Small Change

  I wanted all of it but I didn’t even know where to start, and I realized I was just staring, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  The heat coming off him was intense, and I slid a hand under his shirt, pushing it and his sweater up over his head, wanting to see him.

  He was beautiful—his freckled shoulders broad, chest covered in coppery hair that led down his stomach and disappeared into his jeans. He looked even bigger without his shirt on, the subtle play of muscle making his strength clear. I leaned closer, straddling his hips, and I could feel him harden against me.

  Christopher sucked in a breath, then slid a hand over my breast, his thumb at my nipple sending shivers through me.

  “Are your…nipples pierced?” he asked, and I winked at him. Guess there were benefits to sex not had in alleys. “Christ. Can we please have sex now?”

  I laughed, but the raw, aroused scrape of his voice made me shiver. “Kay.”

  He stood up as if my weight on his lap was nothing and set me gently on my feet. For a moment, he just looked at me, pupils dilated, lips slightly parted, as if he was memorizing the lines of me. Then ran hands over my shoulders, gently, as if he were holding himself back.

  “Can I?” he asked, plucking at the fabric of my dress and nudging me next to the bed.

  I nodded and swallowed hard as Christopher stripped me of my dress in one smooth move.

  “Jesus, you’re so beautiful.” His voice was awed, his eyes roaming over my body.

  My heart pounded, and as his gaze ran over me, my skin prickled.

  He was so undeniably present. Large and unmoving, he took up all the space, all my air, all my senses, but I welcomed that kind of overtaking. I welcomed the way it made my heart slam against my chest and made me feel surrounded, enveloped, overcome.

  He dropped to his knees and kissed the swell of my belly, where a black and gray snake curled, and followed the line of it to my waist and up my ribs, where its tongue licked the underside of my left breast, overlaying the snake’s tongue with his own.

  The second he got my bra off, he knelt and pressed his face to my breastbone, kissing as his stubble rubbed the insides of my breasts, then turned his attention to the barbells through my nipples. His tongue was gentle but his teeth were sharp, and every scrape and nip sent shivers through me. I shuddered when he sucked hard, and pushed my chest out. He licked my nipples roughly and I moaned as my stomach tightened, burying my hands in his hair.

  Suddenly, he hooked his arms under my knees, muscular thighs bunching as he lifted me onto the bed on my back. The sheer power of his body was incredibly hot and I shivered as he moved over me. He dragged my underwear off as he trailed kisses back down to my hip bones and into the crease of my thigh.

  “Fuck, Ginger,” he said. He kissed the tender flesh of my inner thighs, stubble scraping slightly and making the nerve endings come alive. My hips bucked toward him and I felt empty and throbbing. I wanted him inside me.

  I twisted a bit to one side to kick my underwear the rest of the way off, and he grabbed my thigh.

  “Have I mentioned I’m something of an ass man?” he murmured hotly. He ran a rough palm over the swell of my ass, and squeezed. Then he paused and leaned in closer, looking at my tattoo, and smiled.

  “You also said you were a pie man,” I said, patting my ass. The tattoo there was a slice of cherry pie on a blue and white patterned china plate, with lyrics from Patty Griffin’s “Making Pies” curling around it in the stylized script of a fifties diner: “You could cry or die or just make pies all day. I’m making pies.”

  “It’s true.” He licked the slice of pie. “Now this I can have and eat too.” He nibbled at the pie and I smiled.

  I couldn’t go any longer without touching him. I pulled his briefs down and his thick erection smacked his stomach. He was already leaking precome and his cock had a wicked curve that I hoped would touch all the right places inside me. I stroked him and he bit his lip as the muscles of his stomach and ass clenched. Fuck, he was gorgeous.

  “I’m an ass woman too,” I murmured, sliding my hands over it. He had a gorgeous ass, round and muscular, and I pulled him down over me, squeezing until he groaned and shuddered, grinding his hips so the base of his erection slid in the cleft of my pussy—a tease, a promise.

