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O nce Kevin and Ali had left, I carted the salvaged metal furniture inside, swept the front steps, and spent about ten minutes opening and closing my new front door.

It swung on its hinges like a dream, gliding a whisper above the floor. It snuggled into the doorframe with a happy sigh. The latch clicked softly. The key turned with barely a flick of my wrist.

It was perfect.

I couldn’t believe I’d spent almost two years wrestling with the old door every time I went in and out of the house.

On second thought, I could.

It had been a pain in my arse, but it had functioned. Until something didn’t function, it wasn’t going to make it to the top of my list. I went in and out of the back more than the front, anyway.

I ran my hand admiringly over the flawless oak. I didn’t care how much it had cost. It was gorgeous. Kevin said he could stain it for me, or paint it that fancy Cotswolds green, or any other colour I wanted. Let him know.

While I loved the look of natural wood, I was leaning towards the green, a warm light sage.

I was definitely going to have to make a spreadsheet to stay on top of what I owed Kevin. I’d have to pay him back in instalments, but it was worth it.

I opened and shut the door one last time, and rested my back against it, closing my eyes. I was smiling like an idiot, I knew it. Ah well. There was only Phil around to see, and he wasn’t looking. He’d gone to take a nap.

When he’d left, Kevin said that he’d be back at half six—earlier if he could swing it. I refused to sit on the sofa with my knees together and hands on my lap as I awaited my deflowering twice in one day. Instead, I distracted myself by finishing up the monthly accounts, took Phil for a gentle stroll around the block, then came home and made macaroni cheese and a pan of brownies for dinner.

I’d just taken the macaroni out of the oven when the doorbell rang.

“Hi,” I said, opening the door.

Kevin smiled at me brightly. He’d had another shower—his dark-blond hair was damp again, and I could smell the soap on his skin. He’d changed into black jeans and a forest-green, long-sleeved t-shirt, and was wearing actual shoes rather than work boots or trainers. Gripping the doorframe at either side, he leaned in and kissed me. “Hello.”

“I love my door,” I said.

I love you.

“I love your door, too,” he said. He slung an arm around my waist, walked me backwards into the hall, and booted the door shut behind him.

He could boot it shut behind him. No two-handed, bicep-bulging shove required.

He lifted his head and sniffed the air appreciatively. “Food? Did you cook for me?”

“Yes.”

I’d cooked. I’d cleaned. I, too, had showered and spiffed up. I wasn’t quite as well-turned out as Kevin was, but I’d made it out of my usual Saturday sweatpants and squeezed into some jeans that were far too tight to bust out in a public setting, but which I thought Kevin might appreciate.

I headed towards the kitchen and jerked with a gasp when Kevin’s hands landed on my arse.

That was a yes on the jeans, then.

He squeezed. “I am obsessed with your little butt,” he told me seriously.

At least he hadn’t called it fla?—

“It’s so flat.”

I sped up in an attempt to twitch my arse out of his grip but he wasn’t having any of it. “My butt is not little or flat,” I told him, and grunted when he slipped a hand around to press against my navel, snugging his hips up behind mine and then walking us forwards.

“It’s not big and round,” he said.

“It’s average. It’s an average butt.”

“Nothing average about you, Charlie.”

I disagreed, but if Kevin wanted to think I was special, I wasn’t going to talk him down. However, “I haven’t exactly got a pancake back there, you know.”

By then we’d made it to the kitchen. I thought perhaps he’d get distracted by the giant, cobalt-blue Le Creuset casserole dish filled with pasta and topped with browned and bubbling cheese, but to my surprise, he didn’t get distracted at all.

We were still on my arse, apparently.

He kept walking me forwards until I was pressed up against the cabinets. The macaroni cheese was in reach, and while Kevin tucked his chin over my shoulder to have a good look at it and take another deep, appreciative sniff, that was all the attention it got. His hands were now trapped between our bodies, and he flexed his fingers.

