Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 55860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
“I’m not really tired.”
“You are, too,” she says with a sleepy smile. “You’ve absolutely screwed my brains out all night. It feels like I’ve been wrung out and couldn’t move if I wanted to—and you did most of the work.”
“You helped,” I say, my voice going soft at the edges. I turn from the edge of the bed and prop my elbow, lean my head on my hand.
“I’d do it again,” she says, blushing a little shyly. There was a wicked glint in her eyes though, playful and full of mischief. “I really liked being your undoing. Is that weird?”
“Absolutely. You’ll be a dominatrix in no time. I’ve already ordered you a riding crop,” I say, teasing her. She turns beet red up to her hairline, like she thinks I’m serious. I lean in and kiss her.
The restless edginess I felt, that need to flee the bed and collect my thoughts, is soothed by her. Serena lifts her arm and drapes it over my shoulder while we go on kissing. I feel the tension relax from my shoulders, my jaw, everywhere she touches me. Like the warmth of her small hands have some magic to bring me back to myself. I hug her. It feels perfect.
“Did you freak out?” she murmurs sleepily.
“No. Why’d you think that?”
“I don’t know, maybe because your hands shook when you kissed me the first time, and you looked right in my eyes when you came. It felt so real—I thought this would be my wild oats, you know? The thing where you do something crazy to remember how it feels to be young?”
“I’m old now?” I ask wryly.
“I mean, I thought I wouldn’t feel anything other than maybe panic and regret, like I didn’t expect to do any soul-gazing when we were—” she breaks off as if she’s too shy now to say the words.
“Did it bother you that I looked you in the face while I fucked you?” I say, challenging her, using the word that I know will make her pull away from me. Making it graphic, dirty. A small part of me regrets it, but the rest of me is crowing in excitement because she didn’t regret this and felt something deeper. It shouldn’t matter. In fact, it should send me running for the hills but for some reason it doesn’t.
She shakes her head ruefully, “No, I really liked it. When you drilled your eyes into mine, I could see you holding back and waiting for me. Once I realized that, it made me plug right in to what we were doing even more. You hit every spot inside me that feels like it’s put there for pleasure, and I lost my mind. I went from being totally present in my body for maybe the first time ever to having every thought obliterated. It didn’t feel like—like anything that ever passed for pleasure before.”
For the first time in my life, I’m speechless and totally fucked.
And not in the good way.
9
SERENA
Just like at first, he comes every night to the bar, sits at the same table and orders the same drink, our days falling into a pattern so easily.
Although the old man who runs the bar returns to work, I can still count on Jack showing up at the end of my shift to get me. He doesn’t send a car or an associate and laughs when I ask why he doesn’t. We go to his place. Sometimes we hardly make it to the elevator before we are all over each other. Sometimes we get as far as his big bed.
A couple of times, I see a patient in the office behind the bar again. When that happens, it’s like the high stakes of the emergency revs Jack up the way that gambling does with other men. The night I stitch up a stab wound, Jack and I barely make it out to his car before he hikes up my skirt. Before I know it, my bare legs are over his shoulders and his mouth is buried between my thighs. I’ve never had this kind of urgent need for anyone.
When I answer my phone, Jack doesn’t even say hello.
“Where are you?” he says.
Instead of making a smart-ass comment about how demanding he sounds, I press my legs together stubbornly because that alpha male commanding voice sends a thrill right to my core.
I tell him where I am, and tells me to wait there, that he’ll be there in five minutes. It’s hard to believe he’d be that close to a crappy neighborhood on the block with the resale shops and the discount vape joint, but it’s less than three minutes before he drives up and I climb in his car.
“What’s up?” I ask, heart thundering as it always does when I can smell his spicy cologne and the masculine scent of his skin.