Hans held my hand, his thumb tracing lazy circles on top of mine, as he walked me to my car. I’d parked about half a mile away, in a nearby neighborhood, but I wished it were farther. I wanted that walk to last forever.
The humid air hugged us like a warm, thick blanket. My cells sang along with the crickets. My molecules buzzed to the hum of the streetlights. And my heart fluttered with every blink of Hans’s long black eyelashes whenever I caught him smiling down at me.
Or should I say, LDH’s long black lashes. I couldn’t believe that my sweet Hans was the same tall, toned, tattooed badass that I’d just seen perform in front of a few thousand people at Variety Playhouse. He could have left with any girl he wanted that night, but he’d chased me down and knelt in broken glass just to get me to stay.
As the taillights of my trusty black Mustang came into view, just as I began to mourn the end of our evening stroll, I felt myself being tugged away from the street and onto someone’s lawn.
“Look,” Hans whispered as he led me deeper onto the property of a beautifully renovated antebellum home.
I was about to try to steer my distractible boyfriend back on course when I caught my first glimpse of the ethereal wonderland he was dragging me toward. The backyard of the estate had been wrapped, swathed, and wallpapered in thousands upon thousands of tiny white Christmas lights—in the middle of July.
They must have hosted a party or a wedding there earlier, some grand celebration, but by the time we found it, there was no evidence of life anywhere. The backyard sloped downhill to a swimming pool, which was as still as a pane of glass, reflecting the twinkling lights coiled tightly around every tall pine tree surrounding it. The back of the plantation-style house, all three stories of it, was dark. In fact, the only movement at all came from the ceiling fans quietly spinning on the patio under the main deck.
I couldn’t even process all the beauty at once. The way my attention was flitting from one shiny object to the next must have been what Hans’s brain felt like all the time. As my head swiveled and my eyes darted around that sparkly, glowing jewelry box of a backyard, I failed to notice that Hans was pulling me farther and farther onto this obviously very private property.
It wasn’t until my body fell onto Hans’s lap that I realized he had escorted me all the way down to the patio, and we were sitting on one of the cushy lounge chairs under the deck. I froze, highly aware that these people had a stupid amount of money and probably owned a state-of-the-art security system with invisible lasers and paralysis-inducing mist. Not that it mattered. Between Hans’s strong arms around my waist, the secluded coziness of the covered patio, and the majesty of a hundred thousand tiny lights dancing in the trees and on the water before me, I was already paralyzed.
Hans and I sat in silence, enjoying the view. The fiery tree branches flickered in sync with the sounds of crickets and cicadas and air conditioners in the distance, creating a concert of white light and white noise that was playing just for us. As we watched the show, tucked into and around each other, Hans and I had an entire conversation telepathically, one that was full of promises and shiny rings and I dos and baby names.
When Hans began trailing featherlight kisses from my shoulder up to my neck, I tilted my head and bit my lip to keep from humming out loud.
When he repeated his delicate assault on the other side, he surprised me by biting down on the haphazard bow holding my halter dress up and yanking it loose. Within seconds, the black fabric covering my chest was replaced by warm, damp air.
My first instinct was to snatch my dress back up and scurry off before the owners had a chance to loose the hounds, but when Hans took both of my pierced nipples between his fingertips and tugged gently, I was a goner.
My head rolled back onto his shoulder, my back arched involuntarily, and I surrendered to his impulsive will.
“You are so beautiful,” Hans whispered, his teeth grazing my shoulder.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to whimper, his words giving me as much pleasure as his expert hands. Then, he stood up and came around to the foot of the lounge chair and knelt before me. It was reminiscent of our postures from just minutes ago in the parking lot. Only now, everything had changed. Hans’s shy, one-dimpled smile had returned to its rightful place, and I was ready to book a flight to Las Vegas instead of booking it to my car to cry.
After gazing at me for a moment, his eyes soft and loving yet dark and daring, Hans grabbed the hem of my dress with both hands and slipped it off over my head. Before I had time to process the fact that I was almost completely naked on the patio of a complete stranger, Hans bent down and captured my left nipple ring between his lips. He swirled his tongue around and around the sensitive pink flesh as he laid me flat on the overstuffed chaise lounge cushions.
Hans then turned his attention to my other breast, fondling and sucking, while I desperately tore at his sweat-soaked tank top. As I peeled the cotton off his torso, Hans made his way down mine, planting a trail of torturously unhurried kisses along the way. I stared at the ceiling fan overhead, its breeze causing all the wet places Hans had left behind to tingle, as his mouth hit the apex of my very wet panties. The feel of his tongue probing me through that thin piece of fabric was glorious, electric agony.
