Page 151 of Stealing Sunshine

“That’s impossible,” she states.

Guiding my head the opposite way, she starts giving theother side of my neck the same love as the other. My toes curl when she swirls her tongue around the love bite I already feel the sting of.

With her distracted, I carefully move a hand between us and start hitching my skirt up my thighs. I’m pulsing between them, and I’d prefer to wear this skirt and costume again without having it to have it dry-cleaned first.

Bryce is too zoned into my movements. She swats my hand away and bites the underside of my jaw as punishment.

“Are you uncomfortable in your skirt, baby?”

“I don’t want to ruin it.”

I can feel her smile against my skin. “How would you do that?”

“Why don’t you reach beneath it and find out?” I taunt.

She hums, sending the vibrations racing down my body. Too slowly, she palms my knee and then slides her hand up my leg. Her fingers brush the daisy tattoo on my thigh before swivelling inward.

“Are you wet, Daisy?”

“Yes,” I answer without delay.

She brings her mouth to my ear and whispers, “Me too.”

I quiver beneath her fingers. “Oh, God.”

“God is a woman after all.”

My brain short-circuits as she speaks the words while also bringing her thumb to press over my swollen clit. I jerk up off the couch, but she’s there to settle me back down by making a slow circle over my wet panties.

With a strangled noise, I snap a hand out and cup her breast, needing something to hold on to. Her nipple is hard against my palm. It scrapes against it with every one of her inhales, and her lashes flutter against my cheek.

“There are too many layers between us,” I croak, the songs coming from her phone beginning to grow deeper and throatier as the minutes pass.

“Your costume stays on.”

I wiggle my hips. “At least take off the skirt so I can spread my legs.”

“You’re perfect like this. Just like you were the first time I saw you in these ridiculous white feathers and fake wings. It shouldn’t have surprised me that you could make something so cliché look like it was pulled from a runway show. You didn’t even have to do anything, and I was ready to carry you off somewhere we could be alone.”

“Why didn’t you?” I ask on a shuddered exhale.

“You weren’t mine to carry off, Daisy. I knew that before I’d even considered changing my costume.”

“But you still did. We were all expecting something else, and you wore what you knew would match me.”

“I wanted you to notice me,” she reveals, her face remaining hidden in my neck.

“There was never a time when I didn’t.”

The soft noise that escapes her strokes something inside of me. Something raw and sensitive.

“Maybe it wasn’t in the same way that you noticed me, but you were never invisible. I always saw the black-haired woman with the startlingly blue, don’t-piss-me-off eyes and the take-no-shit attitude. You couldn’t blend into a crowd if you tried.”

“I wish I’d said something earlier,” she whispers.

Six words and I know her remaining walls have dropped completely. There’s an honesty to her tone that strikes that raw, sensitive spot all over again.

“I love you, Bryce. This was the perfect time for us. Ifeelit.”

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