Quirks & Kinks (26 page)

“Uh,” she stuttered, her eyebrows curving with an extra arch. “It wasn’t. It is now.”

“Ah!” she screamed as I tackled her to the bed and brought my lips to hers, moving slowly down the line of her neck and ending with a nibble on her exposed collarbone and laughing into the skin there.

“Well, we’ve found at least two things that you’re sexually open to. Dirty talking and doggie style.”

She pulled my face from her chest and waited for my eyes to meet her surprisingly serious ones before she spoke. Fidgety fingers rubbed at the skin of my bicep. “I think I’m just sexually open to one thing.”

Her voice was soft and timid in a way that it never was, and the hold of her body told me it wasn’t the time to joke. “Yeah?”

She nodded.

“What’s that?”

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but she somehow managed to speak even softer. “You.”

My forehead met hers and my eyes closed. “That’s the best thing you could have ever said.”

“Really?”

I groaned. “Oh yeah.”

Rolling to my back, I took her with me, settling her in an enticing straddle at the jut of my hips. She squealed at the suddenness of the ride, but I didn’t slow down. One knee up turned into two, and I used the power of my thighs to thrust my hips upward, forcing her weight forward and her body flat against mine.

She tried to push up onto her elbows, but I held tight, forcing her naked skin to stay against mine and her mouth to open in surprise.

I wanted her so completely, that my arousal, unwilling to stay trapped in the confines of my body, formed a cloud around us, thickening the air and making Easie’s eyes turn heavy.

“Let me feel you, Easie. From the top of your gorgeous head all the way down to the tip of your cute little toes, make me feel you.”

“Anderson—”

“Come on, baby. I’m planning on committing this to memory. You’d better make it good.”

With one simple challenge, she came into herself, embraced her every movement, and let go of all her inhibitions.

And sweet baby Jesus, it was good.

Twice.

Ten after eight the next morning, my phone chirped with an obnoxious tweet indicating a text. I tried to ignore it, but unfortunately, I’d brilliantly set my settings so that it wouldn’t stop until I made it go away.

On the third little bird noise, I groaned, rolling over to feel the warm skin of Easie’s back. She slept soundly through the commotion, and I wasn’t surprised.

She almost never woke up before ten, and she never got up before I did. We’d stumbled into a routine over the last week or so, and I couldn’t deny that I was sleeping much better than I normally did with her by my side. But I was still a relatively morning person.

Her phone went off then, adding to the cacophony of bird noises with the simulation of a spring thunderstorm.

“Dear God,” I mumbled into the smooth skin of her back. “It’s like Planet Earth in here. What’s next? The sound of rushing waves?”

“Shhh,” Easie ordered, snuggling her face even deeper into the plush down of my pillow. “Sleep good. Noise bad.”

“Hey, it’s not just my phone making noise.”

“Fuck the phones, you loud talker. It’s your voodoo doll I’m poking with imaginary needles.”

I laughed at that, slamming my morning wood against her back. “I’m poking something else.”

“No kidding.” She begrudgingly rolled over, facing me with sleepy eyes and a slightly swollen, pillow wrinkled face. “Jesus, of all the times for you to be well endowed and ready to rumble, this isn’t it. Can’t a woman get some sleep?”

Reaching for my phone, I swiped the screen to read the message that had started it all.

Larry: Meeting. Nine AM. Tell your girlfriend.

Though delayed by my curiosity, I finally got around to answering her. “No.”

“What?” she whined, lifting her head from the pillow and cocking one eye open. “Last night you said you’d give me anything I wanted.”

Shaking my head, I smirked. “Different context, Easie girl.”

“Easie girl is not a good nickname. Makes me sound like a whore.”

I wagged my eyebrows and took a pillow to the face for my trouble.

“Alright,” I laughed. “Sorry.” I smoothed a wandering hand over her naked hip, dragging the fabric of the sheets off of her as I did. “But you do have to get up. We’ve got a meeting with Larry in under an hour. Which means—”

“We’re probably already late.”

“Righto, baby.”

“Ughhhh,” she growled. “What’s with Larry and the meetings?”

I stood up from the bed with a chuckle, tossed the pillow back at her head softly. “I’m pretty sure that’s his job. Keeping us on task.”

“We don’t need to be fucking micromanaged.”

I raised a skeptical brow and looked pointedly at her position—still in the bed despite the tight timeline of our schedule.

She was smart and didn’t miss much. This wasn’t an exception.

“Okay,” she conceded. “We might need to be managed.”

“
You
do,” I teased, and then yelled like a little girl as she grabbed the flat sheet and MacGyver-ed it into a whip in point two five seconds. “Ahh!”

“Come on,” she prodded, standing in the center of the bed and swinging her newly fashioned weapon while her eyes zeroed in on my very bare crotch. “Do the helicopter.”

All it took were those three words—and my subsequent serious consideration—to realize that if anyone in this room was being managed . . . it was me.

Engage main rotor.

Ready for liftoff.

