It happened that Crystal’s bedroom window looked out onto the eastern mountain, and that when the weather was clear, it was possible for her to spot the glinting glass and stained logs of the Blackwood lodge tucked away on its plateau in the distance. It was not the same kind of view of the place that one got on the website, but at times she would sit in the window and look over, losing a few moments in imagining what it must be like to live over there in that resplendent place and be one of those werewolves who lived that kind of life.
This was one of those nights.
Dressed for bed in the T-shirt and shorts that she usually wore when she slept, Crystal curled up in a plush chair by the window and gazed over through the dark at the distant lights sparkling on the mountain. And as her eyes traveled across that distance, her mind traveled back to earlier in the evening, to the moments when she went into the meeting room at the tavern to clear away drinks and dishes and take orders for more—and she got to look at Trace Blackwood.
She contemplated the idea of “getting to look at” Trace, as if it were a privilege or a treat. Truth be told, the sight of him was pretty much a treat. The lights of his family’s lodge made her think of the light in his eyes, both as a man and as a wolf man, a light seemed to dance in them like the sparks in a bonfire or the wavering flame of a candle. The fire inside was the perfect complement to the perfect handsomeness and rippling, hairy muscularity of the body outside.
The memory of him standing naked in the stream persisted in slipping itself into her memory of him sitting fully clothed in the tavern. Crystal found herself wishing she could shake off the image of Trace in the water as a wolf shook the water from his fur. As delicious an image as it was, it was not an image she particularly wanted. Well, she enjoyed it, but she did not necessarily want it. She had, after all, not been looking for it.
At the age of eighteen, Crystal only had had just one boyfriend. Gary was a werewolf, and he had shared some of her interests. They were both good in English, though he had an eye on a career in journalism. They had seen each other naked when they changed bodies to play in the forest or go for a swim, and they had kissed. But it had gone no further than that. It wasn’t that Gary was not interested. He was a teenager, he was dark and good-looking, he was a werewolf, and of course he was interested.
And Crystal was tempted—but it had never happened. It could have happened, but it had not. Gary accepted that she was not quite as ready as he, and he tried neither to press the issue nor his luck. They actually kissed quite heavily when they were alone together, and they had come very close more than once, but they never went the whole route, and Gary to his credit never held it against her that she stopped the act before it reached completion.
He was exactly the boyfriend she needed right when she needed him. And then, his family moved away. His father’s connections with other lycan communities outside of the valley led to a job offer that was too good to pass up, and Gary and his family left town the summer after Crystal’s sophomore year, leaving Crystal with a lot of sweet memories.
There were times, like tonight, when Crystal thought of Gary. More than once, looking out at the Blackwood lodge, which looked like a tiny toy house from her window, she had imagined herself and Gary living there, having that kind of life. She had pictured it in the way that a young girl pictures things when she is just discovering boys and all the feelings that come with them, through a kind of rosy, hazy romantic fog.
Almost a couple of years after Gary left, a time that Crystal had spent socializing with boys but not actually dating them, she sometimes wondered how he was doing in his new home in his new life. No doubt there were other females, perhaps more than one, with whom he had gone where he’d never gone with Crystal.
Again, he was a young and handsome werewolf, after all; he had certainly mounted someone by now. In a way, Crystal envied her, whoever she was, and wished her well. That female she would never know was a lucky young lycan. Gary was a prize, and if he had only stayed in Reynolds Hollow, Crystal might well have finally claimed him for herself.
Now, however, someone else loomed a bit larger in her thoughts than Gary, and Crystal was not at all sure he was an appropriate presence in her mind.
Try as she might, Crystal could not dismiss the fact of Trace Blackwood’s age. If his twenties were not already behind him, they surely soon would be. The gap of more than a decade between them seemed to Crystal as wide as the valley itself. Ten years or more—there was a whole life, or a whole time of life, in those years, a life filled with all kinds of experiences that Crystal was yet to know.
Trace must have been to college and been out in the world, and seen and done all the things that come to a person in that time, things that for Crystal were yet to be born. She was on the cusp or the threshold of those things, but they were not yet a reality to her, not the way they were to Trace.
