Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series Page 6
“Is that weird?” she asked him.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“When I was twenty-seven, almost ten years ago, right before I moved here, the same was true for me.”
She took out an apple wedge and toyed with it. “But you grew up in Wales, right? In Aberaeron?”
Her pronunciation was perfect and he tried not to imagine her practicing it.
“That’s right. And Aberaeron is tiny. My mum could call me home to tea from across town. I didn’t need a prospect from which to see my whole life, I could see my whole life from any point I stood in the village.”
“But you left.”
“I elected into a university training program in engineering after taking some time with prerequirements at a local college. I went to London for a year, then to Beijing for almost three.”
“Oh. Wow. I went to Toronto for a class trip in high school, and sometimes my parents took us kids to Pittsburgh to see my grandparents and the Mister Rogers exhibit at the Children’s Museum.”
“Any place can be exotic when you’re away from home.” He looked down and realized he had used the handle end of his fork to press a design of ropes and knots into the top of his Styrofoam pancake box—his hands distracted while he talked. Des reached over and traced over it with her fingers, softly.
“That’s so pretty. I could hang it up in my house and people wouldn’t even know it was a pancake box.”
“I’ll draw you something better than a doodle on a pancake box.” He closed his eyes, willed the blush away.
“You don’t have to, but I’d like that. Your carvings are so good I can’t believe they’re even real.”
“Let’s eat.” He resisted pushing the heel of his hand over his heart to make it slow down. “Is that all you have, then?”
She shook her head, like she was saying no, but then met his eyes, and hers cleared. “I mean, yeah. PB&J, favorite of six-year-olds and the long-term unemployed everywhere.”
He started popping open his boxes. Glanced up at the whitecaps on the lake. Let himself look at her again, tried not to count the number of freckles in the hollow of her throat. “I guess you’d better share with me, then.”
She touched her throat, like she knew where he was looking. “Pancake me,” she said. And he laughed. Helpless.
Chapter Six
Des watched Hefin pour syrup on a huge stack of pancakes. The syrup container was huge, and he obviously had every intention of using it all. He lifted each pancake in the stack with his fork as he poured, to get the syrup over every surface, and the amber stream spilled over his thumb.
He was totally going to lick his thumb.
And then she was going to lick him.
Which, wasn’t true, but when she sat next to him like this, the wind from the lake making his disobedient hair stand on end and his long-sleeved T-shirt rub against the lean muscles in his chest and the hollows under his collarbones, it felt true. It felt really, really true. It felt so true that when he set the syrup container down and brought his thumb to his mouth, to tuck under that overblown upper lip, and drew his thumb in and sucked off the syrup, she fisted her hand because she could sharply perceive that same suction bringing up the blood in her own thumb.
Bringing the blood up everywhere.
And then she was imagining him sucking the ends of her fingers, maybe biting them. She could see him picking the second container of syrup up, tearing her blouse open, yanking her bra down, pouring the syrup all over her chest, then licking her all over. Using his warm fingers to coat her nipples with syrup so he could lick those, too. Because she had caught him looking down her blouse earlier, and he looked twice, so A-cups obviously didn’t bother him.
He picked up the second container of syrup, and she made a sound.
“Oh, shite, sorry. Sweet tooth, remember? Since I’m sharing, you probably want some pancake to go with your syrup.”
“No, it’s fine. I mean, you should fix them how you like.” Because her pancake-to-syrup-ratio need was absolutely why she grunted when he picked up the other syrup.
Des was feeling hopeless. When she came into the library this morning, she was excited to start her new job, sure, and Carrie was just as nice as she had been the day before, and the work was simple. In fact, it was simple enough that she actually asked Carrie if she could try out a few redesigns to make what she was trying to do with the functionality of the teen program’s sites even better.
As she tinkered, she found she had no end of ideas, and it was nice to work on her own, without clients and deadlines breathing down her neck. She remembered that a friend in college was into design, and even thought about asking her to refresh her on some design software—some of the pages on the teen site looked a little tired.
But messing with code wasn’t what had her breathless when she walked in the building this morning. Last night, when she thought about Hefin, she didn’t even think about how he had helped her score a job. Last night, when she thought about Hefin, she didn’t even think about how he had witnessed her public breakdown, or that he had sat with her while she cried about her dad. Somehow, her mind had been more taken with how his eyelashes tangled at the corners, how his irises were as dark as his pupils.
She had called up how his breath had felt against her cheek and ear in the dark of the conference room, how her forearm had slid against his inner elbow. How he had put both fingers in his mouth to clean off the pastry cream after she took her half. And then, just like that, he had been with her in her bed, licking her, licking his fingers again until they were slick enough to work her over while his tongue was full inside her, tasting her.
She had curled her nails into the dripping mess of herself trying to re-create what she thought his callused fingers might feel like, the hair-fine scrapes and stings of them, and the warmth of that pain was exactly right. She was exactly right, fevered and sliding under the hard press of his fingers, his burning hot shoulders wet with sweat, and he had felt the muscles in her soft thighs cord tight against them.
