“Scared?” Thea teased as she basically tackled him backwards onto the queen-sized bed of the random bedroom they’d chosen to consecrate on the third floor.

“Scared? No. Nervous? Yeah. A little.”

She was disarmed by his honesty. He laid on his back, his T-shirt untucked and his hat halfway off. She was straddled over him. She felt him kick off one of his sneakers and then the other.

“Why?” she asked as she pulled his cap off and finally, finally ran fingers through his silky-gold hair.

“Thea,” he said, looking up at her, her freckles standing out sharply in the pale dusk light, her hair in a high messy bun, those clear blue eyes basically eating him alive. He let his eyes trail down her body. To her breasts that pushed against her T-shirt, the curve of her waist and her soft belly. To her ass that was currently spilling over the confines of his large hands. “Any man in his right mind would be nervous right now. You’re so gorgeous, so everything that I want, that it’s hard to breathe when I look at you.”

“You know?” she said, joking past the compliment that she knew, secretly, she was going to treasure for the rest of her life. “You’re actually everything I want, too. Except for the extra decade you’re carrying around.”

“You saying I’m old, little girl?” he asked, scowling and rolling them so that he loomed over her. “Ain’t got no gray hairs to date.”

“Shame. Gray hairs are hot.”

“Can’t win with you, woman.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but he silenced her with a kiss. If you could even call it that. This was the slowest, deepest kiss that Thea had ever been party to. She thrilled to it. He wasn’t attempting to wow her with prodigious sexual skills or fancy tricks. No. He was just trying to melt his way right into her and it thrilled her. The thought of him sharing himself with her like this picked her up and shook her. Made her dizzy. She realized, all at once, in a tidal wave of a realization, she wasn’t about to have sex with Jack, she was about to be washed away in the ocean of him. She could only hope that one day she’d reach shore again.

The kiss went on and on and it was the sole subject of his attention. She couldn’t remember the last time, if ever, a man had kissed her without feeling her up. But Jack’s hands stayed on the bed, his fists opening and closing.

He was kissing her into heated mush that used to be a woman. She was panting, blurry-eyed, her hair falling out of its hair tie when she sat up. She wanted to destroy him. Who cared about foreplay? That kiss had been enough foreplay to last her a decade. She ripped her shirt off and then went for his. She had his pants unbuttoned and down around his thighs when his brain caught up to her actions.

Her hand gripped his cock, a sure hand, just like he’d known she’d have. He ripped his hands through his hair and endured exquisite torture as he looked down at her in that simple black bra that made him want to invest in Walmart or wherever the hell she’d gotten it. She stared up at him through thick lashes as she worked him in her hand. She was stroking him rhythmically, her stroke effective and certain.

Something nagged at him and he wasn’t quite sure what it was, so he leaned forward and took her mouth again. There. There it was. That liquid sliding paradise. A slow spinning fall into her. Into everything. Into perfection.

Her hand stuttered on his cock and loosened its grip. He shoved his pants further down and she found herself with a hell of a lot more room to play. She’d stopped jacking him and now was kind of tugging, pushing him around with the flat of her hand. Her hand circled him again with intention and he experimented with something. He took her bottom lip between his and suckled. He slid lips on lips, melting her, and her practiced jerking stuttered. Her hand flattened around him. Playing and pushing.

He delighted in it. Once, as a younger man, he’d heard a public health slogan that was something like ‘remember that you’re basically having sex with everyone your partner has ever had sex with’. It was a reminder not to ride bareback, that disease is communicable, yadda yadda yadda. Good lesson. But something about it had always irritated Jack. Virgins never particularly got Jack sprung, but when he was with a woman, he wanted to know that he was the only man in that room for her. He wanted to know that she wasn’t weighing experiences or dreaming of someone else.

