My fingers brush his hip instead, and the chessboard in my mind disintegrates.
His other hand finds my waist, closing the gap between us. The feeling of being pressed against him is somewhere between bliss and torture. A small sound sighs out of me. He doesn’t tease me for it. Instead his hands cut a slow path down my sides, tucking each inch of me against him: chest, stomach, hips flush, all my softest parts against all his hardest, my thighs settling loose around his hips. His thumbs catch on the curves of my hips, and a gravelly hum rumbles through him.
My nipples pinch against his skin, and his arms tighten across my back.
We’re both silent, like any word could break the spell of the silver moonlight.
Our lips catch lightly once, then draw apart, slip together a little deeper. His hands follow the curve of my back lower, curling around me, squeezing me to him, rolling his hips into mine.
My mouth feels like it’s melting under his, like I’m wax and he’s the burning wick down my center. One of his hands curls around my jaw, the other sweeping up to cup my breast as my thighs wrap tight around him. My breath catches against his mouth when his thumb rolls across my nipple. He hitches me higher, everything to my belly button above the water now, exposed to the moonlight, and he’s looking, touching, tasting his way across me.
My brain grapples for control of my short-circuiting body. “Should we think about this?”
“Think?” He says it like he’s never heard the word. Another hungry, stomach-flipping kiss erases it from my vocabulary too. My hands twist into his hair. His mouth moves down the side of my throat, teeth sinking into my collarbone.
I’m trying to think my way through this, but it feels like I’m a passenger in a very willing body.
Charlie teases against my ear, “You should never wear clothes, Nora.” My laugh dies in my throat as he pins me against one of the flat rocks at the edge of the water, my hips locking around his, sensation flaming through my thighs at the friction between us, at the push of his stomach and his erection shifting against me through our underwear.
Charlie kisses like no one I’ve ever been with. Like someone who takes the time to figure out how things work.
Every tilt of my hips, arch of my spine, shallow breath guides him, landmarks on a map he’s making of my body.
He hums my name into my skin. It sounds as much like a swear as when I slammed into him at Poppa Squat’s, his voice sizzling through me until I feel like a struck tuning fork.
His lips drag down my throat to my chest, his breath ragged as he draws me into his mouth. His fingers circle my wrists against the rock, our hips moving in a hungry rhythm.
“Shit,” he hisses, but at least this time, he’s not slingshotting away from me. His hands are still everywhere. His mouth hasn’t left my skin. “I don’t want to stop.”
My mind’s still half-heartedly warring for control. My body makes the unilateral decision to say, “Then don’t.”
“We have to talk about this first,” he says. “Things are complicated for me right now.” And yet we’re still clamoring for each other. Charlie’s hands raze over my thighs, squeezing so hard I might bruise. My nails are in his back, urging him close. His warm mouth skims over my shoulder, his tongue and teeth finding my pulse at the base of my throat.
I nod. “Then talk.”
Another sharp kiss, his teeth hard against my lip, his hands hard against my ass. “It’s hard to think in words right now, Nora.”
His hands wind into my hair, his mouth slipping against the corner of mine, his breath shallow and frantic. I lift myself against him and one of his hands curls tight against my spine, his groan crackling through me like a dozen bolts of lightning heading straight to my center.
Everything else is briefly obliterated as I roll myself against him, and he returns the favor, the friction between us electric.
“God, Nora,” he hisses.
Something like I know slips out of me, right into his mouth. His fingers dig under the lace at the sides of my hips, burrowing into my skin. I’ve never felt someone else’s frustration so palpably; I’ve never been so frustrated. I’m seeing spots, everything lost behind a wall of need.
And then my phone rings from the rocks.
All at once, reality crashes in from all sides, a rock slide of thoughts my lust has been holding back. I push back from Charlie, gasping out, “Dusty!”
He blinks at me through the dark, chest heaving. “What?”
“Shit! No! No!” I swim for the rocks, the ringer echoing through the dark.