His cock had been heavy and deliciously unrelieved where it rubbed in her sheets but he wasn’t going to stop, not ever, his tongue deep inside her, her hard clit indistinct under the rough skin of his circling fingertips. She had gone over then, her legs and belly shaking, and after she had floated away from Hefin’s body where she had summoned him between her legs, she found she had left herself so swollen she had to cant her thigh open to let the accumulated tightness work itself back to her heart.
“These are yours,” he said.
She blinked at him, bringing him into focus where he was so absurdly clothed, with the wind in his crimped hair and his squint on her face. She looked down. “Did you cut up my pancakes?”
“Jesus. Yes. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
“You were hoping I wouldn’t notice that my pancakes were in evenly cut, non-chokeable pieces?”
“Yes. Or that you wouldn’t say anything.”
“Are you afraid I’ll choke?”
“No. I …” He looked up, and she watched a redness creep from his ear, his temple. He had seemed so confident yesterday that his uncertainty and careful politeness around her, today, might have made her think he had been nothing more than a good Samaritan in the library, except she had not imagined the way he’d looked at her, sent a furtive glance under her blouse. “It’s just that it’s the way I do them up for myself, so the syrup gets all in, and I did mine and forgot not to do yours, and you had gone all quiet.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“Do you want half my sandwich? I’ll cut the crusts off for you.”
He laughed again, his sort of gruff bark of a laugh that he made to his chest like he wasn’t used to such an involuntary thing. Like it was impolite to laugh at her. “No, thank you.”
She forked in a mouthful of spongy pancakes, saturated with butter and syrup.
“Are these from The Windmill?”
“Of course. It’s a total Lakefield institution. Growing up, it was our birthday place.”
“I like the Amish pancake place near campus as well, but for their giant cinnamon buns. The ones with all the icing on.”
Now Des had to laugh. “Do you eat real food? Like, something other than sugar and flour and butter?”
Hefin smiled into his box of pancakes but then turned to her, still smiling. It was something, that smile. It made him even more beautiful of course, stretched his full upper lip so that a crease appeared in the dark stubble above it, carved those parentheses into his cheeks. But it also seemed rusty, made his eyes cast down as if he were shy. She thought he would prefer that she didn’t see it. “Have you heard of Potato Mountain?”
“No.”
“It’s in the Greek Village neighborhood, where all those student-apartment places are. They serve nothing but plates of potato mash and toppings. You can get anything to go over your mash—fried chicken, gravies, cheese, meat sauce, sausage.”
“Oh my God. That’s pothead food. You’re a pothead.”
“No, no. It’s brilliant. I get mine with chicken curry over.” He laughed into his chest again, and God, he was so cute, even if his eating habits were adolescent.
He took another bite of pancakes, closing his eyes. His lips pressed over the tines of his fork. He ate so neatly, but a crystalline drop of syrup sparkled in the sun at the corner of his mouth. She watched him take a long drink of tea, but the little drop remained.
“Hefin, here. You have syrup right here.” Des pointed to the corner of her own mouth.
Hefin reach up and brushed the opposite side. “Thanks.”
“No,” Des reached over this time and let her thumb swipe over the corner of his mouth. His whiskers flattened, then rose back up, like velvet nap, and she rubbed again. His mouth went soft, but she didn’t look into his eyes. Instead, she maintained her pretense. The syrup had instantly melted when she gathered it, and now it made her thumb drag and slip and she rubbed up and down.
It would be better if she could use her tongue.
She forced herself to pull her hand away and met his eyes. He was squinting, and now she knew what he might be thinking when he looked at her like that. He was thinking it would be better if she had used her tongue.
“You get it?” His voice dropped into that near-whisper range.
“Yeah.” And without even thinking she cleaned her thumb with her mouth, the thumb that had just left his mouth. It was sweet, but there was another flavor there, too. She felt the prickle of millions of capillaries open in her face, to rush the blood through, but she also felt a tight and pinching prickle in her nipples. Between her legs.
“God, Destiny,” is what he said. It fit. He watched her thumb in her mouth and called on God, then whatever else might happen.
He reached up to the corner of his mouth where her thumb had rubbed and touched the place with his fingertips. She didn’t let herself look away from his eyes as she drew her thumb completely from her lips. Then, because her body told her there was no choice, none at all, she slid her arm across the tabletop and wrapped her hand around his wrist. She gripped it hard, as a counterpoint to the pressure in her chest, in the lowest part of her belly.
Then she felt his hand grip her wrist, like she was readying to haul him from the edge of a cliff. His hand was rough and coarse, exactly as she imagined. Bigger though. Hotter. He easily encircled her wrist and upper forearm.
His squint widened into one of his deep, soft looks, and now she knew what that one meant, too. That he was moments from closing the distance between them. She didn’t care what gap narrowed first—the one between their bodies or the one between their lips and necks and cheeks.
She leaned forward, and the hand near his mouth left it to meet her body and grip her shoulder.
