Fireworks: A Holiday Bad Boy Romance (71 page)

“So it’s a forbidden
fruit thing?” she asks.

“No,” I tell her. “It was
just this realization that it’s time to grow up and stop letting my dad or his
dad or anyone else’s dad dictate what I do and don’t do or who I see or don’t
see.”

“Or who you do or don’t
do?” Abs says with a smirk.

“Haven’t really gotten
that far yet,” I tell her. “It was just that thirty seconds… Abs, I can’t
even—you know, right in the middle of everything, I just pulled away, told him
I had to go and walked off?”

“You’re such a—” she
starts.

“I just didn’t know what
else to do,” I say, barely noticing that I’m interrupting. “I don’t think I’ve
ever felt anything like it.”

“I’ve seen you kiss
guys,” Abs says. “I know it’s been a while since you’ve had a boyfriend or
whatever, but you can’t tell me it was that much different.”

“It
was
, though,” I tell her. “I mean, the kiss felt the same, maybe a
bit—all right, pretty substantially better, but it was everything that went
with it. Ever since I saw him that first time, he’s just continued to confound
my expectations.”

“So, what are you going
to do about it?” Abs asks, holding up a hand mirror to make sure her hair’s
still even.

“I don’t know,” I tell
her. “I know I don’t want that kiss a couple blocks from my house to be the end
of the story.”

“You’re staying over,
though, right?” Abs asks, glancing up at me as she starts trimming her
fingernails.

“Yeah,” I answer, “if
that’s all right with you. I just need to be away from my dad for a little
while.”

“It’s fine,” she says,
picking up a stray nail clipping and dropping it into the wastebasket in front
of her.

I still haven’t sat down.

We have dinner—leftover
pizza—and settle in for a movie.

After a while, I hear
snoring from the other end of the couch and it’s hardly a debate. I get up off
the couch and make my way to the door, locking the knob on the way out.

My body’s weary, but my
mind is racing.

I don’t know if he kissed
me or if I kissed him, but I do know neither of us seemed to be holding
anything back. Well, until I got scared and bolted anyway. That’s the problem.

I’ve never really been
the type that could get away with playing games like that for too long. I know
that’s what he thinks I was doing.

It occurs to me about a
block from Ian’s house that I’m probably not going to have a lot of luck going
through the front door. I would just call or text, but I want it to be more of
a surprise than that. That way, if he’s changed his mind, at least I’ll have a
few more moments with the fantasy.

Ian’s house looms against
the starless night sky, and I don’t know what my plan is, but I should probably
figure it out pretty quick.

If I knew which room was
Ian’s…

I set off around the side
of the house, for once grateful for all the light pollution in this town. It
makes the areas without street lights just that much darker.

Most of the windows are
dark, and even those that aren’t all seem to be covered by blinds or curtains.
This might be a short trip.

I reconsider knocking on
the door, but even if Ian’s dad wasn’t such a despot, it’s still too late to
risk waking the whole family.

I’m almost all the way
around the house when I notice something different about what’s blocking the
view into one of the windows. It’s a capital A with a circle around it.

I seriously doubt Ian’s
lawyer dad considers himself an anarchist.

The room is on the second
floor, though.

I look around for a
ladder or some other way to avoid trying to go up the drainpipe, but decide
maybe I shouldn’t just break into his room. The romantic in me still thinks the
idea has its merits, but the rest of me is insecure enough not to take being
welcomed for granted.

I’ve got an idea.

I cautiously make my way
back toward the front of the house and continue to the side of the street,
bending down and collecting a small handful of gravel.

Making my way back to the
side of the house with what
has
to be
Ian’s room, I feel my face growing hot and I’m becoming very aware of the more
sensitive areas of my body.

I throw the first pebble
and immediately rush to the side of the house, crouching down and out of sight.

“What are you doing?” I ask
myself under my breath.

Rather than talk it out
with myself, huddled in a little ball at the side of somebody’s house, I let my
will dominate my won’t, and I take a few steps away from the side of the house.

