I circle her clit twice with my thumb and almost instantly, Ruby lets go, her face against mine as she moans and writhes, her whole body trembling with the release of force.
She moans, she whimpers, she kisses me hard and says my name as she bites my lip. I can feel her pussy clenching and fluttering against my cock, and it nearly sends me over the edge myself.
Before she’s even finished, her hands are moving down my bare chest, over my stomach, reaching the waistband of my pants. She grasps my cock through the flannel and I groan out loud, grabbing her harder than I meant to.
“Come on, Jax,” she gasps, breathless. “Please.”
I want to. Dear God I want to, but it’s not right. I can’t do it like this, on a whim, at my kitchen table. Ruby deserves better than this.
“I promise not to hurt you,” she murmurs, her voice teasing, and I capture her mouth again. As if I’m the one afraid of getting hurt.
She bucks against me, her hand tightening. Then it’s joined by the other and before I know it, she’s pulling at the elastic waistband of my pants and then her hand is around my cock with nothing at all between us.
Ruby presses my shaft up against her panties, damp with desire, and I nearly lose control. She starts to move her panties aside, and I almost don’t stop her. More than anything I want to sink myself into her sweet heat, hear her soft, breathy moans as I fill her up. I want to feel her come on my cock, her legs wrapped around my waist as I lose myself in her.
But instead, I wrap my hand around hers, pull her head down, and kiss her again as she strokes my cock.
I’m already right on the brink, primed for orgasm. She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t beg me to take her again, which is good because my self-control is nearly gone.
I only take a couple of seconds, I’m so tightly wound already. When I come, I come hard, my whole body jerking and shuddering as Ruby keeps stroking me, like she wants every last drop of what I’ve got to give her.
When I finish, I sink back in the wooden kitchen chair and let Ruby’s hand go. We’re both messy, though her shirt got most of it.
She leans in, and I brush the wild hair off of her face before she kisses me, her eyes full of questions. I don’t answer any of them, just kiss her long and slow, letting my hands peruse her body, savoring the warmth of her on top of me.
After a long time, she sits up straight, and she’s just about to say something when her eyes focus on something behind my head and she frowns.
“Is something —" she begins, and then realization dawns over her and she leaps off of me. “Shit! The pancakes!”
Chapter Ten
Ruby
I rush over the stove, grab the handle of the skillet, and dump it into the sink. A single, large pancake slides out obligingly and lands with a wet plop next to a single dirty mug. Jax sidles up behind me, still shirtless, only now he’s laughing.
“Well, I’m surprised,” he admits.
I don’t answer for a moment, examining the pancake in the sink. It’s now slightly soggy, in addition to burned on one side and still raw on the other.
It’s not a good pancake.
“I guess that wasn’t such an emergency,” I admit. “I could have walked over here.”
“I didn’t even think you had the stove on,” Jax admits.
“It was on low,” I say defensively. “Because I didn’t want to burn it.”
He rests his chin on top of my head. After a moment, I realize he’s laughing.
“How about you go clean yourself up?” he finally suggests. “I’ll take care of breakfast.”
Being with Jax is easy in a way I hadn’t expected. Not that I’d expected anything — he was someone I saw once in a blue moon when I made the drive to visit my grandma. Okay, he was someone that I tended to fantasize about, but I never had any reason to think that my fantasies might ever intersect with reality.
And yet, here I am. Eating eggs and bacon and, yes, pancakes at the table where half an hour ago I begged him to be my first.
Somehow, it’s not awkward. Even though he turned me down without actually, technically turning me down. Even though I feel the slightest bit rejected that he doesn’t want me want me.
I decide I’m not going to think about it. And if we do somehow wind up naked and in the throes of wild passion again, I’ll keep my mouth shut and not bring it up again.
There’s no sign of Viper — or Eugene, whatever his name is — again that day.
Jax makes me lunch and dinner, basically not even letting me in the kitchen after the pancake fiasco. He’s a good cook, which surprises me for some reason — I didn’t expect a bachelor who lives alone in the forest to make perfectly-rare steak with a side of braised greens and whipped garlic butter, but he does.
