Problematic Summer Romance (Not in Love, #2)(86)

I pull back. Search his face. He runs his fingers through my hair, a sweet, warm caress at odds with the fact that I’m all but naked in his lap. With the severity of his erection. “Avery?”

He thumbs my cheekbone. Shakes his head. “You were always there.”

“Where?”

“In my mind.”

I nod. Something sticks in my throat.

Expands even more when he says, “Since the first day I met you, you have been the best thing in my life. And you weren’t even in it.”

I close my eyes, overwhelmed by the wastefulness of the last few years. All that could have been. “What a romantic way to say that you think about me when you masturbate,” I joke.

“Maya.” His head tilts backward, resting against the leather. There’s a red flush on his cheekbones.

“Really? That’s the line, Conor?”

He groans. “It’s the Catholic guilt.”

I grin. “You do think about me, then?”

“I try not to.”

“Does it work?”

Laughter, exhaled. “Not once.”

“Aww.” I pretend to pout, and his thumb finds my lower lip. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you aren’t.” But he’s smiling, too, and looks more beautiful than ever, and I decide to lean backward, my palms on his knees, my ass settled on the lower part of his thighs. I’m spread wide open, but he is doing a great job of holding my eyes, as though his gaze sliding to my tits might unleash a nuclear apocalypse.

“Tell me about these fantasies of yours.”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, I do.”

His throat convulses. Visibly. “I don’t know that you would find it particularly sexy.”

“Try me. Are we in a church? Do I have tentacles?”

Making him laugh turns me on as much as making him hard. “Do you want tentacles, Trouble? I can give them to you next time.”

“Maybe. Are we tickling each other? Turning into werewolves?”

The flush deepens. This is a side of Conor no one else sees. A little boyish. Timid. I adore it. “It’s embarrassing, Maya.”

“You don’t have to tell me. But if you do, I might be able to make it come true.”

He huffs. Shakes his head. But after a minute, voice gravelly, he says, “I come home from work—”

“Stop. Too unrealistic.”

He pinches my knee, lightly. “I come home from work, and you’re there. At the table. Doing whatever it is that you do. Studying. Equations. Reading a novel. I have no idea.”

“At least you don’t think I split atoms for a living.”

His lips twitch. “You’re just doing your thing. The same stuff I’ve seen you do countless times in Eli’s kitchen.”

“But I’m naked?”

“No, you’re just…It’s my house. You’re in my house. And your stuff is around the place, scattered everywhere. Like you live there.”

“You’d never be able to get it up in the presence of clutter.”

He snorts, but he’s rock-hard. That wet spot, expanding.

“And then?”

“And then, you look up, and smile. Come to me. Welcome me home.”

I wait for him to continue. “And…?”

“I kiss you, and you kiss me back. And I close my arms around you, because I can. And you’re warm, and you like it, what I’m doing to you. I press you against the table and you’re soft under me and…” Conor sighs. Like just saying all this stuff is turning him on beyond belief. He reaches for his cock and holds the base tight.

“What happens next?”

“I’m usually finished before it escalates. Most times, really. But if I play it further, usually I take you to my room, and—”

“Conor.” I tilt my head, amused. “Are you saying that the peak of your erotic fantasies is doing it in a bed?”

His fingertips trace the pale skin of my thigh, the place where the muscle turns into fat. A touch so light, his fingers may just be hovering over me. “In the fantasy, you’re my girlfriend. My…More than that, maybe. I figured out a way to have you and also set you free. And you are—” He looks away, like out of all the embarrassments, this is the one that burns the brightest. “I’m not afraid to hurt you. You are mine, and used to me touching you. You welcome it. It’s…We have a life, Maya. That’s ours.”

You could have it, I think. Something tears inside me. You could have had it for the past three years, if you hated yourself just a little less.

“That sounds like a highly problematic fantasy,” I say, not sure whether I’m joking. “Am I older, in it? I don’t have the tragic past that makes me highly susceptible to the undue influence of father figures?”

His hand closes around my knee, warm. “You’re not. You’re just you.”

Heartbreaking, that he would change nothing about me. “It’s you who’s different, then. You have found a way to give me the world, and take me, too.”

He nods with some difficulty. All I want is to take this self-loathing man and make him happy.

Next to us, his phone lights up with a work call that he ignores in favor of lifting a hand to my rib cage. It hovers there until I say, “You may,” and then his thumb brushes around my nipple, softly, delicately, like it’s made of a highly explosive substance. When his cock twitches, I lean forward, not letting my hips make contact with his. The front of my panties is wet and slick. I’m sure I’ve soiled his sweats by now. “Do you want to know my fantasy?” I ask, rubbing my cheek against the scratchy surface of his throat.