Page 12

Seb

The moment was a little too real. That instinctive, unpremeditated kiss we’d shared in my room had been fun – an adrenaline rush, a rollercoaster of discovery – but this kiss was soft and scared and achingly slow.

A light tremor rippled through her, scattering my thoughts. I needed air, but I needed her mouth more, so I stayed where I was, my consciousness gradually overtaken by sensations: heat, pressure, tenderness, the tug of her lips and the first brushes of her tongue against mine.

Fisting my hands in the thick towel at her waist, I pulled her towards me and she came with a ragged exhale, one hand sliding into my hair as her knees landed on either side of me and then my mind blanked again when she kissed me – hard and deep this time.

My blood rushed and time elapsed too quickly as she pulled my bib straps off my shoulders and trailed her hands down my chest, her mouth hot and inevitable on mine.

Panting, my vision losing focus, I dropped my head to her collarbone.

The freckles weren’t as dense on her body as on her face, but they were my new favourite thing and I breathed her in, teasing her skin with my lips and tongue until she clutched my head and arched against me.

Spring sunshine – that’s what her skin tasted like.

I brushed my lips and teeth at her jaw, over the cartilage of her ear, and she lifted her chin and whimpered – the most wonderful sound I’d heard in my life.

Her towel loosened, slipping to reveal the most beautiful, freckled curves and I pressed soft kisses to her chest while I tugged at the material, chafing gently over her breasts until she was panting too.

‘Fuck,’ she groaned with a shaky gasp, making me smile into her skin. Slipping my hands under the towel, my mouth dried and my heart hammered and the feel of her was so much that I nearly lost it, as her arms came around my neck and she gave an inarticulate moan, her eyes closed.

‘This is already the best sex of my life,’ I muttered in wonder, almost to myself.

‘Don’t stop now,’ she grumbled in reply, drawing another smile to my lips. Coming down hard on my cock, she moved against me, sending white-hot need crackling up my spine.

‘Steady on,’ I choked.

‘Hurry up,’ she replied, reaching for the hem of my base layer and peeling it over my head. Her mouth was hot on my chest and my fingers dug into her thighs as I fought to hold back.

My palms drifting to the curve of her butt, over her hips and into the crease along the top of her thigh, where I suddenly, desperately wanted my tongue, I held her still and teased her with another tug of the towel.

‘If this is the only time I get to enjoy your body, I’m not going to hurry,’ I said in a low voice.

She wanted to make a smart comeback – I could see it in her eye – but my palm skimmed her rib cage and she arched up with a gasp. Lifting my hand higher, I loosened the towel right to the brink, but I didn’t touch her nipples, enjoying the way her breath hitched and caught.

‘You are so beautiful,’ I groaned, swiping her wet hair from her face with one hand, as the other one slowly pulled back the towel to reveal her freckled breasts, her tough, taut body, heaving with need, her skin flushed pink.

‘Shut up,’ she whispered, grabbing my forearms to steady herself. ‘I don’t believe you anyway.’

‘If you don’t believe me, then it doesn’t matter if I say you’re gorgeous when you want me so bad like this.’

She gave me a shove and opened her mouth to say something, but all I had to do was brush my thumb over her nipple and her protest became a strangled moan.

‘I want to suck your nipples until they’re pink and puffed up, but I also want to keep watching you lose your mind,’ I continued, now firmly addicted to the spark in her eye when I babbled nonsense like that out of the depths of my complicated ego.

Plucking her nipple and soothing it gently, I was endlessly gratified when her eyes slammed closed and she lifted her chin – in submission? Desperation? Invitation? I accepted, dragging my lips up her neck as I teased her breasts, ragged, inarticulate sounds emerging from her throat.

I eased a finger between her legs, gently, carefully, finding her hot and swollen and worthy of my filthiest dreams.

‘Yesssss, you’re so wet,’ I hissed as I let her grind a few times, snagging a nipple and flicking it with my tongue. ‘Gonna make you come hard,’ I promised. ‘But you’ve got to work for it.’

