Then, of course, I imagined him making meals for his women because, well, who went whole hog making a huge, multi-step meal for just themselves? Along with that thought came an intense and almost overpowering jolt of jealousy that was so unwelcome that I had to throw myself into something to distract myself or I would drive myself half-crazy about it.
Seeing as his house was almost freakishly tidy, I set my mind to cooking.
I was a fair cook, having spent endless hours making food for my father when I was younger after my mother died. Him being a bit... traditional (read: chauvinistic) about women's roles in life, that meant it was my job to learn to handle the stove at the tender age of eleven. I had a fair amount of burn scars on my hands as testament to those first awkward, unsafe fumblings. Then, when I was on my own, living in the safe house, I never so much as hooked up my stove. If I couldn't make it in the microwave, I didn't eat it. I was sick of the task.
At Hailstorm, a bunch of the guys and even one or two of the women actually enjoyed the chore and even had more than a little skill at it, so they ended up being the ones who took turns feeding the rest of us.
I had been out of practice for the better part of twenty years but, well, it wasn't exactly something you could forget how to do and I was almost a little tickled to get to do it again... without a man expecting it to be done.
The door opened while I was chopping carrots for the stew I had starting to simmer on the top of the stove, the meat already cooking away in the broth and tomato mixture.
“What smells so good? You order in?” Cash asked and I could hear the sound of my bag hitting the floor in the living room and his boot-clad feet moving toward me. I didn't answer and when he moved into the doorway, he did a slow up-and-down inspection of me standing at his counter, wearing nothing but his tee, my hair in a messy knot at the top of my head, chopping away. “Are you... cooking for me?” he asked, a strange breathlessness in his tone that had my head snapping up to watch him directly, unsure where the inflection came from.
Unsure what to say, I waved the knife casually around. “We needed to eat, right?” I asked, feeling a bit insecure about the whole thing.
“I've never had a woman cook for me before,” he said, watching me with eyes that were too intense and completely devoid of his usual jocular lightness.
“It's not a big deal,” I said, having to look away from him. There was something passing between us and it felt too intimate, too something I didn't quite understand.
I had barely had a chance to get another carrot out of the bag before I felt him move up behind me, as in right behind me, as in... his whole front was against my whole back and he was looking over my shoulder, his chin resting there casually like it was nothing new for us to stand together while I chopped vegetables, like we did it every night of our lives. His hand moved across my belly, pressing in slightly, and I swear the contact shot right between my thighs.
“It is to me,” he said and my brain was racing a million different ways and I had to struggle to remember what he was responding to. Oh, right... me saying it wasn't a big deal. It was a big deal to him? Great. As if I didn't feel insecure enough about doing it.
“Don't get your hopes up. I'm not that great of a cook,” I said, forcing my hands to focus on getting back into motion while I was pretty sure that the last thing I should have been allowed to handle at that moment was a sharpened object.
Cash's head shifted downward and then I felt his teeth sink into the exposed skin on my shoulder which his too-big shirt had slipped to the side to reveal. It was just the barest of bites, but holy hell, I felt it.
Then he moved away to stand next to the pot on the stove, arms behind him, grabbing the counter as he casually watched me work. And I was working, if for no other reason than to not have to look at him.
It was crazy that I was so turned on by him. True, he had given me some really good reasons to be turned on around him after the events of the night before. And, well, let me say one thing: a lot of men could fuck. A lot of men could climb on top of you, slip inside, and plow into you until weren't sure what your own name was anymore. But it took real skill, real understanding of women and how their bodies worked to get them off with oral. Sure, a lot of guys could manage it by sheer dumb luck. The clit was sensitive, you raked over it enough, eventually she's riding the waves. But Cash was in a whole league of his own. Cash ate me like he was a man in famine, like it was the only thing in the world that mattered to him, like it gave him what he needed to go on. He knew when the intensity was bordering on pain, and moved away. He knew when the motion was getting old, and changed directions. He paid attention. And, well, there was nothing like a man who paid attention to a woman's pleasure.
I had never came that hard from oral before. I had a sneaking suspicion that I never would again.
So, yeah, I was having trouble meeting his eye.
“Tell me something no one knows about you,” he said out of the blue, making me narrowly miss slicing off the tip of my forefinger as I startled.