Chapter Eight
Flick had never had a lover as considerate as Tom. It was unnerving.
It wasn’t that he was bad at sex. He wasn’t hesitant. He didn’t have lousy technique or poor rhythm and shit timing. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy himself. He gave. He’d done for her beautifully, he watched, he listened, he followed, but he didn’t know how to take. He stayed in control, on track, kept to the plan. Not robotic, but not spontaneous, not free.
He didn’t let go so much as endure.
It might’ve hurt her heart to see he was that way. Constrained, even in how he took his pleasure.
A hundred other women wouldn’t complain. A hundred other women would make Tom happy by letting him be the giver.
Flick wanted him to understand it could be different. She wanted him to know what chasing pleasure for its own sake felt like. Not out of guilt, not for opportunity or expectation, or habit. She wanted Tom to know how to reset his life because he’d kissed someone, fucked someone till he was blind on the experience of it, scoured clean and reborn and ready to deal with whatever the world could throw at him with his massive shoulders squared and his chin up.
He deserved that. And then he could choose how to be. Free or constrained by those rigid self-made rules he was hemmed in by.
It all went some way to explaining how he walked away from their session in the living room. It’s why he wanted to leave the bed now. He resented her even as he let her kiss him, make him hard again. And it was impossible to imagine he wouldn’t hate her for pushing him.
To do that she needed a plan. Tumbling him into bed again wasn’t it. She couldn’t let him leave the room angry and she’d made him feel uncertain. He would set her aside again. He’d withdraw as soon as he had the chance and she didn’t know if she had what it would take to show Tom O’Connell how to fuck the limits he imposed on himself.
He made her come again and she was loud, came shouting his name. He came too, almost silently, jaw tight against his feelings.
Someone had made Tom think discipline only had one face and that face was hard work, regularity, sacrifice, adherence to standards, no surprises.
Flick knew discipline was a multi-faced goddess on her period. A cranky whip cracker, a procrastinator, a shirker, a boring plodder, a superstar. Not one flavor, all of them. The lows to create the highs. The highs to shatter the ceiling.
Tom didn’t try to stay out of the bed this time. Came back immediately after he got rid of the condom and crashed down beside her to sleep. She dozed too, head full of disjointed, nonsensical scenes. Burning her hand in a microwave. Tom pushing a Walmart cart. Feeling panicked on Constitution Avenue with no place to live.
“Flick.” She opened her eyes to Tom’s smile, his hand on her forehead. “You were dreaming.”
He smoothed her hair and she pulled on his neck so she could have his lips. Walmart, Tom noticing her burn scar, and the perennial bad dream of being homeless. That one would make more sense if she’d ever been without a safe bed to sleep in, but still it arrived whenever she faced a change as if to remind her how far she could fall.
“Did I say anything to make you doubt my sanity?” she asked.
“Nothing I could make sense of. What was the dream?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Something that happened on your visit home?”
He wanted to help. She nibbled on his upper lip, but he didn’t engage. “Nothing happened. Nothing out of the usual. It’s always awful. But it preys on me. I support my older sister and her two kids because she’s a single mom, sometimes, and sometimes she’s married to an unstable, unreliable douchebag. I send Mom money because Dad drinks his pay away. I’ve been doing that since I got a good job. When I got better jobs, I paid off my student loans and kept sending money home. I don’t know how to stop sending money home.”
“What would happen if you stopped?”
“No one would be homeless or without food or clothing.” Not immediately, anyway. She’d have a chance to save, to build her own future, buy a condo like Tom’s so she never needed to have the homeless dream again.
He hooked his arm behind her head and they lay facing each other. “You could stop, but you don’t. Why?”
It was difficult to shrug, lying down, but she gave it a try. He palmed her breast, kissed her forehead. He liked her body. Tuck that fact away for use later. “It feels wrong.”
“Because you have more money than they do?”
“Because I have prospects, choices, and they don’t.”
“Your siblings had the same choices you had.”
“No, I was different.” Never satisfied, a pain in the ass, so everyone said. “They did the best they could.”
“You believe that?”
It was either that or hate them. “On good days.”
“No one starves if you stop. No one goes without a bed, or warmth, or shoes.”
She ruffled his hair. The bruise on his cheekbone was darker now, and his eye socket was shadowed in an ashy smudge. “But everyone deserves more than that.”
“There are people with less. Much less. You could spend your money a different way.”
