Megan Hart

An Erotic Collection Volume 2

Reason Enough

It wasn’t the sort of question I could answer at once, without hesitation. It took me hours to pick out which bath mats to put in our new bathroom. How on earth could I decide in one split moment if I should agree to have a baby?

“Yes? No?” Dan nudged his chin into the curve of my shoulder and neck from behind as his arms slipped around my waist. It made washing the dishes difficult, so I let the greasy pot in my hands slide back beneath the soapy water and leaned back against him. “Maybe?”

“Where did this come from?” I asked-practically, I thought.

Dan’s hands moved up and down my waist and crept below the hem of my shirt to link over my belly. “I was just thinking about it, that’s all.”

“Hmm.” I turned to face him, my hands going behind me to grip the edge of the sink. “A baby is a big responsibility.”

He grinned.

“Dan…” I had nothing to say, really. No real protest.

“Never mind, Elle.” He kissed me. “It’s just something I thought about, that’s all. When you mentioned the pills.”

I’d had a hangnail gone awry. My doctor had prescribed antibiotics to help get rid of the infection. Antibiotics can interfere with the effectiveness of birth-control pills. I’d offered to use my mouth on him instead of making love.

“I thought you’d like a blow job.” I heard the slightly cool tone of my voice and imagined the slightly cool expression on my face, to match. “I mean, you usually do.”

Against me, on the places where our bodies touched, I imagined heat growing. He pushed his hips forward a little bit to nudge a definite bulge against my stomach. He kissed me again, our mouths opening, and his hands gripped tighter on my waist.

“You know I do,” Dan murmured against my lips.

“Here? In the kitchen?” I raised a brow but kept my mouth from the smile threatening to tip it. “How shocking.”

“Shock me.”

We’d only been in the new house, our first together, for a few months. We hadn’t yet made love in every room-though not for lack of effort. I let my hand slide to his belt buckle. I tugged it open, moving his body as I did.

Dan let out a small grunt. “Use your mouth on me, right here.”

It would kill my knees, that tile floor, but I didn’t protest. I liked sucking Dan’s cock. He thought he was lucky. I was the lucky one, though. Lucky I’d found him, and that he loved me.

Luckier I loved him back.

I pushed him, not too gently, until he took a couple steps back. I unzipped his dark trousers, his work clothes, and pulled them over his hips. I went to my knees as I pushed the cloth over his thighs and down to his ankles. His cock tented the front of his soft boxer briefs, and I got rid of those, too.

I looked at him for a minute with my hand on the base of his prick. I licked my mouth to wet my lips, and Dan’s hands slid into my hair. Not pulling, not pushing. He was waiting for me to move. He could be patient if he had to be. If I made him.

I tilted my head to take him in as deep as I could. The groan of his response thrilled me. Sucking Dan was about him, but it affected me, too. My nipples tightened. My clit rubbed against my panties, and I reached with the hand not holding Dan to pull my skirt up my thighs. My knees protested the cold, hard tile without the cushion of my skirt, but I ignored the sensation. My fingers crept under the skirt to touch, just once, the silk between my legs.

* * *

“Yes,” Dan said. “Touch yourself.”

I didn’t answer, my mouth occupied with other tasks. I sucked him a little harder, my lips closing over the head of his cock and meeting. Like a kiss. A second later, the pause so brief it was hardly there, my mouth opened again and I took him down the back of my throat. Up again, this time with one hand following and the other rubbing the front of my panties.

Dan’s fingers slid deeper into my hair, and he pulled out the spring-clip I’d used to keep it up. Dark lengths tumbled around my shoulders. I smelled the shampoo I’d used that morning when I’d bound it up, still damp. He finger-combed it, careful not to pull too hard as my head moved under his hands.

His breath hitched, in and out, faster. It wouldn’t take long for him to come. The question was, how long would it take me?

I closed my eyes. The kitchen went away. So did my job, the bills I meant to pay later, the message on the answering machine from my mother. The discomfort in my knees and jaw vanished, too.

My world became the taste and smell of my husband and my hand between my legs. I rubbed faster over my panties, my clit a tight, hard bump under my fingers. I sucked Dan’s cock a little harder, a little faster, losing my rhythm once or twice when my own pleasure made me sloppy.

“I’m going to come, baby.” Dan’s regular voice was often enough to get my hormones jumping, but the way he sounded just before he came was the trigger on my cunt’s pistol. He spoke. I shot off.

I teased myself with rapid flicks of my fingertip on my silk-covered clit. A harder touch would send me over faster, but it felt so good I didn’t want it to end. Pleasure built. My muscles tightened. I couldn’t breathe. I had to breathe.

With a low moan, Dan bucked his hips forward. His taste flooded me. His hands tightened in my hair and I swallowed, hard, so I could find the breath to moan.

I pressed my palm between my legs as my body shook. I’d become a fist, closed tight, but now I opened wide. I shuddered and swallowed again. Dan pulled back.

I blinked as my orgasm subsided, and looked up at him. Sweat fell at that moment from his face onto mine, onto my lips, and I licked it away. Dan reached to help me up with a hand beneath my elbow, and I groaned at the creak of my joints.

He pulled me close and kissed me, then hugged me, my face against his chest. “You are so good at that. You know that?”

I smiled against the familiar, fresh scent of his shirt. A shirt I had washed and dried and hung in his closet. The closet in the house we shared.

“I know,” I told him, just to hear him laugh.

He hugged me tighter, and we laughed together. The phone rang. I knew who it would be, and though I didn’t really want to answer it, I knew my mother would keep calling until I did. I looked up at him.

“I love you,” I said, and meant it.

“I love you, too,” Dan answered, and didn’t talk about babies again that night.

* * *

“Hot,” my brother said in a no-nonsense tone. “Don’t touch!”

The little girl reaching for the canister of fireplace matches pulled back her hand and gave Chad a reproachful look. But she didn’t reach again, just turned her attention to the stack of magazines on the coffee table.

“Sorry,” I said. “I should’ve put those away. We’re not baby-proof, I guess.”

My younger brother laughed and shrugged. “The princess needs to learn. Don’t worry about it, Elle.”

The little girl-my niece! I had a niece? How had that happened? I was an aunt. My baby brother had fallen in love and adopted a child and had a life.

“What?” he asked as I shook my head in wonder. “No, Leah. Don’t tear Aunt Elle’s magazines. C’mere to Daddy.”

He held out his hands and the girl made her way around the coffee table to take her place on his lap. She grinned, self-satisfied, and looked every bit the princess her daddies believed her to be.

“I just almost can’t believe this,” I told him, knowing he’d understand. “You’re a daddy! Chaddie, it’s just incredible.”

He beamed. My brother looked better than I’d ever seen him. He’d gotten slimmer, and impossibly taller. He’d cut his hair, and it emphasized the leaner lines of his face. He’d gotten older.

Hell. We both had. I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I looked in the mirror often enough, after all.

Chad kissed the soft, round cheek of his daughter and stroked the length of her black curls. She settled contentedly against him and kicked her chubby legs. He let her crawl off his lap to sit on my couch.

“She’ll crash in about fifteen minutes,” he said confidently, though to my eyes Leah looked about as far away from sleep as a kid could get. “Then we’ll really catch up.”

I watched my niece gnaw on the edge of one of my expensive, dry-clean-only pillows and bit my tongue against the words that would have made me sound like my mother. “I’ll go make some coffee, okay?”

* * *

“Sure.” My brother grinned, though the force of his love was directed at his daughter now, and not so much at me.

I didn’t mind, I told myself in the kitchen as I ground beans and measured them into the brand-new, complicated coffeemaker Dan had bought when we moved in. I still wasn’t entirely sure how to work it.

I didn’t mind that my brother was happy. I was, in fact, nearly overwhelmed with happiness on his behalf. We’d grown up in a house fairly devoid of joy, and I’d been an adult before I’d even begun to allow myself to believe I wouldn’t be pretty miserable for my entire life. Instead, he’d met Luke. I’d met Dan. We’d both managed to escape the past and make a present; I had no reason to believe we wouldn’t both create a joyful future, too.

Hell, I’d even forged a relationship, of sorts, with my mother. Chad hadn’t managed that yet, though I hoped the fact he and Luke had moved back to Pennsylvania from California with the only grandchild my mother could claim would change that.

It absolutely wasn’t that I was jealous of my brother.

“Coffee-” I bit off the words when I saw Chad put a finger to his lips. Leah, sprawled on top of the cushions and covered with her blanket, had indeed fallen asleep. Chad made a barrier with more pillows to keep her from rolling off, and gestured to me.

