(A top-secret, for-your-eyes-only first chapter)
(Unproofed! Unedited! Unread! Unholy?)
(THIS IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Please don’t read on your work computer, and if you do, don’t blame me if HR wants to talk.)
Javier
For the record, I know better.
I know it’s not polite, or proper, or possibly even legal to have your hand up someone’s skirt in the third row of a massive SUV while she bites your bottom lip and the rideshare driver in the front stares out the windshield and blasts country radio. I know that Madeline and I should be making awkward small talk while we drive past all the grime and neon of Atlantic Avenue on a Saturday night, counting down the minutes until we’re at her place.
I should probably know her last name, or what she does for a living, or literally one thing about her besides her first name and the fact that she’s got bright pink hair that smells like roses and bright red lips that taste like lime and the second we made eye contact across the bar my entire fucking brain shut down. Madeline is, without a doubt, the hottest person I’ve seen in my entire life, and the skin on her upper thigh feels like warm, soft silk.
But that would require talking, and we haven’t talked much at all past basic introductions, really. Not since I dared her to dance on the table in the dive bar, and she said not in these shoes, but you can give me a show if you’d like, and the next thing I knew we were making out in a dark corner and she palmed me through my jeans and said I live twenty minutes away.
Except she lied, because it’s been fifteen, we’ve gone about seven blocks, and every moment we spend like this erodes my impulse control a little more.
“You said you lived close,” I tell her, digging my fingers into her inner thigh. She squirms and her breath catches and her hand currently grasping my belt tightens.
“You said you could wait.”
“I never said that. I’d remember.”
“It was implied,” she says, and her head goes back against the headrest, and her eyes lower to half-mast. Her bright red lipstick is barely smudged in one spot, and I can’t stop staring at that tiny break in a sharp line.
“I may have been wrong,” I say, and she’s got one foot in its glittery high-heeled shoe on the back of the row of seats in front of us, and she rolls her hips so her panties brush one finger. They’re smooth and silky and body-heat-warm, and my brain goes completely blank.
After a moment, I realize she’s staring at me, wide-eyed, chest heaving. She flicks a glance toward the driver—right, fuck, the driver, Jesus Christ—and just as I move my hand she grabs my wrist and guides it to her waist, so I pull her in and kiss her again, both of us straining against our seatbelts.
“I almost let you,” she murmurs.
“You almost made me,” I murmur back.
She’s wearing a cropped black tank top, and there’s an inch or so of skin showing between it and her electric blue skirt. My hand is on it, then under it. Madeline makes a noise and grabs the front of my shirt as my thumb traces skin and underwire, pulling me closer.
The car stops suddenly, jostling our mouths apart.
“Dammit,” Madeline hisses when she looks around to see that we’re still on Atlantic Avenue, holy shit, though since I can see [landmark] out the back window we’re nearly to the southern end. “It’s twenty minutes most of the time.”
I move my thumb higher and stroke it over her—well, her bra, but it’s probably where her nipple is, and she swallows hard and arches a little. I do it again, and it’s fine, it’s nice, but it’s not—
“Take your bra off.”
“We’re in the back of an Uber,” she says, one side of her mouth already curving up.
“I know where we are.”
Madeline wriggles, smirking, arching her back and pressing into the seatbelt. Her eyes don’t leave mine and the smile doesn’t leave her face as she wriggles more, bites her lip, then sits back to pull the straps over her shoulders and the bra out through one armhole. She only stops looking at me for long enough to shove it in her purse, then grabs the headrest with her left hand and puts her right on her bare thigh, the slit almost up to her hip.
“Anything else?” she asks. She sounds breathless, the seatbelt over her chest pulling the shirt tight over her nipples, sticking out in two hard points. I reach out and circle a thumb around her left nipple, dragging the fabric with me. She inhales softly, watching me. The SUV stops again, in the crosswalk this time, and a swarm of people move past the tinted side windows and the un-tinted back window.
She glances out, at the people, and I slide my hand under her shirt. Madeline makes a noise and her eyes go to half-mast and she swallows hard, her throat working in the dark.
“Just don’t get me arrested,” she says. “I’d be bad at jail.”
“They’d hold you overnight at worst for public indecency,” I say, and pinch her nipple, making her gasp. “It’s Virginia Beach. I see worse every day.”
“I wouldn’t be any better at a holding tank.”
“Then keep still and don’t make too much noise,” I say, and try to position myself so I can use both hands. I’d give almost anything right now not to be buckled into a car. Her shirt rides up until the lower curve of one breast peeks out below the hem, and I pause to stare before pulling it down. There’s still a driver in this vehicle, even if he couldn’t be paying us less attention.
“Javi,” said says into my mouth a few minutes later because we’re kissing again, both my hands under her shirt, while I swallow her tiny sighs and moans. “You, um. Don’t have to be this gentle.”
It feels like something turns over in my hindbrain, like a rock revealing something dark and lush underneath. I pinch her nipples harder and she squirms against the seatbelt, sliding one hand around my upper thigh. My dick twitches at the proximity.
“Like this?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Or. If you wanted.”
“More?” I say, and pinch harder. Madeline drags a breath in, her fingers tightening. I can feel her nails through the denim and the feeling goes straight to my dick. “Tell me.”