There’s no motion in the
window, the flag’s still in place and there’s no sign of light in the room.

I throw another pebble
and, though I once again feel the urge to hide, this time, I stick it out.

There’s no response.

You know, it’s entirely
possible he’s not even home, or if he is, who’s to say that he’s even in his
room? I should just call him.

No, I’m not going to do
this over the phone. I don’t want to talk to him until I can talk to him face
to face.

I throw another pebble
and am really starting to feel silly. That’s when something moves one corner of
the anarchy flag to one side. It’s too dark in the room for me to see in, so I
just look in the direction of where I think his face
might
be, and I smile and wave.

The flag resettles, and
that’s a clear enough answer for me.

I let the rest of the tiny
rocks fall from my hand, and I turn to head back home or back to Abby’s or I
don’t even know where when I hear the sound of a window opening.

“Psst!” a hushed voice
comes from up above and I turn to see Ian standing with most of his upper body
out the window.

PART 3

Chapter Ten

The Hesitant Miss
Dillinger

Ian

“I’m pretty impressed,” I
whisper to Mia as I help her the rest of the way into my room. “Most people
have a harder time climbing that thing.”

She shoots a glance at
me, asking, “Just how many people climb your pipe on a regular basis?”

“You know, the way you
phrased that, I’m not quite sure how to answer,” I laugh.

She lets out a derisive
snort and leans her head forward a little, looking up at me. “Really?” she
asks.

“I reinforced that drain
back when I was like thirteen,” I tell her. “Rob’s dad always had tools lying
around and my parents were out of town. When I was younger, a lot of people
climbed up that thing. Not so much the last few years, though.”

Her stance relaxes a
little.

“So, what’s up?” he asks.
“You took off so suddenly earlier. What are you doing here?”

She opens her mouth and
takes a breath, but she doesn’t speak. Before I even realize it, we’re kissing
again and she’s lifting her shirt from the bottom.

We pull apart long enough
for her to get her shirt over her head and then she starts kissing my neck and
running her palms up under my shirt, the warmth of her hands exciting every
inch of skin on my upper body that she touches.

“You sure?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says in a
hurried whisper. “Now shut up. I really don’t want to have your dad coming in
here right now. The guy kind of freaks me out.”

Yeah, me too.

I undo the clasp of her
bra and she’s got the straps off of her shoulders an instant later and she
tosses the bra off somewhere into the darkness of my room.

I’m kissing the arch of
her neck and she’s unbuttoning my pants.

This is moving a lot
faster than I expected it to, though I’ve had a few fantasies that have
actually come reasonably close to tonight’s reality. I’m not complaining.

I tear my shirt over my
head and throw it blindly, possibly out the window, though I’m not paying
anywhere near the kind of attention to know for certain, and Mia’s kissing her
way down my chest, over my abs and navel.

She stops a moment at the
top of my boxers and she works the fingers of both hands between the fabric and
my skin before she slowly starts pulling both pants and boxers down together.

I’m most of the way hard
already, and the feeling her soft hand encompassing me and her lips teasing my
tip only hasten the transition.

“Why’d you take off
earlier?” I ask.

She coyly shakes her head
and doesn’t respond, only takes me into her mouth, her lips sealing around me,
her tongue already massaging the underside of my cock.

Mia’s working me with her
mouth and a hand and, a second later, her mouth is free of me and she’s pushing
me backward.

Between the darkness and
the general disorientation caused by the moment, I’m not entirely sure of my
relationship to my room as Mia’s final shove sends me backward and off-balance,
so my arms shoot out on their own and I’m just hoping my head doesn’t hit
something on the way down.

I land on my bed, though
just barely, and from the direction of my knees, I can hear Mia’s stifled
giggles.

“You know,” she says,
“for someone for whom motion is art, you’re not particularly graceful.”