“Ignore my own family to buy a condo like you.”
She blinked when he bopped her nose. “Don’t put words in my mouth. Secure your own future before you look to other people’s. Prioritize.”
This wasn’t like on an airline, the drill about fixing your own oxygen mask before you helped others. It couldn’t be. “Or drag them up with me.”
“Do they want to change?”
That was the problem. There was nothing she could do for Dad or the boys. Mom could leave. Elsie could make better decisions and have help to do that.
“I have this recurring dream about being homeless. I’ve never been homeless. It’s like the ultimate fall, the supreme failing. In the dream, I’ve made terrible mistakes and I’ve ended up with nothing. I’m in a strange place and I have a suitcase and that’s everything I own and I’m panicked.”
“That’s the dream you had just now.” She nodded. “Is that why you pushed me about moving in?”
“No.” Maybe. She laughed. “Dammit. Why did you let me move in? You didn’t want me. I figured I pushed you into agreeing in front of Jack because you wanted something from him.”
“Hmmm.”
“Is that true?”
“On a good day.”
She tapped a finger on his closed lips. “Tom, tell me why you agreed to me moving in.”
“You were persistent and yeah, in front of Jack, and I did need him to agree to write a story, and you know how he hates taking tips from flacks.”
“I’m buying half that answer.” Her stomach made a rude whining sound.
“I’m buying pizza.”
They didn’t eat it in bed, but they did sleep together, big and little spoon. Tom at her back banished the dream this time. She woke refreshed but alone. He’d left a note. He’d gone to the office. It was the practical start of his withdrawal.
He avoided her, but not like before. They talked. They ate breakfast together, crossed over in the kitchen at night. She caught him watching her when he thought he was safe to without being seen, a look of longing on his face, part lust, part regret. There were no kisses, no touching, no invitations to his bed.
He was busy. He had a meeting coming with Rendel’s MD to talk about his promotion to office leader. It was a big deal. He had a hundred-day plan to write up. He told her all that so she wouldn’t have any expectations of him.
She had them anyway.
He focused on the top of her head or her hands when they were together and he was excessively cheerful. A distraction technique. It was such a wrong note from him. He wasn’t cheerful. He was pissed off his big meeting kept getting canceled.
She offered to check his injuries and he brushed her off. He was fine. Didn’t want to bother her. She left her satchel on the counter and a jacket over a stool and he didn’t comment. If she wanted a reaction she’d have to push him harder.
And she wanted the reaction.
She wanted Tom. She couldn’t look at him now without imagining him naked, that strength and hardness he downplayed. The gentleness he thought was the only thing he was allowed to give. Her vibrator got a workout and she hoped he heard it buzzing on the rock-my-world setting at night.
On Wednesday, he announced he was going to Des Moines Friday for a conference.
“Go wild,” he’d said. “The place is yours for the weekend.” He’d looked relieved and it was bogus. Pre-rocks-off Tom would’ve been unable to stand the idea of Flick alone in his apartment for days and what it might do to the décor.
Which meant the plan changed. Thursday night she made sure to be out of the Cassidy Strauss office in good time. She went to the gym, did a light workout, enough to build up a glow, came home and left her shoes by the door and draped a clean, dry towel—but he didn’t know that—over the sectional. Her gym bag in the hallway, right where someone might trip over it.
His big meeting had been rescheduled for today but he’d gotten a cancellation email at breakfast and hadn’t been happy. He could well be in a bad headspace. She heard him come in. He didn’t trip but he did stop in the hall. She came out of her bedroom, wearing her damp gym gear, tight-fitted, her hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, and caught him before he could rearrange his features into regretfully cheerful.
“What?”
He frowned and pointed to her bag. “Does this have to be here? I nearly fell over it.”
“You should watch where you’re going.”
He blinked hard at that, his dark brows angling down.
“That towel out there.” He pointed back to the living room. “Did you leave a wet towel on the sectional?”
“Maybe.”
“Seriously, Flick.” He looked away and back. “I don’t have time for this.”
She peeled her tank off and dropped it on the floor.
“What are you doing?” He put his laptop bag on the hall table with a thud.
“What does it look like?”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m hardly in the mood for a striptease.”
His headspace was decidedly not let’s-have-fun. It was I’d-like-to-rip-something-in-half.
“I can see that.” She dropped her shorts, made a show of kicking them toward him.
