The Complete Series Boxed Set (26 page)

“I do not want to hear about your sex games!” Josie screeched. Her e
x
cited clit made a face of horror worthy of an Edvard Munch painting. Or worse, Macaul
a
y Culkin in
Home Alone
.

“Like I wanna hear yours!” Darla huffed.

“Just—goodbye!” Josie stabbed her phone screen repeatedly with an angry finger and fell over as her foot caught in the hem of her pants.
Might as well strip on the
ground
, she thought, and
she
made quick work of it, completely naked in seconds, ass cold on the hard tile of her kitchen floor.

She stood, just long enough to get a good, long look
at
the UPS guy delivering the latest item she’d ordered online.

A good look because her—their,
their
—curtains were wide open in the front picture window.

UPS Man
got an eyeful, too.

S
he ran down the hallway, body flushed with embarrassment, excitement, and a l
i
ngering sense of disgust from her conversation with Darla.

“What was that all about?” Alex asked as she slipped into the tiny shower with him, her face coated with the shower spray. He was so tall she had no choice. It was like showering under a very misty waterfall, and she kept her eyes closed most of the time.

Which was sad, because right before her was one of the seven-inch wonders of the modern world.

S
he opened one eye.

Make that eight.

“Darla started telling me all about some sex game she plays with Trevor and Joe—”

Alex’s entire body shuddered.

“Yeah, about right,” she confirmed, her hands running in opposite direction to the water’s flow on his arms, stretching over his shoulders, sliding down his back, ribcage, to his
hard ass. Filling her hands with his flesh, she pulled him hard against her, and found him
hard
.
 

Against her.

The kiss he slammed her with was insistent and unyi
el
ding, the kind of claiming that only two people who have been together for a while can exercise. She opened her lips and he was inside
her, tongue reacquainting itself with her warmth
, telling her about his day, reuniting after
so much time apart.
 

His long shifts were part of the deal in loving him: being with a doctor, she knew, carried the constant separation, and never knowing exactly when he would come home from a shift in the labor and delivery ward, or the ER, meant getting accustomed to amb
i
guity.

But he was here. Now. Hot and strong and wet and in her arms, and that—by God—was what she was going to think about right now.
Not her silly niece’s sex life, or about the client shortage that
Good Things Come in Threes was experiencing, or her flashing the UPS delivery dude, or the fact that she had just taken a ginormous leap forward in trusting Alex with a bigger piece of her life.
 

And her heart.

Right now, there were decidedly more delicious body parts that Alex coul
d
have pieces of, and my, oh my, was he finding them quite nicely without needing to use a map.

Josie was learning, stroke by stroke, caress by caress, lick by lick, that sex with the same person could be infinitely interesting given enough time and enough desire. While that should have been obvious, and she wondered how she’
d
managed to reach mature adulthood without really registering that little piece of wisdom, it was quite different when you lived it. Day by day, encounter by en
c
ou
n
ter, orgasm by orgasm.

The water’s mist was like an audience, watching and omnipresent, demanding access to their skin, their breath, their very essence, as Alex dropped to his knees and buried his face between her parted thighs, her hands reaching for the balance bar screwed—she hoped—tightly into the shower’s wall.
Thank heaven for safety features
, she loos
e
ly thought as his tongue found a way to make quite a show for
the air that surrounded them. Her head tilted back as her neck muscles tightened and loosened, imitating the pattern of her sex as it clenched and released, and as she shifted slightly her movements were greeted with a face full of hot water.
 

Sputtering, she tugged lightly at his hair, and he moved up, hands on either side of her, caressing her calves, then knees, thumbs digging in possessively as he traversed her thighs, then hips, ribcage greeted by palms that enveloped her breasts with a nearly feral touch. By the time his hands cradled her face for a kiss that tasted like her, like rain, like everything, she was ready
to have
him in
side
her.

More than ready.

Always thinking ahead, she thought as Alex turned away and gave her a spectacular view of an ass that was either forged in a Bessemer furnace or hand-carved by a sculptor. The condom he put on made her smile. No babies.

Not yet.

His touch was more insistent this time, her last view of him fleeting but unfurling a rosebud of need inside, his wet hair and determined, dark look making him dangerous. A force of nature. Her dangerous force of nature, of course, but as he centered her and lifted one leg into place for her, his shaft sliding in from behind and making her core grab hold of him like a velvet glove, she
wanted
danger.

Wanted
him
.

Her fingers curled in on the tile, eyes unfocused and body one cloud of wet, hot skin, pumping blood and tingling with the kinetic frenzy of having Alex behind her, all muscle and flow. He did all the work, and that was just fine, a tacit agreement that was forged through time. You do the work this time; I’ll ride you tonight…

Their climax hit within three breaths, smashing them against the tile wall, their ability to calibrate it swept away by the mind-blowing, involuntary nature of impulse, biology, and release. She screamed, the sound guttural and base, low in her throat but raw, as Alex murmured her name over a
n
d over in her ear, the rasp muted by the shower spray and steam that applauded and shouted “Bravo!” at their performance.

Gasping, she slumped against the shower wall, Alex behind her, the wet hair on his thighs prickling her ass, the feel alien and intriguing.

“Too bad we can’t have porch sex again,” he said as she turned off the shower and slid back the curtain, reaching for two towels. Handing one to him, she paused for a moment to marvel at the casual domesticity of it all. Shower sex. A towel offered as if it were so natural. Part of the flow of
time
and building a life with another human being, to share for decades and beyond, all the way until the fire of
mortality
wa
s gone, and the soul moved on.

Deep in her pensive moment, she missed Alex’s comment. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Penny for your though
t
s?”

“They’re worth way more than that,” she said with a funny laugh, a sound choked with emotion. He had a radar when it came to her, which only made the moment more infused with emotion. Two days. He’d lived here for two days and already she was thinking about forever.

