Sinful Longing (Sinful Nights, #3)(7)

All for her.

She didn’t understand why, but somehow she was his undoing.

And he was hers.

He f*cked her into his own release, his eyes squeezed shut and his face contorted in pleasure. He grunted, and groaned her name before biting her collarbone, holding in all his sounds, too, as he came.

“We can’t stop,” she whispered, voicing the most dangerous words. Words she shouldn’t say. But her body had the reins, making decisions for her, seeking more bliss.

“We can’t and we shouldn’t,” he murmured, layering soft kisses on her neck.

Soon, as they came down from their high and her senses reattuned to the world around her, the tinkling of glasses reached her ears. The after party was starting…

Which meant.

She was about to become a pumpkin.

From inside her clutch purse, the alarm sounded on her phone.

“I have to go. My mom has a shift at eleven. I told her I’d be home by ten-thirty.”

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said.

In the parking garage, he cupped her cheek gently, pressed his lips to hers, and gave her a sweet good-bye kiss that would linger on the whole way home.

He whispered, “Go.”

In three minutes, she was on the road, rushing to return home to her son.





CHAPTER FIVE


Her mother’s head was bent over the kitchen counter, her fingers swiping in a wild blur across her phone screen.

“Gotcha, flesh-eater!”

“Saving the world, Mom?” Elle asked, as she closed the front door to her apartment.

“Somebody has to fend off the infected,” her mom said with a final slide before she looked up and closed the game.

Elle laughed. “I thought you were giving it up. You said it was giving you video game thumb or something.”

Her mother shook her head, her bouncy ponytail swinging with her. “I tried. Oh lord, you know I tried. But your son… He plays a mean game of Dying Light, and he challenged me. I can’t back down.”

“You’re going to need to work on State of Decay next. Alex and his buddies are moving on in the apocalypse gaming world,” Elle said, dropping her keys on the counter and giving her mom a peck on the cheek. Her mother wore green scrubs with Snoopys and Woodstocks on them. “How was he tonight?”

“Fine. Just fine. I plied him with pizza and schooled him with my survival skills.”

“No easier way to the heart of a fourteen-year-old boy, is there?” While there was plenty of truth in her statement, for her son, video games weren’t just the snack-food-and-candy path to winning his teenage heart—they were essential to his emotional survival. They were the difference between him talking and not talking.

Between speech and a complete breakdown.

Some parents might worry that their kids played too many video games, and while Elle set limits, she also knew what they meant for him. Because the time before? It was the end of the world. Black, empty, cold. A true pit of despair. In those dark days, she’d have given anything—a lung, a kidney, a limb—for him to talk to her. He’d shut down after his father died, completely withered, barely able to utter a word except for the essentials—yes, no, I don’t know.

Understandable, given what he’d witnessed in their home on that night three years ago.

Somehow games, zombies, and post-apocalyptic stories became a portal for him. Elle never would have predicted it, but on the days after school when Alex would come by the center, he was drawn to the gaming room, and to the raucous energy of the boys shouting at the screen. After a year of being so traumatized by what he saw he’d gone nearly mute, video games reconnected the voice inside him to the rest of the world. They unlocked the part of him that he’d kept quiet, and how she loved to hear him shouting with his friends.

God bless the living dead.

And The Walking Dead, too. Alex’s favorite show had become a key part of Elle’s lexicon, since she had to stay up to speed with Sheriff Rick Grimes in order to converse with her son again. Zombies. Who would have thought zombies would rescue her son from the near-catatonic state that the death of his father had sent him into?

Her mother tucked the phone into her purse and gathered up her keys. “How was the benefit? Did you meet your goals?” Her mom held up her hand and twisted her index finger around her middle finger. “I had ’em crossed all night for you.”

“We did. It was amazing,” Elle said, and quickly gave a recap of the night. Well, the pre-pool-deck portion of the night.

Her mom beamed, then pumped a fist in the air and did a victory dance in the kitchen. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!”

The woman had amazing energy.

Elle’s mom was pretty much the youngest grandma around. Like Elle, she’d started early when it came to baby making. Her mother was only eighteen when Elle was born. Barely fifty now, her mom poured her ample energy into her two grown daughters, her grandkids, her job as a nurse, and even her new boyfriend. She’d put herself through nursing school when Elle and her younger sister were toddlers, shuttling back and forth between day care and class, struggling to make ends meet with two little kids all to herself. She’d wanted different things for her daughters, and she’d achieved that with Camille, who’d wisely waited ’til she was out of college and married before getting knocked up.