Page 76 of A Deal with the Devil

“Make it last the second time.” My voice is husky, made confident by sheer desire.

I arch upward again, and he inhales sharply. “Fuck,” he groans, squeezing his eyes shut. “Wait.” It sounds like he’s speaking to himself, not me. He climbs from the bed and is back seconds later, throwing his travel kit on the nightstand, pulling a condom on.

He lines himself up with my entrance and slides the tip over me once before his hips push forward. He seats himself inside me, all the way in, thick and hard and perfect. His eyes are feverish, at half mast. “I’m going to need more than a second time,” he warns.

Good.

Slowly he pulls out, dragging over nerve endings that have never been as sensitive as they are at this moment. I’m tight as a clenched fist around him.

There’s that ever-present part of me that wants to know what this all means, or how it will end. But then his hips snap forward and I gasp as if I’ve been impaled. It’s too good for me to worry, it’s too good for me to think.

His head lowers, pulling my nipple into his mouth with his tongue, catching it with his teeth, and he pulls out again and again, snapping back hard. I can feel the coming explosion already. A small twinkling star at the base of my stomach, spinning and unfurling. “Faster,” I hiss, and with a groan he complies, moving ruthlessly in and out.

I come so hard that the world goes silent and dark, that it takes me a second to even realize he’s above me, his thrusts jerky and violent. “Fuck,” he hisses. “Fuck. It’s so good with you. I can’t—” he gasps, and then he goes still above me.

He falls down to the mattress and pulls me against him. “Bloody hell, Tali.”

His chest rises and falls, breathing heavy as we both take a moment to recover.

“Should I joke about ordering my own flowers, or do you already expect that?”

His mouth nuzzles my neck, nipping at the skin. “After last weekend, post-coital awkwardness on your part is kind of a given.”

“On my part?” I pull up, elbow in the bed, to look at him. “You’ve been the one with a stick up your ass all week. Today especially.”

“Because I was trying to fucking behave,” he growls. “And then you drove me off the edge, talking about blow jobs whilst rubbing my shoulders.” He pulls the sheets away from my body, rolling me to my back, and begins to slide downward. His lips press to my hipbone. “I never imagined we’d wind up in bed thanks to a fight over Sam.”

“No?” I ask. “What did you imagine?”

“You have three holes. The permutations are infinite.”

I laugh. “Not really, unless you’re imagining Angela and Savannah with us too.”

He looms over me, pinning me to the mattress as his mouth moves to my neck. “As I’ve told you before, I’d never be willing to share you.” He doesn’t look away as he says it, sincerity written all over his face. And some of the barriers I’ve built around my heart crumble, though I wish they hadn’t.

* * *

It’s the middle of the night and I’m absolutely exhausted but too exhilarated to sleep. He’s been silent long enough that I suspect he’s dozed off when he speaks, suddenly.

“When would you have to leave?” he asks. “To get your sister.”

I’m glad the room is pitch black. It feels safer, somehow, discussing this in the dark. I suspect he’s still mad about the way I handled things…or failed to handle them. I’d be mad too.

I roll toward him and rest my head on his chest. “She’s supposed to come home the third week of August, right before school starts.”

“Surely there’s some other way to handle it,” he says. “Unless you want to go. She can’t just come to LA?”

Beneath my head, his heartbeat is strong and steady. He’s a rock, and I wish with all my might that I could keep leaning on him the way I am now. “It’s her senior year of high school. I can’t uproot her, and she needs someone there who actually cares about her and will listen. If I can’t trust my mother to do it, I’m definitely not trusting a stranger.”

He’s quiet, and I brace myself, wondering if he’ll tell me this can’t go anywhere. And hoping at the same time he’ll tell me it can.

“I felt blindsided today,” he says instead, his voice low and reluctant. “It was like Ella all over again, waiting in the apartment when I got home from Ohio, saying she didn’t want to tell me over the phone.”

I hear the pain there, the wound I reopened with my stupidity. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I intended. I just kept putting it off, I guess. I thought if you knew, it might change things.”

He pulls me beneath him, and his mouth grazes my neck. “It appears to have changed things,” he says, with a quiet laugh.

Yes, I think, but for how long?