Intrusion (9 page)

Not that we really have to see.

I could be across the street and still know what was going on. You could put me in a burlap sack and stuff me in an abandoned mine three thousand miles from where he is, and I would know. My mouth desires his mouth, and my hands desire his hands, and my body desires his body—and apparently, he feels the same way about me.

How else to explain the hand he suddenly puts on my thigh? He must know that the particular spot he chooses is way too high for casual contact. And if he somehow doesn't, then at the very least the
nakedness
of my thigh should raise some questions in his mind. Somehow my dress is far higher than I remember it being when I last checked, but he isn't shying away from that.

He's moving toward it.

He's moving
underneath
it.

And he does it so
casually
, too—just like in the cinema, with his eyes on something else and his every movement so carefully constructed. Anyone would believe he wasn't touching me at all. I hardly believe he's touching me at all.

Even though his hand is an inch from my panties now. I know it is, because my body is so suddenly charged it has the ability to measure distance without tools or even a glance in that general direction. I'm holding my breath, and I hold it harder when I feel him go higher.

Is there even higher to go to?

He must be at the place I want him most now. He must be, he must be—there isn't anywhere else for him to be. From here on in there is only my swollen sex, but somehow that distance is never closed. It keeps on being that single inch. It might as well be a mile. He will never do it completely, I think. He's incapable of going any further than this. He said in the kitchen that a kiss was too much. The chances of him closing that gap are next to none.

So when he actually does, I think my reaction is warranted. My teeth clack together around my tongue—the pain like a beautiful and awful backdrop to the sudden glut of pleasure that bolts through me. And though I immediately want to open my legs as wide as they will go, my thighs completely disobey me. They snap together like the jaws of some frightened animal, muscles so suddenly tense I don't think I'll ever be able to release him.

But maybe that's for the best.

Now he can't get away from this. There's no sense in him trying to pretend it never happened, or that he did it just by accident. His hand is too deep between my legs to try. His fingers are on the plump curve of my cunt, and no amount of explaining or looking away will make it different.

Not that he's looking away, at the moment. I glance in his direction, and his eyes are all over me. They drink me in, so suddenly thirsty it turns my insides to liquid. My heart has to beat at three times the normal speed just to stop itself from sinking, and then he reaches for me, and I swear it bursts right out of my chest.

I see the blood spray halfway up the wall. I have to carry on into this with red all down my dress—or at least, that's how it feels. He puts a hand in my hair and pulls my mouth to his, and everything is terrifying. Everything is too violent and too sudden and too full of a kind of passion I didn't think he was capable of.

He nearly drags me down onto my back, kissing so hard and so fierce it hurts. I feel the glancing edge of his teeth, and want to tell him to stop.

But I want to tell him to go on much more. My mind is saying that this is too much, while my body shouts the opposite. Or is it the other way around? Either way I moan his name into his mouth when that hand does more than press between my legs. He rubs me there—right over my aching sex, right where I'm wet and hot and swollen—and the word just leaps out of me.

“Noah,” I say, “Noah.”

And though the sound is throttled by lips and teeth and tongue, I know he hears it.

The slow grin he gives me as he pulls away tells me as much. He looks almost feral—like he's about to steal something from me and there's nothing I can do about it. Why would I want to do anything about it? I suspect the thing is my breath, and that he's about to take it by touching me in a far lewder manner.

I suspect, yet still somehow it's a shock. He parts my legs and I catch my tongue between my teeth. Then he pulls my panties aside, and I bite down. I taste blood. In a second, he's going to feel how wet I am. He might already know—I can feel that my slickness has spread over my outer lips and into the sparse hair down there. I can make it out on the material he moves aside.

All he has to do is move his fingertips over the very edges of my bare pussy and there it will be, swiftly followed by a look in his eyes. Oh, I know there'll be a look. It's the same one he uses when he turns inward, all heated and out of focus. Any second now, any second here it comes, God, here it comes; just a little touch and then—

“Beth,” he says.

And I snap awake, to the sound of my own frantic breathing.

It sounds kind of like I've just run up a mountain. Or maybe there's a train in my throat that I don't know about. I can certainly hear something chuffing along at the very least—though I have no idea why that's my primary concern. I should be thinking about the fact that I just had a sex dream right in front of him, and he fucking knows it.

One look at his face tells me he knows it. He's sort of leaning over me, even though I've no idea how or when I slid so far down on the bed. And his expression is what I want to call concerned, but can't. It's too close to bemusement, and bemusement says only one thing.

It says he saw me doing something weird.

“I had a dream about drowning,” I blurt out—because what else can I do? If I tell him it was something less extreme he'll know I'm lying. But if I go with the truth he might think I meant that what we have isn't enough.

When it is, it fucking is. God, why isn't it at all?

I hate sex. I have always hated sex. Sex is boring and awful.

“Well, everything is okay now,” he says, and then I understand.

The problem isn't about whether sex was boring and awful before.

It's that I suspect it wouldn't be boring and awful
with him
. He touches the side of my face when he speaks, so softly and with just the tips of his fingers. Those eyes are full of kindness, and apparently I find that much sexier than it has any right to be. People are supposed to get turned on by men hurling them around the room or wearing a business suit.

I get off when someone shows me tenderness over a drowning dream.

“You're burning up—want me to get you some ice?” he says, and I get a little spike of excitement. A spike of excitement over an offer to put frozen water somewhere on me.

I have to say no. If I don't he might do it, and the stuff he's currently doing is bad enough. He just barely touches my throat with the back of his hand—just to show me how much perspiration is coating me, or maybe to stroke it off—and that spike becomes a spear. He pulls aside my cardigan, and I breathe funny.

Though really could anyone blame me?

