Calmly, Carefully, Completely(71)

“I didn’t think you’d come,” I say.

Her face flushes, and I can tell she took that the wrong way. A laugh bursts from my throat. “I meant come across the couch toward me, doofy,” I say, and I reach up to tweak her nose. I lean toward her and kiss her quickly on the cheek. “Although,” I say. I have to stop and clear my throat again. I drop my voice down to a whisper. “When you came with my hand in your panties, that surprised me, too.”

Her breaths aren’t falling naturally now. They’re a little more hurried, and her cheeks are all rosy. I run my hand up the outside of her thigh, all the way up her leg because she’s wearing those crazy-tiny little shorty-shorts. “How do you think I felt?” she asks. She laughs, and it’s the prettiest sound I’ve ever heard. I can feel her words against my cheek, she’s that close to me. They’re hot and humid and all Reagan.

I jostle her in my lap with a bump of my knee. “Tell me how you felt,” I prompt. I want to know everything.

Her brow arches. “You mean, when we were doing that?” she asks.

I nod and slide my hand around the top of her thigh, tracing the line of those shorts, which really means that I’m tracing the crease of her inner thigh. Her legs part ever so slightly, and my heart thrills at the way she responds to me.

She hesitates for no more than second. Then she starts to talk. “I was angry,” she says. “Chase was an ass all night long, and then he touched me and I actually thought about walking away from him, but he was so damn smug. It wasn’t completely a knee-jerk reaction when I hit him. It was me being pissed off and hitting him just because I could. Just because he deserved it. Then I stole his car and came home, and he showed up. But then you were there. I knew you were there in the bushes. And I knew you’d seen me come home with my clothes all messed up, and I was afraid you’d think the worst.”

“The worst?” I ask. Her legs part a little farther, and her mouth opens on a heavy sigh as I trace her inner thigh. I want to pull her shorts off and drag her panties down her legs. Then I want to touch my mouth to all of her wet girly parts and lick her until she comes on my face. But her parents are downstairs.

“You were afraid I’d kissed him?” she asks.

I don’t respond because I’m too busy sliding my fingers beneath her shorts to trace the line of her panties. “Uh huh,” I mutter.

“I thought about it,” she says. “I kind of wanted to get it over and done with.”

I look up. Did she really just say that? “Over and done with?” I ask.

She winces. “You make me feel these…feelings, Pete. And I don’t know what to do with them all or where they came from. And that scares the crap out of me, that I can be like this with you without even having to calm myself down or work to push my feelings into the corner of my mind. So, I kind of wanted to test it with Chase. But when he touched me, I didn’t feel anything.”

“Did he scare you?”

She shakes her head. “Not really. He was an ass. And I knew it before I went out with him. But then he grazed my boob, and my skin began to crawl. It wasn’t like when you touch me at all. So it made me think. It made me want to come back here to you. But I figured I should probably finish out the night. But then he touched my boob again and laughed about it, and I hit him. It wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction. I meant to hit him.” She winces again. “I feel kind of bad about that.”

I just realized I stopped tracing her panties when she started to talk about this, and I look into her eyes. “So you didn’t freak out. You hit him on purpose?” She has no idea how f*cking happy this makes me.