The Guy Next Door

chapter SIX



“HELLO? MOM?”

“Hi, honey. What are you up to?”

Holly rolled her eyes. What are we up to? She couldn’t believe this. What are you up to was the issue.

“We’re still hanging with the friends we met this morning. We’re down near Mallory Square and want to stay for the sunset celebration then go for pizza. Would that be okay?”

“Sure. That sounds fun. Just remember your midnight curfew.”

“Right.”

Just then, Hannah got all up in Holly’s face and started asking questions. “Is she with him? What are they doing?” Holly shushed her friend and shooed her away.

“So, what have you been doing today, Mom?” Holly hoped she sounded casual enough.

“Oh, a little of everything,” was her answer. “I took the Hemingway tour then wandered around the island to get my bearings. I talked to some of the locals then had lunch. I’m getting ready to jump in the pool.”

And? And?

It looked like there wasn’t going to be any and. Holly realized her mom wasn’t going to say a word about the hottie captain, which pissed her off because her mom always got so parentnoid on her about the importance of honesty, but here she was—not one word about how she’d shamed herself zooming around town with her skirt yanked up to her granny panties!

Just then, her mom began to confess.

“I suppose I should mention that I spent most of the day with our neighbor, Jesse. Turns out he’s a very nice man.”

Holly nodded her head dramatically and gave Hannah a thumbs up, their prearranged signal that her mom was coming clean.

“Wow, that’s cool, Mom. Sounds like you had fun.”

Her mom was silent for a moment. “Yep,” was all she said. “Well, I better go. Call me when you’re on your way back to the house so I know when to expect you.”

“Sure.”

Holly felt somewhat calmer. So what if her mom was having a little fun with the dreamy old dude from next door? It was her vacation, too. It was all perfectly innocent.

“See you then, honey,” her mom said. “Thanks for checking in.”

“No prob. Hey, wait.” Holly stopped herself from hanging up. “Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful out there.”





WHAT KIND OF HIDEOUS, despicable mother was she? When Holly called to check in, Gail had just finished stuffing herself into her daughter’s bikini, the one Gail had only yesterday deemed pornographic and unfit for public display.

Yet she was about to head downstairs to put herself on display for Jesse, the guy from next door.

Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod…

Gail examined herself one last time in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. She had to admit that her body looked pretty good for her age, but the suit was slut city. What kind of skanky shops had found berth in the Beaverdale Mall, for goodness’ sake? Gail only thanked God she’d shaved her bikini area that day, because there was no room for error in this thing.

But seriously. She couldn’t really go through with this. Could she?

She heard the clank of the back gate and ran to the upstairs window. Jesse had just let himself in. He wore only a towel, which was angled low to one side and knotted at the hip. He carried a bottle of wine and two glasses in his hands, which he placed on a table. Gail watched him move in the glow of the setting sun, his brown skin gleaming, the light casting shadows on his ripped stomach and cut arms.

Suddenly, he turned. He must have felt the heat of her stare. This time, Gail wasn’t ashamed to be caught ogling, so she smiled and gave him a little wave.

Jesse tilted his head and brought one muscled arm across his body, rubbing the skin low on his abdomen. It was impossible not to notice that he was already getting aroused—the thin terry cloth was no match for the bulge taking shape beneath it. Gail watched in fascination as the ends of the towel began to open like a curtain.

Holy shit. He was naked under there. The most gorgeous hunk of man she’d ever seen in her life was naked underneath his towel! And he was waiting for her, ready to give her the kind of vacation memories a girl just couldn’t get at, say, Disney World.

Deep down, Gail knew it was now or never.

Before she could change her mind, she raced down the steps and through the downstairs, sliding open the patio doors. She stepped onto the pool deck, shaking her hair and posing for him the best she could, thinking that she felt like a woman possessed. The pre-spring-break Gail would never have had the guts to do something like this.

Jesse said nothing. He appeared to be frozen where he stood.

“This isn’t my usual kind of swimsuit,” Gail said, stating the obvious. “I don’t usually wear a two-piece.”

Jesse’s eyes went wide. “Two pieces of what?” he asked, chuckling. “Sweetheart, that’s barely enough thread to floss my teeth.”

Gail laughed—the man made her laugh! She figured if his fiction was as funny and colorful as he was in person, he might really be able to make it as a writer someday. “Should I take it off?” she asked.

Jesse shook his head very slowly. “Nope. That’s my job. Where are the girls?”

“Not coming home until later tonight. I just spoke to Holly.”

“Good. C’mere.”

“Wait. How about some music?” Gail turned and scurried over to the outdoor bar, where she’d seen the girls fiddle with the sound system. She hit the “on” button, and the ground began to pound.