Abstract forever and real-life forever were two very different concepts.

So far she thoroughly enjoyed both.

“
You have that look in your eyes,” he said in that warm, whiskey-laden voice that was so smooth it made her wet. The man could recite the
Physician’s
Desk Reference
manual and she’d be writhing in sexual ecstasy in minutes.
 

“What look? The crazy cat-lady look?” As if on comman
d
, her skittish cat, Crackhead, darted out from underneat
h
the couch and fled into the sanctuary of her—um,
their
—bedroom, enscon
c
ed under the bed, two shining orbs staring at them.

“
Crackhead will never get used to me,” Alex sighed.
 

“Don’t make me choose between the two of you,” she joked. Alex gave her a sour face and disappeared into the kitchen, and from the sounds of it, he was brewing coffee.

A woman could love this man deeply. And she did.

Josie finished toweling off and walked naked into the bedroom, rummaging through her dresser for clothes. A second dresser, one that didn’t match
(
and yet belonged there
)
, rested under the window across from hers. Alex’s meager furniture had fit in so well with her eclectic possessions that it was creepy. Creeptastic, in an overly perfect kind of way. As if he were made for her. Even his coffee mug set with the little wooden stand matched the one she had found at a yard sale a few months ago.

Creepy.

“You look like you want to bolt out into the street and run away from me. Like I have tentacles and crawl into your body at night to turn you into a pod person.”

“You have one tentacle that crawls into me at night,” she said suggestively.

“And if I had more, they would join it.” A
s
if his cock were listening, it rose slo
w
ly, cockeyed (
no pun intended
) at first, then slowly straighten
ed
out, long and strong, the sedate politeness of his foreskin turtlenecking down.

“Seriously?”
S
he made a dismissive, but joking, sound as she stared at his rod. “You’re ready again?”

“Always ready.”

“I know that’s not true, because there was that one time—”

Alex grabbed some underwear and quickly put them on, as if his penis were offended by the conversation and needed to have its ears covered. “That one time I’d just come off an unexpected thirty-eight-hour labor, drank five beers, and you rolled over and started humping me! Give a guy a break.”
He stretched a simple, moss-green t-shirt over his head, pulling the thin cotton with a furious rush. “And besides, I still managed to make you come a few times!”
 

“They need to patent that tongue of yours,” she agreed.

“
Can we stop talking about the one time I couldn’t perform to your satisfaction?”
 

“It’s not that you didn’t—”
she protested.
 

“Or shall I bring up the time you fell asleep during sex?”

“Hey! Not fair! I was on painkillers after that dental surgery and—” The look on his face made her shut up. He was right. Not fair. “Fine. Truce.” The quick kiss they shared righted the world. The steamy gurgle from the kitchen made it all even better.

S
itting at her—
their
—kitchen table, sipping from breast-shaped mugs Darla had given Josie as a gag birthday gift (
“Mama won them in an online sweepstakes contest. You should have seen the molded chocolates that came with them!”
), she sighed wit
h
contentment. And then she ruined the moment.

“I need your help in convincing Mike and Dylan to sit down and talk with Trevor and Joe.”

Alex’s surprised look quickly turned to
confusion
. “What the hell would those four have in common? Oh…” His voice went low
and his eyes registered suspicion. “What are you up to? Is this some stunt for Good Things Come in Threes?”
 

“No! It’s not a stunt. It’s more that Laura’s so lost lately, and even though she’s happy and life is better now that Jillian’s out of the infant phase, it seems like she needs to talk to someone who’s in the same kind of unique relationship.”

“I’m not connecting the dots.”

“She and Darla are getting together for lunch at Jeddy’s.”

“And you want Mike and Dylan to have lunch with Trevor and Joe? Joe? The kid is an inscrut
a
ble blowhard asshole—”

“You still can’t let go of the fact that you smashed your face into a parking sign because you saw me touching him.”

She expected protest, not: “Damn right I can’t. Fucker.”

“Alex! You’re sti
l
l jealous? I was touching his heart surgery scar at Darla’s insistence! He was shirtless and we were on the porch and you and I were broken up and—”

His face had gone bright red and his fingers floated up to the tiny scar along his eye. It had been nearly a year and yet…

“It’s not jealousy in the traditional sense. You never dated him, never kissed him, never…
b
ut in that moment I was so lost without you, and running past your house—no matter how juv
en
ile—was a way to connect with you. And then to run past and see you touching another man just destroyed my world.”

She gave him a look of sympathy and pain.
He took a long drink of his coffee and continued. “Yeah. The guy bugs me. And even if you’d never touched him and I didn’t have that impr
i
nted in my mind on top of my emotional state at
t
he time, he’s a judgmental, condescending prick anyhow. The kind of guy I couldn’t stand in high school and college.’

“He’s twenty-three! Half the guys I knew at that age were like
that
.”

“Doesn’t mean I like him.”

Josie finished her cup of coffee and just watched Alex. His wet brown hair was close cut right now, his haircut more a function of efficiency than of fashion. Being deep into his residency as an OB-GYN and working extra shifts in the emergency room on rotation meant that any part of his life that could be simplified needed to be.

In recent months he’d taken to this principle of optimization with great zeal, and living with Josie w
a
s part of his larger plan. Then again, perhaps it was the other way around: simplifying his life was just a conv
e
nient excuse for getting her to agree to share an apartment together.

Deep brown eyes framed with impossibly long lashes turned to meet hers, troubled and smiling at the same time. Alex could do that—inhabit two distinct emotional states at the same time with comfort, okay with the ambiguity. He didn’t see the world in black or white like she did. Being with him tau
gh
t her, slowly, that there were shades of gr
a
y.