‘You have a big mouth,’ she grunted. ‘Less talking and more doing.’

Stilling her with a tight grip on her hips, I said, ‘Talking and teasing, Folklore. That’s what we do.’

She was frowning, her eyes shining and her chest heaving and maybe she had a point. Maybe we should just fuck and finish, because I was worried I would never forget the way she looked at me just then: wary and vulnerable and a little helpless.

‘That’s what we did online,’ she reminded me, swallowing hard. ‘This is not…’

I tried to pull myself together. This was a fuck to resolve the tension, not the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make love to a woman I could never keep. I was just a sucker like that.

‘Okay,’ I said with a firm kiss to her lips. Tipping her off my lap and onto the bed, I dropped down on top of her, my face in her breasts. ‘It’s just a fuck.’

I yanked at my shorts, peeling them off eagerly.

Sucking a nipple into my mouth and scraping my tongue around it, I revelled in the sounds she made, the way she clutched my head and dropped her legs open.

It was too easy to lose my mind when she smelled like everything I’d ever wanted and the knowledge that I might only get to do this once kept rising in my throat.

‘With some heavy foreplay first,’ I added with a twitch of a smile, pressing kisses down her stomach.

‘We can fuck soon.’ My hand on her knee, the pad of my thumb brushing over the patchwork of puckered scars there, I made progress steadily downwards and my mouth watered.

I glanced up for permission, finding her eyes glazed. ‘Entrée first?’

‘Did you just use a stupid food metaphor?’ Her voice wavered and she was breathing hard.

‘Sorry,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘May I perform oral sex on you?’

‘Fine, you idiot,’ she panted through a laugh, reaching one hand up to the headboard. ‘Do it.’

I gazed at her soft, wet centre and whispered, ‘How the fuck did I deserve this?’ before I took the first, teasing taste that only whetted my appetite for more. She even tasted right and I could have explored that oversensitive, swollen bud and the slick furrows all afternoon.

She whimpered and panted for more and I had to hold her still with a gentle grip on her thigh. With the slightly detached thought that I was the luckiest man in the world, I set to work on her.

Lori

Holy crap, Seb had me so strung out I was about to break.

It was supposed to be a quick bang, but instead he had two fingers easing inside me and I was crawling out of my skin with each swipe of his tongue.

I was riding the edge and I didn’t want it to end, but at the same time, I was desperate to come.

‘You want to come now or when I fuck you?’ he asked, his voice unexpectedly steady when his words twisted me into a pretzel. I tried to reply, but nothing came out.

He gentled his touch and glanced up at me. ‘Now and when I fuck you?’

I didn’t know how he knew, but he slowed the movement of his fingers to a torturous slide and I was a mess in an instant. I gasped, my grip on the headboard tightening as my vision blurred.

‘I love how close you are, Lore,’ he muttered. ‘You’re like my favourite book. It’s going to be hell to only read you once.’

‘Just… fuck me, Seb,’ I whined.

His head came up and he gave me a slow smile that flared over my skin as his dimples deepened. ‘What was that?’

‘You heard me.’

‘I know,’ he said, his smile growing sheepish. ‘I just… want to hear you say it again. I want to hear you say my name like that again.’ His voice trailed off to gusts of breath and his smile faded and I was trapped and squirming, his gaze so hot and my breath so tight.

Taking a shuddering breath, I gave him what he wanted. ‘Please, Seb.’

The way he groaned and bit his lip and curled his hand around my thigh turned my spine to liquid and I’d never wanted anything more in my life when he shifted over me again, pressing a soft kiss to my mouth.

So much for that quick bang. I was drunk, dazed, in pieces. And that was before he gently grasped the back of my knee, holding me open, and pushed his tip inside me. The pressure washed over me, tight and sharp and perfect as he went deeper until the whole thick length of him was seated.

