I lose my grip on him as he moves back and climbs off the mattress. He kicks off his shorts and boxers, then removes a condom from his wallet. The bed sinks beneath me as he kneels between my legs to roll it on. I’m feverish, slightly dazed, by the sight of him between my thighs. He is perfect everywhere.
And as exposed as I am right now with my legs wide, the way he looks at me—hungry, fierce—makes me feel sexy and powerful rather than vulnerable.
He leans over and places a kiss on my stomach, then between my breasts, and braces himself above me, pressing between my legs, watching my face earnestly, as if this matters. It feels almost too intimate. When he starts to thrust inside me, I close my eyes.
“Don’t,” he says. “I want you to see exactly who you’re with.”
“I do,” I whisper, and he pushes in. Slowly. I feel every inch of him as he continues until he’s fully inside me—so thick and perfect that the pleasure overwhelms me. My eyes want to shut, but I’m glad they don’t, because it means I get to see his reaction too: his long lashes dipping for a moment, the soft, inaudible “god” he murmurs as he slides in the rest of the way.
I get to watch him suck in air between his teeth as he pulls back, and, finally, his own eyes shutting when he fills me again. His mouth dips to my neck then, presses to my skin. “Now you’re the one who isn’t looking,” I say breathlessly as he pulls out.
“There was never a moment’s doubt who I was with,” he replies.
Ah. I love that. I love that I know it’s true, I love that it sounds like something he’d rather not have admitted in the first place, that he isn’t saying it in some attempt to charm me but simply because he doesn’t want to lie.
It’s a tight fit, the two of us. If I wasn’t so wet, it would be too tight, but instead it’s delicious, that friction.
There’s an exquisite ache in my center and it’s growing. I want to do this all night, moving as slowly as possible toward the moment when it all breaks open, but I’m already too far gone.
I wrap my legs around him, pulling myself closer, and it’s as if that ache in my center has taken on a life of its own. “Faster,” I beg.
He winces. “Jesus, I’m gonna come so hard.”
But he complies, drawing back and slamming into me. I see stars. Again and again he does it, faster and deeper with every stroke. I cling to him, desperately holding on. And then I can no longer keep my eyes open and light explodes behind my eyelids. I come, gasping his name, my head falling backward, only vaguely aware of him thrusting hard and then holding there, shuddering above me, seconds later.
He falls by my side, wincing as he pulls out and ties off the condom. And then he tugs me against him.
“I’ve wanted that for so long that if you’d asked me an hour ago, I’d have told you it couldn’t possibly live up to my expectations,” he says. “Yet it was better.”
I peer up at him. “I have to assume you didn’t want it for that long,” I reply. “You’re still the guy whose primary concern a few weeks ago was where I would vomit.”
He laughs. “I’ve wanted you since the first night I saw you,” he says. “Last summer, at the party.”
“You acted like you hated me at that party.”
His mouth curves up just a hint. An almost smile that is rueful and apologetic at the same time. “Sometimes,” he says, pulling the sheets over us both, “it’s easier to hate something than admit you’re just pissed off you’ll never have it.”
And with that said, we’re both remembering why he thought he could never have it. Does he feel guilty? Because I do, even if Six did pretty much everything wrong.
“Where do your parents think you are?” I ask.
He runs a hand through his hair. “I said I was out with friends,” he says. “I hate keeping secrets but my mom can never know about this. She still has it in her head that Joel and I will be close one day. I think, mostly, she wants him to have someone to lean on when they’re gone. She’d be devastated if she knew.”
I force myself to smile. There’s no reason what he’s saying should hurt. I guess a part of me wonders if it’s entirely for Beth’s sake that he wants to keep it a secret. I’m hardly the sort of girl his buddies from med school seek out.
“I won’t say anything,” I tell him. “Jumping from one brother to the next wouldn’t do my public image a lot of good anyway.”
This really can’t go anywhere, but it only occurs to me now that I’ll probably never see him again after he leaves my room. He lives in some awful, war-torn country and has no plans to leave and if he did plan to leave, he’d have to lie to everyone he knows to make anything between us happen.
He raises himself on his forearm, pushing the hair away from my face. “I really like you, Drew. If I wasn’t already leaving…I’m not sure I’d be able to stay away.”
If he wasn’t already leaving, I’m not sure I’d have let this happen in the first place. But that’s a little too much truth for this moment, and the clock is ticking.
So instead, I pull him toward me and try to forget this ever has to end.
33
JOSH
It’s hard to believe I looked forward to this meeting in DC a few weeks ago. Yes, I knew even then it would be tedious, full of politicians attempting to sound earnest, like they really care about the state of Somalian refugee camps when they can barely care long enough to listen to me speak. But I was excited by the possibilities it offered. With more funding, we could improve security enough to get a decent medical team in place, if nothing else.
Right now, though, even that possibility pales beside the memory of Drew stretched out in bed Monday morning, naked beneath a thin sheet.
What would she say if I told her I needed to see her again before I leave? She’d probably panic.
We’ve exchanged a few texts since I left her cottage four days ago. Casual, funny texts when what I want to do is write her every minute of every day. I want to tell her that I can’t get Sunday night out of my head and that I felt obsessed with her before then, and now it’s like I’m never going to get a full breath again if I don’t manage to see her.
The morning session ends and afterward is the standard bullshit lunch in the Senate dining room, where phones are forbidden and the menu looks like something from 1940—every dish involving meat and gravy.
“I heard a rumor,” says the senator beside me, “that your brother plays guitar for Breaking Milk.”
Heads lift, and suddenly I’m an object of interest at the table.
I sigh. What’s wrong with our society when my idiot brother is fascinating but the plight of starving children and amputees without appropriate medical equipment is too boring to maintain interest? “Yeah,” I reply, cutting into my pot roast. “He is.”
“Ohmygod,” says the staffer across the table. She’s in her late twenties and seemed like a reasonable person until now, with her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. “He was just in Hawaii. Were you with him?”
I attempt to smile, but I imagine it looks more like a flinch. “Yeah, family trip.”