  We kissed hard, sliding tongues and gasped breath, the scrape of stubble against my chin electrifying. My heart was racing and I could feel it in my throat, my nipples, between my legs. A dark, hot pulse.

  “I want you,” I managed to get out, grabbing a condom from the bedside table and holding it up.

  I cupped Christopher’s heavy balls and ran a finger, feather light, up his length, watching his cock jump against his stomach. I wanted to watch him for hours—watch his unguarded reactions and the beautiful lines of him.

  “Shit,” he murmured.

  His eyes darted to mine as I watched him intently, eyelashes fluttering and the flush that started in his cheeks creeping down his throat. He shivered at my gaze and at his own touch as he rolled the condom on.

  He ran a hand from my knee up my thigh, spreading my legs wide so I was completely open to him. He slid his fingers inside me, stroking my wet folds and swirling around my clit until my hips thrust up and my knees fell apart. I was breathing heavily, my skin hot and my clit throbbing.

  He lowered his hips and slid inside me slowly, hard heat and pressure taking my breath away. At first it was almost too much, but then he bottomed out inside me and I felt myself adjust to his thickness. After a few slow thrusts, I tilted my hips back and he thrust his upward, and then, on a deep thrust, the tip of his cock hit my G-spot, lighting me up.

  I clenched my inner muscles around him and we both groaned.

  “Oh, god, please?” I muttered.

  He was breathing heavily with the effort of holding back, but at my words, he started to thrust into me in earnest, and the pressure built, friction licking my insides with liquid heat.

  He slid me up the bed like I weighed nothing and pulled out, licked a drop of sweat off my stomach, following its trail with his tongue. The loss of him left me feeling empty, and I reached out a hand to his shoulder. Then he rolled my hips up and kissed my clit, his stubble electrifying the sensitive tissue as he started to lick me. Jolts of pleasure shot through me and I squeezed Christopher’s shoulder.

  He gave another lick, then slid up my body and drove into me in one long thrust, a starburst of pleasure running through me. I swore and he did it again, the angle perfect. On his next thrust, I grabbed his ass to keep him inside me, and his eyelids fluttered. He pulsed his hips, deep inside me, and I pressed my hips up, clenching my muscles until my heart pounded.

  “Touch yourself,” he said against my lips, then kissed me as I reached between us. I slid my hand down his stomach to the base of his cock, giving him a squeeze. He bucked and I kissed him harder, running a teasing fingertip over my clit as he moved inside me. It was perfect—the full heat of him inside me and his hard body around me. His firm chest brushed my nipples, my piercings gone extra sensitive from his teeth earlier, and I could feel my orgasm starting to collect, thin shivers of pleasure at my nipples and clit, stronger tendrils deep inside me and in my belly.

  “Fuck,” I moaned, and Christopher went wild, driving into me at an angle that had me seeing stars and clenching around him with every thrust. I’d lost track of my body, become nothing but heat and sweat and pulse and then his mouth was on mine.

  He found that perfect angle again, then, and with every powerful thrust he hit my G-spot, the deep pleasure rippling through my core. My head was pounding and I squeezed my eyes shut, blocking out everything except the feeling of him inside, filling me so perfectly that I never wanted it to stop. I was moaning at every thrust, and his rhythm started to falter. I knew he was close.

  I clenched every muscle, pushing myself there, pressing my hips up as the pulse pounded in my ears and the first ripples of orgasm tore through me with his powerful thrusts. I clutched at Chri
stopher’s back and cried out, and he slammed into me and then held where he was, pushing even deeper inside as my muscles rippled around him. Heat flushed through me and Christopher groaned as my body milked his cock.

  He thrust faster and faster, then froze as he came, and buried his face in my neck as he thrust a few more times, coming down.

  I shivered a little as gentle echoes of pleasure washed through me, and then let myself relax, boneless and fucked-out on the bed.

  “God,” he groaned, sounding totally satisfied. Then, a minute later, “Am I crushing you?”

