Page 40 of For a Goode Time Call…
She shook her head. “See, I’m a little confused by you.”
My eyes followed the exposed line of her clavicle, to her breastbone, across to her other shoulder. Her skin was delicate and soft and warm. “Confused by what?”
“You’re sending me mixed signals. Right now, you’realmosttouching me. I feel like you’vealmostkissed me. Like you want you. But you never do. And I’m just confused. Wondering…why you keep pulling back. Shutting down when things get heated physically.”
“Cassie, I…” I sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”
She ran both hands up my chest. “Try? Please?”
I closed my eyes, feeling her hands on my skin and wanting so badly to feel that touch everywhere. Running south, exploring more of me. My fingertips, three of them, dared across her breastbone again, and this time I tested her by letting my fingers slip just a little further down, closer to her cleavage; I opened my eyes, watched her face and expression as I gloried in the satin of her skin as I dragged my fingertips over the swell of her breasts, one and then the other.
“When I say it’s hard to explain, I don’t mean complicated. I mean it’s…hard as fuck to talk about.”
“Would it help if I told you I’m attracted to you? That if you kissed me, I’d kiss you back?”
I met her eyes. “Cass…” I turned away. Had to. I raked my hand over my scalp, tore my hair free of the ponytail and shook it out—prepared to retie it, but Cassie’s hands stopped me.
“I like it down,” she said, moving around to stand in front of me once more. “Talk to me, Ink. You can trust me.”
Fuck.
My brain was exploding. My body was on fire.
I was about to kiss her stupid. Pick her up and set her on the counter and kiss every inch of her body and not stop until I’d marked her. The primal, wild, demanding, testosterone-fueled sexuality I’d kept bottled up for so damned long was boiling up and about to spill out into an uncontrollable wildfire.
And that scared the shit out of me.
I couldn’t hide that fear in my eyes; couldn’t hide the fear of that need any more than I could hide the need itself raging through me—need for everything this woman had me hard as a rock, rigid inside my shorts, aching and burning and pulsing with need.
I pushed past her and stepped outside. I went around back, into the woods, barefoot. The air was cool on my overheated skin. Moonlight shone silver from a cloudless night sky washed by a countless million stars. I had a little spot, out here, a tiny clearing in the woods behind the shop and my house where I could lie down in the grass and watch the stars wheel overhead. I went there enough that I’d made a little path to it, lined with a few solar-powered tiki torch-like lamps. I sat down in the middle of the clearing and tried to clear my head.
She wanted me to kiss her?
She was attracted to me?
My brain couldn’t quite fathom it. It didn’t seem real, or possible, but there was no mistaking the look in her eyes, the body language which said in no uncertain termshere I am, for you, touch me.
I just couldn’t believe it.
And I couldn’t let myself have it. Have her.
Couldn’t let that beast out of its cage. Look what happened last time, after all.
I forced that memory away before it took over. I knew that’s what Cassie was angling at, but I just simply could not talk about it.
I felt her presence before I saw or heard her. Just knew she was here.
She sat down next to me, cross-legged in the tickling grass. Stared up at the moon. “Beautiful here, isn’t it?”
I nodded. Tugged the right leg of my shorts up, showed her the tattoo covering most of my right thigh—a drawing of this spot. If you lay down on your back right around eleven, just before midnight, you’d see the moon pass over the clearing. The tattoo on my thigh was of the ring of trees overhead seen as you’re lying down, with the full moon right overhead.
She looked at the tattoo, then up at the sky, where the full moon shone bright. “Wow. Just…wow.” She looked at me, then. “This is your happy place, huh?”
“I dunno about happy place, but it’s where I come when I need to find some clarity and some peace.”
Her fingers traced the tattoo on my thigh, as if she could feel the ink. After a moment, her hand just rested on my thigh, and I did my best to ignore that sensation, the thrill of it, the ache of it, the desire raging inside me to feel her hand slide upward, upward, closer to my aching erection.
“Clarity and peace about what?” Her voice was quiet, a whisper—suitably, to me; I am not a religious person, but I do have a spiritual sense of connection to nature, and this particular place has always felt sacred to me.
