I licked the sliding droplets from the hollow of his throat and he snarled, his teeth sinking into my shoulder as he claimed me, his thrusts steady and rhythmic, relentless, and before I could hold back I came at the touch of his teeth, at the feel of him pounding into me even harder than before, the shockwaves rippling through my body as I groaned his name.
“Ally,” he answered, but instead of slowing his rhythm he slammed his cock deeper, tighter, one, two, three more times, and I gasped as he pumped into me one last time, cursing under his breath, a sigh ghosting over my bare skin as the aftershocks of my desire trembled and ran through my suddenly loose and sleepy limbs.
I slid down his warm body, my toes almost slipping on the wet shower floor until he steadied me, and then I leaned into him. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed a kiss to the top of my head, making a contented humming sound into my hair.
He murmured, “We should have done this ages ago.”
I couldn’t have agreed more.
TEN
Unfortunately, time refused to stand still so we could repeat that experience as many times as I would’ve liked, namely, infinity. Unfortunately, I was also technically a responsible adult, and when you’re a responsible adult, people make you have responsibilities. It was the worst.
On the bright side, having so much stuff to do made the following week just fly on by. Filming for the sizzle reel had finished, but the editing team was still working night and day to make that raw footage into art, and some days it seemed an hour couldn’t go by without me getting a text to make a judgment call on two or three different cuts of the same material.
I’d even flown down Sandra and two other artists she’d personally recommended to work on a new vintage-style label for the bottles, crates, and print ads. And speaking of print ads, I was working around the clock on the copy, running each of them past Hunter and wishing I had the kind of supportive work environment where I could have run them past my peers as well, without worrying that said peers would steal and/or sabotage them.
I especially wished this since Hunter wasn’t currently the most available person for running copy past. No matter how much this ad campaign felt like the whole world to me, it was really just one small moving part of the machine that was Knox Liquors, and Hunter had to keep an eye on all of those pieces. This week, he was on the other side of the state touring a small town named Charter Peak, where he was hoping to erect another distillery—if the revenue generated by the ads proved sufficient.
‘Cause, you know, I needed that extra pressure.
I missed him with a burning ache in my chest, and my nights were filled with dreams of his touches.
I was doing my best to focus on the upside: without Hunter around looking all fine and smelling really nice and moving all sexy, it had been much easier to focus. I’d gotten a lot of work done.
I paused and surveyed the work I had done. It was indeed quite a lot.
Enough that I felt I deserved a reward.
I called up the messages on my cell phone, and scrolled through the long list of sexts that we’d been sending each other every evening. Just reading Hunter’s words, carefully chosen and grammatically correct at first, then more and more fragmented as he got more excited, made my heart speed up, my nipples harden against the smooth silk of my brassiere.
My finger hovered over the button as I considered what to send him next.
I briefly considered a topless pic before discarding that idea; if someone from work ever found our dirty texts, I could claim someone else had sent them from my phone, but how that hypothetical someone had got their hands on a topless shot of me would be much harder to explain away.
I filed that idea away for a day in the future when I worked at a company where my colleagues weren’t untrustworthy sexist shitheads, and sent ‘miss u’ instead.
I immediately regretted it.
Not because it wasn’t true, but because it wasn’t sexy. And since our night together, Hunter and I had been keeping our conversations strictly sexy, and far, far away from feelings territory.
The phone rang.
Shit, had that been too much? Was he calling to say I should back off? Had he rethought things completely?
Calm the fuck down, I told myself sternly. You sent him a two word text, not a dozen roses. It’s not a big deal.
I answered the phone. “Hey.”
“Hey, Ally.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “It’s good to actually talk to you. I’ve missed you too.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“So, how’s it going over there?”
“Oh, you know, a complete madhouse. So, the usual.”
“Oh yeah?”
“My boss is calling every fifteen minutes, the editing team can’t find any of the stable footage, Sandra keeps having to ice her hand to stop it cramping up…” I trailed off, and then laughed. “How do you do that?”
He sounded confused. “Do what?”
“Make it all seem so manageable. So okay. Just by listening.”
“One of my secret ninja powers,” he informed me, deadpan.