16. Sebastian

Chapter 16

Sebastian

I stared down at my phone, eyes glued to the notifications that simply read, Back door opened. Back door closed.

It was half past eleven, and as I laid back on my bed with my chest against the headboard and my right leg elevated with an icepack on my knee, I couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, Nelly needed from inside the house at this hour.

She’d avoided me again when I got home, disappearing to the guesthouse without much more than a quick recap of what she and Matty did after they’d left practice earlier and a verification that I didn’t need her help for the rest of the night. I couldn’t blame her — the side of me she’d seen on the ice earlier was a side that seldom came out, and it wasn’t enjoyable to see. But I wasn’t going to apologize for it. Not when Bryan should have apologized.

An old episode of Survivor played softly from my television across the room, quiet enough that it wouldn’t leak through the walls to the other side of the second floor and wake Matty. He’d conked out just after eight, and I’d spent the last three hours trying to get comfortable in my bed and failing.

My phone buzzed in my hand, and a new notification drew my attention.

Nelly: Are you awake?

I quickly typed out a reply.

Me: Yeah. I’m in my room. What’s up?

The three little dots popped up, showing me she was typing, and then quickly disappeared.

Me: Nelly?

Nelly: Can you come downstairs?

That… was odd. Not only had she never come into the house this late before, she hadn’t actively sought me out in over a week, and even then, it wasn’t like this between us.

Me: Come up here. My knee is killing me and the stairs make it worse.

Nelly: Are you sure?

Me: My room isn’t off-limits, Nell.

Not a moment later, light footsteps padded across the hall, coming to a stop outside my door. I could feel her hesitation, could tell she wasn’t sure what to do — she waited for what felt like forever there, the shadow of her feet obvious beneath the door. I paused Survivor .

Me: It’s not locked, you know.

Me: Just open it.

The handle turned, and I watched with bated breath as her form appeared in the open doorway.

Fuck.

Red, puffy eyes looked directly at me, her two braids on either side of her face a mess, her oversized shirt hanging limply around her full figure. I was more than used to an upset five-year-old bursting into my room in the middle of the night, but there was something unnerving about a twenty- five-year-old who had clearly been crying, doing the same thing.

“Fuck. What’s wrong?” I asked, pushing myself a little more upright and wincing from the pain in my knee.

She shut the door behind her but stayed beside it, one hand wrapping around her upper arm. “I’m sorry.” She sniffled, and I moved, shoving the ice pack off my knee and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. It didn’t matter that I was in my boxers and a shirt — something was clearly wrong if she’d gone this far.

“Nelly,” I said, limping around the edge of the bed. She held up a single hand, and I stopped, not wanting to push her on whatever this was.

“I’m sorry, I just…” She released her arm and wiped beneath her eyes with her thumbs, the red around them spreading to her cheeks and deepening her light brown skin. “I feel awful about what happened at the rink earlier. I shouldn’t have come. It just made extra trouble for you.”

I blinked at her, her words causing an overwhelming, sudden confusion. She felt bad about it because of what it meant for me ? “Christ, Nell, don’t fucking apologize for that,” I mumbled, taking one hobbled step toward her.

“Maybe Dani should take him from now?—”

“Stop,” I insisted. “The only person who should have any consequence or limitations put on them for that is Bryan. Not you.”

She tucked her lower lip between her teeth as she looked up at me, the silence falling for just a few seconds. “It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t come,” she said softly.

“That doesn’t matter. I wanted you there. Both of you.” I extended a hand toward her, offering it, hoping she’d take it. “Come here. Sit down. ”

“On your bed ?”

I rolled my eyes at her and waggled my fingers. “Yes, on my bed.”

Hesitantly, she reached out her hand, wrapping her fingers around my palm. I pulled her gently toward the bed, my knee screaming at me as I turned and watched her sink down onto the mattress.

Get her to lay back.

I banished the thought as I stood in front of her, leaning on the pole of the four-poster bed to take some weight off my knee. “Bryan is a piece of shit, and I’m sorry he said what he said to you. But it is not your fault, and I need you to understand that, both for your mental well-being and because I’ll need you at the rink more and more fairly soon. Okay?”