It felt like they were holding each other down. The wind over the knoll had picked up and if not for the four points of warm contact they made on each other’s bodies, they would blow away.
She wanted to explore his arm, his wrist, his hand, but something about the way he gripped her, pinned her, argued against moving at all. Even a little. She didn’t feel like squirming, or restless. She felt expectant. She felt as if she was vibrating at some resonant frequency from her thighs to her chest and it was rearranging everything inside.
Then she did drop her gaze from his. To his mouth, to the jut of his upper lip, that strange upside-down mouth of his she wanted to feel everywhere. Licking his thinner lower lip had become an obsession now, and as soon as she had the thought, his thumb over her wrist started up, back and forth, and the hand on her shoulder gripped tighter.
“You licked your lips,” he said, his voice cracking. The words penetrated the heavy vibrations in her middle and forced them lower, focused them. She wiggled now. She couldn’t not wiggle.
“I want to lick yours, I think.” She whispered, too. Wiggled a little more in his grip, lost one whole side of her body to goose bumps because of that thumb rubbing and scratching over her wrist.
“The first day I saw you in the library you had your brown coat on, the one with the dolphin patch on the elbow.” He moved in so that he said this to her cheek, but not close enough so that anything else touched. She kind of blanked out with his words. He’d been watching her, too.
“There’s a hole there, in the elbow. That’s why I sewed on the patch.” She couldn’t believe she couldn’t think of anything better to say, but it seemed more important to breathe in the smell of his neck, to lean into his grip so he knew he would meet no resistance from her.
“Your hair was in two plaits, one behind each ear. And you were wearing big snow boots. You slid a little, in a puddle of melted snow, and I steadied you, at your elbow.” He slid the hand he had on her shoulder, slowly, to her elbow, cupped it, as if he was demonstrating.
She lost the other side of her body to goose bumps.
“I didn’t know that was you. You were wearing coveralls. You had on a mask thing.”
“But you saw me later, didn’t you?”
She closed her eyes. All the mornings she snuck long looks at him in the work space, memorized how he gripped a panel of wood as his chisel made a long curling cut. He knew. Of course. “I did.”
“It’s been since then.” He turned his head a little more into the crook of her neck, still not touching. But he was holding her up now. She was boneless. Formless. No edges. The breeze and the almost hot sun loosened up everything but where he held her wrist, her elbow, her ear with his breath.
“Since then, what?” She tried to say this right against his ear, so she could feel the curve of it against her lips, but he tipped a little away. So she blew, soft, just the softest warm breath she could manage, and she directed it over his lobe, his neck. His goose bumps trailed in the wake of her breath, and the look of that made her clit feel like it was cutting her, a sharpness surrounded by a rich throb.
How long would it take, just like this, to come?
“It’s been since then that I’ve thought about kissing you.”
Not long at all.
She inhaled. She couldn’t tell if the sawdust smell was his neck or the firs all around them on the hill. She forced herself to pull back, just a little, until she felt him relax his hands where he held her, then she arched forward and rested her cheek against his neck. “How do you kiss me, when you think about it?”
This time, her words moved directly over his skin with her lips. She restrained herself from kissing, licking, but it was so hard, especially when he cleared his throat like that and she could feel the vibration on her mouth.
He let go of her wrist, and the sweat and heat that had been under his hand
was brushed off her skin by the breeze. He used a single finger to hook all the hair away from her nape and drag it so it fell over her shoulder. Then rasped a single finger around and around the bump on the top of her spine.
“Here,” he whispered. “When I let myself think about it, I kiss you here.”
She smiled against his neck. “This is fun.”
“You like torture?”
“Yeah.” She wrapped her freed arm around his side and did her best to snuggle in. He was so steely, it didn’t seem possible he could also be so warm. He was kind of skinny. With the sides of her fingers she skated over each of his ribs.
“You’re tickling me, too.”
“No. Hugging. This is a hug.”
“Ah.”
“It’s a hug for yesterday. For not freaking out when I cried and for telling Carrie about me.”
“What’s the nuzzling for?”
She smiled again and rubbed her nose over his pulse. “That’s for being so pretty.”
Suddenly, his nose was against her neck, his lips against her pulse. “I should nuzzle you too, then.”
But his words against her skin were too much, and when she thought she was just catching her breath, she actually vocalized a groan. “Hefin,” she thought she said, but then felt something wet and hot right where her neck and shoulder met. “Is that …”
It was his lips, turned out and opened so his tongue met her skin, too. She fisted his T-shirt, he gathered her hair in his hand and used it to position her head back so more of her neck was available to him. His mouth barely moved, just kissed and opened. Slowly. Her skin roughened and tightened, more and more with each heartbeat. Her heart felt like it was gasping for something to fill it, as all her blood had pooled away into her sit bones, the tissues of her sex, even into the pulsing crease of her ass.
“You’re sweet,” he whispered.
“Then I’m in trouble, right?” She hoped so. She hoped she was as addicting as cinnamon rolls and pancakes and cream-filled donuts. As every bad thing he had ever tasted.