“Chris.” She met his eyes.
“Joey.”
“That felt amazing. My vagina is smiling.”
“Seriously?”
He pushed her legs open, looked down at her and back at her face.
“Oh, shit, it is. I’ve never seen that before.”
Joey put her hands on her face and laughed behind them.
“No. No hiding your face. I need that face.” Chris took her wrists and removed her hands from her face.
“You need my face?”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“I’m going to fuck it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, in that case, go right ahead.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
Chris leaned over and with his hand on himself guided his cock back into her mouth. She took it in eagerly, wanting to return even a fraction of the pleasure he’d given her. He needed to come and she wanted him to come. In her mouth, on her breasts, she didn’t care. But making him come as hard as he’d made her was Joey’s highest priority tonight.
There wasn’t much in the world she found sexier than the way a man moved his hips while fucking. It was one reason she liked a light on during sex. Now she had a front row seat to the action. Chris moved with a slow steady rhythm as he fucked her mouth, his stomach taut with tension. He didn’t piston his hips, no jackhammering her mouth. Carefully he pushed. Carefully he pulled out. All the while he breathed heavily, half groaning with each thrust in, inhaling sharply each time he withdrew from her mouth. His hands gripped the sheets above her head and Joey ran her hands up his arms. They were tense, so tense. His entire body felt tense against her hands. He was hard everywhere, and she loved his hardness, especially the hardness in her mouth. With her fingernails she dug into the backs of his thighs and scratched downward, not breaking the skin but making sure he felt it, really felt it. The moan he made was obscene. She wished she could have recorded it. It would have been her new ringtone, and maybe then she’d actually like it when someone called her.
Joey would have told him to come but she couldn’t talk at the moment. She lifted her head instead and took him even deeper into her mouth. Maybe that would give him the hint she wasn’t going to stop until he came. He seemed to get the hint because he started to move a little harder and faster in her mouth. He was still careful not to choke her but she could tell it was getting more difficult for him to go slowly. Good. Let him let go. Let him fuck her hard. She didn’t care. She wanted it. It was delicious, decadent, dirty and distracting. And sexy. So damn sexy.
Chris panted hard, loudly. She loved the sound of his pleasure and the taste of his cock and the scent of his arousal. This was exactly what she needed—sex that was nothing but sex. No love, no relationship, no pressure, no pain. All bodies, no hearts. Just pure unadulterated fucking.
With a low grunt, Chris came in her mouth, filling it as she swallowed as best she could. He gave another grunt, and this one sounded almost like pain. He pulled out of her mouth and collapsed next to her on his back.
“Fuck...” He rubbed his face as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “That felt so good it hurt.”
“Best kind of pain.”
“God, yes.” He looked over at her and grinned. “Stay there.”
“I’m naked. Where would I go?”
He didn’t answer as he walked from the room, still naked himself. Chris should do that more often—walk out of rooms naked. The view was spectacular. Better than the view of the mountain from her window. She should charge money for a view like that.
Chris returned quickly with a glass of water and a glass of wine.
“Pick one,” he said.
“I get to pick?”
“You’re the one with the mouth full of my come.”
“I swallowed it. Most of it.”
“Take the water,” he said. “We’ll share the wine.”
She took the water from him and drank it down gratefully.
Meanwhile Chris sipped at the red wine, a pinot noir she’d found in the fridge. Pinot was her favorite. No way Chris could have known that. She didn’t drink wine in high school. Dillon must have put it there.
“I feel kind of weird fucking in this house,” she said. “It was my parents’ house. They fucked in this house. Not us.”
“Dillon fucked in this house.”
“What?”
She sat up and looked down at him.
“If you’re gay and in high school and scared about being outed, wouldn’t you go as far away as you could for your dates?”
“Well...yeah. But I didn’t know he brought guys out here.”
“Just the one guy. Trevor? I think that was his name.”
“Trevor? I don’t remember a Trevor.”
“He didn’t go to our school. They met at the Ski Bowl.”
“How do you know all this and I don’t?”
“He might be gay but he’s still a dude. A guy doesn’t want to tell his baby sister about his sex life.”
“But he wanted to tell you?”
“I covered for him. When he and Trevor were out here, he was supposedly crashing at my house.”
“I’m stunned. I’m just stunned. And jealous. Why did he get to fuck out here and I didn’t?”
“I would have fucked you out here. But you weren’t into me.”
“My mistake,” she said, rolling onto her side to face him. “I kind of regret that now.”
