Page 10 of The Pucking Date
He pulls back just long enough to rip it over his head, tossing it somewhere behind him, then he’s on me again, hands at my waist, my ribs, dragging me closer like he can’t stand even an inch between us.
“Finn.”
It’s a gasp, a plea, I don’t even know. His mouth finds my neck, open and hungry. He bites just below my ear, then soothes it with his tongue.
His grip tightens in my hair again, pulling my head back so he can look at me. He groans low, then lifts me, hands under my thighs, carrying me across the room. Like he’s carried me in his thoughts every damn day.
We finally fall onto the bed, the rest of our clothes disappearing in a blur of tugging and friction. A tangle of limbs, breathless and laughing and burning all at once.
It’s rough at first. Desperate. Teeth and need and months of held-back want.
But later, when he pulls me back to him in the dark, when he touches me, already familiar with every inch of me, it’s soft. Slow. Real.
And I let him have all of me. Every edge. Every secret. Every piece I usually guard. Because for one night, I’m not the coach’s daughter or the PR director or the girl with something to prove.
I’m his.
And the way he moves, like he has all the time in the world, it undoes me.
Piece by piece.
If only I knew how much this one night would change me.
1
SEVENTEEN LOOKS GOOD ON ME
JESSICA
Seven weeks later
There are exactly three reasons I agreed to this weekend at Dmitri Sokolov’s Fire Island house: free booze, Sophie’s threat to tell our mother I’m ‘tragically single,’ and the fact that my apartment still reeks of Chad Vanderbilt’s cologne six months after he decided I wasn’t Vanderbilt-wife material.
What I didn’t expect? Sand in places sand has no business being…and Finn O’Reilly showing up to ruin my carefully constructed emotional walls.
By the time I drag myself up from the beach, everyone’s already showered and glowing, sipping beer or cocktails and tossing salmon on the grill.
I walk straight into a scene; my brother Adam cracking jokes, though his gaze keeps drifting toward Jenna with an intensity he probably thinks no one notices. Liam and Sophie on one of the loungers, Erin’s laughing at something Dmitri just muttered in Russian, and Kieran, Erin and Liam’s brother, is back for the weekend before heading intohis next season at BU. He’s perched on the arm of a deck chair, beer in hand, soaking it all in with the easy confidence of someone who knows exactly how much charm he’s working with. Wesley—the newbie—and Nate are next to him, quietly sipping on their beer and taking it all in.
Somewhere behind them, Dmitri’s daughter Amneris comes tearing across the deck with a group of sandy-footed little girls, giggling like maniacs and weaving through the adults in a mini stampede. She hurls herself at her dad with wild abandon, and Dmitri catches her mid-sentence.
Finn’s not out here.
Yet.
Thank God.
I haven’t seen him since Montreal. Since that night.
I disappeared the next morning, shaken, unraveling, completely wrecked in a way I didn’t see coming. Because what he made me feel wasn’t something I could file under rebounds or flings. It wasn’t a temporary lapse in judgment. It was something that could destroy me.
So I panicked.
But the China trip wasn’t impulsive. Just…convenient.
I’d had my eye on NYU Shanghai’s summer Mandarin intensive for months. After Chad dumped me, it felt like the perfect out; six weeks of total immersion, a chance to sharpen the language I’ve been speaking since I was in diapers but had let slide somewhere between adulthood and emotional self-sabotage.
It was supposed to be a clean break. A distraction. A way to forget Chad. And convince myself Finn was nothing more than a mistake.
