With his last word, a delightful rumble took over his voice and his stare became hungry.
He wrapped his hand around his dick and began to stroke it. “Come over here.”
Her excitement sparked so hot it was a wonder she didn’t set the drapes on fire. She crawled onto the foot of the bed. Facing him on her knee, her pose mirrored his, right down to her fingers stroking over the barely-there lace.
“Closer,” he whispered, and brushed the front of the gown.
She caught his hand and held it as she scooted forward. “I’m glad you talked me into this.”
“I’m glad you let me.”
He lowered his head to her shoulder and snagged the dainty strap in his teeth. Rory giggled as he released it and rubbed his scruffy chin against her neck.
“I don’t know whether to rip this off of you or fuck you in it.”
“Leave it on,” she purred. “You can take the panties off, but leave the rest on.”
“With you on top,” he muttered. The motion of his lips over sensitive skin sent a shiver through her.
Rory sighed and pressed his hand against her pussy. “From behind.”
He groaned and slipped his fingers beneath the crotch. He rubbed the tips through the wet heat. Once his kisses met her lips, he shoved to the knuckle.
A game of push and pull began. Rory made the first move, shuffling forward to get him onto his back, but Noah won. She let him win, let him hook her under the knee and flip her onto her back.
“Don’t say it,” he said with a chuckle.
Rory raised her hips as his thumb twitched around her clit. “Say what?”
“We could have done this at home.”
She shook her head against the plush duvet. It wasn’t in answer to his sarcastic remark, but the dual pleasure he was creating. “I’m all yours.”
He withdrew and tugged her panties. “God, I hate to even take these off. They’re so pretty and frilly but they’re also so …”
Noah ended with a growl and tucked his fingers under the elastic.
Rory lifted her hips, but he quickly changed his mind. Instead of pulling them off, he stretched the fabric aside and bent.
She reached down to cup his head, but he brushed them aside. One look told her he wanted to be able to look up at her while his tongue did its wicked work. Splaying her out was as much a part of this fantasy as the hotel suite and the lingerie.
She spread for him, parted the gown to expose her belly, and rested her hands over her head.
If he wanted to, he could have gotten her off in a matter of minutes. He knew right where that particularly sensitive bundle of nerves was, but he evaded it with his tongue again and again until she was red-faced and begging him for more.
Noah pushed down. He muttered something that could have been “baby” or “Rory” or something else altogether, but she felt it more than heard it as he licked around her clit. The vibration zipped through her and slipped off her own tongue with a gasp. She bucked up, ass off the mattress, and quickly found herself turned over onto her knees.
She bowed low, rendered silent by the sudden brusqueness of it all, and remained in her pose as he wrapped his dick and tugged her panties down. The hem of the babydoll went up to the middle of her back. Expecting the tip of his cock where she wanted it the most, Rory arched up, only to whimper as he rubbed his hard shaft between her nether lips.
“Put your hand over it,” he said quickly.
Rory obeyed and moaned from the sudden motion against her clit. Compared to the methodical swipe of his tongue, the chaotic friction didn’t inspired begging but sobbing. The intensity was too much and she released him, but Noah captured her hand and held it in place.
“Come on, honey. You know I like you nice and wet when I ride you.”
And then, the catalyst. The pressure of his hand at the nape of her neck, fingers in her hair. Not tugging. Not hurting. Merely holding. For a frantic series of heartbeats, Rory went stiff with the shock of it. Then, the significance of it hit her.
Mine.
It wasn’t something he would say out loud, but in the weeks she had known him she had learned that with a look, with a touch, Noah could say so much more.
With her realization came stars before her eyes, white hot and sparking through her entire body. She gurgled, smothered and paralyzed as her heart drummed against the onslaught.
She took it as long as she could. She let him thrust against her until her sensitive clit could take no more, and then made a fist between her throbbing pussy and his palm. He relented, releasing her hand and neck at once. Rory bowed into the bedding, shaking as she tried to catch her breath as he stroked up and down her back.
