Текст книги "Deeper"

Автор книги: Robin York

Соавторы: Robin York,Robin York
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

I’m smart enough to know that to anyone else this would sound like an epically bad idea. Bridget would not approve. My father would have a stroke. The Internet Asshats, predictably, think I’m a sloppy cunt who needs a good dicking, or whatever.

I’m getting kind of bored with the Internet Asshats.

I know what good girls do, and this is not it.

But I put it on my calendar, anyway, fifty minutes twice a week that I round up to an hour and shade in orange because orange feels like his color. WEST, I type.

Bridget and I string Christmas lights around the windows of the dorm room, and I go out to Walmart and buy an extra string to wrap around the posts of the bed and along the edges. When Bridget isn’t home, I turn off the overhead bulb and get under my blanket. The lights glow green and red, blue and yellow and orange.

I close my eyes, skim my fingers over my skin, thinking of West.

I have never been so excited.

He shows up right after his class. Knocks twice, then just opens the door and lets himself in. He’s got that coat again, and a textbook and notebook under one arm. He won’t quite meet my eyes.

“I was thinking,” he says, with no warm-up.

Uh-oh.

“I don’t want this to … hold you up. So I think we should agree, we’re only doing this until—until you feel ready. For something normal.”

“Like … what?”

“Scott. You need to promise me, when you’re ready to go out with Scott, or some other guy like him—some guy who wants to take you to dinner and, like, meet your dad and all that—you’ll tell me. And we’ll quit.”

With West in my room, I find it hard to remember what Scott looks like or why I would ever want anything more than I want this. But I recognize that he’s trying to do the right thing. Some version of the right thing.

I kind of love that about him. He says he’s not noble, but he’s got his own code, and he needs the boundaries, the rules, just as much as I do.

We’re going to do this, but first we’ll box it in and wall it off and find a way to make it acceptable. To make it fit.

“Ooookay,” I tell him.

That out of the way, he unlaces his boots and leaves them by the door. I’ve never seen him with his boots off before. His socks are just ordinary gray socks, and there is no reason they should make me hum with anticipation. No reason at all.

He drops his stuff on my desk, hangs his coat on my chair. He pulls his phone out and sets it on the edge of my desk right by the bed, next to my pillow.

I’m going to have my head on that pillow. West is going to kiss me, and then he’s going to look past me to the desk and see how many minutes we have left.

Fifty minutes seemed like a reasonable amount of time before. Not too long, not too short. Now it seems like an eternity. All I’ve done is kiss him, but no one kisses for fifty minutes.

This is insane.

I glance at West for reassurance, but he isn’t helping. His eyes have found the same magic spot on my floor he stared at last time he was here.

Me, I think. Look at me.

He doesn’t. So I walk to where he’s trained his gaze, find the spot, and step on it.

I step on it because, insane or not, I prepared for this hour. Plugged in the Christmas lights. Put on my favorite dark jeans, a white shirt that’s a little tighter than I’m comfortable with outside the room, a pretty bra. I brushed my hair out, left it down.

I didn’t put shoes on, though. My feet are bare, toenails painted pink, and I want West to see my feet and think about the rest of me naked. I want him to own up to his desire again, although, seriously, how many times does he have to say it before I’ll believe it? The way he grabbed me two days ago, dragged me up his thigh … I get hot flashes just thinking about it.

I get another one now, watching West’s eyes travel up from the floor spot that I’ve obliterated, over my legs, lingering at my hips, my breasts, my lips. That look is back in his eyes, covetous.

He wants to touch me.

It’s just that neither of us seems to know how.

You would think we were both virgins, rather than an Internet naked-picture sensation and … whatever West is. Not a virgin. I’m pretty sure.

Ninety percent sure.

He sits down on the mattress. “Come here.”

I do.

I sit right next to him, thigh touching thigh, and I want to look at his face.

I do look. For fifty minutes, I’m allowed to look. I’m not sure what else I’m allowed to do, but looking is okay.

