Beyond Repair (10 page)

“Is that who you think you look like here?”

“I’m praying I don’t. That’s why I’m making jokes.”

“You don’t seem like a crazed fan for fuck’s sake. I
wish
you seemed more like a crazed fan because good goddamn am I a crazed fan of
yours. For once in my life I’m the one who wants to write someone’s name on my
fucking pencil case and it’s killing me, it’s absolutely killing me.”

Dear Lord in heaven, had he really just said that?

She had to double check, just to be sure.

“You want to write my name on your pencil case?”

“I do, I really do,” he said, tone so wistful she could
hardly stand to hear it. Every muscle in her body seemed to melt the moment he
spoke, and her resistance went with each one. Everything just ran right out of
her and all over the floor.

“Well in that case I do too,” she tried—tentatively.

But he didn’t make her regret it. Not one little bit.

“Then why are you still standing over there? Come on over
here, honey. Come on and come to me before I die of wanting you to.”

She tried, she really did. Her heart wanted nothing more
than to march to where he was—but then her heart wasn’t really the problem. The
fact that his words were starting to sink in was. He’d said
pencil case
.
He’d said
come to me before I die of wanting you
.

She simply wasn’t used to things like that. She barely
understood what romance entailed, and there he was rolling great waves of it
right over her. It was incredible she was still standing, never mind actively
moving toward him.

“I can’t. I can’t. I’m too nervous now.”

“Sure you can. Here, take my hand. I’ll pull you through
like Morten Harket from A-ha in that music video where he takes her out of the
real world and into a drawing,” he said, which made it both worse and better
all at the same time. Now she was close to swooning, but at least her power to
make normal words was back.

“Good God, I don’t think you could have said anything more
perfect if you’d lived to be a thousand.”

“You like that, huh?”

“Yes oh yes, I really like it.”

“I like it too. You pull me through.”

“Wow I was really wrong about that
saying something more
perfect
thing. It took you all of ten seconds,” she said, though she didn’t
realize how true that was until he really did it. He put his hand through the
gap, and her heart did a little dance. He was honestly letting her be the
Morten Harket. She was the pencil-drawn superhero, and he was the ordinary guy
who wanted to be in her world.

Everything was so easy, once she put it that way. Suddenly
she was clasping his hand with almost no effort at all, and then she was
leaning forward, and maybe he was leaning forward too, and none of it had to
mean too much because the space between the films was so small. It was possible
to believe it couldn’t happen, right up until the point where it actually did.

The shadows closed around them both, and there it was. His
mouth touching hers. Her mouth touching his. Wild, crazy explosions going off
inside every inch of her.

For a second they were so intense she was kind of afraid
they were escaping her body. She couldn’t see because her eyes were squeezed
shut, but it certainly felt as if fireworks were popping around her head. The
heat surrounding her was strong enough to singe her skin, and she was sure she
could hear those short, sharp cracks.

Not that he would have minded—fireworks seemed to be going
off for him too. She could tell they were before he’d even pulled away. It was
in the tender, near-shivering way he touched her. It was in the sense of him,
like something suddenly drawn so taut and tense. And when he finally broke the
kiss, he only confirmed this theory.

He was breathing harder than she was. One of his hands was
gripping the shelf above, and it was doing it so tightly she could see the
split in his skin between white and red. His eyes were heavy lidded; the blue
had fallen down into darkness.

But the best part was his parted lips. They
looked
like they’d just kissed someone, even though they’d barely kissed her at all.
They looked slick and swollen, and most of all
persuasive
. Christ, she
wanted to kiss those lips again. And he
definitely
wanted to kiss her
lips back.

“Well…” he said, so breathless it sent a tingle through her.
“That was…”

“Yeah, that was.”

“Want to do it again?”

“It’s possible I do.”

“Maybe without a bookcase in the middle?”

“I can see how that might be better,” she said, but even as
she did so, she could feel her shakes intensifying. In a second, there wouldn’t
be anything between them. And he was probably going to expect more than a
closed-mouth sort of affair.

Hell,
she
was expecting more.

She wanted more.

She just wasn’t quite sure on the
giving it
part.
Kissing the back of her hand simply wasn’t the same as trying to do it to an
actual man. Actual men did not keep very still unless she moved her arm around
a bit to give the whole thing some variety. They moved completely independent
of any of her wishes.

Like right now, holy shit he was doing that
right now
.
She expected him to stay around there until she came to him, but he was coming
around to her. He
strode
around to her. It gave her about ten seconds to
straighten her t-shirt and shake the nerves out of the ends of her hands,
before he was on her.

He was on her like men in movies were on women they hadn’t
seen for eight thousand years. She actually saw him in slow motion as he
rounded the corner—arms swinging heroically, t-shirt pulled taut over his broad
chest, long legs eating up the space between them in a single stride.

Then finally his hands reaching for her face.

He was going to
hold
her
face
in his
hands
as he kissed her. And she was definitely going to come apart when he did. She
knew she was before he’d even clasped her to him. Her lower half had already
begun to lose coherency when his lips found hers, and after that it was just
dissolving time. Her whole body went so limp she had to hang on to his wrists
to keep standing.

But once she had, the door was open for other things.
Terrible things, like using his arms to haul herself closer to him. Though in
her defense, he was just so tall and she was too damn short, and if she was
going to do this at all she needed the extra leverage. Getting up on tiptoe
just wasn’t enough. Grabbing and pulling was required, because Holy Mother of
God was kissing an amazing thing.

