The Reclamation (The Club Trilogy Book 2) (7 page)

“Ha! Oh yeah, as you just now so plainly witnessed, Jonas is totally, completely fixed.” I pat my palms together. “My work here is done.”

She laughs.

I sigh. “Jonas still has a long way to go to be cured of all that ails him, I do believe. But so do I. We’re undertaking a mutual effort.”

Kat smashes her lips together, genuinely touched. “I like that.”

I bite my lip. I’ve never said anything like that out loud about any man. But it’s true. We’re fixing each other.

Kat takes a bite of a spicy tuna roll. “Josh is definitely hot, though, I will say that.”

“You’re dying of curiosity about him, admit it.”

Kat takes another bite of sushi. She shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” I laugh. “It’s written all over your face. You’re
dying.
”

She laughs. “I’d sure like to know what the hell he was going to say about his application—”

“Oh my God, I know!”

“He was just about to say what he requested,” Kat squeals.

“And then he just shut his mouth and stopped talking all of a sudden.”

“Mid-sentence!’”

“And looked
right
at you, Kat.”

Kat shrieks with laughter. “I was like... yes?... and?... what?...
Yes
? You requested
what
in your application, Josh?” Kat throws her head back, howling with laughter.

“I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs when he didn’t finish that sentence.”

“Me, too.” Kat’s laughing so hard she’s crying. “I was peeing.” She wipes her eyes and exhales. “Oh, Sarah, we’re so bad.”

“
We’re
not bad—
I’m
bad. He’s not
your
boyfriend’s brother. I can’t be wondering this stuff about Josh—surely, I’m going to hell.”

“Ah, so Jonas is your boyfriend now? It’s official?”

I nod, blushing.

Kat nudges my shoulder. “Awesome, girl.”

I’m suddenly too flooded with happiness to reply. I still can’t believe he’s all mine.

Kat pauses, apparently deciding what to say. “He seems pretty intense, though, Sarah,” she finally says. Her tone has shifted. She’s warning me. She’s wary. “He’s not exactly the happy-go-lucky type.”

I shrug. Perhaps not. But she hasn’t seen what I’ve seen. She hasn’t seen Jonas scale a thirty-foot waterfall like he was climbing a step stool. She hasn’t seen him bite my ass (literally) and hoot with glee about getting to lick his baby’s sweet pussy. She hasn’t seen him laugh until he cried over something silly I’ve said. He sure seemed pretty happy-go-lucky during all those moments. And, anyway, happy-go-lucky isn’t everything. She wouldn’t question him if she’d seen the way he cried in my arms when he told me about his mother, or the way he looked when he held his matching friendship bracelet up to mine and told me we’re a perfect match.

“He told me he loves me,” I say quietly.

“Really?” She’s shocked. She wasn’t expecting that at all. “In Belize?”

“Mmm hmm.”

“Wow. He said ‘Sarah, I love you?’”

I hesitate. “Well, no—not in those exact words.”

Her face falls.

“It’s complicated.
He’s
complicated. But trust me, he told me.”

She looks skeptical. And I don’t blame her. Last Kat heard, Jonas was Seattle’s King of the Man-Whores—with Stacy the Faker one night and me the next. She knows he took me to Belize on a whirlwind trip, of course, but she probably thinks we enjoyed some light-hearted fun in the sun. How could she ever understand what transpired between us down there—how our very souls grabbed ahold of each other? I can barely understand it myself. I’m sure she’s worried I’m just another one of Jonas’ many conquests—a passing distraction.

“Well, what exactly did he say to you?”

I sigh. There’s no way to explain what Jonas said and did in Belize, how he bared himself to me so completely—and how he finally got me to let go and surrender myself to him in ways I’ve never done before. It’s all too personal, anyway.

“Just trust me,” I say.

She frowns. She’s not at all convinced.

“He told me,” I mutter. “Even if he didn’t say the magic words.”

She nods, but I feel like she’s humoring me.

I sigh. She just doesn’t understand. Jonas told me his feelings the best way he knows how, and that’s enough for me. I love him, even if he can’t or won’t say, “I love you,” even if he
never
says those exact words. When it comes to Jonas, I don’t need conventional. I don’t need usual. I don’t need happy-go-lucky. I just need him.