His face is beautiful. The Christmas lights cast a glow over his skin, blue across his cheekbone, red behind his ear. His eyes, slightly narrowed, seem to glow. The word I think of is avid. Like whatever I’m about to do, he’s going to observe it, lean into it, take it and run with it.

I like being the thing he’s avid for, because that same feeling is inside my skin. The strain of not touching him, a low hum that’s always there, always something I’m pushing down, ignoring.

Only now I don’t have to.

As soon as I think it, my fingertips drift up to touch his neck. I turn my hand over and feel the rasp of his stubble against the backs of my fingers, the bumpy texture that smooths out lower down, until I find a spot where his skin is like hot satin.

“Can I do this?”

What I’m really asking is, How greedy can I be? How much will you give me?

He smiles, a little huff of breath that isn’t a laugh or a judgment, just a pleased noise. “Yeah.”

He draws a line across my chest, above the swell of my breasts. “Above here.”

I inhale and feel the line rise. The wake of his touch.

He strokes down my arm to my wrist. “And here.” He rubs his thumb over my wristbone.

“There?”

“That’s where I’ll touch you.”

“That’s it?”

He looks hard and long at my body. Every part of me that was sleeping comes awake and puts out its arms and says, Come in, come in, come in.

He taps my knee. “From here down.”

I hide my eyes against his shoulder, wanting to grumble. He’s going to skip all the best parts. “Is there a weird, kinky reason for this that I’m not understanding?”

He puts his hand in my hair and lifts my face so I have to look at him. “It’s just … what I want.”

His eyes are cautious, saying this. As if telling me what he wants is the scariest thing he’s done since he opened the door. It makes me certain that he hasn’t always been able to draw lines, hasn’t always set the terms.

It makes me wonder who he’s been with before, and how.

“Do you want me to do the same thing?” I drag my finger across his chest. “Above here.” Down his arm to his wrist, catching on his bracelet. “All along here.” A lingering tap north of his knee. “From here down?”

“You could.” His thigh shifts under my fingers, which have given up tapping in favor of fanning out over the muscle they’ve found. I want to stroke upward, filling the full width of my palm with soft denim and firm warmth until I reach the crease of his hip and have to decide where to go. Map him with my hands. “Or you could just go with the flow and trust me.”

I try to think of something smart to say, or something funny. But those words—trust me—crumple up my confidence and toss it away.

I think, all in a rush, of the reasons I can’t trust. Bad breath and body smells, stuck zippers, biting. The words on the birth-control chart that hangs on the inside door of the bathroom stalls that I’ve meant to look up but never gotten around to. Frottage. Rimming. I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know how many girls West has had sex with, and it seems vitally necessary that I find out so I can compare myself to them unfavorably.

There are condoms in my desk drawer, but they could be the wrong size.

Trust me, he says, and I can’t shut off my brain. Last time we kissed, I was stoned, so it was different. This time I have no defense, no way to hide from how close his eyes are, how much he sees.

It was like this with Nate. Over time I got better about it, but mental flailing was pretty much my constant make-out companion until I figured out that it worked better if I had a few drinks first. Then I tried to plan as many of our sexual encounters as possible for parties.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been kissed at ten in the morning, in the daylight.

I don’t trust it. I don’t trust myself.

“We should have some music,” I blurt.

West sighs.

Then he shoves me.

I’m on my back with West above me, those eyes like smoke, that smart-ass mouth so sure of itself. “Trust me,” he says again, and kisses me.

Then it’s okay.

Way better than okay.

Kissing West is nothing like kissing Nate. His mouth is warm and sure of itself, and it says, Shut up, Caro. Close your eyes. Stop thinking.

Feel.

I do. I can’t not. With West’s mouth on mine, feeling is the only thing I’m capable of.

We kiss. Time passes, and we kiss.

I wish I had words, if only so I could press them into memory. This hot, wet slide of tongue against tongue, soft lips and angled mouths, fitting and refitting. This beautiful pulse, this damp haze, this foggy, hot, yearning ache.

