Wrong Door, Right Man

Chapter 2

The first thing Travis did was grab her by the shoulders and shake.

Not hard enough to hurt — hard enough to land. "Hey. You're drunk. Come back."

Laurel made a sound like someone had unplugged her and grabbed the front of his shirt to keep from tipping over. Her stomach lurched badly. For a moment she thought she was going to be sick all over him.

"Don't — don't shake me —"

"Then stop." He held her still, watching her face.

She blinked at him, eyes glassy and unfocused. "I can't get it dirty," she said, very seriously. "It was two hundred dollars."

Travis looked at her.

The lingerie. She was worried about the lingerie.

He sat up, which required moving her, which she resisted. She was smaller than him by a lot — he was lean in clothes but not under them, all cable and density, the kind of build that doesn't announce itself — and drunk women don't have leverage. He got her wrists pinned behind her back before she could do any more damage, holding them there with one hand, gentle enough not to bruise.

The effect was immediate and not what he'd intended.

"You're mean," Laurel announced. Her eyes filled.

"I'm keeping you from doing something you'll regret."

"You're mean," she said again, like she'd found the one true thing and planned to stay with it.

"Can you sit still if I let go?"

She thought about this with the intense concentration of the genuinely drunk, then chose not to answer. Which was its own answer.

Travis exhaled. He'd invited her in for a beer and some company, figured she'd vent for an hour about Derek, figured Derek would show up eventually and there'd be a scene worth watching. Simple. Low-stakes. He'd miscalculated her tolerance by about three beers.

Other people got belligerent when they drank, or weepy, or fell asleep. Laurel, apparently, stripped off her dress and climbed into a stranger's lap in two hundred dollars' worth of lingerie and called it not letting it go to waste.

At least they were in the bedroom. If Derek walked in right now —

Travis didn't finish the thought.

Laurel had started crying in earnest, the silent kind, tears sliding down her face while she stared at his collarbone like it had personally wronged her. After a while, when he didn't respond to it, the crying wound down on its own. She went quiet. Her breathing slowed.

He thought she'd fallen asleep.

Then she shifted her weight, a slow roll of her hips, and the friction hit him like a hand closing around a fuse.

"Something's —" She looked down between them, brow furrowed. "Something's poking me."

Travis went very still.

She shifted again, experimentally, half-lidded. "It's in your pants. What is that." A pause. "Take it out. I want to see."

He made a sound through his teeth.

She'd been grinding against him for the last thirty seconds and his body had done what bodies do, which was respond without asking permission first. He was hard enough that it was starting to be uncomfortable, and she was sitting directly on top of the problem, rocking back and forth with the unhurried curiosity of someone who had genuinely forgotten what cause and effect was.

Travis had never been particularly interested in s*x. Not in a troubled way — just absent. He'd watched other men organize their entire lives around it and felt nothing he recognized as the same drive. Mornings, he waited it out. He'd started to wonder, quietly, if something in the wiring was just different for him.

He was no longer wondering.

"Stop moving," he said. His voice had dropped without his permission.

"But it's —" She moved again, and the breath left him. "It's weird. It's like — when I do that it's —" The sentence dissolved into something low and soft that was almost a moan.

He flipped her.

One motion — hands at her hips, roll, and she was underneath him, her back against the mattress and his weight bracketing her without landing on her. She looked up at him with wide eyes, the tears still drying on her face, and he settled against her and moved once, deliberately, and watched her mouth fall open.

"Why do you keep —"

"Because you won't stop." He did it again, slower. "Still bothering you?"

She stared at him. Then: "...do it softer."

He was going to hell. He was aware of this. Derek was his friend — or close enough; they'd been running in the same circles for two years, which in this city was practically family — and this was Derek's girlfriend, and she was drunk, and Travis was currently —

He was currently pulling her jeans down.

The lingerie underneath stopped him for a moment. Not in a bad way. She was pale and slight and the black lace sat against her skin like it had been chosen by someone who knew what they were doing, which, given the price tag she'd mentioned twice now, it probably had. The underwear was barely there — a dark scrap of sheer fabric that left almost nothing to work with.

"You took my pants off," Laurel said.

"You said you wanted me to look at the two-hundred-dollar lingerie."

She considered this. "...okay," she said, and moved her hands out of the way.

He'd watched enough to know the general sequence, but he'd barely gotten to the question of where to start when Laurel wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled, and the decision got made for her. She was moving against him again, unhurried and instinctive, and making small sounds that he felt in his back teeth.

"This is so strange," she murmured, not to him exactly. "Why does that feel so —"

He looked down. The lace was pushed to the side and she was flushed and wet, the fabric dark with it, and she had not a single thing to hide behind. He spread her open with two fingers and she gasped and grabbed his wrist — not to stop him, just to hold on.

"Jesus," he said quietly.

He touched her and her whole body shook.

"That's —" Her head went back. "That's my —"

"I know what it is."

He worked his thumb over her slowly, watching her face, and she made a sound that was entirely involuntary — he could tell by the way she immediately looked embarrassed about it. He did it again and she stopped being embarrassed and just made the sound.

He brought his hand up. Smelled it. Clean and warm, something like soap underneath, something underneath that that wasn't soap at all.

He tasted it.

"You're disgusting," Laurel said immediately. "You just —"

"I said I was going to." He looked at her. "You said go ahead."

"I didn't think you'd actually —"

"Lie back."

She opened her mouth.

"Laurel." He said her name like a period. "Lie back."

She lay back.

He hooked her legs over his shoulders and lifted her hips off the mattress entirely, and she made a startled sound and grabbed for the sheets with both hands, suddenly weightless and unable to do anything about it.

"What are you —"

He moved the lace aside with his thumb, put his mouth on her, and she stopped asking questions.