Page 48 of Just Dare Me
“He’s not gonna shift?” Jay asks.
“Nope.”
“So we’re just gonna stare at his butt cheeks?”
“Yep.”
Slowly, very slowly, my mindrises back to awareness from a deep void. Imagine lying at the bottom of the ocean in complete blackness and silence, then letting your body float upwards by its natural buoyancy. The gradual appearance of soft light from the surface. The muted sounds. The growing awareness that you’re coming back into the world of the living.
My ocean is a thick, heavy quilt that presses me into a soft foam mattress. A down feather pillow is doing its best to swallow my head. Time doesn’t exist—I haven’t floated up to that level of consciousness yet. There is only warmth and weight—a heavy weight across my ribs. A vague recognition gives it form. That weight is an arm—Jay’s arm—draped over me from behind. His face is pressed into the back of my neck. His breathing spreads the most pleasant heat across my shoulders.
My own breathing deepens into a purr of serenity. Memory is starting to form out of the haze now. Jay carrying me into my old room in Unit #2, tending to my wounds, washing them with the tenderest of touches, wrapping them, then kissing them to make it all better.
Then kissingeverywhere. I couldn’t move much without hurting, so he’d told me to just lie back, relax, and let him tend to me. And so I had let myself float, drifting out to sea on Jay’s swirling, rising tide. He wound me into a quivering, high-pitched, impossibly prolonged pause of tension, before finally—mercifully—releasing me into a climax that rippled across every inch of skin and through every muscle. With each heavy, intoxicating breath after that, I felt my body getting heavier and heavier, impossibly heavy, sinking and sinking into the darkness of the void.
Let me just tell you—the after-sleep is therealorgasm. It’s the only time the human me can sleep just as well or even better than my fox. It’s a total blackout, no-white-noise-needed, dead-to-the-world sleep.
It also has the benefit of a great waking up. Jay’s breathing is still deep and sleepy, but his fingers are slowly coming back to life, rubbing gentle circles at my sternum. Reaching back, I run my hand across the ridge of his hip, then down behind my bum, feeling for—oh, there he is. Also waking up. I shift my hips, and Jay takes it from there.
In the half-sleep, with no thinking to get in the way, sensation comes easy. It takes no time at all for us both to tense together, pausing our heavy panting with a quick held breath before sinking back into the foam with goose bumps and sleepy smiles.
And then I hear a small sigh, and not from Jay. His head raises to look over me. All I see is blackness, not just because it’s nighttime, but the fluffy pillow is blocking my face. Pressing it down, I see with one eye that Dominique is sitting in a corner chair next to a lamp, watching us with a flat, unimpressed gaze. She pulls the lamp’s chain, assaulting my night vision with a supernova of light. I press the pillow to my eyes, wishing I could transport back to the bottom of the ocean.Please, just five more minutes.
“How many times have I tried to wake him up in just this manner?” she asks wistfully to no one in particular. “But never does it happen. No, not for me. He will not get up, if you take my meaning.”
Just to be a brat, I say, “No, actually, I don’t.”
“What I am meaning is he will not get hard for me.”
“Oh,that.”
“What time is it?” Jay asks.
“Eight-thirty. The sun has been set for twenty minutes.”
“You came quick.”
She lifts her chin. “I might say the same for you.”
Laughter erupts from my throat. Her deadpan would seem so over-the-top if I didn’t know it was totally not an act. Leaning back, I try to elbow Jay, but the movement tweaks my injured neck, freezing me with shooting pain. “Ouch. Oh. Ouch.”
Jay helps me ease back into the pillow while he says to Dominique, “Three of your men were attacked while protecting me. They deserve commendation. That is, if they’re alive. I went to look for them, but they were gone.”
“They live. I suckled them back to strength myself.”
Jay sounds relieved. “If they made it back to you, then they’ve already received the highest honor.”
She narrows her eyes. “Always with just the right things to say. I used to think you were artless, like a child, but now I wonder if it’s a keen survival instinct that gives you such a silver tongue.”
I can’t move my neck to look at her, so I raise a wagging finger in the air to get her attention. “No, no. Look, I don’t speak Renaissance, but if you’re trying to say that Jay’s brown-nosing, you’re wrong. He just speaks a different language than most other guys. It’s like he’s Tarzan, only instead of gorillas he was raised by the Hallmark Channel.”
“For which I credit the vigilant, almost parent-like influence of his sister, Haley.”
I toss both hands in the air. “Obviously.”
Jay starts to object, but I shush him as, struggling through the pain, I roll onto my side to face Dominique. “Whoah, he told you about Haley?”
“Only after my many and repeated guesses as to the origin of his resentment for my kind.”
