“I’m not that delicate,” he said as his mouth found my nipple. I gasped.
“That’s good,” I groaned.
“I know,” he said, with the confidence of a man who understood exactly how to please a woman because he was, as it turned out, very good with his hands. I tried not to think of Kenzie. His touch was deliberate and certain, as he traced the outline of my hip with his hand.
Jude’s phone on the bedside table pinged with an incoming message.
“Should you check that?”
“No,” Jude said.
“Could be Oscar,” I said.
“Then we definitely shouldn’t check it,” Jude said as he found my mouth again. Perhaps I had always wanted him, or perhaps I just wanted what I couldn’t have, but the fact was I couldn’t get out of my leggings fast enough. And then I helped Jude out of his flannel bottoms, and then it was us, pressed together in the most delicious of ways, beneath his white quilt comforter, and for the first time in my whole life, I felt like I’d made it home, and I wanted to be there.
Afterward, we both lay panting, me with my head on Jude’s bare chest, all the bones in my body liquefied. My mind? Blown.
“Wow,” I said against Jude’s chest.
“Wow,” Jude agreed.
“How long have you wanted to do that?” I asked him.
“How long haveyou?” Jude countered.
We both knew the answer: a long freakin’ time.
“We can’t tell Oscar,” I said.
“Obviously,” Jude answered.
I looked up at him and he glanced down at me. He pulled me up then, cuddling me to him with one arm.
“One day we will, though,” Jude promised.
“One day?” I echoed. I pulled my head from his chest. “Don’t go catching feelings for me, Percy Julian.”
“Too late,” Jude said. “I’m already falling for you.”
I sat up in bed, panicked.
“Take that back,” I demanded, fearing that everything Oscar had told me was true. Jude was a delicate flower. Jude didn’t do casual.
“Can’t,” Jude said, seeming fairly unperturbed.
“You have to,” I said.
“You don’t have to freak out,” Jude said in his reasonable, logical tone, the one that always cut through the emotional storm of my brain.
“I don’t?”
“Nope. You don’t.” And Jude reached out and pulled me closer to him, snuggling me up close. “There’s nothing to freak out about.”
He said it with such confidence, I almost believed him. Plus, his body seemed to be tailor-made for mine.
“But what about your living, breathing person? What about her?” I watched the ceiling fan above us draw slow loops.
“Don’t worry about her,” Jude said.
