“Yeah. I trust her.”
I finish up the call with Martin and go over to peel Willow away from the chefs, with whom she’s already in so tight you would never guess she’d just met them. We go outside and get into the car, Willow bemused by my eagerness.
“Where are we going now?” she asks.
“It’s a surprise.”
Twenty minutes later we’re pulling up beside a dusty airstrip, the Nevada sun beating down on us. Willow shields her eyes and scans the shimmering horizon.
“What are we doing out here?”
I nod in the other direction, and she suddenly notices the helicopter starting to spin its blades. She looks back at me, grinning like a kid on Christmas, and I put a hand on the small of her back to hurry her toward the chopper.
“You ever see the Grand Canyon?”
“Not in person,” Willow says, almost laughing with surprise.
“It’s one of the most majestic places on earth—spiritual. Especially when you see it from the sky.”
We duck under the hard pressure of the whipping blades and I open the door for Willow to climb in, getting in after her. The pilot has us buckle up and then lifts us up, spinning away dramatically and making Willow squeal through her overwhelmed smile.
Before long we’re swooping through those sunset-gold cliffs, the grandeur around us making us feel insignificant, even at this height. The horizon all around us filled with that ancient landscape, etched and scarred and formed by time, a history written by nature itself.
But even that can’t compel me as much as the woman beside me, can’t tempt me to peel my eyes from her, can’t diminish the magnificence in her face. Unconsciously, our hands find each other’s, fingers interlocking, as if they were meant to go together.
The chopper veers and dips, pressing our bodies closer. Willow lets out a sudden laugh and we find ourselves staring at each other, our faces inches apart.
“How did you know?” she asks, the roar of the blades stealing her whisper, but her lips easy to read.
I take a second to think about it, to wonder what it was that made me understand she’d like this. But the answer doesn’t come, the feeling something I couldn’t put into words. An answer, a meaning, a thought, that I can only give by moving my lips across that unbearable distance to hers and kissing her with everything I have.
14
Willow
I wake up to the sound of running shower water, light and echoey in the massive suite. A gentle aroma of tea tree oil shower gel tickling my nose and making me roll between the soft, rustling sheets onto my side. I open my eyes to the large, open plan hotel room, the clear window letting in a cool morning light, the messy king bed, and the hazy memory of all the things Cole and I did to each other last night, the scenes flooding back to me in vivid detail.
More than anything else, though, it’s the tender sensitivity of my naked body, my insides still humming, vibrating on some satisfying frequency, as if still bearing the impression of his cock, that reminds me.
We’d stumbled back up to the room from the hotel bar, where we spent the last few hours of the evening eye-fucking each other while talking about the perfect way a chocolate gateau needs to crumble, the most sensuous texture for its filling to be. Using words like ‘melt’ and ‘tight’ and ‘full’ until the words seemed to lose all their original meaning, and the truth of our thoughts were only thinly veiled. Then, half-arguing over whether the garlic in puttanesca should be sliced or crushed, we left the bar. A mixture of alcohol, lust, the musical rhythm with which we talked, the liberation of being in this new place, this luxurious hotel, all finally coming to an inevitable conclusion.
He kissed me in the elevator, and I danced out of his grip when the doors opened on our floor, the low rumble of his teased pride music to my ears. It must have taken us twenty minutes to make the thirty paces to our room, Cole’s hands finding my body again and again, pulling me into kisses so good I almost achieved vertigo, until he pulled away breathlessly and said we’d better get somewhere we wouldn’t be caught by security cameras or gawked at by other guests.
Inside the massive suite he slammed the door behind him, leaving all his restraint on the other side, turning into a sex-god beast. And I let go of modesty, gave myself to the hunger of his hot mouth on my neck, the insatiable grip of his hands spreading my thighs wide open, the relentless stroking of his rock-hard cock pounding deep inside me, never having been so aware of my own body as when he made me the object of his ravenous appetite. Clawing at the rug in dizzying rapture, pressed against the window as if Cole wanted the world to see him taking me, bent over the bed gasping for breath, watching his torso in the mirror as he thrust back and forth, faster and faster, groaning as his fingers dug into my hips and he slammed into me from behind like a force of nature.
“Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” I panted, out of my mind with the need to feel every inch of him inside me.
“Say please,” he commanded, tugging my ponytail so hard that my head tilted back to stare up at the ceiling.
“Please.”
He smacked my ass and I yelped at the sting.
“Louder,” he growled.
“Please, Cole. Please fuck me.” I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. I had never been like that with a guy before. And I loved it.
Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, he rolled me over onto my back and pushed my knees up over my head with one hand, driving himself so deep into me I yelled out loud. He didn’t let up, not for a second.
I came moments later, and then he did, so intense it was like an out of body experience, our moans sounding like they were coming from someplace far away as the earth-shattering shockwaves radiated through us.
The memories have me so hot all over again that I don’t think I can stay in this bed by myself a minute longer.
As I get up and stretch, I look over at the chair by the chest of drawers to find my clothes folded neatly. I smile. So Cole. I can imagine him picking up the clothes carefully from the floor, where they’d been discarded with all the glee of Christmas wrapping paper the night before, and carefully folding them away in that precise way of his.