Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating(66)

My clothes seem to dissolve away as soon as he touches them. I don’t actually remember taking my shirt off. My shorts are dragged down my legs.

Our eyes meet and I’m sure he can see the mania in mine because he smiles and then it turns into a laugh when my mouth falls open as he unbuttons his shirt—too slowly. I start from the bottom, meeting his hands in the middle, and together we push it off his shoulders. They’re warm and hard under my hands when I try to tug him back down over me, but he resists, sliding his pants off and kicking them into a puddle on the floor.

“Josh?”

He bends, kissing my neck, humming. “Hazel?”

“Is this a ‘Ha ha, we’ll just do it three times’ sort of thing?”

“Not for me,” he says, and when his mouth finds my collarbone he scrapes his teeth across it. “For me it’s a ‘We’ll do this again and again’ sort of thing.” He kisses me once, lightly on the mouth. “I want us to be together. Not just friends. Okay?”

Inside me, there is a fist curling around my heart, squeezing. “Yes.”

“But I don’t want to do it on the couch.”

“Like, ever?”

He presses small kisses to my jaw, my neck, my ear. “Sure, over time we’ll christen each piece of furniture, but right now—” He pulls back, lifting his chin toward the bedroom.

I imagine a cartoon dust cloud behind me as I practically sprint there. Josh, of course, takes a calmer approach, and strolls in a few seconds after I’ve launched myself onto the center of the mattress. My energy level has miraculously recovered.

“I don’t want to feel like I’m dragging you here,” he jokes.

But my smile is only a flash, because it all turns very intense as soon as he puts a knee on the mattress and climbs up my bed, between my legs.

Josh Im.

Josh Im is in my bed, about to get naked, and—from the looks of things—about to fuck me very, very thoroughly.

“I’m worried I might make a lot of noise tonight,” I babble, breathless.

“That wouldn’t be a bad thing.” His hands reduce my focus down to just this: The feel of his fingers dragging my underwear down my legs. The way he stares at me. The warm slide of his palms up over my knees, spreading them as he kneels.

The knotted rope inside begins unfurling, loosening as I wonder whether this pregnancy isn’t even a little bit bad. It might be the best thing. I imagine tomorrow morning, how he might shuffle out of my bed, still naked, hair standing straight up like a silken forest. I imagine kissing him, getting distracted and forgetting what I was supposed to be doing before I remember again.

The rest of the thought is cut off as his hands slide up and down my legs, tormenting me, pulling that heavy weight low in my belly, making me so hungry for him to touch me that I ache. I push up on an elbow, wanting to retaliate the teasing, and he laughs in a tight, incredulous breath when my fingers come over him, above his boxers. He is hot in my hand, pulsing steel.

“You’re so hard.” I am a master at stating the obvious.

He watches my hands as I coax the elastic down, but he doesn’t do what I expect after he kicks the boxers off. He doesn’t rise over me and settle between my legs. He ducks lower, kissing the inside of each knee, up my thigh and then down the other. His breath is hot when he comes up again—only inches away now from where my heartbeat has settled—and he stares up at my face from between my legs.

“This okay?”

“What? Yeah. Of course. Yes.” Frankly it’s a struggle to not grab his hair and pull him down.

He smiles, but it’s not a smile I’ve ever seen before. It’s a dangerous smile; he’s a movie villain, the seductive one, the one who robs you but fucks you real good first.

And then he ducks, and kisses me between my legs, and my body becomes a bomb.

He places tiny kisses—from lower, where I am wet and aching, up to the fuse that lights under the sweet press of his mouth. I can feel when it opens, feel the heat of his exhale across that most sensitive place when he moans. His tongue swipes away my sanity but misses the place where I need it—intentionally—sliding around and around, dipping inside me and then arcing high, teasing, narrowing in on his target. Slowly, seductively circling.

The tension in my body is so tight, and I ache so deeply it’s nearly painful. I need his tongue there, and I want him inside me, and I feel like I want to climb out of my skin I’m so desperate to feel him.

“Please.”

He pulls away just slightly and I whimper in torment when he kisses my thighs again, speaking into them. “Hmm?”

“Josh.” My hand goes into his hair, pressing silent radio commands to the brain beneath: Suck on me. Suck on me.

“I could lose my mind down here.”

My other hand dives into my own hair, pulling to keep me from screaming. I let out a tight “I mean, that would be okay.”

His mouth presses warm against the very top of my thigh, and I feel my legs shaking against his hands as he whispers, “Isn’t it nice when I take my time?”

“Oh. Oh my God, yes it is nice.” I sound like I’ve just run a mile.

“You feel like silk in my mouth.” My brain melts inside my cranium at his words and the heat of them across my skin, and Josh—the beast—sucks a small hickey into my inner thigh. I swear he’s smiling when he says, “You’re shaking.”