Page 68 of Lessons in Heartbreak

The impulse was anchored tight around my spine, impossible to ignore.

Take her. Take her. Take her.

She’d be soft and wet and sweet—so very, very tight too. My head spun at the thought, all the blood rushing between my legs, where it pooled into one angry hard-on.

Our kisses were fierce and sloppy, clacking teeth and hot, wet tongues, a dirtier version of how we’d kissed in her office. That kiss had been testing something new. My hands moved more carefully, my restraint perilously in charge.

This was an entirely different beast. It wasn’t unknown, and God, was it better because of it.

It was impossible to imagine any universe where kissing her wasn’t vital. Where it wasn’t the single most significant use of my time. Her hands, still trapped between us, grappled at my shirt, fisting the cotton tightly to hold me in place. Like I was going fucking anywhere.

I’d live there with her if she asked. I’d kiss her and touch her and make her mindless and screaming in the dark for as long as she’d let me, because Ruby Tate in my arms was better than anything I’d ever felt.

Would she let me do that?

I broke my mouth away from hers and sucked at her neck, coasting my hand down her back to fill my palms with her backside underneath her shorts as she writhed against me. Ruby gasped when I bit down on the slope of her shoulder, then dragged my nose up the edge of her jaw.

My hand on her ass directed her movements, and I pulled my head back, watched her eyes go hazy as she found the right rhythm.

Even though I hadn’t done it since I was a teenager, I was going to come in my shorts if I watched her like that for too much longer, and fuck if that didn’t sound like a sacrifice I was willing to make. Thethought of her using me for anything sounded like my patriotic duty at this point.

I was doing this for America.

The rocking motion of her hips had my eyes fluttering shut, my jaw tightening as I gritted my teeth. I sucked her bottom lip into my mouth, and she groaned when I released it.

“That’s it, baby,” I whispered. “That feeling good?”

“Y-yes,” she said in a stuttering voice thick with desire. “I can’t ... I can’t do this myself.”

I hummed, sucking the soft skin of her earlobe into my mouth, relishing the shocked hiss that sprang from her lips. Her body jerked against my own. “You want help?”

Frantically, she nodded. “Yes. Yes.”

My hand moved between us, hooking my fingers into her shorts and the soft elastic of her panties, pulling them aside while I slanted my mouth over hers in a deep, searching kiss. Her hands clutched the back of my head while we devoured each other. When her fingers tightened in my hair, that sharp bite of pain pulled a helpless groan that escaped into her mouth. She swallowed the sound, rocking her hips in a slow, rolling movement.

I pushed my chest back a fraction, making room for my arm between us as I slid one finger in between her legs.

Her head snapped back, a loud, drawn-out moan leaving her lips, and the sound was so fucking good, so delicious and unrestrained, that I wanted to hear it for the rest of my life.

Then I added a second finger, whispering naughty things against her bare shoulder as she took me easily.

“Feels so good,” I told her. “Fucking perfect, Ruby.”

The words didn’t surprise me, because she felt it around my fingers as they slid easily between her legs, as she rocked herself to orgasm on nothing but my hand. But what did shock me was how easily I’d allowed myself to say them.

Neither of us was pretending; there were no false words or forced interactions. This was tiptoeing right up against the flame and hoping we didn’t get burned. Her especially, because I was the one leaving soon, but there was a part of me that worried I’d feel so much more than I let on once this was done.

Only once had I felt like this about a woman, someone I thought I’d loved and would’ve destroyed my life for if she’d have let me. Instead, I was the one destroyed—and Ruby wasn’t anything like her.

This was different. The feel of it, of her, rattled the cage of everything I’d built around myself the last few years. Ruby was pure and good and kind. She was naive and straightforward, and she had no idea what she was missing out on.

God, how I’d show her if she let me.

“Close,” she whimpered. Around my fingers, she fluttered. Her head dropped back against the wall as she keened, and I angled my fingers, using my palm against her as she rocked. Disjointed, whispered pleas fell from her lips, and the moment she broke apart, it was the most beautiful fucking thing I’d ever seen.

Her body jerked in my arms, shuddering through what seemed to be a really great orgasm, and I kissed her through it, swallowing her sounds with swipes of my tongue into her mouth. The tension bled from her frame, but I was able to hold her easily with one arm banded underneath her ass while I slowly worked her through the aftershocks, finally easing my fingers out from between her legs.

Surreptitiously, I wiped them on my shorts before I smoothed my palm around her waist. Her skin was so soft. I wanted to kiss her everywhere. I briefly wondered if I could ask to do just that. Take her home and strip her of all her clothes and kiss every fucking inch of her body, see which parts she liked my mouth on best.

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