Give it to me, baby, nice and slow.



Climb on top like you ride in the rodeo…





“Or not,” she said, flipping it off.

She heard Jesse laugh. “What’s wrong with a little mood music?” He’d begun to walk his way over to her, tented towel and all. The smile on his face was almost as wide as the gap in the terry cloth.

Gail let out a squeak of anxiety. Her breathing accelerated. Her mouth became parched.

Was she really going through with this? Was this really happening?

Jesse walked right past her, brushing against her hip on his way to the sound system. The music was on again, but at a much lower volume.

He stood right in front of her. “Gail.”

“Yes?”

Jesse slid his fingers up into her hair and pulled her head back ever so gently, stopping when she had no choice but to look up into his dark blue eyes. He placed a string of hot kisses along the side of her face, her jawline, her exposed throat. Her knees began to wobble.

“If you want to stop, just say so,” he whispered, still kissing. “I’m only the tour guide here. This is your vacation.”

Gail giggled and nodded at the same time. She was giddy. Drunk. Her skin was on fire everywhere his lips landed. She had the feeling of being lost, gone, out of her mind with lust for him. The volume might have been reduced, but she could still hear the overtly sexual lyrics of that song, words rhyming in subliminal seduction—behind, grind, thong, gone, zipper, quicker…

Jesse nibbled on her earlobe and his hands began to slide down her back to her butt, hips, thighs. Suddenly he grabbed her and pulled her tight against the front of his body. She felt his large erection poke into her belly. “You’re really something, Professor, do you know that?”

She shook her head. If he didn’t kiss her soon she was certain something inside her would snap out of place, never to function properly again.

“You’re the perfect combination of brains and beauty, such achingly sweet beauty.” As Jesse whispered these words, his tongue flicked her earlobe, then behind her ear, then at the tender skin of her throat. She couldn’t stand this. She could hardly breathe.

Jesse had the manual dexterity of a pickpocket. In lightning speed, he’d moved one hand up to her bikini top and deftly pushed one of the triangles of fabric aside so that her whole breast was exposed. She gasped.

He tweaked her nipple—harder than she might have expected from a man she’d only just met—and brought his mouth to hers. Finally.

She opened up to him. Jesse’s tongue was sweet and hot and skilled as it explored her. She heard a desperate moan and realized it had come out of her. She was losing her mind!

Suddenly, she felt the fingers of his other hand brush against the tiny crotch of the bikini. His touch was light. He didn’t poke or prod.

Jesse pulled his mouth from hers. He looked her directly in the eye. “You’re soaking wet.”

She moaned again. She was coming apart in his hands, with his words.

“F*ck me.”

Oh, yes she did. She said it.

“I thought you’d never ask.” Jesse grabbed her under the thighs and picked her up. Within seconds they were inside the house, up the stairs and in her bedroom, where he laid her on the bed.

“Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

As if she’d be capable of movement! Yet, surprisingly, as Gail watched Jesse walk from the room, her hands immediately began to wander of their own volition, approaching the vee of her bikini bottoms. She just wanted to see if Jesse had been exaggerating about the state of her arousal. That’s all. So she dipped her fingers inside, and discovered that, if anything, he’d been downright genteel in his description.

She had no control over herself. Gail closed her eyes and continued touching, stroking, sliding her fingers in her own wetness. She’d never been so turned on in her life. When she heard Jesse at the bedroom door she sat up, eyes wide, ashamed that she’d been caught.

His hands were holding the wine, the glasses and a string of condoms so long it reminded Gail of a party pack of lollipops. She swallowed hard.

“One condition,” Jesse said, placing the items on the bedside table and closing the drapes. “No shame. No embarrassment. Just pleasure. Deal?”

Gail found herself nodding.

Jesse was in front of her. He pushed her legs open where they draped over the side of the bed, forcing his way close. She couldn’t help but notice that his erection was directly lined up with her mouth.

He grabbed her hand, the hand that had just been down inside her swimsuit. Jesse raised it to his lips and licked the juice from her fingertips. Gail gasped. When he was done, he bent at the waist. They were eye-to-eye.

“Now, that’s my idea of an exotic delicacy, Professor. And I plan on treating myself to a lot of it this week. Will that be all right with you?”

Gail nodded, speechless.

“Then tell me again,” Jesse said. “I need to be absolutely sure this is what you want.”

“F*ck me. Right now.”

With one flick of his wrist, the towel fell to the floor. Gail’s eyes nearly popped from her head.

“There will be plenty of time for you to explore me, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere. But right now, I have to get inside you. I just have to be inside your body.”