Now, with Thea spearing up from the bed, kissing him silly and playing with his cock, he didn’t even want her to use tricks she’d used on another man. He was glad that she’d had company in the past, somebody or somebodies to keep her warm. But right now at this very second? He didn’t care about skill. He wanted to invent a whole new way of touching. Something that only the two of them knew how to do. A secret language between them.

The path to that was in keeping both of them out of their heads and in the moment.

“Naked,” he growled against her mouth. “For fuck’s sake, let me finally see you naked.”

She laughed a little unsteadily and lifted her arms over her head. He stripped the bra off of her without bothering with the clasp and groaned as her breasts bounced free.

His thoughts stuttered to a halt. “Never mind,” he gasped. “Pause. Here. Forever.”

Jack fell on her breasts, pushing her back against the bed. His hands shaped and molded while he devoured her with his mouth. Jack painted pictures over her plush skin, relishing the way she yielded to the stiff point of his tongue. When he captured her nipple between his lips, he suckled her, his tongue working that stiff point, sucking her to the roof of his mouth. He let her breast free and buried his face there, rasping his stubble against her sensitive skin.

Thea’s hands opened and closed on Jack’s back as he moved to her other breast. When he suckled at her this time, she couldn’t keep her hips on the bed. She thrusted against his middle and clasped her legs around his ribs. She would have given anything to have had the patience to have gotten all the way naked, but this was good, too. She rubbed her jean-clad pussy against his abs and let him suck her ghost straight out of her chest.

He was humping the bed, making it squeak and grunting and groaning against the flesh of her breasts. Finally, when she couldn’t take it anymore, Thea buried her hand in his hair and gave him a real yank. One that he’d remember. She used the element of surprise and pushed him onto his side, his cock spearing into the air between them. If Jack were someone else, Thea might have reached for him with her hand, continued to jerk him off. But this wasn’t someone else. This was this man. This golden, smiling, loping, rambling man and something deep within her called out to satisfy her deepest instincts.

She didn’t use her hands. Instead she slithered down his body and pressed her breasts, wet from his mouth, against his cock. She gathered her breasts in two hands and enveloped him, but then, suddenly that felt too expected and instead she just pressed her softness into his reddened, taut flesh. She was eye level with his cock now and couldn’t help but admire its perfection. Mauve and huge and curving slightly to the left, it had as much personality as his face did and that made elation effervesce through her like a popped can of coke. She dragged her chest across him and when one of her stiff nipples slicked through the wetness on the tip of his cock both of them groaned.

“Yes,” he said, full-voiced and intentional. “Yes.”

He pushed back from her and stood, his cock rearing up as he grabbed the ankles of her jeans. She quickly unbuttoned and unzipped them and when she lifted her ass, he whipped them off her like a magician ripping a tablecloth off a set table. They were gone, tossed through the air and forgotten. He kicked his own pants off and then his underwear and then there was just that pair of basic black panties between him and everything he could ever remember wanting.

She was panting and wild-eyed, out of her mind with want for him and he knew he looked exactly the same way. This was what he’d wanted. He’d thought he’d had to orchestrate it but he realized now he’d been a fool. Silly Jack. This was always how it was going to be between them. Even if it had been normal, expected sex: kissing, boobs, missionary. Even with that, it would have been the best sex of his life. Because how could it not with this sincere, freckled, panting wildcat reaching up for him.

“Me and you,” she said, and he realized that she must be having similar thoughts to him.

“That’s fucking right, me and you,” he told her, kneeling up on the bed and tucking his thumbs into the edges of her underwear. “It’s just me and you.”             

“No one else,” she said.

“No one else but me and you.”

He’d always loved that phrase, ‘me and you’. It was a palindrome in content. When one person said it to another and that person said it back, it meant the same thing to each of them. Even though the me and the you had flipped meaning. It didn’t matter. Because in the end, it was just the two of them there, mostly naked and wet with passion for each other.

He pulled her underwear down her legs, not looking until he’d flicked them off her toes. When he did look, his head dropped and he let out a huge breath, like he’d been shot. She lay across the bed, blue in the moonlight peeking through the window, every inch of her freckled and pale. Her face was a miracle of angles and architecture while her body was so soft and plush he just knew he was going to get lost in her completely.

