Page 91 of One More Chapter

Andi looks a little nervous, and as soon as Dominic realizes he’s at Thanksgiving dinner with two teachers, he goes full deer in headlights mode.

“Mom. You brought me toMr. Ellis’s house? And Ms. Barker is here too?!”

“If it makes you feel any better, my brother isalsoMr. Ellis,” I try. It doesn’t work. “We have video games in the living room.”

I hitch my thumb toward the entertainment system, and Grant takes Dominic into the living room while we all introduce ourselves to Andi. It’s terrible, but my first thought is that the attention can be off of me and Pen for a little while.

We gather around the table, which is laid up with pies and cookies and Mom’s famous triple chunk brownies. Andi tells us about moving to Massachusetts for a job after her husband’s sudden passing, but how thankful she is that she moved in next door to my brother, and the hospitality and help he has shown her and her son. Ian just grunts, but I see the blush creeping along his neck.

The seating arrangement ended up with Pen and I beside one another. While Grant is grilling Andi—who, by the way, is taking everything like a champ—Penelope leans over to me.

“So. You wanna tell me why you spent all of Thanksgiving Day patching up windows?”

“No ma’am. Thanks for asking first though.”

She huffs a quiet laugh, rolling her eyes until her gaze ticks up to mine. There is desire there written in fifty different shades, and it takes every ounce of my will power not to drag her to my childhood bedroom and pin her to the wall.

“Doyouwant to tell where that little show of standing up for me came from?”

Her eyes widen, but instead of diverting, she says, “You deserved it. You deserve to have your successes bragged about. Yougetto feel proud.”

Annnnnd I’m hard at my parent’s kitchen table. Thank God I’m wearing jeans.

I grunt and slide my chair up to the lip of the table, which puts my knee against Penelope’s. It does absolutely nothing to help the boner situation, especially when she doesn’t move.Especiallywhen she nudges her knee up against mine to be closer to me. I slide my hand over to her knee and squeeze, and the way she squirms in the seat beside me makes it hard to breathe.

We end the night watching football and having a Mario Kart tournament on the old Wii with Dominic—who has since warmed up to spending his Thanksgiving with two teachers. By the time everyone is packing their plates of leftovers to leave, I’m wired on her.

Pen hasn’t left my side all evening. Not since dessert. We sat on the same couch, pressed so close that at one point, when Grant joined us, I had to rest my arm behind her head along the back of the couch, virtually slotting her beneath my arm. She used my thigh to balance on more than one occasion, her fingers inching closer and closer to where my cock was stiff in my jeans. I’m almost glad that we drove separately.

“We are not gonna have to cook for a month,” she laughs when we get home and add our leftovers to the containers we’ve barely made a dent in from Friendsgiving.

She’s lucky I can nod and laugh along with her. I know it’s stilted, because it sounds like I’m underwater in my own head. I want one thing and one thing only.

Her.

But she has to lead. I can’t take the initiative and get shot down, and I also don’t want to pressure her. She told me the other night that she’s protecting her heart first, and I want that for us too. So when she says goodnight and heads to her room, I’m already predicting which visions of her I’m using to jerk off to as soon as I get to my own. I’m halfway down the hall, with my belt already unbuckled, when I hear it.

A tinny tinkling sound.

It’s that damn bell.

My erection pulses. I turn and stalk slowly back toward the living area. Penelope is leaning against the entrance of the hallway that leads to her bedroom, my Boston Tea Party bell dangling from her fingertips.

“Youdidsay to ring this the next time I wanted help, right?”

thirty-five

penelope

Anthony hasn’t moved.

He’s frozen in the middle of the dining room that stands between our two ends of the house, his belt already undone like he was planning on tending to the thick cock trapped behind his jeans all by himself.

As if.

I don’t know what it means that he boarded up those windows for me, but he’s lucky I didn’t ask him to see his childhood bedroom while everyone else was distracted by pie and video games. I was wet the moment he pressed his knee up to mine beneath that dinner table, and it only worsened as the night wore on, especially when I rested my hand on his thigh and could feel the stretch in his jeans. I’m aching for him. There’s no better way to put it.

“Are you going to help me?” I ask, dipping my words into that scratchy, sly timbre I know he likes so much. “Or am I going to have to do it myself?”