She grabbed his face with both her hands and pulled him down to her mouth. Gail felt his fingers deftly untie the swimsuit. His hands began to travel everywhere on her body—her neck, her breasts, her belly, her legs, all while he kissed her, took her over and over again with his tongue.

They rolled together. Gail was on top of him, her fists full of his dark hair and her legs spread over him. She felt like a she-devil, like some kind of animal just released from a cage, like a stranger who’d been living inside her all this time had finally been given permission to come out to play.

Gail reached behind her and grabbed a condom. She handed it to Jesse, who looked up at her with as much wild desire in his eyes as she must have had in hers. Who was this man who’d been thrown into her world and her bed? What was happening to her?

She scooted down then lowered her mouth to his hard cock, gently and slowly tasting what he’d so kindly unveiled for her pleasure. He was thick and long and he tasted salty and clean. She dragged her tongue along the underside of him then closed her lips down on the head, taking as much as she could into her mouth.

“Whoa.” Jesse had his hands in her hair. “Hold up, wild woman.”

Gail raised her head, afraid she’d done something he didn’t like.

“It’s been a while for me, Gail,” he said, his eyes filled with a tender honesty. “Not quite as long as you, but long enough, and the way you’re going at me you’re going to make me come.”

She nodded. “We wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

He gave her a crooked grin then ripped open the foil wrapper.





GAIL WAS A WILD WOMAN all right, but she was also intensely erotic, fluid in the way she moved her body, and so ethereally beautiful that he felt as if he were looking into the face of an angel.

She was spread beneath him, and he was poised to enter her. She was so wet and open from his hand and his tongue that she’d started to pant. This was good.

He grabbed two handfuls of her luscious bottom and pulled her up to him. With one agonizingly pleasurable push, he got the head of his cock inside her. She was tight, slick and already pulsing around him.

With slow determination, Jesse got all the way in her. Her body was trembling. Her eyes looked up at him, pleading for more. So he gave it to her, in, out, his hands clutching her ass, her breasts rolling in rhythm with his thrusts. “Oh, hell, yesssss,” Gail hissed.

Jesse smiled through the waves of intense pleasure now rippling through him. He watched her face. She was lost in her own onslaught of bliss. She moaned, and her head rolled back and forth on her lovely neck.

Suddenly her eyes shot open. Her lips parted. And she clutched at his arms and shoulders. “I’m coming.”

He lowered his face near hers. “Come for me, Gail. That’s what I’m here for.”

“Oh, God.” Her eyes went blank. She was hanging on the edge.

“Do it, you sexy little mami,” he whispered, just before he crushed her mouth with his. She exploded in his arms, beneath his body, her raucous scream absorbed by his kiss. It was all he could do to stop himself from coming right along with her. But he managed. He wasn’t anywhere near ready to wrap up their first go-around together.

Jesse slowed his pace, pulling his lips from hers so that he could see her. Gail’s expression was one of utter satisfaction, complete with rosy cheeks and a drunken little smile. Her eyelids hung heavy over her soft brown eyes.

“Worth waiting for?” he asked.

Gail let go with a giddy chuckle. “Yeah,” she breathed.

Jesse gathered her tightly in his right arm. “Wrap your legs around me,” he said. She did. Then he pushed himself up and turned around to sit on the edge of the bed, his cock still embedded in the heat of her body. She placed her arms loosely around his neck, smiling down at him.

“You know, I have to admit something, Gail,” he said, his fingers kneading her back and buttocks.

“Yeah?”

“I saw it right away,” Jesse continued. “I could tell that underneath your good-girl packaging you were a sexual beast.”

She giggled softly and began to stroke his hair. Jesse closed his eyes and had just begun to luxuriate in the moment when he felt Gail do something wonderful—an unmistakably bad-girl trick—with the lower half of her body.

He opened one eye to see her smile as she squeezed him, wiggled on him, slowly raised and lowered herself on him.

“You bring it out in me, I guess,” Gail said, throwing her head back in pleasure as her inner muscles pulsed around him. She began a slow and intense grind, her soft little groans coming in rhythm with the undulations of her body.

Jesse knew he wouldn’t last three seconds if she kept this up.

“Gail?”

She let her head fall forward and looked down into his face. Her eyes were half closed in ecstasy and her beautiful blond hair tumbled down next to her cheeks. She never stopped wiggling on him and never stopped squeezing.

“Yeah?” she whispered, distracted.

Jesse had to laugh. It was clear to him now that Professor Gail was a single-minded sexpot when in pursuit of pleasure. He f*ckin’ loved it.

She began to ride him faster. “I’m going to come all over you again,” she breathed. “Oh, God, it feels so good.”

That was it. Jesse shuddered and he clutched at her, pulling her body closer as he rode out the searing heat of his orgasm. It took several moments for him to catch his breath. While he waited, he ran his hands all over the silky skin of her back, bottom and hips.

