‘Yeah, I was even best man at her civil partnership.’
‘Wow. Even though she ended it three weeks before you were due to get married?’
‘But when she asked me if I’d donate some of my sperm, I told her to bugger off,’ Wilson said, and he sounded so disgruntled about the temerity of his ex that Hope wanted to giggle. She managed to school her features into something more sympathetic. ‘So, anyway. Remember that this isn’t going to destroy you.’ He paused. ‘It just feels like it will for a while.’
Lauren always insisted that it took a week for every month you dated, or a month for every year that you were in a relationship, to heal your broken heart. Hope realised she was in for a long, painful thirteen months, and then she realised that since she’d been sitting on Wilson’s sofa, she hadn’t once entertained the idea that she and Jack would get back together. At last that had finally sunk in, and while she still wasn’t happy about it, not even a little bit, Hope was accepting it. It was one tiny step on a very, very long road …
‘You know what’s weird?’ Wilson suddenly nudged Hope and disproved her theory that he knew when she wasn’t in the mood for talking any more.
She frowned. ‘No. What?’
‘That I’m meant to be giving you advice and a shoulder if you want to cry on it, but you’re sitting there in my pyjamas and smelling of my bubble bath, neither of which are that alluring, and all I can think about is how you …’ Wilson swallowed hard and Hope could hardly breathe as she waited for him to finish his sentence. ‘You’re warm and naked inside my clothes and I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anyone as much as I want you right now.’
Hope hadn’t been feeling alluring sitting there with frizzy hair and wearing baggy pyjamas, but now she was conscious that she was naked underneath the brushed cotton, which suddenly felt like a caress on her bare breasts, and when she shifted restlessly she could feel herself growing heavy and damp.
She didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t much that she could say either, except that she was meant to be broken and blue and crying on Wilson’s shoulder but, actually, that wasn’t what she wanted from him right then. She wanted his big heavy body on her, in her, and saying the words out loud would be yet another betrayal, but not as much as uncoiling her legs in an unsteady movement so she could rise up on her knees, take off Wilson’s glasses, place them carefully on the coffee table and fling her arms around his neck.
Hope imagined that she could taste Wilson’s shock, but she chased it away with her lips and her tongue, her hands on either side of his head to keep him still while she kissed him. Because he was always kissing her, and that seemed terribly unfair and one-sided.
Wilson’s arms had been hanging limply by his sides, but as he started to kiss her back with a ferocity that was a little bit frightening but mostly thrilling, his hands clasped her hips and he lifted Hope as she scooched over so she was straddling him and God, yes, she could feel the hard nudge of his cock rubbing against her clit, which felt like it might detonate inside its brushed-cotton prison.
It was obvious that Hope wasn’t going anywhere, was happy to stay right where she was, arching against the delicious promise of his dick, but Wilson pulled away from her voracious mouth so he could start to unbutton her pyjama top. He sighed as he slowly uncovered her breasts, sliding his hands into the jacket to shape their swollen fullness, thumbs pressing against her peaked and aching nipples.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said softly, reverently, and no one had ever said that to Hope before. No one. Not even the one person who should have said it to her many times and sounded like he meant it. ‘Your freckles,’ Wilson continued, tracing the freckles that dusted her skin, before Hope could think herself to another place, a place where she shouldn’t be half-naked with someone who wasn’t Jack. ‘If we had enough time, I’d kiss every single one. How far down do they go?’
‘All the way down,’ Hope said, as she slipped the pyjama top down her arms so Wilson could see the mass of brown blotches on her shoulders, where they were at their most prolific. ‘Got them everywhere but my palms and the soles of my feet.’
Hope had never thought of her freckles as sexy before, until Wilson quirked an eyebrow, one hand hovering over the drawstring knot that was holding up her pyjama bottoms.
‘Everywhere?’ he asked with interest.
Hope thought about slapping his hand away because she wasn’t sure how far she wanted this to go, but she decided that there was no harm in giving him a visual demonstration if he really, really wanted one. ‘Everywhere.’