No, that wasn’t a flex, that was a pinch. I went up onto my toes and when I did, he tugged my hips back.

“Can I have a proper look?” he said.

“At...? My arse?”

“Yeah. I want to hold it.”

“You’re already holding it,” I pointed out, clutching the edge of the counter.

He tucked an arm beside mine and used his extra height to arch over me, laying his chest to my back.

“Bare,” he said, and nipped the skin of my neck. “I want to hold it bare.”

“All right,” I said. “But if I hear the word flat one more time, the jeans are coming back up.”

“I won’t say flat again,” he assured me.

I rolled my eyes—he just said it—then yelped when he nipped me again, harder.

“I saw that,” he said, taking my chin in his hand and directing my gaze to our reflection in the window. “I know it’s not flat, anyway.”

“That’s twice you’ve said it again, so I think the jeans stay up.” I choked when he flipped my button open and unzipped my fly dangerously quickly.

He tucked his fingers under the waistband, and didn’t go any further.

I pushed my arse back against him. “Well?” I said.

“Well what?”

“Are you…?”

“You said they stay up.”

“Obviously, I didn’t mean it.”

“It seemed obvious. Never hurts to check in, though.”

I squirmed restlessly. “Fine. Take them down.”

“Take what down?”

I huffed. He was going to make me say it. “Pull my jeans down.”

“Can I pull your boxers down, too?”

“What? Yes.”

“Can I kiss your butt, Charlie?”

My face flamed. “If the spirit moves you, I don’t have any objection.”

“Can I bite it?”

I hesitated.

“Like this.” He gnawed gently on my neck, then whispered in my ear, “Just like this.”

“Okay.”

He heaved against me with what I realised was amusement, and I scowled.

“Can I lick?—”

“Oh my god! You can do what you want to my arse! Today, please.” Before I lost my nerve.

He pushed his hands down, taking my jeans with them. Only so far, though. He yanked me about a bit, made an impatient noise, hauled my back end out, and peeled me like a banana.

“How long did it take you to get into these?” he asked admiringly, standing up from the crouch he’d been obliged to drop into to get them all the way down.

I refused to admit how long it had taken me, but it was in the double digits.

And then I was standing there in my kitchen, braced against the counter with my jeans and underwear around my ankles while Kevin Wallis stood behind me, breathing heavily.

A breeze caressed my naked buttocks.

That was all.

A breeze.

I shifted awkwardly. “Uh,” I said.

… was it flat? Was it too flat? I’d been squatting on a daily basis since he’d first said it that day in the gym. Maybe I needed to do more than ten?

Kevin cleared his throat behind me. I dared a quick glance in the reflective surface of the window. His head was angled down, eyes glued to my butt.

Staring at it.

Guess the spirit was not moving him after all.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough of that.” I attempted to bend down and grab my jeans, haul them up as far as they could go, and make an undignified exit. I didn’t manage it.

As I bent forwards, my lower body pushed out. My arse bumped Kevin’s groin gently, he said “Uhn,” in a rough, broken grunt, and then he dropped to his knees, grabbed both cheeks, and shoved me back into the cabinets.

“Oh,” I said. “My dick . Fucking fuck .”

“Oops.” Kevin spun me and then my dick was in his face. “Sorry. Got carried away.” He contemplated it. “It always bends like that, right?”

I had a hand over my eyes, biting my lip.

This truly was a day of firsts. I didn’t even know you could stub a penis. Now I did. “Which way is it going? Left or right? Because it…it usually goes a bit to the right.”

There was silence.

“Kevin.” I dropped a hand to his head, patting blindly.

“You’re all right. It’s going to the right. My left. Your right. I’m so sorry. I am never this clumsy, I swear. Does it hurt a lot?”

“No.” I took stock. It was throbbing, but honestly that was more likely down to the fact Kevin’s lovely, full lips were three inches away from it. “It was startling more than painful,” I said. “I may have overreacted.”

“Cool.” Kevin leaned in and kissed the tip, his eyes on mine. Then he aimed his gaze downwards and said, “Apologies, little penis.”