“YOU’RE LATE,” LARRY STATED
as we stumbled into the studio thirty minutes late.

I knew it was unprofessional, but Easie was irresistible, and the urge to feel her coming all around me one more time before we left won out over propriety.

“Yeah,” Easie explained, hooking her elbow through mine and flipping one splayed hand out. “See, there was a . . . helicopter.”

“And a cat,” I added helpfully, earning myself a well placed, yet surreptitious, elbow to the ribs.

Larry’s skin bunched between his eyes as his eyebrows pulled together. Big shoulders hunched, wrinkling the normally smooth line of his charcoal gray suit. “Huh?”

“Traffic,” Easie mumbled, fueled by a growing stampede of nerves. All of this meant more to her than it did to me, and this guy held the key to her fate. I lifted my free hand and rubbed soothingly at the skin of her looped arm.

“There was an accident?” Larry asked in an attempt to clarify.

I took the reins, squeezing her arm lightly to let her know, both to help Easie and to ensure we would move on. “Yeah, let’s go with that.”

Silence crept in as he looked from one of us to the other, trying to make sense of a conversation he had absolutely no chance of decoding.

“Whatever,” Larry finally muttered, resigned to the situation for what it was. “Sit. We have big news.”

“Big news?” I asked, pulling out two chairs at the table and settling Easie into hers before slumping into mine.

A combination wink and coy head tilt told me I would be rewarded for my chivalry later.

I made a mental note to open all the doors and pull out all the chairs. In fact, I made an addendum on my mental note to add as many doors and chairs to my daily routine as possible.

“Yep. The season finale. As you know we’ve got two more shows to film before that, but we just got the go ahead.”

“The go ahead for what?” Easie asked, gnawing at her lip during the buildup.

Echoing thuds sounded from the converted kitchen table as Larry did his own version of a drumroll. “We’re going to Vegas!” His eyes let up, and his hands shot out like horizontal fireworks with a touch of jazz fingers.

Yet, despite Larry’s newfound flare for pomp and twinkle, neither of us said anything.

My rapidly closing throat made speaking impossible, and even breathing wasn’t a guarantee.

“Jesus. You guys are the worst at reactions. I don’t know why I bother.”

Easie still had the ability to talk, though, and managed to edge out one distinctly uncreative word. “Vegas?”

“Vegas,” he confirmed, happy to have any kind of interaction. “We’re doing a huge show. The top 10 most popular kinks. You know, really try to swing it to the common ground, win over the every day crowd.” The size of his forehead shrunk with one quick pop of his eyebrows. “And where better to do it than in Sin City?”

I couldn’t speak on the reason for Easie’s silence, but I knew the reason for mine.

I didn’t know how I would keep the rest of my schedule. Vegas didn’t fit into my routine.

Vegas didn’t have my basketball league or my paddle boarding or access to the ocean to surf. In fact, it was pretty much lacking in every last one of my normal activities.

And in that moment, I had not one idea how to deal with it.

Easie was feeling loose tonight, having let me talk her in to drinking something stronger than lemonade on my dime. I actually felt kind of shitty about it because, as much as I truly did want her to have a good time, I knew part of it was done out of desperation to make her less sensitive to my contemplative mood.

I hadn’t quite been able to shake the news of Las Vegas, and with each hour that passed in the depths of that anxiety, I only grew more angry with myself.

I
couldn’t
let it go. I kept trying to talk my brain around, but it was like some little part of the train tracks was missing, leaving a gap I could
not
traverse. Through this experience, I could honestly say that
wanting
to change and not
being able to
was one of the most frustrating, self-hate-producing circumstances of my life.

But, right now, tonight—in
this
moment—Easie sure did make it hard to think of anything but her.

I found pleasure in watching her happiness change phases, starting as sound as laughter bubbled out of her mouth and ending as a light in her eyes. The blue pools of her irises sparkled, shooting bolts of midnight to the rim and lining it there and making the surrounding white stand out through the glassy laziness three lemon martinis had produced. Meanwhile, while her long legs stretched out from her stool-perched feet and surrounded me in their cocoon, bouncing along to the music. Her hair was wilder than normal, and a rosy blush stole the show across her high-boned cheeks.

She looked alive from within, and the energy that produced made her seem two feet taller than she was.

“Get up there and sing again!” she pleaded, inclining her head and tweaking her knee so that it settled into my side.

Chuckling, I pushed the falling hair out of her face and settled my palm on her jaw. “Sorry, baby. Gig’s done for the night.”

There was no fucking way I was getting up there again. I barely got through once every week.

“You’re crushing my soul right now, you . . . soul crusher,” she drunkenly pouted, leaning her face into my hand, resting her hand on top, and weaving her fingers through mine.

“Easie,” I murmured, smiling just before touching my lips to hers.

“How about we go home and I put on a solo performance for a one woman audience?”

“Ooo!” she squealed jerking her head up and settling our linked hands on her thigh. “Tell me it’s Magic Mike inspired! Can you gyrate as well as Channing Tatum?”