got in trouble, you know. My parents were there when I got back.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was worth it. Shouldn’t you leave France?”
That makes him smile. “Ah, but you assume I was ever really here.”
I squeeze his shoulders, and he pushes his lower body against mine. There’s a conversation our bodies are having, a different one than our words. My backpack cushions me against the wall. His body is pure hardness. “You feel real enough.”
Perhaps it’s the two glasses of champagne that give me courage.
Or perhaps that’s just the excuse I use.
I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him down. He holds his head low enough for me to reach, but without actively kissing me. Instead he lets me press a clumsy kiss to his lips. He lets me slip my tongue out to taste his bottom lip. He lets me open my mouth against his, ardent and innocent. Letting, letting, letting. He’s the one letting me consume him this time.
Then he pulls back and grasps my wrist. He pushes it against the wall. Uneven stones press against the back of my hand. Then he carefully, slowly, takes my other wrist. He pushes it against the cool stones, too. Now I’m trapped by his hands, my arms pinned beside my head. My backpack nudges against my back, pressing my breasts forward.
When he kisses me, it’s completely different. Even though I hadn’t been using my hands much, it feels strange to have them trapped. They’re pulled back, my body exposed. He presses his hard length against me as his mouth claims mine.
He teases the entrance to my lips, the seam of them, and it feels like every sensation at once—hot and cold, pain and pleasure. As if every nerve ending has centered on that line. Then he slips his tongue into my mouth, a firm invasion, and my mouth opens. This is what it would be like. Sex. It would feel like him coming inside me, becoming part of me.
He finds a rhythm that makes me ache, makes my whole body clench.
Slowly he pulls back. He keeps his hands around my wrists, forming a kind of prison. I clench my fists and yank them, but he doesn’t let me go. Somehow that makes it more delicious.
“How does it end?” he asks, nuzzling my cheek.
“How does what end?”
“The book. I need something to distract me from your mouth and all the ways I want to use it.” He drops an almost-chaste kiss onto my lips. “Or I’ll never be able to leave.”
All the ways he wants to use it?
I don’t even know the possibilities.
I’ve heard whispers, jokes on TV that never quite made sense, but it’s too far away to imagine. “I don’t know. I got grounded. But it was probably a boring ending. The mermaid queen probably found some way to defeat the dragon. Instead of doing that, she would show mercy and thus prove that she was better than them all along. And there would be peace.”
A soundless laugh. “That’s the ending? It doesn’t sound lame.”
“Oh yeah. If I wrote it, it would be totally different.”
“I want to know your ending.”
“In my head the mermaids and the dragons, they’re the same. I mean they’re actually the same species. One female. One male. They live for so long they’ve forgotten the lore, how their children are made.”
He pulls back with a question in his eyes.
“They destroy each other, you know. The dragons start, but the mermaids fight back just as fierce. They’re made of the same things, after all.”
“There’s no happy ending in your head, is there?”
I shake my head without breaking eye contact. Those green eyes burn with hunger. “Only when the last few dragons are left, when the mermaids are scattered and hiding in the depths of the ocean, do they discover what they lost. But by then it’s too late.”
“Christ,” he murmurs, pressing his face into my neck. It’s not a sexual move. Not to kiss me or consume me. Instead he rests his head there as if seeking comfort. I hold very still so as not to disturb him. I’ve thought many things about my body—that it’s too short or too soft. That it’s too weak, but I’ve never realized how it can provide solace until now.
He drops my wrists, and I fold my arms around his neck, pulling him all the way in. He smells the way I remember from last night. Except now it imprints somewhere deep inside me.
This is what a man