Page 40 of Every Step She Takes

But I also never want this exact moment to end.

I want to live in this innocent pleasure forever, with Sadie making herself feel good against me.

Sadie breathing, Sadie blushing, Sadie making eye contact with me as we tug on each other’s bodies.

I kiss her, because it seems natural that every part of me should be attached to every part of her.

We click together like the gears inside a clock, and something in my brain locks into place.

This is why I never should’ve agreed to this. I don’t know how to have sex without feelings, and I don’t know how to have some feelings without having all of them . Without getting lost completely in the other person.

Sadie goes still, her labored breaths quieting against me. “Is… is this okay?” she exhales against my neck.

“Yes,” I croak. Very, very yes.

She cranes her head back to look at me, and I can see in her sky-sea eyes that I’ve lost her. That she’s in her own head, not here with me on this bed, not against me anymore.

I’m not quite ready to lose her. I’m too scared I’ll never get her back.

“Sadie,” I say, knowing it comes out in a husky growl, betraying exactly how much I need her. “What do you want?”

Sadie

“What do you want?”

I shrink involuntarily from her at this question. What do I want ?

If I knew the answer to that question, we wouldn’t be on this bed fully clothed. I wouldn’t be nervously wringing my hands. Mal wouldn’t be completely still, holding me in place, as if she knows the smallest movement could send me running.

“I-I don’t know what I want,” I mutter into the pillow.

“I don’t believe you.”

I jerk my head up. “What?”

“I don’t believe you,” Mal repeats. A tiny smile curves the left side of her bowed mouth. “I think you do know what you want. I think you’re afraid to ask for it.”

“That… that’s not…” I shift on the bed and accidentally rub myself against her leg again. And that . That is what I want. To feel like that .

“This will be our first lesson, then. I want you to practice talking about your pleasure.”

“Can we, maybe, not do that instead?”

Mal shakes her head. “If you can’t talk about what you want, how will you ever have good sex?”

“I don’t need it to be good,” I quickly reassure her. “I just need it to be over with.”

“Sadie.” She says my name in an annoyed growl. “If we are going to have sex, I’m going to make damn sure it’s good for you.”

The rough edge of her voice rakes across my skin like fingernails. And holy hells. It turns out that what I really want is for Mal to scold me again in that deep growl.

“Sex is about good communication. You have to be able to tell your partner what you need, and you have to be able to listen to your partner’s needs without letting your ego get in the way.”

“Okay, let’s practice that.” I jump in. “Why don’t you tell me what you want?”

Her mouth curls into another smile. “Nice try. This is about your pleasure. What gets you hot?”

That disappointed tone of yours , it would seem. The way you lean against random shit.

Mal’s glistening calves and her staggering widow’s peak. Her tattoos and her mouth. Her spontaneity, her sense of adventure. She’s like no one else I’ve ever known, and I’m someone new when I’m with her.

But I could never tell her that.

“I-I can’t do this.”

Mal is perfectly calm as she asks, “What did you think about when you masturbated in the bathtub earlier?”

“You,” I answer without thinking, without filter, without considering the consequences of that confession.

Her flawless calm shatters. “ Me? Really?”

She’s unnerved, and it turns out that gets me hot too. Knowing I have the power to shatter her facade of cool. So, I answer honestly again. “Yes, really. You.”

She clears her throat. “Oh, um, I…” Now Mal shifts nervously on the bed, and if I’m not mistaken, she’s—

“Shit, are you blushing ?”

“No.” She puts a hand to her pinkening cheek. “I just got hot earlier when you were dry humping my leg.”

I start blushing too, but I don’t feel so embarrassed about it.

“What was I doing in this masturbatory fantasy of yours?” Mal asks with a cocky head tilt against the pillow.

“I-I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” Mal growls impatiently. “Tell me.”

I’m pretty sure I’d jump off a cliff if she told me to do it in that voice. “You were touching me everywhere,” I mumble. “With your hands… and… and with your mouth.”

Her jaw twitches, but she says nothing.

“And I was touching you,” I add quietly.

“Where?” she demands to know.

I close my eyes. This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done, but I can’t stop now, not when I need her to keep using that voice. “Your breasts,” I admit.

She abruptly glances down at her chest, then back up at me. “My breasts ?”

“Yes, Ms. Never-Wears-a-Bra.”