  “No, I like it,” I mumbled. My voice sounded thick and distant.

  His solid weight surrounding me, inside me, his breath on my neck—it all made me feel connected to him and I wanted it to last.

  After a minute, he pulled out gently and I felt my body readjust to being without him. He lifted me half onto his chest, and ran fingers up and down my spine, finally resting one hand on my ass, over the pie tattoo, like it belonged to him, and letting out a huge sigh.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, patting my ass appreciatively. “Thanks.”

  I laughed at that, but couldn’t find any words. I wasn’t tired but I felt relaxed, my limbs like jelly and my heartbeat in my clit.

  “This is perfect,” he murmured into my hair. It was perfect. But as I lay there, I found my heart rate increasing again, a thread of anxiety interrupting the peace of a moment before. I felt blown open, vulnerable, scared. I buried my face in Christopher’s shoulder, wishing it away. After a minute, though, my stomach let out an embarrassingly loud growl and I remembered I still had half my burrito left. Yeah, Holtzman, that’s not an excuse at all.

  “Wait, I know how to make it even more perfect.” I kissed Christopher, then pulled him to the couch. I put my burrito on his gorgeous chest and snapped a picture, then sank down next to him, putting my legs across his and retrieving my burrito as I texted the picture to Daniel.

  “Are you posting to some kind of food porn site?” Christopher asked, raising one eyebrow. “Because I’m pretty confident in the whole size area, but even a porn star would look lacking when compared to this burrito.”

  “I’m just showing Daniel I took his advice,” I said, and held out the burrito to share. “And you really don’t have anything to be concerned about.”

  ⌃ ⌃ ⌃

  Seriously. I get that you don’t want to chat, but Mom’s losing her shit. Please just tell me if you know when you’ll be getting to their house. Or if you don’t know, tell me you don’t know, okay? She’s calling me every day and she has nothing to say, she’s just fishing to see if I’ve heard from you, and no matter how many times I promise her that I’ll tell her as soon as I know, she clearly doesn’t believe me. I know you don’t give a shit about Christmas, and no one’s gonna be mad if you don’t make it, but just…just fucking tell me something, Jude.

  Chapter 10

  “It’s temporary,” Christopher said a little self-consciously. “I just want to get a year with the shop under my belt to see how it goes before I commit to anywhere else.”

  It was the week after Thanksgiving and I was at Christopher’s place for the first time. A first floor one-bedroom in a typical South Philly row house, it looked temporary—just a few pieces of furniture and nothing ornamental—except the kitchen, which appeared to be fully stocked.

  “It’s not a bad space, if you decided to stay.”

  “Yeah, it’s all right. I’ve moved a lot and it’s the first time I’ve lived alone, so I don’t have that much stuff.”

  “The first time?” I followed him into the kitchen because we were purportedly here for him to cook us breakfast, though he’d threatened to make me help.

  “Yeah, well, I always had housemates or…” He glanced up at me. “Or, um, lived with people I was dating.”

  I pictured him in a hundred different houses, sharing laughing breakfasts with housemates, intimate breakfasts with lovers. Thought about women waking up next to him like I had days before; women getting home from work, tired, and resting a cheek against his shoulder, breathing in his smell.

  “So, pretty serious?”

  He pulled things from the cabinets and refrigerator and started working at the table set up like a countertop prep station. Now that the weather had turned, he always layered a waffle-knit thermal under his T-shirts. The sleeves were a little short on him and, like his Thanksgiving sweater, the tight fabric hit just above the bones of his wrists, which my eyes were always drawn to. Since when did I find wrists aggressively sexy? Now, he’d pushed his sleeves up over his forearms and I found myself staring at the play of tendon and lean muscle under lightly freckled skin as he began to slice and mix.

  “Some of them were,” he said. “Do you want to know?”

  “I want to know everything.”

  And, oh fuck, it was true. I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to know about the women he’d lived with because they must have been important to him, because who he cared about that much would mean something. I wanted to know everything he was.