Then, her eyes on his face, she spread her legs apart, slowly, her skin smoothing over the quilt.

Jack found himself drawn forward as if attached to a short rope she was dragging in. There was a part of him that thought, No! Pull back, take a breath. You go there, you’re never coming back. Even then he knew that there was no turning away from this.

When Jack landed his mouth at her hipbone, he got caught somewhere between laughing and praying.

“What?” she asked, popping her head up and threading her fingers through his hair, giving him a good tug.

“Nothing,” he said, falling back and pulling her over him. If he would’ve been dexterous enough to lace toes with her, he would have done it. He was losing his damn mind. “I was just thinking about that cashier from the general store in town.”             

“What?” She attempted to resurface. “The cash—the teenage boy? Jack, if that’s what you're thinking about right now, I think there’s something you need to tell me.”

He laughed harder, and scratched his stubble against her neck. “No, I was thinking about this advice I gave him after you left the store. About women like you.”
“Oh yeah?” she fell back, an electric puddle. “Can’t wait to hear this.”

“I told him that if he ever meets a woman like you, he should do one of two things. Either run for the hills…” he paused with that dramatic, storyteller flair that both annoyed and endeared Thea. She refused to bite. She merely pursed her lips and willed him to get on with the story. “Or be ready to fall at her feet and worship.”

She blinked two very wry eyes at him. “Your point?”

He laughed again. “No point, sweetheart. Don’t you know by now that sometimes I’m just talking to pass the time?” Of course that was a lie. He’d had a point. A cogent one. When he’d told that kid at the general store what to do with a woman like Thea, he’d considered himself to be an exception to that rule. A grown and seasoned man who, through hard-won experience and knowledge, had figured out how to thread the needle for a woman like Thea. He knew how to enjoy her and not get destroyed by her.

But here he was, basically willing himself to not fall on his knees in front of her.

“Let’s see if I can’t help you find another way to pass the time.” They rolled then and ended in a pile. His elbow was caught too far beneath her, her foot was annoyingly twisted in the blanket. Neither of them cared. Because they were naked and squished up together.

Their fingers laced and a swell of heat pulsed out from between their palms. Had either of their eyes been open they would have seen a pulse of blue light ricochet out from them, roll out the window and toward the lake.

Two levels down, Celia looked up from her book. “Lightning?” she asked.

“Nope,” Jean Luc and Tre said at the same moment.

But they didn’t see it up in the bedroom, the otherworldly pulse of light and energy they were making just from touching one another. They were busy with other things as Jack had turned his body, and both of them on their sides, parted her legs to kiss along her thighs. He sucked in a breath that rolled into a laugh and ended on a groan when she pivoted her body to lay opposite along him and followed suit with her tongue.

Her scent rode high through him, making his heart leap to his throat. She was oaky and sharp, like good whiskey. He took one swipe through her heat with his tongue and his eyes rolled back in his head. He was already drunk on her. Spinning. Dizzy with the taste of her arousal.

The first few swipes of Jack’s tongue through her pussy deeply relieved Thea. She’d been grappling with the rising feeling that he was about to do something to her that couldn’t be undone. That he was going to take all her other lovers and just wipe them clean from her memory. All the rolling and rubbing and kissing and sliding had freaked her out as much as it had aroused her. Because it was completely unlike anything she’d ever done with anyone else. She’d felt as if she’d strapped on skis, was standing at the top of an unexplored mountain, nowhere to go but down, down, down. Wherever Jack was gonna take her.

But this? She had her footing again as he gripped her thighs and tasted her wetness. Because this was familiar territory. This was just sex. And she’d had plenty of sex before. It was good sex. Okay. Really good sex. It was—oh Jesus—really REALLY good sex. Well, make that the best sex of her life. But—gah—yes! It was still just sex.

