Turn Up the Heat by Serena Bell

and T-shirt, and wrenched open the night-table drawer.
    He’d done this before, and he knew his cues and prompts. Now he would hold up the condom, a question in his eyes. He’d ask, “Do you want to—?” Now he would crawl over her and lick her nipples. Now he would find her clit and tease it until she was wide and ready. That was the way you played this game. He knew the rules.
    He didn’t ask her. He didn’t even hold up the small plastic packet for her nod of approval. He just tore it open and rolled it down, and she watched with those big, wild eyes. He put a knee on either side of her, fitted himself, and thrust. No preliminaries.
    She made an
mmmph
noise that could have been pain or pleasure, but he knew now that it didn’t matter, and he thrust again. Her head tipped back, her eyes rolled, and she hummed, hummed once for each time he buried himself deep in her, in the heat and clutch of her, in the clamp and grip and caress of her. “Lily,” he said, not meaning to, but it was impossible to shut up the way he knew he should, and her name rolled out of him again and again, with each sinking and withdrawing. Her nails scraped down his back; her teeth found his shoulder.
    She squirmed under him, lifting her hips to meet him, rubbing against him, circling, and he recognized in her sounds a rising frustration, a reaching for something just out of her grasp.
    “What do you want? Hmm? What do you want?” Not a question—a taunt. And he held himself back a little, wrapped control around his own unruly madness, and was gentle with her. Still working himself deep, but not rocking himself against her that last little bit, not letting her rub. That last half-inch, that tug and pull, that place where she was taut at the edge—he teased her with it.
    She writhed and swore at him.
    “You’ll come when I say.” He felt like someone else, someone he’d never met before. He felt like himself, a self he’d denied.
    He stroked in and out a few times, gentlemanly, and she glared and wriggled and
tried,
but he just smirked down at her.
    She reached down and found his balls, slid a hand back through the slick she’d created, to press a slippery fingertip against the pucker of his ass, and he grabbed her hand and held it over her head. Then found the other one and held that one high, too, so she was splayed under him, helpless.
    He lowered his body fully onto hers. He was crushing her. He was a beast. She was tiny, flimsy, under him, she was bucking and making desperate sounds, and he had to tell himself she knew how to make him stop, she knew the word, but she wasn’t saying it, she was straining against his grip, straining against his weight, and he said, “
Now,
” and then she was crying out, one long, continuous yell of triumph and pleasure, her voice breaking as she came in spasms so intense he could feel them, milking him, and he followed her over the edge, like being turned inside out, like letting go, like becoming that strange, lost self.

Chapter 10
    They were silent for a long, long time. His body still lay heavy on hers, although he had lifted himself off her to toss the condom into a bedside wastebasket. She listened to his breathing as it slowed to normal, felt his heart leave its patter and find a steady rhythm against her breast. Her own did the same, and for a while she waited to see if they’d sync up, the two rhythms, but they beat opposite each other instead, like a quiet conversation.
    When so much time had passed that it had started to feel awkward, like it would be impossible to talk about what had just happened, he said, “Well, damn,” thoughtfully, and they both started laughing.
    He rolled off her and she turned toward him and traced the ink on his arms. First the tops of the evergreen trees, their trunks curving over the cuts of his biceps, their spiky tops pointing down toward his hand. Then the other arm, where he’d been tattooed to look as if the skin was peeling off his arm like a