To her, Trace Blackwood represented everything that had yet to happen to her and everything that she was yet to be. It was not only their positions in society that were not equal, Trace being the son and heir of a very wealthy Alpha male. It was their positions in life. So why should Trace Blackwood be so much on her mind?
Because her first sight of him was that of his mind-shocking naked maleness and his phenomenal phallus laid bare in all their glory right in front of her, that was why.
It frustrated her because it was just such a human reaction. She kept returning to the fact that she should not be so preoccupied with it. A splendiferously naked man was a part of nature, and unlike humans, lycans did not consider nature corrupt or dirty, or think of natural things only as things to be dominated and controlled. There was nothing wrong, she knew, with having seen Trace the way she did. Every lycan, at some time, did not like the human part of himself. For Crystal, this was one of those times.
Crystal sat in her window, looking over at the Blackwood lights, thrashing about with these thoughts the way a pup would thrash with a branch in her jaw, until she heard the ringtone on her phone. Snapping out of her thoughts, she went to her bed and sat on it, picking up the phone from her nightstand. The Caller ID said “Lexie.” She tapped the phone to answer the call from her best friend.
Lexie was a dark-haired girl who wore a removable ring through her nose when in her human form. Crystal pictured her friend sitting up on her own bed, probably waiting for her toenails to dry. “What are you doing?” Lexie asked.
“Just getting ready for bed,” answered Crystal.
Lexie wasted no time getting to the point, as was her habit. “So…you served them tonight, right?”
“Yes, I did,” said Crystal, stifling a yawn.
“So…?”
“So, what?” Crystal wondered aloud.
“So…what’s he like?”
“Who?”
“You know…him.”
“Him, who?”
Lexie whined plaintively. “Stop it, you know who!” Then, more softly, as if someone might be listening in: “Trace Blackwood.”
Crystal rolled her eyes and flopped back on her pillow against the headboard. This was going to become an interrogation between girlfriends. “Oh. That him.”
“Yes, ‘that him.’ What’s he like?”
“What do you mean, what’s he like? He’s a guy. An older guy.”
“A really hot older guy, from what everyone says. So, is he?”
“He’s…,” Crystal pondered how to answer that, how honest she should be. She wondered why she was even bothering to ponder it, as she and Lexie always told each other everything. They had always talked together about boys. And perhaps that was the problem: this time, it was not a “boy”. Surrendering to the inevitable despite her misgivings about the whole subject, Crystal answered, “Yeah. He’s hot.”
“Really hot?”
Crystal shrugged with her face, another gesture of surrender. There would be no getting around the truth. “Yeah…really hot. Like maybe too hot. Maybe he should have been in the movies; that hot.”
“Oh my God,” Lexie gushed. “Did you hear any of what they were talking about?”
“I wasn’t really there to listen to what they were talking about except for what they were ordering. I was in and out with their orders, and that’s the most I heard.”
“Oh,” said Lexie. “Well, you know everyone’s been talking about how the town wants to hit them up for help recovering from the fire. Trace Blackwood doesn’t need to be in the movies. He’s already as rich as a movie star and looks like one.”
“Yeah, he does,” said Crystal dreamily, tilting her head back towards the window as if she could just drift off from thinking about him.
There was a beat of silence. Then, Lexie’s voice came back: “Hey! Still there?”
Crystal refocused her attention. “Yeah, I’m still here. I was just…thinking.”
“About what?”
“About…” Crystal didn’t know how to say it. But again, she and Lexie always talked about everything. It was inevitable that she would tell Lexie this. “About something that happened.”
The aroused curiosity in Lexie’s voice became almost tangible even through the phone. “What? What happened?”
“It was…the other day,” Crystal began. “Something that happened the other day.”
More urgently, Lexie pressed, “What?”
“It was something I did,” said Crystal. “And…something I saw.”
“What did you see?”
“Lexie, you can’t tell anyone this. I mean, nobody. This is one of those things like that movie about the guys fighting, one of those things we know about, but we don’t talk about it, right?”
From Lexie’s tone, Crystal could feel her friend straightening herself up on her bed and bracing for something enormous. “Crystal, what did you see?”
Crystal plunged ahead and launched into it. “The other day, I went out for a run down by the stream. I was just running along, and…”
And Crystal told Lexie whom and what she saw. Then she had to hold the phone away from her ear to stop the screams pouring right into her eardrum. Now, she had the picture of Lexie bouncing on her bed.
