Page 22 of Most Likely to Match
“Don’t tease me anymore,” she whispers. She wraps her arms around me, draws me closer with her leg. “Please. I want to come.”
Without giving it much thought, I kiss her. It seems only right. When the woman you’re fingering in a quiet corner of the Toronto Public Library asks to come, you should kiss her. I kiss the moan out of her mouth, the one she can’t control as I finger her in earnest, with purpose.
Chloe gasps. She keens. She pushes and pulls at me, my clothes.
“Shh,” I tell her.
She bites her lip. Shakes her head, like she can’t or she’s sorry.
“Shh,” I say again as I slip another finger inside her, so easily, and rub her clit with the heel of my hand. “Shh.”
Her body stills and the struggling stops as the warm sheath of her body contracts around me. She bears down on me, and between the architecture, the furniture, and me, I don’t think Chloe is currently responsible for carrying any of her body weight. Tears leak from her blue eyes, sharp inhales through her nose, but otherwise, she comes and she comes and she comes, silently. Unless you count my grunt as she bites me again. Or the increasingly obvious sounds of her wet skin against my wet skin from beneath her skirt.
I don’t stop the gentle stroke of my fingers until she releases me. We watch the blood rush back into the fleshy part of my hand. Somehow, she didn’t break skin.
I drop her leg but let her hold on to me for balance, her forehead pressed to my shoulder.
The hand that was inside her shakes. I’m desperate to lick my fingers clean.
“Dean,” she whispers. She spreads her hand across my chest, over my pounding heart. Her hand slides down my body, following the buttons on my shirt, pressing against my stomach, pulling at my belt. “Dean,” she says again.
It’s her hand around my cock that wakes me up from what mustclearly be apoplectic shock, caused by lack of blood to the brain. She grips me in her fist, squeezing just enough to be called rough, and I want it so goddamn bad. I want to let her take me out of my boxer briefs— the fabric stretched over my erection, the cotton soaked from my pre-come— and jerk me until I spill all over her fist. I want to leave a stain on her dress and help her hide it as we walk out of the library by pulling her tight against my side.
“Don’t,” I say, harsher than I intend, pulling myself out of her hand and putting myself back together. “Don’t touch me.” My words are more controlled this time, but they still hurt her. She recoils, confusion crossing her face in the form of that little frown between her brows.
Fuck.
Fuck.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I wasn’t supposed to lose control to her. Again. It doesn’t matter how badly I want it, how hard I am. I can’t let her touch me. I can’t. Not if I can’t trust her.
I stagger a step back, trying to put more space between us. My back is tight and my oblique muscles ache, my body feeling the echoes of a different kind of sex.
“I’m sorry.” She says it automatically, fast. “Dean, I’m—” She reaches for me again, arms open like she might try to hold me. The shaking in my hand has spread to my whole body. No longer from fatigue, but frustration. With myself, mostly. But that doesn’t stop me from taking it out on her.
“Don’t touch me.”
Her panties are still a ball of fabric in my fist. I use them to wipe my fingers clean, using more force than necessary. It’s just that maybe if I can wipe her come off my hands, I can also wipe away the shame I still somehow feel fifteen years later. The shame of being laughed at by an entire school, of my mother’s inability to look me in the eye and my father’s gruffeverything will be finewhen he walked in on me crying in my bedroom.
I throw her panties on the ground when I’m done. My skin is still sticky from her.
It’s not that I blame her for the feeling anymore. Objectively, I understand that we’re not the people we were fifteen years ago; we were kids, and kids make mistakes. Fuck, adults make mistakes. But it’s one thing to finger fuck Chloe, to make her come on my hand, to know that tear track was because of me.
It’s wholly another to let her take that same intimacy from me. To give her my vulnerability— my cock, hard and weeping for her— and not feel the gaze of every single person we went to high school with over her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” I say this time. I grab my messenger bag from where I dropped it on the floor what feels like forever ago. Then I pick up my camera. “I have to go,” I say over my shoulder.
She says my name, barely audible over her shuddering breath, and the sound of it on her lips makes me cringe, makes my shoulders tense. But I turn to her anyway. I don’t run from my problems anymore.
Chloe looks small at the end of the stacks. Her legs are pressed together, one arm crossed over her body, gripping her opposite biceps, her lower lip sawed beneath her teeth.
She looks gorgeous, too. Skin flushed, hair wild. That color really is beautiful on her.
I walk back down the aisle. Each gap in the books on the shelves feels like a peephole that wasn’t there previously. I stop in front of her, bend down, and pick up the pink cotton crumpled on the floor. “Are you okay?” I ask, focusing on a mark on the wall over her shoulder. “To get home?”
Through my peripheral vision, I watch her swallow. “Yes.”
I nod once. “I’ll send you the best ones.” I gesture to my camera. “When I’m done with edits.”
