Offensive Behavior

Her head shot up. “No, I can’t. But I’ll stay tonight. She looked at the bed. “This is everything I own. If we don’t get back inside, this is all of it. I have to start again. It’s worse for Cara, she already lost her job this week.”

“I can help you.”

“This is not cab fare. You can’t help. I don’t need your help.”

He took a step back.

“What I need is a hug. What I need is something to drink, a hot shower and your arms around me in bed.”

“What would you like to drink?” It was leaving the room still, but with purpose.

“A glass of milk like when I was a kid. But I want the hug first.”

She stepped up on the bed and faced him. He moved into the room and she leapt at him. He caught her around the waist but he needn’t have. She latched on with her arms and legs and he buried his face in her neck. She smelled of smoke but she wasn’t going to cry and come Monday when they knew more, he’d find a way to help her and Cara that she’d accept. They’d be wise enough together.

He carried her to the kitchen and they sat side by side on stools and drank their milk. She was amused by the stools but she was exhausted as well. He left her to shower in the en suite and used the other bathroom himself, meeting her in bed. She came tumbling into his arms, searching for his lips, pulling at his t-shirt till he doffed it, stripping out of her own until they were skin to skin, just his boxer briefs and her panties between them.

She was draped across his chest and had her hands in his hair. “I want you, but I need to sleep.” She shook his head about as if to shake the notion of sex out of her own head.

“So sleep. I’m not the one who started this.”

“You started it when you arrived on that big sexy chromed-up machine, looking all hungry. When you didn’t forget my bag, when you called the car service. You started it when you didn’t try to manage me. You bought furniture.”

“I sent you an embarrassing picture.”

“Two seconds before I was going to send you a full frontal.”

He pushed hair away from her face to check her expression. “For real?”

“I’ve still got the photo.”

“I get to see that.”

“If you’re good. If you can let me

lie here like a dead fish while you do rude things to me.”

He could so do that.

He rolled them so she was beneath him. “Is there an art to this doing it with a dead fish thing you want?”

She smiled up at him. “No sudden movements. Make me feel good.”

He kissed her neck, smiling into her clean skin when she rolled her head on the pillow to expose it further to him. “Do I get to come?”

“Only if I do.”

“And you’re going to do nothing.”

She let go his shoulders and her arms flopped out to her sides on the bed. “If I fall asleep don’t wake me.”

She didn’t get to fall asleep. She got slow tender kisses, and a languorous exploration of her body with his hands and his tongue that made her moan. She got wet before he tried to make her that way with his fingers. She trembled when he moved inside her and arched her back and her hands clawed in the sheet.

He liked this lesson, because he had the controls totally to himself and she trusted him to make her feel good. He like it because he’d spent all week thinking about her and what he wanted to do with her and he hadn’t come up with this, an achingly slow delivery of pleasure so quietly passionate he thought he might shake apart before she wrapped her legs around him and tightened up from inside out. They went over together and she was asleep in minutes, rolling on her side, pulling on his arm so he spooned up behind her.

She’d lost her home tonight, but he’d share everything he owned and everything he planned on winning back with her, if she’d let him. He’d spent all week thinking about her and he’d never thought of that, but he did now and he went to sleep with new dreams.

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