She didn’t share his amusement. Not that she should, but she seemed so solemn. A little stiff, even.
He tried to address the latter issue by sitting down on the bed and pulling her onto his lap. She came, but it was like moving apuppet. There was enough light from the hallway that he could see the furrows in her brow.
“Hey,” he said. “We don’t have to do this. This is a completely optional activity.”
“I know, I know! I want to. I really want to. I just… I haven’t had sex with anyone since Reggie, and I haven’t had sex with Reggie for literal years.”
“You’ve had sex with me, remember?”
“Right.”
“So this is the second time. The second time you do something, all the pressure is off.”
“I don’t know, I’m feeling a fair amount of pressure.” She made a silly face. She was trying to make a joke, but he could tell she hadn’t meant it—entirely—in jest.
“Let’s be serious for a moment. We don’t have to do this. We really don’t.” It would be an immense disappointment, but he wasn’t into anything less than mutual enthusiasm. “We can go back to precoital SSR on the couch.Noncoital SSR.”
“No, I want to. I just… I mean, I take your point about us having already done this, if the metric is orgasms, but this is… premeditated.”
“Let’s not overthink it. Let’s just do what feels good. When it stops feeling good, we stop.”
“OK.” She smiled, and it was a little self-deprecating and a little coy, and it made him crazy. His dick twitched. Her eyebrows flew up. “Oh,somethingfelt good there, I gather.”
“Youfelt good,” he said, opting for the truth. A part of him wondered if they ought to have a conversation about parameters, about what this was and what it wasn’t, but he decided against it. She was in his lap in his bedroom; that ship had sailed. And more importantly, he was confident that they did not live in a universe in which Blair Kellermoon had designs on him. The only thing she’d everhad designs on wasIn Time, for her book club, but that ship had sailed, too.
She’d been sitting perpendicular to him on his lap, but she suddenly shifted, straddling him.
“Oh God,” he bit out, and he hated how clichéd, how nonspecific, that refrain was, but all the words that usually lived in his head had evaporated.
She kissed him, and it was as if he’d never been kissed before. Her lips were soft but… bossy. Like her, he supposed. She pressed her tongue against his mouth—apparently her worries were gone, or, more likely, she’d decided to proceed despite them—and he opened for her.
They kissed and kissed, and she rocked against him, and he told himself to draw things out. To be cool. To make it good.
Eventually he broke the kiss, and he was gratified both by the little mew of protest she emitted and by the fact that she was breathing heavily. He was, too. He consciously slowed his breathing as he pulled his T-shirt up and over his head.
She shot him a smile so wide her dimples popped and began unbuttoning her pajama top. Once again the only words he could summon wereOh God. At least he kept them internal this time.
Her breasts were perfect. They just were. Small, like her, and perky like her. Tipped with the same pink as the pinstripes in her pajamas. He lifted his hands. He lifted his eyebrows, too, asking permission. In response, she shoved herself into his hands.
“Oh God.”
Damn. He had said that one aloud.
“Should we do pants, too?” she whispered after a few moments of him kneading her breasts and her writhing in his lap.
“Yep,” he said, despite the fact that normally he endeavored never to sayYeporYup, considering them crass substitutions for theEnglish language’s longstanding and perfectly adequate affirmation. “Yes,” he corrected.
She squirmed off his lap and took off her pants. It felt like his limbs were moving through molasses as he tried to do the same. Eventually she got tired of waiting, or so he assumed, because she shoved him onto his back and divested him of his pants herself.
“Well,” she said, and he wondered what had happened to the tentative, worried Blair from before.
“Everything good?” he asked, but was he talking to her or to himself?
“Do you have condoms?” she countered.
He had to think for a second. “I do.”
He blinked a few times, stunned, until she said, “You want to go get one?”
