Page 30 of The Match Faker

Her legs relax beneath my hands, and she lets me spread her apart, even though I shouldn’t.

“Hold on to the counter,” I tell her, my body clearly unwilling to listen to my brain’s warnings.

“Okay,” she says, her fingernails disappearing underneath the lip of the laminate.

I angle in, eyes closed again. I should not be fucking doing this.

Like she can read minds, she closes her legs once more. “Do you need a cushion?”

I growl, pulling her legs apart. “No.”

“But the floor is hard.”

“So am I, Jasmine.” I grip my dick in my Jockeys for emphasis. “I’m on the hard ground and I’m still hard for you.”

I squeeze myself enough to hurt, because it feels good in that weird way that painful things sometimes do and because I’m mad. I’m fucking livid at the men she’s been with. The men who have clearly made her feel like she has to apologize for thesethings. Even if they didn’t explicitly make her feel that way, they still, clearly, never cared enough to consider her pleasure.

I’m mad at myself for letting it get this far.

I breathe deep again, to collect myself, to get my anger under control. Because it’s not her I’m mad at. None of this is her fault. When I open my mouth next, I’m still not sure what I’ll say, if I’ll ask her to give me more or if I’ll finally be the man I hope I am.

“Do you want this?” I ask.

Fuck.

She bites her lip, plump and pink. Her eyes are blasted, black eating up all the color. Her hair falls in long tendrils around her temples and in front of her ears. She looks messy and messed up and fucking beautiful.

My heart stumbles at the sight. Fuck. How did I get here?

“Do you remember,” she asks, “what our compatibility percentage was?”

I blink slowly. Like I’m drunk. Maybe high. When I’m this close to her, so close I can almost taste her, there’s absolutely no way I can process her words and make responsible choices.

“Remind me,” I say, my mouth dry.

“99.338%,” she says with a little thrill in her words. Like she’s proud of the percentage.

Of course she would be. She would think that getting an A+ in compatibility is something that is both achievable and normal to want.

She runs her hands through my hair, not pulling but not gentle either. I close my eyes and let my head fall wherever she wants, lean into her as she scrapes her French tips along my scalp.

“I didn’t trust this process before,” she admits, her voice a whisper. “I didn’t think there was any way some computer code could find the One for me, but I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong.”

My heart hits my ribs like a hammer. The wordsstopandnever fucking stopare fighting a war in my head.

She grips my hair tighter and tips my head back. “I want you to eat my pussy, Nick.”

It’s my name that sends the blood in my body back to my brain and away from my dick. I can’t do this with her. Not when there’s some other Nick out there. Not when she thinks I’m him.

Maybe he ghosted her that night. Maybe he’s fucking dead. It doesn’t matter what the reason. If I do this with any kind of secret between us, I’ll never see her again. We just met, yeah, but I’ve learned enough about her to know that.

I sit back on my heels. The lust and anticipation on her face fade slowly to confusion.

“I can’t do this,” I force out around the lump that’s lodged itself in my throat.

She opens her mouth. Closes it. The flush in her cheeks transforms, pink to tomato red. Fuck fuck fuck.

“I’m sorry, Jasmine. I?—”