Page 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PERRY

My gut is churning with the seas of a thousand nerves. I’ve never felt like I could simultaneously cry and throw up, but as I send myself light-headed waiting for his response, I’m dangerously close to either one of those things.

St. Clare’s pretty bowed lips have parted enough to see where his bottom lip is shiny with spit. I want to lean in and taste it. To run my tongue over that lip before pushing into his mouth. I’ve been in this position before—this consuming, lustful state—but never with another guy, and finally being on the edge of the experience is a relief as much as it is terrifying.

All it took was my potential murder to get me here.

I’m half-hard and hopeful. Sort of want to beg, but I won’t because that would be weird. Probably. But as St. Clare goes on for longer and longer without an answer, the urge gets stronger. I’m just one man, dammit.

“You want to kiss me?” he finally asks.

“Ah, yeah. I think so.”

“It’s more of a yes or no answer, Perry.” His voice has deepened and sounds raw, as raw as I feel.

“Y-yes.” I can’t stop the way my voice shakes. I really, really do want this, but admitting I want it is hard. The familiar instinct to suppress is strong, and I’m fighting that as much as I’m fighting the urge to get on my knees, ready to see his dick one time.

It’s hard to know if I’m even ready for that when my heart is beating so hard in my throat that I’m close to coughing it out.

“You’re breathing really fast,” he says, and it feels like he’s closer, but that also could be my, you know, complete and utter panic fucking with my perception. Good panic though. Definitely good. The bubbly high filling my head, the clammy hands, the urge to stand up and shake out my whole body, it’s so, so good. The little jolt that spears through my gut every time we inch closer. Good.

It’s all so fucking good.

“You want to kiss me because you think you’re going to die?”

“Actually, I want to kiss you because you have a very pretty mouth, and that gets my dick hard.”

His lips kick up with an unintentional “Heh.”

“I want to do it now because it’s a teeny tiny bit possible I could die tomorrow.” I’m still holding on to my stubborn denial that it won’t happen, obviously, or there’s no way I’d be able to go through with it, but at least if we do this, it’s one thing crossed off my list. One curiosity answered.

Will I like it?

St. Clare reaches up, fingers sliding over my jaw in a way that makes me forget which way I’m breathing. His palm finds my cheek, and oxygen eventually finds my lungs, and I’m breathing through my mouth in an intense state of expectation.

“Perry?”

“Y-yeah?”

“Kiss me.”

Hearing those words makes me surge forward. My eyes squeeze closed, I grip his face between my hands, and I smoosh our lips together so hard I swear I nearly break his nose. My heartbeat is so fucking loud it takes a moment to pick up that St. Clare’s grunt was not a good one.

He jerks back from my hold. “Well, that was aggressive.”

“Thanks? ”

“Not in a good way.” He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand.

Wow. Right. That doesn’t hurt. “It was my first time,” I try to defend.

“First time what? Being around another human?”

“Kissing a man.”

“What if I told you it’s not all that different to kissing a woman?”

“I’d ask you if you’ve ever kissed a woman before because that was nowhere even close to being the same.”

“Good. It’s a relief that you don’t go around attempting to pull the head off everyone you hook up with.”

“I didn’t try to pull off your head!” I’m so loud I’m surprised Lars doesn’t burst in here. “I was nervous, okay? That’s a perfectly normal, totally fine thing to be, and I don’t think that a little, well, passion is such a bad thing, actually.”

“I agree. It’s not.”

I grunt and fold my arms over my chest. “You’re complaining about it pretty loudly right now.”

“No, I’m complaining about your attempt to eat my face. That was completely absent of passion.”

“And now you’re insulting my kissing skills.”

“I would be … if that was kissing.”

I finally look over at him again. “Then what the hell do you call it?”

“A personal attack on attraction everywhere?”

I humpf and turn away again. “Well, if that’s how you feel, I’ll just take my attraction somewhere it’s appreciated.”

“I don’t think that place exists, Perry.”

I’m about to get up and storm out of the room when St. Clare pulls me back onto the bed almost as fast as I stand. Then he throws one leg over my waist, straddling my thighs, and like that, I’ve forgotten everything I was supposed to be doing.

