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‘Fuck, Annalise,’ he mutters, and I bring one knee up onto the bed, half-straddling him, fumbling with his T-shirt. I give up to focus instead on palming the bulge at the front of his jeans, excitement sparking through my veins when a groan stutters out of him and his hands tighten on my legs, fingers biting into my flesh.
There’s no resistance this time when I press against Lloyd’s shoulders for him to lie back, so I can lower myself down with him to kiss him. His hands are everywhere, and his teeth catch my lip like they didwhen we kissed at the party and yet, nothing like it at all. This is hungry, not playful, but I like it. He slips a hand between my thighs, snatching the air from my lungs, and I feel his lips curve into a smile against my collarbone.
His other hand toys with my breast and his lips find mine again, tongue ravishing my mouth as my hips rock helplessly, needily, against his fingers.
It’s still not enough. I want to feel the heat of his skin flush against mine, the weight of his body wrapped up with mine. I want to see him come undone; I need to hear him moan and say my name like that again.
I start to move off him so I can undo his jeans, finally get him out of his T-shirt, but Lloyd grabs my hip to hold me in place, a smirk on his lips and challenge in his eyes when I try to wriggle away again – and buck against him, when his thumb finds a particularly sensitive spot. Like he’s almost daring me. There’s part of me that’s tempted to see what happens if I push him, see what delicious way he’ll find to tease me, but his thumb circles again and I lose the battle, back arching and a moan catching in my throat as I remember the need to be quiet, to not wake up my flatmates.
Lloyd kisses me again, tenderly this time, and I’m pliant as he turns us around for me to lay against thepillows. He undresses as I catch my breath, and I stare as he bares the smooth skin of his back, then turning and giving me a glimpse of the coarse, dark hairs on his chest. His jeans come off, and then his boxers.
I drag my eyes back to his face as he gets back on the bed with me, kneeling between my legs as he rolls on the condom he just took out of his wallet. I cup his cheeks to draw him in for another kiss, languid and soft, and I shiver at the toned, hard lines of his body as he lowers himself down against me, enveloping me. Lloyd groans, low in the back of his throat, as he slides inside me, one of his hands fisting in the sheets for a moment. His forehead leans against mine.
‘Annalise,’ he murmurs, and that’s when I know.
It means everything to him, too.
Lloyd sneaks off to use the shared bathroom down the hall, borrowing my dressing gown for a little modesty, and I lie in the rumpled bedsheets, dizzy and breathless and elated. When I hear him coming back a couple of minutes later, I suddenly feel cold and exposed, sprawled naked on my bed like this, and grab the sheet, tucking it around myself.
Lloyd, for his part, shrugs off the dressing gown, hangs it back on the door where he found it, and slips back into bed with me. I don’t hesitate to burrow into the warmth of his embrace. He reaches for his phone on the nightstand, clicking the screen to life.
‘Half past four,’ he says, turning back to me.
‘Somewhere to be?’
‘Just wondering how late we made it this time. Beats our record, I think.’
I remember our conversation about all-nightersfrom Keye & Shore and smile. ‘I’m not sure it counts when I went to sleep for a few hours.’
‘I … Yeah. Sorry, for waking you up. Although hopefully,’ he adds, grinning, ‘I made up for it.’
I know it’d be easy to go along with his teasing, but there’s something about the comfort of his arms around me, the cocoon of night-time that seems to cut us off from the real world, that makes me feel it’ll be harder to burst our little bubble this time – safer, to say the things I should.
‘I am sorry, for the record,’ I tell him. ‘For the whole … blowing hot and cold, like you said. It wasn’t fair of me. I was mad at you for not just talking to me that first week, but then I did the exact same thing, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel …’
‘No. No, I –youwere right. What you said yesterday. That this would – look worse for you than it does for me, if people knew.’ He pauses, a frown tugging at his face, a tension prickling at the air I can’t quite place.
It takes me a minute to figure it out.
I push up on one elbow slightly, to look him in the eye better.
‘Peoplecan’tknow,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m not trying to push you away again, Lloyd, I promise I’m not. But – you understand, right? I don’t want this internship togo to waste because people think I only achieved what I did because you were helping me, or whatever – just like you don’t want them thinking you made the same mistake twice.’
He’s unnervingly quiet and still, a stark contrast to the larger-than-life attitude I’m so used to seeing from him.
Then Lloyd reaches for my hand, lifting it so he can press a lingering kiss to my knuckles, his fingers squeezing mine as he lays our hands back against his chest. He smiles at me as he says, ‘So I should probably sneak out now while everyone’s asleep, huh?’
I don’t argue, and I kiss him goodbye at the front door.
But there’s an uneasy feeling curdling in the pit of my chest, and I can’t help but think that smile didn’t reach his eyes.
I’m not sure whether it’s weirder if I text Lloyd throughout the rest of the weekend, or weirder if I don’t. In the end, I decide against it – he doesn’t text me, either, and we’ll see each other soon enough anyway. There are butterflies in my stomach as I envisage more stolen touches in the queue in the canteen like last week, or maybe another late night working long past when everyone else has gone home, a quiet place for anotherkiss, maybe being able to sneak him back into the flat again after the others are in bed …
On Monday morning, when I join a few of the others for our usual early-start commute to the office, Tasha falls into step beside me to ask pointedly, ‘So how was your weekend, Anna? Did you get up to anythingfun?’
She does this all the time, asks when sheknowsI didn’t have any exciting plans or skipped out on something the rest of them had planned. She probably thinks I spent the whole weekend nursing my hangover from Friday, after that comment about how I couldn’t handle my drink.
She reminds me of every bully from school. The people who thought they were so much better than me and that I didn’t deserve their time of day. The nasty, catty girls from my uni halls who were always quick to put me down and make me feel so silly and insignificant.
