Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (26 page)

“Yes.”

I laugh, and so he looks at my mouth, again, and then he leans the rest of the way over and I was wrong about his mouth, because it doesn’t feel amazing, it feels like I’m being rubbed with heat from something deeply radiant, magnetized.

The physical yearning is intense, wrong, almost, if wrong is exactly what you want to be doing, all the time.

His hand on my jaw is holding tight, hard, and it’s
insane
because the way he touches me usually are these light touches, these directive touches to politely guide me through a door or an activity, or get my attention.

But his hand is honestly holding on to me, his fingertips are into my hair, almost pulling it, his thumb is pressing under my chin, and he knows where he wants me, which is close, and at an angle so he can get his mouth over mine, and then I finally breathe, I think, because it’s his tongue I feel next on the inside of my lower lip and then I need to reach up and hold on to him, too.

“Jenny,” he whispers, when my hand is around his nape, but that’s all he says before he kisses me again, and you know how tongue kissing is sometimes all you can think about with a guy, but then you’re kissing and can’t work out how to get it started?

With Evan, I don’t even realize how deep we’re kissing, it’s just simple and hungry and dirty because it’s Evan.

It’s Evan with both his hands bracketing my face.

It’s Evan whose mouth is a little rough with mine, and like he wants to be rougher, like he wants to hold me a little too tight, and I want him to, with one of my hands over his on my face, and my other tangled in his messy hair, and let myself get soft and pull him closer.

I feel his grunt in my mouth, and fuck,
fuck
he rakes his hand into my hair all the
way and he
pulls
it, hard, I think he’s
fisting
it, and he sucks in my lip and bites it while he pulls, greedy for me, hot for me, and I feel another sound in his throat, so low I can’t hear it, and every time he comes for my mouth between breaths he gets me where he wants me by that fist in my hair, the sting washing tight, icy-hot goose bumps over my spine, into the crease of my ass,
my God
, and then pulsing with dark, dark pins and needles all through the slick swollen mess of myself, my clit.

It’s a kiss that isn’t supposed to happen and he isn’t supposed to take, and so it tastes so good, it’s spiked, it’s drugged, and I’m messed up, I’m so messed up, I want to bite, too, but it’s better just to get fucked on this burn, this shot of something so ill-advised that it doesn’t let you breathe until it’s soaked through your middle, hot.

He pulls away to pant against my mouth, his forehead against mine, and I realize he’s squeezing my nape, keeping me right where I am.

“Let’s go somewhere,” he says.

“My house,” I tell him. “Come home with me.”

* * *

We’re walking along the sidewalk with all the shoppers, kind of fast, and he’s got all of my bags hung on one arm so his other hand is free to lace through mine.

It’s unreal. This is unreal, the cold and the shoppers walking all around us, and the glittery window displays, and his big hand all through mine, his arm pressed into my side, his glances in my direction that make his almost smile look completely different. Because it is promising something, to me, Jenny Wright.

And I think that smile always has been promising me something, but I was too wrapped up in my own sadness to see it.

So it makes sense, I think, that seeing this promise cracks through my sadness, and it makes sense that I feel like I am in the middle of some kind of unreality, because my entire reality lately has been to be sad. Ohio, for me, has been a sad place. Even with my lab and ESEM—because of my diagnosis, maybe especially with my lab and ESEM. I finally achieved what might get taken away.

This doesn’t feel sad. His kiss didn’t feel sad. The way we’re walking, breathless, the taste of our kiss still in our mouths, is not sad.

It’s not because I need Evan, either.

I need myself.

Kissing Evan is an entirely unexpected bonus: in fact,
Evan
is an entirely unexpected bonus. The fact of his enjoyment of so many ordinary-life things—a woman who could laugh off dumping a smoothie in a man’s lap, pratfalls, simple science, snow.

He’s a man who sees this huge big picture, the entire view, and takes it in.

I feel the entire promise of the holiday, actually, the fresh newness of the year as the old one goes away. How the white blanket of snow isn’t really concealing but tucking everything in to sleep, to get rest, to be made new.

