17
Trevor is craving steak. His steak.
I stand by the back of the couch, clinging to it like a life raft, watching as Ben sorts through the food in the bags.
Or, more accurately, watching Ben’s ass as it hypnotically moves in those loose, low-hanging light blue jeans, showing a hint of his ass crack.
Yes, he’s not wearing underwear. Yes, I noticed the second he came down the stairs and headed to the kitchen. Yes, it’s all that’s been on my mind: sex, butt, and Ben.
It has to be deliberate. He is trying to drive me crazy, and it is working. Just that little tease of his crack makes my cock swell in my already too-tight underwear.
This is not a healthy combination to endure if I want to honor my plan of behaving and treating him like my boss, nothing more.
Not to mention my stupid freak-out about him checking out other guys. Really? I just agreed to be nothing but boss and intern with him, and then I go off like a jealous boyfriend?
I shake off all of my worries (or pretend to) and decide to play it cool. I think about what an actual, totally-platonic situation with an employee at his boss’s place might be like. With that in mind, I calmly stroll over to the kitchen counter where he sorts the two bags of food the delivery boy dropped off.
“If you had ordered already before I arrived,” I ask, “then how do you have enough for both of us? I don’t have to stay, really.”
“I always order too much. You see these two bags?” He lifts his gaze to me, his eyes piercing and bright. “Besides, I can … put down a lot of food.”
Everything he says bleeds with innuendo. Like, does he mean that he literally eats a lot of food? Or is he actually talking about being able to sexually “take” a lot? And why is either answer as sexy as the other?
“Sit down,” he tells me, his voice deep. “I set a place for you.”
Yes, he did. And I had watched with hungry eyes as he set that spot for me, placing the silverware. When he did that, I watched with such focused attunement on his backside, the toned muscles of which showed in excruciating detail through that fitted t-shirt of his. His bulging biceps are seriously torturing those sleeves so badly, I’m surprised they haven’t torn yet.
And his ass. Oh my God, his ass. The loose, light blue jeans he’s wearing are already hanging low enough to show the top of his firm, pert cheeks—his shirt mercifully cut just above his waist so that his butt is on perfect display for me. But when he had reached over the table to set down a fork and knife, I got such a generous front row seat to his butt as it moved. I mean, I could see the tops of either cheek like two perfect, sculpted humps of smooth, inviting muscle.
How the hell am I supposed to focus on anything else??
I’m like a preadolescent all over again, hunting jock butts in the locker room after gym class. I feel so out of control and primal, the way I yearn for him.
It’s almost too much to take.
I blink away my dirty thoughts and give a distracted nod at the table. “Who’s the, um … third table setting for?”
“Lance.”
I quirk an eyebrow. “Who?”
“You’ve already forgotten? My dog. Lancelot. Trouble is,” he goes on, smirking as he nods toward the stairs, “I don’t think he’s going to be up for coming down to eat. He’s not very trusting or social, I think I warned you. Lance!” he calls out, his strong, sexy voice booming. “Food’s here! Your favorite!”
We both look up at the banister. No dog appears.
“He eats steak?” I ask incredulously.
“No. The chef makes him a special plate. I’ll bring it up to him later,” Ben decides with a shrug, then turns halfway toward me. “Go ahead. Either of the other spots are fine.” He turns back to the counter, slowly filling our plates as his sexy wide back faces me. Naturally, I become quickly hypnotized once again, watching him longingly. Ben must sense it because after a moment, he looks over his shoulder, catches me staring slack-jawed, then teasingly adds, “Nothing to be afraid of. My forks don’t bite.”
It’s not the forks I’m afraid that bite. I keep my thoughts in my head, give him a curt nod, then take a seat at the table. The chair is a ridiculously comfortable improvement from the stiff wooden ones that creak at Elijah’s apartment.
