Tempted (14 page)

For what?

“Smells kind of like ass, to me,” said James. “Sweaty ass.”

Alex smirked. “And you know this how?”

I’d tucked my feet up on the edge of the chair, the better to snuggle close for warmth. James’s shoulder made a bony pillow but I rested my cheek there, anyway. It brought me close to him and let me see Alex at the same time.

“Yes, James. I want to hear the answer to that.” Beneath the blanket, his hand moved between my thighs. His fingers were a little cool but quickly warmed.

“I’m just saying. It’s not ‘fresh’ anything. Hey, man, give me one of those.” James gestured at Alex’s pack of cigarettes.

Alex tossed him the pack. James pulled out one of the slim tubes and held it up to me. “Anne?”

The look I gave him was one he’d fondly termed the what-the-fuck look. As in, what the fuck are you doing, asking me if I want a cigarette?

“Let me guess,” Alex said as he sucked in smoke and held it. “You don’t smoke?”

“I don’t. James doesn’t, either. Do you?” I sat up, putting some distance between us.

“Only when I’m drinking, babe.” He lit the cigarette and drew in some smoke, but let it out in a small fit of coughing.

“Ha! Ya fucking pansy.” Alex grinned and blew a smoke ring.

They traded more insults, and to my relief, James stubbed out his cigarette without taking any more drags. He pulled me back down next to him. His hand slid beneath my arm to cup my breast. His thumb eased back and forth across my nipple, bringing it to a tight point. His lips found my temple and lingered.

Across from us, Alex had fallen into shadow lit by the occasional flare of his cigarette and the square of light from the kitchen window. He and James had been matching each other bottle for bottle, and now he lifted another to his lips.

“Don’t swim. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke,” he said in a husky voice. “What do you do, Anne?”

“That’s me. Goody Two-shoes.” It wasn’t true. Didn’t feel true, anyway.

“Just like Jamie.” Alex propped his feet up on the edge of our lounger, one between James’s toes and the other along the edge of mine. His feet dented the blanket tangling around our heels.

“Why do you call him Jamie?”

Under the blanket, James’s hand kept up the slow stroking. He’d moved it beneath my shirt, his fingers skating the edge of my lace bra. I was pretending not to notice, though it was impossible to ignore.

“Why don’t you?”

It didn’t seem fair that they were both drunk and I wasn’t, yet I was the one left without a witty answer. “Because…his name is James.”

“Alex is the only one who calls me Jamie.” James’s mouth moved against my temple.

A chill skittered down my neck at the combination of hot breath and tweaking fingers. I shifted, which pushed my foot against Alex’s but allowed James the chance to slip a hand between my thighs again. He put it much higher, this time the edge of his thumb pressing against my clit.

“Why? Why not Jimmy? Or Jim?”

Alex couldn’t see what James was doing to me and might not have cared. James had drunk enough beer to make certain he didn’t. I was the one who ought to have had more restraint. I didn’t have the luxury of blaming booze for my lack of composure.

“Because his name’s Jamie,” said Alex, like that explained it all.

Maybe to both of them it did, but I was still on the outside. I hadn’t heard half of their inside jokes and didn’t understand the ones I had.

James left off pressing between my legs to shift my hand over the bulge in his jeans, then returned his hand to its previous spot. His cock pushed against the denim. His thumb pushed against me. His other thumb dipped inside my bra to fondle my nipple.

I wasn’t drunk, but I was feeling a bit lightheaded. I wasn’t averse to a little subtle poke or pinch now and again, but James was full-on trying to get me off.

It was working, too. My clit had gone as tight and hard as my nipples, even though there were two layers of cloth between his hand and my body. It was the steady push-push against me that was doing it. It hit me just right. It was…perfect.

James and Alex kept talking, sharing memories, though I noticed they avoided any further mention of Alex’s parents or the years after high school. They mocked each other mercilessly, saying things I’d have bet would have earned other men a punch in the face.

They talked. James stroked and kneaded me and every now and again pushed his crotch with growing insistence into my hand. My arousal grew slowly, like the first drip-drip of melting ice that threatened to become a torrent.

It was my husband touching me, but his friend whose face I watched as my pussy got slick and my clit throbbed. The two of them, James so light and Alex his dark counter-part, seemed to work together. James’s hands, Alex’s voice as he told us stories about living in Asia. About the sex shops there, where you could buy anything you wanted.

“I thought Singapore didn’t have sex shops. I thought they were illegal.” How did my husband know about Singaporean sex laws?

“In Singapore, yeah…but not in other places. There are always places to find it, if you want it.”

“And you wanted.” James’s voice had grown hoarse.

The night had grown downright cold, though beneath our blanket James and I were hot enough to start a fire. Alex didn’t seem to mind the chill. He’d buttoned his shirt up to the throat but seemed otherwise unaffected.

“Who wouldn’t, man?” came Alex’s shadow-voiced answer. “Find a girl, find a boy. One of each. You’d find your houseboy there, Anne.”

My inner thighs were trembling, my breath coming short and shallow as the sneaky seduction orchestrated by my husband’s hands did its work. It wasn’t exactly what he was doing, as the stimulation would likely have left me wanting under other circumstances. It was the sheer length of time he’d been at it.

“Anne wants a houseboy? That’s news to me.” James didn’t sound like he was about to dissolve into orgasm at any moment. Then again, my occasional pressure on his cock was probably only enough to tease.

“Yeah, she wants a houseboy in a thong to cook and clean for her.” Alex’s chuckle was low and naughty. “But, hell. Who wouldn’t?”

“I never said…he had to wear a thong.” I shifted and put a hand over the one between my legs. James didn’t get the hint, didn’t stop what he was doing. A slow, inexorable press-press, release against my clit that had me biting my lip and wanting to moan.