We broke our silence in my new kitchen, with all its new appliances and dishes and pictures on the walls. Chad took the coffee from me with a grateful gasp and drank back half his cup in a large gulp.

“God,” he said. “I swear to you I’m living on caffeine now. She’s finally starting to sleep through the night, but it’s been a hellish six months. The pediatrician says at twenty-two months she should be sleeping through with no problem, but she’s having adjustment issues.”

I liked to sleep. Really, really liked it. Was pretty unfunctional without enough sleep, as a matter of fact.

“So, has she said anything about us?” Chad didn’t waste time. He got up to pour himself more coffee and helped himself to a muffin from my fridge. Only the slope of his shoulders gave away his tension.

“Oh, Chaddie, do you want to know?”

He turned. “Yes, Ella. I want to know.”

He’d used my old name, the one my mother still insisted on using. Point taken. “She asked if I’d seen her. Meaning Leah. I said yes. She wanted to know…”

The words lodged in my throat. I shouldn’t be embarrassed to repeat them. Chad was the one who’d always called my mother The Dragon Lady, after all. He wouldn’t be surprised, but he would be hurt. I didn’t want to hurt my brother, not even by proxy.

“What?”

I sighed. “She wanted to know how dark she was.”

Chad’s expression went so carefully blank I knew he was furious. “Uh-huh. What did you tell her?”

“I told her,” I said, “to stop being so damn ridiculous.”

He smiled. “Did you?”

“I did. I can’t make excuses for her, Chad, but you know how she is.”

“It’s bad enough I’m gay, I know. But that I have a black daughter…God. What will the neighbors say?” Chad grimaced and slugged back more coffee. “And she wonders why I don’t come home.”

“At least she’s asked you to,” I pointed out, drinking my own coffee. “At least she’s not pretending you don’t exist.”

He made a derisive noise. “If she doesn’t accept Luke or Leah, then she still doesn’t really accept me. End of story. She can kiss my ass.”

I knew his partner’s name, of course, and his daughter’s, but hearing them together that way made me giggle. “Luke and Leah.”

“What about them?” He must have heard it, too, the sound of two names that paired brought to mind one of the most easily recognized film references from the past thirty years. “Very funny!”

But he was laughing, and my kitchen filled with giggles and chortles we tried to stifle so as not to wake his child. All our best efforts went to ruin in the next minute, because I heard the front door open and a booming voice carry down the hall.

“I’m hooooome!”

Leah’s thin, high wail followed a moment later. Chad was already off his chair and I went after him. We were too late, both to shush Dan and to quiet Leah.

“Hey, there, little girl,” Dan was murmuring, the child in his arms already when I came down the hall and into the living room. Leah looked up at him with wide eyes, but no more tears.

My heart melted.

That night I brushed my teeth, washed my face, smoothed cream into my skin. Every step of my bedtime ritual was the same as it had always been, steps to be counted without even thinking of them. A routine that provided some small measure of comfort in its perpetual sameness, no matter what had happened during the day. Yet when I lifted the white plastic case containing my birth-control pills, I didn’t simply pop one out of the silver foil and swallow it with a swig of water the way I always did.

I thought about punching out the pill, letting it drop into the sink and running the water to flush it away down the pipes into darkness. That one, small pill which had been my womb’s only protection since the day Dan and I had stopped using condoms. I’d trusted my life to those small white discs of compressed hormones.

In the end, I swallowed the pill. I also took the last dose of antibiotics, because even though my infected finger had cleared up days ago, the instructions on the pill bottle had said to finish the medication. I wasn’t then and doubt I ever will be the sort of woman to throw caution to the wind and ignore even something as simple as a doctor’s prescription.

I thought about it, though, as I slipped my nightgown over bare skin and pulled back the blankets to get into bed beside my husband. He’d been reading a paperback novel with a lurid cover, but now his chin had dropped to his chest. The series of small, puffing breaths that always announced his slip into sleep had begun. His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose.

He woke when I removed the narrow wire frames and set them on the nightstand. His breath gusted hot against my chest and his arms went around me.

“What a nice view,” he murmured into my cleavage.

It had been more than a week since we’d made love in any traditional fashion, if you could call whatever love we’d ever made traditional. It was the longest I’d gone without him inside me since we’d been married. For a couple who fucked more often than we exercised, this had been an eye-opener.

Dan looked pleased when I straddled him, and even more so when I undid the row of tiny pearl buttons at the front of my gown. His hands slid up my sides to cup my bare breasts and push them together. I shivered when his tongue flickered out to taste me. My pulse instantly sped up.

He nuzzled his face against my skin, then used his mouth to pull gently on my nipples. One, the other, then back to the first. Underneath me, nestled along my cunt and ass, his cock got hard. The soft flannel of his pajama bottoms rubbed my bare skin. I wanted to rock my body against it, but held still.

“Take this off.” He didn’t wait for me to comply, but lifted my nightgown over my hips as I tugged it over my head.

* * *

The tips of my breasts brushed his bare chest as I leaned forward to kiss him. His lips parted at once. Greedy. Hungry. I kissed him hard and threaded my fingers through his hair. I tipped his head back to gain access to his throat, where I nipped and sucked until he groaned and his cock pulsed beneath me.

I was naked, and Dan was still partially dressed, but I felt no disadvantage. If there was power being played, I was the one in control. If I’d had any ideas about drawing this out, they fled when his hand slipped between us and his thumb settled on my clit. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had any orgasms in the past ten days, but I hadn’t had any with Dan inside me, and I could no longer stand to wait.

He made the noise I loved when I lifted myself to grasp his cock and guide myself onto it. I was already so slick with wanting there was no resistance when I slid all the way down. His eyes closed for a second as he arched to push himself deeper.

We sat that way without moving, our breath coming faster. My heart had started to pound. His thumb pressed again on my clit and a spasm of pleasure rocked me. I moaned.

His eyes opened. “Fuck, Elle, I love that sound.”

I laughed and moved on him; the laugh stuttered into a groan as he made small circles on my clitoris. He knew just how to touch me. I sat up, my hands on his chest for support, and rocked on his prick.

We took our time. In this position he couldn’t thrust too hard, too fast or too deep. I could set the pace, but I had to do the work, too, and with my clit pressing his thumb every time I moved, I was content to go slow.

If marriage had made any sort of change in our lovemaking it was that we did it more often in the dark now. In bed, the way I imagined most “normal” couples did. I hadn’t turned off the bedside lamp, though, and I was glad for the light to show me Dan’s face. I loved the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, and the beads of sweat that formed at his hairline and turned his sandy hair the color of wet sand. I loved the way his blue-green eyes darkened as his pupils dilated with arousal.

I loved everything about this man, not just each piece but how they all fit to make the whole of him. I’d bound my life with his and never regretted it. So why, then, did I fear so much sharing one more piece of myself?

I wanted him inside me harder, faster, deeper. I leaned forward to kiss him and he pumped upward. I no longer needed the help of his hand. My clit rubbed his belly as he thrust, and I cried out into his mouth as I started to come. My cunt clenched on his erection and he grunted. His hands gripped my sides, sliding on my sweat-slick skin. I tasted salt on his mouth.

I wanted to close my eyes when I came, but I kept them open so I could see his face. His mouth tightened. He thrust so hard he moved my entire body. He blinked, his gaze going far away, and knowing he was so close sent another thrill of climax jittering through me.

“Elle,” Dan panted. “Is it okay?”

“It’s great, baby,” I murmured. Sex makes even the silliest sentences all right.

He shook his head a little, still thrusting. “No, baby. Is it okay?”

He hadn’t meant my orgasm. He’d meant his. I hadn’t made him use a condom, and I still had the antibiotics in my system. I loved him a hundred times more for his concern.

“It’s absolutely okay.”

It was like I gave him permission, because that’s when his body tensed and he let out a long, low groan. His cock throbbed inside me and he thrust upward once more before clutching me to him and kissing my mouth.

I couldn’t feel him spurt inside me, but I imagined I did. In my head the army of small, swimming sperm surged upward through the welcoming territory of my womb, seeking their target. Would one find its goal tonight?

Had we made a child?

And if we had, would it really be all right?

* * *

Nobody in their right mind would have ever asked me to help plan a baby shower, but Marcy’s sister Linda didn’t know me. Or maybe she wasn’t in her right mind. At any rate, as Marcy’s self-proclaimed best friend, I’d been strongly encouraged to help her sister with organizing this party.

