Her thumbs dig into my jaw, holding me steady as her lips part mine. One touch is gentle while the other is urgent, and her tongue slips in to taste me, hot and wet, curling against mine in a slow teasing drag that pulls a groan out of me I couldn't stop if I tried.
I lick into her mouth and nip at her lower lip just hard enough to make her gasp, and the sound goes straight to my cock. She tastes so good I want to live in her mouth.
Her breath hitches, desperate little pants between the deep, devouring press of us.
And then she rocks against me, harder. Her pussy rubbing over my cock through the thin barriers of fabric, insistent and greedy. I'm thrusting up to meet her before I can think, chasing it, needing it. I need it so bad.
My mouth breaks from hers to kiss the rest of her face, teeth grazing because I am hungry, in a hurry. I find her collarbone and latch on, sucking hard enough to mark her, to leave something on her skin that says I was here.
She arches into me and makes a sound that's going to live in my head for the rest of my natural life, so I stay there longer, tongue laving over the spot. She’s all warm skin and that faint floral shampoo and her.
My cock aches for her. Her grind turns erratic, hips chasing pressure, and I'm losing my mind. I'm losing my fucking mind.
"Callahan..."
My name in her voice is barely above a whisper, a plea.
A groan rips out of me, the kind of sound I've never made before, because I've never had Lily like this before. She presses closer, thighs clamping around my hips, nails scraping lightly over my scalp like she's trying to anchor us both to something.
Her hands move from my face into my hair, and mine find the hem of her hoodie and slip underneath to the skin of her waist.
She's in my lap in my car on a dark street at two thirty in the morning. The windows are fogging at the edges. There's nobody here.
She shifts against me and I pull her in with one hand flatacross her back. We are one clear decision away from all of it. One decision. I'm ready to make it. My hips buck up to chase that wet friction and I can already picture her later, on her knees, calling herself mine because she is.
Then headlights sweep across the windshield. Her hands stop in my hair. Mine still against her skin. We freeze in that suspended breath, caught like teenagers, and for a second I don't care. I almost don't care.
The car passes at normal speed and disappears in seconds. She exhales, and only then do I let myself do the same.
We sit there in the dark, panting, the decision unmade between us like something fragile neither of us wants to be the one to break.
"Hi." Her voice is broken in a very specific way that I feel in my core.
"Hi."
My thumb moves once against her ribs and she closes her eyes. I take her in: lashes dark against her cheeks, mouth soft and wet, hands loosely in my hair like she's forgotten they're there.
The song ends at some point. The playlist moves on to something that doesn't matter.
I reach past her and press the screen. The opening beat comes back, low and slow and unmistakable. Her eyes open.
"Just one song," I whisper, my hand moving up her spine, and she goes pliant under my touch.
I gather her hair back with both hands, all of it. "Still just one song."
And then I do the one thing I'll never regret. I take her mouth with mine.
18
CAL
Tonight's dinner is Dad's pasta, which means three pots and forty minutes of the kitchen smelling like an actual restaurant while he hums something low and off-key over the stove and refuses to be helped with any of it.
He's been making it since before I could reach the counter. Still makes it on nights when the house needs to feel like more than two people rattling around inside too much space.
I set the table the way I've been doing my whole life, first from a parent's hip and then on my own when I got tall enough to reach. We eat over small talk, the evening settling around us familiar and worn in all the right places.
"You know, you don't have to stay here."