There are more ways to kiss than anyone ever told me, and I want them all.

I get them. I get West, his mouth, his weight, his smell.

We kiss.

The lines we’ve drawn on our bodies aren’t important. They’re just pencil marks we need to put around this thing that’s so big, it could get scary if we let it.

Kissing West is my hands in his hair, on his neck, spanning his shoulders. It’s clutching his back when he plunges his tongue into my mouth, finding his waist, sneaking my hands under his shirt to steal the heat and smoothness of his skin.

It’s his body above me, his chest on me, a heavy crush I can’t get enough of because he’s always been so far away and now he’s here. His palm cradling my head, his fingers curled around my shirt at the shoulder, fisted in a tight grip because they want to wander and he won’t let them.

It’s his pale eyes, a rim of bluish color around huge dark pupils, his eyelashes long and his eyelids sleepy.

It’s the sighing weight of his forehead on mine when he has to breathe.

Lazy heat. Connection. Safety and quiet in a place where I’ve been alone and afraid and the voices in my head have been loud for weeks now. Months. He casts a spell on me, throws me into a gorgeous daze where I could kiss him forever and be perfectly content.

We have fifty minutes.

The thought is fingers snapping in my consciousness. Fifty minutes. How many are left? My lips feel full, bruised, tender and slick. I can’t remember ever kissing this much. Surely I must have, with Nate, in the early months we were dating? But when I think that far back, I mostly remember arguments. We would kiss, and then he would want more and I’d stop him, and he would get distant, huffy, pained.

You don’t know what it’s like, Caroline.

West is carrying his weight on one elbow, his legs and hips off to the side. I don’t know if he’s hard. I haven’t cared, haven’t thought. I’ve been too busy kissing, and I don’t know what it’s like.

Cocktease, the Internet Asshats say, but this time they’re right. I just forgot. I forgot about him.

I break the kiss so I can crane my head around and look at the time on the phone. Ten minutes left. We’ve been kissing for thirty-five, forty minutes, and I haven’t thought. But ten minutes should be long enough, if we need to do something different. Finish West off.

The thought is spiky, uncomfortable.

I ask him, “Are you … ?”

“Mmm.”

He’s mouthing my neck. Paying zero attention to my attempt to question him.

I curl my fingers around the thick leather of his belt. Bring them to the buckle, heavy and threatening.

I pull the leather from the loop.

West’s hand covers mine. “What are you doing?”

“If you’re … you have class, so …”

West rolls away and sits up. He has to duck his head because of the bunked beds. “I have class?”

“I don’t want you to …” I can’t say it. “Forget it.”

He grabs my chin and turns my head and makes me look at him. He won’t let me look away. It’s freaking annoying, and I hate it.

“Trust me,” he says. “I need this to be—need us to do this right. With you talking to me, telling me what you like, nobody trying to just guess or do stuff they don’t necessarily want to. I need it.”

I can’t say no to that. To anything he needs. As much as I hate to, I have to tell him.

“I thought you were maybe uncomfortable. From so much … from kissing me, maybe that was making you … hard, and if we only had a few minutes left before class, I’d better … finish it.”

He sits there, watching me with his eyebrows drawn in. I can’t tell what he’s thinking—if he’s angry or frustrated, confused, or maybe wishing he were somewhere else. With some girl who isn’t such a mixed-up freak.

Then he leans toward me, catches me by the waist, and pulls me into his lap.

He kisses my hair, right by my ear. “He really did a number on you, huh?”

I think about saying, Who? or No, but I’m trembling, and my mouth tastes like battery acid, so, yeah.

Yeah. I guess he did.

“I have to go in a minute,” West says quietly. “I don’t want to. But I have to.”

“I know.”

“I like kissing you, Caro.” He puts his lips to my neck. His arm is wrapped around my back, his hand heavy at my hip. The weight of it—perfect. “You like kissing me?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

His mouth moves down to my shoulder, to the sliver of exposed skin at the neckline of my shirt. To the hollow behind my ear, where his breath makes me shiver. He finds my mouth, and then our lips meet again, hot and wet and perfect, perfect.