I glared at him.

“Hee hee,” he said, grinning.

Oh my god. That should have deflated my erection. It did the opposite.

“I’m kidding,” he said. “It’s not little. It’s bigger than mine. Good job. We’ve got a top-notch erection here.” He kissed it again, then carefully but firmly turned me back to face the cabinets. “And your butt isn’t flat. I only say that because it makes you snippy and I love it when you get sassy with me.”

I cocked a hip. “I do not ?—”

He groaned. “Love it.” He put a hand on the lower curve of each cheek and lifted them, then made them bounce.

I could accept that there wasn’t a huge amount of jiggle happening, but there was some.

Kevin didn’t do anything more than that, and he went quiet again.

“Okay, listen,” I said, fighting the urge to make another grab for my jeans. “I might come across as confident about all this?—”

He made a soft noise and kissed the outside of my hip.

My breath caught. “But the thing is, when it comes to the sexy stuff, I’m…I’m slightly less confident than you might think. In general.”

There was a thoughtful pause. “I know,” he said.

Great. It showed. Great.

I decided that it would be easier to have this conversation with at least my underwear on, and thoughtlessly bent over to grab my boxers. This time, I ended up mashing my arse in Kevin’s face.

He was still holding my cheeks, and stopped me from getting too far.

“Um…” he said slowly. “Okay. Hmm. Okay. Charlie, I…I think we might have a problem.”

Exactly what every man wanted to hear when exposing himself to a potential partner.

I couldn’t get my underwear back up with the way Kevin was holding me in place. I covered my groin with my hands and hunched my shoulders instead.

“That’s fine,” I said, attempting to shuffle sideways. “To be honest I’m not feeling it all that much, either. No harm, no foul.”

No harm?

I was never getting over this.

He was all hot and heavy, good to go, right up until he was faced with the reality of my naked man-butt, and then the brakes came on.

I practically heard the tyres squealing against the tarmac.

Kevin eased me flat to the cabinets as he stood behind me in one smooth movement and laid his hot body against mine. I appreciated the warmth.

What with being half naked and exposed and everything.

“It’s fine,” I said again. “You can want to kiss a guy but not be able to go through with the sex when the crunch comes. That’s fine.”

Kevin’s reflection frowned at me and I looked away. He slid a hand along my jaw.

“Don’t worry, I won’t take it personally.” I was going to take it so personally I would never expose myself to a human being again. Or an animal, to be clear. Once I got these jeans back up, they were staying on for life. “It was a nice idea but?—”

Kevin curled around, ducked his head, and stopped me talking by putting his mouth on mine. He held my jaw in one hand and massaged my arse with the other.

I couldn’t help but notice the direction the massage was heading in.

If he kept going that way, he was going to hit my—nope, yep, he did it. Finger right on my hole. Nothing coy about it. Nothing tentative.

He rubbed sensuously up and down, and I whined into the kiss. My hips jerked. I almost stubbed my dick again.

Kevin pulled back slightly. “The problem isn’t that I don’t want to go here, Charlie,” he said, punctuating it with a firm push that almost—almost!—slid him inside. “The problem is, I’m going to come in my jeans, and I was hoping to impress you, not pop off the moment I get my hands on you naked.”

“Oh. Well. That’s…that’s a lot more flattering than wanting to stop because you’re freaked out by my arse.”

He flexed his hand, making me rise up onto my toes again. “Have I not made my feelings about your flat little butt?—”

“That is it !”

He laughed and contained my flailing. “I love your arse. You have to know I do. I just demanded that you let me get my hands on it bare. Why on earth would you think that I’m freaked out by it?”

I heaved a sigh and closed my eyes. “Maybe…maybe I might be the one who is freaked out.”

“No,” he said. “Really?”

My eyes opened and I scowled at him.

“You don’t have to be freaked out, Charlie,” he said. “It’s just me.”

That was sweet, but not as reassuring as he obviously thought it was.