My hands are up in front of me like a busted perp, and my jaw is down somewhere around my aching balls.

He smirks, a light breaking through the deep offense I’m riddled with, and when he takes my hands and sets them on his hips, I finally remember how to swallow.

“You are way too high-strung,” he murmurs, gaze settled back on my mouth. “And you have an abnormally large Adam’s apple.”

“Are you insulting me again?”

“No. It just means you can’t swallow around me, ever, because it’s a kink I wasn’t aware I had before, and every time you do it, it makes me want to lick your throat.”

I’m still in complete shock when I do it again.

St. Clare groans. “Don’t test me.”

This time, I do it on purpose.

He jerks my head upward before his wet tongue finds my collarbone and slides tortuously up my neck. When his lips dip back by my ear, his voice is huskier than before. “I could lick every single inch of you, and it wouldn’t be enough.”

Mentally, I’m imagining him doing just that. A roadmap of his mouth’s expedition as it passes over the most sensitive areas.

My grip on his hips tightens as St. Clare kisses his way along my jaw. He’s getting closer to my mouth, teasing the thing I want most, and when he’s a whisper away, I turn my head so his mouth lands on mine.

Sweet relief fills everything from my ears to my toes, and St. Clare groans at the contact. The sound is so deep in his chest it rumbles against mine, and I want to steal that sound from him and play it on repeat forever.

Unlike our first kiss—which was totally a kiss—the pressure of controlling it is taken away from me, and I’m able to enjoy it for what it is. The press of lips on lips. Soft and slow. Hard and fast. Slow and hard. Fast and soft. It’s an alternating explosion of sensations that hasn’t done anything to fill my curiosity and instead has exploded that curiosity into a million more tiny pieces. My brain isn’t big enough to hold all those pieces though. I barely have time to catch my thoughts as they bubble away into blissful nothingness. Nothing but his mouth and his hands on my shoulders, one of them scraping up the back of my neck to tangle in my hair and the other dipping lower, resting over my chest, thumb gently flicking over my nipple in a way that tugs an embarrassing nrgh from my throat.

He chuckles, lips smiling against mine before his tongue dips out to slide over my bottom lip. Without thinking, I suck it into my mouth.

St. Clare freezes, and then, with a bone-melting moan, his mouth crashes against mine. Deep and consuming, his kiss makes my toes curl over and my thumbs find that soft skin beside his hip bones as my grip on him anchors me to Earth. He holds me tighter, kisses me so deep that breathing becomes more of an optional thing. An optional thing that comes second to falling into the kiss and letting it destroy me.

My neck and cheeks are burning up, St. Clare’s grip on my hair tightening, reeling us closer like a fish caught helpless on a line, and when his cock nudges mine, my eyes roll back into my skull.

I’ve never been so willingly trapped before, and when St. Clare goes to back off, I grunt and pull him closer.

Through our underwear, our cocks line up. Dueling hardness seeking relief, which only gets worse as he ruts against me. His bare chest is hot through my shirt, and I wish that we were wearing one hundred percent fewer clothes, but the time it would take to remove them would be wasted. I don’t need to be naked to enjoy this, not when I already feel like I’m about to shoot off fucking fireworks.

I’m so blindingly out of control, and it’s almost an out-of-body experience. I urge him faster as he rocks against me, balls so damn tight I need relief, nipples driving me out of my mind every time my shirt rubs against them. Our kiss has turned sloppy, driven by pure need, and if this is the passion St. Clare was talking about, I’m happy to declare him fucking correct because our first kiss had none of this. Even though it was definitely, totally a kiss.

Finally, I get the courage to free my hands from where they’ve been planted and move them to skin. All that skin. Bare and smooth, a light dusting of blond hair over his chest and body burning up as much as I am. My hands rub up his back before dropping again, sensory overload, holding him tight and making sure there isn’t a crack of distance between our bodies.

St. Clare’s teeth bury into my bottom lip, hard enough to bring out a choked-back cry but not hard enough to want him to stop. The light pain ripples through me and when he finally lets go, my head drops back, barely able to take any more.

His mouth moves to my neck instead. Prickling up every nerve in my body as he kisses and licks what feels like a live wire delivering impulses straight to my cock.

It’s not enough. It’s too much.