“You like that?” His voice is a growl, a low thrum, explicit as fingers between my legs.

“Yes.”

“That’s it, then. You like it. I like it. Beginning, middle, end. There’s no finish. This is the whole thing, right now.”

He’s kissing me again, so I can’t think about whether or not what he said is true. I just wrap my arms around his neck, rake through his hair, outline his ear with my fingertip, and kiss him back. Under the Christmas lights, in our cave. Kisses chasing kisses, hands and mouths.

Everything. Everything.

And then we run out of time. It takes me a second to figure out that the beeping I hear is his phone.

“You set an alarm?”

“Knew I’d never stop otherwise.”

Reluctantly, he pushes me off his lap and reaches for the phone, silencing it. Then he’s standing, adjusting his belt, lacing up his boots.

When he lifts his head, his eyes are sleepy and sexy, his lips stained, color high in his cheeks. Looking at him does something crazy to me, a wet hot clench between my legs, heat spreading outward, upward. I wish I’d gotten his shirt unbuttoned while I had the chance. Seen more of him. Pressed up against his bare skin.

Next time.

God, I hope there’s a next time.

“You coming to the bakery tonight?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Cool. I’ll be back Tuesday. If you want me back.”

“Yeah. I do.”

He retrieves his jacket from the couch and puts it on. When his hand is on the doorknob, he says, “For the record, Caro?”

“Yeah?”

“Hard as a fucking rock.”

He slips out the door, and I’m still smiling at it like an idiot when Bridget comes back from class.

Tuesday.

Fifty minutes.

Outside, the sky is dark. It’s snowing, blowing icy slush sideways, gray and miserable. I’ve put on Bing Crosby just to make West shake his head and pretend to lament my terrible taste in music.

His hair is cold and damp, his nose freezing when he presses it against mine, but his lips are warm. His smile is warmer. We have this dim room, this bed surrounded by color, our feet intertwined, his body pushing down on me.

We have slow, deep kisses that keep getting deeper.

I ruck up his shirt and follow the gully of his spine up. The muscles of his shoulders flex under my hands. I scoot down. My shirt hikes up. We kiss and kiss, and I find a way to wiggle until my bare stomach is touching his.

Do you feel this? Your skin and mine?

Because I feel it everywhere.

I want it. I want you.

I skate my palms up his sides. Over his shoulders, into the inner sleeves of his shirt until I run out of room over his hard biceps. His hips move into my thigh, belt buckle nipping into the top of my leg, and I press my fingernails into his skin and scoot down another fraction, seeking better alignment.

Seeking pressure between my legs.

I want the knowledge of what I do to him, the heat of what we do to each other.

When I get there, he grunts and bites my lip. His eyes are slits, his nostrils flared as he breathes in deep, fast. “Caroline.”

I lift into the ridge of heat in his jeans, loving that I can do this to him. Loving the pressure, the weight, the way his kiss gets darker and more desperate and we move together, synchronized.

It’s not sex. It’s better than sex.

It’s West.

Thursday. I wore this shirt—this joke of a shirt. It’s supposed to fall off at the shoulder. It’s supposed to be layered over another shirt, but I didn’t tell him that, and as soon as we lie down to start kissing, it comes off my shoulder and exposes my bra strap and a little bit of my bra.

Red lace.

Come on, West. Be tempted.

Everything is faster this time. His first kiss is hungry, and I’m glad because I’ve missed him, I’ve missed this, I’ve thought of nothing else for two days. His hands have a desperation in them, sliding up and down, into my hair, back to my arms. Starving.

It’s not enough anymore. These limits he drew on my body, the pencil marks faint. I want more. We both want more.