I realize, too, that the only times I let myself really feel the full scope of my sadness was with Evan. He’s seen my anger, too. When I trip over chairs or bump into walls, it’s not just that he knows why, it’s that when it’s him that sees me stumble, I let myself kick the chair and the wall back and swear and otherwise lose my shit.

I dumped that smoothie on him during our third session, and he had already seen all of this, and yet he talked to his supervisor about my potential irresistibility.

Which meant he saw something that all my sadness had been concealing. The Jenny that’s always been Jenny sleeping underneath, and maybe getting stronger, or at least resting to face what was ahead.

I squeeze his hand, and he squeezes back, so certain and immediate it takes my breath away.

I hated therapy, but I never missed a session. I thought I hated Evan, but I never asked for another therapist. I couldn’t tell my mom that to keep myself from crying to sleep every night I was having a cyberaffair with the former tenant of my apartment, but Evan, while maybe he didn’t know precisely
that
, he knew that I cried. Knew that I spent too much time sitting alone in the dark.

Knew that what I was most afraid of was not the darkness of the whole world, but the darkness covering the small things, that it was the small things that made up my whole life.

He gets the big things.

Confronts them.

He stops at his van and lets me in, and then runs around to the other side. When he’s in his seat, and the packages dumped between us, and the door’s closed, he turns toward me.

For a moment, maybe I take a breath, but just one.

He’s looking at me, all over, not in my eyes.

I am wearing my giant green coat, but the way he’s looking at my body my coat seems to have burst into flames and I am actually naked, framed in fire.

Then he grabs my hand and pulls me to lurch after him into the bench seat directly behind the captain’s chairs. I start to settle next to him, trying not to tangle myself in my own legs, then he turns to face me, and reaches across and grabs my thigh, right by my butt, and then he freaking jerks me around with one of his long arms and big hands into his lap.

I am straddling Evan Carlisle, and he yanks on my coat until we’re chest to chest, and then he’s unsnapping my coat, watching my face.

“Okay,” he says, “just so we’re clear, I’m no longer your occupational therapist.”

“Huh, but aren’t you the best one?” He widens his thighs, and I notch close. My hotness pressed against him makes my eyes feel heavy.

He puts his hands over the tops of my thighs to adjust me on his lap, squeezing, hard, digging his fingertips in, watching his hands, and it feels so good, and unexpected, and I realize it’s been so long since I’ve felt the simple pleasure of human touch, let alone this insane agony of Evan’s unhesitating hands.

He slides off my coat.

“Tell me what you want.”

We’re both tall, so in his lap, we’re pretty much eye to eye. The bow of his top lip is swollen from my mouth, his blue eyes are bright and looking over my face. He has been so
careful
with me.

“I want you to do exactly what you’re thinking.”

His eyes rest in mine. I can’t breathe, hardly. “I’m thinking some pretty bad things.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He drags the heels of his hands up my thighs until he has his hands around my hips. I am not a small woman, but the way he presses his thumbs in, on either side of my fly, makes me feel like he’s determined to get his hands on every possible inch.

“How can a nice guy like you think bad things?”

“How can I not when you look like you do? When you’re so fucking smart? The
things I wanted to do to you watching you prepare that slide in your lab, God. I think I broke something.”

I have to close my eyes for a minute.

I’m in his lap, his hot hands around my hips, and I feel the burn of tears in the sides of my nose, in a painful thickness in my throat.

I open them, to look at him. It’s hard to look at him. He’s breathing hard, he’s watching me, he’s risking, for me.

So a tear falls, so what? He’s seen it all, already. It seems completely right that he should see me unsnap his coat while tears fall, while my hips rock in his hands, while my breath hitches.

He lets go so I can slide his coat from his arms.

Then I unzip his hoodie, take that away from his body.

Then I pull my sweater over my head and close my eyes again because he whispers,
God, Jenny
.

The van is cool, but the air just around our bodies, in our thin T-shirts, is warm.

I kiss him once over his lower lip, chaste and lingering, then I brace my hands on the seatback at his shoulders and close my eyes and kiss his neck, just under his ear.