“Damn,” he whispered, pulling away from Gail and cradling her face in his hands. As he kissed her cheeks and chin, he thought about how lucky he’d been to be saddled with Lelinda’s Hemingway tour that morning.

It had turned out to be one of the most outstanding days of his life.





“WHAT THE—”

Holly stood in the open sliding door, staring at the sexy old dude from next door and her mom, romping around in the lit-up pool like teenagers. What were they doing? What music were they listening to? Why was her mom laughing so hard?

Please, God. Don’t let them be naked.

“I thought your mom hated hip-hop,” Hannah whispered into Holly’s ear.

“With a passion.”

“You said she goes to bed every night around nine.”

“Like clockwork.”

“Hey girls!” Her mom waved enthusiastically, a huge smile on her face. It was then that Holly noticed the familiar straps of her mom’s fugly one-piece aqua-blue swimsuit and knew it was safe to start breathing again.

“Hey!” Hannah answered for both of them. “Here we are, home by curfew, just like we promised!”

“That’s great, girls. I really appreciate it.”

Her mom paddled over to the pool’s edge while the captain dove underwater. Holly watched him glide to the pool wall, all sleek and dark muscles in the Day-Glo green water.

She didn’t trust him. He was probably a player. And her mom was clueless. It was like watching an Animal Planet episode on lions and gazelles on the Serengeti. She wanted to cover her eyes.

“I was just getting ready to head home.” Jesse propelled himself straight out of the water then smoothed back his hair. Hannah made a little squeak of appreciation as he turned his back to them and bent over to grab his towel. At least his swim trunks were the normal kind and not an old-pervert Speedo.

“Did you guys have fun tonight?” her mother asked, looking up at them with that big smile still on her face. Holly decided she looked totally blissed-out.

Oh, God.

“A great time,” Holly said, not wanting to be outdone by her mom. “We met these awesome local boys who were really nice and showed us around.”

Her mom just nodded, but the comment caught Jesse’s attention, and he spun toward them while he toweled off his hair. “Oh yeah? What are their names?”

“Luis and Nestor,” Hannah answered. “They said you were like family to them.”

Jesse’s arm stopped in midair. It was only for a split second and he went on as though nothing happened, but Holly noticed the reaction.

“Do you know them?” her mom asked Jesse. “Are they good kids?”

“Absolutely,” Jesse said, smiling a smile that Holly thought looked genuine. “Their dad’s one of my best friends. No worries.”

That seemed to make her mom happy.

“Just tell them I said to behave.”

Hannah thought that Jesse’s comment was funny, but Holly detected a real nervousness in the way Jesse was moving and speaking. Now she knew for sure the guy couldn’t be trusted.

Just then her mom jumped from the pool and began to dry off, asking if the girls had eaten and inviting them to join her and Jesse tomorrow. He was taking her to swim with the dolphins, she said.

“Thanks, but we have plans.” Holly answered while keeping an eye on the captain.

“Oh. Okay, then.” Her mom gave both the girls a kiss on the cheek. “I’m headed off to bed—I’m completely exhausted.”

I just bet you are, Holly thought.

Then she watched her mother smile at Jesse. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for a wonderful day.”

The captain smiled back at her. “Sleep tight.”

Hannah and her mom had already stepped through the back sliding door, and the captain was headed to the pool gate.

“Um, Jesse?”

He turned around, the smile he had for her mom still hanging around on his face. “Yes?”

“She’s not, you know—” Holly checked to make sure her mother was out of earshot. “My mom, I mean. She’s not all that experienced with men. She’s kind of naive.”

Jesse tugged the towel tight around his waist and looked at Holly with kind eyes. He nodded slowly, as if he was thinking about what she’d said.

“Mom’s only been with my dad, and she got pretty hurt.”

“She’s told me everything.”

That was a surprise. Holly took a step closer to him. He really was very handsome—for an old guy. “Don’t hurt her. Just don’t. It wouldn’t be good.”

A smile spread across Jesse’s face, and he looked away, almost like he was embarrassed. He laughed softly before he looked at Holly again. “Your mom is a very perceptive and smart woman. I wouldn’t worry too much about her.”

She shrugged, not wanting to admit that was what was going on here—she was worried about her mom.

Jesse took a step closer to her and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. “Believe me, Holly. The last thing I’d ever want to do is cause your mom pain. She’s a very special lady, and she deserves the best.”

Holly crossed her arms over her chest and studied him. He seemed like a decent enough guy. And he liked her mom. That was obvious.

“Well, okay,” Holly said tentatively. “But I’ll be keeping my eye on the two of you, just in case.”