Seconds later, Ben brings two dishes of the most gorgeously plated pasta and steak I have ever seen. The aroma is intoxicating, rich, and eye-rollingly succulent. Like Pavlov’s dog, I salivate the second the plate is set before me.
It’s astonishing, how he’s so instantly forced me to trade one appetite for another.
Of course that appetite is traded right back when he takes his seat and my eyes meet his. There’s nothing decent about his dark, hungry gaze. He undresses me with his eyes, stripping me of everything I have and know. Ben grins crookedly, gripping his fork and knife like he plans to eat me for dinner instead.
Then, in a voice deep and gravelly, he says, “Bon appétit.”
“Th-Thank you,” I choke out.
And we begin to cut into our steaks.
The first bite explodes with flavor in my mouth. It’s so good, I can’t help but close my eyes as I chew, savoring every bit of the juice that coats my tongue. I swallow it in seconds. When I cut and help myself to a second bite, it’s twice as good as the first, and an involuntary moan hops out of my throat. A third makes its way to my fork, then past my lips. Oh my God, this is some kind of heaven.
When I look up, Ben’s eyes are all on me, watching, amused, and his first tiny square of steak remains speared at the end of his fork, uneaten.
I smirk at him. “Well, go on and eat your steak, too,” I tease him. “This isn’t the Trevor show.”
He grins. “I beg to differ, but alright.” He brings the bite to his teeth—yes, his teeth before his tongue—and then I watch that lucky bite disappear past his lips. When he chews, his whole jaw moves slowly and sensually, its muscles flexing and tightening. He closes his eyes too, savoring it. It’s entrancing, the way his lips squirm, showing evidence of his tongue as it wrestles and works the piece of meat in his mouth, devouring it skillfully. He seems like an expert in … working pieces of meat with his mouth.
And now I’m thinking about blowjobs. Perfect.
I pull my attention back to my plate like yanking the leash of a stubborn dog, cutting myself another bite, then another. The meat is tender and falls apart in my mouth. The bed of pasta beneath is coated in the delicious juice from the steak, and when I twist a helping onto my fork and bring it to my tongue, a whole new set of flavors, mouthwatering and savory, crash through my body and fulfill cravings I didn’t know I had.
And I can’t stop.
It isn’t long before I’m scraping an empty plate, putting every little bit of broken pasta and scrap of meat I can find past my lips.
“Good?”
I lift my chin, alarmed, as if his one spoken word just yanked me out of some trance I was caught in. Ben watches me with his elbows on the table and his chin propped up by his fists. He’s probably been like that for a while, judging from the amused glint in his eyes and the upward quirk of the corners of his lips.
I set my fork and knife down, my face going red. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Got a bit carried away there.” I wipe a spot on my lips, not sure if there’s sauce there or if it’s my sudden self-consciousness playing tricks. “I’ve … never eaten steak like that before.”
He nods. “It’s a favorite place of mine. I’ve known the owner for years.” He starts cutting another piece of steak, barely halfway through his meal.
I watch for a moment. My hands are in my lap suddenly. I’m wringing them, fidgeting, picking at my nails, chewing on my lip and still tasting the oil from the pasta.
Watching him eat is like an encore of the meal I just downed. Except my mind is going everywhere but the food. His lips, how they move. His jaw, how it works. His eyes, how they savor.
“So,” I exclaim abruptly, forcing myself to talk and fill the silence, “I remember this one time I had steak—I was thirteen, maybe fourteen—and this big piece got lodged in my throat. I didn’t even know what was happening because my eyes were so watered up, everything looked stretched like a funhouse mirror, and I couldn’t breathe. All I could hear was screaming. My mom’s screams. My dad’s yelling. And y’know what I was thinking the whole time? Shut up. I just wanted them to shut up. Really, was the last thing I’d hear in my life going to be the shrill sound of my parents’ screams? I mean, we’re talking the same kind of scream my mom makes when a cockroach scuttles up the wall. So there I was, being screamed at like an insect because I couldn’t properly chew and swallow my dinner. That’s how I was gonna die: choking on a chunk of some dead cooked cow.”
