Page 10 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

DEAN

S he arches her eyebrow when she says it, her challenge thrown like a glove between us. And it’s funny, because this whole time, I’ve been trying so hard to be the asshole I wish I’d been years ago; the character has felt like an ill-fitting glove.

But this? Sliding my hand up the back of her thigh to hitch it high around my waist, cupping her waist with my other hand, my thumb brushing the underside of her breast through the soft fabric, pushing her skirt up to her hip to catch a glimpse of her pussy, bare, glistening.

Nothing has ever felt more me than this.

The first pass of my thumb through her lips, wetting my skin with her essence, brushing over her clit, and her sharp intake of breath in response, makes my dick hard.

A teeth-gritting wave of arousal moves down my spine.

I have to close my eyes, brace my whole body against the urge to unzip myself and fuck into her like I’ve wanted to do since I first saw her again.

The position is a bit awkward, my arm wrapped around her leg, holding her up and pinning her between my body and the stacks, but it’s the best one to keep anyone from seeing her. Though no one seems to have entered this specific aisle since around the year we graduated anyway.

Still, when I pump two fingers inside her and she moans, I cover her mouth with my hand— the hand still holding her panties.

Chloe watches me, my hand, her panties between us, each exhale against the side of my hand unsteady.

“You have to be quiet, okay?”

She nods. I press my fingers deeper into her as a reward, and she moans without regard.

“You want me to take my hand away?” I ask.

Her eyes get wide. She shakes her head, makes fists in the poly-cotton blend of my shirt. She makes a different sound, a helpless, begging moan, one that vibrates like a shock through my hand, down my arm, straight into my cock.

No . She does not want me to remove my hand. I have to close my eyes again, because I can’t look at her right now. I can’t contend with all of this, the desperate way she pulls me closer to her, the heat of her cunt, the slick honey halfway down her thighs, and still see her, too.

That is a bridge too far.

But because I can’t ever do anything other than exactly what she wants, I keep my hand, and her panties, over her mouth. I fuck her with my fingers, my eyes closed, my forehead pressed to hers.

Our sounds are muted. Harsh breaths and wet skin and the occasional thump when I readjust my grip on her thigh or she shifts her weight.

My mouth waters to taste her. Those sounds.

Her mouth just inches away. Her perfume, sweet and fruity, reminiscent of the body butter she used in high school but more mature.

Grown. And beneath that, the fucking smell of her . Salt, sweat, and sex.

I could drop to my knees right now and smell her on my lips for the rest of the day, taste her again every time I swallow.

A sharp pain against the side of my hand pulls me out of that fantasy. Chloe smiles at me, her teeth still leaving indents in my skin. I’ve pressed her into the corner, wall and shelving on one side, me on the other. My cock throbs from the pressure of rutting against her .

“Sorry,” I say. My eyelids are heavy, my pulse a slow glug at my throat. “Is that okay? Are you okay?”

I pull my hand away.

“Don’t tease me anymore,” she whispers. She wraps her arms around me, draws me closer with her leg. “Please. I want to come.”

Without giving it much thought, I kiss her. It seems only right. When the woman you’re fingering in a quiet corner of the Toronto Public Library asks to come, you should kiss her. I kiss the moan out of her mouth, the one she can’t control as I finger her in earnest, with purpose.

Chloe gasps. She keens. She pushes and pulls at me, my clothes.

“Shh,” I tell her.

She bites her lip. Shakes her head, like she can’t or she’s sorry.

“Shh,” I say again as I slip another finger inside her, so easily, and rub her clit with the heel of my hand. “Shh.”

Her body stills and the struggling stops as the warm sheath of her body contracts around me.

She bears down on me, and between the architecture, the furniture, and me, I don’t think Chloe is currently responsible for carrying any of her body weight.

Tears leak from her blue eyes, sharp inhales through her nose, but otherwise, she comes and she comes and she comes, silently.

Unless you count my grunt as she bites me again.

Or the increasingly obvious sounds of her wet skin against my wet skin from beneath her skirt.

I don’t stop the gentle stroke of my fingers until she releases me. We watch the blood rush back into the fleshy part of my hand. Somehow, she didn’t break skin.

I drop her leg but let her hold on to me for balance, her forehead pressed to my shoulder.

The hand that was inside her shakes. I’m desperate to lick my fingers clean.

