Best Erotic Romance 2014 (12 page)

“I hope you're not expecting me to kiss you after that.” She waves her hand ineffectively toward the place on the balcony where what's left of his cigarette is still smoldering.

“No. But I expect you to let me
kiss
you.” With that, he sinks to his knees.

“What—”

“Here.” He pushes the sides of her robe up with ink-stained hands and parts her with his thumbs. The rasp of breath over bare, slickening flesh is warm and unexpected. She's never had
it quite like this, not with her standing in the middle of a room, not with the man who should have slunk out in the middle of the night asking her what she is and threatening to make her forget regardless.

He lets her back away until her spine is to the wall, and then he's unyielding, shoulders fitting to the
V
of her thighs, tongue hot and wet against her clit and fingers pushing inside. Fucking her with his hand, he licks and licks and licks, and she puts her hands in his hair. She doesn't know what this is, doesn't know why he's going down on her, making her rise like the ball of the sun over her balcony, but she's no dummy. She pulls his face in closer and rides it. When he slings her leg over his shoulder, she lets him hold her up until she floats away.

She's still coming back down, still pulsing when he puts her on the floor, gets his fly down and protection on and gets inside. It's like her hips and shoulders are parts of the wood, like he's fucking her through the floor, and she just wraps her legs around him. He doesn't try to kiss her mouth, but his lips are on her nipple, his hands playing her ribs like piano keys, and how did he learn to make such music?

She comes around him, uncertain if she ever even really finished with the last one, and he asks her if it's good, if she could drown in this, and she could, she is, she
is
. He clasps her jaw in his hand and sinks his teeth into her neck, bucks once, then twice, then stills.

After, she lies with her head on his chest, staring out at the sky through the doors he left open when he didn't leave. Running the backs of her knuckles over his abdomen, she asks, “And what are you?”

He twirls an unlit cigarette between his fingertips. “I'm a singer who doesn't sing.”

* * *

On Monday, she walks into her office to find a bouquet of red pencils, sitting on her desk.

“So?”

She hesitates, trailing a hand over the back of his couch. “It's…not quite what I expected.”

Nothing about him is—not his invitation or his gifts or the way he looked at her over a plate of spaghetti before asking her back to his place.

It's a studio apartment in the bowels of the Village, and the tiny living space is dominated by an upright piano that takes up most of the main interior wall. Turning her back on him, she walks toward it and touches the cool ivory of the keys. A single, hollow note rings out, and it feels like the first one the place has heard in a while.

She looks at him and asks, “Do you play?”

“I already told you.” His gait is loose and easy as he comes to stand beside her, pressing a kiss to the bare skin of her neck before pulling her down to sit with him on the bench. “Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

Shrugging, he fiddles with the strap of her dress. He slides it down and runs rough fingertips over her collarbone. “It didn't feel like it was mine.”

“Were you any good?”

“Good enough to almost make a living at it. And that was enough to kill it.”

She knows the story as if it were her own. She thinks of deadlines and newsprint stains and the whir of the press. There were so many words she didn't care about and words she didn't mean, and none of them were hers by the time they'd been
wrung out of her. She'd had no words left of her own.

“I'd love to hear you play sometime.”

“I'd love to see what you can make.”

She laughs as he drifts his hand lower, brushing it around the outer curve of her breast. He makes it easy, somehow, this intimacy with a not-quite-stranger. It makes her bold. She pushes his hand away, but it's only to straddle him, one knee to either side of his hips.

“To see what I can make beside love?” She murmurs it, sass and sex, with her lips just close enough to ghost across the corner of his mouth.

He nods and leans back, one hand on her thigh and the other at the small of her back. “
Besides
love.”

But that's the only thing they make that night except for noise, except for the thump of the legs of the bench against the floor, except for the crash of his shoulders on ivory keys as she sinks down on him. He's hard and big and just as good as she remembers, and it's even better when he slips a hand between them, a plaintive middle C sounding out with every twitch of his forearm to stroke her where they're joined.

“And you said you didn't play anymore,” she breathes, riding him hard. She slams her hands down on the keys for anything to hold on to.

He shakes his head and drives his hips up into hers. “I said I didn't play unless it felt like mine.”

With his free hand curled possessively around her neck, she can't question him. She feels like his, feels like they could play this—could play each other—forever.

When she's almost at her peak, he reaches up and pulls the red pencil from her hair, undoing the twist, and the locks fall down around them like a curtain from the world. He kisses her mouth and he doesn't taste like smoke. “Sing for me.”

She shatters like notes, shivering crystal to its bones. She crashes like hands clattering over piano keys. And when he pulls her down on him, groaning her name into her ear, it's music, indeed.

One year after she picked him up at a bar, he stands in front of their balcony, framed against the city's twinkling lights as the sun sets over the horizon. He hasn't lit up a cigarette in months, but sometimes she still thinks she smells them on him. She almost misses the curl of the smoke around his head and on his tongue.

One year, and still, a part of her is expecting him to leave, to disappear like so many ambitions and dreams that no longer feel like hers. He doesn't, though.

They're surrounded by boxes, and an upright piano now dominates the wall beside her dusty typewriter. The empty canvases are propped against the velvet-covered bench. They look good together, she thinks. Like they belong.

He walks over to her and wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her close. A soft peck behind her ear and a tug of teeth at the lobe. “Come to bed with me?”

“A little early for that, don't you think?”

“Not at all.”