Jack was working her slowly, methodically, and she got the impression that he was paying complete attention to every minuscule movement and sound that she made. He was learning her as much as he was pleasuring her. That simultaneously tensed her and let loose a flood of wetness.

He made a sound halfway between a chuckle and a groan and that hot-rough tongue of his dipped inside her.

Thea was starting to lose her grip on something and it wasn’t just the sheets. He was a skilled lover, obviously, but she couldn’t help but feel like he wasn’t just having sex with her. It was almost like he was trying to tell her something. His tongue painted a circle inside her and she almost asked him to repeat himself. There were words on the air. If she could only make them out. She strained and arched back and slammed her eyes closed.

Again, the two of them missed the arcing blue light that spiraled out of them.

When her eyes came open, Thea looked down, barely recognizing her own legs the way they were wrapped around Jack’s head and shoulders. She was trembling. And she never trembled. His eyes were shut tight and the scar on his eyebrow gleamed white in the gloomy lighting of the room.

She had the distinct impression that she was losing a battle with herself. What was happening? Her orgasm was nearing, drawing her tight, about to kick her boat out to deep water.

She had to get a hold on things, ahold of herself. She lunged forward, gripped Jack’s hips and swallowed down his cock with absolutely no preamble. She took him hard, straight to the back of her throat, patient through her own gag reflex, and swallowed around him.

The sound he made then, she’d never forget. If she could have worn it around her neck like a jewel she would have.

“Tryin’ to kill me?” he asked her, looking down the bed at her. She didn’t respond. Just repeated the action. Did it again. And again.

Whether he could read the look in her eye or if it was something else, some slow-moving preference that he was born with, Jack didn’t take the bait. He didn’t clamp his mouth to her and match pace. Nor did he tell her to slow down or pull her off him. He simply let her do her thing while he kept at her.

He’d been learning her channel, every sweet slick of it. And now he was slowly working his way up toward her clit, nipping and sucking her lips as he went. He was attempting not to lose his mind as she bottomed out around his cock about ten times in a row. His tongue was rough and patient as he finally pressed it to her clit. He swiped over it in a hundred different directions, different patterns and pressures. And then there, he found the right little one-two-three combination that made her pull her mouth up off of him and gasp for breath.

Bringing a woman pleasure, he’d learned, wasn’t about learning moves and then re-using them. It was about learning a woman herself. So Jack was delighted and perplexed when he realized that what was doing it for Thea wasn’t roughness or hardness or intensity, tough as she was. No, what was making her jerk and tremble, gasp and whisper his name, was the featherlight teasing he was doing. He was certain that his whiskers were giving her thighs road rash and that his fingers, clamped on her thighs, were in danger of leaving marks, but his mouth was tender and patient, not slow, but he was flirtatious with his pressure, making her buck her hips into him.

It was a matter of seconds before she was imitating him. Her mouth over the head of his cock wasn’t performing the vacuum-like exorcism of moments before. It was light and almost sweet, if it weren’t for the fact that she was licking pre-cum off of him like it was a Popsicle on a hot day.

They were wet with each other and melting again, rising and falling all in one endless, rolling breath. His hips jutted forward as she licked all the way down the side of him and sucked his base. He followed suit, pressing inside her with his tongue to lift back up and almost tickle her clit. She began to tighten against him and he knew she was close.

“Jack,” she gasped, then stopped speaking to swallow him down for a second. “I want—”

“Me.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah.” He shook his head and pulled away from her to fumble with the condom box. He suddenly felt like a teenager again and he couldn’t have been happier about it. Because in some ways, he hadn’t ever done anything like this before. Sex had always been a wildly enjoyable pastime in which both partners did their best to make the other see stars. But this new thing that was happening? Well, he was new at it, but determined to be good at it. He slid the condom on with two hands, one after the other, and looked back at her sprawled across the bed. He couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was something he was supposed to say, something he’d forgotten to say.

Later.