Her throat worked on a swallow as she looked up at me. The confidence I’d seen in her when it came to Matty seemed to waver in front of me, and I wished I could read her mind, wished I could see exactly what was happening in there and piece it together like a puzzle.

“Nelly.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

“No, that’s not— fuck ,” I sighed. “That’s not an order, it’s an invitation to discuss this.”

She wiped at her eyes again, every bit of makeup either removed or cried off, and I wondered just how much and how long she’d been crying before she made her way inside, how out of her comfort zone she was.

“Right. Sorry,” she said again, and I just wanted to make her stop apologizing, wanted to make her feel okay again, wanted to fix whatever problem she’d found — but she wasn’t letting me.

Hesitantly, out of some stupid idea that I could touch her and make it all better, I reached out, tucking the loose strands from her braid behind her ear. “It’s not just what happened at the rink, is it?”

Her eyes went glassy again as she bit down on her lips. She shook her head, her face brushing against the base of my palm.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I offered. When she hit me with nothing but silence, I spoke again. “I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t want to listen, Nell.”

“My ex is getting married,” she croaked, wiping her eyes again as a stray tear broke free. “And I think, since finding that out and going back over everything in my head, I’m starting to realize that he wasn’t just a shitty person. He was worse than that. And I don’t think I wrapped my mind around the extent of how much he fucked me up until now.”

Shit.

My chest ached for her, and one by one, things that had happened between us clicked into place, making more and more sense. She’d been confused that I didn’t call. She’d been upset that I’d come home late. She’d run when I had come close to kissing her in the kitchen. And she’d avoided me for over a week because of it.

“He’s marrying the girl who used to be my best friend. I introduced them.” She huffed out a hollow laugh as she pulled her legs up onto the bed. I did my absolute best not to notice that she wasn’t wearing anything but underwear beneath her oversized shirt.

“Fuck, that’s a low blow.” I shifted uncomfortably on my legs, my knee screaming at me, and eventually decided I was better off sitting down, too. I moved around the post, sinking down onto the mattress a few feet from her, trying to give her enough space that she didn’t feel crowded but close enough that she didn’t think I was made uncomfortable by the situation. “I’m sorry. I don’t know the extent of it, but I can guarantee you didn’t deserve to have to go through that. Any of it.”

The irony of my words wasn’t lost on me. I should be saying that shit to myself, too, and heeding it.

I pulled my legs up onto the bed, hissing in pain from the discomfort in my knee, and reached behind me for the ice pack — but she gave me pause when the warmth of her hand touched the cold skin, her fingers just gently moving across the scar.

“What happened?” she asked.

Holding the ice pack in my grasp, I waited, watching as she inspected it and trying not to visibly wince from the pain. “Took a skate to the knee about twelve years ago,” I said, turning my leg a little so she could get a better view. The white, raised skin wrapped around the side of my knee and curved toward the back, and looking at it now, I could still picture the way the skin and muscle had split so badly I could see my bones beneath. “It was my first year playing. I was having an impromptu practice with some of the guys on my team and I didn’t have my protective gear, and I was checking my teammate. We both went down, and his skate got lodged in my knee.”

She sniffled again, but the tears had stopped, her attention focused on me instead. If that’s what it would take to get her to calm down and feel okay, I’d happily talk her ear off. “Sounds painful.”

“It was. Still is,” I said. “The ice was covered in blood. We got in trouble for it.”

“You got in trouble for it?” she asked, her mouth popping open in a shocked O.

“Yeah,” I chuckled. “We weren’t supposed to be on the ice that day, and I passed out before the paramedics got there, so I couldn’t clean it up. The guys didn’t either. We just left a shit ton of blood all over the rink.”

“Well, obviously, you should have gotten your act together and cleaned up your own blood,” she joked.

“Obviously,” I laughed. I put the ice pack back on it the moment her hand left me, sighing at the minuscule amount of relief it brought. “It still flares up occasionally. I knocked it on the boards the other day when Bryan shoved me into them. Our masseuse worked some of it out, but it’s still screaming.”

“Was it hurting when you were at practice earlier?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been skipping leg day to get it to calm down, but I can’t exactly skip practice.”