The hard part, though, I must admit, is not letting those damned words slip out of my own mouth. Every time I look into his mournful eyes, every time I touch his taut skin, every time he makes love to me, every time he looks lost or swallowed alive by his demons, or holds me tight out of some frantic impulse to protect me, every time he makes me climax and scream his name, I desperately want to say those words to him.

But I can’t. I know I can’t—no matter how powerful the urge. Because, without a doubt, if I say those particular words to Jonas Faraday, they’ll scare the bajeezus out of him and blast our nascent relationship to Kingdom Come. I know it without a doubt. And I’m fine with that. I really am. We’re mutually stricken with a serious mental disease—madness—something better and deeper and hotter and more beautiful than anything I’ve ever experienced before. And that’s enough. We don’t need three clichéd little words to make our love official. We just need each other.

All of a sudden, I can’t stand to be apart from him.

I stand, looking at my watch. It’s already close to one o’clock. This has been the longest day of my life—I woke up in frickin’ Belize this morning, for Pete’s sake. I stretch my arms above my head. Back to reality. I’ve got class tomorrow, homework to do. Study outlines to get from my study group. Oh shit, I’ve got to find a new job. Damn. And I can’t manage any of that without a good night’s sleep—not to mention without a laptop or textbooks or any of the clothes from my apartment. But I’ll figure all that out in the morning. Right now I want one thing. Jonas Faraday. Inside me.

“Come on,” I say to Kat. “Let’s go back inside.”

Jonas and Josh are sitting on the couch, talking calmly. Good sign.

Without a word, I waltz across the living room, right up to Jonas. I pull him up off the couch, press my body against his, take his face in my hands, and kiss him deeply.

“You take such good care of me,” I breathe into him. “Thank you.”

There’s no better way to tell Kat what Jonas means to me than to show her. If she doesn’t believe Seattle’s King of the Man-Whores has fallen desperately in love with me, if she doesn’t understand the depth of our emotional connection, if she can’t see the goodness radiating off him, the kindness, the beauty, that’s her problem, not mine. I know who he is and how he feels about me.

“You’re welcome,” Jonas says quietly. His face is on fire. He leans in and kisses me again—Kat and Josh be damned. When his tongue enters my mouth, my entire body sizzles with electricity. I can feel his erection nudging against me. Good thing, because I’ve got my own girlie version of an erection throbbing inside my panties, too.

“Have you two made nice?” I ask.

Jonas nods.

“You’ve come up with a plan to conquer the world?”

Jonas shakes his head in a “yes and no” kind of way. “Sort of,” he breathes into my lips. “But Rome wasn’t built in a day.” He leans down and lifts me up by my hips, making me gasp, and slings me over his shoulder like a caveman. “We’ll just have to finish plotting world domination at breakfast.” He bounds out of the living room toward his bedroom, my head dangling and bobbing down his broad back as he goes.

“Don’t worry about me; I’m fine,” Josh calls after us. “I’ll just party the night away with Party Girl with a Hyphen.”

“Oh no, you won’t. I’m going to sleep, Playboy,” Kat replies, her voice just barely within earshot as Jonas closes in on his bedroom door. “You’ll have to find another Mickey Mouse roller coaster to ride tonight.”

Chapter 5

Jonas

I fling her down onto my bed, cue up “Dangerous” by Big Data, and rip her clothes off without mercy. After tearing my own clothes off, too, I sit on the edge of my bed, hard as a rock, and wordlessly beg her to fuck some serenity into me. With a low moan, she straddles me, encircling her legs tightly behind my back, and takes my full length into her. I pull her close, right up against me, and kiss her and kiss her and kiss her, staring into those big brown eyes of hers, reveling in her as my body melds into hers. We don’t speak—there’s no need—except, of course, for the times I moan her name, which can’t be helped.

As Big Data swirls around us, I fuck her slowly, intensely, quietly, filling every inch of her, positioning my cock right up against her G-spot deep inside her. I caress the smooth skin of her back, run my hands through her hair, lick her neck, inhale her—losing myself in her, the music, her skin, her eyes, her scent. I think about absolutely nothing except how amazing she feels and how turned on I am and how awesome Big Data is for making a song so perfectly suited to blissful fucking. I’m not even thinking about making her come, to be perfectly honest—I’m too lost in the moment.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, she comes like a motherfucker. Holy fuck, the woman explodes like a fucking rocket.