He laid a hand on her naked hip and caressed it.
“I wish... I wish I hadn’t been such a coward. I could have told you.”
“I wish I hadn’t been such a snob. I don’t know if you telling me would have made a difference. You were my brother’s stoner friend. And I liked you. I did. I liked that you were so protective of Dillon. I liked hanging out with you. I didn’t like you like you. Except for the night you kissed me. Then I liked you.”
“We were drunk. Doesn’t count.”
“No, I guess not. But I’m very sober tonight. And tonight counts.”
“You don’t like me. I’m just the rebound guy.”
“I like you. You’re very sexy when you’re not stoned.”
“I haven’t gotten stoned since my freshman year in college.”
“You said you went to a trade school.”
“Because I flunked out of college.”
“Because of the pot?”
“Because of the pot and the drinking and the not giving enough of a shit to go to class. When I flunked out, Dad kicked me out. Mom un-kicked me out. Sort of. She said I could stay in the storage room over the garage for six months but after that it was either go back to school or move out for real.”
“So you got a job?”
“I had to clean up the room in the garage first. Dad kept all his tools out there.” He stopped and smiled. “This will sound dumb.”
“Sound dumb. I want to hear you sound dumb.”
“I found a knife, a really pretty one, and Dad had some birch wood he’d never gotten around to using for something. And I was bored. I started whittling it. It made me feel better, better than I’d felt in a long time. Clear up here.” He tapped his forehead. “I did that for a couple weeks. Played with Dad’s tools, whittled, carved a little. In shop class in high school, I’d made a chair. I taught myself how to make one again, a rocking chair this time, and gave it to Mom as a thank-you for un-kicking me out. She thought it was so pretty she cried. Dad had been promising her a porch rocker for years like the one her grandmother had. Right after that, Dad had a heart attack and had to cut way back on work. I stepped up because I knew I could do it then. Making one stupid chair changed me. Yeah, that did sound dumb.”
“No, it sounds kind of...spiritual, maybe?” She hoped that didn’t sound as cheesy to him as it sounded to her.
“It’s wild, you know. Trees are alive and they die when you cut them down, but if you treat the wood the right way, carve it, stain it, polish it, make something beautiful out of it, or something useful—”
“Like a rocking chair for your mom?”
“Right. If you make something out of that wood, if you use it well, it’ll last for centuries. It’ll last longer than the tree might have lived. How’s that for an afterlife?”
“Sounds like a good afterlife to me. So making a chair changed you. I like that.”
“You make your mother cry by giving her something you made with your own hands and it gets to you, you know? That’s when I decided to get my act together. I quit drugs, all of them. I’m clean now. Have been for years.”
Joey felt an unexpected knot in her throat. She hadn’t meant to see Chris’s heart like that. She hadn’t meant to go digging. She certainly hadn’t expected to hit gold like she had.
“Anybody ever tell you that you clean up really nice?”
“Dillon did. But he doesn’t count.”
“Why not?”
“Because right now, only you count.”
He kissed her again, gently, but she didn’t want that. No gentle kisses for her. She needed rough and hard. She needed bruising kisses that would remind her tomorrow that she was single and could do stuff like have wild meaningless one-night stands with old high school friends. Of course, if Chris kept making her feel this good, this sexy, she might accidentally find a little meaning in it and that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? She didn’t want to have to get over two guys in one month. That was a lot of rebounding.
Joey touched his face tenderly. He pulled back and looked her in the eyes.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice soft and low. His eyelashes were long and they made him look younger in the low lamplight. They made him look almost innocent.
She didn’t want to hurt him.
Wait. Where had that thought come from? That she didn’t want to hurt him? He was half a foot taller than her, fifty pounds heavier, stronger, a man who rebuilt houses for his work. How could she hurt him? And yet the thought persisted.
“Nothing. I just like the beard.”
“I want to be inside you now.”
“You can be inside me now.”
Chris cupped her between her legs and pushed two and then three fingers inside her. Joey gripped his shoulder as he moved his hand with a deep spiraling motion in and out of her, opening her back up for him. She wanted to be open for him. She spread her legs wider.
“You feel so good inside,” he said. “You’re so wet.”
“You made me this wet. We haven’t even fucked yet and there’s a wet spot underneath me.”
“You’re so sexy when you come. Your whole body was into it. I’ve never seen a girl move like that. I’m hard again just thinking about it. I want you to move like that on my cock.”