“I couldn’t even tell you were in pain,” she said softly, breaking her stare and dragging her gaze back up to my eyes.

I shrugged, biting down the hiss I desperately wanted to let out as I readjusted my knee. “I can block it out when I need to sometimes.” I watched her closely, watched as her lips flattened into a thin line, watched as her nose crinkled just slightly. “I block out a lot of things, Nelly.”

She blinked at me, her mouth parting just slightly, but she didn’t speak.

“My ex wasn’t exactly the best person, either,” I said, gauging her reaction as I steered the conversation back to what she’d brought up. If she was done with it, then that was fine, but I wanted her to not feel alone, wanted her to feel comfortable if there was more she needed to say. “Not in the same ways as yours, I assume, but there was always a level of love that she wasn’t able to give me. Toward the end, Taryn started spouting a lot of toxic guru bullshit, going really hardcore on that single phrase, you can’t truly love someone else until you love yourself . Which, who knows, maybe in her case, it was true. But she picked up and left, went on a journey of self-discovery. Left her fuckin’ kid. Left me.”

Nelly’s eyes glassed over again, and her mouth opened further, but I spoke before she could say something that would likely leave me second-guessing saying anything at all.

“I’ve come to terms with it, for the record. And if you’d rather I shut up, you can say that. I just didn’t want you to feel like you couldn’t talk about your situation,” I sighed. “And I imagine if I found out tomorrow that Taryn was marrying someone else, it would probably bring up a lot of mixed feelings. It’s okay to be upset about it, Nelly.”

Her lower lip trembled, and for a worrying second, I wasn’t sure what she was doing as she moved across the bed toward me, her hands on the thick down comforter and her rear lifting, but in truth, I wouldn’t have moved regardless. If she’d been coming in to make a move, I would have let her. If she’d been simply moving closer, I would have let her. So, it didn’t strike me as something I should have avoided when her arms wrapped around my upper body and her head tucked into the crook of my neck, and I didn’t feel like I needed to push her off when her knee brushed against my thigh or when her breasts pressed against my chest. It was unexpected, and it was a little dizzying, but it wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I’d once imagined it would be to have someone wrapped around me like that in my bedroom after Taryn.

I kept us both upright with one hand on the mattress, but the other wrapped itself around her waist instinctually, returning the gesture in the best way I knew how that wouldn’t cross a line.

“Thank you,” she said, the sound muffled as she spoke it directly against my skin. Warmth from her breath heated me, the pleasant scent of flowers surrounding me, and God I was lucky my shirt was long enough to pool around my hips because there wasn’t a single chance my boxers would hide the base reaction my body was having. “It’s really hard for me to assume that any guy I meet is even halfway decent because of him, but you being this nice to me is kind of breaking that down.”

How bad must he have been for me to be the kind of person that broke that mold? I liked to think that I wasn’t a bad guy when you boiled things down, but she’d literally watched me shove my skate into someone's chest earlier.

She pulled back a bit, and I wanted to tighten my grip, wanted to let her hug me just a little longer, but I thought better of it. I didn’t know what kind of trauma I was working with here, and I didn’t want to push her in the slightest.

“What happened?” I asked when she slipped away from me entirely, her lower lashes damp and clumped together. She settled down right in front of me, her knee touching my thigh, her hands falling into her lap as her mouth scrunched up to one side. “If you don’t mind me asking, I mean. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

Her lips unscrunched and quirked upward on one side, the saddest little smile I’d ever seen on an adult woman taking shape on her face. “Morris, uh, didn’t… he didn’t believe me when I told him that I wasn’t capable of having kids,” she said, swallowing audibly as her gaze averted from me, finding a home in her lap instead. Shit. “I had told him when things first started getting serious, and we’d talked about it a few times over the years before he proposed. I think he just didn’t want to hear it and didn’t want to consider what that would mean, you know? But he came with me to my yearly pap smear a few months after we got engaged, and I was chatting with the doctor about wedding planning and all that — he wasn’t even paying attention, just staring at some game on his phone, but the moment she asked me if we planned to do IVF after the wedding, all hell broke loose.”

