Page 35 of Harbor Me

Every night since she stepped out of that truck, wanting her, and tonight I finally know what her mouth tastes like, and the knowing is a hundred times worse than the wondering.

In my head I peel that green dress up her body slow, gathering it in my fists, and she lifts her arms for me like she can’t wait for the inevitable to happen.

"Tell me what you want," I say to her in the fantasy, low against her ear, my hand working steadily under the spray, water running down my back, stomach muscles jumping every time my thumb crosses the crown.

In my head I can't stop talking, telling her how long, how bad, how she's not getting the quiet version of me tonight, and she answers with her chin up and her spine against the door, no shyness anywhere in her.

"I want you inside me," she says. "I can’t wait for you to take me to the bedroom. Right here. Immediately."

My fist is moving fast now, slick and tight, no slowing it, the sound of it lost under the water, my braced arm trembling, and in my head, I've got her thighs in my hands, her heels locked behind me, both of us still half-dressed and past caring, grinding her up that door while she gasps into my neck.

And then it isn't the fantasy that finishes me. It's the real thing.

The actual sound she made tonight, that small helpless moan into my mouth when we kissed, arriving in my memory clean and true, and everything in me lets go at once. It hits fast and it hits like a wave over the transom, no stopping it, no riding it out gracefully, my whole body locking as I spill over my fist and the shower floor, and I get my mouth against my own forearm just in time to groan into it, long and ragged and muffled, in an empty house, a mile from the nearest ears, hiding the sound from absolutely no one.

It goes on longer than it ever has before. Fast and enormous at once, pleasure wringing me out in pulses while the water beats down, my hand slowing, gentling, my forehead rolling against the tile like the pressure might keep me from falling apart.

Then it's just me and the spray, breathing hard, legs unsteady as a new dock.

I told her no. She had her hands inside my shirt and asked me to come up and I turned her down. Now I’m jerking off in the shower. Most of me still swears it was the right thing to do, and the rest of me wants to drown that part in the harbor.

The water's going cool. Her taste is finally fading, and I catch myself pressing my tongue to my bottom lip anyway, chasing it, like a man checking his pocket for money he already knows he spent.

Chapter 8

Vanessa

The sensible thing to do after being kissed within an inch of my life is to drink some water, take off my dress, wash my face, and go to sleep like a functioning adult with a job to protect.

What I actually do is turn off the light, lie down on top of the quilt fully dressed, and stare at the ceiling while the window fan runs on its highest setting and accomplishes nothing at all.

My whole body is still reverberating. My lips sting, swollen and tender when I press them together, and my scalp is alive in little sparking points everywhere his fingers pulled, and if I close my eyes, I can still feel the doorframe against my shoulder blades and the whole solid unbelievable weight of him pinning me to it.

Aiden Cole kissed me like the building was on fire and I was the only thing in it worth carrying out, and then he said, ‘ask me sober’ and walked away into the dark, and now I'm lying here in my party dress at war with my entire nervous system.

There will be no lying here reliving that kiss like a teenager. I'm a grown woman.

What happens instead is worse.

My thighs press together and they're slick, skin sliding on skin all the way up under the hem, and the dress that felt pretty at the bar feels unbearable now, clinging everywhere, too hot against skin that's burning from the inside out.

My hips shift on their own, restless, looking for something to press against, and I give up the fight with roughly the amount of dignity I've shown all evening. Which is none.

My hand slides down over the viscose first, pressing the fabric between my legs, and even through two layers of fabric the jolt of it arches me off the quilt. More. I need more. I pull the dress up to my waist and cup my pussy over the lace, and oh… the lace is a lost cause, slippery and clinging, and underneath it I'm swollen and throbbing and so ready that the first slow glide of my fingers barely meets any resistance at all.

He made me this way with a kiss. One kiss, both of us dressed, on a public street.

Leaving me on my own to finish the night it should have ended.

In my head he doesn't turn me down. When I whisper come upstairs with me, that groan he made, the one that punched out of him into my mouth when I rolled my hips, that groan turns into yes, and he follows me through the door.

We don't make it up the stairs.

We get maybe six steps up in the dark, with his mouth never leaving mine, and then his patience just quits and he lays me down across the stairs with the edge of a step under my shoulders and another one digging into my back, while he kneels over me with that huge, muscular body of his, blocking out what little light there is.

In my head his hands run up my thighs and shove the dress to my waist and stop dead when they find the lace.

"You wore this for me." Not a question. That low gravel certainty he uses when he's diagnosed something.