The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2)(63)
It was like his heartbeat was everywhere at once.
Confession pushed against his lips. “Listen, I can’t stand—”
“I’m about to come,” she said, and then his speakers filled the room with her desperate mewls of pleasure, and Ethan threw his head back and groaned, not even watching the video anymore, because it was too much.
He was on fire. His sheer, undiluted wanting so strong that it eclipsed the painful way he was grinding his teeth. Any moment now he was going to pass out.
“Ethan?” Naomi leaned forward and shut the laptop, cutting off both the picture and sound from the video. Her voice was huskier than he’d ever heard it. He could feel her vowels against the nape of his neck.
Barely, he managed to sit up, to take in the splashes of crimson marking her cheekbones.
“I had a great time tonight,” she said.
“Me too,” he grunted after counting silently to three.
“Think you can walk me to the door?”
He assumed at that point that she was teasing him, which was honestly fair.
But when Ethan stood up, hissing at the pressure the new angle put on his hard-on, he saw that she wasn’t being coy after all. Naomi’s legs were trembling.
He offered her his hand to get to her feet, and through sheer force of will managed to escort her to the door.
Naomi lingered at the exit, staring at him like he was something feral. He must have looked like a complete mess. He felt like a complete mess.
Please strive for a sliver of normalcy.
“I’ll see you tomorrow for coffee?” They had a standing date to review her seminar notes.
For a moment she just looked at him, the rise and fall of her chest dramatic.
“Yeah,” Naomi said, and then gave him the filthiest kiss he’d ever received. Quite possibly, he corrected as her tongue pressed against his, the filthiest kiss anyone had ever received.
She pressed herself against him, and he rolled his hips helplessly in time with the greedy press of their mouths. It was all Ethan could do to keep from rubbing his dick, well, all over her, anywhere he could reach.
Naomi pulled his hair until he moaned against her mouth, out-of-his-mind wrecked, but then she stepped away so suddenly he actually stumbled forward. Barely keeping from breaking his nose by catching his arm on the door frame.
“I should go.” Her lips were swollen and her hair was mussed. She looked like the first meteor shower he’d ever seen—impossible and brilliant, so far away but somehow also right inside his chest.
Ethan briefly considered dropping to his knees and begging her to stay.
Instead he said, “Of course.”
“This was great. Again.” She pressed the back of her hand to her cheek, eyes somewhat incredulous before smiling at him and reaching under her dress to slip off her panties and shove them into his hand. “Bye, see you tomorrow.”
The door crashed closed before he had time to process his good fortune.
He slumped against it, jerked open his belt buckle, dragged down his zipper, and fisted his cock, pumping a handful of times against the slip of silk, warm from her body, until he came, shaking like a leaf.
If that was what a first date with Naomi Grant was like, how on earth was he supposed to survive the second one?
Chapter Twenty-Two
MODERN INTIMACY—LECTURE 4:
Friends don’t let friends lie to themselves
NAOMI WAS A firm believer that if she told herself something wasn’t a big deal, and then forced herself to behave in accordance with that version of reality, she could conquer just about any type of social anxiety. Unfortunately, ever since she’d started dating Ethan Cohen, that strategy had gone completely to shit.
For example, she currently stood behind a now-familiar lectern at the JCC, preaching about the modern dating milestone of introducing the object of your affection to your group of friends, while a drop of sweat snaked down the back of her top. Before she and Ethan had started actually following the steps she’d written for their experiment in love, she’d gotten into a groove with the syllabus. Each lecture flowed pretty seamlessly. Organic connections started forming in their conversation. Participants actually started to show up with positive anecdotes about people they interacted with, rather than the negative—albeit funnier—stories from the first few weeks. But now . . .
“If you’re afraid to introduce the person you’re seeing to your friends,” she said, reinforcing the key theme of the evening’s seminar as they hit the midway point in the session, “it’s probably because you know they’re not right for you.”
Smile, your grimace is scaring the audience.
“So,” she continued after a deep breath, reading directly from her notes, “quit kidding yourself and cut your losses, or prepare to face the truth you’ve buried about the inevitable failure of your relationship because you’re afraid to die alone.” Yikes. She’d written the outline for this module a few weeks ago. Now each easy proclamation fell from her lips like a personal sentencing.
“And with that”—she forced herself to release her death grip on the lectern—“let’s break up into groups of three to five. I want you each to go around and share some commentary you received from your friends about your last significant other. See if there are any patterns that you’ve been ignoring.”