Page 10 of The Couch Where It Happens

Soft lips over hard teeth echoed what I imagined his whole body would be: soft skin over hard muscle. His tongue taunted my upper lip, but standing here, we couldn’t get close enough. I wanted to climb his body and feel all that glorious man wrap around me, but we were outside and on the stairs. The building sheltered us from the shore breeze, so his scent wrapped around me. A hint of ocean from the water we’d splashed on each other, a little sweat, a little Old Spice, all mixed alchemically to create a man. I wanted to strip him and kiss him and feel his mouth all over me, but all I did was part my lips for him and use my tongue to push him to take this kiss further. His hands wrapped around my upper arms, not pulling, not grabbing, just supporting, while those warm lips tugged and worshipped.

Now, my lower lip was his focus. He wasn’t even pressed against my chest, and already my breathing sounded like a wild thing and my senses screamed for more. I stroked the hair on the back of his head. He had a short cut, almost military, growing out into soft strands but not long enough to grab. It set him apart from the layered fashion cuts of the Hamptons visitors and the mullets on local guys, and the difference was my new kryptonite.

We broke apart to breathe. Our chests rose so full when we inhaled. They almost touched as we stared into each other’s eyes. His might normally be gray-blue, but right now, his pupils were big and dark and fixed on my face. He had stupid-long eyelashes.

I needed to exhale. Well-remembered lines tumbled out along with my breath and, apparently, my brain. “They looked up to the sky, whose floating glow spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright.” I heard another of my own ragged inhalations, but I couldn’t stop. “They gazed upon the glittering sea below, whence the broad moon rose circling into sight. They heard the wave’s splash.” I knew these words by rote, and after our time on thewater, and this kiss, I knew how they felt beating in my chest, how they flowed across my lips as he stared into my face and our breath rose together.

I licked my lips and backtracked because I’d lost my place while looking at him. “They heard the wave’s splash, the wind so low, and saw each other’s dark eyes darting light into each other.”

I swallowed, then continued.

“Beholding this, their lips drew near.” I did. I drew near again.

My voice dropped into a whisper. “And clung into a kiss.”

This time, he yanked me hard into his arms. His chest felt like a wall, and when his mouth hit mine, I was lost. My hands found his cheeks, the slightest rasp of stubble under my palms making me gasp with sensation as I bracketed his face. I wanted that. I wanted it on the ticklish curve of my neck, and I really wanted it on my breasts and on my thighs. Fuck, I wanted him.

“What was that?” He breathed the question across my lips.

“A kiss?” I didn’t even open my eyes.

“No.” His hand squeezed my butt, hard enough to lift me to my toes. “The poem.”

“Byron.” I whispered it into the corner of his mouth. My tongue tested the curve of his lower lip. “Don Juan.”

“I’ll read it tomorrow.” His mouth shifted to the spot where my jaw turned into my neck, and I shuddered against him.

“It’s over five hundred pages.” I shivered, because his lips had reached a spot behind my ear.

“It’s a poem, not thermodynamics.”

That could not stand. I couldn’t help myself; I squeezed the arrogant jock’s shoulders harder than I’d intended, but he was too solid to dent. My little gesture made him snort into my hair. Truthfully, I knew I would cut him slack since he had identified Iron Maiden’s Tennyson reference, and I was anticipating getting a lot closer to what he pressed against mythigh. “Wait until I tell you about the Scottish poet who inspired ‘The Number of the Beast.’”

My collar had shifted enough to permit his lips to access my clavicle. At the same moment I heard him, I felt the vibrations of his reply cross my taut skin. “Robert Fucking Burns.”

I was so gone. Those three words would earn Mr. Melting-My-Panties an A even if I were a thermodynamics professor, but they slayed this English lit teaching assistant.

My hand groped behind me until I found the doorknob and managed to turn it. “Inside.”

We toed off our shoes and left them by the door. Maybe I should feel vulnerable, bringing a stranger here, but he’d unlocked my pussy with a “Robert Fucking Burns” whispered against my skin.

“This is nice.” His gaze moved around the furniture: a round wooden table with four shield-back chairs, a tasseled ottoman, a love seat, all castoffs from the big house, but still fancier than what my family owned. Because the apartment covered the four-car garage, I had a lot of space, and none of it felt crowded. Or it hadn’t until I invited him up.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked on the balls of his feet again. Despite that kiss, we were back to awkwardness, and I didn’t want to exchange tidbits about our studies or our hometowns. I had zero interest in learning what television shows he watched or any sort of fuck-Ginger-or-Mary Ann icebreaker. I wanted whispers on my neck and hands on my butt. I wanted what we’d come up here for.

“Take your clothes off.” I accidentally used my put-that-case-of-champagne-over-there house manager tone.

When he closed his eyes and his lips fell slightly open, I had a moment of panic over having used my boss voice, but he immediately raised his hands to undo the buttons in the middle of his chest. Relief and desire unfurled through me. In the few seconds it took him to shrug out of his oxford, I got my first look at the logo on the T-shirt he wore beneath. The giant letter P filled with orange-and-black tiger stripes was easy to understand in the porch light that streamed through the curtainless window, but it took me a moment to process the smaller print underneath.

Princeton Football.

I did not think I could illustrate the difference between irony and coincidence to fall semester freshman English precepts by using the example of coming all the way to the far end of Long Island to end up screwing a Princeton football player, so, sadlyfor them, I would have to stick with teaching the dead white guy canon.

In front of me, the very live guy’s shoulders and chest seemed to grow larger as he lifted that worn cotton over his head and dropped it on the floor, until his physical presence was a gravity well in the center of my living space and I had to actively resist being pulled in. His chest looked like a wall of muscle, exactly like a football player who spends a lot of time lifting heavy, solid things while on his back, and then running and lifting more heavy things.

I wanted to stroke my hands across that sculpted expanse and trace the bumps of his nipples and the groove between his pecs and the ridges of ribs. I wanted to take all those parts and assemble them with my hands. I wanted to get closer to him and feel how exactly that much skin stretched when he moved or breathed. And my breasts begged me to let them explore the curls of brown hair dusted around his nipples while being crushed by his solidity.

His hands stopped at his belt. He didn’t speak until our gazes locked. “This too?”

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