It was supposed to be a surprise, but getting Marcy out of the house and to the restaurant where dozens of her friends and family waited was harder than I’d expected.

“I’m a whale,” she complained from her place on the couch. “A frigging whale, Elle. I’m not going out of the house like this. I can’t buy shoes. My feet are way too swollen.”

“It’s BOGO at Neiman Marcus.” I had no shame. I also had fifty people and a buffet lunch waiting for us. “C’mon. Get your lazy ass off that couch.”

“I’m not lazy,” Marcy said reprovingly. “I’m knocked up.”

“Shoes,” I said sternly.

“Fine. Bitch,” she said and held out her hand. “Help me up.”

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to run away. I most definitely did not want to be the woman sprawled on the couch with a belly so big she wouldn’t be able to see the shoes I was supposedly bullying her into buying. I tugged her to her feet. In the car I had to help her buckle her seat belt and we both laughed until I felt sick to my stomach.

I also didn’t want to be the woman weeping at the sight of her friends shouting, “surprise.” Marcy’s tears didn’t seem to embarrass her, but little did. I, however, would’ve been mortified to break down like that in public. It would have been like wetting my pants, or throwing up on myself. I never wanted to be that woman with such a precarious hold on her emotions. Not ever.

“You’re quiet.” Marcy, plate laden with cake and pasta salad, wore a hat festooned with ribbons and bows from the packages she’d spent forty minutes unwrapping. “Everything okay?”

“Absolutely.” I smiled. “You made out like a bandit.”

“I love you,” Marcy said suddenly. Tears welled in her eyes again.

I’ve never been a hugger, but there wasn’t any graceful way to avoid her embrace. “Oh, Marce. Hush.”

“This was the b-b-best…” She sniffled and then dug into her cake. “You’re the best friend ever!”

“I just helped, that’s all.”

“Thank you,” Marcy said. “I mean it, Elle. I’m so…thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I told her, because there wasn’t much else to say.

Marcy was pulled away by some other friends who wanted to take her picture, and I was left alone for a moment to look around at the heaps of baby items she’d received. Diapers, wipes, blankets, tiny little outfits in pale colors and decorated with ducks and bunnies…. Only a few months ago she and I had gone shopping for sexy lingerie, and now her entire life had changed. Her entire focus had turned toward the stranger in her belly.

She didn’t notice when I slipped out.

I drove for a while before going home, just trying to clear my head. When I pulled into my driveway and saw a familiar car parked in front of my house, I wished I’d driven a lot longer.

My mother rarely visited us, but when she did she never called first. I think she knew if I had warning I’d probably make excuses about why she couldn’t come over. Since my father’s death, her life had changed a lot and so had our relationship, but it would never be the sort to write about on a greeting card.

* * *

My mother might not view me as the perfect daughter, but she loved Dan. This brought me no end of amusement and surprise, because she’d been set on hating him at the start. I never knew what changed her mind, aside from the fact I didn’t see how anyone could not love Dan. Still, my mother wasn’t known for loving anyone, and every time I saw her smile at him I couldn’t help wondering when she was going to sink the knife in his gut.

Dan, on the other hand, had no doubts about his ability to charm my mother. I watched them through the kitchen door before I went in. He poured her coffee and offered her the creamer. He was talking about something, his hands waving, and she watched him, nodding. I might have been jealous if I really wanted her to like me as much as she liked him, but thankfully I’d managed to get past yearning for that.

“…rip out the floor and put in hardwood.”

Ah. He was telling her about his grand plans to renovate the house. Dan talked a lot about what he wanted to do. I talked a lot about how much it would cost. We usually found a compromise.

“Elle.” My mother looked up from her coffee. “You’re home.”

I bit my tongue on the sarcastic “duh” that wanted to come out. “Hi, Mom.”

Dan came to kiss and hug me. “How was the shower?”

“Fine.” I wanted some coffee and helped myself.

“Shower? What shower?”

“My friend Marcy is having a baby,” I said.

“How lucky for her mother,” my mother said. “She must be thrilled to become a grandmother.”

Dead silence filled the kitchen. I glanced at Dan, but he was getting ready to flee. My husband is a smart man.

“Mom,” I said mildly, turning with my cup in my hand. “You’re a grandma, too.”

“I’ve got some…stuff…to do…in the place….” Dan said, and exited the kitchen before my mother could reply.

“I need a cigarette,” my mother said. “Come outside with me.”

I’d learned to pick my battles. I went outside. My mother lit up at once, smoking and looking out over our small backyard. I waited for her to talk.

“He sent me a picture of her.”

“Her name is Leah, Mom. She’s adorable.”

My mother glanced at me sideways and blew twin streams of smoke from her nose. “I know you think I’m being awful. But I just can’t, Ella. I just…”

“Oh, why not?” I asked, weary of her drama. “Because she’s black? Because he’s gay? What the hell is your problem, Mother, really?”

“Because I’m not sure how to be a grandmother!” she cried in a thin, high voice nothing like her usual one. Her hand shook as she stabbed out her cigarette and lit another.

I couldn’t speak at first, not until I’d swallowed some coffee. “I thought you wanted to be a grandma. God knows you keep dropping hints about it.”

“It would be different with you.”

“How would it be different?” I demanded.

My mother looked at me. “You are my daughter. It’s different with a mother and a daughter, that’s all.”

I hardly thought our relationship qualified, but I didn’t say that. Sometimes the things we most want to say are the ones that should never be said. “She’s just a little girl, Mom. All you have to do is…all you have to do is love her.”

I was horrified at the way my throat closed on those words and at the burning of tears in my eyes. “Just love her.”

We stared at each other for what felt like a very long time while my mother’s cigarette burned to ash in her fingers, unsmoked.

“I don’t know if I can.” Her words came out low and soft and naked. “I just don’t know if I can.”

Honestly, I wasn’t sure she could, either.

“You should try.”

How had the tables turned? How had I become the one who knew what should be done and how to do it? How had my mother become the child needing to be taught?

“Maybe we could…go see them together,” she said after another long, long minute. “Would you go with me?”

She had asked, not demanded. I couldn’t remember if she’d ever asked me to do anything in my entire life. And though we never touched, I reached for my mother’s hand.

“Yes,” I told her. “I’ll go with you.”

* * *

My period had come and gone. I stared at the plastic compact in my hand. Today I was supposed to take the first of this month’s pills. I hadn’t decided if I was going to.

“Elle, are you coming?”

“Just a minute.” I punched the pill from the foil but didn’t swallow it.

I’d just finished my nightly shower and as usual the mirror had steamed over. My hair hung in wet tendrils on my cheeks. The towel I’d tucked around my chest hit me only at midthigh and wasn’t much in favor of staying on. When Dan poked his head into the bathroom and I turned to face him, it fell down.

“Nice view.” He grinned.

I grabbed it with the hand not clutching the pill. “Ha ha.”

He came in, naked and unconcerned with his nudity. He reached for the towel and yanked it with a grin. We tussled over it. I didn’t fight too hard. I was naked in a minute.

Dan put his hand between my legs as he looked into my eyes. “Hello.”

“You,” I said, “are a perv.”

His brows raised. “Why? Because all I can think about right now is eating that sweet pussy until you scream?”

His dirty talk made me giggle even though it turned me on, too. “I hear you talking, but I don’t see you on your knees.”

He dropped at once, so fast I let out a startled cry. He kissed me, hot breath stealing over my flesh and parting my legs. I took a step back until my rear hit the countertop.

“Is this better?” he murmured against my flesh.

Whatever witty comment I’d planned got lost as his tongue came out to taste me. I put a hand on his head, my fingers threading through his hair. It had grown long, needed a cutting, but it was perfect for grabbing.

He opened my thighs with his hands and found my clit with his lips and tongue. I could see his cock in his fist if I tilted my head just right, but I found it hard to concentrate on anything but the pleasure sweeping through me. I settled for putting my other hand on his shoulder and letting the smooth rise and fall tell me how fast and hard he was stroking.

My head tipped back as I lost myself in the sensation of his hot, wet mouth on my hot, wet cunt. When he added a finger, then two, inside me, I cried out. It sometimes took me too long to come this way, and sometimes I didn’t like it at all, but not tonight. Tonight it was all I could do not to ride his face and hand…well, I’ll admit it. I did.

His soft moans and the steady, slick sound of his cock pumping in his fist encouraged me. He licked me and I rocked my hips to press my clit closer on his tongue.

I was going to come. He was going to come. Best of all, there was absolutely, positively no way I was going to get pregnant this way.

