Afternoon Delight (4 page)

A quick tussle with button and zipper, straining to contain his erection, and she had the fly open, the fabric spread. “Lift,” she said.

He did, his entire abdomen flexing as he moved. She worked his pants and boxer briefs down to the tops of his thighs and left them there. His erection lay thick and heavy against his pelvis, the tip wet.

Now that she knew what she was working with, she took her time and explored, tracing the framework of his body, muscle and bone, where it lifted and flexed under the skin, the edges of his ribs, the definition of his muscles, his hip bones, the flat wall of stomach between them. She trailed her fingers around his cock, outlined it, from the base to the tip and around, then over his balls. Again and again she let her fingers wander over his torso from his nipples to his balls, keeping her touch firm and purposeful but always avoiding his cock. As she watched, it thickened and darkened in color, the tip growing more wet. His thighs tensed involuntarily.

“You're a tease.”

“Shush,” she said in reply. His hands were now curled into loose fists on the bed. She flicked a glance at his face. “If it's too much,” she said sweetly, her fingers flat on either side of his cock and her thumbs brushing rhythmically over his balls, “just say the word.”

“Because you're magnanimous in victory,” he said, part hope, part disbelief.

“Admit defeat and find out.”

His head dropped back. He inhaled, slow and deep, then blew it back out again. Muscles flexed in his neck and torso as he lifted his head to look at her.

She smiled, then closed her hand around the base of his cock and drew it up to the tip, then back down. His whole body jerked. “Oh, fuck,” he said, so she did it again, slow and firm, using her thumb at the tip. He shifted under her, his uniform pants preventing him from spreading his legs.

“Shh,” she soothed, patting his hip bone with her free hand. “You're almost hard enough.”

His disbelieving laugh tumbled into a rich groan. When he was thrusting into her hand, she stopped. She'd exposed just enough to use him for her own pleasure, and now the heat pooled sweet and slick between her thighs. She left him there to claim her messenger bag from the floor between the kitchen and bed, and found a condom in one of its many pockets.

She shimmied out of her panties first and watched his pupils dilate even more. Then she straddled him again, her skirt pooling on his thighs as she tore open the condom packet.

“Take your clothes off,” he said.

Her messy knot of hair slipped even more as she shook her head mock-regretfully. “Why bother? You can't touch me.” She bent forward and whispered in his ear. “I wish you could.”

She drew her lips along his jaw, then kissed him, slow and deep and all tongue. When she drew back he captured her lower lip between his teeth and held on. Electric sparks shot from her lip to her nipples to her ready sex. It was her turn to whimper.

“Tell me to touch you.”

“Ah, ah,” she chided. “I'm not making this easy for you.”

Using the tips of her fingers to handle him without giving him any satisfaction at all, she rolled the condom down his shaft, taking care to smooth his hair out of the way. If she cupped and massaged his balls in the process, if she worked over his cock, testing the reservoir, adjusting it just so, she simply exercised her prerogative.

Then she gripped his shaft just below the head, rose to her knees, and lifted her skirt just enough to expose her sex. “Watch,” she said.

She took her time, using the head of his cock to open her folds and smooth her slick fluids, then situated him just inside her sex.

“Christ,” he said.

His hands were fisted, his abdomen gleamed with sweat, and his eyes were fierce. She paused to savor that threshold moment when the promise of him inside her was imminent, but not yet, not yet, oh, not yet. Her head dropped back, and the elastic holding her hair up lost the battle with gravity and sex. Eyes still closed, she kept hold of her skirt with one hand and lifted the other to tug the elastic free. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders.

“Christ,”
he said.

Little by little she sank down, taking him in slow, hot stages, shivering with each subtle stretch until her inner thighs pressed against his hip bones and he was fully inside her.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, yes.”

Heat wicked along her nerves as she rode him, lost in sensation. She kept her skirt lifted to just the tops of her thighs and planted her hand on his sternum as she moved. This gave her the leverage to lift and fall and helpfully kept his undershirt pushed up. Her gaze flitted from his eyes to his mouth to his incredible torso to his clenched fists.

