The Boy and His Ribbon (The Ribbon Duet, #1)(79)

She didn’t have anything.

She didn’t look any different.

It didn’t mean she was any less confident as she entered the stable with her chin high and nipples still pebbled.

“Come with me.” Taking my hand, she gently led me toward a pile of horse blankets that had been dumped there last winter. Pushing me down, she held out her hand and revealed a tiny silver packet. “I can’t believe you don’t know about these things but…this is called a condom. It stops any sexually transmitted diseases and removes about ninety-five percent of risk of unwanted pregnancies.”

She’d just talked witchcraft, but all I could focus on was the word disease. I didn’t have a clue what sort of diseases you could catch through sex. Maybe it was another version of chicken pox, which I definitely didn’t want.

I managed to keep my mouth shut about that, but I couldn’t about the other fact. I stupidly asked, “Why only ninety-five percent?”

She sighed. “Not sure. I guess if you nick it with your teeth or fingernails or if it’s not held down when you disengage. Who knows? My point is…you can fuck me. No more excuses. I’m actually on the pill, and you’re clean, seeing as I’ll be your first time, but you should learn how to use one of these for the future, and I want to teach you.” She smiled softly. “I’ve enjoyed teaching you over the years.”

I looked away, my mind racing.

Pill and clean and condoms…she spoke a different language. Pill for what? Clean from what? But my brain had relocated to my cock, and it’d just been given a free pass to proceed.

No more fear of pregnancy.

No Della spying in the shadows.

No reason to say no.

Grabbing the hem of her nightgown, Cassie once again switched clothing for nakedness, and I no longer had any arguments not to feast my eyes on her flesh or allow the quaking desire to gather between my legs.

“I want you, Ren,” she murmured. “Do you want me?”

This time, there was no debate.

I nodded, licking my lips and reaching for her from where I sat on the blankets.

“Oh, thank God.” Kneeling before me, not caring about her knees on cold stones, she tore the tiny packet and pulled out something slimy and small. “This is going to feel a little strange, and you can’t come while I put it on because I only brought one, got it?”

I bit my lip as she came closer, doing my best to control my trembling and the bobbing of my overeager cock.

Shifting the condom in her hands, she fisted me and pressed it on my tip.

She was right.

It did feel weird.

Weird good.

Weird strange.

Weird ‘holy crap I don’t know how I’m going to be able to control myself.’

It took her an eternity to roll the slippery thing down my length, and when she’d finally finished, my vision was half-cross-eyed, and I panted as if I’d run to the paddocks and back.

I reached out to touch the casing around me, but she swatted away my hand and placed both of hers on my shoulders. Climbing up my body, she kneeled over me as I spread my legs out in front and ceased breathing as the scent of her arousal and the illicitness of what I was about to do almost sent me into cardiac arrest.

“Ready?” she breathed, leaning down to kiss me.

I’d passed the point of conversation and half-gasped, half-grunted as she slowly sat on me.

My mouth went slack beneath hers.

The sensation of her tight heat blew my mind.

The tremble of her thighs as she eased down and the small hitches in her breath as she threw her head back and let me fill her, activated the same trigger as before.

I was no longer Ren, the considerate teen thrust into fatherhood and homeless runaway. I was Ren the nineteen-year-old who’d been hungry for something for years and had finally found it.

She sank the final distance, her body clenching around mine, and I grabbed a fistful of her hair. Cradling her, I shot upright, spun her so she was on the blankets and slid her down until she was on her back.

And then I did what stallions and bulls and every male animal did when he was given access to a female.

I fucked her.

No other words.

I fucked her.

I thrust as fast and as hard as I could.

I turned animal as I bit her neck, raged upward, held her down, and punished her for making me unravel so completely.

And when that tickling, tingling warning came and my balls tightened and my cock swelled, I locked my mouth on hers and rode her harder.

And I came.

I officially entered adulthood.

I was a boy no longer.





CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT


REN



2010




TWENTY and TEN.

This shared birthday was one of the more important ones because Della reached double figures, and I reached the milestone of any kid.

I was no longer a teenager.

I was a man.

A man who’d had sex—quite regularly, in fact—a man who still felt like a kid most of the time but was also no longer at the mercy of laws of minors or the judgment and pity of adults.

I was my own person, but it didn’t mean our life changed.

It didn’t matter the wanderlust in my veins switched from suggestion to downright obsession. It didn’t matter, as I sat in an echo-plagued school hall and watched Della play the role of a Sandy in a younger, less suggestive version of Grease Lightning, that I suffered both pride and bittersweet sacrifice. And it didn’t matter that as I grew older, the more I burned for something I hadn’t found yet. Something I didn’t know but wanted more than I could stand.