He got there before I did. He let out that certain groan-moan-sigh I knew so well. I smelled him, that familiar scent. My orgasm ripped through me and the world spun. I took a breath, then another, gasping.

When I opened my eyes, Dan was looking up at me with a cat-got-the-cream grin. He got to his feet and kissed me. I put my arms around him, hugging him tight.

“I love you,” he said and kissed my mouth again before turning on the shower. I heard him whistling, jaunty, when he got under the spray, and I envied him the nature that made everything so swiftly eased.

I turned to the mirror again and saw my face, flushed, before the steam once again covered the glass. I’d had my fingers closed tight and the sting in my palm made me open my hand. The pill still lay within, half-dissolved, and I stared at it before I brought my hand to my mouth and licked it clean.

* * *

When my father was alive, my mother had thrown a gala Christmas party every year. We children had been banished upstairs while the grown-ups ate and drank and smoked and played cards. It was a party for adults, never us. I remembered peeking through the banister to watch my mother, dressed as always in a perfectly matching outfit, her hair and makeup immaculate. The perfect hostess. I had grown up thinking that was what a woman should be. What a mother should be.

I wasn’t anything like my mother.

This party, too, was nothing like the parties my mother had organized with such precision. As Dan pulled into my brother’s driveway, a cluster of children in party hats stampeded around the house. My mother let out a distinctive, sniffing sigh. Whatever caustic comment had risen to her lips stayed locked behind them, though. She said nothing as she got out of the car and stood, staring at the house.

My former neighbor Mrs. Pease had given me the heavy crockery bowl on my lap before she moved in with her son, but though she’d tried to teach me her best recipes, Dan had been the one to fill it with his Macaroni Salad a la Dan. He took the bowl so I could get out of the car, too, and he stole a kiss while he was at it.

“Relax,” he murmured in my ear. “It will be fine.”

From the backyard came the noise of chatter and music. I smelled burgers grilling, and my stomach rumbled. My mother clutched a small tray of cookies with both hands. She’d baked them herself, but if I knew my mother it had been out of a sense of social propriety rather than any sort of ooey-gooey, fuzzy feelings. She’d no more have shown up at a party empty-handed than she would have spit on the sidewalk. Yet now she clutched that tray so hard her knuckles turned white.

“Mom?”

She turned to look at me. Her lips had pressed into the thin, grim line I’d seen so often. “Let’s get this over with.”

* * *

I wanted to shake her then, I really did. Dan’s touch on my arm turned me toward him. His smile made me forget I had an evil side.

Dan looked at her. “Let’s go around back, okay?”

She nodded just once and moved forward with a series of jerky steps unlike her usual graceful ones. He shot me a glance over his shoulder as I followed. Dan touched my mother’s shoulder gently.

“Why don’t you let me take the tray?”

I thought she’d say no, but after a second she nodded. “Yes. I think…Ella, would you show me the restroom, please. I think I’d like to freshen up.”

Another look from Dan stayed my retort. “Sure. We’ll go in the front.”

Again, she nodded. Dan took the cookies and headed around the back while I took my mother through the front door and into the kitchen, where I dropped off the bowl of macaroni salad and showed her the powder room.

My brother’s house was newer than mine, and in a suburban neighborhood rather than in the heart of Harrisburg. The previous owner had been a big fan of country decor. The apple-and-rooster border on the walls of the kitchen and attached den didn’t quite match the modern leather and wood furniture Chad and Luke had brought from California. Toys had been tossed into a series of brightly colored plastic bins along the far wall, and those didn’t match, either.

Through the sliding glass doors I could see the deck where my brother’s partner reigned in his chef’s hat and apron over the grill. Dan was shaking Chad’s hand and taking a beer. A few women mingled, but mostly men chased after the hordes of children swarming the jungle gym and trampoline and wreaking havoc on the grass.

“Ella, my God,” my mother said as she came out of the bathroom. She’d refreshed her lipstick and powder and brushed her hair. I even caught the fresh scent of perfume. Any earlier hesitation had vanished beneath the cosmetics she wore as a shield. “Did you know there are…kittens…in that bathroom?”

She said it as though they’d decorated the bathroom with photographs of severed limbs. I’d seen that bathroom. Severed limbs would have been less disturbing. “Yes.”

“Kittens in a washtub!” Clearly, she was appalled.

“It came with the house, Mom.”

“Well,” she said with a familiar sniff, “I know your brother has better taste than that.”

The sliding glass door opened and Chad stepped through, blinking as he came from bright into dim. “Hey.”

Her chin lifted a bit. “Chad.”

Their embrace was so stiff I felt awkward just watching it. The hug he gave me was much more natural. I felt my mother watching us, but when I looked at her I couldn’t tell what she was thinking about the fact her children were more comfortable with each other than either of us was with her. Maybe she wasn’t thinking anything. Maybe I was the one who always thought too much.

The door slid open again, letting in the smell of grilling meat and the cries of children. Luke came in bearing a platter of burgers that he set on the counter. Dan followed on his heels, Leah a squirming bundle in his arms.

“Mrs. Kavanagh.” Luke, who stood over six feet tall and had arms the size of my thighs, made no move to hug her. “Glad you could come.”

The kitchen was suddenly much smaller than it had been five minutes before as we all eyed each other. Dan put Leah down and took a second to straighten her frilly white dress. She wore lacy socks, too, and white patent-leather shoes. Her daddies thought she was their princess and had dressed her as one.

My mother didn’t move. Didn’t look. Her expression remained rigid. Tension strangled us all into silence.

Leah toddled over to my mother and grabbed her around the knees. She tilted her little face up and up. She grinned. “Gammy.”

Nobody gasped, not physically, but I heard the sound of surprise echo through the kitchen just the same.

My mother looked down at the small girl clutching her legs and wrinkling her skirt.

“Gammy,” Leah said again. “Up, Gammy.”

She lifted her arms as if it were the most natural thing in the world to ask for and receive. And my mother, who hadn’t even yet told her friends about the child her son had adopted, bent and lifted her up as though she had no other choice. She had held all of us that way, I thought. My brothers and I. When we were small.

“She knows me?” my mother said.

“We’ve shown her your picture,” Chad said as though he were challenging her. “She’s very bright.”

For another instant we all hung there. Luke and Dan might have imagined they knew what they were waiting for, but they would never know my mother the way Chad and I did. I don’t know what my brother waited for, but I waited for her to ruin this.

“Well,” my mother said to Leah. “Aren’t you just the smartest girl? Aren’t you, just?”

If relief washed over me in a wave it must have been a veritable tsunami for my brother. After that, there were guests to feed, children to chase. Chad and Luke knew how to throw a party, and if it didn’t have the glitter of those long-ago Christmas galas, there was one major improvement in that I’d been invited to attend.

Later, Dan found me sitting in a lawn chair on a patch of grass as yet undiscovered by children. I had a plate overloaded with food but I’d already eaten myself full. He took it from me and sat in the empty chair next to mine to dig in.

“Great party, huh?” He waved his fork toward the house.

“Yes.” I watched him eat with the fondness women have for men whose manners on a stranger would have earned scorn. “You have schmutz all over your mouth.”

He leaned forward as though he meant to kiss me and laughed, withdrawing, when I wrinkled my nose. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Better?”

“Yes.” I looked toward the deck, where my mother sat with Leah sleeping on her lap.

Dan watched me looking. “Nice, huh?”

“Unexpected.”

He put the plate on the grass and leaned back in his chair with a contented sigh, hands laced over his belly. “You don’t give her enough credit.”

I raised a brow at him. We’d had this discussion before. He was lucky that he couldn’t really imagine what it was like not to have a doting, affectionate mother. His own would have been a parody of sit-com moms if she hadn’t been so utterly sincere in her motherhood.

“Babies change people, Elle.”

“Uh-huh.” I swirled some ice in my plastic cup.

I watched my mother stare into the face of the sleeping child. Had she ever looked at me that way? Yes, I thought. Long ago, she had. No matter what had come between us, and it had been a lot of very awful things, she had looked at me like that. My mother had loved me.

“You ready to get out of here?” Dan stood and gathered up the garbage.

I was. As much as I loved my brother, the cacophony of the party had given me a headache. I hugged and kissed him and Luke goodbye. We said nothing about my mother with our voices, but our eyes said enough.

When I went to kiss my niece goodbye, she barely stirred.

“She’s worn out.” My mother stroked the soft black curls. “Too much party for a little girl.”

“We’re leaving, Mom.”

