ANNIE

Take off your clothes.

The words ignited inside of me, burning away what was left of my reservations.

“No,” I said, the courage coming from I had no idea where.

He lifted his eyebrow, flares of color showing up on his cheeks, because he wasn’t expecting me to say that. And he liked it.

Dylan always liked it when I said no.

More fire. More courage. I did not recognize myself in this moment.

“No?”

Instead of answering, I sat down on the leather chair facing him. It was big, that chair, and it practically swallowed me whole. His eyes burned into me and I leaned back, spreading my legs. Slowly, making sure he saw everything. That his eye tracked every twitch of my fingers. I lifted my hand from beside my hip to touch my stomach and then the top edge of my shorts.

I could feel the heat of my pussy on the tips of my fingers.

With one hand Dylan swept all the stuff off the ottoman, magazines and a book. The television remote. It all clattered to the floor, but I didn’t jump. His eyes held me pinned to the chair. He sat down on the ottoman, facing me, so close our knees touched. So close I could smell him.

“Show me what you’ve been doing,” he said. “Show me what you’ve been doing all alone in your trailer.”

My fingers slipped down over the fabric between my legs. My fingers curled and I scraped my short, blunt nails against myself. My eyelids flinched with the pleasure/pain.

“Good pain?” he asked.

“You were right,” I whispered. “It does exist.”

He clenched his hands around his kneecaps. And I imagined he wanted to grab me and was stopping himself, and that restraint…God, it was so sexy. And I wanted more than anything in the world at this moment to break that restraint. To test it, over and over again, until he snapped.

“What else do you like?” he whispered.

I pushed the palm of my hand harder against my pussy and arched into it, rolling my hips against the pressure.

“I like that,” I said, biting my lip.

“Take off your shorts,” he said.

I shook my head, smiling at him.

“You,” I told him.

He reached for me with big, thick hands, calloused and nicked. Scarred not by the fire, but by the usual things. Life things.

I held my breath, waiting for their touch. It seemed in that moment I’d been waiting for his touch forever. My whole life. He grabbed hold of the bottom edges of my shorts, his hands brushing over the tops of my thighs in the process, and I gasped. His eyes lifted to mine and he stroked his thumb against my leg again.

I felt that touch inside my skin.

Dylan was touching me. And I read some kind of surprise in his face.

After all this time, we were touching.

After another second he yanked the shorts down my legs, revealing my old bikini underwear. The blue ones with the white flowers.

God. It had to be this underwear.

The elastic bit into my skin and red hair curled over the edges.

“You’re a redhead,” he whispered, touching those curls, and then he touched the underwear, right over my core. Right where I ached. “You’re wet.”

“I’m…” on fire, dying. Hurting.

Unable to wait, unable to do this at his pace, I slipped my fingers beneath the tight blue crotch of my underwear, and we both looked down to see the rolling edges of my knuckles as I made my way down to my clit.

“Spread your legs wider,” he whispered and I complied. I lifted my knees, bracing my feet against the edge of the cushion.

“You are so fucking gorgeous,” he said, his eyes moving over my body. My shoulders. My breasts. My hand between my legs.

Dylan watching was hotter than I’d expected, hotter, almost, than I could take, and I squeezed my clit between my fingers.

“Does that feel good?” he asked.

I nodded, squeezing it harder and then letting it go. In time with my heartbeat.

Slowly, he reached forward and touched the top trembling edge of my breast, just where it rose above my camisole. Just his finger there across that small curve.

I jumped. Startled, shocked even. His eyes were locked on mine and I couldn’t look away. My fingers under my panties slipped farther, lower, until I was inside of myself, reaching deep and high and as hard as I could.

That had always felt good. Always been enough. But somehow with his eyes on me, with his hand on my breast, it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

“Dylan…” I breathed, hoping he’d understand and he’d just do it. Just push my hands out of the way and take over. That’s what I needed him to do, because the things I did alone in my trailer, they weren’t enough. Not nearly enough.

“You can do it,” he said, cupping my whole breast in his hand, his thumb right over the hard edge of my nipple.

“But I want you.”

His face was flushed. Blotchy, almost. His jaw as hard as granite.

“I want you to fill me up,” I whispered.

But all he did was press my nipple between his thumb and finger and pinch it, slowly building up the pressure until I groaned. Until I felt like I was being pulled into pieces.

“More,” I begged. “More…”

“Keep going,” he told me, and I lifted my hips up off the chair.

“Dylan—”

“This is what you get,” he breathed. “All you get right now.”

Oh God. Fuck him. My face twisted and I lifted my other hand, using both between my legs, keeping up that heartbeat on my clit, and slipping two other fingers inside of myself.

Between the look on his face and my hands between my legs I was lost in the pleasure, swept up in some kind of endless tide, and then he squeezed my nipple as hard as I could take it, as if he knew the very specific calibrations of pain and pleasure in my body, and I screamed. I screamed and arched up off that chair.

The orgasm went on and on. Until finally I collapsed back against the leather. Boneless and strange. Different.

I opened my eyes and found him watching me and tenderness unspooled in my chest. Something living and vibrant, a wild…affection for him.

It was startling and awful. The wrong thing at the wrong time. And I felt myself flinch away from his eyes. Away from his touch.

“Annie?”

I took a breath, another, trying to rein myself in. Find my footing.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Best one yet,” I said with a wide, ecstatic smile, hoping he wouldn’t look past it at the strange panic I was feeling.

It’s just the sex, I told myself. You’re all twisted up because it feels so good and he helped you get it. That’s all it was.

I really, really wanted to believe that. But somehow, nearly naked in front of him, the air between us smelling like sex, I couldn’t…couldn’t commit to it.

He was staring at me, as if he could see what I was thinking, read my thoughts like a book. I put my feet back on the floor, shifting so my underwear wasn’t cutting up into me.

“Maybe,” I whispered, my voice still shaking. Sweat still dripping down from my hairline. “I should—”

He fell down onto his knees between my legs and reached an arm around my hips and pulled me hard against him.

I squeaked, startled. That soft wet place between my legs, still pulsing with blood, twitching still with pleasure, was tight up against the hard length of his erection in his jeans. He dropped his hand down to my ass and pushed me harder against him.

“Feel that?” he asked.

My mouth dry, my brain dumb, I nodded.

“Every time I talk to you, that’s how I get,” he said.

He ground us together and I flinched and gasped at the same time.

“Sore?” he asked me, and pushed back slightly like he was ready to give me a second. But his eyes said only a second.

He brushed his thumb over the damp crotch of my underwear and I flinched again, but not as hard.

“Just…sensitive,” I said.

“I thought listening to you come was hot,” he told me, his thumb tracing circles and circles around that damp spot, making it grow.