“You saw HIM like THAT? ACTUALLY?” Lexie had to stifle her screaming.
“It was an accident. I was just there when he was, and then he…”
“He went human! He showed himself to you like that! Oh my God, do you think he was hitting on you?”
Crystal shook her head, harking back to her conversation with her father. “I don’t know. I think it’s just something he did, something he does. You know, our guys just do that. It’s how they are.”
“Yeah, but he was like that with you. And you saw it. He showed it to you, right there.”
“He sure did,” Crystal sighed.
“So…what was it like?”
“What was it like?” Crystal couldn’t help repeating the question. “You know what they’re like. We’ve seen them.”
“We’ve seen them on boys. This isn’t a boy.”
Crystal rolled her eyes again. “No…he sure isn’t.”
“So, it was big, right?”
“Of course, it was big. Our guys don’t have little ones.”
“Yeah, but was it…you know bigger? Bigger because he’s older?”
“It was big enough,” said Crystal. Then, after a meaningful beat: “It was huge.”
Lexie almost squealed. “Oh my God! Was it hard?”
“I don’t think so,” Crystal said. “He was in the water, and we were both surprised. I don’t think it was hard. It was just…big.”
Lexie sighed. “Oh, Crystal, talk about right place, right time! You actually caught him like that and saw it.”
Well, if she was having trouble getting the image out of her head before, sharing it with Lexie was now embedding it in Crystal’s mind that much more deeply. “Yeah, I sure did,” she said wistfully.
“So, did he say anything?” Lexie asked.
“No, neither one of us said anything,” Crystal replied. “I was all wolf, so I couldn’t talk. And he just stood there. I think he smiled a little, maybe. I think. It all just turns into a blur to me. I turned and ran so fast; the whole thing just blurs in my head.”
“Wow,” said Lexie. “Are you sorry you ran? Do you wish you’d stayed and said something?”
“I didn’t even know who he was, Lexie!” Crystal balked. “What would you have said? ‘Hello, naked strange guy standing in the water? Come here often?’ What do you say at a time like that?”
“I would have thought of something.”
“You would not! You would have turned and ran just like I did.”
Lexie sighed again. Crystal imagined her slumping her shoulders. “You're right. I would have been a coward about the whole thing too.”
“It’s not being a coward. It’s being smart. I didn’t know who he was. But I sure found out when he showed up at the tavern. My God, I could have split my clothes and my human skin wide open and gone tearing out of there all wolf. I’ve never been so shocked in my life.”
“I’ll bet,” said Lexie. Then, after a thoughtful beat: “So, when you saw him at the tavern…was he nice?”
“I guess,” said Crystal. “I mean, he was polite. And I was grateful that I stayed wolf when I saw him at the stream. He doesn’t know my human scent; he couldn’t have recognized me. And they left a huge tip.”
“Well, they’re rich. They ought to.”
“Well, they did.” Now, Crystal could not stop herself yawning. “I’ve really got to hang up now. All of a sudden, I’m catching up to how tired I am.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Lexie. “But you really got an eyeful to take with you to sleep.”
Crystal agreed, “Yeah, I did.”
Lexie asked, “Crystal, before you go…what do you really think about him?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…what if a guy like that…wanted to? Would you let him?”
A spike of shock went through Crystal at the question. Suddenly, her weariness was forgotten. “Would I let him?”
“Yeah. Would you?”
Crystal was on the verge of freaking out. “Lexie, the guy must be thirty!”
“Yeah, but he’s hot. I mean, over-the-top hot. What if you saw him again and he was interested? Wouldn’t you at least think about it?”
Crystal wiped her brow, completely unprepared for this subject and not really wanting to go into it. “I don’t know, Lexie. He’s so much older. We wouldn’t have anything in common. Why would he be interested, anyway? He’s used to women his own age. What would he want with me?”
“I guess,” said Lexie. “But can you imagine, though, showing up at the prom with someone like that on your arm?”
Now, Crystal was truly flustered. With the distraction of both impending graduation and the sensuous surprise of Trace Blackwood, she had completely forgotten that prom season was starting. It was one more thing to crowd her mind. She almost laughed, “Lexie, a guy like Trace Blackwood isn’t going to be anybody’s prom date. He’s had his proms. He’s past all that.”