I didn’t know a lot about struggling with conception, but I didn’t know nothing , either. There was a period, before everything went downhill, when Taryn was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to conceive naturally, and I remembered the sleepless nights we’d had and the overwhelming feeling she’d struggled with that something about her was incorrect while she waited for the results of her fertility tests. I couldn’t imagine brushing that off or pretending like it wasn’t happening. For all her faults, I’d still been right there, holding her hand at four in the morning while she cried her eyes out.

I didn’t know what to say to Nelly, not when I didn’t know her well enough to ask specific questions, but I found myself reaching out to her regardless, dragging my fingers across her thigh until I reached her hand. I at least knew how to hold that.

“He checked out after that, I think,” she said softly, her eyes locked on our joined hands. I dragged my thumb over the back of her hand, over and over, over and over. “That was when he started sleeping with Ruby.”

“Oh, fuck,” I sighed, adjusting my ice pack with one hand and squeezing her fingers with the other. “Don’t tell me Ruby is?—”

“Yeah,” she said, letting out a small, bitter laugh. “She’s who he’s marrying. He was a music producer, she was a wedding singer… can I make it any more obvious?”

I blinked at her, the joke settling in, and the moment it clicked, I snorted. “Did you just make a “Skater Boy” reference in the middle of this?”

Her lips quirked up again as she lifted her gaze a little, looking at me through heavy lashes. “Maybe.”

“Unbelievable. Here I was thinking we were having a serious discussion about your piece of shit ex,” I laughed. I squeezed her hand again, and she chuckled, pushing the little stray strands of brown and blonde out of her face. I tried not to let it worry me how natural and easy this felt, how much it reminded me of the night I’d gone back to her apartment with her — it had startled me, then, how easy I found her to speak to, to touch, to kiss .

“We are ,” she chuckled. “Anyway, my point is, I didn’t know about it for months. And when he finally told me about it, he claimed he was just struggling with the idea of us not being able to conceive naturally, which is insane because he knew for years. And I just… stayed. I stayed, and stayed, and stayed, and we put the wedding on hold, we canceled our venue. I was naive enough to believe that he just needed time to work through it between my best friend's thighs and that he’d come back better. And when he didn’t, or rather when he realized I was just waiting and not getting a hint, he packed up and left while I sat and stared at him. I just froze.”

“God damn,” I cursed, shifting my weight forward and leaning just a little closer. “Not trying to be entirely inappropriate here, but why the fuck would he choose to sleep with anyone else? I mean, there’s a reason I spoke to you and not someone else at Smokey’s. How on earth were not enough for him?”

She laughed hollowly again, her eyes shifting from me and dropping back to her lap. “Honestly?” she said, her cheeks deepening in color. “It was because I’m terrible in bed.”

I reeled back a little, my nose scrunching, my brows folding in. What? I couldn’t see a world where that was true — sure, I hadn’t let her touch me that night, but she’d wanted to. The only scenario I could think of where someone could truly be a bad lay was one where the person didn’t even try to contribute, and that couldn’t be the case with her. “Bullshit,” I said.

She took a deep breath in. “I am.”

“Did he tell you that?”

She nodded, and fuck, it was like my heart was breaking for her all over again. Had he created some sort of complex?

“Have you slept with anyone else?”

“Yeah, one guy in high school who didn’t complain, but I think he was just over the moon to be having sex at all that he didn’t think to question it. And the handful of guys I’ve slept with since Morris and I split…” Her low lip caught between her teeth, slowly dragging along until it popped back into place. “Well, none of them ever called again, so.”

Including you.

The words were unspoken, but they hung in the air, mildly accusatory and wholly understandable. I’d contributed to that feeling for her. It made sense, now — all of it. Why she’d been so upset by it, why she’d kept her distance the last week after I’d advanced on her, why her face had fallen when I’d left in a hurry that night. She claimed I was breaking a mold for her, but I was just as guilty for reinforcing it.

“I’m sorry. That was shitty of me,” I offered. I swallowed, the words I wanted to say getting stuck. I wasn’t sure if it was the hour, the lightly dizzying pain meds I’d downed, but the words came out anyway without a second thought. “If it’s any consolation, if I had even the slightest worry that you were bad in bed, I wouldn’t have wanted you the moment I saw you again. And I did.”

