He does it again and again, until I’m shivering, shaking, until I’m crying out his name as tears of need roll down my face. I’m all but sobbing now, my whole body shuddering beneath him, and he lifts his head for a second to look at my face. To check in and make sure I’m still with him.
I’m not sure what he sees there, but it must be what he was looking for because he ducks his head and starts the same torture on my other breast even as he pinches my first, overworked nipple between his thumb and forefinger.
It’s so much—too much, even, and I push him away as the tension, the need, continues to build inside me. “Stop,” I gasp, even as my fingers tangle in his T-shirt, keeping him from moving back too far.
“What do you need, sweetheart?” he murmurs, one hand coming up to stroke my cheek as the other continues to play with my nipple.
“God, Shawn, stop!” I can feel myself careening out of control and it startles me, scares me, has me clinging to sanity with bruised and battered fingertips. I shove him more forcefully this time and his head snaps back, his eyes meeting mine. There’s a question in them now, and genuine concern as he searches my face. When he takes a few deep, shuddering breaths, it occurs to me that he’s trying to get himself under control. That he thinks I want him to stop for good. I don’t. I just need a second to breathe, to think.
“Are you okay?” he asks, and I nod, my throat too tight with need to speak.
I’m balanced precariously on the edge of the table, ass half in the air and legs wrapped around his hips for balance. With another guy I’d be all freaked out, waiting for him to drop me. But I trust Shawn to hold me up, even as I squirm against him and start tugging at this T-shirt. It takes a couple of seconds to untwist it from between us, but once I do I strip it over his head in one fluid movement.
Then I’m too busy looking at him to remember to drop the thing. He’s so beautiful, so freaking beautiful, with his powerful athlete’s body and the scars he doesn’t even try to hide.
His chest is smooth and sculpted, packed with muscles and so hard it makes my mouth water with the need to taste him again. To run my tongue over the long, lean muscles of his sides and shoulders. To kiss my way across the heavy thickness of his pecs before taking first one nipple and then the other in my mouth.
He groans at the first touch of my lips on his skin, his hand moving to cup the back of my neck and hold me in place. It’s such a proprietary hold that it should freak me out, should have me breaking away, but instead I just give myself up to it. To him.
But just because I let him guide me doesn’t mean I don’t have some tricks of my own, and as he presses my mouth to his skin, I sink my teeth into his pec. He stiffens, curses, but his cock twitches against my sex, and he doesn’t pull away. It’s all the encouragement I need, so I swirl my tongue over the small hurt before biting him again. And again.
His reaction is explosive, immediate and desperate—so desperate. Almost as desperate as I am to feel his mouth on me. To feel him inside me. He thrusts his hand into my hair, then yanks none too gently until I’m sitting up and we are face-to-face.
My first glimpse of his eyes has me gasping, growing wetter. His gaze has gone midnight black—his pupils blown wide with lust as they turn his normally calm and caring eyes dark and dangerous and oh-so-tempting. I can see his need for me flickering in the depths of his eyes, as well as the razor-thin edge of control that he’s walking. One look tells me how close he is to the edge, warns me that—like me—he’s hanging on by his fingertips.
There’s a part of me that wants to back off, that wants to see what happens if I let him stay on that edge of his control for a little longer. But seeing him like this, pushed so close to the edge because of me—because he needs me, the same way I need him—is everything I want and more than I thought to ask for.
I never realized how easy hiding was before this, never realized how easy it is to use my security blanket as a shield between me and all the messy feelings and experiences that come my way. Shawn ripped that blanket—that shield—away in one fell swoop. But as I look at him, as I hold him and kiss him and prepare to take him inside of myself, I can’t feel sorry for it. I’m smart enough to know it’s going to hurt when this is over, smart enough to know I’ll have to fight to feel safe again. But right now, that doesn’t matter. Nothing does but making Shawn feel as good as I do right now.
Because there’s something in knowing I’m not alone, in knowing—really knowing—that he’s right here with me, that makes okay even the desperate maelstrom of need roiling inside me.
I lick my lips, watching as his eyes follow my every movement like I’m his salvation. I do it again and revel in the groan he doesn’t even try to hold back. Then I do it once more, this time allowing my tongue to linger on my lower lip as I use my eyes to make all kinds of promises that I have every intention of keeping.
He reaches for me then, slides his hands down my neck before resting his palms against my collarbone and his fingers against the pulse points at the base of my throat. It’s an intimate hold, and a dominant one. I’ve never let anyone touch me like that before in my life, never even imagined that I would want to. But there’s something powerful in giving Shawn that right, something powerful in letting myself trust someone—letting myself trust him—enough to allow it. The fact that every part of me is saying it’s okay, that he won’t hurt me, tells me more about how I’m starting to feel about him than I’m ready to admit.
But that doesn’t mean I want him to back off, because I don’t. And I sure as hell don’t want him to stop.
I’m not sure what all this says about me, about him, about us—if there even is an us—and right now I don’t actually care. Not when the heat we’re generating has lightning crackling between us, ripping into my body. Burning through my veins and muscles. Tearing at my soul. Touching, destroying every defense I had until Shawn is all I can think of, and all I want.
His other hand is still on my breast, and the tug of his fingers on my nipple is only making me crazier. I lean forward, press my lips to his with a desperation I never thought myself capable of feeling. I’m the one who is always in control, the one who always looks before she leaps, thinks before she acts. Yet now, here, with him, all I can do is feel. And all I feel is need.
Suddenly our clothes are too much of a barrier between us. I want us naked, want his athletic shorts out of the way and my yoga pants on the floor as he slides himself deep inside me. Everything I am pulses at the idea, my sex aching emptily even as my hands move to tug at his shorts.
“Take them off,” I tell him as I rip my mouth from his. Take them off, take them off, take them off. It’s my new mantra now, as desperation overtakes me and I buck and twist against him in an agony of tortured desire.
“Soon, I promise,” he whispers in between kisses to my neck, my shoulder, the tips of my breasts. “Just relax, sweetheart. I’ve got you. I’ve—”
“Now!” The word tears itself from my throat, as I rip at the top of my own pants in an effort to bare myself to him completely. It hurts, this need I have for him. This emptiness that’s burning inside of me begging to be filled. “I need you now.”
“Fuck. Okay. Fuck.” He pulls away and I whine, my hands grabbing for him even as he yanks my pants and underwear down my legs and throws them behind him. Then he’s fumbling with his own shorts as I watch him with a desperation I don’t even try to hide.
His eyes are wild and his hands are shaking as he yanks them over his hips and lets them pool on the floor at his feet. “Shit,” he mutters, pressing close to kiss me again. And again. And again. “I need to get a condom.”
“In my bag,” I tell him, looking wildly around for it. I dropped it when he grabbed me and— “There. It’s over there. Left side pocket.”
He pushes me back on the table, makes sure I’m not going to fall. Then makes a mad dash for my backpack, tearing into the side pocket like it holds the key to his salvation. And maybe it does—God knows, it feels like having Shawn against me, inside me, is the only thing that will keep me sane right now.
I nearly cry with relief when he finds the condom Emerson put there months ago when she was trying to talk me into having a little fun, coloring outside the very rigid lines of the life I’ve built for myself. I ignored her at the time, even laughed at her, but right now—as I watch Shawn rip it open and sheathe himself—I couldn’t be more grateful.