“I know, but what if you could? Picture that, walking into the prom with a guy like that. All the heads turning in your direction…”
“…and saying, ‘Look at the pervy older guy taking an eighteen-year-old girl to her prom! Eeewww…!’ Yeah, that would be a sight, all right.”
“Yeah, you're right. It’s a stupid idea. Forget I said it.”
“Done and forgotten,” said Crystal. “And I really need to hang up now.”
“Yeah, me too. See you at school. And…try to get some sleep in spite of…you know.”
“I’ll try,” said Crystal. “Night, Lexie.”
“Night.”
They ended the call, and with a long, blubbering breath, Crystal put her phone back on her nightstand, shut off the light, slipped under the covers, and curled up in bed.
In the quiet and the dark, Crystal was alone with her thoughts and her memories. She closed her eyes and tried to call sleep to her, to make it take her away. Sleep, at the moment, was decidedly playing hard to get.
Trying to forget the conversation she had just had with Lexie, she pushed past it and past the memory of Trace in the tavern and in the stream, and went further into the past.
Unfortunately, that did her no good, for waiting in the past were memories that only underlined the things that were happening right now.
Crystal returned to all the nights she and Lexie had slept over, either there or at Lexie’s house. She returned to all the times they’d sat up together in this very room, talking about the kinds of things they had talked about tonight, but with different subjects—not the older Trace Blackwood, but boys their own age from school.
She thought of all the hushed conversations they’d had about the way other lycan boys looked when they stripped to change from boy to wolf, and when they morphed back from wolf to naked boy. She and Lexie had discussed which ones they thought were the most attractive, which ones were coming into their human muscles better than others, and which ones were getting the handsomest. And which ones were endowed the best.
Being lycans, none of them were exactly small, but naturally some were bigger and thicker than others down there. She and Lexie had compared and verbally catalogued all of them, and they had talked at great length about what they would most want in a boy when someday they finally let one “do it.” They talked of how they imagined it would feel to “touch it” and feel it hard and know what the boy would do to them with it—and how it must feel to have it pumping inside.
And they talked of what it would be like to “suck it” before letting him do what he most wanted to do, and of how it would feel when he touched them there and there, and when he licked and sucked at her down there before at last he “did the deed.” Crystal had told Lexie of how much she had been tempted to do those things to Gary and let him do them to her. She had confessed of faintly regretting that she hadn’t allowed it. But they both agreed that when the time finally came, it would be with the right boy and it would be wonderful.
A little calmer, she let her mind roll forward to the future. Lexie had brought up the prom. It would be next month now, and no boy had asked her—yet. She expected someone would, but none of the boys at school had brought up the subject with her. That would be soon, she was sure. And she smiled in the dark, wondering which one it would be.
That was when it happened. Crystal sensed she was not alone in the room. She pried her eyes open just a little and looked. Totally unbidden, wholly unasked-for, a vision came to her, standing in the swath of light coming in from the window. Trace Blackwood was there, as if he had ridden the light of the stars and the Moon from the mountain on the other side of the valley right here to her bedroom. And he was as naked as he had been at the stream.
Crystal propped herself up against her pillows and stared at what was there only in her mind. And she whispered his name—his first name, as he’d asked her to call him at the tavern: “Trace…?”
“Hello, Crystal,” said the vision of Trace Blackwood.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Don’t you know?” Trace asked back.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“Why not? Don’t you want me?” He showed himself fully to her in the stream of light, just as he had shown himself to her in the stream of water. He was every bit as incredible in her imagination as he was in reality.
“Trace, this isn’t right,” Crystal said.
“Why?” the vision asked.
“You know why,” she replied.
“What, because I’m older? Because I’m more experienced? Being older and more experienced just makes it better. I can show you.”
Crystal wanted to say something, but before she could get the words out, he crossed the few steps from her window to her bed and was right there at her bedside—all of him, muscles, hair, face, and man-tool, right within arm’s length. Crystal could not breathe with him so close. She could not even move.
Trace sat his beautiful male nakedness down on the side of the bed. “Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “This is the thing you should be the least afraid of. You know that. Touch me—anywhere you want. Go ahead—touch.”
