After Hours by Cara McKenna

shorts down and sliding inside me. The breaths heating my neck would deepen to
     grunts, the fidgeting of his hips speeding to thrusts.
    I wanted all those things as badly as I feared them. I wanted to know what he sounded
     like as the need mounted, what he’d say as he chased his pleasure. A man so in control,
     coming undone. I didn’t know which of us I distrusted more, on this bed.
    He made me curious—me, the girl who’d always planted her feet firmly in place when
     the other kids wanted to race after trouble. I was in my sister’s shoes now. Shoes
     that felt like roller skates, bad ideas like magnets and me dipped in steel. I’d glide
     right into whatever Kelly wanted, I could feel it. And I hated myself for it.
    But you can’t fuck him unprotected.
    He’d be the one fucking, silly girl.
    Still.
If that happened . . . it’d feel awful, come the dawn. I’d feel foolish and reckless,
     and any pleasure that giving in might offer, it’d sour to days or weeks of disappointment,
     cast a shadow over my working relationship with this man, maybe even wreck the professional
     trust I’d already invested in him.
    “Where’d you go?” Kelly whispered.
    I’d turned still and stiff, I realized, brittle with regrets I hadn’t even earned
     yet. “I’m right here.”
    He kissed my ear, and when he spoke it was like he’d stepped inside my mind. “Not
     all of you.”
    “You scare me, a little.”
    Another soft kiss. “What about me?”
    Your intentions. And the way you garble my intuition.
“I don’t know. You’re just more . . .”
    “More what?” Another kiss, another hot exhalation.
    I spoke from some thoughtless, honest place. “I don’t trust myself around you. This
     way.”
    “There’s something between us,” he murmured. “We’re just doing what it’s asking.”
    “It feels like I’m just doing what
you
ask.”
    “And you don’t like that?” As he said it, his fingers traced my lips through my panties,
     cock pressing close. Heat flashed, dizzying me.
    I swallowed a moan, scrabbling for words. “I like it now. I’m afraid I’ll wish I hadn’t
     done so much in the morning. It feels good, but it won’t last.”
    “That’s what pleasure is.”
    Indeed. That was what made much of it decadent. Every one-too-many cocktails a person
     downed, every cookie that wrecked a diet, every bad-idea boyfriend taken by my mother
     or sister . . . all just pleasures given in to, consequences be damned. But I hated
     consequences. I’d spent my entire life searching for calm in the fallout of other
     people’s shitty impulses.
    Push him away,
my brain said.
    Fuck him,
my body begged.
All these years you’ve wasted cleaning up after other people’s parties. Quit reaching
     for the dustpan.
    Kelly slid my pajama bottoms over my hips. Thoughtlessly, I shifted to let him pull
     them to my thighs, my knees, then I kicked them away myself, all those fresh chances
     to tell him to stop heaped on the growing pile.
    His hand was on my belly and slipping lower, lower. His cock was against my ass, insistent.
     I felt his knee nudging my legs, and I did as it said, raising the top one. He moved
     behind me, adjusting his erection, pressing it deeper between my thighs. My breath
     was shallow, cheeks fevered, lips swollen. Drunk again. Drunk on Kelly.
    “Jesus,” I muttered.
    “Got a better name you can say, if you want.”
    Before I could reply, his hand slipped inside my underwear, robbing me of words. His
     fingers tickled my curls, warmed my skin. They glanced my clitoris and I bucked. It
     was too much and nowhere near enough. His breath steamed hot on my neck, and with
     a low, sharp moan, he stroked my clit. I gasped.
    “Good,” he murmured. He withdrew his hand but only to wet his fingertips at his mouth.
     Then they were between my legs again, hot and slick, teasing me with explicit caresses.
     I groaned, imagining his tongue. His cock. He was imagining the same, I knew. I