My hips began to thrust involuntarily, begging him to end the torture, when I felt a thick finger hook the sopping wet fabric between my legs and pull it to one side.
As soon as Hans’s mouth made contact with my aching flesh, I felt my entire body contract. It was too much. I was spread-eagled, practically naked on a stranger’s chaise lounge, with my breasts exposed to the steamy night air. Fingers that had just skillfully shredded a bass guitar in front of thousands of people were stroking my G-spot, and the playfully wicked black-rimmed eyes of a rock star were gazing up at me from between my thighs where his expert tongue was flicking and teasing the barbell piercing my clit.
Just as a tidal wave of an orgasm began to build, I heard the sound of Hans undoing his belt and fly.
Oh, thank God!
Hans shimmied out of his baggy pants and Adidas with ease and scooped me up into his arms. I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, hoping he would take me against the wall of the house so that we wouldn’t have to worry about any unexpected squeaks from the patio furniture.
As Hans carried me, the feel of his callused hands gripping my ass and his thick, firm cock grazing the inside of my thigh had me writhing in need. I thrust my hands into his sweaty hair and sucked at his swollen, tart lips. My senses were so overwhelmed with desire that I didn’t even notice how far we’d traveled until I felt lukewarm water sloshing into my boots.
My eyes shot open as the water continued to rise up my legs.
Hans had carried me into…the motherfucking…pool!
Before I could yelp or thrash in protest, Hans thrust his tongue into my mouth and the head of his rock-hard cock into my aching pussy.
My awareness dived below the surface of the water to where our bodies were now joined. Hans was all I could feel. There was simply no room in my consciousness to process anxiety, fear, wet, dry, hot, cold, past, future. Every sensation was flooded with him.
Once we were completely submerged, Hans pressed my back against the cool tiled wall of the pool and filled me completely. With his lust, with his loyalty, with his love, with himself. Every achingly slow withdrawal felt as though it was peeling away another layer of separation between us until we were no longer two people in a pool. We were the pool.
We were the unending, undulating sea.
Hans broke our kiss just long enough to whisper into my neck, “I love you.”
Tears stung my eyes. Hans had said those three words to me a thousand times before, but that was the first time I’d truly allowed myself to hear them. To believe them. To hope against hope that the fairy tale might actually come true.
I grasped his beautiful face with both hands and urged him to look at me. When he finally complied, tiny white lights from the trees around us danced across the shiny surface of his eyes, giving me the sense that, through those black holes of eyeliner and dark lashes, I could see directly into the heavens.
I smoothed the worried V between his brows with one thumb and whispered back, never breaking eye contact, “I love you too, baby.”
Hans tightened his grip on my ass and buried himself into me as far as he could go, pressing his forehead into mine. “I love you.”
Hans’s words were forceful. Resolute. They echoed through me, bouncing into and out of all the hollow places they’d never managed to reach before, leaving a satisfying vibration in their wake.
After a moment of reverie, Hans slowly withdrew and then plunged into me harder than before. I moaned unintentionally. His next thrust was harder still.
I grabbed a handful of his messy black hair and hissed into his mouth, “I love you.”
My sentiment was immediately rewarded with a pounding so forceful that water sloshed over the edge of the pool.
Kissing me just below my ear, Hans growled as he ground his hips into mine, “I love you.”
Abruptly, Hans tightened the grip he had on my ass and stood upright, exposing both of our naked torsos to the warm night air. I reached behind me and propped myself up with my arms on the ledge of the pool, baring my breasts to the rock star before me and my soul to the sensitive artist within. Hans responded to my submission by taking my left nipple ring between his teeth and thrusting fully into me just as he bit down.
Fire.
I might have been submerged in water, but my loins and heart and lungs were ablaze with pleasure. My eyes rolled back, and my body erupted in a volcano of curse words and whimpers and I love yous and tears as Hans withdrew and attacked, harder and faster. The once-mirrorlike body of water around us had become an uncontainable riptide of waves and lust spilling over the edges of the pool and crisscrossing through the cracks between the surrounding terra-cotta tiles.
Hans slid two wet fingertips into my mouth to silence me and growled with every advance, “God…I…fucking…love you,” before he stilled, pouring the last ounce of himself into me.
We stood there in the water, eye makeup running down both of our faces, slumped over one another, panting in a tangle of hot, wet bliss until our brains were able to process outside information again.
How long? Who knows? Time doesn’t exist in heaven. But I do know that, when I finally looked up at the house, something was different.
“Um, Hans? Was that light on before?”
“What light?” Hans’s head snapped around, and the look that flashed across his face as soon as he caught sight of that illuminated second-story window was all the answer I needed.
But the sirens in the distance confirmed it.