I am totally fucking ruined.

I can barely keep my hands beneath my thighs on the chair when she pulls away, licking her lips.

“I kissed you,” she whispers.

My voice shakes: “I thought we weren’t allowed to do that.”

With a tiny one-shouldered shrug, she whispers, “I think I’m going to do it again.”

My pulse is hammering so hard, I can barely manage an “Okay.”

When she comes back, I groan, pulling my hands free and so desperate for the taste of her that I stretch forward, meeting her halfway with my palms cupping her face. It’s explosive: the feel of our skin touching just here. I perceive the kiss in every tiny hollow part of me, filling me up with her sweetness, and lust, and abandon. I want to devour Lola, but this first series of kisses is remarkably gentle. Aimless. Everything wild and tense is held in our muscles: in the tight clench of my quads under her ass, and my hands barely holding her face. In her hands in fists in the shirt at my shoulders, her legs trembling over me. It feels like sex, the way she’s kissing me, the way her tongue slides across mine, but slower, and infinitely more innocent.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I murmur into her mouth. “I’ve wanted this for so long.”

The words cause her to tense and she sits back, blinking slowly. “Will this mess everything up?”

I move my hands from her face and rest them, carefully, on the outside of her thighs. “It can make everything better. We can do whatever you want.” I stretch to kiss her again, repeating, “Whatever you want. We can put on a movie and relax. We can stay here and kiss. We can play some more cards.”

The clock in the hall must tick at least a hundred times before Lola speaks.

“I don’t want to stay out here and play cards.”

My lungs have evaporated. “Okay,” I agree.

“Or watch a movie.”

I nod, choking on my own breath. “Whatever you want, pet.”

“And I don’t want to just kiss.” She stands, pulling me up with her. We’re so close my exhales puff against her hair as she stares, wide-eyed, up at me.

Her hand comes down the inside of my arm, fingers curling with mine, and she turns, tugging me down the hall.

Chapter

NINE

Lola

I’VE ONLY BEEN in Oliver’s room one other time—when he was fixing something in the garage and needed me to grab his phone from his dresser—but I didn’t take the time to look around and take in how he’d put his secret space together. That time, it felt too personal to be in his sanctuary; I located the phone and dashed out. Back then, too, I hadn’t really let the enormity of my feelings sink in. We were still Just Friends. Being in his room wasn’t intense because he would be naked here, or sleep here. It just felt like a level of personal that Lola + Oliver didn’t do.

But right now—after that perfect kiss, after the feel of him rock hard beneath me, and knowing what we’re about to do in this room—my heart is a banging drum in my ear.

This is really happening.

I’m not dreaming.

Oliver’s hand is wrapped around mine, the memory of his mouth still makes my lips tingle, and his bed is mere feet from where we stand. It’s on the far side of the room, near the window that overlooks the ocean, which is a couple of blocks away. His window is open and it smells like salt water and ocean air and the clean pine scent of his laundry detergent.

I lead him over, and with a shaking hand pull back the covers and carefully slide in. His sheets are clean, the cotton cool beneath my back, and it makes my skin feel charged. Oliver watches me turn and lie down, and waits only a moment before he moves, slowly prowling over me and settling between my legs. His expression is so full of wonder when he looks down at me; it gives me a dizzying rush of power. He wants this as much as I do. I knew it, because he’d told me, but until just tonight, I didn’t truly believe.

The cold of the sheets is gone in only seconds and I’m too warm in an excited, frantic sort of way; the prick of sweat rises on my neck, down my chest. My nipples feel swollen and sensitive, and the heat of his skin when I rub against him pulls a soft gasp from my mouth.

“Lola.” My name is an urgent whisper on his lips, and I reach up, pulling his glasses from his face. He takes them from me and slides them onto the nightstand with so much caution that I wonder if he also feels so deliberate in every movement, it’s like moving through water.

“There,” I say when he turns back to me.

While my eyes adjust to the darkness of his room, I let my fingertips trace the outline of his face, the sharp line of his jaw. He’s angles and slopes; his skin is smooth along his cheeks, rough along his jaw. I stretch into him, pressing my bare chest to his, and Oliver lets out a shaking groan, sliding his hand down my side, along my thigh to my knee, where he pulls my leg over his hip. Beneath the denim of his jeans, his cock is rigid against me, and I feel the shape of it as we press together and apart, together and apart, rocking.

“You sure?” he whispers.

“I’m sure.”

The panel shows them prone, entwined, afire.

My breaths are violent jerks sucked in by necessity and pushed out by a wild beast in my chest. I’m completely naked except for the cotton of my underwear, and I relish the scratch of the denim on the soft skin of my thighs, but I want to feel him. The warmth, the skin, the tickle of hair. While his mouth plays along my neck, to my collarbone, and over the top swell of my breast, I slip my fingers between our bodies, unfasten his jeans, and work them as far as I can down his hips. I feel the rumbling groan in his chest before I hear it. He rocks his hips forward, making me gasp sharply when he presses himself—now only in his boxers—directly against my clit.

Oliver bends to move his mouth up my neck in a hot trail of teeth and lips. “Holy fuck, Lola—”

He cuts himself off when his mouth finds mine already open and searching for his, and I know the second I taste him that we’re skipping the slow exploration. His lips are soft and strong, sliding with mine so urgently we quickly grow messy—teeth grazing and chins captured in the hunger of it.

Want hits me like the lash of a whip, propelled by adrenaline. I grip the back of his neck, urging him to kiss me harder, to touch me. The sound I make when his thumb slides across my nipple is nearly one of pain; it pulls every nerve ending into a tight bunch, stroking me into fire, and he does it again, and again, in small, pressing circles. My heart pounds beneath his hand as he holds me there for his mouth and bends, sucking wetly . . . biting sharply . . . and his hips press forward and back, pushing himself right up against my clit until I’m scratching at his shoulders trying to get his weight to push me into the mattress, push my legs farther apart, push into me.

I tickle my fingers down his stomach, feeling both frantic and terrified.

“Yeah. Touch me,” he begs into my open mouth.

I slip my hand inside and gasp at the warmth. He’s urgent in my grip and exactly how I imagined he would feel: silken skin wrapped tight around iron and fire. Oliver’s face falls in relief as I stroke him, gently slipping his foreskin down and up, over the crown, and he begins to move, forward and back, lips distracted and hungry over mine.

The last eight months have been the slowest, most torturous foreplay, and there’s a fever beneath my skin that makes me impatient, lets me release him only long enough to push his boxers down far enough for him to kick them and his jeans the rest of the way off.

He’s unable to remain still over me, stubbly jaw razing across my sensitive nipples as he kisses down my ribs, under my arm, teeth scraping over my bicep as he rocks into my hand.