Also, he was still stroking my hole. He’d added a finger, and he was being bossier about it. Firm, regular strokes. Up and down. Up and down. I clenched without thinking, and he let out a harsh breath.

I flashed back to him fingering the cinnamon buns in the coffee shop—the weirdo—and my face burned. He’d been imagining this, hadn’t he? I’d known it at the time, intellectually speaking. Experiencing it was something else.

“So, I’ve got an idea,” he said.

“I’m open to ideas.”

He sucked on his bottom lip briefly, eyes dark on my face. “I’m thinking that it would be best if I got my orgasm out of the way, and then I can focus properly on yours.”

I wasn’t sure I could withstand Kevin focusing on me.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what’s happening. All right?”

“Yes?”

“Cool.” I heard the purr of a zip, then he stepped back, hauled my arse out again, and I heard the unmistakeable sound of someone jerking off.

Felt it, too. At the top of each stroke, his knuckles lightly bumped the curve of my right cheek.

My mouth dropped open.

“Now normally,” Kevin said, “I wouldn’t do it like this.” He moved closer to tap a foot on the inside of mine. I shuffled my legs wider and he made a filthy sound of appreciation. “Thing is, I’ve wanted you for so long and I had two good wanks before I came over so this wouldn’t happen but I suppose I should have had three.”

“You’ve had two already?”

“Yeah.” A heavy hand landed at the back of my neck and rested there. I dropped my head forwards. “I told you I get wound up.”

To be fair, he had.

“This probably isn’t feeling very romantic, is it?” His words came out breathless and ragged. The sound of him touching himself sped up.

“It could be more romantic if you let me turn around and do that for you?”

He groaned, ran his hand down my back, and pushed gently at the base of my spine, encouraging me to lift my arse. “I want to do it for you, though,” he said. He was moving faster now. I deepened the arch of my back and he swore. “Fuck. I’m going to be cross with myself for this later, but I gotta…I have to vent this, and then I can treat you right. I want to treat you right, Charlie. You know that, don’t you? Want to make you feel good. Mmm. Want to… fuck . Want to make you smile at me that way you do, and uhhhhh. Uhn. Uhn .”

If he stripped it any faster, despite how wet it sounded, I was worried he’d strike a spark or something.

One of Kevin’s arms came over my shoulder and braced on the counter. He pressed against me, moved against me. I risked a glance at our reflection.

Holy shit.

He looked absolutely wild, moving frantically. I couldn’t take it. I squeezed my eyes shut and wrapped my fingers around his wrist. I reached back with my other hand and managed to rest it on his bunching thigh.

“I wish I could kiss you when you come,” I said, then yelped.

He turned me around, shoved his tongue in my mouth and rutted against my stomach.

I threw my arms around him and held on for dear life, the air getting knocked out of me in little huffs as his body bumped mine. He wasn’t just moving his hand, he was hitching his hips, pushing into me.

I cupped his face and pulled back to look into his eyes. They were open and fixed on mine, the skin around them tight with focus.

I recognised the expression. It was exactly how he’d looked at me that first time in the gym. I hadn’t understood it then. I did now.

He wanted me, as much as I wanted him.

Kevin was the kind of guy who had options. He was so lovely. So, so lovely—my hands flexed on his sides, and slid around to rest on his arse. He could have anyone he wanted, and he was here in my kitchen, doing his best to seduce me and getting incredibly worked up over it.

Even I, with my wariness and less-than-optimistic outlook on life, couldn’t question that he really did desire me.

Not when I was being banged into my cabinets like he’d banged me into my kitchen table last week and would soon—I really hoped—bang me into my mattress.

I smiled at him.

“Oh!” he said. “Oh, uh, uhhhhnnnnn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”

God, the noises coming out of him. My ears were ringing. I smiled wider, and that did it. He sucked in a hard breath in the middle of a yeah , hauled my t-shirt up to my armpits, and came on my stomach.

