“Can I put this inside you?” he asked, as he came up for air. I nodded furiously. He reached down and began to tug at my panties. He grew impatient after a moment and dragged them down, fingernails scraping against the soft flesh of my legs.

I was quivering with lust by this point. He let me wait there, dangling himself in front of me like the proverbial carrot. Finally, Landon grinned and bent low, sliding himself inside me in one fluid, perfect motion. I felt myself widen as his shaft pressed inside. It hurt for a moment, but seconds later I was swallowed by pleasure. He fit perfectly.

Off my nod, Landon began to push slowly deeper. It was like my whole body was melting—I might have been made of butter. I took his ass in my hands and began to draw him in deeper; I widened my legs so he could move with more ease.

“Yes,” he cried, rocking faster now. “Oh, God. Oh, God, Ashleigh—your pussy is so tight and wet!”

Once again, I was shocked at my visceral reaction to his dirty talk—seemingly of their own accord, my hands had flown over my head to grip the headboard. Perhaps it was just the fact that he sounded so honest, so plaintive, when he spoke. Or perhaps it was just the fact that he was super fucking hot and I'd been wanting him for months.

I took moments to drink in the contours of his body. He moved with an athlete's grace, no matter how hard he was pounding me. Every muscle, every straining sinew, seemed artfully placed. Yes, every cell in my body seemed to insist. Yes! Take me. Fuck me so hard I forget my own name.

Landon dug his fingers into the meat of my hips, and began urging my body into the same quick time that he kept. The base of my skull thudded against the pine headboard, but I didn't mind the pain. I let my eyes flutter open and closed. I reached down and dug my fingers into my own breast, began massaging myself in time with his thrusts. I looked down and watched his mammoth dick entering me, sliding in and out, sticky and perfect and vast—then I looked up and saw his tender eyes scrunched up with concentration and lust. I tilted my body upward, wrapped my legs around him, and kissed him. I clung to the back of his neck.

“Oh, God!” Landon cried, his breath collapsing against my sweaty neck. His fingers dug into my back, so hard I felt the half-moons of his nails again. Then, I was filled with a sweet warmth. His member seemed to pulse inside me, in one last gasp.

I exhaled, victorious that I'd managed to make him come—but I took one look into my stepbrother's eyes and realized we weren't quite finished yet. He was still panting from release, but with the arch of an impish eyebrow, Landon scurried one muscular hand down the heaving expanse of my body, until two strong fingers had landed on the base of my clit. I shuddered with pleasure on the contact. To my shock, he was still rigid in my pussy.

“I want to make you squirt,” he murmured, voice husky and raw. A spasm of pleasure coursed through me—half the product of his words, half the product of his touch. Slowly but surely, Landon began to rock back and forth again. I felt him stiffening. The concert of movement his whirling fingers made, paired with the thrusting, was nearly too much to bear.

“Jesus,” I murmured, head falling back against the pillows again. I was sweating hard and fast from my temples. Landon reached his free hand across the expanse of my naked chest and began manipulating my other breast with the slow, loping motion he rubbed out on my mound.

“Just like that,” I heard myself say, and soon my hips were bucking, accomplices to the rhythm. Landon sped up. His thumb gently spread my folds, granting him deeper purchase into my wet heat. He rubbed and rubbed, faster and faster. I clawed at the bed below me like someone possessed.

“Yes,” Landon said, his voice firm, all command. As if by his own instruction, his cock began to push deeper and deeper. I was hovering on the tip, in a way I never had before. No boy, no vibrator, no memory had ever made me feel this good.

“Oh, FUCK!” I cried, pressing my shoulder blades into the damp bedspread. In one swift arc, my breasts tumbled forward—all the better for Landon's grip. I felt my legs part of their own accord—wider, I figured, than they ever had before. His fingers were racing one another now, roving in faster and faster circles. I opened my eyes for a split second to drink in his gyrating, taut body. The muscular span of his arms, hovering over me. The threads of chest hair spiraling down his perfect abs into the thatch of his magnificent cock.

I felt my legs tense, my eyes bulge. With a screech and a shiver, I came, clenching and releasing all at once—and yet again, we were flooded with the sweetness of our mingled juices.

The bed was tiny, and we both seemed to be expanding like bread—our lungs seemed to require huge gasps just to recover all the spent air. In the ensuing silence, I thought I heard the footsteps of a tentative roommate, out in the hall. At this, I started laughing.

“Oh, he owes me,” Landon whispered, tilting his sweaty face so he spoke directly into my ear. His morning stubble tickled. We tittered together, until the laughter snowballed into a full-on guffaw-fest. He would smile, and I would smile, and then we'd start up hooting like goblins again.

After the goofing had subsided, Landon rolled over and drew his index finger from the pearl of my sternum down my shaking body, passing first my breasts, then my belly, then the damp expanse of my lower body. His touch was light and sweet. Had my eyes been closed, I might have thought it was wind, or a feather. I turned to look him straight in his deep brown eyes and felt nothing but incredible peace.

“I'm glad we did this,” he said. Then, just as quickly, rolled his eyes. “Gah—I'm sorry. Is that super lame? Something a Dad would say?”

“You're not lame, Landy.”

“Glad you think so, Doll.” His eyes blinked slowly as he spoke my silly nickname. I leaned over and kissed him on the nose.

 “So,” Landon finally ventured, after a few dozy minutes had passed. “Did I live up to the hype?”

I reached across the tiny bed until I'd grabbed hold of a striped pillow. Then, I thwacked my stepbrother neatly across the face.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Landon

“What the fuck are you smiling about?” Clay murmured, through gritted teeth. It took a second to snap back down to earth. I shrugged, then waved away my buddy's attentions. A whole pile of MYOB, Clay.

“Boys, I know y'all have been paying close attention to your coach,” came the then-unwelcome voice of Special Teams Coach Yeardley, a tall, oily, skeleton-like man with bad teeth and a comb-over. “He's been talking about the scouts coming to watch the A & M game tomorrow. But then, because you're a useful and contributing member of the Longhorn community, you must know all about that. Landon.”

I wanted to throttle the sucker, but instead I nodded, tightly. As soon as Yeardley had wandered farther afield Clay raised his eyebrows at me, in a way I knew contained sympathy but also a willingness to lend our coach a break. His sarcasm hit a chord, after all. For assorted reasons, I had been super distracted the past seven days—or specifically, all the days leading up to the big A & M game, the one that would allegedly decide my future in the NFL. Or outside of it.

For starters, just about every minute I hadn't spent in practice these past few days had been spent with Pop. After Anya had decided she didn't want to press charges about the beating, Carson and I got together and had a pow-wow. Missus Bohemia herself had given me the names of a few anger management counselors she knew, several of whom had connections to the VA and would be willing to work with Pop on his insurance plan. “Landon, you have to do something about this,” she'd told me, when I'd protested. I was still so mad at the geezer that it seemed just as well that he be sent off to a funny farm. But Carson, something of an amateur shrink herself, had convinced me that I'd feel guilty forever if I abandoned the old man full-out in his time of need. She even got me to talk about some of my childhood shit with the Pastor, which was surprisingly freeing. It's not like I'm going to sign up for group therapy anytime soon or anything, but I must say—it did feel good to talk.