Page 44 of Thank you, Next

But she couldn’t pretend that she hated him now—well, maybe as a sex thing, but not in real life. He could make her beg. He could bring her to her knees—and probably would.

He might know that without her telling him because he gave her what she begged for. He licked and sucked and gradually zeroed in on her clit before she was forced to rip a clump of his hair out. He teased her entrance with his fingers until her hips started dancing for him. She grabbed his perfect white sheets so hard she might have shredded them, but she didn’t care. He coaxed her body to the edge of orgasm and then slowed down what felt like ten times, until she was sweaty and writhing, and less verbal than he was before his coffee.

And when she finally went over, either because he took her there or her body demanded what he’d been refusing to give, he was still looking at her with the same level of awe that he’d started with. And that made her hungry for him again. She didn’t know that she’d ever get enough of him.

“I want you inside me,” she said, once she’d recovered the power of speech.

He stood up and pulled off his pajama pants, but she didn’t get to see his cock because he crawled over her body. “Condom?” he asked.

“I have an IUD,” she said. “If you really haven’t been with anyone else—”

“I haven’t.”

“We can—”

“Are you sure?”

She would never trust anyone else like this. He might have been a dick sometimes over the years, but he’d never lied to her. So she nodded. And opened her legs to him. When he was inside her, it felt so right that tears came to her eyes. She liked everything about being with him, and it felt like being young again. Like when she’d first met him and had gripped on to every word he said as though it had been a shiny agate that she could keep to admire later.

It was first-time sex. He rolled on her hair when they changed positions; she had to tell him how to touch her clit when he was behind her so that she would come again. But he didn’t seem invested in performing well as a salve to his ego. He genuinely wanted it to be good for her so that it would be good for them. It was so different from sex with her exes, when she always felt as though she was performing a role for their benefit.

She came again while he was behind her, so they moved again until he was on his back and she straddled his thighs. “This is one of the things I’ve pictured again and again.”

“What?” She took him inside her and rolled her hips until he groaned and started steering her. She liked that she’d made him lose control. He normally didn’t let anyone see him close to undone. She knew that she was one of the intimate few.

After he came, he cleaned her up. Another first. And they cuddled, yet another first after first-time sex. Most of her relationships had started out as hookups, so she’d usually been calling an Uber as the guy had been rolling off her the first time. She was back in her panties and looking for shoes by the time the app found her a car.

Before this, she’d had her postcoital escape plan down to a science. Hell, even the hookup had been science. But sex with Will was art. It was music. He was literature.

She shook her head. Will’s dick was not literature. It had just been a long time for both of them, and that’s why it was so good. They’d also gone without a condom—another first—and knew each other really well. It was just more intimate because of a whole host of circumstances. That’s why it felt different. They still hadn’t talked about where they were going, and she shouldn’t read too much into what had just happened. Even if it was the best she’d ever had.

Just because they’d had sex, that didn’t mean she could start planning a whole future with the guy, as much as her heart was telling her to. To be fair, her vulva was singing along with that chorus. She hadn’t felt so relaxed, maybe ever. This sex-with-trust thing was not overrated.

Will pulled her so that she was on her back, and he was on his side looming over her. Like, a sexy loom, and not a creepy loom. “You’re thinking a whole lot.”

“How can you tell?”

He gave her a sexy smile and then kissed her on the tip of her nose. She might have been wrung out, but she felt a tingle of desire when his lips touched her. “I don’t know, but I know. It’s like your brain has a rhythm and I can tell that it’s moving fast.”

“You’re so weird,” Alex said. “Cute, but weird.”

“You never made me feel weird when I was a teenager,” Will said. “I never thanked you for that.”

“You were the coolest guy that I’d ever met. It wouldn’t have done me any good to make you feel weird. I had a giant crush on you from the moment that we met.” He looked different now. He was broader and manly in a way that wouldn’t have appealed to her when she was a teen. He might be a chef, but he had the look of a biker about him. When he was younger, he hadn’t had a baby face. But he’d been sort of an insouciant bad boy to her. It hadn’t struck her until this moment that her memory might be faulty—that she might have been wrong about him.

She’d thought that because he hadn’t shown any vulnerability to her back then, he didn’t have any. But knowing how rarely he let people in, she knew that he’d been feeling her out. And she’d tried to kiss him like some creeper. If the tables were turned, he’d be rightly labeled a sex pervert.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and he looked at her with a scrunched brow. Even that was cute, though it would be menacing if he looked at one of his staff like that. “I came on to you when you weren’t wanting it. And all these years, I’ve been so angry and upset that you rejected me.”

“I regretted turning you down, and my dick punished me for it. But I’d found a home for the first time since I was really little. After my mom left, my dad got married a bunch of times. You know that, but I really felt like you couldn’t understand what it was like not to have roots.”

“I was lucky. My mom wasn’t a marriage junkie. She had to pawn me off on Lexi every summer because she needed to go on academic trips and make discoveries like it was her job,” she said with sarcasm. She rubbed the forearm that he’d slung over her body. Even his veins were appealing to her. “But I was plopped in a completely different world every summer. I adapted. And I am so lucky and so privileged. My whole life, I’ve wanted for very little.”

“You were kind of a brat.” His voice was teasing, so she only pinched his arm a little.

“It’s true.” She could admit that much about herself. Although she was privileged, she tried to see herself clearly. “But to be fair, I’ve never reacted quite so poorly to not getting what I wanted as I did when you said you would absolutely not consider kissing me or being my boyfriend or anything of the sort.”

“I wasn’t nice about it. I didn’t know how to be. I’d never had a girl actually approach me before.”