Incapable of speech, I mumbled something inarticulate and shifted, my fingers digging into his butt.

‘It’s— Wow. Lore— Goood,’ he choked out, panting.

‘I— Ohhhh fuck. I know,’ I managed, trailing off to a gasp when he thrust.

Clutching at his shoulders, I hung on as he pumped, his breath hitched and his expression wild. He pushed deep, frantic and rough, but he nuzzled my jaw with such tenderness.

It wasn’t supposed to be this good. I definitely shouldn’t have been thinking about LoonieDunes and the jokes and easy conversation and the way he’d patiently let me put my life back together around our training rides.

We were supposed to do the animal thing and then get over it, but I snaked my arm around his neck and pulled him close.

His ragged breath in my ear was my new favourite sound, even better than his voice in my headphones, dragging me up out of a low moment by telling me how his grandma knitted him leg warmers for cycling in winter that looked like something Cyndi Lauper would have worn.

He pushed me higher and higher, bucking and losing it as though he couldn’t contain himself. My thoughts blurred, prickles of something joyful rippling over my skin, my body growing light.

He hiked up my leg, going deeper. ‘Ohhh, the way you take it, Lore,’ he groaned. ‘The way you take my cock.’

‘Need it,’ I mumbled, long past coherent thought.

‘Yeah?’ he panted. ‘You need this?’

My eyes rolled back and I arched off the mattress, whispering my answer between thrusts. ‘Yes. Yes .’

‘I’ve got you,’ he crooned, dropping his body close to mine, which dragged the base of his cock against my clit, making me whimper and moan. Two more thrusts and I splintered, the orgasm looming. ‘That’s it, Lori,’ he choked out. ‘Come for me. You’re so beautiful.’

With a flash of heat through my body and light behind my eyes, I tumbled over, hiding my face in his shoulder as I gasped for breath, as my molecules separated and re-formed, sensation ripping through me, leaving me moaning and gasping, not a bone left.

With a huff and a groan and a frantic thrust, Seb joined me, shuddering through his own orgasm as his cock jerked inside me. Coming down slowly, the spots gradually receded from my vision and I felt his deep sigh through my own body.

As awareness returned, so did my concerns. What did we do now? I was just wondering whether I should give him a push so I could get up, swipe my hair over my shoulder and march out of there, when he rolled off, collapsing onto his back next to me.

I met his gaze, which turned out to be a bad idea. The light in his eyes, the lopsided smile he gave me, burned somewhere in my chest and that burn could torch my entire career, everything I’d worked for.

His smile faded and he sat up, stilling me with a hand on my shoulder when I tried to do the same.

‘Just a minute,’ he said softly. ‘Let me clean you up and then we can go.’

I froze, coolness spreading over my skin at the awkwardness of his words – at least I thought it was the awkwardness and definitely not the tenderness.

He returned with a face cloth from the bathroom. ‘Or do you want to have another shower?’

‘Let’s just go,’ I said hurriedly, making to get up, but he stopped me again.

‘Hold on,’ he said firmly. ‘This will only take a second.’

I looked anywhere but at him while he pressed the warm, damp cloth between my legs.

‘What’s the matter? No one ever cleaned up their mess with you before?’

I slapped one hand over my eyes, even as I began to relax into his ministrations. ‘No,’ I admitted quietly.

‘Well, I didn’t want you driving home with…’

I peeked through my fingers. ‘With your come dripping into my shorts?’

He choked and I sat up to wallop him on the back until he laughed and fended off my arm. He grasped my chin and my heart rate kicked up again, wondering if he was going to kiss me and a bit concerned by how much I wanted that.

But instead, he just said, ‘Friends, right? Always?’

I nodded eagerly, the promise of that statement wrapping around me like a cosy blanket in that odd moment. ‘Friends.’

Perhaps I should have taken the time to ask myself why he’d needed confirmation, his tone a little desperate. If I had, I might have realised exactly how much trouble we could end up in later, when it all came back to bite me.