Hesitantly, Crystal raised her hand. She held it up between them, extended towards him—and stopped. She had the sense of this being one moment, of all moments in her life, from which there would be no turning back. Trace’s eyes gleamed with the light of so many mysteries soon to be solved. Her hand stayed suspended in the darkened space between them. And then, Trace did something else. He reached out—a gesture that filled Crystal with a tingle of both excitement and apprehension—not for Crystal, but for her nightstand and the phone resting on it. What could he want with that?
At once she had her answer. He picked up the phone and tapped on the flashlight app. With the app running, Trace put the phone back on the nightstand, and the space around the upper half of the bed was bathed in a golden-white glow. The light of the phone flashlight illuminated Trace’s body and made him appear to be an angel. An inhumanly handsome, dark, hairy, sexy, generously muscled angel with a long, stout staff of flesh between his legs.
Crystal became aware that she had drawn back her hand when Trace said, “There, that’s better. Now—touch me. Wherever you want. Feel my body.” He glanced down at his staff. “Feel me there.”
She looked him up and down, still so very tempted and still so very unsure. “Trace,” she said, “I don’t know if I should. I don’t know if we should…”
“Give me your hand, then,” he said. He held out his hand to her. “Give me your hand, Crystal. Please.”
She raised her hand to him again, and he took it in his. She felt something like the sensation of their handshake at the tavern—but stronger, reaching into her somehow, letting her know that holding hands was the prelude to so much more. He flexed his fingers around hers, caressing her, telling her with his touch that there was nothing to fear.
Trace moved closer to her on the bed and brought her hand to him—and put it on his chest, his massive, hard, hairy chest, a pair of twin plateaus of hair-bristled muscle like the mountains outside. He moved her fingers and palm up and down and over his pecs, letting Crystal take in the feeling of him. He guided her fingers to his nipples, like two little stones of hardened flesh mounted in his chest. The way he felt made her feel as if she were swimming and flying inside at the same time.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Trace said.
“Yes…,” said Crystal hypnotically.
“That’s only the beginning,” he told her. “Here—come closer.”
Crystal leaned forward, closer to him, until Trace’s face was right at hers. She trembled a bit, and he closed the distance between them with the first touch of their lips together.
She let her senses fill with the soft press of this first mellow kiss. Trace held the kiss exactly that way, letting her grow more accustomed to him—until he deepened the kiss. He pressed a little harder and felt her yield to him. He took her arms and wrapped them around his broad and muscular shoulders.
He pulled her ever closer into his embrace and made her instinctively part her lips to receive the moist brush of his tongue. The feeling of his stubble rustling with a prickly fire against the skin of her face thrilled Crystal, making her yield to him all the more. He kissed her harder, more deeply, sliding his mouth across hers, claiming her teenage passion and feeding her his own.
Having brought her to a point of complete surrender, Trace was ready to claim more of her. He took one arm from around Crystal and slid it down to the bottom of her T-shirt, then up under it and onto the tender skin of her stomach. Startled by this new and even more intimate feeling, Crystal broke the kiss and gasped. But his eyes held her in place. She could not even tremble as Trace moved first one hand, then the other, up beneath her T-shirt and grasped her bosom.
“Ooohhh…,” Crystal sighed at the feeling of his strong male hands clutching and kneading her breasts, and the circular pressing of his thumb-tips making her nipples turn as hard as his. “Oh, Trace…”
“Mmm,” said Trace before seizing her mouth in another kiss. “Those boobs feel nice. Let me see them. Take this shirt off.”
He kissed her again, a kiss that she broke once more, only to be pinned once more by the look in his eyes. “Take off your shirt. Let me see them.”
Crystal did not move, so Trace did the job for her. He slipped the T-shirt up over her and off of her, discarding it on one side of the bed, leaving her naked except for her shorts. Crystal’s breathing quickened now, with Trace’s gaze falling on her exposed bosom. “Nice,” he said. “So nice.” And he took one breast in each hand once again and returned to squeezing and kneading and thumbing at them, making Crystal feel as if she would melt right into the sheets.
“Take those off too,” he said, glancing down at her shorts.
She looked wide-eyed at him, once again afraid to move.
“Do you want me to take them off?” Trace asked.
