Page 76 of Fangs with Benefits

The eye contact is intense. I wish I could look away, but he’s got me captured here, beneath his gaze, beneath his body, and I don’t want to be anywhere else.

Elijah pulls out suddenly, and I make a noise that he shushes.

He taps my hips. ‘Up.’

I do as he says, lifting my hips off the couch, and he slips one of my throw pillows under them before plunging back into me. I squeak at the new angle, my eyes closing as he finds his rhythm in me.

‘You’re perfect. I haven’t dreamed in centuries, but I am now. Look at me, darling,’ he commands and I do. His eyes are like infernos, flaming with desire and heat as he thrusts into me.

‘You’re not—’ I gasp as he thrusts deeper ‘—supposed to call me darling.’

‘Bossy Molly, always coming up with new rules,’ he says. ‘Can you come from this?’

I swallow and shake my head. I haven’t come from penetration alone before, but this feels insanely good. He’s pressing into a spot inside of me that feels like a secret, one that might just make me come all over his stupidly gorgeous dick if he keeps at it. ‘Maybe,’ I say.

‘Hm.’ Elijah lowers himself onto one elbow, bringing his face just above mine, and uses his other hand to reach between us. He rubs the pads of his fingers over my clit in firm circles and I groan. Elijah grins. ‘That’s my girl.’

‘Not your girl,’ I groan, but let him kiss me, because I’m too boneless to actually refuse him anything–his pet names, his endearments, his sloppy kisses licking into my mouth while he fucks me into the couch like it’s his favourite activity.

The climb towards my climax isn’t slow, but heady and quick, a sudden rush towards freefall, and suddenly I’m moaning loudly into his mouth, my calf lightly cramping as I shake around his cock.

‘That’s it, darling, keep going for me, just like that,’ he murmurs against my mouth, but his voice is strained. When he reaches his peak moments later, hips jutting wildly, his words become gibberish, mindless praise for my body, my mouth, my tits, my cunt.

I have a light layer of sweat cooling over my whole body when we’ve both come down from our climaxes, and Elijah licks the side of my neck like I taste delectable. He sucks on my skin until I lightly swat at his back. ‘You’re going to leave a hickey,’ I complain, laughing breathlessly.

‘That’s the point,’ he mutters before resuming his task.

I’m pretty sure if we were any good at the whole friends-with-benefits thing, I’d make him go home after what we just did. Instead, I let him shower with me and then pull him into my bed.

Cuddling with a hookup is a bad habit that I ought to nip in the bud now, but with his breath on the back of my neck, his hands on my stomach, his knees tucked into the backs of mine–I don’t want him to go anywhere.

Elijah isn’t wrapped around me when I wake up two mornings later, and I blink, sitting up in bed to look for him. One perk of a studio apartment is that he really can’t go anywhere that I wouldn’t see him, other than the bathroom, and sure enough, he’s sitting at my little two-person table, one leg bent on the seat while he hunches over something in the pale blue morning light. I rub my eyes and squint, thinking it must be one of the books from my shelf, but then he picks up a sheet of printer paper and passes it onto a second stack. My gut lurches at the sight.

‘What are you reading?’ I croak, startling him. I know the answer, but I don’t want to be right.

I stand up too quickly, making myself a little dizzy. He bolts to my side, supernaturally fast, and steadies me.

‘I found it in the credenza when I was putting away the puzzle and, well, I read the first page and then couldn’t stop reading.’

I approach the table warily, my mouth pulled into a frown. Sure enough, my abandoned novel manuscript sits in two piles–one the pages he’s already read, the other the pages he has left. He’s more than halfway done.

Every Now and Then by Molly Mason.

I want to be mad at him for reading it, but I’m more curious to know what he thinks. The novel is a mess of a project–one that needs a lot of work before it can see the light of day–but I’m still proud of it.

‘You wrote this?’ he asks when I sink into the chair across from his. ‘I mean, I know you did, it has your name on it and, even if it didn’t, it just–it sounds like you. Molly, it’s excellent.’

I chew on my lower lip for a moment then nod. ‘I wrote it after grad school.’

‘I said it when I read your stories online, but you’re so talented, Molly. I haven’t stood up once since I started reading it a couple of hours ago.’

‘I haven’t edited it. I haven’t touched it in a couple years,’ I say. ‘It’s…’

I don’t finish the sentence, because I was going to say it’s nothing. But it most certainly is not nothing. It’s months of work and heart poured into its pages, it’s a story I loved so much that I sometimes hated it while writing it for not living up to the vision in my head. It’s both dear to me and the reminder that I’ve failed myself; failed every version of myself that’s dreamed of being a writer.

‘The story structure is brilliant, the way you’ve weaved in the past and present is propulsive, and withholding until the second act that the historical chapters are her mother–Molly, why have you stopped writing?’

I give a tight shrug, my hands clutched between my legs to keep from fidgeting. Elijah stands up and flips the Keurig open before putting in a fresh pod and a clean mug from the drying rack for me.