Roomies(62)

“I didn’t need to get anything from the apartment.”

What?

Calvin bends, and his mouth hovers just below my ear. “I just wanted to come home before lunch.”

Oh.

The ache explodes.

My body is pretty sure it understands his meaning clearly—my hands move up his chest and around his neck. But my brain—my brain is always the problem: “Why?”

He laughs, scraping my jaw with his teeth, and then kisses my cheek, my ear. “Do you realize you’ve been avoiding any casual physical contact since we woke up in bed together?”

“I have?” I pull back. It’s surreal to be looking into his eyes when they’re so close to mine.

This makes him laugh again. “I think I’ve made it pretty clear you can have me if you want me. I practically refuse to put on clothes when we’re in the apartment.”

“Oh. That’s true.”

He smiles, kissing my nose. “But if you aren’t interested, I’ll leave you alone and not ask again.”

I hurl my words out like I’m bidding at an auction: “I’m interested.”

“I’ve wanted this since the first time we had lunch.”

What?

His smile moves up my neck, pressing parentheses into my skin. “I remember how nervous and sweet you were.” More kisses. “I wondered whether you liked me that way. But you kept so calm with me in your house . . . and I’m out here on the couch thinking about you.”

I don’t even know what to say to this. I want to repeat the way he says tinking about you. He was out here feeling what I was feeling? My charade was too convincing; apparently I could have been getting Calvin Sex for the past month. I want to both celebrate and scream.

“And then we fell into your bed,” he says, and his mouth moves across my throat to the other ear. He sucks just below, pressing into me. Something hard digs into my hip, and I gasp.

It makes him hiss. “I like your sounds. I remember how many of them you made.” His mouth moves closer to mine. “What do you remember?”

“Earlier,” I say, and he kisses me once, “in the elevator, when you were close to me, I was thinking about . . .”

He pulls back, waiting. “Thinking about . . . ?”

“When we were in my bed.”

“What were we doing?”

I push back the self-conscious doubt in my throat. “You were on top of me. We were already . . .”

Moving together, I don’t say.

Calvin groans, sliding his hands under my shirt to grip my waist. “You were thinking about fucking me in the elevator?”

And just like that, I am hot everywhere. He’s making this so easy. “I was remembering that feeling of skin on skin, where you can’t get enough?”

His mouth comes over mine, and I remember this, too. It’s not a new kiss, it’s a kiss we’ve done before—teasing only at first and then sucking, and deeper, and hungry.

He slides his hands farther up my shirt, and around so he’s unfastening my bra with a tiny pinch. My shirt and bra are pulled off together, and his mouth moves down, dragging words over my skin. I stare down at his shoulders, reaching for his shirt, wanting to see the way the muscles move as he grabs me and holds me, as he works his mouth down my belly to the clasp of my skirt.

My clothes are peeled off in front of the door again, but this time I notice everything. I notice how his skin looks in the dim light coming in the living room window, and I notice how he smiles even when he’s kissing me.

I notice the feel of his skin on my fingertips and how it’s even smoother against my lips.

I notice he likes being licked on his chest, he likes being bitten near his hip, and his hands shake when he slides them into my hair as I move lower, taking him in my mouth.

But the things I learn about Calvin right now won’t ever be shared in an interview; finally we have something that is just for us. I don’t need to know that he’s quiet while he watches, his breaths initially cut off and then gasping. I don’t need to know that he begs sweetly when he’s close, or that he warns me, trying to slow his body down before he comes—but I learn these things anyway. And I don’t need to know for anyone but myself that he’s a tease when he puts his mouth on me, or that he’ll touch me with the same fingers he uses to strum his guitar and it’s that knowledge that will send me over the edge on my living room floor.

We get a drink of water, we move to my bed, and his mouth is all over me again, along my thighs, over my stomach, sucking, sucking at my chest. I’m sure we’ll talk later, but for now we’re only sounds and breathing. It feels like all we’ve done is talk—in this instructional, memorizing way, knowing that everything we say needs to be filed away for a later date—but right now the only thing I want is to reconstruct that choppy memory of how it feels to have his weight on me and his skin all over mine.

The strange thing is that all of this feels so easy and familiar, but when he’s there—above me and then pushing inside—that’s where the familiarity ends. I know now that that night we were nearly numb with intoxication, and I can say with certainty that he didn’t watch as he inched into me; he didn’t go this slowly. I can say with certainty that my eyes were probably closed and it was all wilder and rougher because we could barely process a thing.