Page 98 of Edge of Midnight

Sean was enjoying himself hugely. “I’ll live,” he said, his voice offhand. He stroked his penis and brought his hand up to his face, inhaling. “Your smell makes my mouth water. Can I go down on you?”

“Um…actually…” She stared at him for a long moment, and gave in to the impulse. “I have a better idea.”

She rolled over and reached for him, gripping the broad stalk of his penis, and took him in her mouth, tasting herself as well as his own hot salt tang. He groaned, shuddered. “Oh, God, Liv.”

She murmured something soothing, petting and licking him.

It was by no means easy to perform fellatio on a guy of his proportions. Particularly since her jaw was still sore from her pit-bull imitation with T-Rex. She didn’t care. She wanted this. She was hungry to pleasure him, to reduce him to a state of writhing desperation.

Hungry to wrest the sexual upper hand away from him, for once.

But he gave it to her generously, abandoning himself with his usual wholehearted sensuality. He curled his body over hers, clutching her hair, her back, shivering and moaning his incoherent appreciation.

He reached down and touched her cheek when she took a moment to breathe and relax her jaw. “Stop if you’re tired,” he said gently.

She milked him with her hands, smiling. “Gotta get going early if I want to make a dent in that forty-eight-hundred-dollar bill.”

Laughter jerked in his chest, but he tilted her face up again. “You know that’s just a joke, right?” His eyes looked worried. “I know I come on strong, but if you don’t want it, it stops. Is that clear?”

“Um, OK,” she faltered. “Does that mean you don’t want…?”

“Fuck, no.” The words burst out of him. “I love it. I’ll beg, plead, suck your toes. But you decide when and how much. Understand?”

“Um, yes, thanks,” she said demurely. “Can I continue, now?”

He ignored the question, caressing her cheek with his fingertips. “This means a lot to me,” he said. “I don’t want to mess it up.”

The earnest, worried look in his eyes made her heart swell with tenderness. “You’re not,” she told him. “Believe me, you’re not.”

She tried to scoot back down and pick up where she’d left off, but he grabbed her and spun his body around until they were sixty-nined.

“I can’t wait,” he said. “Let me play, too.”

He pushed her thigh up and put his mouth to her.

Liv stiffened, at first. Sixty-nining was not her thing. Oral sex required concentration, and to have the guy bend her into a pretzel and stick his face between her legs, tickling and prodding while she tried to pull it off…um, no. In her opinion, a proper blow job, like driving an expensive sports car, or chopping vegetables with a sharp knife, was a thing best done without serious distractions.

But like everything else she thought she knew about sex, that turned on its head when Sean was concerned. Being twisted into a pretzel was great if a girl was relaxed to virtual bonelessness from multiple orgasms, and Sean’s lapping, lashing, trilling tongue was so unerringly skilled at keeping her in a state of quivering delight.

It was perfect, twining and luscious and ravishing. Each inspired the other to more sensual, ravenous excesses with each suckling stroke, each voluptuous caress, his pleasure amplifying hers and vice versa until they melded into a shining whole; his hardness to her softness, his rough to her smooth, offering satisfaction to every secret, wordless yearning. They crested the wave, exploded into crashing foam together.

She lay incapable of moving while the light in the room slowly brightened, inhaling his warm man musk smell. She was petting the gilt tipped hairs on his muscular thigh when she noticed something that looked like a small, irregular bruise. She looked closer. It was a tattoo, written crookedly on his thigh in small, blurry, letters. SEAN.

She traced it with her finger. “Did you do this yourself? It doesn’t look like a professional tattoo.”

He grunted. “It’s not. Dad put that on me when I was about eight, with a hot needle and a ballpoint pen. Bottle of Scotch for disinfectant.”

Liv froze, her hand tightening on his thigh. “Eight years old?”

“Yeah. He was pissed at me and Kev for playing tricks on him. That was back when it was real hard to tell us apart. Dad didn’t have much of a sense of humor. I think that’s the first thing to go, when a person is mentally ill. So he labeled us. He did Kev first. When I saw what was in store for me, I took off for the woods. Took him days to track me down, but I let him find me, in the end. I got hungry.”

“My God.” She stroked the mark with her finger, horrified. “Sean, that’s awful. You poor baby.”

He looked uncomfortable. “I’ve had worse experiences. I’m just glad my name didn’t have more letters. Kev only had three. Cured me of any impulse to get a tattoo, I’ll tell you that much.” He pondered for a moment. “Maybe that’s why I hate Scotch,” he added thoughtfully. “Even the smell of the stuff makes me gag.”

She wondered if he even knew how much that confession revealed about his childhood. She could see so clearly the little boy he’d been, hiding in the woods. Hungry and scared. It made her chest hurt, but she sensed that her sympathy would embarrass him.

She wiggled closer, and gently kissed the faded tattoo. Silently grateful that all that pain, all that darkness, had not put out his light.

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