As her senses went from electric to tingling, she pushed up.
There, again, at the back of her neck while the other hand moved to rest above her ass. He moved quietly but quickly. He stretched her with the tip in one heartbeat and filled her with the second.
He could be a master of words when it was her pleasure he manipulated, but when it came to taking for himself he merely took. He met each shove with a moan that rattled from the back of his throat. She tried to lay her head down, but he wouldn’t let her out of his reach. He pinched down, not enough to hurt her but to make it clear he wanted her as she was.
The steady friction of his cock against her inner wall quickly reignited her. She used her weight and pushed back against him, meeting his every thrust with a stinging slap of his belly against her ass. The bed, unanchored to the headboard, shook and creaked as the momentum built.
Noah thrust so hard and groaned that she was sure he had reached the end, but as she shunted back he withdrew. He turned her over again, and pulled her panties completely off, pushed her legs apart and with a jut of his hips filled her up.
Delirious with the heat that pulsed beneath her hands and between her legs, Rory held onto him as he pounded into her. He hovered over her, red-faced and demonic, staring down at her with the most intense stare she had ever seen on him.
His gaze flicked from her face so briefly she nearly missed it, and just as quickly he reached out and yanked the ribbon holding her bodice together. Rory quickly split the gown apart, then grasped the bedding over her head.
“Fuck me, baby,” she said in a pant, and tucked her knees against his ribs. “Fuck me so good.”
With one fierce thrust he impaled her. With his cock throbbing and his semen jetting against the tip of the condom, his tongue finally loosened. Words poured out, gurgling as he was emptied.
One last word and he deflated, heaving with his cheek against her shoulder.
Rory stared at the ceiling, arms still around him but too startled to move.
One last word.
One devastating word reaching out to her from amidst that frenzy of meaningless words.
“…love…”
Her mind raced, unable to hold onto a single thought as calm settled in the man on top of her.
He didn’t mean it.
It’s just something that came out in the moment.
Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.
But something had shifted. As he pushed up and away from her, she felt it. He didn’t look at her as he settled back and quietly discarded the condom.
After a long time, he spoke.
“I’m sorry I said it,” he said, and just as tears pricked behind her eyes he turned his head with a curse. “I mean, I’m not sorry I said it. I’m sorry I said it the way I did. Fuck.”
He sat up and rubbed his whole face into his hands, repeating “fuck” over and over again.
Rory bit her lip to keep from whatever insanity was brewing on her tongue and busied herself with putting the babydoll back together.
“What I mean is, I didn’t mean to tell you I loved you while I was blowing my load.” He sighed, clearly sick of himself, and turned his head to look down on her. “I meant it, Rory. I love you.”
For Rory, she didn’t know whether the most overwhelming thing about that moment was the raw vulnerability on his face or the strange caved-in feeling in her chest. She wanted to say something; she
needed
to say something, if not to be rid of this feeling but to chase it away from him.
She’d never felt heavier than when she pushed herself up onto her hands and sat shoulder to shoulder with him. It took several tries of opening and closing her mouth before she was able to get anything out. “I don’t know what to say. I’ve never been here before.”
“You think I have? Yeah, I’ve had girlfriends that I’ve been close with, but I’ve never--there’s never been anyone like you.” His eyes brightened as soon as he breathed out his last words, and then the clouds came back. “I know it’s complicated, but--”
“I love you, too.”
She almost clapped her hand over her mouth. She wanted to. Hell, she wanted to leap from the bed and lock herself in the bathroom.
The urge became too much she started to tremble, and he took her hand.
“Did you say it because I said it?” he asked.
Rory shook her head. “No, I--I don’t know why I said it back except that--that it’s what I feel.”
“Rory--” Noah crooked his finger under her chin and leaned close, and the gravity of it all finally became too overcome. She pushed off the bed and hugged herself as she paced in front of him.
“I don’t know why I said it. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Why?”