“Brat. You’re trying to rile me up.” He took his tie off. “It’s not going to work.”
He doth protest too vigorously. “You’re trying to shut me out.”
“I’m busy. We had sex. Hooked up. Homegrown Tinder. It was great. You’re the one who said it wasn’t a proposal. We’re roommates. It’s short-term. That’s it.”
Vicious, except for the way he looked at her and that his tie had made it all the way to the carpet. He took his jacket off, tossed it toward the hall table where it caught and slid off. He didn’t glance at it and he wasn’t worried about a wet towel on his precious sectional. He was steamed up. She put her hand behind her back to undo her bra.
“Don’t.”
He could blow past her, leave her standing there in her underwear and a good idea gone bad, having damaged their fledgling friendship. But he was fixed on her as the source of his troubles and she was too far into this to abort.
“What are you going to do to stop me?” Apart from eat her up with his eyes.
“We’re not doing this.”
“It’s simple. I want you. I want to feel you. I want you to feel me.”
He broke eye contact and looked out toward the ignored towel, the block of marble coffee table and other people’s playlists. “Been there, done that.” His eyes snapped back. “It was all very nice, but let’s not make a habit of it.”
The more he denied himself, the worse he made it. His hands were fists. He couldn’t step away. He couldn’t keep his eyes from drilling into her.
She unhooked her bra.
He crashed into her space and loomed over her. He was so close to losing his temper, but she wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t angry with her. He was angry because he wanted her and that messed with his plans.
“If you drop that—”
“What are you going to do about it?” His breath was in her hair. She pushed her chest forward, bra covering her precariously, dared him to touch her. “You going to kiss me? Ooh. You going to press me against a wall and make me feel good? I’ll take it.”
“Stop.” He hissed it, face alive with the challenge.
She dropped the bra.
He was on her so fast she lost her balance, but he had her, hugged up against his torso, her feet barely on the floor. “You don’t know when to leave a thing alone.”
“You don’t know how to take what you want without a ten-point plan and a week to prepare.”
He kissed her meanly, punishing her with the delight of it. She’d climbed him before he had a chance to regroup. “Like this. Tom, like this. Take me like this.”
A dozen strides and they were in his bedroom. He didn’t put her down, he threw her on the bed. She bounced, laughed. He stared at her, hand crumpling his shirt, his eyes lit with recognition. She was going to lose him.
“It’s a wet towel, soaking, dripping wet.” It was the first thing she thought to say and it wasn’t going to be enough. His breathing was short. He closed his eyes. The rational part of Tom knew this was a game, knew she’d engineered this and he could stop it with a tilt of his chin. He was trapped between her manipulation and his own desire, and it made his hands tremble. “I’m wet too. Dripping for you. Come get me.”
That did it.
He groaned, dragged his shirt from his trousers, toeing out of his shoes. She stood on the bed to take her panties off. They got naked simultaneously, came together with searching hands and hungry mouths. Tom on his knees, Flick grateful, relieved and beyond excited.
He urged her legs around him, took her down to her back. She locked her ankles behind his waist and bucked her hips, carved her fingers through his hair. His skin was hot and a fine tremor played through his muscles.
“Trust you,” she whispered against his mouth, permission to go wild.
He tore that breath up, ripped it from her throat and fed it back to her in sips and licks. “Safe,” he said, voice gone so deep and torn it sounded tortured. “I’m safe.”
Teasing presses at her opening made her moan, but she went still when he entered her on one thick, easy push. “God. Tom.” Filled and pinned and wanting.
“Feels—” he dropped his face into her neck “—feels perfect, this sweetness. You’re gonna turn me inside out.”
He didn’t dominate. He wasn’t rough. He unwound her deliberately, a jagged edge to his consideration, a selfish calculation matched with desire he didn’t leash. He worked her over with steady drumbeat pulses of his hips, grunts of exertion, eyes locked on her face, glazed, not seeing until he reached a point of tolerance and the beat became a rabbit kick, fast and furiously aimed at striking both their pleasure spots over and over, wrecking her breath as his body took control, exploding her core, lighting her brain up.
He came behind her with a shouted curse, taking her mouth for a kiss that was exhausted and possessive, his weight going heavy. A second of being crushed before he dropped to her side, face-planting a pillow with a muffled groan.
In the breathless silence, it was clear they’d destroyed the bedclothes, been riotously noisy and everything had changed.
Flick hoped it was for the better.