As I listen to him, picturing every scenario he’s presenting, my mind starts to grow hazy and there are tingles spreading over my body with every thrust.
“Oh, God—I’m close,” I whimper.
Smith speeds up a fraction, creating an incredibly delicious friction.
“God, you’re getting tighter by the second,” he murmurs.
He grazes my earlobe with his tongue before biting down lightly. I dig my nails into his shoulder as my second orgasm crests, then crashes over me, this one even stronger than the first. I don’t remember much, other than the fact that I’m crying out and begging and he’s hammering into me with a kind of ferocity that, up until this moment, I had no idea was so hot. When he finally lets out a stilted roar, releasing everything he has to give deep within me, I feel like he’s performed an exorcism—I just don’t know if it’s on him or on me.
For a long moment, we stay connected. I run my hands over his back and his shoulders as he toys with my hair. Both of us breathe deeply and I wonder if we could actually fall asleep in this position.
“Still good?” he asks, pulling back to gaze down at me. I nod, feeling a little shy.
“Still great, actually.”
Smith grins broadly, then pushes himself up to standing and saunters out my door to the hall bathroom. I marvel at his naked ass because, hell, it’s a fucking marvel, then I bury my face in my pillow and sigh with contentment.
“Are you hiding?” he asks when he comes back in and sees me. I lift up and shake my head.
“Nope. Just sharing my unstoppable smile with this pillow here.”
He crawls over the bed and pulls down the comforter, then wraps it around us.
“Does that mean you’re spending the night?” I ask as he tucks one end of the blanket under my shoulders. He quirks a brow at me.
“Well, yeah. Is that okay?”
I nod and let my head drop against the pillow, then watch him as he adjusts, getting his body comfortable in my bed next to me. The mere notion of that—of him being here, in my bed—makes me both giddy and terrified. Maybe a little more giddy than terrified.
I close my eyes and try to slow my breathing. Moments later, I feel Smith’s arm curl around my hip and he pulls me closer to him. When I open my eyes, our faces are only a few inches apart. His eyes are even bluer at night than they are in the daytime.
“Hey,” he says softly. I smile at him almost shyly and I lift an arm up around his neck.
“Hey back.”
He smiles and, a few seconds later, his eyes close sort of slowly, like he’s actually fighting the desire to sleep. For a few long moments, I watch the almost imperceptible twitches of his eyelids. I reach up and lay a hand on his jaw. His skin feels like a miracle.
He feels like a miracle.
And, more than that, he feels like he belongs here. Right here, next to me.
For once, I don’t want to overthink everything. I don’t want to dissect the rights and wrongs of this evening. I just want to rest—every part of me, relaxing next to the body of this man that I’ve tried so hard to stay away from.
***
The dawn feels bright and full of possibility when I open my eyes and see Smith’s head on the pillow next to mine.
I breathe slowly and softly, staring at the shirtless man tangled in my sheets. Last night was a revelation. It was something I couldn’t have possibly planned better. And, sure, maybe it’s complicated. But this morning, complicated feels inexplicably close to perfect.
Smith’s eyes flutter open and his gaze is warm when it lands on me.
“Good morning.” His voice is gruff and sexy in the morning—of course his voice is gruff and sexy in the morning.
“Good morning,” I murmur.
“What time is it?” he asks, reaching to brush a curl out of my face. I reach over to grab my phone off the nightstand and peer at the screen.
“Nearly eight.”
He sort of groans and then rolls out of bed. When he stands, I find myself eagerly anticipating seeing his perfect body clad in nothing but underwear.
“Shit—I promised a friend I’d help him with a few things this morning.” He rubs his forehead. “I should have set my alarm.”
Then he leans down and braces his hands on the mattress, his face hardly a foot from mine.
“Although, looking at you all sexy and rumpled like that, all I want to do is lay you back down and fuck you again, this time in all the ways and in all the positions that I’ve been dreaming of every night since I met you.”
Um, yes please.
I push up to my knees and place my hands on his shoulders. I know exactly what I want to happen—what my body is craving.
“Can I convince you to stay for a little longer?”
I whisper the words, but Smith hears them loud and clear. He sort of groans, then leans forward to press his forehead to mine.
“I wish I could, baby. God, I wish I could.”
He presses his lips against mine. The pressure is soft at first, then builds as he moves to kneel on the bed in front of me. He coaxes my lips apart and I moan as his hands move up to cup my breasts.
“Shit.” He brushes his thumbs across my nipples and I dig my nails into his shoulders.
“Stay,” I murmur against his mouth.
He sort of groans, then forces himself to pull back. He gives me a rueful smile as he backs away from the bed.
“You’re a bad influence,” he says, wagging a finger at me. I bark out a laugh as he grabs his jeans from the floor and starts to pull them back on. When he walks over toward my door to search for his shirt, I hear a loud buzzing nearby. I glance around until I see his phone lying on the floor.
“Hey, I think you’ve got a text or something,” I call out as I grab it.
And then I look at the screen.
J. D. Fenton: Yo Asher—where you at?
For a second, I can’t move. After the incident with J. D. in the teachers’ lounge, I’d thought that Smith had written him off—at the very least, that he’d realized J. D. was the kind of person who hurt people. That he was the kind of person who would hurt me. And the realization that it didn’t change a thing makes my blood boil.
I grab my pillow and hug it tightly to my chest. I try to think of something to say. Smith turns back around to face me, now fully dressed. I just stare at him and he frowns.
“What’s up?
“I—I looked at the text,” I stutter.
“Uh . . . okay . . .”
I hand him the phone and he peers down at it. Then something like realization blooms across his face. I blink at him and he pushes a hand back through his hair.
“Hyacinth . . .”
“Is he the friend you’re going to see?” I ask quietly.
“Yes,” he says, shoving both hands in his pockets, “but it isn’t what you think.”
I close my eyes and feel a flush coast over my skin—my mostly, completely naked skin, blocked from his view by a pillow alone.
“Then explain it to me.”
There’s a long pause. When I open my eyes and look at Smith again, he’s staring down at the floor.
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
I swallow hard.
“Why would you want to spend time with someone who threatened me?” I ask, practically spitting the words at him. Smith doesn’t meet my gaze.
I lick my lips, trying my damnedest to think of something else to say. But before I can respond, he moves forward. Standing barely a foot from the bed he leans down again to look into my eyes.
“I need you to trust me—this . . . there’s a reason for this.”
My lips part and I exhale an angry breath. “How could there possibly be a reason you’d want to spend time with someone who hurt me?”