Page 67 of Doomsdate

My fingertips drag down the side seams of her underwear, tracing where fabric meets hot, damp flesh, then wriggling beneath. A sharp intake of breath escapes her as my exploring fingers are enveloped in soft, silky wet, and I yank the panties to the side.

“No,” I say, peering up at her pleasure-dazed face before taking a long, luxurious lick from cunt to clit. “I fucking love this.”

It’s her turn to grip me by the hair, and I speak into her shivering body. “I’m going to slide my fingers up and down this slippery pussy you’ve made for me, Maisie, pushing them inside of you until the stretch of it makes you whimper. I’m going to drink from this cunt, eating you out until you beg for more.” I yank down her panties the rest of the way, then part her even wider as I shoulder between her shaking thighs.

“Then what,” she asks, her voice breathy and strained and needful, starry eyes fixed on my own.

I lift one of her legs onto my shoulder, tilting her pussy so that I can access every slick inch of her. “Then you’re going to come for me,” I explain calmly, pausing to roll the tip of my tongue against the hard knot of her clit, already so swollen. “Aren’t you, baby?”

She cries out before squeezing her thighs around my head.

“Yes, Professor.”

Chapter Fifteen

Maisie

I come for him again, and again, and because we forgot to set a time limit, a third time, too. I knew oral sex would feel good—I invested in an excellent showerhead system a few years ago and never looked back—but Everett’s face buried between my legs, sighing into me, moaning, murmuring encouragement while he comes into his own stroking fist is like nothing I could’ve expected.

I didn’t know my body could make these sensations, but somehow, Everett did. It’s freeing, giving my pleasure to someone else’s hands, and frankly astonishing to come from them. Part of me wasn’t sure Everett could do it. Not for lack of skill, and definitely not for lack of attraction, but because of how difficult it can be for me to make myself come. All the anxiety and worry and never-ending thoughts spooling through my brain build this wall between me and letting go that I can’t always get over. The more worried I am, the higher the wall.

And letting someone else touch me for the first time? During a zombie apocalypse, no less? I thought the wall would be a thousand stories high. And maybe it was, but it crumbled beneath Everett’s heated gaze, the sure slide of his hands down my hips, the hot suck of my breast into his mouth. I didn’t know what desire felt like, what it added to the equation. And I had no goddamn clue what it would feel like to be wanted this way. His yearning is a revelation, a physical presence between us. I feel it as much as I feel him. This deep, powerful wanting that borders on pain, on frenzy. I’m drunk with it.

My fingers go lax in his hair as I pant up at the red velvet ceiling of this presidential movie theater. Breathless. Spent. Floored. He presses gentle kisses down the inside of my thigh, sending reverberations of the last orgasm through my body.

“Maisie.” It’s all he says as he closes his eyes and nuzzles against my leg.

I caress his cheek. The pinpricks of stubble against my palm plucking something deep between my legs. “Come on. It’s late.”

I lead him up to the bedroom I chose in the presidential residence earlier in the evening. Not the president’s—I’d never sleep in the same bed as that guy—but one of the fancy guest suites down the hall. It’s filled with priceless relics from the nation’s earliest days, a massive four-poster bed, and sheets so crisp and smooth it feels like sliding between two cool breezes. Chicken curls up by the window on a deeply cushioned chair that was Jackie O’s favorite, the little placard states.

“Are you tired?” Everett asks, but it seems like he’s asking something else. He glances at me, then the bed, then back to me. We didn’t expressly say the lesson was over when we made our way up to the bedroom, but with the change of location, it feels undoubtedly implied.

“Yes,” I admit, confirming what I think he’s really asking. I’m exhausted, happy and used up in the best possible way. “But I don’t want you to leave. I—want you to stay. Is that okay?”

The corner of his mouth lifts, and he runs a hand down my arm. “Absolutely.”

We slide into bed, lying on our sides and facing each other. Sharing a bed—another first for me. Everett tucks a hand beneath his pillow, his face mirroring the same contentment I feel in my bones.

“So,” he begins. “Favorite museum today and go.”

I laugh, surprised. “Hm. National Gallery of Art.”

His eyebrows rise. “Really—why is that?”

My smile relaxes as I remember all the swirling feelings I’d had as we walked through the gleaming halls of art, contemplative and quiet. “Every time I looked at a painting, it felt like being someone else. Like I had the artist’s eyes, and their life, and got to live in this moment they chose to capture. All the hours they must’ve spent sitting in front of that painting, seeing it, and then I got to see it, too. Walking through there, I made a thousand little connections with a thousand different people at a thousand different moments in their lives that I never would’ve had otherwise.”

Everett’s lips part, and he breathes out long and slow. “That is exactly how I feel about movies.” He blinks. “Or used to, at least. They lost their luster after Louise got sick.”

“I think you still love them,” I say slowly, thinking of how entranced he was during Jaws. “Maybe you just lost the connection to the part of yourself that does, and that’s what you need to find—the way back.”

“Maybe that’s you, Maisie.” He smiles ruefully. “You’re my way back.”

“That’s funny,” I say, feeling my throat tighten against the thought. “Because you feel like my way forward.”

His eyes go impossibly soft. He slips his hand across the sheets until it finds mine and squeezes. “I’m glad we found each other, then.”

Me, too.