Page 13 of Foreplay on Words

She looked at me expectantly, and I felt my cheeks heat up again. “Over there. The double doors lead to the patio. You can walk down the hill to the dock from there.”

There. Talking didn’t have to be this hard.

Stop thinking about hard things.

“Got it.”

We both smiled at each other again, and I shook my head as she giggled.

“Well, I’ll uh...just go then.”

“See you soon,” she nodded with an indulgent smile.

Walking backward toward the hallway that led to my bedroom, only bumping into the corner of the kitchen island once, I couldn’t manage to keep my eyes off her, eliciting that giggle from her again. I pivoted and turned away once she was out of sight, taking a few long strides toward my bedroom door. I needed to regroup.

“Fuck,” I cursed under my breath. This was exactly why I hid from people. I always managed to say or do something completely mortifying.

Chase was out there waiting for me, probably wondering why she’d been sent out into the woods to babysit an imbecile.

Stop. Just relax. I was a good writer. I knew that. I wasn’t questioning my ability to weave a well-planned out plot. I was entirely questioning my ability to interact with women. Simone had really done a number on my self-esteem, and I was still beating myself up over it three years later.

“You can do this.” And now I was talking to myself again. My psychiatrist would be having a field day with my inability to function today.

Walking into my bathroom, I toed off my shoes, stripped off my shirt and shorts, and threw my sweaty clothes into the hamper.

It’d be easy to become a slob living hidden out here by myself, but I’d always respected order.

That was probably why writing always came easily to me. It was second nature to outline my stories. I had numerous diagrams, outlines, and character summaries filling folders on my laptop. I always knew exactly where the plot was going before I typed the first line of text.

Maybe that was why I was having such a hard time with these sex scenes. I could outline them and move the characters how I wanted them to, but my words only skimmed the surface.

It was mechanical, choreographed. I needed help making it seem spontaneous or passionate. Probably because I’d never had spontaneous or passionate anything, definitely not the kind of affair I was trying to convey in my novel.

The sex scenes that Chastity—Chase—wrote were a different matter. They drew you in, pulled you in to observe like a voyeur, and then made you feel what the characters were experiencing in a sensual way.

I could feel a stirring in my briefs as I imagined the scene in Michael’s playroom where he had Kayla suspended mid-air with her hands bound and attached to a hoist while he fucked her from behind, ramming himself inside her as he held onto her hips.

How did she even come up with that? I knew you could research things on the internet, watch videos on YouTube—and other sites—and try to immerse yourself into the experience, but the way she wrote it made me feel like she’d experienced it.

Was Chase into bondage? Did she do more in-depth research into the lifestyle?

“Stop it,” I growled at myself in the mirror. Thinking about it was making things harder. Much harder.

If she weren’t here, in my home, I would take care of it in the shower, but that would be weird right now. When I hadn’t met her yet, she was simply another sexy woman on the internet. Now she was a living, breathing person inside my house that I needed to work with for the foreseeable future. I needed to get a grip, and not on my cock. Especially not to thoughts of her.

Turning the faucet to barely warmer than room temperature, I hopped in and lathered myself up. Practicing my breathing techniques under the tepid blast helped calm me down.

It also meant I’d taken the fastest damn shower I’d had in a while.

Where did she go?

I stood in my kitchen, looking out the windows that lined the back wall of my house, wondering where my guest had disappeared. Surely I hadn’t scared her off already.

She wasn’t in the living room, and the patio was empty. I could only see the very end of the dock from the windows, so she must be somewhere down the hill.

“Chase?”

The sun was barely starting to skim the tree line, although I knew it’d be pitch black in a matter of hours. I didn’t really know what to plan for our meeting, but I could offer to feed her. The market in Ashford was small and quiet, so I made a weekly trip in and stocked up on groceries since I lived so far out of town.

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