Page 137 of What We Bury

“Yeah?”

“I want to kiss you.”

I immediately close the distance and press my lips to his.

His lips are warm. He tastes like sleep and bitter coffee, like he is just now surfacing into the day and I’m the first thing he sees. The kiss is slow, a little tentative at first. When I press closer, his hand comes up, cupping the side of my face. He draws me in, deepening the kiss, and the tremor in his fingers doesn’t match how gentle his mouth feels on mine.

I kiss him back—hungry, greedy, afraid that if I let up for a second, the moment will close up and never come back.

When we finally separate, he rests his forehead against mine. “God, you taste good.”

I kiss him again. I can’t help it. His mouth is soft and rough at the same time, like someone who knows exactly how to take what he wants but is being deliberately, destructively slow about it just to see if I’ll break first.

He pulls back for a second, studying my face.

“You always this much of a morning person?” I ask, breathless.

“Only when I wake up to you.” The cheesy answer would make me roll my eyes if it wasn’t for the fact that he means it.

He leans in again, and this time the kiss is different. Deeper. His tongue slides against mine and I feel it everywhere—a slow, rolling heat that builds until my whole body is humming. I climb off the coffee table and into his lap, knees on either side of his hips, and his hands find my waist like they were made to hold me exactly here.

“Fuck,” he breathes, pulling back to look at me. His pupils are blown wide, his lips swollen. “Baby girl, you have no idea what you do to me.”

I shift in his lap and feel exactly what I do to him, hard and insistent against my core. The friction sends a jolt through me that makes me gasp, and his fingers tighten on my hips.

“Micah. I need you to fuck me,” I gasp against his mouth.

“Are you?—”

“Micah. Bedroom. Now.”

He stands in one fluid motion, lifting me with him, my legs wrapping around his waist. His hands grip the backs of my thighs, and I can feel the coiled strength of him, how easily he carries me, how steady his steps are even as I’m kissing his neck, his jaw, his mouth.

He sets me down on the edge of the bed and pulls back, standing between my knees, looking down at me with those devastating eyes. His chest is rising and falling fast, and I watch him fight for control.

“Tell me what you want,” he says. “Tell me and it’s yours.”

“You.” I tug his shirt over his head and he lets me, arms rising, and the sight of him bare-chested in my bedroom, morning light catching the lean lines of his body, makes my mouth go dry. He’s not bulky. He’s built like a swimmer, all long muscle and smooth skin, with a scar across his ribs that I want to ask about later and a tattoo on his left shoulder blade that I’ll trace with my tongue if he’ll let me.

He kneels. Right there, between my legs, hands on my thighs, looking up at me like I’m something holy.

“Can I taste you?” he asks, and his voice is so low it’s barely there. “I’ve been thinking about it all week. Wake up wanting it. Go to work wanting it. I want my mouth on you, baby girl. Please.”

I nod, not trusting my voice, and he hooks his fingers into the waistband of my sweats and drags them, along with my panties, down my legs with a slowness that borders on cruelty. The cool air hits my skin and I shiver, but his hands are warm, palms sliding up my inner thighs, spreading me open gently.

“Stunning,” he murmurs, almost to himself. Then he leans in and the first press of his mouth against me pulls a sound from my throat that I didn’t know I could make.

He’s patient. Takes his time, learning me with his tongue, finding every spot that makes me shake, every rhythm that makes me grip the sheets. He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t perform. Just gives and gives and gives, his hands holding my thighs steady while I come apart against his mouth.

“Micah—Fuck—I’m?—”

He hums against me, the vibration sending shockwaves through my core, and slides two fingers inside me at the same time, curling them, finding the spot that makes my vision blur. I come with his name on my lips, my back arching off the bed, my fingers fisted in his hair. The orgasm rolls through me in waves, each one cresting higher than the last, and he doesn’t stop until I’m shaking, until I’m pulling at him, until I gasp out, “Come here, comehere?—”

He rises over me, bracing his arms on either side of my head, and I pull him down into a kiss that tastes like me and him and everything we’ve been building toward since the night on the beach. I reach for his belt, fumbling with the buckle, and he helps me. Both of us laughing a little because the angle is awkward and his jeans are tight and neither of us wants to stop kissing long enough to make it easier.

He kicks them off. His boxer briefs follow. And then he’s bare above me and I let myself look at the full length of him, hard and flushed, and the wanting is so acute it’s almost painful.

“Are you on birth control?” he asks, breathless. “I’m clean. The club makes us test all the time.”