A giggle that doesn't sound like her but sounds exactly like them spills from her lips as he lifts her bridal style. Safe in his embrace, she holds on with one arm slung around his shoulder, her other hand tangled in his hair as she kisses his temple and buries her nose in soft locks.

He sets her down on their bed and comes to hover over her on hands and knees. He kisses her mouth, licking into it and chasing her tongue. Then he slides down. She arches her back and lets him pull at fabric with lips and teeth and fingertips.
Naked, she feels as real as she ever has beneath the solidity of his hands, and she spreads her legs.

“Kiss me?” she asks. She slides her fingertip down to swirl in a circle around her clit. “Here?”

He tugs his shirt off and shifts to lie on his stomach between her thighs. He's done this so many times, has ended up wet all over his mouth and down his chin, has dragged messy fingers over his own chest to rub her slick across his nipples and then to clasp around his cock before pressing in.

With a smirk, he presses kisses to the juncture of her leg and her hip, to the inside of her knee and the back of her wrist. He licks all around her fingers when she disappears them into her body, and then finally, finally, he purses his lips around her clit. She pulls her hand away, slides shining knuckles to rest on her belly. His hand comes up to splay beside hers, flat and broad and pushing her down when she wants to buck up into that soft, lapping heat.

And he knows how to do this so well now, knows how to twist and curl his fingers just inside, how to tease and how to make her writhe. She rises and rises with every deep push of his tongue, and she's digging fingernails into his shoulder, everything tight and set to break and—

“What?” She chokes on the word, clenching on nothing as her stomach plummets, so close it hurts; she's aching and swollen and
wants
.

“Shh. I know what you need.” He kneels at the foot of the bed and pulls his belt free, opens his pants and shoves everything down, gets naked and then comes to lie over her. Sliding the tip of his cock around her opening, he gets himself nice and wet, and he's right there. Right there.

She can't stop the little whining noise, the hiss of satisfaction when he pushes inside, thick and perfect and bare. She
curls her ankle around his calf and hitches the other leg. He puts his hand to the curve of her ass and slides it to the back of her thigh, pressing it higher, bending her and opening her, making her wide so he can drive in hard. He palms her flesh so easily, feels big and solid as he thrusts and grinds, and she's so full.

“Perfect,” he murmurs, lips touching hers with each syllable.

With each glide of flesh, each rock of hips against hips, he gets her back to the top of that precipice, pressure just where she needs it as he stays flush, buried deep. He surges, the rhythm one she knows so well and yet still feels new. Brightness coils, then tingles of feeling and the promise of the rush of pleasure, the overtaking wave. When it finally hits her, it's tidal, pulling her under. She heaves and curls herself up, fixes her teeth to his shoulder and bites down hard.

He doesn't make her stop, just helps her through it, and when she's lax and easy again, opening her jaw for breath, he lets her leg go and wraps his fingers around her throat. It's light, no threat there as he pushes her back onto the mattress. He keeps his eyes open as his thrusts go long again, the steady pace of the way her fucks her slowly giving way until it's erratic and breathless, and she writes the words
I love you
on his skin as he closes his eyes.

He drops both palms to the mattress just before he tenses, before his voice breaks and he pulses, making everything wetter and warmer. He drags himself out and falls to his side, one arm curled loosely over her waist. With his face pressed to her shoulder, he breathes and breathes and breathes, and she thinks maybe she can keep this. Maybe this is what she needed, and maybe it's just for her.

Coming back to himself, he lifts his face and presses a kiss to the point of her jaw. It's so simple, comfortable in a way she never
expected intimacy to be. She never expected to be this happy.

He rolls onto his back, tugging her to move with him. She ends up lying on her side, head tucked up under his chin, staring at her own hand as she traces invisible lines against his side, feeling wrapped up and safe.

He breaks the silence, asking quietly, voice rough, “That first night. Why did you pick me?”

The whole scene at the bar has morphed over the course of this year. What she once thought of as just a whim she now sees in softer hues. He was pretty; he still is. But there was more to it than that. She'd liked the way he moved, as if he were part of the beat.

She gets the words out before she can stop them. “Because I saw music under your skin.”

Humming, he lets out a little chuckle and closes his hand around her side.

The silence only lasts a minute this time before she clears her throat. “That first morning. Why did you stay?”

He drags his knuckles over her cheek. “Because I heard paintings under yours.”

She smiles and nestles in deeper.

At some point, she drifts off to the feeling of his fingers playing music on her ribs. She wakes to a dark room, to full night beyond the open curtains of her window.

She wakes to the sound of a song.

She finds the robe she wore their first morning together and pulls it on, tying the sash at her waist and hugging herself against the chill as she tiptoes out into the living room.

He's there, hair in his eyes, long fingers arched as they make chords and trills of notes that fill the room. As he opens his mouth, the softest baritone sweeps over her. And she knows him. She knows him as well as she's ever known a lover, knows
the taste of his mouth and the weight of his body and the cadence of his thoughts.

On another level, though, she's never known him before this moment.

He's beautiful, gorgeous in lines and shades and shadow-drenched planes, and she doesn't want to interrupt him. Doesn't want to change anything about this moment except to make it last.

She wants to
make
something.

From the jar of pencils on the console, she withdraws one with a dull red barrel, scratched and bitten and worn from a year of use. She finds a notebook under one of the piles. With quiet steps, she makes her way over to their couch and sits, tucking bare feet under the corner of a cushion to keep them warm, and opens the notebook to a page that's as naked as she was, moments before. A page that's as naked as she feels.