“Because I meant it, that’s why. Because I’ve been pretending I don’t, but when you said it I felt it here.” She pressed her hand to her throat where all her emotions seemed to have fused together in a hard ball. “I don’t know what to do with it.”
“I didn’t know we were supposed to do anything with it.”
Rory halted. The quirky little smile on his face almost killed her. She wanted to be someone else for a little while, to throw herself at him and enjoy this whole being-in-love thing for a little while.
But she couldn’t. It would show on her face as long as she kept it in.
“What about when we both leave?”
His only reaction was to press his lips together and swallow hard. “We’re not going to be so far away.”
“You want to do this--
this
--on weekends? On the phone? Over the computer?” Needing to do something with her hands and she resumed her pacing, she clenched the billowing skirt of the babydoll. “Don’t you know how that ends?”
“Yeah, and I know we’re different.”
She turned away as the tears started to come. “How can you say that?”
“Hey.
Hey
.” The bed creaked and she tried to evade him, but it was a poor attempt once his arms closed around her, back to chest. “Don’t cry. I don’t want to be the asshole that makes you cry.”
“It’s not you.” She wiggled around until her cheek was against his warm chest. He slipped his hand under her hair, his touch gentle where not long ago it had been insistent, but the effect was still the same.
Mine
.
“You and I are different,” he murmured, his breath fluttering at the top of her head. “I knew it the first night we were at the camp site and we were just sitting in lawn chairs, and God, you looked so pretty in the lamplight. I knew that’s what I wanted.”
She could have believed it as warmth spread from his body to hers. She buried her face into the skin and breathed him in. He smelled foreign to her with the aftershave he’d patted on before dinner, but beneath it was his scent: his soap, his sweat, his heat.
“We could rearrange things a little,” he murmured. “One of us could transfer.”
One of us.
Meaning her. She wasn’t going to university. She was going to take a one-year course and get a job to pay her bills. He was going to get an MBA and continue the family legacy.
She suddenly felt the same shameful feeling that had come over her the first time she let him into her cottage. That ugly sense of feeling like she wasn’t good enough mingled with the implication that she could--should--be the one to rearrange her life, and it made her feel sick.
Inside his embrace she tensed, and he didn’t smother her. He drew back and cupped her face. “This isn’t as bad as it seems in your head.”
“How do you know what’s in my head?”
“I’ve been reading you since I knocked you down. I’m getting pretty good at it. Here, come over here.” He led her to the bed and pulled her next to him, and shuffled against her until their legs twined together and her head was on his chest. “This is how it should have ended a few minutes ago. Just like this. Just … together. We’ll figure it out.”
Rory closed her eyes and tried to disappear into his heartbeat and his warmth, but she couldn’t banish her sense of being out of place now that the specter of what was to come was in the room with them. After pretending it wasn’t there for so long, it was impossible not to feel it.
It was dark when she opened her eyes. She was surprised that she’d dropped off to sleep at all.
Noah was awake. He hadn’t roused when she did, and he probably didn’t even know she had come out of her slumber completely. He didn’t move. He remained where he was, chin against the top of her head and his arm around her shoulder. She would have thought he was asleep if a finger wasn’t drawing a circle against her arm.
Rory wondered if he had slept at all, or if he had just left her to her rest and simmered in his own thoughts for God knows how long.
She drew a deep breath to alert him that she was awake, and as he squeezed her closer she turned her face into his chest and pressed a gentle kiss above his heart.
Neither of them said anything as she turned on the light and reached into the condom box on the night stand. As she sheathed his dick, he drew apart the babydoll. The gown was quickly discarded as she mounted him. The silence didn’t endure as they moved together. No words ever transpired, but as she took him balls deep each time they communicated in moans and sighs.
We’ll figure it out.
She played his words over and over in her head as she rode him towards her climax. She needed to believe it. She loved him and needed to know everything would be all right. As she came, he gripped her hips and held her in place as her inner walls rendered him captive, and she knew he needed it too.