“Sure,” I scoff, “I’m
sure if I were to push you over backward in a dark room, you’d just float to
the ground like a flower petal, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m not the one trying
to impress the world with the way I move,” she says and puts one of her hands
on each of my knees.

Mia slowly moves her open
palms up and over my quads, over my stomach.

When her fingertips reach
my chest, I can feel the warm thickness of her tongue at the base of my shaft,
and she moves the rest of the way up me, reversing direction when her mouth
reaches and again enveloping my part, and I wonder if this is what people are
talking about when they say relationships are complicated.

Earlier today, she was
hesitant to spend any time with me at all and now, she’s snuck into my room and
taking me ever deeper into her eager mouth.

This wasn’t even my idea.

Not that I’m complaining.

She slides up me again,
this time all the way until her eyes are above mine and we both look at each
other a moment.

“You’re sure this isn’t
going to ruin the friendship?” she asks.

I chuckle. “What do you
mean?” I ask. “You don’t even like me.”

Her eyes go up and to the
left, and her bottom lip matches their direction as she carefully considers her
response.

“I guess you’re right,”
she says. “We should be fine, then. Condom?”

“Nightstand,” I answer.

“On the one hand, I’m a
little skeeved out that you just happen to have a box of condoms in your
nightstand,” she says, crawling over the bed. “On the other, though,” she
continues as she opens the drawer, “I’d rather you be prepared and not
prepared, so what say we just leave it at that?”

“Just one problem,” I
tell her.

“What’s that?” she asks,
turning toward me, her brow slightly raised.

“That’s the wrong
nightstand,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she says, raising
herself to a kneeling position and pointing to the other nightstand as if she
were Patton conducting troop movements. “Get ‘em.”

I laugh a little at the
dramatic gesture, but I do as I’m told and take a single, wrapped condom out of
its place and toss it to her.

“Oh, you think I’m going
to do all the work?” she asks.

“I can never get those
things open,” I tell her. “It’ll be better this way, trust me. If I do it, ten
minutes will pass and we’ll both end up too frustrated to stay naked. It’s very
important that we stay naked.”

“You sound like you’ve
thought this out,” she says, raising her chin and turning a little away from
me, skeptical, but still happy enough to leave her breasts bare and beautiful.

“Who says I haven’t?” I
ask. “Be prepared: they teach you that in Boy Scouts, you know.”

“Girl Scouts, too,” she
says, “though when I went through it seemed like what we were supposed to be
most prepared for were making kitschy little crafts and learning to be better
wives to our bread-winner, WASP husbands.”

“Yeah, we didn’t get that
part of the lesson,” I tell her.

A tight smile twists one
side of Mia’s mouth and she goes to open the wrapper.

“Not that easy, is it?” I
ask.

“Shut up,” she says.
“You’re just trying to make this more difficult than it actually is.”

“Then open it,” I tell
her.

It’s somewhere around
here I realize that now’s not the best time to toy with the power of
suggestion, although it would make for a particularly interesting conclusion to
my earlier point on the placebo effect.

“You can do it,” I tell
her. “That’s why I gave it to you.”

For a student of
psychology, she fell for one of the simpler mind games. Then again, she
probably wasn’t expecting such an experiment when we’re on the verge of
admittedly more important things.

It’s not really my
brightest move.

Fortunately, having given
her permission to easily open the condom wrapper, she does and I think she
knows I was toying with her, because she’s tossing each half of the wrapper at
my face, one at a time, saying, “You’ve got a weird sense of humor.”

“It’s part of my charm,”
I tell her.

Somehow, she manages to
tolerate me well enough that she rubs her hand over my cock to make sure I’m
good and hard and she slides the condom over me.

“You’re lucky I’m a
sucker for a guy who can skate,” she says and positions herself above me.

I’m working on thinking
of an answer, but banter isn’t what’s holding my attention as I cup her soft,
perky breasts and feel the heat of her body as she lowers herself onto my cock,
gasping with that mix of pleasure and excitement that has me thinking about
team sports to keep from getting too saturated with the intense pleasure of
her.