‘Well, that’s something to bear in mind,’ Wilson murmured just before he kissed her again.
They kissed for long moments, hands exploring, clothing pushed impatiently out of the way. And then they’d stop, and Wilson’s hands would still be on the curve of Hope’s hips, and she’d rest her forehead on his shoulder and try to catch her breath.
The next time they stopped, it was so Hope could tug Wilson’s jumper and T-shirt over his head and as he sprawled back on the sofa sideways, she snuggled against him. The drawstring knot on her pyjama bottoms had been loosened and Wilson’s hand rested just inside the waistband so his thumb could stroke against the jut of her hipbone.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Hope asked as she traced her finger around one hard, flat nipple. Without his clothes, Wilson was solid and firm, but not as bulky as Hope had imagined. He wasn’t rock-hard like he lifted weights for hours every day, but obviously there were benefits to lugging around heavy pieces of photographic equipment. ‘I mean, why me?’
‘You really want to talk about this now?’ Wilson sighed and shifted around so he could get more comfortable and Hope could slip into the little valley between his body and the sofa cushions. ‘Why not you? You’re smart and funny, and I never could resist a damsel in distress.’
‘I’m not a damsel and I’m not in distress,’ Hope pointed out, because being heartbroken wasn’t the same as being distressed. ‘It’s just before this all happened, well, I thought that you didn’t even like me that much.’
‘I didn’t. Bolshie cow, remember? You and Susie brought out the worst in each other,’ Wilson said, and if this was his sexy talk then he was failing miserably, although Hope had been the one to raise the subject, but he was right. Together, she and Susie had been loud and obnoxious and invariably drunk. ‘But since then, you’ve grown on me and I have a weakness for girls who I can’t have.’
‘Isn’t that kind of a moot point at the moment?’
‘I suppose it is,’ Wilson agreed, dipping his head to catch a rosy nipple between his teeth and give it a hard suck so for one moment Hope forgot what they’d been talking about as she gasped and arched against him, the pyjama bottoms slipping a little further down so Wilson could place the shocking warmth of his hand on her bottom. He lifted his head and, in the dim light, the gleam in his eyes was unmistakable. ‘You going to let me have you then, are you, Hope?’
The way he said it … his voice still gruff and stern, but in the right context, gruff and stern became wickedly, dangerously sexy. Still, there was no way that Hope could give Wilson the answer that he wanted (though God, she wanted it too) so she bit her lip instead.
‘Is this just about revenge?’ Now Wilson’s voice sounded hurt, and Hope tried to take away the pain by scattering kisses across his chest.
‘No! Of course it isn’t,’ she said. ‘It never was. It might have been about being comforted once, but now it’s about wanting you. It’s just that … well, am I just on the rebound? Because if I am, then it’s not right, is it? To use you like this. And is it too soon? I mean, we only split up last week.’
‘I’m really quite happy if you are on the rebound,’ Wilson’s hand tightened on her arse meaningfully. ‘Are you saying this is all happening too soon?’
‘I don’t know.’ Hope burrowed against Wilson and his arm wrapped around her even as he grunted like she was really testing his limits and his patience. ‘It’s not like life c
omes with big flashing lights above the doors that you’re meant to go through.’
‘You’re half-naked in my arms. I’d say that was as good as a big flashing light.’
‘Please don’t take this the wrong way,’ Hope begged and she sat up, which meant digging her elbow into Wilson’s ribs so she could brush the tangle of hair out of her eyes and pull together the gaping edges of his pyjama top. ‘It’s not to say that this isn’t special or that I don’t want to be here, but until you I’d never even kissed another man except Jack …’
‘You must have! At university …’
‘I didn’t! We’d been together five years by then and why would I throw that away on a few drunken gropes with sweaty Electronic Engineering students and I really thought Jack and I had a for ever and ever kind of deal – and now you’re right, I’m half-naked in your arms … Oh, fuck!’