I don’t have to be sneaky in order to get him between my legs. I tug at his belt, and he’s over me, as hard and hot as I remember him but better. So much better. The way he rears up suddenly to look at me. His eyes in this light, keeping no secrets. My stomach is showing, one bra cup half out, and his hands tremble on my wrists as he pulls them overhead and crosses them on the pillow.

I’ve never felt so desirable. It’s a drug in my veins, a giddy ecstasy that makes me grin at him with well-kissed lips. Makes me powerful.

Do something, I order him with my eyes and the small, restless movements of my hips. Do something, or I will.

He sinks down, hair falling in his face, and kisses me again. He thrusts—really thrusts—and my head tilts back. My whole spine arches up, moving into him. I’m wet, and I want his fingers. I want his whole hand inside my jeans, fumbling into my panties. His mouth on my breasts. I want us to round all the bases, one after another, in the next half an hour.

“Please,” I say.

West breathes against my ear. Licks my earlobe. Bites me. “That is not a shirt.”

I grin at the bunked bed above me. “Please.”

He sits up again. “Take it off.”

Gladly. Gladly I do, and then his hands are just … everywhere.

Everywhere. More than once.

My bra hooks in the front. I show him, helpfully, and then the bra is gone and he’s kissing me again, his shark-bit T-shirt so annoying, his warm palm on my breast. Long fingers. Gorgeous, capable, intelligent hands. He knows exactly what to do. Exactly.

“Take this off,” I say, tugging at his hem, so he does, throws the shirt on the floor, comes back down on top of me, skin-to-skin, naked from the waist up—oh, my God, this is the best thing that has ever happened to anyone in the history of the universe. I slide my hands all over his back. He kisses a trail from my mouth to my jaw, down my neck.

He licks my nipple, and I die. I just die.

We are hands and arms, colored light on smooth skin, heat and sweat in the sweltering dorm room. We are kissing mouths, thrusting hips, building tension between my legs.

“Here, this can’t feel good,” he says, and yanks open his belt, pulls it out of the loops, throws it on the floor. He is a cowboy, his belt a whip. It is the sexiest four seconds of action I have ever witnessed.

I miss the pinch of his buckle into my stomach, but not for long. Not for long, because he touches my breasts. He watches me. He figures out what I like, plucks at that tension with his fingers, presses against my clit just right until I’m openmouthed, gasping, embarrassingly wet. It sneaks up on me, unexpected, because I’ve come before with a guy but never from friction, never through my jeans. Never so easy. I don’t recognize this effortless skip from good to great to unbearably amazing, but West must, because he figures out the angles and pushes himself into me in just the right spot, so hard, so perfect, until I’m coming apart against his hardness and his hands and his mouth, oh, God, his mouth.

When the alarm goes off, I’m still catching my breath, and he’s smiling like I gave him a prize.

I think maybe he gave me one. Not the orgasm, either—although the orgasm was great.

The knowledge that it can be so easy.

He does it again before he leaves, with his thigh between my legs and his mouth on my breasts. He’ll be late for class, I think, but I’m limp and my upper lip is sweating, and he licks right over it when he kisses me goodbye.

He pulls his boots back on and rakes his eyes over me, half naked, half dead from pleasure.

I’ve never felt so beautiful.

It’s the shortest fifty minutes of my life.

The end of the semester arrives, and I’m not ready for it. Back in September, it seemed like an impossible goal—to get through the days, to keep my head up, to keep going. I’m not sure when it stopped being impossible, but I know that the difference has everything to do with West.

It’s finals week, which means no class. No schedule, except for a few in-class exams I have to show up for.

No Tuesday and Thursday morning time with West.

Worse, I won’t see him for an entire month. He’s flying home to Oregon. Dad is taking Janelle and her fiancé and me to St. Maarten for Christmas, and then I’ll be hanging around home, waiting for next semester to start. Last year, I spent most of Christmas break with Nate. Now it’s like this yawning void up ahead—nothing to look forward to, and a lot to cringe away from.