“Fuck, that’s good,” she whispers. “Can you—a little harder—”
I squeeze my fingers together harder and my dick throbs. Madeline bites her lips together and muffles a moan, and I haven’t come by accident since I was a teenager but I’m starting to worry. We’re past the lights of Atlantic Avenue now, and it’s not dark—we’re still in the city—but it’s streetlights and not the nonstop neon. Dark storefronts, then houses, empty sidewalks.
Jesus, we have to be close. In a moment of inspiration I scrape both my thumbnails across the flat surface of both her nipples, and Madeline’s mouth falls open and her head goes back. She squeezes my thigh even higher, and then we’re kissing again and fuck she’s massaging my dick through my jeans and there’s no way this doesn’t end—
The dome light of the SUV comes on, and we both jerk back. Madeline tugs her shirt down, face flaming red.
“We’re here,” the driver says.
* * *
Three minutes and one massive tip later—probably too massive, but my bank account is a problem for tomorrow, I’ll pick up some extra shifts, I don’t fucking care—we’re inside Madeline’s apartment, her shoes kicked off, her skirt around her waist, her shirt pushed up over her tits, her panties around one ankle, up against a wall.
I’ve got my mouth on her neck and my hand between her legs, fingertips stroking slick wet heat, my palm cupped over her clit. I think. I’m like, ninety percent sure about that last one, but she’s panting and swearing and trying not to moan, both her hands bunched in my shirt, so I feel pretty good about my guess.
When I bite down on that soft spot between her neck and shoulder—not hard enough for teeth marks tomorrow, probably—a moan breaks through before she swallows it. I lick the spot and tighten my hand on her, the tip of my middle finger nudging between her lips and against her entrance.
“Shit,” she hisses, head back, neck still bared for me.
“What are your neighbors like?” I ask, lips against warm skin. I can feel her swallow.
“What?”
“C’mon,” I say, bite her again, then kiss it. “Are they loud? Quiet? Early risers? Complain a lot?”
“They’re, um. Fuck. Twenties, maybe? They had a big Halloween party last year.”
“Are you gonna get a noise complaint if I make you come against this wall?”
Madeline exhales hard and smiles. She’s started rolling her hips against my hand, or trying, at least.
“I don’t care,” she says.
“You should be a better neighbor.”
“You should,” she starts, and mid-sentence I flatten the palm of my hand against her clit and she inhales sharply.
“Hm?”
“Do you even know where my clit is or are you just guess—”
I am guessing, but it turns out I’m a good guesser because I slide my hand back until I’ve got two fingers on either side of her clit, then squeeze them together. Madeline cuts herself off again and her whole body shudders. I think her fingernails might rip through my shirt.
“Fuck,” she whispers. “Fuck. Okay. Oh—fuck.”
“They’re not noise complaint neighbors, are they?” I say, right in her ear. I’m pressing her to the wall with my other hand, her ribcage heaving under me. I’m so hard I’m dizzy. “They gonna call it in if they hear me tell you to work your pretty little clit against my hand?”
She does, her hips rolling. Her eyelids flicker.
“You can’t even see it,” she says, voice low. “How do you know it’s pretty?”
“It’s a good guess. The rest of you is.” I move my other hand, skating it up over the curve of her breast, softly circling the pad of my thumb over her puffy pink nipple, warmer to the touch than the rest of her. “Think you can come like this?” I ask.
She huffs a noise that might be a laugh, but her head’s back against the wall and her eyes are closed, her hands fisted in my shirt as she works her hips against my hand, her clit sliding between my fingers while she makes tiny, aborted noises. I lean in even further, the heat of her bare skin soaking through my shirt, and put my lips to her ear.
“Well?”
“I think so.” She’s moving faster now, harder, and I’m fucking laser-focused on my hand between her legs, the exact amount of pressure on her clit, pushing back just enough that she can feel it. It’s small and careful and oddly precise for how messy sex is, and I focus on it to shut out the way my skin feels overheated and stretched too tight, every seam in this shirt suddenly scratchy and uncomfortable, or the way my dick is trapped between my pants and my hip and I’m afraid that tiny pressure might be enough.
I’m holding it together. I am. I am. Even if this feels like some sort of wild, wonderful dream and I’ll wake up any second.
Suddenly Madeline grabs my wrist and arches her back, and before I can say anything or even react, her whole body shudders and she’s coming. It’s not loud but it’s obvious, panting and groaning and shaking until she finally goes still against the wall, eyes closed, head back.
I stare. I think I’m slack-jawed, holding my breath, praying that I don’t come myself, my brain trying to catch up to what just happened because these things might happen to other people, but they don’t happen to me. Holy shit. Holy shit.
“Good?” I ask, like I need confirmation. I’ve still got her clit between two fingers, and I give it a soft squeeze, just because I can. Her whole body jerks, but she doesn’t pull my hand away.
Madeline nods, then clears her throat and swallows. “Yeah,” she finally says. “Good.”
Then she finally moves my hand and drags me in for a hard kiss.
(And if you need something to read in the meantime, Javier first appears in The Hookup Equation, and then has cameos in The One Month Boyfriend and The Two Week Roommate. I imagine he’ll also eventually appear in The Four Year Crush [coming 2025], but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.)