at the base of my throat and kept moving lower. “I’m just following directions.”
“But . . .” I squirmed, but I couldn’t quite come up with a strong argument, particularly not when his hands bracketed my thighs and eased them apart.
“I promise, this is going to be good.” He paused, and then his eyes flickered up to meet mine. “You can trust me.”
I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “Okay.”
He smiled, and there was something intimate and warm in it. Some of my reservations melted. “Just . . . let me take care of you.”
My nod was barely perceptible, but it must have been enough to give Eli the green light he needed. He dipped his head between my legs and brushed a soft kiss—right there.
“Oh, my God.” Even through the silk and cotton of my underwear, I could feel the imprint of his lips. “That’s—are you sure—this is, um, right?”
Eli laughed softly. “If this is wrong, I so don’t care about being right.” With his finger tip, he eased the material of the panties out of his way and licked me, which very well may have been the only thing that could’ve shocked me more.
I’d heard allusions to certain aspects of the sex act—it was impossible to be in high school and not have some inkling about what sex was about. I’d gone through health class, and I’d snuck peeks at some of the naughtier books at the library, so I knew the basics. I’d picked up enough from my classmates’ jokes and whispered stories to have a vague idea about what blow jobs were.
But the truth was that I’d been raised in a protective family within a fairly old-fashioned community. I was sure most of the people in my school were sexually active, but I wasn’t. I’d never even been tempted to sleep with any boy I’d dated—not that there’d been many of them. We didn’t have a television at home, I rarely went to the movies, and that was the norm among my friends’ families, too.
So maybe it wasn’t so surprising that I hadn’t ever heard of any guy doing to a girl what Eli was so busy with between my legs just now. It hadn’t even occurred to me that a boy would want to do this.
Eli, though, seemed to be enjoying himself, if I could judge by the small sounds coming from deep in his throat. I, on the other hand, was struggling to push down my panic far enough that I could see if I liked the way his tongue, teeth and lips were assaulting my . . . well, down there.
He slid the tip of his finger into me, and I sucked in a deep breath, my legs instinctively trying to close against the intrusion.
“Shhhh, baby, it’s okay.” He whispered the words, his breath hitching slightly. “Just relax.”
“Yeah.” My body was tense with the effort not to shy away from him. My legs began to shake.
“Hey.” Eli pushed himself up to sit, frowning down at me. “Do you . . . are you not enjoying this?”
My frantic and slightly numb brain tried to come up with an answer that didn’t make me sound like a hopelessly inexperienced moron. “Um—it’s just that—I want to touch you.” I blurted it out before I could stop and think. “I want to make you feel good.” Somehow managing a tremulous smile, I sat up and pushed at Eli’s shoulder. “Lay down. Let me . . . take care of you.”
I had no idea in hell what I was doing, but something my aunt Norrie had once said popped into my mind.
“Men don’t care if you’re doing it right or wrong, or if you’re the best or the worst at it, as long as they believe you’re doing it for them—to make them happy.” She’d been talking about making pies, of course, but I kind of thought the same rules applied here.
And really, how hard could a blow job be?
Apparently, Eli was easy to convince, because he didn’t argue with me. Instead, he stripped off his shirt and tossed it aside. I sat in awed silence for a few seconds, just appreciating the hell out of his chest.
He was defined without being too muscled. A light smattering of hair ran down the center of his flat belly into the waistband of his jeans, which, as I watched, he unbuttoned and eased down his legs, kicking the pants away. What that move revealed was longer and bigger than