“What the hell do my parents have to do with this?” He barely opens his lips to let the words out.
I shake my head sadly. “You don’t even see the parallel, do you?”
“There isn’t one.” Rhyson’s eyes harden. “How can you compare me doing that for you to what my parents did to me?”
“It’s not what you did, it’s that you took away my chance to do it for myself. That you took away my choices. It’s as much a control move as what they did to you.”
“That’s not true.” Rhyson’s eyes go from hard to soft in a few blinks. “I don’t want to control you. I want to be with you. I want things to be easier for you so you can focus on your career.”
“My career. My life. My responsibilities. So maybe you’re right.” I place a hand on his chest, looking up to study his face. “I don’t want to need you.”
“Well, I need you.” He pulls both my hands into one of his over his heart. “I think about you as soon as I wake up and before I go to sleep. I want to call you whether I find out I’m performing in Times Square or if I beat Marlon at Madden. Little things, big things. It doesn’t matter.”
His voice falls so far, I’m leaning into him to catch his next words.
“I want to share everything with you. I want to kiss you all the time. I want to kiss you right now.”
I shouldn’t have come. All the things I felt and fought, the things I suspected he felt too, he just spewed all over me. And as much as I want to be, I’m not sure I’m ready. I’ll never forget seeing my Mama in bed for days after Daddy left. And even though she got up, I suspect a part of her never left that bed, but just stayed there, waiting. We had to leave the house where she grew up and where I spent my first years, because Daddy left us with nowhere to go. Mama learned to stand on her two feet, and I’ve done the same. I just didn’t count on Rhyson sweeping me off of them.
“We’re obviously on different pages about this.” I pull my hands free and turn to leave, but he steps in front of me, blocking my grand exit. “Let’s talk later.”
“Enough talking.”
The heat of his body grabs me before his hands do. He traps my chin between two fingers, taking my mouth in a paradox of rough and tender. I want to move. To slide away from his body pressing me into the pool table. But I can’t. Not with his hand caressing my back. Not with his tongue in my mouth. Not with his erection pressing into my stomach. I can’t. I won’t. I have been denying myself this, and I’m so damn hungry. My mouth opens under his, ravenous and wet and hot. His groan vibrates against my lips.
“Yes. Good God, yes, Pep.” His words slip down my throat.
I strain up on tiptoes, clawing my fingers into his dark hair, forcing him closer. He lifts me onto the pool table, planting himself between my knees. His fingers skim my bare thigh, working up my leg until he reaches a damp patch of silk. He pushes my panties aside, rubbing his hand into the wet flesh there before sliding one long finger and then another inside of me. I rock into these fingers which have awed millions with their skill. They own me. I’m the instrument in his hands. He’s playing me. Plucking at me. Strumming me.
He tugs at the wide neck of my sweater until it falls away from my shoulder, slipping his hand in and cupping my naked breast. He brushes his fingers over my nipple, and I lose my mind and every inhibition. My head flops back and I stretch my legs wider, offering him anything he wants.
“Are you kidding me?” His question burns the vulnerable curve of my neck as he drags his lips to my shoulder. “You come here wearing no bra and think I won’t . . .”
He abandons the words, his dark, untidy head disappearing under my sweater, and before I have time to regain even millimeters of sanity, my nipple is in his mouth and he’s suckling me. Not gentle. Not soft. My breasts are so small, he almost eats me whole. Every draw, every suck, every bite sends a power surge to my core until my knees hold his hips in a desperate grip, and my nails rake across the flat surface of the pool table behind me.
His mouth at my breast. His fingers inside me. His clean scent surrounding me. I have nowhere to hide anymore. I am exposed. I want to spread myself wide open for him. That voice that has been telling me I can’t rely on him. I can’t trust him. I can’t need him—that voice is stunned into silence by his thorough possession of my body, by the inferno between my legs, blazing a hole right through my soul and scorching my heart.
His hands push at the sweater from inside, urging my arms above me until it is over my head and discarded on the floor. The cool air embarrasses me, reminds me how little I have to offer up top. I scoot forward, covering my breasts and ready to bolt before he’s disappointed, but he presses one wide palm to my chest, pushing my hands aside.
“Let me look at you.” His eyes are so hot on my neck, shoulders, nipples, that heat simmers under my skin. “Damn, you’re beautiful, Pep.”
“I’m tiny.” I drop my eyes to my knees. “Are you a breast man?”
“I’m your man.” His finger traces one pert nipple until it tightens and strains forward. He tips up my chin, holding my eyes with his. “At least I want to be.”
He pushes me back until I’m laid out on the pool table, knees apart, arms flung over my head, bare nipples pointed up and in the air. He flips the skirt up over my stomach and tugs at my panties until they slip past my ankles. Before I have time to think of a way out, his fingers spread me. He tucks into the juncture at my thighs and kisses away the last of my resolve. I’m not going anywhere.
He is relentless. He bites my clit. Oh, God. No one has bitten me like that before. He licks and mouths and slides his tongue inside of me. Everything flammable below my waist incinerates, and the world goes dark before light bursts behind my eyelids. My toes clench, the muscles in my legs tighten, and I release a scream that punches a hole into the silence around us.
His breath comes heavy. His hands move quickly, urgently, sliding on a condom. He braces his hand on the table over my head. He’s going to—
“Ahhhhhhhh.” That’s me. Losing my breath as he slides inside. He pushes in slowly, savoring every inch of me he possesses along the way. He’s so thick. I’m so full. It’s too much, almost more than I can take, but my body is greedy for him.
“Okay?” He looks down at me, his forehead clumped into a frown. He’s holding back. “Pep, are you okay?”
I’m not okay. I’ve lost so much of myself to him already, and I don’t know how I will fix this. I only know I need him moving inside me. Taking me. I push my hips into him, and he groans, his eyes scrunching closed.
“Pep, you’re so tight.” He leans up, eyes pinning me to the table. “This feels . . . ahhhhh. Fuck.”
His strong thrusts scoot me up the table. I hook my ankles around his waist to lock us together and I receive him. I keep my eyes open as long as I can, watching his full bottom lip clamped between his teeth. Watching his face fight the pleasure engulfing both of us. I watch until his mouth drops open and his head falls back and his neck strains against the avalanche of sensation. I can’t watch anymore because I’m coming again myself. Toppling over this precipice into the inescapable pleasure I’ve denied myself for weeks. For months. For what feels like forever.
He leans down, dusting kisses over my bare shoulders and up my neck until he whispers in my ear.
“I didn’t want our first time to be like this, Pep. On a pool table.” His smile warm and tender, he pushes the heavy hair back from my face, following the line of my eyebrows with his index finger. “But I don’t regret it. Do you regret it?”
It’s not regret I feel, but I can’t answer aloud, I’m so shaken. I just shake my head against his shoulder. The air between us practically throbs. Our bodies still joined, sharing a heartbeat, it feels absolutely perfect. But my life, sailing right along the course I’ve set, just capitulated. The man I didn’t want to need feels like the breath in my lungs. Feels like the blood pumping through my heart. Feels like the pulse pounding in my ears. Feels like everything I need to survive. I can’t even find myself in the rubble, in the aftermath of that erotic catastrophe.