She looked up at me. Her face was softer than I’d ever seen it. “Your brother will drive me home. You go on ahead.”

“You’re sure?”

* * *

She looked again at Leah, whose small pink lips had pursed in sleep. “I can’t wake this baby, can I?”

It would have been too weird to hug or kiss her goodbye, so I didn’t. I left her holding the grandchild she’d been so sure she couldn’t love. In the car, I let out a laugh.

“Strange, strange, strange,” I said.

“You knew she’d be okay, Elle.” Dan had more faith in me than I had in myself, but that was only one of the many reasons I loved him.

At home, I groaned when he came up behind me to slip his arms around my waist as I stood in front of the full-length mirror in our bedroom. “I’m going to explode.”

He rubbed the taut curve of my too-full belly. “I can help you work it off.”

“Oh, sure. Just roll me onto the bed like that girl from the Willy Wonka movie.”

“Veruca Salt?”

I laughed. “No. The one who ate the pill that turned her into a blueberry.”

Dan turned me sideways to look at us both in the mirror. “You’re not blue.”

“But I am round. God, why did I eat so much?”

“You were making sure you had enough sustenance to get you through the night?” He waggled his brows.

I rolled my eyes. “Riiiiight.”

His hands, though, were working their usual magic. He moved them up and down my sides, over my hips. Over my belly, which most definitely could benefit from a few hundred sit-ups. Between my legs.

“I like you curvier.” Dan’s fingers played along my inner thigh and a little higher.

“You haven’t ever known me as anything but curvy!” The light, tantalizing touch forced my voice into a seductive breathiness. “You have no basis of comparison.”

“You’ve been thinner.” Dan’s other hand ran up my side to cup my breast. “When I met you. Just before we got married. Last year when you were deciding whether or not to quit your job.”

My feminine sensibility demanded I be affronted, even though I knew he was right. “Gee, thanks for reminding me.”

Dan pulled me closer, so our naked bodies touched. He looked deep into my eyes. “I like you better with a few extra pounds on you. It’s not bullshit.”

I was only slightly mollified. “Why on earth do you like me better when I’m fatter?”

“Curvier,” he corrected. He dipped his head to kiss the swell of my breasts, then to suckle each nipple.

My breath quickened. His hand moved between my legs, finding my heat and slickness. He suckled a little harder, and my pulse skipped in all my secret places.

Dan kissed his way up to my shoulder, then my neck, then at last to my mouth. His cock got hard between us. Even with a few extra pounds on my belly I had no trouble feeling that. When he pulled me toward the bed, I didn’t protest.

We lay on soft, smooth sheets that warmed quickly beneath us. He kissed me endlessly while his hand moved between my legs. He dipped a finger inside me and drew it up to slide along my clitoris. He knew just how to touch me, over and over, until I went boneless under him.

“Get on your hands and knees,” he told me. He had a knack for knowing just what I wanted without me ever having to say it.

I did, and clutched the pillow as he moved behind me. Dan stroked his cock along the edge of my cunt, wetting himself before he pushed inside me. He did it slowly, half an inch at a time, until I pushed back to force him inside me all the way.

We both moaned. His hands gripped my hips. I imagined how I must look in front of him, how the line and knobs of my spine would stand out as my back curved. I buried my face in the pillow and lifted my ass in the air, changing the angle so he could go deeper.

Dan went deeper. There were times when I felt he’d never fill me entirely, times when I counted my empty spaces and knew they’d always stay that way. There were times when this mattered to me, very much, and times I secretly despaired…but there were more times like this, when those small and secret empty places became insignificant.

He stroked deep inside me, and I opened my body to take him all the way. His thrusts got faster. He leaned forward, the heat of him all along my back, and reached around to press his hand to my clit.

I was close enough that he didn’t need to do much stroking. The force of each thrust moved my body against his hand. Pleasure built bit by bit as he fucked into me. It lasted forever.

Sometimes I came fast and hard, but now I rode on waves of slow, steady climax. My orgasm built, receded and built again. My body tightened as we moved together, as Dan thrust faster. Heat flooded me and I bit down on the pillow to hold back my cries.

Our bodies slapped. I was so wet I felt slick heat sliding down my thighs. I breathed in the soft scent of fabric softener and the linen spray I used on the pillows; when I turned my head the heavy, familiar musk aroma of our fucking surrounded and overwhelmed me. I gulped in air saturated with our lovemaking. I wanted to drink it, eat it. I wanted to survive solely on the touch and taste and smell of the man behind me, and the pleasure sending me whirling into mindlessness.

“Count them.” Dan’s voice, thick with desire, trailed off into a groan. “Count them for me.”

My longtime habit of counting in my head had diminished over the months we’d been married, but when he told me to now, I didn’t hesitate. “One,” I gasped as my first orgasm burst over me. “Two,” I groaned a minute later as the second burst inside me.

And later, not much later, “Three!”

Three was the most I could manage. I shuddered with the last climax. My fingers dug furrows in the sheets. Dan thrust once more inside me and came with a shout that made me smile.

He paused for a minute before moving in and out of me a couple more times, then withdrew and collapsed beside me on the bed. A gush of hot fluid surged down my thighs, and I let out a cry as I clamped my legs together.

He laughed. “Sorry.”

He wasn’t, but I didn’t care. “Feh. Hazards of the sport.”

I rolled onto my back, making sure to position myself on his side of the bed with a grin he didn’t notice at first. When he did, he rolled onto his side to put his hand on my belly. He nuzzled into my shoulder.

“You’re going to make me sleep on the wet spot?”

“Absolutely,” I said with a sigh of utter satisfaction. Already my eyes were trying to flutter closed, and I stifled a yawn with the back of my hand.

Dan snorted softly. “Nice.”

His hand made hypnotic circles on my stomach. I would have to get up in a minute to use the bathroom, to brush my teeth. Take a shower. But for now it was too nice, lying here with him, for me to move.

I put my hand over his to stop it from moving. I thought about Marcy, the swell of her giant belly in front of her like something belonging to another person. It was another person. She’d complained vociferously about getting fat, but I’d never really believed she meant it. She’d always said it with a hint of smug satisfaction, her hands on the mound of her stomach, holding it as though it were a prize.

“Do you really like me curvier?”

I’d been ready to fall into sleep, but Dan was almost there. “Mmm,” he muttered.

“Why?” I whispered as I threaded my hands through his hair. I didn’t really expect or need an answer. No matter what Dan said, I was going to love and hate my body in equal turns.

* * *

“It means you’re happier,” he mumbled against my skin, and fell silent.

It wasn’t what I’d expected him to say, but I knew he was right. I waited until he started snoring before I slipped from under his grasp and went to the bathroom to run the shower. I washed away the evidence of our lovemaking, but slowly, letting the hot shower soothe aching muscles and relax me even more.

I did some of my best thinking in the shower, and the day had given me much to think about. What Dan had said was true. I had been thinner before, with hollowed cheeks and hip bones jutting from my skin, mountains on either side of the valley of my belly. I’d been able to count my ribs and see the delicate bones of my wrists. Now my flesh curved smoothly, without wrinkles, over all of me, and though I was nowhere near overweight, there was also no way to deny the difference. And I was happier-that was also true.

I was happy with Dan, our marriage, our life. Our house. My job, which had been precariously balanced a few months ago, had worked out in favor. With my brother back in the area and my relationship with my mother on steadier ground, I had a glimmer of a family life, not to mention that Dan’s mom and dad had embraced me as the daughter they’d never had. I had friends, health, success.

And I cried, thinking of all of it, and how easy it would be to lose it all, and of how terrified I was of that happening.

Tears disturb and confuse men, but women know the relief they can bring. I didn’t cry because I couldn’t deal with my life, but because I could. The hot water hid the sound of my sobs and washed the tears from my cheeks before I could even taste them. I cried for a solid ten or fifteen minutes, and when I was done, I turned the water to icy-cold needles that stabbed me but refreshed me at the same time.

Stepping out onto the bath mat, I didn’t criticize my flesh, or obsess over the jiggle of my thighs. I scrubbed my face and combed the tangles from my hair and I slathered cream on every inch of bare skin I could reach, but I didn’t worry if there was more bare skin to cover than had been available a few months ago.

I turned sideways to look at my stomach in the mirror. It curved, but nowhere nearly as much as it would if I were pregnant. I put my hands on it, imagining the bulge. Thinking of how my breasts would weigh so heavily. What on earth would that feel like?

Dan hadn’t been bugging me about the baby decision, but he hadn’t forgotten it, either. I’d seen him with Leah. I knew he wanted our child-children! I knew he believed we would be good parents. That we would love a baby.

