“No.” His hand captured my face when my answer came out, gripping me hard, his mouth following suit, crashing down on my lips with a neediness that ached.
“Promise me.” His other hand came hard on my ass, dragging me forward, to the edge of the counter ‘til he held me fully against him, the soft material of his shorts doing nothing to disguise his arousal. I hated the way he could do this. His need instantly turned me into a raw cavern of want.
“He hasn’t,” I gasped. “Please, I need…” I clawed at him, wrapped my legs around him, pulling at his neck to bring his mouth back to mine.
“Tell me.”
My hands fumbled at the top of his shorts. Reached inside and gripped him, his hold tightening on me the moment I had him fully in my hand. “This.”
“You know what I think you need?” He pushed into my hand. “Is to be bad.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I swallowed a mouthful of lust. “Then make me bad.”
“I’ll make you worse.”
Then he fucked me. Right there on the counter. And I screamed my orgasm against the waves and the gulls and the wind. And forty-two stories above us, the colossal mansion on the cliff was silent and empty.
Chapter 50
Living together changes a relationship. Brant and I didn’t have the normal relationship issues. There were no dirty dishes to argue over. No laundry left on unswept floors. No, the traditional sources of strife were handled by our over-attentive staff of seven. But even without fights, our relationship changed, improved as a result of our addresses merging.
If I had any doubt of my love, it disappeared with every morning I woke up next to this man. His focus best in the morning, when he woke me with gentle swipes of his fingers through my hair, soft kisses placed on the surface of my skin. I’d roll into his arms, and there we’d spend an extra hour in bed, blinking the sleep from our eyes as the warmth of coffee flooded our veins. Sometimes he read, my body curling into his as I fell back asleep on his shoulder. Sometimes we fucked, his hard-on impossible to ignore between us, playful kisses turned into much more by his hands. Mostly we talked. About his day or mine. About HYA events or BSX projects. About our future and whether we would have two kids or four. Private or public schooling. Stanford or Peace Corps.
In the evenings, on the nights he came home, we cooked. Christine, the chef, acted as instructor, our skill growing with each dinner. My skill was implementation, Brant’s prep. We put on music; Christine kicked us off with general instruction, and then let us fail horribly.
Sometimes he’d get home too late. I’d save him a plate of her creation and sit with him on the upper porch. Listen to the crash of the ocean and talk while I sipped wine and he ate like a teenager. His appetite was huge. I never knew that before we lived together. Never knew that he snacked constantly then ate large, as if he was burning a thousand calories a day, his taste in cuisine as varied as my own.
He also worked impossible hours. Couldn’t recall half of his days when we sat down to talk. Lost track of time when steaks were on the grill. Loved, above all else, the sound of my orgasm. Wanted, above all else, to spend the rest of his life with me.
The closer we grew, the more I wanted to really talk. About the secrets that lay between us. There was a way for us to have a real future. I knew it. Fuck Jillian and the things she had told me. I believed our love could carry us through it. I believed I could be the glue that held him together when his world fell apart.
I wanted to kick at the support beams of all that he knew. Expose the truth behind all of this. Tell him everything. And see if he survived. See if he stayed.
I risked losing him.
I risked destroying his life.
I risked saving our love. Our future.
Chapter 51
Brant
I am not a simple man. I know that. We all discovered that the summer of my eleventh year. The summer it snowed in San Francisco. The summer the three girls disappeared. The summer my parents bought a computer, and I stopped playing outside. That summer, everything as I knew it changed.