I interrupt myself by bringing a glass of water to my mouth so fast, it splashes my face. Not that I seem to care, chugging away like I’ve been stranded in the Sahara for a month, water droplets letting loose from my chin. I set it back down way too fast—it splashes again—and then I continue rambling.
“One of the thoughts that went through my head—yeah, of all possibly profound things to occur to me during my maybe-last-minute-on-earth—was whether my English paper on Socrates was due that Monday or the next.” I roll my eyes and shake my head. “Socrates. Y’know. I’m choking on dead cow only because I know I’m choking on dead cow, and I am what I know, and blah, blah, philosophy. The irony made me want to laugh, but of course I couldn’t laugh, because I’m choking to death, right?” I’m telling the story with my hands, gesturing in front of me. I’m never like this. Someone hit my nutty switch and I don’t have any red wine to blame this time. “So then my mom starts trying to reach down my throat—no joke, I almost bit her finger off, and then I would’ve been choking on steak and my mother’s finger, what a lovely image that is, and yes, that would have included her diamond wedding ring—and my dad yells at her to back off while he bear-hugs me from behind like a WWE wrestler. My dad squeezed me so damned hard, I could taste my ribcage. Up I went, then back to the ground. Up, then to the ground. Up. Ground. Up. Ground. I started to see stars. And then: boom. Out. Chunk of cow cannonballs over the dining room table like a brown, lumpy pigeon and lands right into the aquarium with a cute plop.”
I press my lips shut when I realize Ben is staring at me, wide-eyed and slowly chewing his last bite, his plate emptied.
After swallowing, he offers me a tiny smile, then quietly asks, “And the moral of your story is … don’t bite off more than you can chew?”
I let out one light, nervous chuckle—thinking about the clubs I headed in high school, my strictly laid-out four-year college plan, my ambitious class schedule, the amount of hours, the credits …
Thinking about Ben, the gorgeous man sitting in front of me. Thinking about being here at all. Thinking about whether I’ve spent my whole life biting off more than I can chew.
Ben, my latest too-big bite of steak.
I swallow, then murmur, “Story of my life.”
He sets down his silverware, then leans back in his chair. His eyes drift down my chest for a moment. We just ate a full meal of steak and pasta, yet somehow he still looks starved.
Starved for something else.
Like me.
I rise from the table so fast, my thighs bang into it. He lifts his eyebrows, startled. “I’ll … I’ll get the plates,” I announce, my voice unsteady and an octave too high, before taking both our dishes away and moving to the kitchen too fast.
I count my breaths to calm myself and quickly run through a roulette of different things I can say to excuse myself home. If I’m here a second longer, I’m seriously going to give in to impulses we both promised we’d resist. With every passing glance, my resolve is crumbling.
And then I go and talk for an hour about my near-death experience with red meat. What the hell is wrong with me?
I’m just nervous. I’m doubting my tenacity, here. I’ve resisted Ben for so damned long, and I know for a fact that I won’t be able to take the high-and-well-behaved road much longer.
And I’m supposed to survive a summer of this torture?
The faucet turns on too strongly, and a spray ricochets off a dish and covers my front in water and pasta oil.
“Fuck!” I cry out, dropping the dishes into the sink.
“It’s alright,” comes his deep voice—from directly behind me.
I spin around to face him. My whole front is transparent now from the water, my nipples hardened from the cold. And now Ben towers over me, the deep resonance in his unassuming words pulling me in. It’s alright. Everything about him has me trapped, roped up like a prisoner. Even literally, I feel like I can’t pull my arms away from my body nor make my legs bend.
I’m all his. I’ll do anything he wants. He owns me.
“I was thinking,” he says, his voice soft, the sound of it casting goosebumps up my arms, up my back, up my neck, “that maybe we’ve left a little room … for dessert.”