Now, he fell to his knees beside the bed and spread her legs again. He wanted her at the edge, balancing, when he pushed inside. So he found her with his mouth again and this time, let his eyes take her in. Every trembling, gasping, silvery-freckled inch of her. Her thighs were opening even wider and her knuckles were white where she gripped the sheet when he finally kneeled up, one foot on the floor and one knee on the bed, and spread her open with his hands.

He made half circles over the top of her clit with his thumb when he leaned forward and pressed the head of his cock between her legs.

“Ah fuck. Holy—Thea. Fuck.” He knew he was growling and couldn’t help it as he sank, so slowly, into the hottest, wettest unknown of his life.

Thea’s orgasm had no real beginning and no real end. It was just suddenly happening to her as he inexorably pushed his way inside her. The slow, constant pushing pressure of his cock inside her with the rub of his hand made her eyes go blind, her mouth fall open, everything inside her tighten down and pulse against itself.

When he was fully in her, he pushed a bit more and then a bit more, tiny pulsing motions that prolonged her orgasm even further. It had been a deep, aching pleasure, starting from deep inside her. She’d never come like that before. When she blinked her eyes open, he was staring down at her, halfway on the bed and halfway off, a ghost of a smile on his face. God, they’d barely started, how was she going to survive this?

She reared up to sitting, clamping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist at the same time. The edge of the bed took some of her weight, but Jack was basically standing as he absorbed the impact of this new position. He gripped onto her, his palm over one cheek of her ass, his fingers slipping into her cleft. And that’s when she started climbing him, only to slip back down and climb again. And again and again. They were sliding against each other, the rub of their hands against one another creating a layering, echoing friction that never seemed to stop.

Jack’s thrusts into her weren’t sharp or sudden, it was more of an unstoppable roll that had her gasping into his neck.

He used his weight to tip them back onto the bed, her hair spilling everywhere, his hands braced on either side of her and one of his feet still on the ground. He didn’t stop that rollingrollingrolling grind of his hips. Even when she tipped forward, rolled them to their sides.

She realized her mistake immediately. She’d wanted to roll them to a position where Jack wasn’t dismantling her heart, stroke by stroke. But she’d ended up wrapped tightly in his arms, not enough space to really fuck, just holding each other while he whispered impossible words in her ear, pumping forward just enough to keep her on the absolute edge.

She rolled them again and ended up on top. There. Now, she could control things a little better. This was what she wanted. To be in charge. To make sure he couldn’t keep—

“Oh, fuck it,” she muttered and rolled them again, so that he was back on top. “Just go ahead and wreck me, then,” she told him.

He smiled and gritted his teeth, pleasure and pain all at once as he kept rolling those hips. “Believe me, sweetheart, you’re the one wrecking me.”

He lowered himself to give her a little of his weight, his chest hair scraping across her nipples.

“I ain’t never—” he tried, the pleasure too acute and cutting himself off. “This is the first time I—” He cleared his throat, tried to see through the spots in front of his eyes. “I’m never gonna—”

He looked down at her, saw those clear blue eyes dilated to almost all black.

“Oh, fuck it,” he repeated her words and buried his face in her neck. Her wetness was spreading between them, both of them shaking and straining. They were sliding against one another more than thrusting, choosing ultimate, never-ending friction over the banging search for pleasure they both usually partook in. Jack felt like he might have been having sex the wrong way his entire life. He’d always dug down deep for an orgasm, when what he really should have been doing was swimming down deep for it.

He was holding his breath and so was she, bursting out for breath every twenty seconds or so and then holding it again. They were rising, falling, slipping. Their eyes held and her hands found his shoulders, clamped down like a lifeboat.

“You and me,” he told her, sweat dripping from his forehead, their bodies hot enough in the cool room to create condensation on the window. “You and me.”