“I don’t wear a bra because I don’t need to.” She grabs at the absence of boobs in demonstration. “I’m flat-chested.”

“Yes, but with the showiest nipples I’ve ever seen.”

“My nipples are showy? What does that even mean?” She rubs her fingers over the ridge of her nipples under her tank top on the bed next to me.

Any teasing dies in the back of my throat as I watch her touch herself.

She catches me watching, and she must see something in my face that prompts her next command. “Tell me what you want.”

I want too much. “I want— I want you to take your shirt off.”

Without another word, Mal pushes herself up to her knees and pulls off the tank, ruffling her mullet in the process. On instinct, I turn away, the way I did in every locker room, at that small handful of sleepovers, terrified that someone would catch me staring.

Terrified of what it would mean if I did stare.

“Look at me, Sadie,” Mal orders in that motherfucking growl.

And I do, taking in the knife’s edge of her clavicle, the compass tattoo on her sternum, the snaking vines across her taut stomach, and the hint of hip bones above the waistband of her shorts.

I study her ropey muscles and her sun-kissed skin and, finally, her breasts.

Like two small teardrops on her chest. Her areolas take up most of the real estate, and they’re more of a wine color than the dark brown of my imagination, but her nipples are even darker, even larger, swollen pebbles that make me woozy.

I lose track of time, of all sense of modesty and shame, staring at the realness of her.

“Sadie.”

The sound of my name pulls my focus back up to her face, where she’s watching me as I watch her, discovering every beautiful mystery she’s divulged to me.

“What do you want?” she demands.

“I want… I want to touch you.”

“Then do it.”

When I don’t move my tingling limbs, she takes my hand in hers and gently presses it to her chest, right over the compass tattoo. She guides my hand across her rib cage, over her breasts, down her stomach. Then her hand falls away, leaving me to chart my own course.

Time ceases to exist once more as I trace one finger around the knot of her hip bone. She shivers, and I move my hand up the subtle curve of her waist, up toward those lovely nipples.

When my fingertips touch the edge of her left breast, Mal inhales sharply, but she’s otherwise motionless, allowing my hand to explore at its own pace.

Slowly, I crawl the pads of my fingers across the underside of her breast, then up to those red-wine areolas, ghosting over the goose bumps around her nipple.

When I take her skin between two fingers, Mal arches into my touch.

The restless buzz is between my legs again, the horrible, wonderful need for relief.

I rock my hips against her, desperate for pressure or friction or anything.

“All you have to do is ask,” she says, barely above a whisper.

“Kiss me?”

“Where?” she asks, but I’m already reaching for her and pulling her on top of me until her mouth crashes into mine.

Pleasure sears across my lips, sweeps down my whole body in a fiery current.

She straddles me, kisses me messily, like she’s as overcome by feeling as I am.

Her knees are on either side of my hips, and I run my hands up her thighs.

I grasp her hips and yank her even closer, trying to rub myself against her like I did before, and I’m rewarded with a wordless growl.

Each point of contact between our bodies feels like a shock of electricity.

Mal smothers me with her weight. She’s over me, on top of me, her growling voice is in my ear. “Tell me where you want my mouth.”

“I want it on my… wrist.” The word slips out in a frenzy of feeling, and I cringe. My wrist? I’m drunk on her red-wine nipples. That’s the only possible explanation for why I said my wrist .

Mal sits up. The sharp points of her ass dig into my stomach as she reaches for my hand. She lifts it to her mouth and tenderly kisses my wrist bone, just below our matching tattoo.

I laugh underneath her, and our bodies vibrate together from the sound. “Why am I so awful at this?”

“I’m into it, actually.” Mal turns my arm so that the delicate skin on the inside of my wrist is facing her mouth. And then she licks slowly, like my skin is pistachio ice cream. “Wrist play is totally hot.”

I laugh again. Is there usually this much laughter in sex, or am I doing something horribly wrong?

Another cocky head tilt. “Do you want to see what I can do with my wrist?”

I stop laughing. I very much do.

Her right hand finds the swell of my lower stomach, and we’re back to electric touches.

“You’re so soft and smooth,” she murmurs admiringly as her hand inches toward the waistband of my pajama shorts, then lower, fingers stroking the outside of my underwear.

I clamp down on my jaw to stop any mortifying sounds from escaping.

She lifts her hips up off me so her two fingers rub against my clit through the fabric. It’s pressure and friction and everything .