Need? That was a good question. Probably not, but I sure wanted it in the most self-serving way imaginable.
“I don’t have anything warm to drink.” I hugged my arms to my chest.
His grin swelled as his boots gripped my porch steps.
“Where’s your daughter?”
“Friend’s house.” I allowed a matching grin to steal my lips, knowing that once I let it takeover my face, there would be no going back, no erasing it, no acting cool.
His boots kept moving, forcing me back a few steps as he crossed the threshold of my front door.
On a hard swallow, I took three more steps in reverse while he popped off his hat and deposited it on the top of my coat-tree followed by his jacket.
What am I doing? What am I doing?
I feigned confidence as he hunched down to untie his leather hiking boots. I hadn’t had sex for nearly a year. And I hadn’t had sex for the first time with a guy since I was eighteen. And … I had only had sex with one man my whole life.
Did the younger crowd have sex differently? Were certain positions and particular foreplay moves outdated? Yes. Those thoughts went through my head. My kids loved reminding me how ancient I was from the clothes I wore to the words I spoke. And everything they said went over my head. I didn’t speak young person. It took me years to stop calling flip-flops thongs, and apparently videotaping was no longer a thing because there was no longer a tape involved.
No gagging with a spoon.
No barfing out the door.
No more having cows.
And the word grody coming out of my mouth ensured my kids rarely invited their friends over to our house.
“Where are you?”
My gaze snapped up from my mental videotape of forty-something insecurities to find Kael in front of me, towering over my short five-three stature by close to a foot. “Just thinking about the twelve years between us.”
“Why?” His hand snaked around my neck.
I stiffened, releasing a shaky breath. “Because I’m not sure I will …” I covered my face with my hands. “What am I doing?”
He peeled my hands away from my face. “Finish what you were going to say.”
My gaze didn’t quite make it to his face. The pressure of looking in his eyes while saying the embarrassing words was too heavy. “I’m not sure I do things the way you’re used to doing them.” Biting my lips together, I closed my eyes. That sounded ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.
Meadow squeezed between us, and we looked at her between our socked feet. Kael wore a pair of red and gray striped wool socks that made me grin. My socks were wool as well, but light pink and white and super fuzzy.
“This is Meadow.”
“Hey, Meadow. I’m going to fuck your mom. Are you good with that?”
There was that word again. I felt it in a physical way—a quivering feverishness, the palpations and jolt of electricity. It felt wrong and forbidden. Yet coming from Kael’s mouth, I felt those things in the best possible way. The Saturday shaboink girl craved to be fucked by a Good Samaritan with an uncensored mouth.
Kael’s arousal-inducing gaze inched up my body, painting my skin shades of deep pink in its wake.
“You’re shaking.” He leered at me as my gaze bounced off his several times before sticking for more than three seconds.
“I’m being a bad hostess. Can I get you something?”
“You.”
My nerves got the best of me. “Maybe you should make yourself at home while I go upstairs and change my clothes.”
His ear-splitting grin made me feel lightheaded, like a dream. “I don’t think clothes are required.”
“I need to shave … some things.”
“You don’t.”
“I didn’t brush my teeth after dinner.” I cleared my throat as what little confidence I had completely shriveled.
“Turn your brain off.” His fingers deftly unbuttoned my jeans and inched down my zipper, causing massive arrhythmia. “I don’t want you clean and smooth.” His hand made its way down the front of my pants, arresting my breath. “I want you dirty with all your rough, unkept edges. I want a few of the buttons on your shirt to pop off when I'm too impatient to use any sort of dexterity to remove it properly. I want to hear you moan profanities that would make your church friends clutch their pearls.”
I wanted the floor beneath me to open and swallow me whole when he touched me where no other man aside from Craig had touched me. Two of his fingers found their way inside of me, and for a few seconds, I felt horrified, completely wrecked by my emotions and my inability to turn off my brain.
“Shut. It. Off.” Kael dipped his head and stole my lips and my breath. He didn’t ask me how I liked his touch. He didn’t ask me a string of questions that didn’t matter, that only served to magnify his own insecurities.