It's almost like taking my clothes off—or maybe a move someone would do if they wanted a better look at my right breast. His eyes even dart down briefly, as if he wants that very thing. The only hint that he doesn't comes when he straightens my dress.

Apparently he noticed a wrinkle I made in the middle of my sex wriggles.

All of which is good in one way. It means he misses my stiff nipples, and what the flush all over my face and chest really means. But in another way, it's really awful. It pushes me further down into this mess I seem to be creating. It makes him go get me ice even though I shake my head, and then I have to spend half an hour enduring his careful ministrations.

It's like being teased to death. I end up biting the pillow—a thing I've often seen done in sexy movies but never thought was a real thing. By the time he's done I'm a shivering mess, and seriously contemplating going to the bathroom to ease the tension. The only thing that stops me is the thought of the noise, but even then, it's a close thing. I teeter on the brink of saying it, and just about manage to tell him I should go instead.

Not that this helps me in any way whatsoever.

“You can stay if you want,” he says, and I freeze in the middle of the turn I'm attempting. One of my feet is almost off the bed, but it falls at the final hurdle. He wants me to stay, to sleep in the same bed as him, to be with him.

How can I say no?

I don't even
want
to say no. It's been a long time since I slept with anyone.

And by a long time, I mean
that has never actually happened
. You know that thing where people spoon and wake up sprawled all over each other and say
morning
sleepily?

Yeah, I don't know what that is. I've never experienced it.

And the thought of experiencing it makes me ache.

“Are you sure that's okay?” I ask, without even turning around. I keep my face carefully away, so he can't see all the millions of emotions warring all over it.

He'll see desire in there, not problems. Desire and pain and loneliness and longing—and I don't want him to. I want him to make the choice on his own.

“I think it would be more than okay,” he says.

God, I wish I hadn't let him make the choice on his own.

Chapter Six

W
E SLEEP TOGETHER
almost every day, after that. Sometimes, I come home at four in the morning and follow him up the stairs to collapse in a heap on his bed. Sometimes we watch a movie, and I fall asleep against his arm. Sometimes, I wake with one of his arms over me or his face pressed between my shoulder blades, sleep making him more peaceful and careless than he ever is when conscious.

And all of it is unbearable and brilliant in equal measures.

Mainly because of him and his smell swamping me and his sheets with the tiny daisies on them and suddenly waking to find my face is in the maze of his hair. But also because I still dream, and each one is worse than the last. One of them just seems to start with him fucking me, and in another he pushes me facedown on the bed and ruts at me like an animal.

In most of them he ruts at me like an animal, to be honest. And I really don't need Dr. Grant to tell me what that says about my subconscious.

My subconscious already knows that lust is driving it to some ridiculous lengths. I sleep right on the edge of the bed for fear that I'll grope him accidentally in the middle of the night. When his hand sleepily brushes part of me I clench all over, just to stop myself from grabbing it and dragging it back.

And when I wake at three thirty to the sound of his desperate panting, my first thought isn't
oh my God, what's wrong?
My first thought is a kind of internal shout of excitement.
He's masturbating
, my mind throws up, and suddenly my whole body is engulfed in flames. Why shouldn't it be?

It absolutely sounds like he is. His breathing is almost exactly what mine was, that first night we slept together. In fact, his breathing is worse than mine. It keeps hitching just as it hits the outtake, and the hitching is
loud
. There's a kind of punching quality to it, as though a wall has been built somewhere just past his throat.

I hardly dare look. I hardly dare not.

What if he really is? I have to see, I think, but when I do I kind of wish I hadn't. He looks so much worse than I expect him to—though
worse
doesn't seem like the right word. If it was truly worse then I probably wouldn't thrill as much as I do at the sight. Somehow I wasn't expecting him to be anywhere close to the masturbating image in my head.

Yet he sort of is.

For a start, he's absolutely drenched in sweat. His curls are clinging to his forehead; his T-shirt has dark circles the size of the Pacific Ocean all over it. And even in the dark, I can see his muscles are tense. He could really be going at himself.

If his hands weren't by his sides. I glance down and there they are, clenched into the tightest fists I've ever seen on a human being.

Clearly, he's dreaming. And by the looks of things, his dreams aren't pleasant. I would like to believe they are—that he's just fake-drowning, like I usually am—but I can't. It's bad enough that I spent the past five minutes wondering feverishly if he might be jerking off. Carrying on with that when he's obviously having a nightmare is too horrible.

Or at least, that's what I think until I put a hand on him. I touch his shoulder and say his name, just like he did for me. And he snaps awake just like I did, and looks at me the way I probably looked at him—like someone horrified and thrilled all at the same time.

And then he does
exactly what I wanted to do
but couldn't
.

He reaches up, and strokes my hair over and over, eyes searching mine for something—some relief or acceptance or God knows what. And when he finds some semblance of whatever he's looking for, he fucking kisses me.

He kisses me like he has to, before he dies of wanting it. His hands make fists in my hair. A sound comes out of him, more shocking than a blow from someone else. I take it right in the gut, all the same. It shudders through the rest of my body, just like a punch would. And it stays with me, dear God, how it stays.

I'll still be feeling this three weeks from now. When my grandkids are grown I'll tell them about the time I once experienced real pleasure and real pain—because it's that, too. I know he won't go any further than this. I know I won't get any more.

But that only makes it more blistering when I do. He stops kissing my mouth, and kisses the side of my throat, my jaw, my cheek. All of which would be nothing, if he was a completely different person. If he was Bob instead of Noah, I would be bored by now.

Instead, a great swell goes through me at the mere idea of it. Arousal practically chokes my body to death, and when it's done it leaves behind a buzzing mess. My heart is trying to explode out of my chest. My vagina feels three times the normal size, and I suspect it isn't going to stop there. If he keeps going like this, it may well take over planet Earth.