When she sits up, her long dark hair slides over her shoulders, covering her breasts. It’s the contrast of the black against her milky skin, the way the ends of her hair just cover her nipples. Now I know why this view of a woman has been drawn a million-million times.
Her voice cuts into my trance. “Staring again.”
“Still braless.”
“I lied,” she says, rubbing her finger absently across her lower lip.
The way she says it tells me it’s a game, at least a little. “When?”
“When I pretended I didn’t want to kiss you.”
I feel my brows pull together. “The no-makeout rule?”
“That.” She drops her eyes to where her finger traces circles on the tabletop. “And every time I saw you.”
My arteries can’t dilate fast enough for how much blood rushes into my system, and I feel lightheaded. “Come here.”
She shakes her head, pushing the stack of cards to me before standing to get us each another beer. “Your deal.”
After another round loaded with innuendo and tension, Lola loses, but this time is smart enough to only ante up her shoes before she folds. The next hand, she wins back her earrings and my watch, but after that, she loses both of these things as well as her socks.
“You’ve only got two more items, if my calculations are correct,” I tell her while I watch her shuffle the deck. “Pants and whatever you’ve got beneath.”
She laughs. “I don’t mind the jeans but I can’t lose my underwear.”
“Then you’ve got nowhere to go. It’s my turn to open after the deal.”
She ponders this, eyes warm with the effects of two beers consumed relatively quickly. “Text Harlow. Have her tell us what the consequence is for losing. Don’t let her know who’s losing, though.”
I nod, reaching for my phone and sending the question to Harlow. We need a consequence for losing at poker. One of us is out of clothing.
Barely thirty seconds pass before she answers, Dance on her goddamn lap, kid.
Laughing, I tell Lola, “She thinks this is my punishment, not yours.”
“What did she say?”
“I’ll tell you when you lose.”
* * *
LOLA SLIDES HER losing hand into the middle of the table, looking up at me with fear in her eyes. “Wait. I need another beer before I hear this. Oh, God.”
“You’re going to need music, too.”
Her eyes go wide before she grabs another beer from the middle of the table, chugging it down, then picking up my phone. She knows my passcode, entering it without thinking.
Her mouth drops open when she reads Harlow’s text. “I’m not going to do that.”
“Then give me your underwear.”
“Fuck no.”
I laugh, standing and walking over to the stereo. “Do you want rock and roll or something more club appropriate?”
She groans. “Oliver, I’ve never in my life given a lap dance.”
“Club it is!” I crow, pressing play. Walking back, I nearly trip at the full view of Lola standing near the dining table. I couldn’t see her from the waist down when we were sitting, but Lord.
Lola is in nothing but her underwear. Black silk. Minuscule. Her body is so smooth; I want to sink my teeth into the soft flesh of her upper thigh.
My skin is on fire.
I can feel my pulse in my throat as I lower myself into a chair.
She smacks my arm as I tuck my shaking hands beneath my legs. “You even know protocol.”
“So do you, it would seem.”
Lola steps closer, staring down at me. “Why couldn’t you have been the one who lost?” Her knees touch mine and I feel the pressure reverberate along every inch of my legs.
“Wouldn’t be nearly as good now, would it?”
“Is it weird to see me topless?” she asks, sliding one leg to the side of mine, and then moving closer, straddling me.
It’s hard to breathe, hard to think.
I look up and down the length of her body. Her waist is narrow, hips perfectly curved. She has a tattoo along her side that I can’t read in the dim light, but I’ll read it later. Right now, I’m one breath away from putting my face in her tits. “It’s fucking bliss is what it is.”
The music rolls through the room, slowly taking over my pulse until it seems to do the same with Lola, and her hips tentatively rock forward, and back. Her hands come around my shoulders, anchoring there.
“Lola . . .” I whisper. “Just do whatever you’re comfortable doing.”
She leans in, looking at my eyes so closely as if searching for a stray eyelash, to steal a wish. Her gaze swims a little, but I like tipsy Lola. She cracks out of her shell and looks at the world around her. Right now I want to be that entire world. I want to be all she sees.
“What’s your tattoo?” I ask.
She licks her lips and studies my mouth as she answers. “ ‘It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.’ ”
I scan my thoughts to place the quote, but with her nearly naked body over mine, the smell of her shampoo, her skin, and even the hint of her lust . . . I’m obliterated. “What is it from?”
“The goddess of wit, the woman who made generations of women put on their big girl pants: Eleanor Roosevelt.” Lola anchors her hands on the back of the chair and tilts her head as she moves.
The heat of her body against me makes my words come out thick: “How old were you when you got it?”
“Seventeen.”
Her hair slides over her shoulder, tickling along my bare arm. When her eyes lock on mine, my chest clutches at how her makeup has smudged slightly, making her appear sweetly rumpled, as if I’ve already had my way with her. Just the thought tips me into a desperate, trembling sort of hunger.
“Is this awkward?” she whispers.
My words are propelled by an incredulous burst of air: “Fuck no.”
Her brow twitches. “You mean because you’re used to having half-naked friends dancing on your lap?”
“I think you are at least one article of clothing past ‘half-naked,’ ” I tease. “And perhaps more than a little past friend.”