As she did when he first appeared, Crystal tried to say something, but no words came.
Trace took that as a “yes.” With a sensuous smile, he took his hands from her breasts to the waistline of her shorts and pulled at them. Crystal found herself unable to protest, much as she could not believe any of this was happening. Instinctively, she leaned back and let him work the shorts down over her thighs. She lifted her legs and let him slip them all the way from her and toss them away. And now, she was as naked as he.
Gulping, hugging her stomach, Crystal did not know what else to do but submit to him. He was too beautiful, too perfect, too strong, and too male for her to show any resistance. When Trace said, “Open your legs,” to her astonishment, she did just that, showing him the pink petals of her girl flower under the bush of hair between her thighs, the opening to her promised land.
Smiling, Trace licked the fingertips of one hand and moved them to the prize that Crystal presented him. He stroked his moistened fingertips up and down her girlie place, and she tingled all over with the feeling of her sex moistening at his touch. She gave forth long, soft sighs of discovered pleasure. “That’s good,” Trace said. “Keep your legs open just like that. Let me see what you’ve got.”
Trace leaned down and supported himself on his elbows. “Bend your legs up a bit,” he said. She did, and with both hands now he spread apart the soft, moist curtains of Crystal’s sex and peered inside at the glistening pink seal of her maidenhood. “Oh,” he said, “I like that. I like that. I know what I want to do to that.”
He brought his face forward, and Crystal’s heart leapt at the thought of him breaking her seal with his tongue or his fingers, taking her virginity that way. But to her further surprise, he took away his fingers from her curtains—and brought the tip of his tongue just to her lady bud. Something that felt like a splash of pleasure moved through her body now, at the feeling of Trace’s tongue teasing that bud, tasting of her and giving her the first taste of being taken.
Crystal breathed quickly, her breaths coming in little gasps, submitting further to being pleasured by Trace. He licked her girl-tool and sucked at it, licked and sucked, carrying her up and up into increasing delight. At some point, after she did not know how long, his wet teasing brought her to what felt like a place where she was floating on a cloud and just hovering there, suspended in bliss. She would not have minded this going on all night.
But Trace had other ideas. Leaving Crystal hovering for a moment in lingering pleasure, he lifted up his face and climbed all the way up onto the bed. Crystal looked up at him looming over her, his erection pointing at her like a drawbridge. “Come here,” he said and held out his hand to her again.
She obeyed. Still feeling the buzz of his oral pleasuring, she lifted herself up on her knees and sat facing him. Trace’s prong still pointed at her, a manly javelin aimed at its target. With the hand that he’d held out to her, Trace again took her by one hand and moved it over and down to where he wanted it. “Touch it,” he said. “Feel it. Stroke it and feel my balls.”
Again, she did as he told her, relinquishing all control to him. She did now to a man what she had so often imagined doing to boys: she touched the hot, hard prong that he offered her. Crystal’s fingers closed around his erection, which pulsed and throbbed in her grasp.
Trace groaned and cursed sexily at her touch. “Oh, yeah,” he uttered. “Stroke it up and down. Come closer; feel it…”
He drew her into an embrace and captured her mouth in hungry kisses while Crystal moved her fingers up and down the length of his hardness. Between kisses he grunted, “My balls…cup my balls.” He took her free hand and reached it down and around behind him. “Grab my ass. Yeah, feel my junk and my ass, that’s it…”.
Her senses were now completely filled with him. She tenderly squeezed the soft, full roundness of his sac and grasped and groped at the firm, fleshy loaves of his buttocks. At the same time, Trace returned the favor to her bottom, thrilling her all the more with the way he felt and squeezed at it, and with his other hand he played at where his mouth had been, his fingers fluttering over her wetness and teasing at her little pleasure knob. Crystal began to groan with him. She was the captive of his body now. She returned to pulling and stroking at his hard-on, making him grunt and curse over and over as he sucked at her lips, until at last he hovered his face next to hers and said, “Lie back down. I want to be in you.”
There was nothing for Crystal to do but give Trace what he wanted—and take what she knew without a doubt that she wanted. She lay back down on the bed, her legs parted, presenting to him the place where they both wanted him to go. He did not hesitate. He climbed between her thighs and put his tool at her opening. For a moment, he slid just the tip of it up and down between her petals as he had done with his fingers, sending tremors of anticipation through her. Then, smoothly and surely, he eased his hard length and thickness into her.