Even though we don’t have class, West has work, of course, so I see him at the bakery, the library, and his apartment. Bridget and I have been hanging out with Krishna and Quinn a lot, and with West, too, when he’s around. The five of us are getting to be kind of a unit.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed being part of a group of friends until I had one again. There’s an unpredictability to it, a potential for fun—or at least for conversation, someone to talk to, something interesting to hear about. When it was just Bridget and me, I would see her in all the same places. We had fun, but I think I was sort of a fortress after August, and we were behind the walls.

Now when I walk across campus, I run into Quinn on the quad. She’s trying to talk me into buying rugby shoes. She’s planning a big party for right after break, and she wants me to help her with organizing. Quinn’s been running the rugby club single-handed since the end of last year. I think she wants to recruit me to the dark side.

I walk out of Latin and see Krishna, and he and I head in the same direction, talking about nothing. TV. What his mom sent him in the mail. What he’s up to for Christmas.

The pictures are still out there, but they’re no longer everything I see when I look around. The first report I got from the service I hired is only a page long, miserly about details. I shrug it off, just happy to have it be someone else’s responsibility.

West fills a lot of the space in my head where the pictures used to be. He crowds out my concentration when I’m trying to review my notes at the library. He pushes his cart past, earbuds in, eyebrows lifted in an understated hello.

I get one look at that smirk and I’m a goner, back in my bed, under the lights. Under him.

I can’t concentrate for an hour.

During our usual Tuesday meeting time, I keep glancing at my bed, surprised by how much I miss him. The next night we hang out at the bakery, and I want to touch him, but Krishna’s there, and I’m not allowed, anyway. Not at the bakery. Not in the library. Not where anyone could see.

I sit in my nook on the floor, flipping through my Latin flash cards, and when I look up he’s staring at me from across the table.

He’s got flour on the bridge of his nose. Dusted over his forearms.

He’s got his jeans and boots on, and he’s measuring ingredients, scraping bowls, emptying fifty-pound bags of flour into the wheeled bin. I can’t stop thinking about this scene I saw in a movie once, where the man and the woman had sex with her sitting at the edge of a table and all their clothes still on, just shoved down out of the way.

It certainly wouldn’t be sanitary, but I have a feeling I wouldn’t care.

“What are you up to after this?” West asks.

It’s toward the end of the shift. Krishna has left. He’s done with his finals already, heading home to Chicago for the holiday.

“I’m going to grab a nap, and then I have my English paper to write still.”

“That’s your last thing, right?”

“Yeah. It’s due Friday.”

“You gonna be able to sleep?”

He means because Bridget’s family will be here to pick her up first thing in the morning. Part of her family—her dad and his new wife, plus some stepkids. The room will be a zoo.

“I hope so.”

“You could crash on our couch,” he says. “Write it over at our place.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. Why not?”

West does the dishes, and I get drowsy. I fall asleep with my head against the leg of the sink, waking once when someone shows up to buy an eighth off West and again later when he drops a pan with a loud clatter.

On the walk to his apartment, I feel drunk. I fall asleep on the couch while he’s taking a shower, barely coming awake when he settles a blanket on me, kisses my temple, and says, “Sleep tight.”

I wake up shivering.

The blanket is a puddle on the floor, the apartment cold. Outside, the snow is blowing, nasty. I think of Krishna in his car and hope he’s okay. But it feels like late morning—he’s probably already home by now.

I reach for the blanket, wrap it around my shoulders, stand up.

I find myself on the threshold of West’s bedroom, still drowsy, looking in at him.

He’s a lump beneath a kids’ comforter, dark blue with rocket ships and planets on it. I asked once if he got it at a yard sale, and he gave me an odd look. “Brought it from home,” he said, as though that’s what we all did. Picked up the comforters off our childhood beds and carried them with us to college.

Everyone else I know works so hard to separate childhood from college, to prove we’re grown up and those years are far in the past. Not West.

It’s not because he’s still a child. I wonder if it’s because he never was.

I can’t imagine West’s childhood. I can’t imagine anything about his life away from here.

