his lips from my skin and pulled back just far enough to look into my eyes, a silent question in his. I nodded, and probably looked like I wanted to punch him, because I was still fighting those tears.
Fuck, I was not going to cry. I was still mad at him, and I wasn’t going to lose it just because he wanted to suck me off.
My stomach flipped as Connor dropped to his knees on the grass in front of me. He took me in his mouth all at once, nothing hesitant about it. My knees threatened to buckle, but he pressed my hips back against the tree, holding me steady. My shirt rode up, the bark scratching my back, but I didn’t care.
Whatever else had transpired in the past ten years, nothing had dimmed our physical connection. Connor’s tongue was tender and rough, teasing and demanding at the same time. He worked me up and down, and he hummed in the back of his throat as my cock twitched.
Connor looked up at me, his eyes honest and unafraid. Naked with desire. He’d never hidden it, never let anyone make him feel ashamed of what he wanted. Being with Connor always made me feel vulnerable that way. There was so damn much I hid about myself, and around him, I became painfully aware of all the lies I was telling.
Those eyes, those sharp cheekbones, that chiseled jaw. He wasn’t the boy he’d been, but there were enough traces of that boy to make me ache for what we’d had, and what we’d lost.
I melted in his hands and under his tongue. It had been too long since I’d been with anyone, man or woman. But with Connor here, his mouth on me, his hands holding me close, I could admit a truth I’d been running from since he’d left. No one else made me feel like this.
Connor was the night and the ocean and the pull of the moon. Everyone else was just a photograph. Pretty, maybe, but it didn’t make me shiver.
Hesitantly, I reached out and slid my hand through his hair, letting the wild strands slip through my fingers. He took me all the way down again and I whimpered. He looked so damn good with my cock filling his mouth, his eyes begging to please me.
“God, Connor.” My hand tightened in his hair and his eyes told me he knew I was close. He could read me as easily as ever, and he drew my pleasure out until I reached the breaking point.
“I’m—oh, God, I’m gonna come.”
I released into his mouth, letting myself go for the first time in so long. Connor guided me through it, holding me steady as my body soared on waves of pleasure. It wasn’t till my breathing finally began to slow that he pulled off.
My hands shook as I tried to put myself back together, pulling my pants back up. Connor stood and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. My chest still heaved like I’d run a marathon and Connor looked a little ragged as well.
I tried to parse the emotions I saw in his eyes. Anger? Hope? All I could be sure of was that his stare was a challenge.
“What,” I said, when I finally got my brain to work, “was that?”
And in an instant, he was granite again, as flat and unforgiving as a mountain face.
“Don’t read too much into it,” Connor said with a shrug. He looked over his shoulder at Roxie and Gretchen as I stared at him in confusion. He whistled. “Come on, Rox. Time to go.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I told you,” Connor said as Roxie trotted over to him. “Don’t read too much into it.”
“But where does that leave us?”
“The same place we were before.”
“You sucked me off in my backyard, but that’s it? We’re just gonna pretend like there’s nothing here? Like that didn’t happen?”
“Sex doesn’t have to mean more than what it does. Just let it be, Julian.”
He whistled once more to Roxie, and walked away.
7
Connor
So that was probably not the smartest thing I’d ever done.
Understatement of the millennium.
I don’t even know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I think.
One minute, Julian was backing me literally and figuratively into a corner, and the next minute, I was kissing him.
It was like my body acted without bothering to consult my brain. Not that I quite trusted my brain at this point anyway, since the predominant thing it kept whispering was that if Julian