Intrusion (14 page)

It feels like drowning in pleasure.

But not as deeply as he is going down.

“No, no, ohhhh God.”

“Or that I love sucking your cock. I love it, I love it.”

“No, I'm too—I won't—” he chokes out, his body now so tense I can see veins standing out at his temples. His neck is a thick column. His free hand digs into the bed. It's agony to watch him go through this and even more so when it occurs to me:

It isn't just that he fears what desire will turn him into.

It's that he doesn't think he deserves to feel it at all. He could give in now easily, with no harm to me. Nothing he does in this moment will magically make him a monster. He just fights it anyway. He refuses it all the same.

I need to shock him out of it, I think.

But the person I really shock is me, when the words come out.

“I love you, Noah,” I blurt, and when his eyes suddenly meet mine and his back arches and everything teeters right on the edge, I tell him again. Only this time, I do it because I know it's true. And he knows it, too.

“I love you,” I say.

Then I watch as he comes, and comes, and comes.

Chapter Eight

I
DON'T KNOW
when it happens, exactly. One day I just find myself tucking one of his plaid shirts into a pair of old jeans I've worn three times already, and realize with a start that I haven't been home in a while. More than a while, in truth. I've practically moved my dog and me into his home without being consciously aware of doing it.

Luckily, however, he doesn't seem consciously aware of it, either. I go downstairs to see where he is—maybe just to figure out if I've paralyzed him with terror by invading his space in small increments—and he barely looks up from what he's doing. He talks while working on his latest project, as though my being here is about as unexpected and uncomfortable as going to the refrigerator and finding a container of milk.

I'm meant to be here, quite clearly.

He likes me here.

“What do you want to do for breakfast?” he asks, because not only is this really normal but he's also somehow adapted himself to my schedule. He still has on the sweatpants he wears for sleeping, at five in the afternoon. He waited for me to have the first meal of the day, even though the first meal is going to happen closer to dinnertime. And though selling and fixing machinery means he can do this, it still gives me a thrill to know he
has
.

We're building a little life together, him and me.

A good life, too. I make eggs as he finishes up with the giant metal octopus he seems to be constructing. Then he tells me all about it while we eat. Apparently, in order to make the arms work, you've got to get all the tiny cogs in just the right places.

“Could almost be a metaphor,” I say, and he gets that look on his face.

I call it: wry pleasure. One eyebrow seems to go up even though it doesn't go up at all, and something like a smile drifts over his lips. Though I guess now it's kind of more than
something like
. It's absolutely and really, and it gets deeper every day. Last night, I barely had to say anything to persuade him into a tangle of limbs and heated kisses. We got so close to fucking I can almost feel him there today.

And when he kisses me good-bye, it doesn't seem like any kiss he's ever given me before.

Unless you're talking about the ones he gives me on my vagina.

“Hurry home,” he tells me, after which I'm in no doubt he means the ones he gives me on my vagina. His lips pull away so slow they could only be described as reluctant. Everything in his expression asks me to stay, and I don't think he wants me to so we can play Parcheesi. I think he wants more experiments in how far he can go, and what delightful pleasure he's going to uncover today.

I swear, I almost call in sick to work. I drive there in a daze, still feeling his mouth on mine. Just the way he caught my lower lip between his, before he broke the kiss. The way it didn't seem like breaking at all.

It unmakes me—as does the taste of him still on my lips. I lick them and there he is, faintly salty and faintly sweet, and suddenly I can't do a bit of work. I pause with a file in my hands, half forgetting whatever it was I was about to do. An e-mail I need to write to a supplier has seven mysterious typos I don't remember making on reread, and when one of the nurses asks me a question I can hardly answer.

“Just use the purple ones,” I say, only it comes out back to front. I put
ones
in front of
purple
and have to hurriedly add
that are
in the middle, and oh God, oh God, I need help. Being lovesick is not supposed to actually exist outside movies. I said the words, true, but that doesn't mean my brain has to die.

