“So soon?”
Before the words had left my mouth, his hand was up my skirt, tugging on the top of my stockings. He’d seen what I was wearing under the dress. In the exhilaration of skating, I’d forgotten I’d expose myself in the spin, and now I had his arms around my waist, his lips finding mine, the thrust of his body pushing me back against the wall.
“You wore those for me?”
“I’m wearing it for me.” I didn’t believe myself, but I said it anyway.
“I’m going to eat you alive.” His mouth coursed the length of my throat, and his hands gripped my ass.
He’d been attracted to me before. I knew that. But I didn’t know what a garter belt did. I’d hoped it would make me a little hotter. I hadn’t known it would make him crazy.
The sudden increase in heat sent my alarm bells screaming. It was too soon. He wasn’t committed to me or my feelings. My sexual arousal had always been tightly tethered to love, romance, the promise of something more. A future. We had none, and I was clear about that. It was the weight that spun me in his centrifuge. We were just bodies, and I couldn’t drag him down. I couldn’t weigh on him.
I was burning up from the inside out, melting flesh and bone against him. I couldn’t put together a thought, only a series of images. All were affected by gravity. Falling. Sucked down. My consciousness, thought processes, ability to keep my body from molding itself to his got swept into the black hole of our shared need.
“Wait,” I gasped.
“What?” he answered in my ear, breath hot, hands settling on my waist.
What did I want to say? Did it have words? I just needed to stop breaking apart into a million hot shards, or I was going to lose my mind.
“I mean it. I didn’t wear this for you. I just didn’t expect to be doing scratch spins.”
He nodded once. Slowly.
“And I don’t even know you. It’s too soon for you to take me home. I’m scared of getting attached to you. Really scared.”
“The feeling’s mutual.”
Mentally, I stopped dead in my tracks. Whatever train my thoughts had been on screeched to a halt between stations. I looked in his eyes, searching for a bit of guardedness, a little double meaning, but there was none. He wasn’t lying.
“I tell you what,” he said, drawing his finger along the ridge of my jaw. “Come home with me, and let’s get to know each other. But we can reserve sex for later.”
“Define sex. Penetration? Coitus?”
He laughed. “You sure you don’t teach sex ed?”
“I’m trying to make it less appealing.”
“Didn’t work. But I’ll use your words. I’ll get my mouth on you, my hands all over you. We can enjoy each other tonight, and I’ll fuck you later.”
“Those weren’t my words.”
“I meant the words you were thinking.”
“You’re a little crazy. Do you know that?”
He dropped his hands, smoothing down my skirt. His cheek against mine, I felt him smile. “Any man would get a little crazy around you.”
I put my hands flat on his chest. He was so solid, so real, yet he’d mistaken me for a woman who drove men wild. He saw some mirror image and not the real Vivian. What would the anti-me do right there, with her hands on him and his body so close she could feel the heat coming off it?
“Take me home, Dash.”
twenty
Vivian
He drove up to the hills, hand on the stick shift, mine on top of it, but he didn’t say much. I’d never wanted anything as badly as I wanted his body and his time, but he wasn’t talking.
Neither was I. I had nothing interesting to say besides fuck me, which I couldn’t bring myself to utter, and as he clicked the box that opened his garage door, I wondered if I was doing a good job of being the anti-me.
“Vivian.”
“It’s all right. You don’t have to.”
The garage yawned before us, and I wondered if I had my Ryde app ready.
“I want to.” He squeezed my hand and looked into my eyes in the darkness. “But I’m sticking by my word. I’m not fucking you. Not tonight.”
I wanted to reassure him that I could easily be talked into all kinds of things, but cautious Vivian and reckless Vivian agreed it was time to shut up.
I shifted in my seat, and my skirt slipped over the tops of my stockings. I pulled it down. He laid his finger on my thigh and drew it over the stocking, pushing my skirt back up. He looked out the windshield as if he needed a moment, then he turned back to me, leaned forward, and spoke softly yet with force.
“Open your legs.”
He put a hint of pressure inside my knee to part it from the other one. I went liquid and squeaked, so intense was the pleasure that gushed out from my center.
“Go on,” he whispered.
I parted my knees, and he watched. My hands were at my sides, braced against the seat, the only clue to my heightened nerves.