She looked at me through heavy lashes again, that deep red tinge to her cheeks doing things to me that it absolutely shouldn’t have. I slipped my hand from hers, using it to lift her chin instead, leaning just a little further forward despite the ungodly pain from my knee.

Maybe I shouldn’t have said it. Maybe I was taking advantage of someone who was clearly emotionally unstable right now, but I couldn’t help myself, not when it came to her — the words came out whether I wanted them to or not. “I still do,” I said, hooking my fingers around the side of her neck and pulling her just a little closer.

Her eyes blew wide, but she didn’t pull back, didn’t run from me. She stayed perfectly still.

“If you’re so bad, Nelly,” I rasped, pushing up onto my good knee and bringing myself closer, closer, closer , “all you really need is the right teacher.”

Her heartbeat thrummed against my fingertips, thunderous and quick, and I couldn’t tell if she was holding her breath or just breathing so shallowly that it was hard to tell. But once our noses touched, once she was no more than an inch away from my mouth at best, I could hear the quick little breaths, the sound of her throat moving on a swallow. I didn’t believe for a second that she needed any teaching, but I was desperate, aching to find out.

“Do you want me to stop?” I breathed, hovering just above her lips, balancing myself on one knee. I cupped her cheek with my other hand, fixing her in place just in case she moved, and searched her gaze with blurry vision, my eyes too close to focus.

Her short little exhale warmed the air between our mouths. “No. ”

I dragged my thumb across her lip, tempting her, daring her. “Then kiss me.”

She moved. God, did she move.

Her mouth met mine, and her hands met my chest, gripping and pulling at the fabric of my shirt. She pushed up onto her knees, forcing me back down on my rear, and it was as if every sensible thought in my mind evaporated at once — fuck being professional, fuck stability, fuck the unknown of it all, fuck the repercussions, fuck her, fuck her, fuck her, fuck her , God, I need to fuck her.

Wrapping my arm around her waist, I pulled her in, seating her firmly astride me. She let me into her mouth, let me taste her, the flavor familiar but missing that tinge of whiskey she’d had the last time she’d let me in like this. She was warm against me, her upper body practically flush against mine, and fuck , the heat between her thighs came down right on top of my hardening cock, nothing but two layers of thin cotton separating us.

I wanted to tear them to shreds.

I broke from her mouth with a gasp, kissing her chin, her jaw, her neck instead. “Do you want me to fuck you, Penelope?” I mumbled, balling the fabric of her shirt in my fist and forcing it up her back, my bare forearm slipping against her warm skin.

Her breathing was deep but unsteady as she slid her hand around the back of my neck, her fingers twisting between the little brown waves of hair at the base of my skull. “Yes. Please, yes.”

Those three words sent me into a goddamn spiral. I knew I shouldn’t do this, but I didn’t fucking care. “Tell me what you like,” I grunted, pulling my mouth from her for a fraction of a second while I lifted her shirt up and over her head. And, of course, there wasn’t a bra in sight beneath it. Fucking tease. “Or I swear to God, Nell, I’ll take you however I see fit.”

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

Her little gasp as my mouth met her breast was enough to send the rest of the blood in my body directly down below, making me so rigid that it physically hurt . At least it was enough to distract me from my knee, but I still found myself pulling at her hips, pushing her against me to create the smallest amount of friction. “That’s fine,” I rasped, nipping at her skin just barely with my teeth and eliciting a little moan from her. “We can figure it out as we go.”

She nodded hastily, her braids moving against her collarbones and the little strands brushing against my cheek.

“Now, refresh my memory,” I smirked. I cupped her breast with one hand, slipping my thumb over the hardened bud of flesh, and her mouth popped open on a beautiful, mesmerizing O. “You like having these played with. Right?”

“Yeah,” she squeaked, her hips pushing against me. The friction nearly turned me feral, but I kept my head, focusing on the inevitability of being inside her.

I hooked the fingers of my free hand on the band of her underwear, pulling just enough to get it over the crest of her ass. With her legs on either side of me, I wouldn’t be able to get them down far enough, but I needed something , needed to touch her, needed to feel the slick warmth between her thighs.