Or maybe it was more that kissing
him
was an amazing
thing. His lips were butter-soft. He tasted of peppermint. And he made it so easy,
everything was so easy. All she had to do was follow the slow, sliding rhythm
he settled into—insinuating her mouth against his in that same manner he’d just
used, then sucking just a little on his lower lip. Not enough to really call it
sucking
if she was being pedantic about it, but enough to give her a
strange thrill every time he did it.

It felt sort of like he’d decided to pull away, but was
reluctant to let her lips go. And once he realized he was on the verge of
cutting the kiss short, he dived right back in there. He pushed his mouth right
up against hers, in a way that should have been too much but instead was never
enough.

Mainly because of the rolling way he went about it, she
thought. He didn’t shove his lips against hers. There was no crushing or
bashing or storming of her battlements. It was more like being gently rocked
through a kiss—which sounded absolutely bonkers but was pretty close to making
her pass out.

She just didn’t know what to do with all this heat pouring
through her. Was this much heat normal, over a simple kiss? It seemed
completely excessive even to her and her zero experience of these things. In
some places it was getting close to pain, and the more he did the closer it
got. His hand slid down her back and suddenly the faint pulsing sensation in
her lower belly was something else altogether.

It almost felt like a
thudding
. Like someone had made
a fist inside her and was trying to pound their way out—only not half as
terrible as that seemed to suggest. None of this was terrible. If it was pain,
it was the sweetest sort she’d ever experienced. And if she was afraid, this
fear was some kind of new good type. It had to be, because when he finally
decided to slide his hand all the way down and over her ass, terror seized
control of her body.

And in response she made a sound.

She moaned. She moaned so loud and long even she was
shocked, and she was the one doing it. Christ only knew what he thought, to
hear her nearly coming in his mouth over an ass grab—because that was
definitely what it sounded like. It sounded like she’d had an orgasm. It
felt
like she’d had an orgasm.

Could he tell when a woman had an orgasm?

She prayed that he couldn’t. Or at the very least, she
prayed that he wouldn’t comment on it. If he just steered clear of the topic,
she would be all right. She could skate through the rest of this, no problems.
He would kiss her and she would kiss him and everything would be absolutely
fine.

And then he stroked over her ass, and it was not fine at
all.

What was he thinking? She wasn’t prepared for groping. And
especially when the groping was so…so…she didn’t even know. She’d always seen
the term
grab ass
and imagined something brutal and rude. The equivalent
in her head was punching someone’s great-aunt with a penis.

But this was not like that. The entire area suddenly felt
incredibly sensitive, in a way she’d never imagined it could be. Then just to
cap it off, he seemed
aware
of this fact. His stroked over her curves
with such deliberate, tentative care—almost as though there was a slight
barrier between her body and his hand. He didn’t want to disturb it too much.
He just wanted to test the limits of it, a little.

Was it okay for him to go lower? Would he be electrocuted if
he squeezed a little?

The answer was a resounding no for the latter.

But it was a yes for her.
She
was electrocuted when
he squeezed a little. Her entire body seemed to spasm the second he did it,
then again when he moaned at the feel of her. He actually
moaned
at the
feel of her—all desperate and half-dying—and the combined effect was a
crackling, fizzing sort of sensation.

And an insane urge to do the same to him.

She couldn’t fault herself for it, though. He’d spent the
better part of the last few days wandering around in those stupid sweatpants,
and she knew he didn’t have any briefs to go on under them. Everything was just
bare beneath that flimsy material, including his incredibly firm and impossibly
muscular ass. Sometimes it was nearly hypnotic watching him walk or bend over
with a backside like that.

And the less said about the stuff in front, the better.

If she said anything about it—if she thought about it for
one second—she was going to end up touching him there instead. She could feel
the urge rising in her, and not just because of disobedient images in her
foolish head. She was also pretty sure she could feel something pressing
against her…and it wasn’t his phone.

He’d kicked his phone under the bed, which left very few
other options. His hip bone was a possibility, if his hip bone had maybe been
recently dislocated then moved about half a foot down. And it wasn’t so
farfetched to imagine this was him in his soft and unthreatening state, if she
just lost her mind for a little bit.

Otherwise, this had to be all him.

And he was very stiff, and really swollen.

So much so, in fact, that she couldn’t pretend it was
anything else. He had an erection, and though he was doing his best not to rut
it against her he wasn’t really succeeding. His hands on her ass just
exacerbated the problem—he squeezed her, and suddenly her lower belly was
rubbing and rubbing over his obviously hard dick.

Though maybe
suddenly
wasn’t quite the right word.
Suddenly
implied something unexpected and jarring…something entirely devoid of
intention. But it didn’t feel like there was no intention here. It felt as
though someone was doing something to the other person, and after a while it
started to dawn on her. The person doing this
something
was not really
him.

It was her. She was doing the things. She didn’t want to be
doing them, but apparently her body didn’t care whether she wanted it or not.
Her body was only interested in the feel of that thick, solid bar between them,
and how much she could explore and uncover just by easing her body against his.

Which was apparently a
lot
.

All she had to do was sort of roll her hips a bit and the
size of him became really startlingly clear. She couldn’t seem to find the
point where it ended, no matter how much she wriggled. He just went on forever—as
long as her forearm and as thick as her wrist. Or at least, that was what her
terrified mind tried to tell her. It was probably a little out, considering how
insane she currently felt.

And that was
before
he responded to whatever crazy
thing she was doing.

Dear God, she wasn’t expecting him to respond. It had almost
become a kind of weird science experiment, completely detached from the real,
live person she was doing it to. She’d only wanted to figure out what she was
dealing with, and now he’d gone all still and weird. His hand tightened much
more roughly on the handful of ass he was holding, and his body sort of
stiffened—as if she’d shocked him.

Surely she hadn’t shocked him?

“Jesus, Alice.”