Hope was suddenly filled with shame and self-loathing. She was an awful, terrible, horrible person. She was meant to be out of her mind with grief, but she knew exactly what she was doing, and what she was doing was wrong. According to Lauren and those ‘How to Get Over a Broken Heart’ articles in all the magazines, it was going to take her at least thirteen months to be a fully functioning human being again, but here she was already in another man’s arms. It didn’t say much about the depth of her love for Jack that she was aching and wet for another man. For Wilson, who hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word to condemn her, but Hope was trying to scramble away from him, which was hard when she was wedged between him and the back of the sofa. ‘Let me up!’
Wilson didn’t let her up, but took her wrists in a firm hold. ‘Listen, Dylan didn’t have to see a man about a pushchair tonight. I told him that I’d take the photos because I wanted to see you again,’ he said. ‘I even gave him a hundred quid when he kept bitching at me that he really needed the money with a baby on the way.’
‘Oh.’ Hope stopped struggling, until she decided that Wilson’s subterfuge, though flattering, didn’t even begin to compare to her treachery. ‘But that doesn’t make it right me using you like this and …’
‘What if I’m OK with being used? God, Hope, you’ve only been with one man your entire life. Aren’t you even a little bit curious to see what it would be like with someone else?’ Wilson asked Hope urgently. ‘You’re a free agent. You can do whatever the hell you like.’
And when he put it like that, it didn’t seem so awful in the grand scheme of things, but maybe she was letting herself be convinced because she wanted to be, Hope thought as Wilson let go of her wrists, and slid his hands down the length of her spine so he could delve into the pyjama bottoms and cup her arse.
‘Enough talking, more kissing,’ he said.
‘But it is still wrong,’ Hope mumbled, and she wished that she could just shut the hell up. It was already wrong, what with the kissing and being bare chest to bare chest. Any other wrongness that occurred was just gravy. ‘Don’t you think?’
Wilson kissed her then, sliding his tongue possessively into her mouth so Hope couldn’t speak, but she didn’t really want to do anything other than kiss him back, and this time when they stopped kissing, she had managed to unbuckle his belt and undo his jeans, and the pyjama bottoms had slipped so far down her hips that she might just as well have not been wearing them. Wilson obviously thought so because he pushed them slowly down so they were tangled around her knees.
Here we go, Hope thought to herself, all ready to slip her hands inside Wilson’s jeans, but then she wasn’t able to do anything but gasp as his mouth grazed the tip of one swollen breast before sucking it into the warm heat of his mouth.
He lavished attention on her breasts for long, long minutes until they were gleaming damply and so sensitive that when he moved back Hope wanted to cry out as she felt the air stir against them.
Wilson’s chest slowly coming back into view distracted Hope from the clamorous demands of her own body. Jack was so wiry and thin, that Hope always felt too fleshy in comparison. But Wilson wasn’t like that all over, she thought as she pressed her palm against his stomach and felt the hard ridge of muscle just beneath the skin. Wilson also had a faint smattering of hair across his chest, not foliage by any means, but Jack didn’t and again it was different.
Hope knew she shouldn’t be comparing and contrasting as much as she was, but it seemed to her that Jack was still a boy and Wilson was very much a man. Looked like a man, talked like a man and acted like a man as he lowered her back down on to the sofa so he could kiss her again.
And when his hand slid up her thigh, he didn’t falter or fumble or negotiate like Jack would have (‘I’ll let you go first if you promise to give me a blow job afterwards’), he just cupped her damp pussy and looked her right in the eye.
‘I’m not going to fuck you but I am going to make you come,’ he told Hope and it should have been scary because this was Wilson (Wilson!) but Hope trusted him implicitly. Wilson didn’t go in for double-speak or bullshit and if he said he was going to make her come, then he’d exhaust every possible avenue until her heart was racing, her eyes were rolling back in her head and her brain had short-circuited.
Hope dipped her head to give Wilson her tacit approval and wriggled to get more comfortable. They ended up side by side, facing each other, so they could still kiss as Wilson parted her thighs and explored her wet swollen pussy with the tip of one finger, while his tongue slipped into her mouth.
