“That vodka. Is hitting me.” I clear my throat. “You’re right. This day has been too long—”
His hand lays over my other one where it’s splayed on the table.
My eyes go wide. I lift my head because I want to see his face this time.
His eyes are bloodshot. He sways a little; or maybe I sway, the sky is dark beyond the windows. What time is it? I have no idea. Time doesn’t exist. There’s only whipped cream vodka and the way Loch’s fingers follow the lines his smears of paint left yesterday, down the delicate skin on the back of my hand.
He launches up from the barstool.
I stand too, tethered to his movements like a reflection.
He comes around the end of the island. My body shifts to follow his, then he’s in front of me, his heat pricking goosebumps down my arms.
“You do na know what you want,” he says. Asks.
“No.” The word wrenches out of me. “What do you want?”
A smile. It’s shattering. Earth-destroying.
He curves down, breaking the height difference in a graceful arc, and rubs his lips across mine.
It’s barely a kiss. It’s a question. It’s the start of something, one of those endless lines of possibilities that ripple out from me, only this one gleams and pulses and shows me the way until I get to that realization I’ve been fighting and I stand face to face with it.
I want him.
God, do I want him.
I let it explode over me, but what comes isn’t destructive, it’s a web of refracting beams the way the kitchen light is going into streaks at the edge of my vision, giving me a centering focal point around which everything else is ombré rays.
I shove onto my toes and kiss him back.
Loch whimpers in the core of his throat and meets me before I’ve even come up all the way, lips punishing and devouring and severe.
He tastes like vanilla and bitter hops and I’m gulping him in the way I drank up the frigid breeze from the car window. Like it could shock the thoughts from my head, the stress from my body, the chaos from my soul. And he does, with each palpitation of his lips on mine, I’m taken to the basest form of a primal existence. He sucks my tongue into his mouth and his beard abrades my face and it’s all a throughline straight to every individual nerve ending. I make a noise that he counters with his own delicious moan and he’s not just peeling me apart now, he’s obliterating.
I never knew kissing could bethis. Could be the fervor of every argument, the passion of every lashing that tongue has given me verbally, but in a way that melts my insides and I feel golden.
His hands are on my jaw, clamped around my head, holding me in place like I might evaporate—I might, I am, he bites my lower lip and my blood is turning to champagne bubbles. I grab onto his sweater against his hips to anchor to this plane of existence, but I’mtouching his hips,those arched hills, that deep V I saw in his studio, and I whimper pitifully.
We twist and I need the support of the island at my back, hisbody boxing around mine, his height transforming to consume, swallowing me raw.
“Kris.” He morphs my name into a melody, lilting accent dripping from each letter he speaks into my mouth. “You’re all I’ve been able to think about for weeks. The only thought in my head is what your face will look like when I take you apart—like this, like this right now, you’re perfect.”
He hefts his hands under my thighs and I swear to god all the air in the room vanishes. It’s nothing but electric ozone as I’m lifted, slammed to sit on the edge of the island, legs spreading to belt around his waist.
There are stars shooting all around, supernovas thrown into ruin by the way he works his lips across my jaw, laving, sucking, drawing an abstract curve with his mouth the way he paints them with his fingers. Those fingers. Thosefingers—they’re tangled in my belt, tugging, and I rock my head back and I’m so drunk and he feels soright.
“Perfect, Kris. Christ, look at you, spread out for me. So fucking good.”
His praise hits my veins rapid-fire, my breaths heaving faster—holy shit, I’ve never been this close this fast. I rock against him, not caring at all that I’m devolving into greedy little moans that get lewder when his hard cock grinds against mine, but Iamgreedy. I am greed and gluttony and proof that these sins are deadly.
I can feel his grin on my neck. The flick of his tongue. “You like that, eh? Me telling you how good you are.”
“Mmmf.” I try to speak but language is gone.
He puts a kiss in the divot under my ear, his words echoing in its hollow. “You are, Kris. So good for me. Look how well you react.”
He bites my neck and I struggle for something solid but the world is sweaty and honeyed.