“Dean,” she whispers. She spreads her hand across my chest, over my pounding heart. Her hand slides down my body, following the buttons on my shirt, pressing against my stomach, pulling at my belt. “Dean,” she says again.

It’s her hand around my cock that wakes me up from what must clearly be apoplectic shock, caused by lack of blood to the brain.

She grips me in her fist, squeezing just enough to be called rough, and I want it so goddamn bad.

I want to let her take me out of my boxer briefs— the fabric stretched over my erection, the cotton soaked from my pre-come— and jerk me until I spill all over her fist. I want to leave a stain on her dress and help her hide it as we walk out of the library by pulling her tight against my side.

“ Don’t ,” I say, harsher than I intend, pulling myself out of her hand and putting myself back together. “Don’t touch me.” My words are more controlled this time, but they still hurt her. She recoils, confusion crossing her face in the form of that little frown between her brows.

Fuck.

Fuck .

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I wasn’t supposed to lose control to her. Again. It doesn’t matter how badly I want it, how hard I am. I can’t let her touch me. I can’t. Not if I can’t trust her.

I stagger a step back, trying to put more space between us. My back is tight and my oblique muscles ache, my body feeling the echoes of a different kind of sex.

“I’m sorry.” She says it automatically, fast. “Dean, I’m—” She reaches for me again, arms open like she might try to hold me. The shaking in my hand has spread to my whole body. No longer from fatigue, but frustration. With myself, mostly. But that doesn’t stop me from taking it out on her.

“Don’t touch me.”

Her panties are still a ball of fabric in my fist. I use them to wipe my fingers clean, using more force than necessary.

It’s just that maybe if I can wipe her come off my hands, I can also wipe away the shame I still somehow feel fifteen years later.

The shame of being laughed at by an entire school, of my mother’s inability to look me in the eye and my father’s gruff everything will be fine when he walked in on me crying in my bedroom.

I throw her panties on the ground when I’m done. My skin is still sticky from her .

It’s not that I blame her for the feeling anymore.

Objectively, I understand that we’re not the people we were fifteen years ago; we were kids, and kids make mistakes.

Fuck, adults make mistakes. But it’s one thing to finger fuck Chloe, to make her come on my hand, to know that tear track was because of me.

It’s wholly another to let her take that same intimacy from me. To give her my vulnerability— my cock, hard and weeping for her— and not feel the gaze of every single person we went to high school with over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I say this time. I grab my messenger bag from where I dropped it on the floor what feels like forever ago. Then I pick up my camera. “I have to go,” I say over my shoulder.

She says my name, barely audible over her shuddering breath, and the sound of it on her lips makes me cringe, makes my shoulders tense. But I turn to her anyway. I don’t run from my problems anymore.

Chloe looks small at the end of the stacks. Her legs are pressed together, one arm crossed over her body, gripping her opposite biceps, her lower lip sawed beneath her teeth.

She looks gorgeous, too. Skin flushed, hair wild. That color really is beautiful on her.

I walk back down the aisle. Each gap in the books on the shelves feels like a peephole that wasn’t there previously. I stop in front of her, bend down, and pick up the pink cotton crumpled on the floor. “Are you okay?” I ask, focusing on a mark on the wall over her shoulder. “To get home?”

Through my peripheral vision, I watch her swallow. “Yes.”

I nod once. “I’ll send you the best ones.” I gesture to my camera. “When I’m done with edits.”

I shove her panties into my slacks pocket.

Then I leave.

The only time I can open my bedroom window is at night, when my parents are already in bed. Dad would refuse to acknowledge a window’s existence if he could, because “who needs windows when you have air conditioning?”

It’s a habit I picked up in London. My first few apartments were nice but didn’t have air conditioning. Now, I just like to be able to hear the breeze in the trees, the cars slowing down in my cul-de-sac. I like to hear the quiet at night, something easy to come by in the suburbs.

Mom brought me tea before she went to bed, with the reminder that I need to stop working eventually.

They’re leaving for a summer’s-long European vacation soon, and I think she’s trying to get as much mothering in as she can before then, like they’ll come back and I’ll have already gotten everything figured out, a steady list of clients and a new place to live.

The tea has gone cold by now, but I still take sips once in a while as I click through Chloe’s photos, adjust the saturation here, the balance there.