“So good,” she said.

“Faster,” he said.

“No.”

“More.”

She laughed, then shifted her weight from her knees to the hand on his sternum, let her skirt drop, put that hand on his shoulder, and leaned. “More of this would be good, wouldn't it?” she murmured in his ear. “I'm not going to give it to you. If you want more, take it.”

He groaned, and the grabby impulse did him in. His hands clamped around her hips, driving her down as he thrust up. There was a short battle as he tried to keep his shoulders off the bed, but she pushed him flat on his back and whispered, “I win.”

“Fuck winning,” he said, and rolled her to her back. His next thrust, deep and hard and uncompromising, made her cry out. She wrapped her legs around his hips, flattened her hands at the base of his spine, and lifted into his pounding strokes. Her entire nervous system went up in flames as her orgasm steamrolled her. He followed her almost immediately, muffling his low groan in her hair.

When she came out of it, the first thing she noticed was his hand cupping the back of her head to push her mouth against his shoulder and stifle her cries. She rolled her head into the touch, feeling his fingertips press into all the tight spots in her skull.

“That was incredible,” she said.

“Except for the part where I lost,” he said, the low rumble of his voice in his chest too satisfied to give the words any weight. He pulled out and removed the condom, then a couple of strides took him to the bathroom. Sarah rolled to her side, pushed her skirt over her hip, found her hair elastic in the sheets and pulled it over her wrist. When he emerged, he was zipped up and tucked in, drat it.

“Hi,” she said, grinning.

He leaned against the door frame and scowled at her, but she could see a satisfied set to his shoulders. “I underestimated you.”

“You certainly did,” she said.

“You won. What do I lose?”

She sat up, found her panties on the floor by the foot of the bed, and pulled them on. “Come over for dinner,” she said.

“I lost so you're going to cook me dinner?”

“Somehow I doubt you get many home-cooked meals,” she said with a glance at his apartment. She could see what appeared to be training manuals stacked in the oven.

“Eating your food isn't a penalty.”

“The penalty is that you cleanse your palate before you eat.”

His brows drew down. “You mean some kind of crazy detox diet? I transport one or two of those a month. They're hell on your system and a really bad idea.”

“Do I look like the kind of woman interested in detox diets? Not that palate. Don't masturbate until you come over.”

He blinked. “What?”

She slid past him into a bathroom so tiny, she had to all but step into the shower to wash her hands in the sink. When she looked in the mirror she saw his broad back and his profile as he peered over his shoulder at her. Intrigued. Against his will. He lost with a fair bit of grace; not a bad characteristic.

“That's what I claim as my winnings,” she said as she twirled her hair into a knot and snapped the elastic off her wrist. “I want you to want the next time we do this. If you manage it, you set the pace for our next encounter. If you don't, I win again.”

“We agreed on a forfeit, not torture,” he said.

“You're being dramatic. Think of it as a chance to redeem yourself after a loss.”

“You're not the one going without for days.”

She patted his chest as she scooted past him and found her clogs, kicked off by the door. “I'll play, too. Neither of us gets off until we see each other again.”

“This can't be much of a sacrifice for you if you're willing to go along with it.”

“That's the first sex I've had in . . .” Thinking about it reminded her of the darker reason that had brought her to New York. To distract herself she tried to count the days and got lost in months. This was exactly what she needed, and after what she'd gone through for two years, a little spring fling wouldn't hurt. “A very long time, and it was top ten, easily. Top five, maybe. I'd have to think about it. No, I wouldn't. Top five. Anyway, I could go again right now, so this won't be easy for me, either.”

Long fingers wrapped around her upper arm. “I bet I can get top three. Who's number one?”

Heat eddied through her, because his voice was as scratchy and raw and demanding as his stubble on her cheek. “I dated a soldier who deployed to Afghanistan. His first weekend home on leave we holed up in a tent near the beach in Point Reyes. Sunshine and the ocean after six months of celibacy. I know what it means to ache for it, and I know how good it feels when you get it.”

