Going Dark(78)
Thorn was back from the mousetrap dream and others he couldn’t recall. Turning, he found her face inches away, seeing the fine down on her cheeks brightened by the streaming sun. Light rippling on her skin.
He drew back an inch. Blinked. Her eyes were bemused. She reached out and touched the stubble on his cheek and with a finger traced his jawline as she had on his dock that day a year ago or more when she’d dropped by. Her fingernail crackling against the bristles.
“What is this?”
“This is me lying next to you.”
He opened his mouth, but she touched a shushing finger to his lips. “Twenty minutes. Do this for me.”
What he saw was the fourteen-year-old, the waif on his dock. The troubled eyes, her sad, bruised aura. “No, Leslie. No.”
“Because of the age difference?”
“That’s one thing.”
She slid her hand to the top button on his shirt, undid it. Smile gone, a serious look, a determined eagerness. “Doesn’t bother me you’re so damn old.”
He gripped her hand, halted it. “You’re not serious.”
“Dead serious. Since the first, your dock, the snappers, those long afternoons, the talks we had, I imagined this.”
Yes, he remembered the talks. Mostly Leslie’s terse retelling of nights in the trailer park, the rough, horny men who screwed her mother, leaving behind tiny bags of white powder, then sauntered down the hall to shake the knob on Leslie’s door. Wanting a slice of ripe dessert. She’d managed to keep them away, blocking the door with furniture. But someday it would happen. The door wouldn’t hold.
Once she’d mentioned a couple of names, guys who’d pounded and budged the door open. Those two Thorn tracked down, the first a redneck with gaudy jewelry and a cowboy hat, the second a black dude whose truck had giant wheels, loud exhausts, and fuck-you decals. Both sneered at him when he asked if what Leslie had told him was true. Both he left unconscious, broken teeth, bloody, the redneck’s right arm busted up, Thorn’s own knuckles shredded. Neither bothered her again.
“You think you owe me something? You’re wrong.”
“Not about owing. About wanting.” Her fingers trickled down the front of his shirt, slid along his belt.
He caught her wrist, held it firm. His goddamn prick hardening anyway. “It won’t work,” he said, but no longer believed it.
She pried free of his grasp, brushed a hand against his crotch, gripped its length through the cotton fabric. An appraising smile. “Seems to be working fine. For an old man.”
“Leslie, I understand what you’re trying to do.”
“You damn well better.”
“I’m going along on the attack. You don’t need to win me over.”
“Then just lie there and I’ll carry on without you.”
“Stop.”
“This is it,” she said. “This is our chance.”
“I don’t feel that way about you.”
“Doesn’t matter. I feel enough for both of us.”
“No, goddamn it.”
“Just a kiss. Grant me that. A kiss.”
Her mouth moved to his. Slowly, tempting. And he allowed that much. Believing this was an act, an attempt to finalize the deal. Bring him solidly into the fold. Confirm with their bodies that Thorn was committed.
Her lips grazed his, light and teasing, searching for a fit, elastic, Thorn resisting, his body taut, withheld. Then, goddamn it, okay, the kiss became real. Her tongue slipping in, seeking his. Her warmth, her sleek skin, the snug fit.
By fractions Thorn’s restraint melted, then melted more, until he didn’t care what her reasons were, didn’t care if this was a test, didn’t care about their age or their shared history or anything else. She was no longer that girl on his dock.
They worked in unison to make the kiss come alive, to disappear into each other. It had been so long. He’d lost count of the months of abstinence, and he was there with Leslie, rekindling old reflexes, warming up memories of other kisses as deep and exploratory, as briefly hesitant, then no longer so.
They breathed into each other, a mutual resuscitation, all reluctance gone, a blind fumbling of hands and thickening of breath, with mouths joined, the softness of her, the power just below the skin, Leslie Levine, a troubled waif, but now a woman who’d outgrown all that, gotten strong, a woman who knew her way, was making risky, bold decisions. This being one, an act committed in full daylight, the door of his childhood bedroom ajar.
She stripped off her shirt. No time for unbuttoning. She motioned for Thorn to raise his arms and she dragged his off. A rushed impatience as if something were appearing from a long way off, something coming fast toward them, a dark onrushing mass, and they must hurry before the certain collision, this woman, stronger than her slim body appeared, rolling upright and planting herself on him, his hands reaching out to cup her bare breasts, to learn their shape and weight, watching her eyes shut as she sat astride him, pants still on, Thorn fully hard, pushing into her crotch.