My fingertips move over
her sides, before lightly running up her back just so I can feel the raising
goose bumps on her skin.

She’s looking down at me,
her mouth slightly open, her hair falling to the sides of her face, and she
puts her hands on my chest to hold herself up as she grinds herself harder over
me, encouraging me deeper inside of her.

Our hips move as mirror
images, meeting most at the point of impact, and my hand is moving through the
hair falling to one side of her face and affix it behind her ear, giving that
face as much exposure as possible to what little light is in the room.

Her eyes are closed now
and she moves over me with a near-breathless smile, almost seeming to laugh
voicelessly at just how simple things can be, though admittedly my
understanding of the motivation behind that smile is speculative at best.

She leans down, kissing
my lips before lifting herself again only to take her hands from my chest and
stretch them above me, pressing the whole of her upper body resting against
mine now.

I take the opportunity to
wrap my arms around her and, with her ready cooperation, I roll so I’m now
above, looking down at the shadowed body of my lover, growing ever more eager
as she rests a forearm against the back of my neck, looking up at me like she’s
expecting me to tell her a secret, only I already am, one breath at a time.

It’s hard to think
between the darkened vision of her and the feel of her inviting body.

Her bottom half moves a
little and I feel her heels coming to rest on my lower back, and she uses that
as leverage to lift herself to meet me, just as voracious as before.

“So, I take it this means
you like me, huh?” I ask.

“Barely,” she breathes.
“Don’t ruin it by talking.”

I’m amused and, honestly
a little offended, but she’s smiling and caressing my hair, so my ego manages
to make it through reasonably unscathed.

“Keep going,” she says.
“Just keep going, okay?”

“Okay,” I tell her, and
both of her arms are around me now, and she’s pulling me into her with renewed
vigor.

“I’m going to…” she
whispers, her body quaking beneath me. “I’m going to…”

I start to lean in for a
kiss, but she’s grabbing a pillow and putting it firmly over her mouth, though
it’s doing surprisingly little to dampen the sound of her ecstasy.

My only option here is to
push the pillow harder over her face, and I don’t feel particularly all right
doing that, so I just enjoy the music of her orgasm as she twitches and writhes
beneath me, trying not to think too hard about how far the sound could travel.

She’s so wet and growing
even wetter as the contractions of her muscles slowly eases into a new rhythm
and she’s tossing the pillow away now, pulling my head down and kissing me with
almost scalding lips.

I work myself in and out
of her, trying to contain my smile, but it’s not working.

“What?” she asks, looking
up at me with her big eyes.

“I don’t know,” I answer.
“I guess I just wasn’t expecting this when you were telling me not to use foul
language.”

“I said ‘not in public,’”
she corrects. “What relevance could that possibly have right now?”

“I don’t know,” I tell
her and kiss her cheek. “You just didn’t strike me as the climb up a drainpipe
and have amazing sex with a skater guy from class type.”

“I’m full of surprises,”
she says. “Now stop talking and get back to work. I want to come at least one
more time tonight.”

I snicker.

It’s hardly, “shut up and
fuck the shit out of me,” by any means, but considering the way she normally
speaks, I think we’ve about reached her equivalent of it.

Still, I’ve found it best
never to dawdle when a women tells you she wants something.

I ease out of her as I
make my way down her body the way she’d made her way up mine, and I’m already
drunk with the scent of her.

My lips kiss the curve of
her thigh and her hands go to the back of my head, gentle, but persuasive, and
I go where she encourages me to go.

When my tongue reaches
her clit, her body tenses, relaxes and tenses again.

“Oh my god,” she exhales
and her hips rock beneath my mouth.

Her hands leave the back
of my head and, as I glance upward, I can see her grasping her breasts, arching
her back.

“I need you back inside,”
she says when her legs start to shake again and I make my way on hands and
knees to kiss her neck as I place myself at her opening and enter her once
more.