The Outskirts (The Outskirts Duet #1)

His hard body against my softer one.

Yes, yes it was.

Finn snaked his hand around my hips, resting it on my lower stomach. A thought flashed through my muddled brain. My eyes sprang open.

“You’re not…” I started.

“Calm yourself. Unwilling girls aren’t really my thing,” Finn said, sounding offended.

“It’s not like I would know that you weren’t trying to…” I stopped, not sure which word to use or even if I wanted to use one at all.

“FUCK you,” he finished for me. “It’s not like you would know that I wasn’t trying to FUCK you.”

“Yes. THAT.”

“You wouldn’t have a single doubt in your mind if I really was trying to fuck you tonight.”

“Oh,” I said, both relieved and disappointed. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Finn said, his breath warm against my neck.

My nipples were hardened due to the curious sensations coursing through my body.

“Is there a difference between beautiful and attractive?”

Finn didn’t answer at first. I’d finally resolved that he’d decided to stop talking to me when he spoke. “Yes. But it can also be the same.”

“How is that?” I asked, feeling his heartbeat speed up against my back.

“There are two kinds of beauty. At least to me there are. The other day I saw an old woman on the side of the road selling mangos. She had silver hair and no teeth, but the biggest smile on her face. Her eyes were bright blue and lit up any time a customer stopped to buy a mango. I thought she was beautiful.”

He traced slow lazy circles on my lower stomach and I shivered.

Fin pulled the blanket up higher. “Better?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, although my shiver wasn’t from being cold.

“So what’s the second kind of beauty?”

“The kind you can’t stop looking at no matter how hard you try.” Finn lowered his mouth so his lips moved against the tip of my ear when he spoke. “The kind you want to fuck.”

I swallowed. “What does that kind of beauty look like?” I asked, breathlessly.

Finn’s hand rose on my stomach until his fingers lightly grazed the underside of one of my breasts. “Right now it looks like freckled skin and gold flecked eyes.”

I gasped.

“Now it’s my turn to ask you a question,” Finn started. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Where did you…”

A bolt of lightning chose that moment to light up the window followed by thunder so loud it might as well have come from inside. I flinched and started to shake all over again.

“I’m…I’m afraid of storms,” I admitted. “I guess after what happened tonight I should be.”

Finn held me tighter. “It’s called Astraphobia,” he said, out of nowhere.

“Wha…what?” I asked, opening my eyes and blinking rapidly when I realized he was shaking me. I must have drifted off.

“Stay with me,” Finn said, his voice smoothing over my body like a healing salve. “Astraphobia is the fear of thunder and lightning. That’s what it’s called.”

“How do you know that?”

“Someone I used to know had it pretty bad,” Finn’s breath tickled my neck. “I used to tease her about it relentlessly, thinking she was just being a baby until I looked it up at the library and realized it was a real thing.”

Another particularly brutal series of lightning strikes flashed like machine gun fire. Possessed by fear, I tried to leap from the bed, but Finn pulled me down and pinned me to the mattress.

With a grunt, Finn flipped me around so I was facing him, and when I tried to pull away again he did the last thing I ever expected him to do.

He kissed me.





Chapter Nineteen





Finn





I am so fucked.





Chapter Twenty





Sawyer





Kissing was something I was told I would only ever do with my future husband once we were married. When I heard this the first time, I was a young child, and being married seemed like something so far off in the future that I filed both marriage and kissing away in my mind under a category called: THINGS SO FAR OFF IN THE FUTURE THEY AREN’T EVEN WORTH THINKING ABOUT NOW.

Somehow, as I’d gotten older, I’d never quite retrieved it from the archives.

Until Finn.

So, there I was. Lying in his bed.

Naked. Exposed.

Vulnerable.

It was almost as freeing as when I changed out of my modest clothes except a thousand times more frightening. More intriguing.

More everything.

Surrounded by the most delicious humming sensation. My heart pounding. My palms sweating. My brain not quite able to believe what was happening as his lips pressed against mine, then slightly parted before pressing again.

Finn’s lips were soft and full, the scruff on his chin lightly scraped against my face. But that wasn’t all I was feeling. All sorts of new and confusing sparks were igniting everywhere inside me. Jolts of pleasure coursed to places around my body he wasn’t even touching, making me aware of those places, and then aware that I might want him to be touching them.

Kissing before marriage was a sin punishable by eternal hellfire.

On that day, with Finn’s lips on mine, I realized there was no truth to that lesson. It didn’t feel like hell. It felt magical and wondrous and beautiful.

It was pure heaven.

However, if I was wrong, and it turned out that kissing was punishable by an eternity at the devil’s side, then kissing Finn might just be worth the risk.

It was as if the lightning had come inside the house and was buzzing between us. Connecting us. Pulling us closer.

At one point, Finn’s fingers dug into my hips, holding me in place as if to prevent me from coming any closer. We were both breathing heavily. Thunder boomed all around us, shaking the walls. I was still in shock from the kiss to react to the fear of the storm that was no match for this new kind of fear taking hold.

“Why did you…?” I asked when he pulled back.

“Distraction,” he explained, clearing his throat.

“Distraction,” I repeated slowly. “Did you use that technique with your friend too?”

“A lot of dogs have the fear of storms,” Finn explained, trying his first method of distraction again. Talking. “They sense them coming before people do and the pressure in the air makes some of them go nuts. They even sell these jackets on late night TV that you wrap around them so that they feel like they’re being hugged and comforted, although if that works then why not just give the dog a hug?”

Finn’s hands left my hips and wrapped around my back, pressing my chest to his but keeping the lower half of our bodies separated.

“Are you hugging me like a dog?” I asked curiously.

Finn chuckled. “No. And just so you know, I don’t kiss dogs like that either.” Finn smelled like the rain and sweat and I inhaled deeply before being shaken awake again.

“Did you know that Nascar racing started because drivers running moonshine needed to soup up their cars to run from the police through the mountains?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“Finn?”

“Yeah?”