Eva’s typing, her eyes glued to the screen. She’s shifting a little in her seat, which leads me to believe she’s pressing her thighs against one another.
I lean on the counter and look across at her until she meets my eyes.
“It’s not fair, you know. You already finished all your work.”
“That’s not true. I have another job.” The moment the words are out of my mouth, I regret it. This is the getaway of a lifetime with a girl like Eva. I don’t want to ruin it by getting into all my obsessions.
But she lets the comment slide right on by. “Still.” She taps out a few more words on the keyboard. I’m tempted to go around and see if it’s gibberish, but I won’t. This is the first thing she’s typed besides Chapter One since we got here.
“Hey, Eva?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you writing the world’s sexiest psychological thriller?”
She gives me a little smile. “Maybe.”
“Is that why your face is so red?” I lean in closer. “Or do you relish the thought of being punished by yours truly?”
Eva laughs out loud. “Look, we’re straying into weird territory. Territory that’s too inappropriate for a writer’s retreat.”
I cock my head to the side. “Is there always so much sex at a writer’s retreat?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Eva’s blush somehow reaches a deeper shade of red. “I’ve never been on one before.”
“You’re a famous writer and you’ve never been on a writer’s retreat?”
“You’re a famous fact-checker,” she shoots back. “Haven’t you ever been on a fact-checking retreat?”
“Are a lot of other fact-checkers in the market for a rustic getaway far from the Internet?” That would be some hilarious shit.
“I wouldn’t know,” Eva says primly.
“I can tell you this much. There’s no such thing as a retreat from my job. The only way to get any deeper into it is to go on-site.”
“Like traveling?”
“Like traveling.”
“For articles? That seems expensive. You know. Publishing-wise.”
“I usually don’t travel for my paid work.” There it is. Out in the open. She can’t miss it now. And in the light of day...it does matter. In the light of day, I know I can’t give it up. Not for good.
“What kind of fact-checker does unpaid work?” Eva wrinkles her nose. “That seems like it would be—”
“We had a deal.” I flip the veggies in the frying pan one more time, the colors flying up into the air and back down. “Words for food.”
“I want food and words.” She puts her hands flat on the keyboard. “I want to know more of your secrets, Ben.”
“Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart.”
Eva laughs. She’s right; it was an incredible joke.
15
Eva
I’ve never been hungrier in my life.
“I am careful with what I wish for,” I say quietly, but Bennett turns back to his work with a smirk that makes me feel like melting into a sexual puddle.
I focus on the screen, letting the pure white of the empty Word document envelop me like a blanket of clean snow. It is not my antagonist. We simply exist in the world together.
The food smells...wholesome. Normal. Good. It’s not takeout, saturated with fat and sugar and God knows what else, and it doesn’t smell like the shame of another box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Not that I have anything against Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It’s just the thing that I tend to eat when I’m in panic-writing-avoidance mode.
Ask me how I know they sell 15-packs of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at Costco.
The other upside to this little venture is that Bennett looks unbeliev
ably hot standing there in the kitchen in his T-shirt. It’s your average, run-of-the-mill gray T-shirt, but it might as well cost a million dollars for how it accentuates his biceps.
Plus, that fabric is all that’s protecting his once-in-a-lifetime abs from the ravages of the outside world.
For the first time in a long time, nothing else seems to matter aside from this counter and this man. We’re safe behind the walls of this cabin. It’s like they’re imbued with a magical force field that keeps the pressure of my editing deadline and the larger guillotine of my publishing contract at bay.
The young woman in the backpack comes back to me.
She needs money; that’s her first thought, and there she is, sprung to life on the page. Something from nothing.
She needs money… but why?
The college she attends sprouts from the ground around her, a Midwestern university collection of old ivy-covered buildings tucked around boxy monstrosities from the sixties.
Money doesn’t always have to be tangible. It’s not crumpled bills shoved into her pockets, though she could use that too. What she needs is a roommate.
The situation she’s coming from in this moment plays out in fast-forward in front of my eyes. I won’t put it on the page, not in all its humiliating details—not now, not yet. I’ll hold it in reserve. What’s important is that I know about it. I know about the bitchy middle-aged woman in the financial aid office telling my heroine that nobody is going to give her a loan for room and board, especially not the university. Not this late in the process, and maybe not ever.
Which explains why my heroine is more desperate than ever, hustling across campus in a late August storm, hair dripping wet.
She has one last shred of hope for this day.
And that hope is to find a roommate.
The listing on RoommateNow.com seems too good to be true, but now that there’s no chance of living in the dorms, she’s out of options. And she doesn’t want to stay in the seedy weekly motel she’s been living in. I leave a note to myself midway through the paragraph around the hotel that something else happened to this heroine to put her in the hotel in the first place. It’s on the very edge of my mind, and I’ll flesh it out later. I’ll come back to it.