I’m absolutely floored. It’s the first time Sarah’s had an orgasm through intercourse alone—no tongue, no fingertips, just my cock inside her, filling her up, hitting her G-spot, just my shaft moving in and out of her, rubbing against her clit as we move together. Just my eyes locked onto hers. Just Big Data serenading us with the perfect fucking song—the perfect song for fucking.

It’s incredible. The best yet, I might even say.

Our bodies fuse together in a whole new way until I can’t tell where she ends and I begin, can’t distinguish her pleasure from mine, her orgasm from mine, her flesh from mine. It’s like discovering a treasure chest filled with priceless jewels buried six feet under the ocean’s deepest floor, when all I’d been searching for was a couple of gold coins in the sand. Fucking epic. Without even trying to, I’ve discovered a brand new holy grail—this. Right here. Right now.

And yet . . .

I still don’t say the words to her. I
feel
them, yes, of course—and thank God for that, because there was a time in my life I truly wondered if I was sociopathic—but I don’t
say
them to her. Again.

Immediately after we’re done, she falls asleep next to me, exhausted and totally satisfied. The woman is practically purring against me.

But I can’t fall asleep. My soul has already started whispering to itself, an unpleasant truth barreling down upon it. I lie next to her for close to an hour, awake, listening to her breathing in and out, my mind reeling. Am I hopeless? Am I incapable of surrendering myself fully to Sarah the way I keep pushing her to surrender to me? Am I a hypocrite? I’ve been pushing her to get out of her own way—and yet I won’t budge out of mine.

And damned if I know exactly what’s happening, but the next thing I know I’m making love to her again. I must have drifted off to sleep at some point, at least briefly, because I wake up and I’m inside her, spooning her from behind, fucking her, and she’s so wet and warm and fluttering all around me, and... Oh my God. There’s nothing like watching my baby transforming into a beautiful butterfly right before my very eyes.

Chapter 6

Sarah

Jonas and I are dining in a fancy restaurant amid a flurry of activity. An army of waiters serves us, a woman sits at my feet giving me a pedicure, an artist paints our portrait from a few feet away, some woman in a toga primps my hair, and diners clatter and chatter all around our table. All of a sudden, Jonas leaps out of his chair, swats everyone away from me like he’s King Kong, rips my shimmering gown off, and pushes my naked body onto our table, right on top of our food and lit candles and goblets of red wine and cutlery (including a most unfortunately positioned fork), and begins making love to me. But as he does, he’s not his actual, physical self. It’s hard to explain, but, in a flash, Jonas splinters and multiplies and becomes amorphic, until he’s ten disembodied poltergeists, all of them with ghost lips and magical fingers and bulging biceps and chiseled abs and erect penises—all of them simultaneously embracing me, fucking me, licking me, sucking me, fondling me, groping me, kissing me, and whispering in my ears—all of them enveloping me like a slithering cloud.

And all the while, waiters refill our fallen wine glasses until they overflow, sending warm red wine gushing across my belly and spilling into my crotch and over my clit and down my thighs and between my toes until it accumulates around us into a warm and sensuous pool. The pedicure girl begins massaging my feet with the warm red wine. The hairdresser pours the wine over my scalp until it trickles down my face. And the most titillating thing of all, the thing that turns me on the most, other than Jonas himself, is how the other diners watch us and comment on our lovemaking like they’re beholding a masterpiece of performance art.

“He’s the most beautiful man in the world,” one woman sighs.

“Clearly, but who’s
she
?” a male diner asks.

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t take my eyes off him,” another spectator observes.

“She must be something special if he wants her.”

“I’m not even looking at her. I can’t take my eyes off him.”

“He’s playing her like a grand piano.”

“He’s masterful.”

“I’ve never seen anyone do it quite like this before.”

“I wish he’d do that to me.”

“I wish he’d make me moan like that.”

“I’m having an orgasm just watching them.”

Jonas’ many tongues continue flickering on me, licking up the gushing red wine, his penises penetrate my every orifice, his muscles tense and bulge and contract under my fingertips, and his lips devour and suck and lick the wine off my skin and lap it out of every sensitive fold. It’s almost too much pleasure to bear, intensified by the palpable desire and envy of every person watching us.