He stroked the soft inner flesh of her arm, not-so-coincidentally running the backs of his fingers against the swell of her breast. “I'm not waiting six months for dinner.”

“Neither am I. Saturday night? My roommate's going to her first weekend at her beach house.”

“I haven't eaten dinner yet today.”

She laughed and hunkered down by her messenger bag to find her phone. “We wait. What's your number?” He rattled off a 212 number. She keyed it into her phone, sent him a quick text to give him her number, then picked up her messenger bag.

“Sarah.”

She stopped. She didn't mean to, but there was an edge of command in his voice, a rough, masculine power that hinted that while he'd underestimated her, he'd also been holding back. There was nothing hotter than six-plus feet of blond, bearded man at her command.

“I won't underestimate you again,” he said.

“Good,” she said, and unlocked the door.

“One more thing. Did you feed strays?”

“No. My mother said it was best not to encourage them. We trapped them and took them to the shelter. I play to win, Tim.”

***

Sarah clattered down the narrow stairwell to the door leading to the street and hoped no one in the building worked the night shift. Her favorite Dansko clogs in a fire engine–red patent leather saved her legs during long shifts on her feet, but they weren't exactly stealth shoes. When she reached the street, she stopped and took her bearings, adding Tim's exact address to his contact in her phone, and the cross streets for good measure. Manhattan wasn't difficult to navigate on the grid above Houston, but below that, the streets were a lopsided warren with odd names and no discernible rhyme or reason to naming.

She plugged her Brooklyn Heights address into the maps app on her phone and waited while it calculated a walking route. It would take her an hour, but that suited her. The day was fine, sunny and not too warm, and the best way to learn a city was on foot. She set off toward the Brooklyn Bridge, moving quickly, following the New York habit of walking with the lights and jaywalking when traffic allowed it. Her knees firmed by the time she climbed the ramp to the pedestrian path of the bridge, but the quiver in her thighs and the slick heat between them didn't subside with movement.

Occasionally she turned back to study the skyline, One World Trade Center rising over lower Manhattan. Trish could tell her which banks and investment houses occupied which building on Wall Street, point out Goldman Sachs and the space where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood. The Brooklyn Bridge loomed over her, a silent presence she hadn't quite come to terms with. The bridge, while unique, lacked the Golden Gate Bridge's stately grandeur and charm. She'd walked that bridge hundreds of times, fascinated by how San Francisco changed with the weather. Fog, sunshine, cloudy days, fog, rain, occasional sleet, and more fog. Alcatraz in the middle of the bay, sailboats tacking with the wind, Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid, and the Marin Headlands rolling to the west. The light. Sunlight filtered through the Bay Area's micro-ecosystems and diffused over the city in a way she'd never seen anywhere else in the world. Not Paris. Not Rome. Not New York.

This wasn't her city yet, not like San Francisco was. She found New York unapproachable, and only time would tell whether a little shoe leather and a lot of noshing her way through neighborhoods would make the city her own.

She may not be able to find much of anything in Manhattan yet, but once she crossed the bridge she could find her way to the apartment she shared with Trish. She unlocked the yellow door to the building and clomped up the stairs.

“Shoes!” their downstairs neighbor called from behind her door on the second floor.

“Sorry, Mrs. Hyland!” Sarah called back. She paused and slipped her clogs off, picked them up by the heels, and continued up the stairs to the top-floor apartment she shared with Trish. Inside the door she wiped her bare feet on the mat, dropped her clogs and messenger bag just inside the door, and heaved a sigh of relief.

“Twenty pounds of brown rice, another twenty of white, we need limes . . . Do we need limes?” Trish muttered from her chair near the window. She cast a quick glance at Sarah. “Thank God you're home. Help!”

“No problem. Let me shower first, okay?”

“I'll open some wine.”

Sarah took a quick shower and dressed in yoga pants and a thin hoodie, then joined Trish in the living room. The East River glittered in the setting sun, and the Manhattan skyline rose in the distance, untouchable and arrogant.