I stared directly into his eyes while he did it, unable to look away. Unable to stop myself from tipping over the edge and joining him.

His hand slowed but he continued to move in languid, almost absent-minded, rolls of his body. His cheeks flushed dark and his eyes grew heavy-lidded and drowsy. He blinked twice, then groaned and tipped forwards, squashing me completely and dropping his head to rest on my shoulder.

“Wow,” he said, his voice deep and throbbing with satisfaction.

“Wow indeed,” I said, holding him to me.

His stomach rumbled and I started to shake with laughter.

Kevin sighed, then joined in. We stood there giggling like idiots for a full minute before he peeled himself off me. His cheeks were still pink, and so was the tip of his nose. His expression was soft and happy. He bit his lip. “Sorry,” he said. “God, I made a real mess of you, didn’t I?” He held my hips and pushed his upper body back to look down between us. “Oh.”

Yeah, he wasn’t the only one who’d made a mess.

Luckily, he seemed thrilled at the sight of it. “You got it all over me!” he said, delighted. “I didn’t hear you, Charlie!”

“I’m not surprised. You were making enough noise to wake the dead. You wouldn’t have heard a helicopter landing in the back garden.”

He grinned. “I can get a bit loud.”

“A bit? I might need to invest in ear defenders.” Because noise-cancelling headphones wouldn’t cut it. If they couldn’t muffle the sound of Kevin and Ali ripping out the old door when I was all the way on the other side of the house in the kitchen, they wouldn’t have a chance against Kevin’s thrilling moans from mere inches away.

“Mmm, that’d be sexy. You, buck naked apart from a big pair of ear defenders while I take you from behind. I’ve got a pair you can borrow. They’re rated for use in a mine or on a nuclear submarine. You wouldn’t be able to hear a thing. All you’d be able to do is feel.”

My lips parted. Me, naked in ear defenders, was not what I’d call an arousing image.

Interesting, though.

His stomach rumbled again. He didn’t mention the macaroni cheese currently cooling three feet away from him. He didn’t even look at it. He was still busy looking at me.

“Was that all right?” he asked. “I’m sorry, it wasn’t what I’d planned at all.”

“It was wonderful.”

“Yeah? Good. I wanted to take you tenderly in a bed and be a gentleman about it, not jerk off all over you before we even got to dinner.”

Something told me that whatever his intentions might be at the outset, Kevin wasn’t ever what you could call a gentleman in bed. Bossy, demanding and relentless, yes. Gentleman, no.

“Never mind,” he said. “We can do that in a minute.”

“It might take me more than a minute to recover,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. Sure. I didn’t mean an actual minute. I meant, like, ten.”

His stomach groaned again.

My eyes widened a fraction. “Don’t you want to eat first? Hydrate?” He’d been to the gym, he’d hung a door, helped a friend take a load to the tip, wanked three times, and came on my stomach.

I was exhausted and wrung out just thinking about it.

And if he was this sexually intense after all of that physical exertion, what in god’s name would he be like if he hadn’t burned some energy off first? I swallowed hard. Possibly more than I could handle.

But…I’d give it a go.

He looked down at himself. It was hard to say which one of us looked more debauched—me with my jeans around my ankles and t-shirt still tucked under my arms or Kevin, healthily flushed and sweet-faced in his tidy date outfit, which had been ruined by the not-insignificant amount of come on it.

Not hard, actually. It was definitely the half-bare hussy, meaning me.

Kevin seemed to be enjoying the view, at any rate. He stroked up and down my sides lazily, absently. He smoothed a palm over my stomach and rubbed?—

“Nope.” I twisted away.

His lips hitched at one side and his eyes heated.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him.

They heated even more. Right. He liked it when I was sassy.

This man was a sex demon.

“Let’s get cleaned up and have some food,” I said, “and then…”

“What then, Charlie?”

“How about a game of Monopoly?”

“I think you’re trying to be funny, but whether you are or not, no thanks. After food, I’m going to pin you down on your bed and fuck you until you scream.”