I took her nipple between the edges of my teeth, just barely pressing down, and the sound she made… I couldn’t think. Didn’t care to. I didn’t want her moving an inch away to get her underwear off, didn’t want her going anywhere that wasn’t right fucking here. “I’ll buy you new ones,” I said, and in one quick movement, I tugged hard on the fabric, tearing it, shredding it, breaking through the elastic easily.

“Oh my God?—”

She cut herself off as my fingers slipped between us, gliding through thoroughly damp heat. I was working on instinct with this, specifically since I’d played with her with a vibrator last time. It took everything in me not to throw her down on the bed and take her right then, but I needed to learn how to touch her if I was going to teach her anything.

Even if I still wasn’t convinced she needed to be taught anything at all.

I pulled away from her breast, and she tightened her grip on the back of my neck, her head slumping forward until her forehead rested against mine. I circled her clit, just gently, just gliding along the smooth skin in time with her frantic breaths. “How’s that, baby?”

She nodded weakly between moans.

“Words,” I insisted. “Use your words. If you want me to change something, tell me.”

“Fuck, okay, uh, more pressure,” she croaked.

I followed her command, and her moans turned deeper, darker, louder. “Shh,” I urged. “Don’t wake him.”

Her panted breaths took center stage instead, and every second that I touched her, warmth and wetness seeped into the fabric of my boxers. I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t fucking wait. I needed this.

“Do you want me to be rough with you?” I asked, abandoning her breast with my hand entirely and using it to fist down the waistband of my boxers, desperate for freedom, desperate for her .

“You already know the answer to that,” she whispered.

God, I did. And it only made everything worse .

Her hips shifted back just enough for me to free my cock, and with nowhere to go but a millimeter up, it pressed against her bare heat and the back of my hand. It took everything in me not to pull her forward and push my way inside.

Instead, I slid two fingers down over her clit, sinking them inside of her with ease. She shuddered as I hooked them deep, pressing on the little rougher patch a few inches inside, and I used my grip on her to bring her hips back to mine.

Slowly, achingly, with my knee screaming at me, I stretched out my legs beneath her and leaned back, pulling her body down with me in a desperate attempt to not be too far from her. “You want to be filled, right? Stretched?” I teased, grabbing her by the base of her neck and knotting my fingers in the loose strands that had slipped from her braids. I slipped my fingers out from her, gripped her hip, and lifted her rear just enough that she was poised just above the aching, leaking tip of my cock.

Wide eyes locked on to the space between our bodies, to the length and thickness that sat beneath her. “Holy shit, Sebastian. How am I?—”

“You took four fingers like a goddamn champ,” I smirked and tugged on that handful of hair, forcing her gaze to snap back to mine. “You can handle more than that.”

One shaky, deep breath later, with parted lips and heavy-lidded eyes, she sunk down enough to press the tip of my cock against her entrance, and then a little further, just enough to coat an inch of me in her heat.

“ Fuck ,” I seethed. I wanted to push her down onto it, wanted to take up every bit of space inside of her, but I used every bit of self-control I had to keep myself at bay. This was still for her. All of it .

She stopped, her gaze flicking from me to somewhere off to my right. “Is your knee okay?”

“Christ, Nelly, don’t ask me about my knee right now,” I laughed.

She bit back a chuckle and adjusted herself again, sinking just a little lower, a little deeper, her hands shaking as she laid them on my lower stomach. She pushed my shirt up, fingernails dragging over my muscles, leaving little fires in their wake. I wanted her to do it again, and again, and again, I wanted to feel her sink them in, wanted them to dig into my skin.

A long, hefty groan dragged from my chest as she sunk further, further, further, her little gasps marking each inch, until finally, she opened enough for her hips to meet mine, wrapping me entirely with her .

Shit. This was a horrible, terrible, ferociously bad idea.

I never wanted to fucking leave .

She fit me so perfectly, so tightly, so impossibly mind-numbingly well that for just a moment, as neither of us moved except the erratic rising and falling of our chests, there was nothing else. There was no pain in my knee, no practice in the morning, no threat of a five-year-old hearing us, no Bryan Addaway — there was this, there was her, and that was it.

How anyone could choose to be inside anyone else over her was just… unfathomable.