Why is my brain dying? 

All I can think about is sex and him, and just when I think I've got it all under control—that taste on my lips washed away by disgusting tuna sandwiches and even grosser apple juice—I get a whiff of the shirt I ridiculously decided to wear. I turn too hurriedly, and the material shifts, and then there it is.

A great gust of Noah right in my face.

It takes just about everything I have not to smother myself in its folds. I make it all the way to the end of the workday and the safety of my car before I give in—and I'm proud of myself for that. I'm not so proud of how fast I drive it to get to him. Or how loud Cyndi Lauper is in my head as I do. By the time I get there I'm in a fever, electrified by songs I shouldn't have thought of and hopes it's crazy to have.

But the best part is: they're not crazy to have at all.

He feels it too. He greets me at the door like I've been away for a thousand years, after the end of a government edict that banned sex forever. He practically lifts me off my feet—no, scratch that, there is no
practically
. He does, he just does, and I die to have it happen. At the very least, I have no qualms about wrapping my legs around him.

What qualms would I have when his hands are in my hair?

When his mouth is on mine, so hot and hungry I can hardly stand it?

“Why do you have to do anything but be here?” he asks between kisses that send me over the edge of some crazy precipice. “Earning money is so overrated.”

“I know. I'm giving it up tomorrow. We can dig a hole in a field and live there.”

“Sounds good to me. Let me just get my shovel.”

“Shovel later. Doing things first,” I say, and to my greatest delight, he agrees. He's already pulling off my clothes. We barely make it up the stairs, just like in all my dreams of what sex and desire and wanting could possibly be. And it's not because of me. It's him—all him. Some dam has burst inside him, and now all the greed he previously suppressed is gushing out.

If he could cram me down his throat I think he would do it. He already has great handfuls of me. All he has to do is maneuver it all toward his mouth, and the thing is done. Hell, I want the thing to be done. The moment we get to the bed he starts this disturbing process, and it is awesome. I get his kisses on that sensitive spot just under my right ear, and once my top comes off he moves on to better places.

More thrilling, faintly shocking places.

Though I'm not really sure if they should be. After all, he's licked my cunt. Pushing my bra to one side so he can fondle and suck my stiff nipples is supposed to be a breeze, in light of that fact.

It isn't. It is the opposite of a breeze. I nearly arch my back clean off the bed—quite possibly because it just zings right to the center of my nervous system, but more likely because I didn't even ask. I never said
you feel great, keep going, carry on
. He really does just go for it now, and in a far more assertive sort of way. The way he exposed my breast was almost rough. I feel the glancing edge of his teeth more than once, stinging sweet as something sour on my tongue.

And he wastes no time finding my clit with eager, feverish fingers.

By the time I get to touching him, I'm already halfway to my first orgasm. He's fully dressed and I'm almost naked—though that isn't exactly unusual for us. In fact, when I think about it, he nearly always keeps most of his clothes on. I put my hand almost up his T-shirt the other day and he kind of maneuvered me away, and he does the same here. He pulls back the moment I come close to edging my hand underneath his collar, and hides it beneath the guise of stripping my jeans down my legs.

After which it's hard to remember what my point was.

And especially when he says things like:

“Tell me what you want.”

Because the thing is—we're actually at the point where I'm comfortable saying. I don't feel like I'm going to disturb him—or at least not too much—and nothing really seems out of bounds. He's not going to dump me because I mentioned something too sexual. I can just say.

So I do. I grit my teeth and go for it.

“I want your cock in me.”

The thing is, I expect him to say no.

So I'm not too disappointed when he licks me, instead. Licking is good. Licking is great. He's so good at it that sometimes I wake up from dreams half coming, just because they were full of his slippery tongue working and working over my clit. He gets everything so wet down there, and never just makes polite little circles. He rubs and sucks at my stiff little bud until I'm delirious. Until I'm saying things I'd never usually say, like
fuck me with your fingers
and
Jesus, yeah, I'm going to come all over your face
.