She stares down at me, worrying her lip with her teeth.
“It’s not awkward because it’s you, Lola Love. And you look amazing half-naked.”
A long stretch of silence passes where she’s still just looking at me. Staring, eyes fixed on mine. But it isn’t static. It’s an enormous transition in her expression from playful to sincere, and watching each step seems to pluck at a vibrating, urgent thread between my ribs.
“Are you hard?” She lowers her hips and slides over me, just once.
Oh, fuck.
I lose my breath when my heart climbs into my throat. She knows I am; my cock is rigid and pressed right against her.
“Are you wet?” I volley back.
I know she is. When she rocks forward again, I can feel it in the easy slide of her over me.
She laughs and her attention shifts from my eyes back to my lips. She’s so close, it isn’t just a flicker of her gaze; it’s an intentional drop, a mile-long stretch that seems to take forever as she looks at my nose, my cheeks, my lips, then snags there. If she looked any lower she would no doubt see my pulse frozen in my throat.
“Are you thinking of kissing me?” she asks.
I stare right back at her mouth. Lick my lips. “Are you thinking of being kissed?”
“Will you answer any question I ask?”
“Yes, but only that one.”
She gives me my favorite laugh: the quiet thrust of breath from her mouth. The sound she probably doesn’t even know she makes. And then she bends, time stops, and after a tiny beat of hesitation where she holds her breath, Lola presses her full lips to mine.
Warm, soft, and just the tiniest bit wet: it’s the sweetest first kiss I’ve ever had. Lola gives me a blissful few introductory kisses before the eventual parting of her lips, and the careful capture
of my bottom lip between hers.
When she sucks, gently bites, and makes a tiny rough growl, I am wrecked.
When the tip of her tongue grazes mine, my heart seems intent on punching its way out of my chest.
I am totally fucking ruined.
I can barely keep my hands beneath my thighs on the chair when she pulls away, licking her lips.
“I kissed you,” she whispers.
My voice shakes: “I thought we weren’t allowed to do that.”
With a tiny one-shouldered shrug, she whispers, “I think I’m going to do it again.”
My pulse is hammering so hard, I can barely manage an “Okay.”
When she comes back, I groan, pulling my hands free and so desperate for the taste of her that I stretch forward, meeting her halfway with my palms cupping her face. It’s explosive: the feel of our skin touching just here. I perceive the kiss in every tiny hollow part of me, filling me up with her sweetness, and lust, and abandon. I want to devour Lola, but this first series of kisses is remarkably gentle. Aimless. Everything wild and tense is held in our muscles: in the tight clench of my quads under her ass, and my hands barely holding her face. In her hands in fists in the shirt at my shoulders, her legs trembling over me. It feels like sex, the way she’s kissing me, the way her tongue slides across mine, but slower, and infinitely more innocent.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I murmur into her mouth. “I’ve wanted this for so long.”
The words cause her to tense and she sits back, blinking slowly. “Will this mess everything up?”
I move my hands from her face and rest them, carefully, on the outside of her thighs. “It can make everything better. We can do whatever you want.” I stretch to kiss her again, repeating, “Whatever you want. We can put on a movie and relax. We can stay here and kiss. We can play some more cards.”
The clock in the hall must tick at least a hundred times before Lola speaks.
“I don’t want to stay out here and play cards.”
My lungs have evaporated. “Okay,” I agree.
“Or watch a movie.”
I nod, choking on my own breath. “Whatever you want, pet.”
“And I don’t want to just kiss.” She stands, pulling me up with her. We’re so close my exhales puff against her hair as she stares, wide-eyed, up at me.
Her hand comes down the inside of my arm, fingers curling with mine, and she turns, tugging me down the hall.
Chapter NINE
Lola
I’VE ONLY BEEN in Oliver’s room one other time—when he was fixing something in the garage and needed me to grab his phone from his dresser—but I didn’t take the time to look around and take in how he’d put his secret space together. That time, it felt too personal to be in his sanctuary; I located the phone and dashed out. Back then, too, I hadn’t really let the enormity of my feelings sink in. We were still Just Friends. Being in his room wasn’t intense because he would be naked here, or sleep here. It just felt like a level of personal that Lola + Oliver didn’t do.
But right now—after that perfect kiss, after the feel of him rock hard beneath me, and knowing what we’re about to do in this room—my heart is a banging drum in my ear.
This is really happening.
I’m not dreaming.
Oliver’s hand is wrapped around mine, the memory of his mouth still makes my lips tingle, and his bed is mere feet from where we stand. It’s on the far side of the room, near the window that overlooks the ocean, which is a couple of blocks away. His window is open and it smells like salt water and ocean air and the clean pine scent of his laundry detergent.
I lead him over, and with a shaking hand pull back the covers and carefully slide in. His sheets are clean, the cotton cool beneath my back, and it makes my skin feel charged. Oliver watches me turn and lie down, and waits only a moment before he moves, slowly prowling over me and settling between my legs. His expression is so full of wonder when he looks down at me; it gives me a dizzying rush of power. He wants this as much as I do. I knew it, because he’d told me, but until just tonight, I didn’t truly believe.
