Page 61 of Backslide
Nellie shrugs. She is happy to oblige. She lays her shirt back down, crosses over to Noah, and, without a word, gestures for him to turn toward her.
He smooths the wrinkles out of the thighs of his jeans as she straddles him.
Once settled, she leans in and whispers in his ear, “Girlfriend, huh?”
“Is that okay?” he murmurs.
“That’s okay,” she nods.
“Hurry it up!” Chloe calls.
So, Nellie presses light kisses to Noah’s neck beneath his ear, his jaw, his cheek, then nips his lower lip. The other eyes on them are strange, but, right now, she couldn’t care less. He tips his chin up toward her, waits for her to return. And she does, her lips—progressively familiar—working against his own. Her tongue slips into his mouth, tasting of St. Ides forties and cold raspberry Snapple.
And maybe it’s part of the dare, only maybe it’s not, but she starts to grind against him, despite the audience. He pulls her closer to him, his hands on her ass, so that they’re flush against each other. Her inner thighs squeeze the outside of his, his button fly pressing between her legs. The heat dials up quickly, and soon they are fully all over each other—his hands finding her pretty blue bra, him hard beneath her, both of them breathless.
“Okay, okay, time’s up,” Chloe is saying, but they’re not stopping. “We should go to the party!”
“I think we lost them,” Sabrina laughs.
And she’s right. They are lost. To everyone but each other. Too drunk to care about the spectacle. Too into each other to care about some party, where they’ll only want to escape together anyway. Too absorbed to even really notice as everyone else grabs their belongings.
“Hey!” Sabrina calls, before she leaves, forcing them to look up, heavy-lidded, for just a moment. “We’re going. Be back in a few hours. Place is yours.”
She winks.
And, with the slam of the door, they go back to their business.
Things get real. Quickly. This is the first time they’ve been truly alone for an extended period of time. Not just a few minutes. Not just outside. Not with friends around the other side of a monument or outside a closed door. Just alone.
Soon, that blue bra is discarded on the floor beside the couch—beside his jeans and T-shirt and her shorts, too. His boxer briefs are pushed down. And the two are horizontal on the couch, skin sticking to the leather, facing each other, entwined.
Their lips are swollen. Their cheeks are flushed. Their hearts are hammering, stomachs rising and falling fast.
He drags his hands down her sides to the elastic of her underwear, readying to slip them down and off. But then he pauses, narrows his eyes. Murmurs into her mouth: “Why did you pick dare?”
“What?” she breathes, distracted by the heat pouring through her body, by an anticipation she hasn’t experienced before.
“Why did you pick dare?” he repeats, still breathing heavily. “Why didn’t you answer the truth question?”
And she opens her eyes to gaze back at him. “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess I was embarrassed.”
“Because…?”
“Because,” she shrugs.
He rests his head back against a patterned throw pillow, not separating from her, but creating the smallest amount of distance so he can see her whole face.
“Because the number is high?”
She pauses. Sighs. Slumps slightly back too. “Because it’s not.”
“It’s low?”
“It’s low.”
“How low?”
She bites her lip. “Zero low.”