Each thought flitters through my empty brain, gone as fast as it hits, scrambled into more nonsense than has ever existed, and really, at this point, I’m not even completely sure I exist.

We’ve gone from kissing to sex in less time than I’ve had to think it through, and I’m glad for it. My brain gets in the way sometimes, making me do stupid shit that’s the complete opposite of what I want, and without it, this is so much easier. Because I’m letting myself have this moment without anything else trying to get in the way.

This . This is what I want.

St. Clare. On top of me. Sinful hips grinding confidently against mine, pulling so much precum from me that the material separating us is sticky.

“Ah, fuck,” I grunt into the dark room, and St. Clare answers me with a groan of his own.

My hands drop to his mouthwatering ass, and I thrust up against him.

What the fuck are even clothes at this point? All that exists is his mouth on my skin and his cock rubbing delicious friction right where I need it.

I stop holding back, stop trying to draw it out, just give in to the moment and let it take over. His panting, his tongue, the sweat building between our chests. The tight grip on my hair, making my eyes sting, as my fingers dig into his ass.

St. Clare thrusts against me, and I thrust against him, and my brain is like water down a drain, swirling faster and faster, building to that final release.

A pleasant zapping fills the base of my spine, and I tremble against him.

“Close,” I pant. “Gonna … I’m gonna …”

“Me too, Perry.” His rasp is right by my ear.

The sound of my name in that deep, rough tone sets me off. The high hits, a stupidly brief moment of the greatest pleasure I’ve ever had, and almost as fast as it fills me, it disappears again.

St. Clare shudders against me, and it’s the weirdest fucking feeling, the way his cock throbs against mine. When it’s over, I want to ask him to do it again. And again.

But I can barely breathe, and as soon as he untangles his fingers from my hair, I drop back against the bed, arms splayed out like a snow angel, and let the first real inhale hit my lungs.

“I think I’m dying,” I groan.

St. Clare climbs off me. My eyes follow him, every movement, and then he looks down at his underwear. “Well, that was probably a dumb choice.”

“Umm … is insults after sex a guy thing or a you thing? Because it’s hard to bask when you’re called a dumb choice.”

Amusement sparks on his face. “Not you.” He waves a hand down the front of him. “Coming in our fucking pants when we’re sort of low on clothing.”

“Ohh …” That’s better. And a fair point. “I can’t remember the last time I popped one off in my underwear.”

“Can’t say it’s common for me either.” His gaze travels steadily over me. “Damn, it’s hot though.”

His words hover between us. Because fuck. It really was.

“Did that help your before I die bucket list?”

I’m still too lost in orgasm land to really follow the conversation. “It sure helped something. Not sure of specifics. Need hydrating. And feeding.”

“Do you ever stop eating?”

I rub at the ache in my lower stomach, feeling far from satisfied. “ Yes? No? I think when I came, a little bit of brain shot out too.”

Laughter bursts from him, and he reaches a hand down to pull me to my feet. “Go eat.”

“Food. Yes.”

“Wait. No. Clean yourself up first, and then eat.”

That sounds like the smarter option. “Will do.”

I lean in to taste his mouth one more time, and damn, even with the edge off, he kisses as good as I remember.

“Perry …” He pulls back a little. “We’re going to end up back on the bed again.”

I groan and physically have to pull myself away. “I’m going. Yes.” Except then I make the mistake of running my gaze over him again. From his messy hair to his puffy lips to that mouthwatering body and then, finally, to the wet stain on the front of his underwear.

I have to cover my fucking eyes. “Point me in the direction of the door. I’ll find it.”

“Sort of worried about touching you again though.”

“Fine.” I take a few steps forward. “Am I close?”

“Ah, yeah. Forward some more.”

I go forward some more, and when he doesn’t say stop, I keep going. And keep going. And keep?—

I plow headfirst into the wall.

“ Fuck .”

St. Clare is wheezing he’s laughing so hard, and I turn my glare on him.

“And you wonder why we have trust issues.”

“All that and I’m still somehow attracted to you.” He lifts his eyes skyward like he’s in pain when I’m the one who ran into the wall.

That pain disappears quickly though.

Because he’s still attracted to me.

Even after the sex.

Kinda smug about being that good.