“Since when? Why haven’t you asked yet?”
“I wasn’t sure you wanted me to. Which was apparently a valid concern since—”
“I want you to,” I cut in.
“You want me to… what?” he says carefully.
“I want you to ask.”
“So you can say no?” I don’t say anything, and he lets out a deep sigh before continuing. “Okay. Joey, I—” He pauses, considering his words, and I watch him, rapt. “I think you’re the best. I spend so much of my time away from you simply looking forward to seeing you again. But it’s been a while since—I don’t know the right way to go about dating somebody. I don’t know the timeline for these things. When can you say, ‘To hell with casually making out, do you want commitment?’ without sounding like an overeager loser? But I guess I let that moment come and go, so I’m a little late to asking: Will you be my girlfriend?”
I can’t seem to find the right words, so instead of speaking, I hurl myself at him. He catches me and picks me up, and I wrap myself around him like a koala. I press my mouth to his, but I’m smiling so hard, unableto contain it, that the kiss isn’t actually a very good kiss, strictly speaking. Soon he’s smiling back, and rather than kissing, we’re pressing our smiles together. I’m sure that if I could see this kiss from an observer’s standpoint, we would look like freaks.
It’s the best kiss I’ve ever had.
“Is that a yes?” he asks, pulling back.
“That’s a hell yes,” I say, then school my smile enough to give him a proper kiss.
He wastes no time deepening it, his tongue running along the seam of my mouth and begging for entry. Things escalate quickly until we’re both desperate, panting messes, and while this would usually be the point where he puts the brakes on things, he doesn’t seem in danger of doing that anytime soon.
I break from the kiss, just barely, and ask my question into his lips.
“Are we still taking things slow?”
“Fucktaking things slow,” he says, his voice so deep and gravelly, it’s almost a growl. He kisses me again, fingers curling in my hair. He tugs until I groan, and I follow suit, both of us delighting in every sound we can pull from the other.
Minutes pass before I feel him start to walk, never once breaking the kiss. He backs us up until I feel his bed behind me, then gently lays me down on it and crawls on top. He freezes. “Unless you still want to take things slow?”
“No way,” I say, then pull his mouth back down to mine.
We don’t get much further before I realize it’ssotiny. The bed, I mean. Not his—that, I know from experience, is a great size. The bed, however—
It’s a tiny fucking bed. I mean, sure, it’s an extra-long twin, but it’s still atwin. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve had sex in a twin bed, and all of them were over a decade ago. And don’teven think about partner-induced orgasms, because the sex I was having at that point in my life was not good enough for me to actually come. Every orgasm I ever had in a twin bed was self-elicited.
“What are you thinking about?” Alex asks, pulling back to look at me with concern.
I struggle to hold back my laugh.
“This is the tiniest bed in the world.”
“Mmm,” he says, sliding down to kiss my jaw. “We might have to get creative, then.”
Alex kisses a path across my jaw and down my neck, pausing only to look up at me and see if it’s okay for him to lift my shirt over my head. I nod, and before I know it, I’ve been divested of not only my shirt but my bra and pants as well.
It’s only as he’s sucking my nipple into his mouth, his hand inching up toward the edge of my underwear, that I remember: This is Alex. The first time we slept together was probably the best sex of my life. There’s no need for me to wonder if he’s going to get me off or not, because he’s the kind of guy who cares about his partner’s pleasure first and foremost.
Though, if the shaking of his fingers as he inches my underwear aside is anything to go by, he’s more nervous this time around.
The first time—the time that I should really stop thinking about, because it officially never happened, and because thinking about it is only pulling me out ofthistime—we had come together quickly, desperately. It had been more like two cars crashing into each other than anything. Oh, sure, we’d done it again later in the night, slower, lazier.
This is neither quick and desperate nor lazy.
Alex takes his time, seeming determined to kiss every inch of me.
Every moment that passes, every kiss, fans the flames of anticipation inside me. He kisses his way across my breasts and down my stomach, hisshaking fingers becoming a lot more steady when they finally meet their target, and he starts to rub me in slow, confident circles.
He checks on me at every point, asking if it’s okay when he lowers his fingers to penetrate me, then again before he brings his mouth down to focus on the spot his fingers just vacated.