He knew he could do it. He believed I could. I was the one uncertain of that.

My mother hadn’t been sure she could love the offspring of a stranger, even though Leah had become her son’s daughter as fully as if he’d created her. I wasn’t so foolish as to think one afternoon could change everything overnight, but I also couldn’t forget the look on my mother’s face as she looked down at my niece.

My mother had loved her children. If I wanted to be entirely charitable, I could postulate that she still did, no matter how difficult it was to see that love. And if my mother had been able to do it, if she could do it now with my brother’s child, well…maybe I could do it, too.

* * *

It wasn’t until the next night that I realized I’d forgotten to take my pill the night before. I stared at the small foil package and the extra pill with some befuddlement. I couldn’t recall ever forgetting a pill before, not in all the years I’d taken them.

I knew the importance of taking them both, doubling up to prevent them from failing, but when my fingers made to punch out both pills, they hesitated. What if I didn’t take the one I’d missed, but just kept on with the week as though I’d taken it?

I could have calculated the risk easily enough, if I’d had the statistics in front of me. I was very good with numbers. All I did instead was to pop the regular pill in my mouth and toss the other down the drain.

“Everything okay?” Dan looked at me from over the edge of his book. He’d started another garishly covered paperback, but he put it aside with his finger marking his place when I crossed to sit on his side of the bed.

“Yes.” I took the book from him and settled it on his nightstand.

“Ah.” Dan took off his glasses and put his hands behind his head. “You’ve come to ravish me.”

“I have.” We smiled. I ran a finger down his chest to where the sheets covered him. When I pulled them aside, I shook my head in mock scolding. “This doesn’t help.”

He looked at the soft cotton pajama bottoms. “Take them off.”

I stood. “You take them off.”

He grinned and hooked his thumbs in the sides, but I held up my hand. “No. Not like that.”

I took a seat in the rocking chair and gestured at him to stand up. “I want to watch you.”

The pajamas were already tenting when he got out of bed. “Do you want me to put on some music?”

“No.” I kept my face stern even though I wanted to giggle. I didn’t want to laugh; it would ruin the mood.

Dan stood in front of me, thumbs hooked in his waistband. “You want me to just strip ‚Aoem off, or what?”

“Surprise me.” I parted my legs so the hem of my short nightgown rode up. I was naked beneath.

I loved the way his eyes gleamed and the way his tongue snuck out to swipe across his lips. Dan didn’t have to worry about extra curves. He had been blessed with good genes. Now he eyed me, one hip cocked.

I inched my hem higher and ran a hand over the soft patch of hair between my legs. I wasn’t stroking myself. Not yet. But there was definitely the promise I might start.

He had such a playful side. It was sexy. Now, watching me, Dan ran his hands over his chest. Up and down, then over his belly. He traced the lines of muscle in his abs and the indentations of his ribs. He licked the fingertips on both hands and circled his nipples. It should have been silly, but my throat tightened.

He didn’t do a bump and grind. It was more like a slow, easy exploration of his body. He kept his gaze locked on mine the whole time, too. My hand slid again, and this time found my clit. I moved my finger in small circles as I watched him touch himself the way I wanted to be touching him.

He turned around to slide the waist of his pajamas down just far enough for me to see the small patch of hair at the base of his spine. I loved to lick that spot. He loved me to lick it. He eased the elastic a little lower, then lower again, to reveal the crack of his ass. He tossed me a look over his shoulder and turned, pulling the waistband up again.

“Tease,” I murmured.

He laughed softly and pushed the cloth down in front until the first fluff of his pubic hair showed. He’d offered once to shave down there, but I’d protested. Now he just kept himself trimmed. I held my breath as he pushed the pants lower, lower…

“You are a tease!” I told him when he let go and the elastic snapped back up around his hips.

“You told me to surprise you.” He hooked his thumbs into the fabric but didn’t pull it off.

I couldn’t deny it. Instead, I parted my legs wider and gave him a full glimpse of my body. I slipped my fingers down low enough to find slippery fluid. He licked his mouth again.

“I love to watch you touch yourself,” he said.

“Let me see you do the same,” I breathed.

Dan put a hand over the bulge in his pants. He stroked himself a few times through the cloth. Then he reached inside and stroked again. His face tightened and he bit his lower lip a little.

“No fair!” I said.

Dan’s laugh came out a little strangled. “Fine.”

He pushed his pajamas down, finally, and stepped out of them. He gripped his erection as he kicked away the bottoms. When he stroked down, slowly, I couldn’t decide where to look: at his face, taut with desire, or at his cock, so deliciously hard.

My body responded. My breath came faster, my pulse sped up, my clit grew harder beneath my fingertips. The curved wood beneath my bare ass had warmed to my skin, smooth, and I slid on it as I set the chair to rocking.

We’d fucked on this chair, more than once, and I thought of that now. Of how Dan’s prick felt inside me as we rocked, of how good it felt when my clitoris rubbed his stomach. How easy it was to thrust and move with the chair helping us.

* * *

Dan’s hand moved up and down on his erection. I did love watching him. There was something singular in him jerking himself and in watching how he moved his hand to bring himself the most pleasure. He added a twist to his wrist as he stroked the head of his cock. I caught a glimpse of pre-come glistening as he stroked. He stood with his feet spread apart to anchor himself, and it was easy to imagine myself on my knees in front of him.

I knew how he’d taste and the sound he’d make when I closed my lips over his penis. I didn’t, though. I watched him stroke himself, instead, as I brought myself closer and closer to climax.

We could have finished that way, watching each other. But when my cunt gave its first spasm, hovering on the edge of coming, I pulled my hand away. I wanted to squirm on the chair. I wanted to push my cunt against the air, or squeeze my thighs together, keeping myself from tipping into orgasm, but only barely.

“Dan,” I said.

That was all it took. He crossed to me in two strides. I almost came when he pulled me to my feet. The world tipped a little as pleasure swooped over me, but I breathed deep and managed to hold it off. Dan took my place on the chair and pulled me onto his lap. I slid onto his prick, my clit against his belly, our mouths locked. I cried out, the sound lost against his lips. He fucked upward as his hands cupped my ass.

I was already coming. My body jerked. My fingers dug into his shoulders. He thrust harder as the chair rocked. The floor squeaked. He said my name. My orgasm became all-encompassing, immense, enormous. The world. The universe. Pleasure overtook me.

Dan yelled when he came. His final thrust lifted me up, and when we settled the chair kept rocking, though we’d stopped. He put his arms around me, tight. I felt him throb inside me as my cunt fluttered in climax. I couldn’t always feel it, and tonight it seemed especially appropriate that I could.

I thought of him spurting inside me. Dan’s body had made sperm, small, wriggling and invisible, that even now were swimming mightily up the convulsing corridor of my vagina to seek the cavern of my womb. Would it welcome them? Had my body created an egg, waiting, even now, to be conquered? It wasn’t likely, but neither was it impossible. Many women who’d counted themselves “safe” had ended up getting pregnant.

Dan had buried his face against my chest with a happy sigh. His hair tickled my nose. Our bodies glued together, sticky from sweat, as the chair rocked to a stop. I didn’t move, too content to bother.

We didn’t have secrets anymore, and I was glad for that. Even so, I didn’t tell him I’d forgotten and then deliberately not taken my pill. I wasn’t sure there’d be a point in telling him we may or may not have made a baby.

“I love you.” Dan kissed my collarbone.

“I love you too.” So easy to say it, now.

Easier to mean it, too.

* * *

“Fuck me with a barbed-wire dildo!” Marcy’s voice echoed through the tiled hall, and nobody blinked an eye. “Where the fuck is Wayne?”

“I’ve left a message with his secretary, on his voice mail and on his cell,” I told her. “He’ll be here.”

Marcy let out a low, guttural groan. Sweat had plastered her hair to her forehead. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and the corners of her mouth had cracked a little. She gripped my arm with fingers like talons, but I didn’t dare show a wince. I wasn’t the one getting ready to push a bowling ball out of my body.

We’d been walking for an hour as she labored. Marcy had called me when her efforts to get in touch with her husband had failed. She’d driven herself to Harrisburg Hospital and I’d met her there, not because I had any burning desire to watch my friend give birth, but because she’d had nobody else.

Funny how Marcy hadn’t considered me her last resort, though. She’d hugged me fiercely when I got there and chattered on and on in a bright, happy voice as we got her settled in. It took me twenty minutes of listening to her babble for me to realize Marcy was terrified.