Crystal let out a long moan at the filling of Trace penetrating her and filling her with his maleness, and in some corner of her mind, she knew that his penetrating tool had burst the seal on her womanhood, relieving her of her virginity. She was no longer a maiden, no longer waiting to be claimed. Trace had her now, and she had him.
Holding his shaft in her, Trace lay down on her and took her mouth in the deepest kiss yet, telling her that they would now be one in body. Crystal surrendered completely, wrapping his shoulders in her arms and receiving his first deep, urgent thrusts inside her. Now, his body and his erection were her world. She gave herself into the beating and rhythm of his strokes, yielding up her sex and her being to his deep, steady pumping.
His kisses consumed her, and his thrusts filled her. Trace was uniting them, binding them together, with the quick and passionate pumping of his tool in and out of her. Crystal, in that far corner of her mind, bid farewell to her virginity and hello to the most wonderful, awesome thing a girl could ever feel.
Trace pumped her long and hard, making her think he would never stop and making her never want him to take it out. His body on top of her, his muscles straining and flexing with the beats of his piston inside her tight wetness, the rustle of his hair against her skin, the expression of ecstasy on his handsome and stubbled face as it hovered over her, were all too exquisite for her ever to want this to be over. “Yeah,” Trace grunted down hotly at her. “See how good this is? See how good it is, having me in you like this?”
“Oh, yes,” she sighed, awash in pleasure.
“Yeah…you want me on top of you forever, don’t you? You never want me to take my thing out of you. Yeah, you want me to screw you like this and never stop. Tell me…tell me you never want me to stop…”
“Don’t stop,” Crystal moaned deliriously.
“Mmm, yeah…I’ll never take it out, Crystal. I’ll screw you forever.” And he bore down on her, kissing her harder, pumping her harder and faster.
Trace felt as though he would make good on his word and never take himself out of her. As he had done with his mouth, he carried her up and up to a place of pleasure beyond expression, where she thought she would float until the end of time. And suddenly, Crystal’s world turned to an explosion of blinding light, making Trace’s body and hers and everything else in the world disappear into brilliant whiteness…
And then, with a loud gasp of shock, Crystal bolted upright on the bed.
She sat there, shaking all over, a sheen of perspiration on her brow and her bosom and her arms and legs. She looked around, trying to collect whatever fragments of thought she had left. Nothing was as it had been. Her phone was on the nightstand, but the flashlight was not turned on. Her bedroom was dark. And she was alone.
Alone. There was no Trace Blackwood in her bed, no awesomely perfect and horny older man on top of her. She was not being humped with all the manly passion of his accumulated years. She was not pressed beneath his incredible flesh and muscle and hair. She was not being seared by his kisses. Crystal was alone.
She flopped back onto the bed and slowly gathered her wits. None of it had happened. No magical appearance of Trace at her window. No Trace welcoming himself to her bed and her body, nor welcoming her to his. Even the things he had said—they were things that reminded her of what she had overheard boys whispering, or things she had read in stolen glimpses through paperbacks in bookstores when she went out of town to the mall. Somehow, her mind had collected all those things and poured them into a dream—a dream from which she had bolted awake right at the point that she knew a woman most wanted to reach.
Her imagination had supplied her body with all the details of how it would feel; her imagination, and the things that she and Lexie had spent so many hours talking about. It had conjured up for her an approximation of how it must be to have a man in bed. She did not even know if it would actually feel that way. She had only her imagination to go on.
Crystal exhaled a puffing breath. Wow. That’s some imagination I’ve got. I didn’t know I had that in me.
She did know, however, what she did not have in her—not really. She had not actually been kissed and fondled and licked and mounted and penetrated, and her virginity taken away, by Trace Blackwood. Whatever else she may have had in her, it was not him.
But the meaning of the dream nagged at her now. He had not really lain with her and atop her, had not really been inside her. But the dream seemed to suggest something. She would not have had such a dream out of nowhere. There was a reason for it. She had dreamed this thing for a reason.
Crystal was not at all sure that she liked what her sleeping mind had to say to her. And she was not at all certain she wanted to go back to sleep now.