The cold of the sheets is gone in only seconds and I’m too warm in an excited, frantic sort of way; the prick of sweat rises on my neck, down my chest. My nipples feel swollen and sensitive, and the heat of his skin when I rub against him pulls a soft gasp from my mouth.
“Lola.” My name is an urgent whisper on his lips, and I reach up, pulling his glasses from his face. He takes them from me and slides them onto the nightstand with so much caution that I wonder if he also feels so deliberate in every movement, it’s like moving through water.
“There,” I say when he turns back to me.
While my eyes adjust to the darkness of his room, I let my fingertips trace the outline of his face, the sharp line of his jaw. He’s angles and slopes; his skin is smooth along his cheeks, rough along his jaw. I stretch into him, pressing my bare chest to his, and Oliver lets out a shaking groan, sliding his hand down my side, along my thigh to my knee, where he pulls my leg over his hip. Beneath the denim of his jeans, his cock is rigid against me, and I feel the shape of it as we press together and apart, together and apart, rocking.
“You sure?” he whispers.
“I’m sure.”
The panel shows them prone, entwined, afire.
My breaths are violent jerks sucked in by necessity and pushed out by a wild beast in my chest. I’m completely naked except for the cotton of my underwear, and I relish the scratch of the denim on the soft skin of my thighs, but I want to feel him. The warmth, the skin, the tickle of hair. While his mouth plays along my neck, to my collarbone, and over the top swell of my breast, I slip my fingers between our bodies, unfasten his jeans, and work them as far as I can down his hips. I feel the rumbling groan in his chest before I hear it. He rocks his hips forward, making me gasp sharply when he presses himself—now only in his boxers—directly against my clit.
Oliver bends to move his mouth up my neck in a hot trail of teeth and lips. “Holy fuck, Lola—”
He cuts himself off when his mouth finds mine already open and searching for his, and I know the second I taste him that we’re skipping the slow exploration. His lips are soft and strong, sliding with mine so urgently we quickly grow messy—teeth grazing and chins captured in the hunger of it.
Want hits me like the lash of a whip, propelled by adrenaline. I grip the back of his neck, urging him to kiss me harder, to touch me. The sound I make when his thumb slides across my nipple is nearly one of pain; it pulls every nerve ending into a tight bunch, stroking me into fire, and he does it again, and again, in small, pressing circles. My heart pounds beneath his hand as he holds me there for his mouth and bends, sucking wetly . . . biting sharply . . . and his hips press forward and back, pushing himself right up against my clit until I’m scratching at his shoulders trying to get his weight to push me into the mattress, push my legs farther apart, push into me.
I tickle my fingers down his stomach, feeling both frantic and terrified.
“Yeah. Touch me,” he begs into my open mouth.
I slip my hand inside and gasp at the warmth. He’s urgent in my grip and exactly how I imagined he would feel: silken skin wrapped tight around iron and fire. Oliver’s face falls in relief as I stroke him, gently slipping his foreskin down and up, over the crown, and he begins to move, forward and back, lips distracted and hungry over mine.
The last eight months have been the slowest, most torturous foreplay, and there’s a fever beneath my skin that makes me impatient, lets me release him only long enough to push his boxers down far enough for him to kick them and his jeans the rest of the way off.
He’s unable to remain still over me, stubbly jaw razing across my sensitive nipples as he kisses down my ribs, under my arm, teeth scraping over my bicep as he rocks into my hand.
He fumbles between us, pulling my underwear down so I can free one leg and then his fingers are there, sliding over and into me and it’
s like being plugged into the solar system, everything inside me is light and fire, and I’m squirming under him to get there because, already, I’m close. I want to know what he feels, how he feels when he’s touching me and I’m there, too, one finger twisted around his and he laughs into a kiss, telling me how amazing it is. How can he find words when I’m completely speechless? His thumb grazes my clit again and again and I’m so swollen and desperate and pushing up off the bed so he can reach deeper with his forever-long fingers. His cock brushes against our hands and then he shifts his hips and moves our fingers out of the way and then it’s there, closer, and with a tiny synchronized catch in our breath he’s pushing forward and he slides into me.
“Oh, fuck,” he says
and
“Lola. Oh fuck me. Oh fuck me.”
And it turns to frenzy.
He’s moving
not just moving but
absolutely fucking me
and
it’s Oliver and he’s inside me already
and he’s moving so deep in and out, groaning into my neck.
Oliver plants his knees into the mattress and moves—there is nothing but sound in the darkness around us: the headboard slams against the wall, the hinges of the bed groan in protest. He’s grunting in my ear because it’s work, fucking me like this: fast and messy. His fingers slip over my chin and my mouth and he’s following with his tongue, licking my taste from my skin.
We’re laughing into kisses because it’s good—it’s so good—and my hands are everywhere between us: his chest and hips and stomach and the base of his cock. Somewhere deep down I knew it would be like this, I did. In the corners where I let myself imagine being close to anyone in this way, it was him. Always the fantasy had a flash of dark hair tucked into my neck, long fingers wrapped around my hip, his mouth curved into a knowing smile when I start to come—