She was going up and over the edge again. On impulse, Jack dropped his face to hers and sucked the breath from her lungs. He pulled back and clamped one hand over her mouth and nose, just for a few seconds, as he rode her through the height of it. Her pussy clamped down on him so hard he yelled, realized he’d just stepped through a one-way door. There was no going back.

He dropped his hand and barreled toward his own paradise. “Jack,” she gasped, sounding undone and utterly his. “Jack.”

He dropped his face to her neck, held his breath, and went over the edge. The bed trembled on its legs as he shook and shook himself out. The longest and most intense orgasm of his life threatened to kill him. When he finally collapsed, he gulped down air and let his cock jump inside her for a while.

They lay there, pressed together, panting. Jack could have stayed that way for a year had he not had to deal with the condom.

When he pulled away from her, a bright burst of embarrassment hit Thea, something she was not accustomed to in the least. But she’d had to work to dislodge her hands from him and even in the dim, blue light of dusk, she could see that there were bruises already forming over him.              

The sweat on her skin began to cool as she listened to the faucet run in the adjoining bathroom. A crack of light speared out from under the door. It was too bright and an intrusion on the warm, blue bubble of the bedroom.

She was just sitting up, shaking her hair back when Jack stepped back into the bedroom.

He was on her in a second, nuzzling into her neck, tracing his hands over her legs, melting her again. The strange, immediate loneliness that had crept in in his absence was gone. The embarrassment didn’t go naturally, though; Thea had to kick that out the door.

“I hurt you,” she said.

Jack was too busy laying her down on the bed, pressing his full weight against her, burying his face in her hair to hear her correctly the first time. “What’s that?”

“I hurt you. On your back and shoulders.”

He lifted his head and one arm, inspecting it first and then the other. That smile of his started to crinkle up his face. “Looks like you had yourself a hell of a time.”

Thea rolled her eyes. She didn’t deign to respond to that. Especially not when he was grinning and dragging her under the covers.

The woman was halfway caught between being stiff and melting again and it was a perplexing little mystery to Jack. She was sexually confident, he knew that, so he didn’t think she was in the throes of humiliation that they’d just fucked each other straight off the map. He was wrapped around her, tangled in every which way, but for just one moment, Jack allowed himself to retreat fully into his own head. He took a quick inventory, seeing if how he was feeling could lend any credence to how she was feeling.

There was exhaustion, sure. He wasn’t in his twenties anymore and he’d just had about an hour of the most passionate sex of his life. There was also exhilaration. Because, come on, he’d just had about an hour of the most passionate sex of his life. And there was a rising, admittedly terrifying, euphoria. For the exact same reason.

Huh. He turned back to her and wondered what his reaction might have been if he’d had that exact same sexual encounter at age 29.

He chuckled to himself. He didn’t have to wonder for long at all.

He would have been out the door just about as fast as he could have gotten his boots back on. At 29, he’d been looking for willing bodies and good times. Somebody to scratch the itch. He hadn’t been looking for what they’d just done to one another. Which was to abruptly, rudely, and completely change one another’s lives. He was sure of it.

Whether or not she was willing to admit that remained to be seen.

“Never quite felt like that before,” he said, figuring that admitting how it felt for him might help thaw this strange stiffness she seemed to be battling with.

“Like what?”

“Like I was a bowl of melted chocolate and you were a bowl of melted chocolate and we just kind of mixed all up together.”

That was the exact right way of putting it, Thea decided. It scared the shit out of her. Because there was no way to get all her chocolate back from him, so to speak. They’d gone and done it now. They were mixed! And no amount of complaining about it could change that. It was that that calmed her again. There was nothing she could do about it. She’d fallen into bed with Jack Warren and now she was all tangled up in him and when she left to go home, it would hurt. Painful. She’d leave a part of herself behind. Something she’d never done with a man before.

She dreaded it, but she didn’t fear it anymore. Not the way she had just moments ago. Because she knew what it was that had happened. They’d mixed. Maybe even irrevocably. But to Thea Redgrave, practical as she was, it didn’t have to mean any more than that.