One of his hands is on my waist, the other skating across my cheek. I’m overwhelmed by his touch, the way it’s both achingly gentle and a contained kind of pressure. Every place he touches me starts a mini-inferno, and I make a noise of surprise as he kisses me hungrier, then hungrier. His mouth slides against mine, warm, firm, purposeful. I feel like I’m getting devoured.
“For the record.” Small kiss, big kiss. “I’ve barely gotten a thing done at work since I learned what it’s like to sleep next to you.”
“No?” I pant.
“No. You are quickly becoming the best distraction I’ve ever encountered.”
“I’m sorry.”
He sucks on the side of my neck and mumbles, “I’m not.”
I start to unbutton his shirt. He smells clean and cottony and perfect, like a rainy vacation rental on your first day.
“Can you describe to me,” Alex rasps, “in a bit more detail.” He’s looking down at my fingers working his shirt open. “What exactly you meant when you said, Other things that follow kissing, on occasion?”
I pause and look up at him. “I meant that I want to have sex with you.”
He nods, staring at my swollen lips. “Thank you for clarifying.”
The next thing I know, I’m being carried to his bed. We land on his sheets in a heap of half-torn-off clothes and newly formed love bites.
More kissing, which Alex seems content to prolong more than any guy I’ve ever hooked up with. Probably because he’s better at it than any guy I’ve ever hooked up with. The way Alex is kissing me puts all other experiences of foreplay to shame, using his teeth and tongue to mark my skin.
“Beautiful,” he sighs, his capable hands rubbing at my waist, gripping it in his palms, moving my body this way and that. Clothes are removed, slowly, lazily, and I feel practically strung out, high off the arousal he’s already managed to induce. My silk pants and small cotton T-shirt are discarded. Alex watches my eyes, waiting for some signal to stop, slow down, speed up, or just kiss me again.
“Kiss me again,” I say.
He smiles easily, his lips a cherry-red color, and obliges for only a moment before he starts kissing down the length of my stomach. I lie there, staring at the ceiling, feeling like I’m the center of his whole universe. Every kiss he presses against me is reverent, every word like a prayer, and I wonder to myself, Is this hotter than it should be because we’re coworkers, or is it really just that hot?
The groan I hear when his lips push against my thigh makes me gasp. His thumb traces the inside of my knee, and it’s everything. There’s a greedy look in his dark eyes I can’t describe as anything other than the most flattering feeling I have ever, ever felt. It flips a switch of confidence inside me; I yank him up and turn us sideways. Biting my lip, I work up the courage to put my hands on him.
This whole experience feels better since we’re sober, but it’s scarier for that reason, too. My knuckles trail down his body, rubbing at his chest, dipping into his waistband. Alex unleashes a strangled huff against my neck. I haven’t touched anyone like this in years. His lashes are stark against his cheekbones as his eyes flutter closed, which I take as a good sign, and he mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like Imagined this.
I blush, freezing up. Alex’s eyes snap open to reveal large black pupils, a wicked challenge in them. But then he kisses me hard, ending it for both of us, and I mumble something about Can we please have sex now, and Alex mumbles something like Hell fucking yes. He grabs a condom from his nightstand, and our foreheads rest against each other as he slips it on. He palms my butt, pushes into me, and kisses me at the same time.
For a moment, it’s still, his thumbs brushing my cheeks. My legs wrap around his waist. I try and fail to do much of anything helpful as he slowly, slowly begins to work himself against me in a delirious kind of perfection.
One thrust. Two. By the third, we’re both shaking. He pushes all the way inside, and a fleeting thought burns through me—there and then gone—that this feels better and more important, more vital, more permanent, than any sex I’ve ever had.
But also, now really isn’t the time to get in my head about it.
My fingers grasp at his back. Every thrust is punctuated with a dreamy sigh in my ear. I’m shivering and melting at the same time, and Alex is paying careful attention to it, figuring out what I like and how he can do more of it.
“This.” His voice is disjointed. He’s looking down at me with hooded eyes. “Is so, so good for me, Casey.” As if he really, truly needs me to know.
“Me too,” I pant, my vocabulary debased.
“It was all worth it,” he jerkily mumbles, his head dropping beside mine until his mouth is at my ear. “I knew you’d be worth it. Every email, every glare.”
“How do you know I wasn’t working you up?” I try to joke.
“Don’t think I’d have minded,” he replies. “What do you need?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me,” he demands.
“Just this.”
We are so close, and his body is landing against mine just right, and I’ve already been worked up by him for half an hour plus seven whole weeks, and it shows. I come undone seconds later, and Alex kisses me through it, hips still working. Based on his expression as he watches me, I think he’s in awe at how little it took me to get there, and yep, I am, too.
I hold his head against my neck when he collapses on top of me, spent. He swears against my skin, and that noise, combined with this feeling, morphs into something permanent that lodges beneath my rib cage.
At that inconvenient moment, I ruin all sexual aftershocks with this thought: Holy crap, I just had mind-blowing sex with Elevator Man! The playacting we spun for Jack and Jill came true after all, which means we’re a living, breathing cliché, and I’m not mad about it?
I start to laugh. It’s quiet, lacking the oxygen it truly needs, but the laugh still works its way out of me against my will. I’m embarrassed about it for all of two seconds before Alex is laughing with me, kissing along my ear and throat.
He rolls onto his back and pulls me halfway on top of him, grabbing my leg and hiking it up across his stomach. We lie there, catching our breath and finding our bearings, and I let myself bask in the comfortable bliss of it all before the inevitable departure that follows casual sex ruins it.
After a few minutes of me thinking Alex actually fell asleep, he says, “I just need to state, for the record, that we can do that again, Casey Maitland, whenever you want, however often you want, until the day you leave for London.”
A noise between a hum and a sigh works its way out of me. “Okay. Let’s go again.”
“Okay.” He pushes my leg off his stomach.
“Alex, I was just jo—”
But he rolls back on top of me and kisses me quiet.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The thing about sex is, it’s great until it ends （honestly, they should put that on the abstinence pamphlets we always got handed on campus, which would later get defaced with dick drawings and left on classroom desks）。 But here’s the other thing about sex: afterward, things get really awkward, really fast, and half the time, the only way to stifle it is to just leave, bucking up and putting on your walk-of-shame face as you head out the door.