His hands move to my back, as he takes this big breath.

“Tell me what you want to do with me,” I whisper.

“Your mouth,” he says. “I want more of that.”

I want to feel the skin of his neck against my tongue but after the undressing, I suddenly feel a teeny tiny bit shy, so I smooth my hands over his cheeks and kiss him with my eyes closed.

Inside the van, our breath is loud, the sounds of our kissing, too.

He keeps his hands on my shoulders, except when he lets go to gather my hair where it has fallen over our faces and to drape it over my shoulder, like he needs a little room to do this, to kiss me.

Every time his mouth moves over mine, every time our tongues touch, I feel like I’m getting squeezed tight all over and need to escape by rubbing all over him.

I make myself keep my hands on his face, his neck, soft and light, meet his kisses, his mouth as softly as I can stand it.

I want this to last.

The heat of him, those shivery moments where he moves my hair aside so gently,
the sound of his breath almost voiced in his throat.

We open our eyes, sometimes, between kisses, and every time we look at each other, he gives me that almost smile that I realize, now, was always, always, for me, and disguised his thoughts of touching me, just like this.

Underneath that smile are his hands, restless over the places he’s letting himself touch me.

Underneath we are stirring, tangling, waiting.

Evan gets his hands around my hips again, the same kind of grab that puts a big black line between then and now. He should get a job getting his hands around a woman because he does it all serious and professional, like he’s competing for the best way to hold a woman and showing everyone that he knows we like it when hands press and shape and fingers dig and thumbs circle.

I open my eyes, and catch his again, and that’s so hot, I think because by looking at each other, we have to admit what we’re doing. We’ve caught each other doing something kind of dirty, but neither one of us is stopping.

In fact, I raise a little and move my hips closer, until he closes his eyes because it feels so good. I have to close
my
eyes because it feels so good.

I have to let him hold on to me because kissing him and straddling him finally breaks something inside me and all I want to do is move on him, against him, even though I’m keeping my kisses sweet, just pressing them on all the places I’ve been looking at for so long—his worried eyebrows, his dark whiskers, his smiling mouth.

Then his neck, where I end up just resting my face because he smells good and I’m breathing hard, and my heart is pounding between my legs.

He slides his hands under my T-shirt, to rest against my bare lower back, and God, I can feel his hands shaking, and I involuntarily push back a little, a reaction to the skin on skin, and he presses back, guiding my movement, and then we go still because,
fuck
, this is dry humping, tipping my hips up and back like that.

“Wait,” he whispers, and then he tips his own hips up while driving me into a new position with his hands at my waist; he arranges something about how he’s sitting.

Then, he presses against my back again, and now I feel him, so hard and so thick inside his jeans; I feel him against where it seems like the entire pulse of my body has gone.

I put my arms all the way around his shoulders, rest my cheek against his, and let
my hips go loose, let myself move how I want to.

It makes my eyes roll, it makes my body restless, it makes my breasts feel tight and heavy, and my arms and legs feel light, almost disconnected.

It makes me feel so swollen between my legs that I start to take slow breaths; I still want to draw this out, and if I don’t think about how I am breathing, I’ll stop thinking, entirely, and come all over him.

“Jenny?”

I try to answer, but answering would change how I am breathing.

And even though he’s so hard and his hands are digging into my spine so tight, his showing me, silently, how turned on he is makes him seem so vulnerable, like he wants me to tell him what to do, for once.

Like he doesn’t know what to do about it but tell me, like he told me I was beautiful, like he told his boss he wanted me, like he doesn’t even know what to do except keep himself in check because he’s been keeping himself in check for so long.

I don’t think, either, given his confidence in his work, his unstoppable competence, that he’s very used to not knowing what to do.

I shift against him and his hands clench into fists at my back.

He does know what he wants, though.

So now I’m grinning, because I just—feel like
myself
, like Jenny who is a little crazy about someone and loves holding people and could stand to lose a little time to kissing and coming and smiling with a man who thinks I’m beautiful.