“I don’t know about you, but I’m an all-in kind of guy. When I want something, I tend to get selfish. So, let’s just say I felt myself getting a little too selfish this morning.”
His fingers traveled absentmindedly up my calf. I was drunk, but not enough to misunderstand the implication he left floating there, and maybe he was hoping I would. Maybe he expected I’d forget by the morning, or that he could take it back if he needed to. Or maybe he hoped that I wouldn’t at all.
Maybe he wanted every single word to sink into my skin, so I’d know that he meant he wanted me too much to let himself have me. My body was buzzing to know what Frankie felt like when he was being too selfish.
I opened my mouth with a reply, but in the same breath a ghoulish groan from down the hallway filled the silence. My eyes widened as I sat up, searching for an explanation in an entirely amused and unsurprised Frankie. The noise continued, this time flanked with several yeses and high-pitched Mattys.
I gasped. “Oh my god.”
“I told you.”
7
I’d never been so comfortable.
Warm, soft velvet weighed me down. It curled around my torso and supported my neck, diving between my thighs as I swung my legs around it. I was near the ocean, the morning dawn still purple beneath the horizon, the ripple of waves kissing and lapping at lukewarm sand just a few feet away. No one was around, the only sounds a distant caw of a seagull, and the far-off rumble of morning commutes crowding the intercoastal. The breeze was comfortable and playful on my bare skin as I waited for the sun to wake and nip the last brisk breath of air from the night.
A raspy satisfied groan came out of me as I felt lips on my chest, searing the already hot skin. A soft mouth explored me carefully, traveling toward my exposed collarbones, then my neck, the sensitive spot below my ear at the hinge of my jaw.
God, what is happening?
I hummed at the teasing scratch of stubble down my skin and whimpered, ever so softly, at the feeling of hands, deft and large, pressing carefully at the insides of my thighs, spreading them.
My fingers threaded through feathery brown waves of hair. The short strands tickled my knuckles as the head they were attached to swayed rhythmically down my body, leaving a torrid trail of tongue and teeth, licking greedily at my hip bones.
“God yes.” I sighed, shifting my body to open wider. Somehow the cushion at my back gave like a well-worn pillow as I sunk further into the sand. The softest sand. It smelled like home, like cedar and cotton and the manly tang of teakwood.
The sound of the waves faded into background noise as my breaths quickened and the apex of my thighs ached for use. My brain screamed, Kiss me there, touch me there, but suddenly reprieve felt farther away no matter the very tangible pulse in my core. I reached for it, grinding my hips in circles until the throb was sated by the bundle of fabric caught in the tangle of my legs. I could do it. I could reach my peak like this, with the image of the ocean and the palm trees and those perfectly tan hands and demanding brown eyes flickering up to meet my gaze as Frankie—
The shutter of a camera cracked my fantasy like a strike of lightning to pine. My eyelids flipped open, adjusting to the space through the tired, crusted slit of my eyelashes. Fuck, waterproof mascara was a fickle bitch.
The lights were low. I could see a peek of blue sky and sunshine trying with all their might to breach through the blinds in the Delacora windows. My neck was unsurprisingly stiff; I grumbled and rolled it on my shoulders twice, activating the headache that had been lying dormant.
I laid back down, only to be met with another much louder and apparent shutter of a camera.
I flung into an upright position, immediately coming face-to-iPhone with Frankie at the opposite end of the couch as he had been when I fell asleep. Except now he tauntingly held his camera over my sock-covered toes in his lap.
“Good morning, Colorado. Were you just having a wet dream on my couch?”
“Ugh, sicko!” I tried to kick the phone out of his hand but he snatched it away quicker, showing me the screen. The front-facing camera had been capturing photos of his curly mop of hair and shadowed forehead.
“I had to wake you up somehow. You were performing parts of the Kama Sutra on my bed spread. It felt like a thing I needed to give consent for.”
Indeed, his comforter was twisted in a braid between my legs and up the length of my body. I was hugging it like a koala bear would a tree trunk and there was absolutely no way to coyly untangle my limbs without spreading my legs.
I cleared my throat. “Why didn’t you just get up and sleep in your own bed then?”
“I didn’t want to disturb you after you fell asleep. You looked cute as fuck drooling on my pillows.”
“I did not drool on your—” I palmed the cream-colored throw under my head. Fuck, I definitely drooled on it.
He smirked and looked down at his lap. “You know, for a girl who swore up and down last night she’d never put her feet on a dick, you’re looking extremely comfy right now.”
I registered then that my legs were still extended clear across Frankie’s thighs. I’d claimed the couch as my own in the middle of the night under the influence of drunken comfort seeking. To be fair, it could have been much worse—that little dream I just woke up from could have been real.
I rolled my eyes and pulled my feet back under the blankets, but my heel caught something stiff and sensitive tucked into the band of his sweatpants.
“Oof.” Frankie winced through his teeth. “Careful where you’re kicking those.”
My cheeks flamed. “Do you have a fucking hard-on right now!?” I tried not to look, I really did. The sweats did nothing to sway my gaze though. It was difficult enough to know it was there; call it Mission Impossible not to selfishly want to see what he was working with.
He shrugged. “It’s the morning, I don’t control these things.”
“Put it away,” I demanded. “Make it go away.”
“Should I pack it a bag and buy it a plane ticket?”
“Frankie.” I ground my teeth together. I was still nursing a buzz like a parasite from the club and half my body obviously wanted something in, near, or around it enough to send me to beach-fuck dreamland. The respectable half of my brain reminded me that Frankie wasn’t out of the dark yet despite the late-night couch-talk, and if he wanted to be back in my good graces, it would take more than making a dick joke and wearing a pair of gray sweatpants.
“You’re overconfident,” I told him.
“Am I, though?” He tilted his head and watched me like he could see the gears turning inside my head. The tennis match of pros and cons that would come with letting him bend me over the arm of the sofa right then…
“Don’t call me Colorado,” I deflected. “This isn’t Zombieland.”