And it’s delicious.
And he has me for dessert, this time on his leather couch in front of a roaring fire. Then he eats me out again an hour later, when we go to bed.
We pass a couple of days the same way. We eat meals that Jax cooks, we hang out in his cabin, we fool around like teenagers on lovers’ lane except way, way better. I don’t ask him to take my virginity again and he doesn’t bring it up, either, and even though every time he looks at me I swear I ache for him, it’s fine.
Really. It’s fine. I don’t feel mildly rejected at all.
The third night, after dinner, Jax answers a knock on his door while I’m washing up. I can barely hear what’s being said and when he gets back, he stares off into the distance for a long time, until I ask what’s wrong.
“That was the police,” he says, sighing.
“Did they find him?”
He just shakes his head. I come over to him, sit on his lap, and stroke his hair. Since I don’t have any of my own clothes, I’m borrowing his, and wearing boxers and an old t-shirt about five sizes too big for me.
“At least I get to stay here with you, right?” I say, snuggling into his warm chest.
He strokes my back, seeming a little absent-minded, his other hand on my knee. But for once he isn’t greedily sliding his hand upward, stroking my inner thigh with his rough thumb. He’s just sitting there.
“They want to send you back to your father’s house,” he finally says. “Instead of keeping you here.”
“Oh,” I say quietly.
I know my father is worried, in his absent sort of way. We’ve been texting back and forth since I’ve been here, so he knows I’m alive and safe and perfectly fine. Obviously, he doesn’t know what else I’ve been up to.
“They think it’s safe?”
“That’s what their informant is saying,” he tells me. “Apparently no one’s seen Viper since the incident. They think he ran off completely, to Mexico or Canada or something.”
There’s an odd sadness in his voice, something I can’t quite place, his eyes suddenly far away.
I put my face to his, hold him close.
“Jax,” I whisper. “We can still see each other. I don’t live too far away.”
He smiles, but I can tell that the smile doesn’t touch his heart.
“Of course,” he says. “I know, sweetheart.”
Chapter Eleven
Jax
That night, I just hold Ruby, and that’s all. Even though I still want her more than I can put into words, even though I’m always aching for her still-virginal body, I don’t do anything.
I just hold her, because tomorrow she’ll be gone.
I know she doesn’t live that far away. I know that she used to come into the road house every so often, that there’s no reason we can’t keep seeing each other.
Except that she’s twenty and I’m more than ten years older than her. When she came into the road house, I wasn’t even allowed to sell her alcohol, just the cherry coke she always drank.
Ruby’s going to want to find someone her own age. She’ll go back to school, meet another twenty-year-old, and I’ll be forgotten. I’m just a blip in her past.
That’s why I haven’t taken her virginity. That, and I don’t deserve it.
Ruby rolls over in my arms, sighing in her sleep. She’s so beautiful right now I can hardly stand it. I can’t comprehend how this willowy slip of a girl has taken so much of my heart in the past few days, but she has.
It’s hers. I’m hers.
Before, when I saw her sometimes, I thought I was obsessed. I thought that my yearning for this girl who I barely knew would pass, and I’d get over her, but I was wrong.
I didn’t get over her.
I’ll never get over her for as long as I live. Once Ruby leaves my life, I know that I’m going to look back on these days forever.
It must be one o’clock in the morning before I finally drift off, even though I’m trying not to. I want to stay awake tonight so that I can memorize everything about Ruby.
The way she looks when she sleeps. The way she breathes softly, eyelashes fluttering through a dream. The way she curls onto her side, dark hair fanning over the pillow, the soft skin of her neck beating with her pulse.
I don’t ever want to forget a single moment of this.
I wake up suddenly and completely to dead silence. It’s dark in the cabin, a blackness so thick I feel like I could swim through it, but instinctively I know something is wrong.
I just don’t know what. Ruby’s still asleep in my arms, her face buried in the pillow, limbs askance. She’s taking up at least two-thirds of my king size bed, but I don’t mind.