Her water hadn’t broken yet, so she’d been encouraged to walk up and down the halls to help with her labor. The first half an hour had been fine. She’d been upbeat, if still a little manic, but as time wore on and the contractions got harder and Wayne was nowhere to be found, Marcy had ceased with the little Susie Sunshine act.

“God damn him,” she said. “I fucking told him to keep his motherfucking phone charged…. Fuck!” She clutched her belly and stopped, hunching. She breathed in a series of rapid, whistling breaths while I stood by, helpless to do anything but watch.

“He’ll be here,” I repeated. Please God, I prayed. Let him get here. Soon.

When the contraction stopped, the tears started. Marcy turned to me with a desperate look. “Thank you for being with me, Elle. Thank you.”

Guilt stabbed me. “Of course I’d be here for you, Marcy. You know that.”

She gripped my hand as another contraction rolled over her. Her lips thinned to pale lines in her face. “Fucking hell!”

Marcy wasn’t the only woman in labor. I could hear the burble of television sets in some of the labor and delivery rooms, and an occasional grunt or cry. There were women giving birth all over the place here. The air was thick with the odor of blood and fear and joy; my stomach kept trying to turn and I wouldn’t let it.

“I’m so glad you’re here.” Marcy gripped the wooden handrail along the wall. “You’re always so together, Elle. You’re always so calm.”

I was anything but calm, but hell, Marcy was expecting me to be something for her and I could give her that, at least. “It’s all going to be okay.”

She nodded and then looked up at me, her face a mask of surprise. I didn’t know why until a second later when the rapid patter of liquid hitting the tile floor caught my attention. We both looked down, though I doubted Marcy could see past her belly.

“My water just broke!”

“It’s okay.” I gripped her hand. “Let’s get you into your room.”

It all happened very fast after that. Nurses and midwives showed up to do their jobs. Wayne, tie askew and hair windblown, arrived with a story about traffic and dead cell batteries. Marcy forgave him at once. The looks on their faces when he held her hand and kissed it was like something from a movie.

Wayne’s eyes rolling up in the back of his head and him hitting the tile floor with the sound of a pumpkin breaking open was somewhat less glamorous.

I’d been edging my way out of the room at that point, preferring to leave them to their privacy, but when Wayne hit the ground Marcy shrieked my name, and I found myself at her side in a second.

“He’s okay,” I told her. Two orderlies got him to his feet and into a chair, where he promptly put his head between his knees.

“Get ready to push,” the midwife said. “Elle, can you hold her leg for her?”

Did I have a choice? I positioned myself at the foot of the table with Marcy’s knee lodged firmly in the stirrup of my hands as I kept it pulled back to help her push. She screamed. Wayne looked up, face pale but determined, and got to his feet. They slapped a gown and gloves on him as fast as a pit crew changing the tires on a race car. The midwife cooed soothing phrases I didn’t hear.

And Marcy’s baby was born.

I saw the head, crowning, the sleek dark hair wet and the skull pulsing. She pushed again, in silence this time. The baby slid forth in a gush of blood and liquid, the smell of it ripe and indescribable. Wayne held out his hands and his son slid into the welcoming cradle of his arms. He was crying. So was the baby, and Marcy.

So was I.

Ten minutes later she held him, dried and buffed and wrapped in a blanket, to her breast. She didn’t care who saw her nakedness, or that strangers were wiping her body clean, or that she needed three stitches to repair a tear.

“Look, oh, look,” she said in a voice full of wonder. “How beautiful he is.”

And he was.

* * *

My phone buzzed in my pocket as I washed my hands at the sink of the main restroom on the labor-and-delivery floor. I’d left Marcy and Wayne to share their son without witness. They hadn’t even noticed me leaving.

“Elle?” Dan’s voice sounded strained. “Where are you?”

“I’m at Harrisburg Hospital.” Elation made my voice shake. “Marcy just had her baby. Where are you?”

He was silent so long I thought we’d lost the connection. When he spoke again, he didn’t sound like my Dan, the man who always made everything all right for me.

“I’m at the hospital, too,” he said. “My dad just had a stroke.”

* * *

Dotty Stewart wrung her handkerchief in her hands over and over until the fabric twisted. Then she’d let it unwind, only to twist it again. She didn’t hold herself the way my mother would have. Dotty didn’t care how she looked to anyone else just then.

“Have you called your brother?” she asked. “Did you call Sam?”

“I tried. I left a message.” Dan’s voice was still strained, but he’d pulled himself together for his mom.

“Oh, I wish Sam were here,” his mother said before she went to sit again by her husband’s side.

I don’t think she meant it to be hurtful. If Dotty had favorites I’d never seen evidence of it. Then again, I’d only met his brother very briefly at our wedding. Dan and his brother got along fine with distance between them. Though they’d never said it, I got the impression Sam’s moving to New York hadn’t exactly made him the favorite son.

Dan paced in the waiting room and drank cup after cup of black coffee. His mother kept up her vigil by Morty’s side. I would have held Dan’s hand, if he’d wanted, but instead I sat and watched him traverse the linoleum floor. I’d have gone in his father’s room with him, too, when they came to get him, but he shook his head a little.

“You don’t have to come.”

“If you need me, Dan, I’ll be there.” He’d been there for me when my father had died. I’d needed him to be. I reached for him and pulled him close for a kiss, both of us ignoring the nurse sent to fetch him.

“It might be uncomfortable for you.” He spoke in a low voice against the side of my neck. His arms tightened.

I thought what he meant was that it might be uncomfortable for him to have me there. To see him upset, maybe even crying. I held him a little closer.

“If you need me, I’m here.”

He nodded and gripped my hands. He looked into my eyes. “I know you are.”

I’d never had to be strong for him before. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be. Together we went to listen to what the doctors had to say.

It wasn’t entirely good, but it wasn’t all bad. His dad had suffered a stroke, but a mild one. He was expected to regain consciousness within a few hours, and they didn’t think there’d been much damage to his brain. It meant another few hours of waiting, though, in which we visited the cafeteria and Dan tried calling his brother again. We waited another hour in the small hospital room before Morty opened his eyes. Dotty had stepped out to use the bathroom. Dan had heard from his brother and was even now out in the corridor talking to him.

“Heya,” Morty said and licked his lips. He gestured at me to come closer. “Heya, girlie.”

“Hi, Morty.” I took his hand. The skin felt like onionskin. “How are you feeling?”

“Not so good, not so good.” He coughed a little, but the monitors didn’t beep erratically and I didn’t think I needed to holler for a nurse. “How’re you?”

I hadn’t known Morty that long, really. A couple years. But he’d been more of a father to me than my own had been for a long time. My throat closed as I squeezed his hand ever so gently. I didn’t want to lose him, and yet my grief would be so much less than Dan’s.

“I’m okay, Morty. I should go get Dotty.”

He shook his head a bit. I’d always seen a lot of Morty in Dan, but now I saw a bit of Dan in Morty. “Not yet. Sit here with me for a minute.”

I did, without letting go of his hand. We didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Morty looked as though he wanted to say something important, and my heart beat faster as I anticipated some sort of last words. It wasn’t my place to hear them, if this were his final speech.

“You’re good for my boy.”

“He’s good for me.”

Morty smiled. His fingers twitched in mine, not quite a squeeze but a valiant effort. “Me and Dot, we always wanted a girl. She couldn’t have another, you know. After Sam. We tried, but she lost ‚Aoem. Finally, the doctor just said, no more. You’ll kill yourself. So that was that.”

I hadn’t known. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Morty shook his head a little again. His grin was a ghost of its normal brightness, but still there. I could so easily see how Dan would look in another thirty years. “We got our daughter, didn’t we?”

I smiled. “Thanks.”

“Our Sam, now, he might not ever settle down. But Danny, he’s a smart one.” Morty shifted in the bed and looked a little pained. Alarmed, I made to move, but he shook his head again. “Now, it’s not my way to push.”

Not compared to my mother, that was for sure.

“But it surely would make me happy…me and Dotty both, you know…”

“If we had a baby?” I said quietly, leaning forward though there was nobody to overhear us.

“Yes.” Morty’s eyes gleamed.

I leaned even closer, conspiring. “I think we’re working on it.”

He laughed, and the laugh trailed away into a weak cough. “Good. Does Danny know that?”

“He was there,” I said, which wasn’t quite the right answer but made him laugh again. I’d never have said such a ribald thing to my mother, but Dan’s dad was different.

