Wrong Door, Right Man

Chapter 3

The sounds she made were soft and broken, barely contained by the walls of the room.

She had her legs hooked over his shoulders, the black lace still on — mostly — and Travis had her hips tilted at an angle that left her with nothing to brace against, nothing to push back with, no leverage at all. She'd tried. Her hands had found the sheets and lost them and found them again. It didn't help.

He'd been working her c**t for a while now, tongue slow and deliberate, and she was swollen and slick and she knew it and that was somehow the worst part — that her body had just decided, without consulting her, that this was exactly what it wanted.

"Don't — not there — I can't —"

He kept going. Of course he kept going. The more she said it the more he seemed to settle in, like she was giving him directions instead of objections, and the sensation moved through her in long rolling pulls that started at the point of contact and spread until her toes were curling against his back and she'd completely lost track of what she'd been trying to say.

He moved lower. His tongue pressed into her, mimicking something, and the sound she made was embarrassing and involuntary and she couldn't stop it.

"You're —" She had to swallow. "That's disgusting."

He lifted his head just enough to say, "You're calling yourself disgusting." His voice was rough, unhurried. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

She didn't have an answer for that. She was too far gone for a comeback, which was its own kind of humiliation, and she lay there flushed and breathing too fast while he sat up and worked his belt open.

"Do you want me to stop?"

The absence hit her before she processed the question. He'd pulled back, and the place where his mouth had been felt empty and unbearable, and her body had an answer that her brain was still composing objections to.

"Don't go," she heard herself say. It came out small. "Please don't."

He looked at her for a second. Something shifted in his expression — not softness, exactly, but something adjacent to it.

He brought his hand down against her hip with a sharp crack of sound, and she gasped, the flesh still warm and stinging when he pressed the head of himself against her.

"Does Derek know you're like this?"

She squirmed against the sting. "He doesn't know anything." A pause. "Lighter next time."

Travis made a low sound that might have been a laugh, and then he started to push into her, slow and incremental, and she felt herself stretching around him in a way that was almost too much, her body trying to accommodate something it wasn't sure it could.

She'd thought she was ready. She hadn't been ready.

He stopped. He'd hit something, and the look on his face changed — a sudden stillness, like a man who'd just realized the floor under him wasn't solid.

"Laurel."

She was already crying. The pain had cut straight through the alcohol, and she was looking up at him with wet eyes and a face that had gone completely sober, and she said, "Take it out. Please, Travis, take it out."

He didn't move. His jaw was tight. There was sweat at his temple and his whole body had gone rigid, and she could see him doing the math, the terrible arithmetic of where he was and what that meant.

"You're a —"

"It hurts," she said. "I know. I know, just — please."

But he was already pressed against the door from the hallway. The sound of it stopped them both.

A key. No — not a key. Someone trying a handle.

Travis's hand came over her mouth, fast and firm. His eyes had gone sharp and still. He held himself motionless above her, every muscle locked, and she could feel her own pulse hammering against his palm.

Derek's voice came through the wall. "Travis? You home?"

She couldn't breathe.

Travis shifted his weight, and the movement sent a shock of pain through her, and she made a muffled sound against his hand and her eyes went wide. He looked down at her. She looked up at him. Neither of them moved.

Footsteps. More than one pair.

The handle rattled again. Then stopped.

"He's not here." Derek's voice, lower now, slightly muffled by the door. Something in his tone that she recognized and wished she didn't. "We can use the living room."

The silence after that was a different kind of sound entirely.

Laurel lay there and felt everything at once — the pain that had dulled to a deep, insistent ache, the fullness of him still inside her, the specific quality of Derek's voice through the wall, the way he'd said we without a second's hesitation. She'd put on the lingerie for him. She'd bought it for tonight. She'd thought —

It didn't matter what she'd thought.

Travis was watching her. His hand had come away from her mouth, and she hadn't noticed when, and now she was just looking at the ceiling while something in her chest did a slow, quiet collapse.

"It doesn't hurt as much," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected.

It was true. The pain had receded while they were holding still, replaced by something else — a dense, spreading ache that wasn't entirely bad, a pressure right at the edge of something she couldn't name yet.

She reached down between them, curious and half-dazed, fingers finding where they were joined, and the slickness there, the sheer improbability of it, made her exhale slowly.

"You're so —" She didn't finish. She pressed her palm flat against her own stomach and felt him through the skin and said, "God."

Travis pulled back an inch. Just an inch. Then forward.

"

He did it again, the same careful increment, and this time the sound she made was different — still pained at the edges but underneath it something was building, something that hadn't been there a minute ago.

From the living room, muffled through the wall, came sounds she recognized.

She should have cared more. Part of her did care — the part that had bought the lingerie and planned the evening and wanted, stupidly, to be chosen. That part was still there, still bleeding a little. But there was another part now, one that was very focused on the slow, devastating drag of Travis moving inside her, on the way each careful thrust was opening her up to something she hadn't known she was capable of feeling.

"I want —" She stopped. Started over. "Can you hold me?"

He looked at her for a long moment. She could see him deciding something. Then he shifted, lowering himself over her, and she wrapped her arms around his back and pressed her face against his neck, and when he moved again the angle changed and she made a sound she'd never made before in her life.

"There," she breathed. "Right there, don't —"

He kept the rhythm, slow and deep, and she bit her lip until she could taste it and still the sounds came out, quiet and uncontrolled, and she turned her face into his shoulder to muffle them.

He reached past her and grabbed something from the sheets — a shirt, her shirt, she thought — and pushed it toward her. "Bite this."

She looked at him. Her eyes were wet, and she didn't entirely know why anymore — the pain, or Derek through the wall, or the fact that she was here at all, that this was the night she'd wanted to be something else entirely.

"Can I kiss you instead?"

Travis went still. His expression did something complicated, something she couldn't quite read in the low light.

She felt her lip start to go. "Never mind, forget I —"

He bent down and kissed her. Soft at first — just his mouth on hers, almost careful. Then she opened for him and it wasn't careful anymore, his tongue moving against hers while he kept his hips rolling in that slow, relentless rhythm, and she stopped thinking about the sounds from the living room, stopped thinking about Derek, stopped thinking about anything at all.