“Then put your cock in me and I will.”
“Stay here. I need to get the condom.”
“Where’d you leave your wallet?”
“It’s not in my wallet.” He kissed the tip of her nose.
“Where is it, then?” she asked, narrowing her eyes in suspicion.
“In my toolbox.”
A man who stored his condoms in his toolbox. That was cute. Very cute. She could get used to being with a guy like this.
Except she couldn’t get used to it.
Because she was leaving right after the wedding.
Because she was on the rebound, and if she got used to this, she’d just get hurt again.
This time when he walked naked from the room, she didn’t let herself enjoy the view.
5
HOLY.
Fucking.
Shit.
What the hell was he doing?
This was not the plan. Why wasn’t it the plan? This was a much better plan than the original plan.
Chris leaned back against the door in the master bedroom—the only part of the room without fresh paint on it—and closed his eyes. He breathed, breathed again.
The plan was to be here when Joey arrived so he could talk to Joey.
He wasn’t talking to Joey. He was having sex with Joey.
Joey.
Joey Silvia. Joey Silvia, who he’d been in love with in high school and pined for even after he graduated, even after he’d heard she’d gone to the University of Hawaii instead of somewhere he could actually hope to see her every now and then like the University of Oregon. She could have been a Duck. And there was always OSU. Why hadn’t she gone to Oregon State? She could have been a Beaver. What girl didn’t want to be a Beaver?
He peeled his body off the door and rummaged through his toolbox for the condom he kept in a box in the bottom. Shortly after opening his own contracting business, he’d discovered that lots of his clients were women—single and divorced—who’d never been taught anything about home repair. More than once he’d been propositioned by a beautiful newly divorced lady on the rebound. More than once he’d succumbed to the temptation. Three times precisely, with three different divorced women who were setting up their new homes and needed a handyman to be, well, handy. And he’d been handy. Very, very handy.
But being with Joey felt nothing like that.
Those few late-afternoon assignations had been nothing but sex. Good sex, more or less. But still just sex. Only his body had been there, not him. Not the real him that you only showed to someone after a few weeks together, a few months. With Joey, he’d shown up right then and there, right out of the gate. He’d ordered her around, talked dirty, “made her” lie on her back and suck him off. Usually he never did that sort of thing until he was in a relationship with someone and felt comfortable enough to talk about that side of him. Never had he been this himself with a girl the first time. Never had he felt that safe, that comfortable, to do it when he was with a stranger. Because Joey wasn’t a stranger. Because he’d known her for years, since he and Dillon were freshman in high school together and sixth-grader Joey tagged along when they’d gone to movies or the skate park. He didn’t care. She was less annoying than Dillon, anyway. Then by the time she started high school, it was a whole different game. On the first day of school she showed up in Dillon’s car. She wore tight jeans, a low-cut shirt, a scarf draped around her neck, and instead of her usual ponytail, she wore her long straight dark hair down and over her shoulder. And she smelled like vanilla, like cookies out of the oven, and he wanted to devour her, which—as a teenage boy—just meant making out with her for a few years until she warmed up to the idea of sex and then having sex for a few more years until his cock broke off from all the sex they’d had and they were forced to be just friends. Friends who made out. It sounded like a good plan to him. He even told it to Dillon while they were getting high in the garage one night their senior year.
It was a pipe dream. Literally. He could only talk about how crazy he was about Joey when he was smoking weed. But he didn’t have any drugs to blame or thank for this trip. It was real. He had Joey in the bedroom waiting for him to fuck her. What was he waiting for?
“Dillon is going to kill me.” He sighed to himself as he opened the bedroom door, the condom in his hand. He stood in the doorway to the second bedroom. Joey lay on her stomach, her feet in the air, her head on a pillow. She stared out the window into the deep wet green forest outside the house.
“Isn’t it beautiful here?” she asked. “I’d almost forgotten how beautiful it is out here. Like Narnia. I love the moss. That’s my favorite part. Did you ever notice how the tree branches look like giant green tarantulas when they’re all bunched together and covered in moss?”
Chris couldn’t speak at first. She looked so comfortable on the bed he’d made, so lovely with her black hair lying over her soft brown skin, the lamplight turning it golden.
Yeah, okay, so Dillon might kill him for having a one-night stand with his sister. So what? That woman on that bed was worth dying for. His cock told him so.
“I hadn’t noticed that,” he said as he slid onto the bed next