Page 63 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
She let him indulge. She let him grab her butt and sweep down her thighs as he took one nipple and then the other into his mouth to suck and lick at them, to warm her up and steal her breath. She also used that time to finally liberate his cock. It was already thick, and a few good strokes had it straining for her, stretching for more.
The sounds he made, deep and low, gentle but expectant, vibrated on the puckered flesh in his mouth, already oversensitive from his earlier enthusiasm. It was enough to make Candace briefly forget her plan again, instead conjuring thoughts of what would happen if she stroked him to completion just like this, of how they would clean up the mess he made between them, of if she would enjoy this sort of thing better than she had with her ex, whom it always felt degrading with.
Reminding herself that in the earliest days with him, he had been very sweet and romantic and enthusiastic with her, too.
It was enough to encourage her to push Laurin down instead of following through with that experiment. He fell back with a big grin but propped himself up on his elbows to watch her finally tug his pants off. He remained a good sport when she realized she hadn’t thought this through and needed him on the bed properly, situating himself the right way before she could embarrass herself too much by attempting to move a man of his size. He did snag her by the waist, though, dragging her over him to kiss as he much more adeptly manipulated her body. Next thing she knew, he’d parted her legs by snagging one knee up next to his hip and nestled his cock between her folds to slide through the slickness building.
He made a move to roll them over, but Candace resisted, and Laurin didn’t fight back. He relaxed when he realized her intention, stretching his arms up and tucking his hands under his head, showing that he was all for Candace taking the lead with a pose he surely knew would accentuate all his best features. He deserved his self-serving grin as Candace took a brief detour, pushing through her more timid, conservative instincts to run her tongue and teeth across his sculpted armsand chest. Only when she took hold of his shaft and lined herself up over him did he attempt to stop her.
“Wait,” he groaned, unhappy about halting her progress but attempting to be responsible. He reached toward his nightstand. “Let me grab a condom.”
She grabbed that hand and, with an impish grin, tucked it back under the pillow. Neither of them had had another partner in ages, and she was on birth control. Just this time, she wanted to be ever so slightly irresponsible. So before he could protest further, she lowered herself down, taking him fully within her.
His head rolled back. “God, Candace,” he moaned. “Your cunt feels so fucking perfect.” When he brought his eyes back to her, they consumed her, taking in every inch of her body as she worked herself over him.
Instead of the old urge to lean down and hide herself, not even the words he’d said the night before about her weight loss could stop her from holding her own hands behind her head to give his eyes a feast of her flesh.
Until she felt his thighs clench between hers as he barked out a strangled, “Touch yourself!”
She would have laughed about it if she hadn’t understood immediately. He was behaving himself for her, keeping his hands tucked, but he was about to come and didn’t want to go first. She happily followed his instructions, grabbing a breast in one hand as much for his benefit as her own as she brought her other hand over her clit. He spoke words of encouragement, his own body coming to a stop as he watched her intensely.
When she came with a riot of muscle spasms over the cock buried deep inside her, he didn’t follow suit as she’d expected. Instead, he sat up to bring their bodies together. A meetingof their lips, but only briefly before he leaned to her ear and whispered a question.
In French. She responded with a confused shake of the head, wondering if he didn’t realize he’d switched languages. But his look and the way he repeated it while replacing her fingers with his own to force her to come again made her think he knew full well she couldn’t understand him. And that it didn’t matter. He was moving within her again, and she knew he was asking her if she wanted this, if she was enjoying it, if she was ready for him to go harder. He didn’t need to speak her language for her to understand him.
The thought of that bond between them, that quiet ease they’d somehow found together despite their rocky start, the way they’d been able to talk to each other over the dinner table with only glances, the obvious proof of how good they could be together, tipped her emotions over. She was coming again; tears in her eyes and a scrunched face wouldn’t mean anything more than that to Laurin.
But once the next wave passed, she sank into him, hiding her face in his shoulder as she clung to him. He kept talking in French, his words no longer making a question but a mantra punctuated by the occasional kiss of the cheek or a groan. A particularly loud, higher-pitched one that came mid-word when she squeezed herself tight made her laugh, only to start sobbing. She hoped he would ignore it, but instead, he peeled her off him and forced her to look him in the eye as he repeated the mantra one last time.
He kissed her hard as he managed to roll her onto her back and, with a few pumps, they finished together.
Laurin spoke no more words. He only shifted enough that his weight was off her but his head was on her shoulder and his armwas around her waist, as though he thought he could keep her there for the night if only he pinned her just right.
But she already knew he was a heavy sleeper, and when the Uber driver arrived at three in the morning, still the dead of night, she was ready and waiting for them.
When Laurin woke up to a cold bed, he knew Candace was gone. Not because she wasn’t there beside him; being seen sneaking out of his bedroom in the morning would have defeated the purpose of staying in her own room. And he’d known from the beginning, from the first spark between them, perhaps when they were putting her cake back together, but perhaps earlier, out in the woods when she freely poured her heart out for him, that she was ever a feral cat. He knew that, just like with Minoue, she would run away many times before she stayed.
But there was that storm rampaging through the northeast, and he’d hoped to offer her more bits of cheese to earn her trust before she darted off this time.
No, he knew she was gone because there was that moment while they’d made love — definitely love this time — when he’d wanted to say some incredibly dirty things to her but worried she would think them crude and not at all the words that made love. So of course the solution was to say them in French. The language of love. Not just in the general sense; it was the language spoken by the people Laurin loved the most, the three generations of women in this house who meant everything to him. And the arguably filthy things he’d said — the incredibly heartfelt but filthy things — had worked far too well in French,pushing emotions to the point where he hoped she would make some declaration, some level of commitment. Instead, they’d broken her into a sobbing mess.
And that was when he knew.
She’d refused to have the talk they needed to have, and he knew.
She hadn’t said even a single word to him, and he knew.
This was goodbye, and she was too weak to say it.
He was too proud to beg her to stay. In English, at any rate. He said far too many things in French. And in the light of day, he wasn’t sure what he regretted more: that he said them in words she couldn’t understand, or that he said them at all.
There was nothing to do. Not right now. He needed to win the baking competition, but he had to win Candace, and the conflict that caused wasn’t even a blip on the list of problems he had in succeeding at either of them. He had nearly a month to prepare for the competition, to consider the various possible challenges it could be by reviewing previous seasons, to work out recipes that were universal enough to meet a variety of needs, to hone some of his weaker skills. But it was also a month without Candace, and he was worried that distance wouldn’t make either of their hearts grow fonder. He knew the moment he woke up that his heart was going to grow sicker by the day. Would Candace’s ache as well? Or would it finally begin to heal from everything else and heal right over him as well?
He couldn’t let that happen, but he didn’t even have her phone number.
He did have social media, and he knew at least one person who’d hopefully be willing to give him Candace’s number. Hesent off a DM to Jannie and stared at his phone for several long seconds before realizing that it wasn’t quite six in the morning and Jannie was likely sound asleep.
That was okay. He had a distraction. He’d promised to do the mixing at the bakery, after all, and even though it was usually done later in the day, it wasn’t like he couldn’t get an early start. Work out some of his frustration by kneading dough.
