Deep End(47)

“Don’t worry, we’re going to—fuck—work on this. You’re doing great. So good to me,” he reassures me when I don’t have enough experience to make myself lax, like this is precisely what he wanted.

Me, trying.

And I do try. A slight push, like I can fit him inside just by will, and it must catch him off guard. There are more Swedish words, and an unsteady quality to his grip on my nape, and then he’s on the edge of coming.

“Fuck, Scarlett—”

For a second, I’m sure he’ll hold my gaze throughout. Then, just before his orgasm tears through him, his eyes close, his head tips back, and his lost expression has me moaning around his flesh. His grip strengthens around both sides of my face, and I’m convinced that there is a universe in which I could come just from this—from how much he’s enjoying it, from knowing that I did this for him, the lightness of being in my body, and not in my head.

I do my best to swallow, work convulsively, but there’s too much, the positioning’s wrong, and Lukas has to use his thumb to press what’s left of his come in my mouth. He’s slow and patient and thorough, glassy eyes and flushed freckles, and every time I suck on the pad of his finger, he lets out silent groans and something foreign that could be perfect.

I’m high-strung. Floating. Burning up. He lifts me like I weigh less than a feather, settles me on the edge of the bench. I’m almost—almost—aware of my surroundings: The pungent, chemical smells of the lab. Lukas’s biceps, steel around me. The loud tempo of his breathing.

I once learned that the fastest sprinters don’t bother taking a single breath across the entire pool. Something about the head rotations being inefficient, and the oxygen not having enough time to reach the muscles. They go totally anaerobic for twenty seconds, which means that their lung capacity must be a work of art.

And Lukas Blomqvist, the fastest person to ever swim fifty meters, is panting against the curve of my throat like there isn’t enough air in the universe to fill him up. And it takes him a while to recover, before he’s able to cup the back of my head again, his tongue in my mouth almost obscenely deep.

He’s still hard against my stomach. My arms are wedged between our torsos, as though he wants to burrow me into him. “You did really well, Scarlett.” He sounds shaken but steady. Slowly regaining control. His fingers slide down my flanks, travel down to my thighs, and . . . the hem of my shorts comes up so high, it’s easy for him to slide one hand underneath and meet the elastic of my cotton panties.

I gasp.

He smiles.

“And you know what girls who did good get?”

His thumb, the same that was in my mouth moments ago, taps faintly against my clit through my soaked underwear. I’m so swollen, so oversensitive, my whine echoes throughout the lab.

“You’re really wet, Scarlett. Aren’t you?”

I hide my moan in his neck, but he pulls me back, forcing me to meet his gaze. I know that my face is red and blotchy. I felt the tears sliding down the corners of my eyes as he came. I am mortified. Also, trembling with want.

And he knows it.

“You did so well. You deserve to come. I would love to make you come. I would pay a not insignificant amount of money to go down on you. Though you could probably come just from this.” Another slow stroke, this time against the drenched seam of my underwear. I lean in, whimper, sink my teeth into the hard muscles of his lats, but he doesn’t mind. His palm cradles the back of my head, gathering me into his skin. “The problem is, I’m not sure you want it enough yet.”

I shut my eyes and barely, barely stop myself from begging. I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to do that yet.

“Come on.”

He pulls me down from the bench. Adjusts my shorts. Straightens my tank top, pausing to swipe a finger over my hard nipple, where it sticks out against the ribbed cotton. When my breath hitches, he presses a kiss to my cheek. “So sweet,” he murmurs, and then, “let’s go.”

“Where—” I have to clear my throat. “Where are we going?”

He smiles and takes the USB out of his pocket.

“Did you forget? We have a project to work on.”





CHAPTER 26


I’M FAWN-LEGGED AS WE WALK DOWN THE MAIN QUAD, WOBBLIER than after a week with the flu. The fresh air does little to clear out the haze, or to ease the throbbing between my legs.

I lift my chin, trying to look like I’m not still processing the ins and outs of what just happened, like it wasn’t a bit of a religious, existence-defining experience.

Scenes, that’s what people call what we did. Pockets of time in which power is exchanged. They have a beginning and an end. They can be broken with safe words. They can be structured and formalized as much as their participants like—in my case, not too much, at least for now. Words like dom and sub feel a little cumbersome. Unwieldy. I wrote on my list that at this stage I’d rather explore than constrain, and Lukas seemed . . . eager. For now, we’re just two kinky people, checking in with each other and figuring it out.

I wonder if something like this birthed the expression fuck around and find out.

I take deep breaths, squinting at the glare of the late-afternoon sun, until a pair of sunglasses is pushed up the bridge of my nose. Lukas looks formidable against the suddenly dark sky, but his eyes are very much bare .