We’re fighting over who wants this more, and I’m winning.
I catch his bottom lip between my teeth and press down lightly. He groans into my mouth and slides his tongue against mine like he’s trying to take the point back. My hands are already under his shirt, flat against the warm plane of him, and his skin shivers under my fingers. His hands are buried in my hair. We’re both pushing so hard I’ve stopped being able to breathe.
He lifts me like I weigh nothing and sets me on the kitchen counter. Butterflies fill my stomach, and I laugh against his mouth. And even with me up here, he’s still got a couple of inches on me. The man is absurd.
“There’s flour all over back there,” I manage. “I’m sitting in your pie disaster.”
“I’ll clean it up later.” He pulls back just far enough to look at me, lips wet, eyes bright. “Much later.”
This is so easy and light. It’s different from before, and it makes me want to laugh out loud in the middle of it. It’s fun. It’s just him, and me, and a wrecked kitchen.
His eyes cut to the fridge.
“Hang on.” He’s grinning now, the one that means he’s about to do something ridiculous. He crosses the kitchen, pulls the fridge open, and comes back with the can of whipped cream.
“Oh no,” I say.
“Oh yes.” He shakes it. “Waste not.”
He sprays an absurd amount onto his finger and feeds it to me. I laugh and let him, and he gets some on the tip of my nose doing it, and then he’s eating it straight off the nozzle like an animal, and it’s so dumb, so him, turning a serious afternoon of both our lives into a good time.
I’m still laughing when a little of the whipped cream slips off my lip and lands on my shirt, the top of my left breast.
He stops.
I watch his eyes drop. Watch them come back to mine, and somewhere in that second, they go dark, the laughter banking down into something lower and hotter, and the whole temperature of the kitchen changes.
“May I?” he asks.
Heat floods all the way through me, top to bottom, off two words in that low voice.
I nod.
He lowers his head and licks it off my breast, his mouth warm through my shirt. I make a sound I’d be embarrassed by if I had a scrap of dignity left, which I don’t.
And then he hooks an arm under me and lifts me clean off the counter because he is Stanley Ermington and always keeping me on my toes.
I squeal, legs around him, both of us laughing, the can of whipped cream still somehow in his hand.
“Ermington,” I shriek.
“Hold on, Linwood.”
And he carries me out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and I’m laughing the whole way, flour and cream and all. I have never felt less like myself and more like myself at the exact same time.
He kicks the bedroom door open and shuts it behind us. He drops me onto the bed.
“May I?” I ask, reaching for the can of whipped cream.
His eyebrows go up. He hands it over without a word.
“Shirt. Off,” I command.
He laughs, low and delighted. He pulls the shirt over his head, and I feel the heat start in my chest when I take in his body. He looks so good. It takes me a second to comprehend that he’s mine now –– that this is all mine. I pat the bed, and he jumps on. I climb onto his lap right away, looking down at his body.
“Can I use the whole bottle on you?”
He laughs, leaning with his head back on the pillow, hands settling easy on my thighs. “What are you planning to do to me?”
