Page 26 of Edged
“Is that what’s happening here?”
He popped the button and dropped his fingers to the zipper, going still. “I don’t know, Owen. You tell me.”
CHAPTER7
ARCHIE
Owen smelledlike hops and barley, and a little bit like anger. When he said he hated me, he meant it, and for some reason that only turned me on more. I had realized, after all, I was a little bit of a masochist and apparently that fetish wasn’t limited to physical pain, but emotional as well.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said, head dropped against the cheap framed print on the wall behind him. His neck was long and slender, his muscles tight. His hair smelled like rosemary, like hotel shampoo, and his skin like the salt of the ocean mixed with a little sweat. The edges of a tattoo snaked out above his collar, inching toward his neck, and if my hand wasn’t glued to his zipper, I would have reached for his shirt to tug it down so I could get a better view.
“Is that supposed to change my mind?” I dragged my nose against the shell of his ear, waiting as patiently for his consent as I could muster. But around Owen, it was always hard to think. If I’d been thinking the night of my graduation, I wouldn’t have fucked him and fucked up all of our lives. If I’d been thinking last night, I wouldn’t have followed him into the alley, and if I was thinking at all in that moment, I’d have never shown up at his hotel like a dog taking command from its trainer.
That wasn’t me.
I didn’twantthat to be me, for Owen or for anyone else.
“I don’t think anyone can change your mind about anything.” He cleared his throat quietly, rolling his head to bump my face away from his ear. “But what do you want, Archer? Just somewhere to stick your dick?”
“Don’t diminish your contributions to my pleasure, Owen. You got me off better than anyone else ever has.”
I shouldn’t have given him that truth.
After last night, I knew Owen was as much of a sure thing as I was, and there was no reason for us to talk about anything besides consent. No need to drudge up the past to muddy the present.
“You just can’t stop, can you?” Owen angled his head toward me, a bleached clump of curls hanging over his forehead.
“Can’t stop what?”
My hand was still on his zipper and I thought I’d done a pretty remarkable job of stopping, considering how hard my cock was and how much I wanted to get it inside of him.
“Lying.”
I knew there was no trying to convince him that I was anyone besides the man he’d built me up to be in his head. “I’ll stop,” I promised.
“Use a condom,” he said.
I pulled down his zipper the rest of the way. “Always.”
“Don’t you dare tell me again that you love me.”
I pushed his pants down to his knees.
“Alright,” I agreed, licking my lower lip with the tip of my tongue.
Owen’s stare flickered down toward my mouth and I grinned, waiting for the rest of his rules so I could get him on his back. I didn’t even know why it felt as urgent as it did, but getting Owen naked and beneath me felt as necessary as air. I’d gone ten years thinking about him as a specter of my past, like a ghost always out of reach for the rest of my life. The man on the pedestal that no one else would ever compare to, and then here he was. In the present, in the flesh…
In the rock hard, burning hot, and ready-to-come-for-me flesh.
“What else?” I reached down with one hand to open my belt and pop the fly on my jeans. Fingers on my zipper, I waited for Owen’s approval to move forward.
I watched the way his jaw worked back and forth while he thought about what to say next, and I couldn’t help but wonder how loaded the words on the tip of his tongue had to be. For as much deliberation as he gave before speaking, I worried there was a very real possibility of us both coming in the middle of the room from the tension of the whole encounter.
“The…the way it was before. Then and last night,” he whispered.
“You want me to make you work for it, Owen?”
God, Iwasgoing to come in my pants. Less than a dozen words and Owen had reduced me back to the teenager I used to be.
