Chapter 6

Sawyer

I have the house to myself. Jonah is next door for the night. I start unpacking boxes, but I don’t get very far. I keep having sex-with-Elle flashbacks. But the funny thing is, they aren’t about the dirtiest part of what I did to her against the brick wall in an alleyway beside a bar. No, the thing I can’t stop thinking about is how cute she was when she was drunk. I don’t usually like women who blab—I hate gossip and small talk and the kind of nervous-polite chitchat Elle was making earlier today.

But that night, the way she kept blurting things out made me want to smile, and I hadn’t wanted to smile about much in a long, long time.

The thing was, I didn’t want to want to smile, if you know what I mean.

And I really didn’t want a woman to be the thing making me want to smile.

Smiling at a cute woman made me think about Lucy, and that sucked. Because what Lucy and I had—it wasn’t going to come around again.

Lucy was the only woman I’d ever loved, and I’m pretty sure she’s the only woman I’ll ever love.

For one thing, I’m not the kind of guy who falls in love. I guess maybe you could say I’m a misanthrope. Or maybe just a loner. Whatever. At any rate, there aren’t very many people in the world I genuinely like spending time with. Brooks and Chase, in small doses. And Jonah—but I figure that’s because in that respect he’s kind of a mini-me—a loner, too.

And for a while there, there was Lucy.

Lucy was the one woman I ever knew who didn’t seem to think there was something wrong with me, who wasn’t always trying to offer me a penny for my thoughts or get me to talk more. And the funny thing was, that made me more talkative. It was like during the time I was with Lucy, there was a light on inside me. And when she died—

Well, it went out.

And I don’t know if I want it lit again. Because the snuffing out was pretty much the most awful, painful thing you can possibly imagine. Watching Lucy fade away, from who she was to, well, nothing…

Yeah. Not going there.

Anyway, the odds that there’s someone else out there who could do that to me—light me up like that again?

Not playing that lottery.

Which is why anything that makes me think about Lucy and what we had is also incredibly painful.

So when Elle’s goofy chatter thing made me like her just a little bit that night at Maeve’s, I wanted to get back on solid ground. I was comfortable with sex. I’d had lots of it. At least once a week since a month or two after Lucy died—pickups, hookups, always an up-front “one-time-only” warning, as impersonal as jerking off.

No smiling. No enjoying myself. No liking anyone or finding her cute. (Hot, yes. Sexy, yes. Filthy, naughty, delicious—all okay.) Cute, no way. Because among other things, I knew I had nothing to give in a relationship. And I didn’t want one.

Then Elle said the dorky thing about it being her first hookup and she blushed.

Cute.

I finished my whiskey, and instead of getting up like I knew I should, I followed an impulse that felt more dangerous than pretty much any of the impersonal sex I’d had since Luce died.

I touched her. Ran my thumb over her lower lip.

It was like touching a live wire. Not just because I felt the touch flick back over my own nerves, but because she reacted, quicksilver and perfect. Her lips parted on a silent gasp, and her pupils flared.

I wanted to make her do it again. I wanted to make her feel it again, whatever she’d just felt.

I wanted to know exactly what it was, too. I wanted her to tell me. I guess that’s part of why I asked her that crazy question. You need to fuck? Prove you can still do it? That your ex didn’t take it away from you?

I just knew, somehow. I knew that was how she felt. Like he’d taken away something that belonged to her. And I also knew I could give it back to her.

When I said the word fuck, her pupils flared again. She liked it; she was dirty to the core. But also scared and vulnerable and—

I’m hard.

Now, I mean. Standing in my new kitchen, a coffee mug in one hand and a bunch of newspaper in the other hand, in an Elle trance. My dick is pumped full of blood, just like it was that night when I took her hand and led her outside and lifted her up so I could brace her against the wall. I have no idea how I had the wherewithal to slow things down enough to bring her off before I plowed into her, but somehow I managed it. Rucked her skirt up, ripped her panties trying to get them out of my way, slid one finger into her wet heat, slicked the swollen nub of her clit until she came clenching around my touch. So fucking hot I almost spilled in my briefs, which would have been an embarrassing (and unprecedented) end to a potential hookup.

My hand is in my jeans. In my briefs. Straightening myself out.

I slowly become aware that I am in a lit room with no curtains and it is growing dark outside. I have enough living brain cells not concentrated in my dick to get myself around the corner into the area behind the stairs so I’m not visible from the street or either of my neighbors’ houses. But that’s as far as I get before I unzip my jeans, free my erection from my briefs, and wrap my fist tight around myself.

That night, I got the condom on so fast that she was still coming when I filled her. Clenching around me, fluttering, whimpering, clutching my arms, my hair, anything she could get her hands on. She gasped at every thrust, pressing herself down on me like she couldn’t get enough.

It was the best kind of sex, the kind you want to go on for hours that has no prayer of lasting more than seconds.

I came so fast, so hard, that I figured I owed her a big apology, except when I started to regain some semblance of conscious thought I realized she was coming again, clamping down around me, biting the crap out of my arm to keep from making noise.

I yell something incoherent and christen my new house with an epic fountain of cum, coating my hands and dousing my shirt.

Laundry. Damn. Gotta install the washer and dryer.

Rookie.