But that's his effect on me. He wants me to talk like that, and encourages me to talk like that, so eventually I
do
talk like that. I tell him how wet he makes me—which, as it turns out, is the whole point into this little detour through pussy-licking land. Midway through he abruptly stops—right when I'm on the verge, flushed and filthy talking, clit so swollen I can make out its every little twitch and curve, cunt so soaking I can feel it sliding between the cheeks of my ass—and then he sits back.

And unbuttons his jeans.

Even better: he looks like he really wants to do it. His face is as red as mine feels, and his fingers tremble as he wrenches the material open. Plus there's his mouth, all open and gleaming, and the way he speaks when he can finally manage it. “Keep talking,” he tells me as he shoves those jeans down, and suddenly it occurs to me what he got me all wet for.

That thick cock of his.

He wanted it to be easy.

He wanted me to take him without any trouble. Though if I'm honest, just watching him roll a condom on is enough to get me to that point. I shiver at the sight, and again when he pulls me closer—one-handed, on my hip, as strong as I can take it and as much as he can manage without panicking.

Though this is the part where he's going to struggle, I think. And he does. For a start, he doesn't seem to want to lie on me. He can't cover me with his body. The second he goes to I see every single muscle in him seize up, and I'm fairly sure it's only my filthy mouth that keeps him hard. “I'm so ready for you, so ready for your cock go on go on, fill me up,” I say—both because I am and because it has the desired effect.

His eyes practically roll back into his head when I do it, and I feel the thick tip brush over me. In fact, for a while that's mostly what he does. He just strokes himself through my slick folds, occasionally nudging my stiff clit in a way that makes me jerk. Sometimes almost but not quite grazing my greedy hole, before moving away at the last moment.

I'm pretty sure it's not his intention, but it's the most agonizing tease in the history of the world. Several times, I almost die. By the time he seems to process that he's going to have to try this a different way, I'm shuddering like a broken washing machine. A broken industrial washing machine that has been filled with rocks. Christ only knows what I'm saying—it sounds like unintelligible noises, intermingled with shameless begging. “Do me, fuck me, anything you want,” I say.

And finally, he obeys.

He just needs another position to do it—a fact that I don't quite get until he shifts around on the bed, exasperated, and suddenly it clicks. He wants me over him. I have to do this. I have to somehow get up on my shaking arms and legs and straddle him, even though I can barely move or think rationally. I almost knock him out with one flailing elbow. I definitely attempt it from the wrong angle at first.

And then there's my body. God, my body, fuck, I must look like such a mess. My tits nearly smother him, and everything just feels fucking enormous—like I'm some monster trying to climb the Everest of him. It has to be the least sexy thing of all time and yet when I look at him, oh, Lord, when I look at him. . .

How is it that he looks like that?

His face is slack and stunned. I could drown in his eyes, as deep as they are and as lust-fucked. I swear, if his need for me to talk gets me going then that expression pushes me the rest of the way. It almost makes me come. I think I do come. At the very least, I've never taken a cock so easily in the entire history of my pathetically sex-starved life. I just glide right down on him, despite the fact that he has to be roughly the size of a Coke can. I should be wincing, I'm sure.

Instead, I moan all the way to the root of him.

Not even moaning, really—it's this whimpering sound like nothing I've ever heard before. Certainly nothing I've ever done before. Not for someone's cock. Not for the kind of sex I've had in the past. And even more staggering: that isn't even the peak of this. It doesn't end there. How could it, when his hands immediately go to my hips and his eyes go wider than I thought they could possibly go and then, oh, then he says the best possible thing he could ever possibly fucking say.

“Hold on, hold on, Jesus I think I'm going to come.”

I honestly never thought I'd be so happy to hear those words. A swell of actual sensation goes through me to hear it. My cunt clenches around him involuntarily—though of course, that just makes things worse. His head goes back for that. My Noah, my repressed, wound-so-tight Noah, pushes his head into the pillow, and after a second he tells me why.