There’s nothing much in the room. No decorations. No Christmas lights. No sign that he’s loved or that he loves anything.

It’s not inviting, but it’s Thursday morning. Nine o’clock, according to the display on his alarm clock. I’m barefoot, wrapped in a blue fleece blanket from the couch, and I feel invited.

He invited me.

I walk to his bed and take off my jeans.

I flip back the covers. I climb in behind him.

I put my arm over him, nestling it up beside his arm. Tuck my knees behind his. He’s not wearing pants; his leg hair is ticklish on my thighs, and I wonder briefly if I should be doing this. If he’ll be angry with me for taking a liberty.

But West is the one who made it so we’d be alone, and here we are, on the verge of not being able to see each other for a month.

Mostly I do it because right next to West is where I want to be.

With my head on his pillow, I can feel him breathing, slow and steady. He’s warm and heavy, safe and so dangerously essential.

I close my eyes. He smells like bread and soap.

I drift.

When I wake up, we’ve flipped positions. He’s spooned behind me, and the energy is different.

He’s awake.

All over.

“Caroline.” His voice is low and husky, with an edge to it I’ve never heard.

“Mmm?”

“You’re in my bed.”

“Yeah. You looked cozy.”

“It’s ten o’clock. Thursday.”

I roll to my back. He rolls right on top of me, lifting my arm above my head. Our eyes meet, and then our lips.

The kiss is sleepy, lazy, but insistent. You’re in my bed.

This is how I get kissed if I’m in his bed.

My shirt is just a T-shirt. My bra is boring and white. I could probably use a shower. I have morning breath.

He kisses me like I’m delicious.

He peels off the layers of my clothing as though he’s going to find some fabulous treasure underneath, then strokes his hands over my naked body as if to say, This. This is it. You.

His shirt comes off. He’s gorgeous—tan and flawless, muscular and lean. I lick his biceps. Bite his shoulder. He tastes clean and alive, like everything I want.

In minutes we’re down to his boxer briefs and my panties, and I’m writhing. Actually writhing. It isn’t a thing I knew I was capable of doing, but with West it isn’t even a choice. I have to. Our tongues are at war, my hands on his ass, tugging him closer, closer, always closer.

I’m so wet. Wet through my underwear, I’m sure of it, and the tip of his erection is probing, pushing my panties a few centimeters inside me with the weight of his body and his slow, rolling thrusts. Two thin layers of fabric between us, moist, slippery, insubstantial. Our hips come together in time with our mouths, our tongues, our straining need.

I need him. I need him. I can’t think about anything else. My hands find the waistband of his briefs and slip inside to find the clench of his muscles under my palms.

“Jesus,” he says, with his face against my neck. “Don’t.”

I take my hands away, discouraged. West looks at me. Kisses the wrinkle between my eyebrows, the tip of my nose, my chin, my mouth. “Come on, I didn’t mean it like that. You’re killing me, that’s all.”

“I want to be killing you.”

I want you inside me. Deep. Deeper.

Please.

The words are at the back of my tongue, piled up, and I can’t make myself say them. I can’t ask.

“I want to make you come,” he says.

That would also be excellent.

He strokes his hand up my leg, and I make this sound that’s like a squeak. I guess he likes it, because he kisses me hard. His palm starts over again, sliding from my neck to the cap of my shoulder. It slips over my collarbone to cup my breast and drag slowly over my nipple and then down, down to my waist, to my navel, to the space between our bellies. “I need to touch you.”

“Please.”

He shifts to the side, leaves his thigh slung over mine, his elbow by my arm, his breath at my ear as he caresses my breasts with the back of his hand. Brushes back and forth over my nipples. Traces circles, random patterns, until I’m ready to hurt him because the anticipation is killing me, and I say, “West, please, please,” and he relents. He flattens his hand and slides it slowly—agonizingly slowly—down my stomach. Over my navel. Right to the margin of my panties, which are ridiculous red-and-white-striped cotton with holly berries on them and this cartoon Santa, the least sexy panties I own.