“She doesn’t need a houseboy. She’s got me.” James nuzzled the side of my neck. He nipped. I felt tongue. I closed my eyes.

“You, my friend, don’t cook.”

“You’re right.” James’s laughter buzzed in my ear. Press-press. Release. “But you do. And now she has you.”

I was only paying half attention to their half-drunk conversation, focused too much on the building pleasure between my legs. My fingers gripped down on the arm of the lounger. I was timing each breath to coincide with the infinitesimal motion of James’s hand. In. Out. Press-press, release.

I was going to come, hard. Inevitably. I couldn’t stop it, not without forcing away James’s hand and leaping to my feet to get away from him, and even then I’d reached the point where something as simple as the pull of my panties against my clit would finish me off.

“She’s not listening.”

I heard Alex’s chair scrape the deck and felt our chair shake a little as he pulled his feet off it. My eyes opened, wide. Startled. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and the motion brought his face completely into the golden light shining from the kitchen.

“She’s listening,” James said.

And I came. Not fast, like lightning, but in slow, easy waves. Climax rolled over me in a tightening and trembling of muscles, in a stifled, hitching breath, in the flutter of my eyes as I fought not to give any outward sign of my orgasm. My eyes went wide, though, as my fingers dug into the arm of the chair and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out.

We were looking into each other’s eyes, when I did it, Alex and I, and no sooner had the last spasm coursed through me than he leaned back in his chair, one bare foot resting on his denim-clad knee.

“I know she was,” he said. “But I look like shit in a thong.”

Warmth flooded and abandoned me, leaving behind a chill that had nothing to do with the night air. My illicit orgasm should’ve left me relaxed but had instead created greater tension. Silence hung between the three of us for what seemed too long for comfort.

Then Alex stood. “Well, ladies, I’m off to bed. I need my beauty sleep.”

I began to disentangle myself from the blanket and James’s arms, meaning to get up and bid our guest goodnight in the polite way. I hadn’t managed to get very far when Alex leaned over us both, one hand on each arm of the chair. I smelled him again, something like the bite of cedar with a hint of exotic flowers. Smoke and alcohol, too. His scent was a layering as complicated as the man himself seemed to be.

Light from the window cut across his face, highlighting his eyes, which were large and round. I’d thought they were brown, but now I saw they were dark gray. He smiled, lopsided, weaving a little.

“Good night,” Alex said. He brushed his lips against my cheek, then did the same to James without a pause, adding a pat to both our heads as he withdrew. “See you in the morning.”

“Night,” I replied, my voice somewhat faint.

I watched him as, holding the doorjamb for momentary balance, he went into the house. A minute later the lights in the kitchen went out, leaving us in darkness. James pulled me closer at once, his mouth seeking mine.

“Baby, I’ve been waiting all night to do this.” He nibbled my lips and urged my mouth to open, sweeping his tongue inside.

“James…” My protest was feeble, no more than a hand on his chest and a turn of my head to fend him off.

His hand slid between my legs again. “I couldn’t stop touching you.”

I looked at him. “You’re drunk.”

That smile, that copy of his friend’s. James had worked hard on it, I could tell, but it was still something that didn’t belong to him. It was too hard for him. Rapacious.

Yet I couldn’t deny what that smile did to me, how it made me feel. How seeing it, I’d know exactly what he was thinking about doing, and how much I always enjoyed what he did.

James moved his hand a little. “You liked it, didn’t you?”

I had. “That was impolite, at the very least.”

He laughed, pulling me closer and kissing me again. I tasted beer. I turned my face again, slightly, when he attempted to capture my mouth once more. He satisfied himself with mouthing my jaw and neck.

“But you liked it, Anne.”

“I don’t know what to think about that,” I whispered with a glance at the house. The light in Alex’s room, which I would’ve been able to see from the deck, hadn’t gone on. “He’s your friend! It was…”

“It was fucking hot,” he murmured against me. “Touching you like that, getting you off. Sort of like the time in the movie theater. Sort of like when I came over that weekend at school and your roommate wouldn’t leave.”

“Yes, but that was…those were…” I couldn’t exactly think what I meant to say.

“This was better,” James whispered with a little growl. He bit at my neck, gently, but still with a press of teeth that made me hiss. “My cock’s so hard I could lift bricks.”

That was certainly true. He groaned a little when I touched him. When I slipped a hand inside his jeans, he muttered “fuck,” and leaned back against the lounger with an arch of hip that pushed his cock harder into my hand.

“Suck it,” he whispered. “I’ve been thinking about you sucking my cock all night, Anne. Put it in your mouth.”

I undid the button, then the zipper, slowly. I folded open the denim and freed his erection. It pulsed hot in my hand. James lifted his hips so I could pull down the jeans a little. When I pumped my curled fingers up and down his shaft, he moaned.

“You want me to suck you?” I asked, quiet, mindful of the neighbors and our presumably sleeping houseguest. “You want me to put you in my mouth?”

He liked to hear me say it. I liked to say it. During sex was the one time I never had to pretend, never had to be polite. Never had to bite my tongue against saying what I really thought and felt.

“Yeah,” he moaned, carding his fingers through my hair. “Suck my cock the way you do. So good.”

Normally the way he was slurring his words would have turned me off. I’d have put distance between us, real physical distance as well as mental, the way I always did around someone who’d overindulged in alcohol. Tonight, all the rules seemed to have changed. James wasn’t melancholy or belligerent. He wasn’t going to be driving and therefore taking his life and the lives of the world around him into his hands. Alex and James were drinking. They were drunk. And though it normally would have settled my stomach firmly into my throat, tonight, somehow, it was different.