Family Ties (Morelli Family 4)

She seems legitimately surprised. “No?”

My eyebrows rise and I look down at her. She’s frowning a little, like I’ve said something legitimately confusing. “Well, no.”

“Why?”

I don’t really know how to answer that. “Uh… well, you haven’t had many partners. Generally women don’t get into that with their first sexual experience. I guess I assumed Dead Man Walking was your only lover?”

Nodding a little as her hand skates absently across my chest, she says, “He was. That’s how he…” She pauses. “I just thought that was part of giving a standard blowjob. I have fancier skills than that, but you were too aroused and it’s easier to do when I’m on my knees. I would’ve done it earlier, but I thought we were going to have sex, so…”

I can’t even find any words to respond to this. My expectations of Francesca’s oral capabilities were so low, and the reality is so far in the opposite direction. From a purely selfish perspective, I couldn’t be happier about all this. But considering what she said earlier about needing alcohol to get through sex, basically, I’m hesitant to be too jubilant.

I also have no fucking idea how to ask about it. If any of the women I’ve ever been with before had any kind of sexually inflicted mental damage, they never told me about it. It would’ve been kinda weird if they did, all things considered, but this is Francesca. It’s probably a little unfair for all the women before her to think she’s the only one that matters, but, well, she is. The shift in my interest with her is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before, but it’s hit me so naturally I don’t even care to question it.

“Do you like doing it?” I finally ask.

At first I don’t think she’s going to answer me. She’s still tracing shapes on my chest with her finger, dragging her finger tip in little swirls. I want to put it in my mouth. I want her in my mouth, but I’m too unsure of her response to try it. As much as I want to give her back the pleasure she just gave me, this is maybe the first time in my life it’s seemed like that might not be welcome. I don’t want to set off her nerves again, so maybe I should just wait.

Finally Francesca answers me. “It’s stressful. It wasn’t especially easy to learn, because every time I would fuck it up he would get pissed off at me and just… jam it. I couldn’t breathe sometimes. Like, he pushed himself so far and intentionally cut off my oxygen as a consequence for fucking up, and it was always awful. I threw up once. Another time I couldn’t breathe for so long I thought I was going to die like that, and I thought, wow, what a humiliating way to go.” As she says this horrible fucking shit to me, she smiles wryly and shakes her head.

It’s hard to believe I was so relaxed just seconds ago, because now I’m so taut with anger that I feel like I’m going to snap.

“It was worse if I stopped though, so I just had to get good at it. I mean, it’s hard to actually know if you’re good at it, so you just have to pay attention to the feedback to know if you need to adjust. And even though I didn’t expect you’d get mad at me, I still kind of expect it mentally, so it’s stressful. It’s not your fault it’s stressful,” she says, glancing up at me. “It’s just how I was trained.”

And now the motherfucker has ruined blowjobs for me. I have a blowjob queen in my arms, and I can’t even fucking appreciate it.

I’m going to find out who this motherfucker is. If she won’t tell me, I’ll find out myself. And when I do, I’m going to fucking kill him—whether Mateo likes it or not.

Chapter Eleven

Waking up is never my favorite thing to do, but trying to convince myself to get out of bed when Francesca is curled up against me is literally impossible.

The conversation goes something like, “You know, you actually do have work to do today. So you actually do need to book tickets to fly your ass home, because if you don’t show up where you’re supposed to be this afternoon, you’re going to draw attention and your dad’s going to start wondering why all of a sudden you’re so fucking distracted. Then he might have one of his guys look into it, and it’s going to take all of a day for him to figure out you have something going on with a Morelli. From there, all Hell is going to break loose. Get your lazy ass out of bed and circumvent certain disaster.”

But Francesca is comfortable. If I move, I’ll wake her up.