Page 27 of Spicy or Sweet
I check out herAboutsection, doing the math on her graduation year: she’s either forty-six or forty-seven. She grew up in Oakland, California, practically right next door to Berkeley, where I went to college. Her parents still live there, from what I can tell. She has a few pictures from recent years, from trips home and a few family weddings. I find the pictures fromherwedding. She had to have been younger than me when she got married. Philippe is her ex’s name. She looks… resigned, in the pictures. Neither happy nor sad, just there. I’ve only met her brother in passing—I don’t go up the mountain often, and he doesn’t come down—but he hasn’t changed much from what I can tell. He looks miserable in Shay’s wedding pictures, like there’s a dark cloud hanging over him. Which is exactly how he looks now, in my experience.
She was beautiful on her wedding day, she’s beautiful in every picture on her feed, but they have nothing on the real thing. They don’t capture the glow of her aura, the delicate intensity of every move she makes.
I throw my phone down, lying back with a groan, squeezing my eyes closed. Not even the picture in my head does her justice, but I can’t get her out. Every inch of me is humming with electricity—wishing, wishing, wishing…
Fuck it.
I’d rather deal with the post-orgasm regret of getting off to the thought of Shay than this goddamn emptiness.
I kick off my underwear and spread my legs, running one hand up the inside of my old college T-shirt, and letting the other skate south. I take a deep breath, letting the image of her consume me, imagining how she feels, how she tastes.
Lemons, I decide. Lemons, and sugar, and vanilla, and sunshine. Sweet and tart, soft and rich.
My moan is too loud in the silence of the room as I brush my clit with one finger, but I can’t hold it back. I try to imagine how she would touch me: slow, tentative, scrutinizing every reaction. She would do whatever it took to make it good for me, I know it.
And I know my fingers don’t feel half as good as hers would.
I open my nightstand drawer and blindly pull out a toy, hoping it’s charged and powerful. I’m not picky when it comes to sex toys. I like to try new things, so anything could be in there, but my hand closes around a basic suction toy.
Yes. Absolutely yes.
I breathe a sigh of relief when it buzzes to life, and an even bigger, happier sigh when I press it to my clit. There’s no point in fucking around—it’s been a long day, and I’m not interested in dragging this out. I turn up the speed, one, two, three, until I’m writhing in the sheets. My body twists, my head pressing back into the pillows as sparkles dance before my eyes, and all I can smell is lemon. It’s easy to imagine the weight of Shay on top of me when I’m so out of my mind with lust, easy to imagine it’s her lips around my clit and not an expensive piece of pink silicon.
So easy to imagine that I can practically feel her hair tickling my thighs. I can’t open my eyes, but if I did, I bet I could imagine her between my legs, silver eyes looking up at me through her long lashes.
The vision in my head hits me like a freight train, and I come to the thought of Shay’s mouth on me, with her name on my tongue. I press the toy harder against my clit, catching every aftershock as it rolls over my body like flames, biting my lip so hard I’m surprised I can’t taste blood. My hips buck off the bed, my body rising with the orgasm and then falling, slowly, softly, like I’m floating on a cloud.
My phone chimes while I’m still trying to breathe through the dregs of the orgasm, and I reach clumsily for it, knocking it to the floor. Embarrassing.
I grumble as I have to lean down to grab it, and almost drop my phone again when I read the notification:
You have a match! Chat with Shay now!
What the fuck?
15
SHAY
I’m not saying that I stayed up later than is reasonable, watching my phone in case Noelle messaged me. But I’m notnotsaying that.
She did not message me. Clearly. Nor has she breathed a word about the kissorthe match since she came down to the basement kitchen to work a few hours ago, and the workday is almost over.
Six hours standing less than ten feet apart, and she’s barely said a word to me. Not that that’s unusual for Noelle, but after yesterday… I’m probably overthinking it. She regretted the kiss, that much was obvious. And maybe she has her notifications turned off for Locked and didn’t see the match. Or maybe she did, and she’s taking pity on me by not bringing up how not interested in me she is.
She sure felt interested yesterday. Before she ran like the wind, I guess.
Noelle is crumb coating a couple of cakes, and I sneakily watch her from behind my bowl of Italian meringue buttercream. I’m an almost forty-seven-year-old woman, acting like a high school freshman with a crush on the goddamn cheerleader. It’s embarrassing.
I wonder if she was a cheerleader in high school. She doesn’t seem like the type, but everything I know about Noelle is secondhand information passed on by a town that clearly sees her as a Whitten before they see her as Noelle.
“What were you like in high school?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Noelle’s hand stills, the spatula she’s holding dead center on top of the cake. “What? Why?” she asks without looking up.
“I’m just curious. You know, were you a band person, an athlete, amathlete?”
She sighs, spinning the cake on the turntable and smoothing out the crumb coat. “I was head elf of the Christmas Club.”