She leaned forward, pushing my shirt up more and dragging her nails again, and the movement of her hips as she did it, mixed with the sensation across my chest, nearly had me coming undone already. Reluctantly, I released my hold on her and used every bit of concentration I had left to get my shirt up and over my head.

But I needed her to move, and based on the way her hands were still shaking and her breathing came and went too quickly, she needed that too.

I reached up, gripping her by the chin, my palm beneath her jaw and my thumb and forefingers on either side of her cheeks, and pulled her down to me. “Show me how you move,” I ordered. “Show me what feels good for you, baby, and I’ll reward you.”

She fucking clenched around me.

Finding her purchase with her hands just beneath my pecs, she slowly moved her hips forward, dragging her clit across the short stubble I’d failed to shave down before rotating back into her starting position.

She bit back her moans on each thrust, struggling to keep her little sounds at bay. She pushed her hips forward further and further with each one, driving me maddeningly deeper as she angled herself a little more upright — and she kept that position. Deep. She likes it deep.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” I rasped, releasing my hold on her face so I could free my hand up. I took her in, every centimeter of skin, every little divot and crease and mark, and burned it into my brain. “Fuck, you look so pretty riding my cock.”

Her hips stuttered from the compliment, her movements going choppy as she struggled to concentrate.

“But you’d look so much prettier beneath me.”

She clenched again, harder, and I nearly lost my mind.

I didn’t care that it physically hurt, didn’t care that I’d probably get a shit night’s sleep over it — I wrapped a single arm around her waist and pushed down on the mattress with my foot, rolling us over in one quick, easy motion. My pain from my knee rippled horribly, but I blocked it out as best as I could, forcing it to take weight.

“This okay?” I asked through clenched teeth, grabbing her by the hips and lifting her enough that my waist would take the weight of her lower half. I sunk further than I’d been before, and her desperate, too-loud moan was enough of an answer before she spoke.

“God, yes,” she mewled, her voice shaking on the words.

She reached up for me, but I took her hands, bringing her wrists together in one palm. I found my balance as I pinned them behind her head, bent over her body, just inches from her mouth — leaving one hand free to do exactly what I wanted to, and what I hoped would give her what she needed.

I slipped it between our bodies, quickly finding that spot that made her back arch, and her eyes widen, and somehow, some way, I sunk in further. She squeaked something incoherent, her irises rolling back the moment I started to move, and yes , that was it.

“You drive me insane,” I drawled, nudging her cheek with my nose as I found the right speed, the right depth, and the right amount of aggression in my thrusts that had her writhing beneath me. “Do you know that? Do you know how many times I touched myself to the thought of doing this to you?”

She squeezed again, her chest rising to meet mine, and gave her just a little more pressure on her clit. “ Fuck , Sebastian,” she moaned, and her brows knitted, her mouth opening and closing with little gasps.

God. The way she said my name, bitter and pleasure-drunk, was like the prettiest song I’d ever heard. “I dreamed of the way you’d feel when you came around my cock,” I said, dropping my forehead to hers as I thrust harder, faster, feeling every bit of tension and heat and wetness as it closed down around me like a vice. “I don’t think it’ll even come close to the real thing. Show me, baby. ”

Her nails dug into the back of my hand, punishing and bruising and so goddamn sweet, and as my own release coiled and tensed in my gut, she took that final gasp of air that sent her over the edge.

It was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

I kissed her as she broke, absorbing every sound she made. Every ripple of muscle in her pussy tightened and spasmed, milking me, bringing me to new heights that left me groaning and gasping against her lips, a desperate attempt to keep the noise down, and failing spectacularly. I tumbled over after her, breaking as she started to come down, and it was as if weeks of pent-up frustration, and stress, and desperation poured out of my body and settled between us.

I released her hands and slipped my fingers out from between us, sucking them clean one by one, savoring the taste I knew I needed to try for myself at some point. But I just wanted to kiss her in the haze of pleasure, just wanted to savor the last few seconds before I needed to withdraw from her.

Fuck what Morris had said to her. But if showing her what sex could be was my ticket to getting to be inside of her, I’d gladly be her teacher.

I just didn’t know what the hell that would mean moving forward.