Page 27 of Best Friend Burden

He looked right back at me.

“Dare,” he said, his eyes closing in on mine, just as they had before.

We were back in the apartment doorway, like when we just entered. His arm was above me against the wall and he looked down at me, letting me stand in his shadow. He felt so powerful above me like that. So dominating in the best way possible.

And he'd just said dare.

I wasn't going to waste this opportunity.

“I dare you to—”

But before I could finish my sentence, his lips were on mine, in a passionate kiss, the likes of which I hadn't experienced since high school.

CHAPTER10

***KIEFER***

Icouldn't control myself. I could only look at those adorable eyes and pursed lips for so long without doing something about it. We could have spent the night dancing around the issue, I suppose, but at a certain point, I just had to make the move and kiss her.

God, she was a good kisser. Some people were so mechanical with their mouths, like they were thinking about every move. Others tried to compensate for that by going as hard and fast as they could. Not Melody. Nah, she was in the moment, even if that moment caught her by surprise.

In its own way, it was like being back in high school. Maybe even before that. With so many women, kissing them was just a pretext for the main event. Back when we were younger, making out was the main event and, if you were lucky, you might make it to second base.

Holding Melody in my arms and feeling her lean into my body as I kissed her was a feeling unto itself. It was the first time I'd felt at all out of my head since going sober. I could truly relax and just let the music happen.

It was the exact opposite of being back in the club with that aggressive sorority girl. Things were quiet and intimate instead of loud and overwhelming.

Before too long, the two of us stumbled into my room and onto my bed, and that was the first time since our lips touched that I had a sense of awareness.

Prior to Wendy, I was living the rock star lifestyle, albeit on a smaller scale. Once you get to the level where you're performing for audiences of a couple hundred or more, you get the groupies. Something about holding an instrument in my hands made me irresistible to a certain kind of woman. There were weeks that went by where I never slept in my apartment.

It was fun, but ultimately empty.

And I wondered, in that moment with Melody, if I was falling back into my old traps. Was I treating her just like another one of my nameless one night stands?

She must have noticed something because she stopped.

“You doing okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling at her. “Quite a bit better than okay.”

I took her shirt off and caressed her breasts, those beautiful breasts that had been hanging out of her bra in my kitchen and at the vintage store, begging to be kissed. Before I even knew what I was doing, I'd freed them from their bra and teased her nipples with my tongue, listening to the soft moans that came out of her mouth with every touch.

My hands grazed down her side, appreciating the curve of her figure. It was hard to look at Melody and not see how beautiful and sexy she was, but I had gained an even greater appreciation right now. Every inch of her body was filling me with an impossible combination of contradictory animalistic urges that I could only have fulfilled if I had several mouths and at least a dozen hands.

She put her hand on my chin and tilted my head up towards her face, where she wore that goofy, sexy smile and had a devilish look in her eyes.

“I dare you,” she said, “to strip for me.”

I stood up off the bed and practically ripped my shirt off.

“No,” she said. “Not like that. Slowly. So I can enjoy it.”

I pulled the shirt back down, only to slowly remove it, taking my time and keeping my eyes on her as I did.

She was lying in bed, topless but in a pair of tight jeans. As my shirt came off, she unzipped her jeans and pulled them off her legs, then placed her hand into her underwear, gently fingering herself.

“Keep going,” she told me and I wanted to repeat those words right back at her.

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