Page 64 of Offside

I reached up and took the red lace at her hips. Worked it down slowly, my palms dragging the full length of her thighs, feeling the softness of her skin under my hands, and I watched her face the whole time. The small sound she made when the fabric cleared her ankles—barely there, almost swallowed, entirely involuntary—went straight into the part of me that was keeping score of every sound she made that she hadn’t planned on. I was going to earn every single one before this night was over.

I pressed her back against the glass.

Her spine met the cool surface and she gasped again, sharper this time—the temperature against her bare skin, the height, the whole glittering grid of the city spread out fourteen floors below her—and I looked up at her from my knees and waited until her eyes came down to mine.

She looked down.

Her chest was rising and falling fast. Her lower lip was parted. Her fingers were still loose in my hair and she was looking at me like she already knew what was about to happen and couldn’t believe it was real.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” she breathed out the word. “Please.”

I lifted her right leg over my shoulder.

Her fingers locked in my hair. Her thigh was warm and smooth against my cheek and I could feel her pulse there, fast and getting faster, and I put my mouth on her.

I started slow. Because she deserved slow. Because I’d been thinking about exactly this since the moment I left her house this morning and I was not going to rush it for anything in the world. The taste of her, warm and clean and—hers, only hers—and the way her hips pushed forward a fraction before she caught them, and the soft catch of her breath when I found the pressure she wanted. I learned all of it with full attention, no shortcuts, nothing withheld. The tremor running through the thigh hooked over my shoulder. The way the sounds she was trying to suppress were getting shorter and harder to hold back.

She tried to stay quiet.

She kept trying, and every time she lost—every sharp intake of breath, every soft broken sound that escaped before she could stop it, every time my name came out fractured and low in the register of a woman well past managing anything—I gave her more. More pressure, more heat, more of exactly what was taking her apart, because she earned it. Every sound she made that she hadn’t meant to make, she earned.

Her thigh tightened hard over my shoulder. I slid two fingers inside her and felt the grip of her around them—hot and tight and absolutely devastating—and with my other hand gripped her hip to hold her against the glass because she was moving and I was nowhere near done.

“Ryan—”

Just my name. Nothing attached to it. The most honest thing she’d said all night.

I kept the rhythm exactly where it was. Slow and relentless, reading every shift in her breathing the way I read everything that mattered—where she was chasing more, where she needed me to hold back and make her wait, the exact place that made the grip in my hair go from wanting to desperate. I found it and I stayed there.

“Please,” she breathed.

I didn’t change anything.

“Please.” The word coming apart. Nothing left behind it, nothing held back, the last of everything she managed in every other room completely gone. “Ryan. Fuck. Please.”

I gave her everything, sucking her clit into my mouth, pumping my fingers inside her, tasting her. I could have done it all night long.

She came with her back against the glass and both hands fisted in my hair and my name shattering in her throat, her whole body pulling taut and releasing in waves, and I worked her through every single one—not letting up, not rushing her past it, staying exactly where she needed me until she was trembling and making small helpless sounds she’d given up trying to contain, her fingers gone slack, her weight leaning into the glass behind her.

I pressed my mouth once to the inside of her thigh.

The skin there was soft and warm and tasted faintly of salt and I stayed a moment longer than I needed to, just that, just breathing her in.

Then I looked up at her.

Flushed and wrecked and open in a way she wasn’t anywhere else, with anyone else. Her hair loose around her shoulders. Her eyes dark and heavy. The whole city blazing fourteen floors below like it hadn’t noticed what just happened here.

She reached for me before I’d fully stood.

I was breathing hard. She was breathing harder.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then—“Okay. That’s—” She exhaled and didn’t finish the sentence.

She didn’t need to. I knew what it was.

“I could eat your pussy all night,” I said against her mouth.