Well, there was one thing he was pretty sure she wanted as much as he did. Her legs were so close, her messily polished eggplant-purple toenails inches from his thigh. Without thinking too much more about anything, he closed a hand gently around her ankle, his thumb stroking the fine bone there.
He was not prepared for the quiet moan it elicited, or the way her eyelids fluttered shut in pleasure. “Why does that feel so good?”
“Because you’re horny?” he suggested with a grin.
“Oh, shut up.” She opened one eye. “No, wait, don’t shut up. Talk to me more about being horny.”
“You’re horrible,” he said, but he laughed. The blissed-out look on her face was easily the best thing he’d seen since, well, the night before. “I just came here to talk.”
“We did talk. Mission accomplished.”
He hung his head. “I was so determined to be good.”
“That sounds deeply boring.”
“It does,” he groaned. “I knew I shouldn’t have come here, butAkiva kept pushing, and I just”—he rolled his chin up to look at her—“couldn’t stay away.”
“That doesn’t sound like a guy who intends to be good.” She slid slowly closer to him on the couch, and his fingers trailed up toward her knee and beyond.
“I guess not,” he admitted, his voice tapering off in strangulation when the tracing of the back of her knee made her purr.
“I should warn you, you did touch me first. And you may be a good boy, but I amnota good girl. You’re kind of pushing my responsible behavior to its limit here.”
He did touch her first. And for once, he knew exactly what he was doing. “I’m not asking you to be responsible. I don’t… I don’t think I want you to be.”
Her eyebrow arched, and her legs fell a little farther apart, forcing him to swallow deeply. “You don’tthink?”
This was it—his last chance to turn back. But he already knew he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Whatever hold Arielle Becker had over him was powerful and intoxicating; it felt like he’d been wandering in the desert for forty years and someone had finally given him a drink of water.
“I leave for Mexico in a week,” he said slowly, “and then it’s the Omer, which means no weddings. That’s almost five weeks of definitely not seeing each other.” The thought did not actually make him feel good at all, but that was something to deal with on his own time. “And if we don’t see each other for over a month, this… thing between us—”
“The extremely inexplicable and inconvenient attraction thing?”
“Yes, that. It’ll probably go away on its own after that long, right?”PleaseGod,let it go away after that long.It had to.
“I suppose. Especially if we find other people to keep us busy during that time.”
Okay, wow, turned out he viscerallyhatedthat idea, but it was probably a good one. The few weeks between Pesach and LagBa’Omer, when no weddings or any other celebratory parties were permitted, were one of the two quietest periods of his professional year. It was exactly when he should have been focused on dating, buckling down and finding The One, rather than The One Whose Skin Felt So Impossibly Soft that he wanted to wrap his entire body in it. The part aboutherfinding someone else to hook up with… he was just going to choose not to think about. “Yeah, we could do that.”
“So. If it’s going to dissolve anyway, and we already have a deadline…” She inched closer, then quick as a whip, she was straddling his lap, the creamy skin above her low neckline coming dangerously near his lips. “Maybe we have a fun last hurrah?”
That was exactly what he’d been thinking, but it was getting extremely hard to form words and thoughts, and well, it was just getting extremely hard, period. He slipped his hands under the hem of her tank top, brushing the warm skin beneath, and when she lifted her arms, he slid it up, then over, and nearly had a heart attack at his new view.
He closed his eyes. “It would be really helpful if you were, like, ten to fifteen percent less hot. Not that I’m not grateful, but… it’s a lot.”
“My cups runneth over,” she said apologetically, with a grin that suggested she wasn’t remotely sorry for the way the sight of her in a satiny bra—perfect pillowy breasts practically spilling out—had short-circuited his brain.
He gave her lip a quick nip, intended as a response to her impertinence, and instantly got pulled into the taste and feel of her: chili-lime salt and silk. He brushed kisses down her throat and over every bare inch of her chest, dragging his tongue over her neck to dip into her collarbones. When his thumbs brushed her tightening nipples, she let out a soft moan that turned him feral.
“You know we can take this off,” she breathed as he scraped his teeth lightly over a nipple through the fabric.
“What a novel idea.” He sent up a silent prayer that seeing her completely bare from the waist up wouldn’t cause him to spontaneously combust. “Are you sure no one’s gonna walk in?”
“Yes, but my bed’s bigger anyway. Let’s go.” She hopped up and started toward what must’ve been her bedroom, then realized he wasn’t following. “Change your mind?”
“Not about this,” he said, gesturing weakly at the space between them. “It’s just, uh—I’m still pretty set on not doingeverything, and while I’m sure you could talk me out of that in about thirty seconds…”
“Relax, wedding singer; I haven’t doneeverythingand don’t plan to before marriage either.” She turned and finished the walk to her room, unclasping her bra and tossing it behind her onto the hardwood floor as she went. Weirdly, he didn’t know whether he was more turned on that she was half naked or that she was saving something for marriage, which was somehow even more discombobulating. “I think we’ve both mastered plenty of other ways to get off by now.”