The finger stroked and pressed and teased but never exactly where she wanted it, so in the end Hope was forced to wrench her mouth away from Wilson’s so she could give him directions. ‘You’re about two centimetres out,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Just to the left a bit.’
‘I know exactly where it is,’ Wilson snapped, resting his thumb on her clit for one fleeting second, before going back to the same ticklish teasing that he’d been doing for what felt like hours – thumb slipping around her clit but never properly making contact, while a finger traced the edge of her cunt without slipping inside.
Hope ground her teeth in frustration. ‘I need more stimulation than that to come,’ she tried to explain. ‘A lot more.’
‘I could do without a running commentary from the cheap seats,’ Wilson said. ‘We do it my way, or we don’t do it at all.’
For a moment, a long moment, Hope was tempted to snap her legs shut and tell him to forget it. She always gave Jack detailed instructions, otherwise it would have taken them all night to do what could be done in twenty minutes, which included a little bit of snuggle-time afterwards.
Maybe that was what Jack had meant when he’d dissed their sex life, but after ten years you fell into a routine and oh! … Hope arched back against the sofa as Wilson rubbed his thumb against her clit and slipped a finger inside her just long enough for her to think that they were finally starting to get somewhere – and then he was just circling around her clit again with a maddening, featherlight touch.
Hope huffed in annoyance. ‘I was just saying …’
‘I have done this before, you know,’ Wilson said, biting down on her earlobe. ‘Quite a few times, as it goes.’
Was that why Susie had gone for Jack? Or Jack had gone for Susie? Because Wilson’s technique left a lot to be desired, and Hope was bossy and always told Jack exactly what she expected from him before she’d even dropped her knickers?
‘Give me your hand,’ Wilson suddenly said, and Hope stopped frowning so she could blink at him warily.
‘Why?’
‘Well, I’d quite like to come too,’ Wilson said, taking her hand which had been resting limply on her hip and pulling it towards him and down, down until it was resting on his cock, hard and pulsing, even through his jeans, which she hadn’t managed to completely unzip. Hope’s first instinct was to snatch her hand back and maybe freak out a little bit, but then Wilson took his hand away and her own fingers were shaping him and curiosity was taking over. Curiosity was making her unzip his Levis all the way down and slip her hand into his shorts
because the whole time she could hear Susie’s smug voice echoing in her head: ‘he’s got a big dick and he knows what to do with it.’
Was it bigger than Jack’s? Hope couldn’t tell, but as her fingers explored, Wilson felt a tiny bit longer maybe, definitely thicker, and just wrapping her hand around another man’s cock should have been the very definition of wicked, but if it was, then it was wicked in a very good way. Feeling someone up was so teenage and reminded Hope of those long-ago evenings in her bedroom, door ajar because she was forbidden to close it when Jack was on the premises, something loud on her stereo to drown out the sound of the little moans and gasps they both made as they went to third base, dry-humped, heavy petted and all the other things they did that weren’t full-on, penetrative sex.
Truth be told, Hope missed the hours that she and Jack used to spend snogging and groping and becoming familiar with the workings of a body that wasn’t their own. Once they’d started to have sex, all the snogging and groping had fallen away because snogging and groping weren’t enough by themselves, they were simply a means to an end, and the end was always sex.
Wilson murmured something indistinct and throaty when Hope thumbed the head of his cock, and she realised that she’d been absent-mindedly stroking him as she took a detour down memory lane. She’d obviously been doing the stroking with some measure of success because finally, finally his finger stopped circling and plunged deep inside her and it was her turn to voice her approval with a greedy little moan.
There was something ridiculous about the two of them squirming on a sofa barely wide enough to contain them, hands down each other’s pants. The skin on Hope’s wrist chafed against the zip of Wilson’s jeans, and his pyjama bottoms were looped around her ankles and she didn’t even have room to kick them off, but it didn’t feel ridiculous to be kissing Wilson while he finger-fucked her slowly and deeply, thumb working her clit as she jacked him off.