Page 68 of Fun at Parties
My instinct is to chase him. To lift my head and fasten our mouths together and pull him back to me, but instead I wait.Show me. Please, please show me.He cradles my jaw in his hand and slides his thumb to my lips,tracing the edges and then the seam. When he dips his fingertip inside my mouth, nudging it open with gentle pressure, a whimper slips out of me.
In the end, the wait is worth it. He buries his hands in my hair and fits his mouth against mine, and his rumbling groan sounds like relief. This kiss is deep, hypnotizing. The slow press of his lips, the indulgent glide of his tongue turning me pliant. He tastes like toothpaste. The heat of his chest against the vee of bare skin at the top of my pajama shirt scorches me. When my fingernails dig into his shoulders, he shivers. I savor it all.
The song changes to the Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” iconic yet not exactly right for this moment. Nate smiles against my mouth. “Is this your playlist?” He moves to my neck to suck lightly on the skin at the base of my throat. I arch toward him and realize the comforter is still between us. We scramble to tear it out of the way, then do the same with the bedsheet, which gets tangled around Nate’s ankle as we move it. “Shit,” he says, extricating himself and shoving the whole mass of bedding to the floor.
When he returns to me, I realize just how muchfeelingthe fluffy blankets were suppressing. Not only the sensation of him hard against my thigh—although definitely that—but also our tangled knees and the flex of his quads as he moves. Eventually, when I’ve all but dissolved, he drops a kiss on my forehead, sits back, and touches the top button on my shirt. “Off?”
“Please,” I rasp.
The pace he chooses is torturous. He undoes the buttons with intense focus, his eyes lingering on each new scrap of exposed skin before moving on to the next one.
He’s not just moving like we have all the time in the world. He’s moving like weneedall the time in the world.
When there’s one button left, an inconvenient thought comes to my mind. “What about Livvie and Kyla?” The last show of the night must be nearly over.
He runs his hand down the center of my chest, almost to my belly button. “They’re not coming back tonight.”
“What? How do you know?”
“Livvie texted me. It wasn’t Ravi earlier, it was her. They’re staying with a couple friends who got one of the yurts.”
“Why’d she text you and not me?” I thought she and I had bonded. She’d let me borrow her clothes.
He huffs out a laugh and closes one eye. “Probably because she wanted to give me a pep talk about making a move on you.”
“What?” I prop myself up on my elbows. My shirt falls open a bit more, and his eyes dart there. “She knows about our…situation?”
“You mean she knows I’ve been crazy about you forever? Yeah, she knows that.”
“Oh,” I squeak.
He circles the last button absently with one finger. “When Logan tried to set me up with her, my response to her first message was basically, ‘Nice to hear from you. Unfortunately, I’m emotionally unavailable because I’m hung up on someone else.’ ”
Our eyes meet. I nudge his finger out of the way and flick open the button, and he swallows thickly. The tension turns this tiny room in this stupid red RV in this little corner of a big, gussied-up pigpen full of people vibingto a thousand different soundtracks—well, it turns it incandescent, the air loaded with the weight of everything that’s brought us to this moment.
We are a single sparkle suspended in a cascade of glitter glue. One fleck of stardust floating in the solar system. Definitely not the sun, because if everything here revolved around us, I would not be listening to the opening notes of “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” right now.
It’s fitting for it to happen like this, though. Everything unexpected about this trip—especially every single one of these ridiculous, chaotic parties—has brought us closer together. The chaos has been a sledgehammer, breaking down his walls and mine.
He slides the two sides of my shirt apart, and I shrug it off the rest of the way. “You’re beautiful, Quinn.” He squeezes my waist and we watch his unhurried hands slide up my torso inch by inch, applying pressure the whole way. Like my body is a flower he’s trying to press between pages.
He brushes my nipples with his thumbs, then follows with his mouth. My hips rise involuntarily, searching for him, but he’s holding himself too high above me. I fight the urge to beg for more, faster; yes, it would feel good, but it feels even better to learn what he wants to give and take from me without my begging for it.
All he wants for the next few minutes, apparently, is this, his mouth and hands, my breasts and, at one point, the dip of my waist. “This is what I see every time you wear those little workout shirts,” he says.
“I like when I catch you looking there.”
He kisses me again as his hand slides down to mythigh, curving around to grip my ass, his fingers almost between my legs. The next time my body shifts, they nudge the spot where I’m aching, and I moan.
“I want more,” he says. “Do you?”
“Yes. Now.Please.”
The next time he kisses me, he bites my bottom lip, gently pulling it away as his hand ducks under the hem of my shorts and underwear. He makes a desperate noise like he’s the one being touched. “I need to see you,” he says, pulling away as I try to kiss him again. “I’m sorry, please, I just need to—”
We yank off the rest of my clothes and he sits back to watch himself touch me, his lips parted. If he didn’t look so turned on, I wouldn’t be able to handle the vulnerability I feel. I’d be reaching for the blanket, pressing my knees together. But his face is so open and full of need, I want to give those things back to him.
He checks in with me when he drops his head to replace his fingers with his mouth. I nod, and when his tongue meets me, I curse and grab the sheets. He finds an angle and rhythm that no one else has ever discovered, and my whole body winds up with tension that leaves me shaking. But this magic angle requires him toreallyget in there, and he can’t possibly be comfortable in this position.