  His eyes met mine over the jumble of ingredients. He looked younger for a moment. Startled. “Okay.” He looked down at the food in front of him. “Do you want to help? I can show you how to make this.”

  “I can learn by watching.” There was raw chicken on the table and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

  “You’re a tattoo artist—don’t you learn by doing?”

  “Well, first I learned by doing a shit ton of watching. Then by tattooing on oranges.” I tapped his fruit bowl. “So if you’d like this to mimic that apprenticeship, I’m going to need some different equipment. Do your thing. I want to watch you.”

  He flushed over his cheekbones, underneath those slashes of freckles. Gorgeous. I couldn’t get enough of watching him, and he definitely got off on it. I stood and walked to his side, leaning into his shoulder and looking at him.

  “What are we having?”

  His skin was throwing off heat I could feel through two layers of cotton. “Um. Chicken and waffles. I walked past Federal Donuts yesterday and then last night I dreamed of chicken and waffles and woke up craving it.”

  “That sounds good.” I ducked under his arm to stand in front of him, and ran my palms up his chest to his shoulders. He made an abortive movement to touch me, realized his hands were covered in food, and left them on the tabletop. I kissed his flushed cheek.

  He started to say something but I kissed him before he could, catching his words with my tongue. His mouth was warm and he tasted a little of coffee. When I pulled back to look at him, he kept his eyes closed and bit his lip as if he could keep me there. I kissed his other cheek and his lips parted, expecting mine.

  “You look gorgeous when you cook,” I said. “You get this little line between your eyebrows when you’re concentrating.” I pressed my finger there. “And you look happy.”

  “I am happy,” he said softly, eyes fluttering open.

  His honesty about how much he liked spending time with me undid me. It made me wish I could be as open.

  I sat back down and watched him shift his hips and take deep breaths through his nose as he got his food in order again. He glanced up at me a few times, like he was checking to see if I was watching, and cleared his throat.

  “Theresa was my girlfriend in college. We lived together for a few months because her housing stuff fell through. She moved in with me until the lease was up. We broke up a month after she moved in. We weren’t that serious. It was more…timing.”

  “You let her keep living there after you guys broke up?”

  “Well I wasn’t going to just kick her out.” He looked at me like I’d suggested he drown a puppy.

  “Just seems awkward.”

  “Nah—well, yeah, it was a little at first, but we got over it. I was working a ton on top of school and she was graduating that year, so we didn’t actually see each other that much.”

  He moved confidently, mixing and
seasoning and slicing like we were in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant.

  “Then I lived with a bunch of different housemates. I dated one for a little while, but that doesn’t really count as living together, since we were…you know, living together.”

  I snorted and nodded.

  “Jen asked me to move in after we’d been dating for maybe…six months?”

  “Six months!”

  He looked up. “What?”

  “That’s just so fast, I can’t even imagine. Well, I can’t imagine moving in with someone, period.”

  “Yeah? How come?”

  “I…I’m not sure, I just…I’ve never lived with anyone so I can’t picture what I’d think of it. It seems so…” I shook my head.

  “Intimate?”

  I nodded and Christopher leaned across the table and kissed me.

  “It is.”

  I bit my lip.

  “Anyway, I was really young when I dated Jen. She was older and I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of work. In terms of anything. It was like my relationship was the one thing that was working so it made sense to kind of go with it.”

  He turned to the stove and when the chicken hit hot oil the smell made my stomach growl loudly. Sitting around smelling delicious food and checking out Christopher’s round ass tightening in well-worn jeans as he cooked wasn’t actually the worst way I could imagine starting my days…

  “So what happened? With Jen, I mean.”

  “It wasn’t bad. She was great. She taught middle school and ran marathons. Always tried to get me to run with her and then totally smoked me.” He smiled. “But she wanted to be done, you know? She wanted to settle down and have a garden and dinner parties and I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life or what I was good at and I couldn’t just stop. We ended things and I left for Croatia to teach.”

  “You ran away all the way to Europe, huh?”