“Good,” he said again and closed his eyes for so long I was afraid he wouldn’t open them. Then, “Good.”

* * *

“C’mon. You’ve had a very long day.” I bent over the bath and turned on the faucets. We had a nice, big bathtub put in by the previous owners. They’d obviously been obsessed with the bathroom, since it was the only room in the house to have been completely renovated. I added some lavender-scented oil. “You need this.”

“I need to get to bed….” But he was only protesting for show as I unbuckled his belt and helped him out of his clothes.

I put him into the bath and scrubbed him with some body wash and a loofah. Water splashed over the edges of the tub and wet my clothes, but I kept at it, washing and kneading him until he closed his eyes and gave himself up to my ministrations. When I was done, I helped him out, dried him off and took him to bed.

I slid in, naked, beside him. He was warm from the hot water and my skin was a little cool, but he didn’t object when I put my arm over his chest and my leg over his thighs. I kissed his shoulder.

Sometimes we said more with silence than with all our words.

When I kissed my way down his arm and across to his belly, he sighed. When I kissed lower, Dan’s belly vibrated under my lips. My hand found his cock and I stroked him erect in a minute. He put his hand on top of my head, though, when I went to move lower.

“Elle.”

I looked up at him. “Shh. I love you. Let me do this.”

He smiled a little. “I need this, too?”

I nodded. “You want me to do this.”

He’d said those same words to me, in the past, and he’d been right. The way I was right now. Sex has many uses I would never pretend to know or want to know, but I did know the comfort losing oneself in pleasure could bring.

I made love to him with my hands and tongue for a while until he shivered. Then I climbed on top of him. He groaned as he slid inside me; that simple sound sent a pulse of arousal through me. I always got turned on at the sounds he made.

I’d meant to do this for him, not for me, but he slid a hand between us and I wasn’t going to complain. We moved together, slow at first then faster. I thought he might come right away, and that would have been fine, but Dan looked at me, watching my face as he used his thumb to provide steady pressure on my clit. When I gasped, he smiled.

“I want to watch you come,” he whispered. “Let me see it.”

I did a minute after that.

He thrust inside me a few more times before his face tightened and he gasped out my name. Then he gathered me to him and held me tight. He kissed me.

“I love you,” he said. “God, I love you so much.”

“I love you too,” I whispered, holding him as hard as I could. I didn’t want to let go, not when he needed me to hold on.

I thought he might cry, but he didn’t. His breathing slowed. Our bodies cooled. I pulled the blankets over us and snuggled into his side. I didn’t sleep, but I listened to him sleeping.

I knew I should get up, take a shower. Brush my teeth.

Take my pill.

Instead I lay there listening to the sound of my husband breathing, and I held on to him with all I had inside me. I’d worried I didn’t have enough for him, but time had shown me I was wrong.

I didn’t get out of bed.

It wasn’t my conversation with Morty that had changed my mind about having a child, or watching my mother with my niece, or my niece herself. It wasn’t watching the miracle of Marcy’s son being born, either.

All of those were reasons. Good reasons. But it was the man beside me who’d proven to me that love was worth everything. That my life, my heart, had room in it for more love than I ever thought possible.

There were dozens of reasons to agree to have a child, but as far as I was concerned, just then, with his breath on my face and the warmth of his skin on mine, there was only one that mattered. Love.

That was reason enough.

* * * * *

Gilt and Midnight

Yesterday and long ago, in a kingdom far from here but right next door, there lived a handsome young man and his equally beautiful young wife. She had hair the color of sunshine, eyes like a summer sky and skin like rich cream. Her name was Ilina, and the young man loved her more than anything else in the world.

Ilina, for her part, loved her handsome young husband. Pitor was strong, with muscled arms and legs that had no trouble chopping wood or building fences. His hair, the color of the forest’s deepest shadows, hung to his shoulders in ripples like silk, and his eyes shone like the night sky littered with stars.

If Ilina had one small wish, it was that Pitor could be as satisfied with their humble cottage and plot of land as she was, but though her husband worked long and hard, he hated the labor that brought them their food and the roof above their heads. No matter how Ilina tried to soften the small rooms with her handwoven tapestries or delicately embroidered pillows, night after night Pitor looked around their home with dissatisfaction on his face.

“I love you,” she told him. “No matter if we eat on gold and silver or on wooden trenchers, Pitor, I love you.”

But Pitor would not be satisfied, no matter what Ilina did. And each day when he came home from chopping wood in the forest, he grew angrier and more sullen. Nothing Ilina did could move him to smile.

A time of drought and misfortune came upon the land. Pitor had to travel farther and farther into the woods to find trees he could chop for profit, until at last one day he’d traveled so far he couldn’t make it home before dark. Though he ached to return to his beloved Ilina and knew she would worry for his safety, he knew how foolish traveling in the dark would be. He made himself a small camp and prepared to spend the night. He dared not even burn one small portion of the wood he’d gathered, for not only would it be taking food from Ilina’s mouth to use the wood he intended to sell, but the risk of deadly fire in the dry forest was too great. Instead, he pulled his cloak around himself and hunkered down, unable even to sleep lest a beast attack him in the night.

Nevertheless, weariness overtook him, and Pitor’s eyes closed. He dreamed of his love, of her touch and of her kiss, and woke with his cock straining the front of his trousers.

“Ah, sweet,” said a voice from the shadows. “What a prize you hold between your legs. How I long for a man to fill me up with what you’ve got.”

Convinced he was dreaming, Pitor sat up with a shake of his head. Laughter curled like smoke from the darkness. A woman stepped from behind a tree. The sight of her sent fear and desire coursing through him in equal amounts, and Pitor sprang to his feet, his hatchet ready to defend against her.

“You know me?” The woman’s dark hair swirled around her face.

Pitor’s breath heaved. The closer she stepped the more aroused he became, until all he could think of was satisfying the carnal urges flooding him.

The woman was upon him, astride him, before he knew how to object.

“Who are you?” he cried, stricken, for he’d never been unfaithful to his wife before.

“You don’t need to know.”

He turned and was on her before she could escape, the blade of his ax to her throat, but she only laughed. To his shame, his cock twitched and rose at the sound of it. She reached between them to grab and stroke him fully erect.

“You should be better satisfied with what you have, woodsman, else you lose it all. Let me show you what you could have.”

Pitor jerked away from her and lowered the ax. “I love my wife.”

The woman stood, her eyes flashing in a face still covered with shadows. “Come with me and be my love, and we will walk the forest as monarchs.”

He shook his head. “No!”

She tilted her head. “No? Then fuck me once with that sweet prick, and I’ll reward you for your efforts.”

Pitor’s hand trembled. “No reward you could offer me would be enough for me to betray my wife.”

“Not even the life of your child?”

Pitor gasped aloud. “I have no children!”

Ilina had lost several pregnancies at great harm to her health. He knew she still longed for a babe, but he hoped for her sake she wouldn’t catch again. The woman in front of him clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

“Fuck me, and your child will never know hunger, nor poverty. How is that for a reward, and for so simple a task? One your body craves already?”

“You can promise me that?”

“That and more,” promised the woman, and Pitor was lost.

As he sank into her warm, slick flesh, Pitor groaned, “Ilina!”

“Ah, yes,” said the woman atop him, the woman who smelled and felt so familiar now.

Pitor groaned again as ecstasy swept him. “Ilina!”

The woman slowed her movements, rocking against him. She bent to whisper in his ear. “I am your Ilina, if you so desire.”

Pitor’s hands gripped her hips as he thrust inside her, over and over, until his seed boiled out of him and he fell back, spent. The woman laughed and withdrew, leaving him cold in the night air. Pitor blinked, stunned at how she’d once again become a stranger.

“Don’t travel so far from home, next time,” she advised, and was gone, leaving Pitor to return to his wife.

* * *

She had meant to keep it secret from him until she knew for sure the babe grew inside her without difficulty, but Ilina didn’t regret telling Pitor about the child their love had planted, because the moment she did, the gloom and anger Pitor had allowed to overtake him vanished.

For months, Pitor returned each night to his Ilina with a smile as bright as diamonds. He made sure to bring her the finest fruits they could afford, even forsaking his own hunger to provide his wife with the best delicacies to tempt her failing appetite. Still, as Ilina’s belly swelled, the rest of her withered. She kept a smile on her face, though, while the babe inside her wriggled and squirmed.

The midwife was not pleased with the way the babe had stolen so much of Ilina’s strength. “It’s not right,” she told Pitor when Ilina had fallen into an exhausted, feverish sleep. “The labor has begun, but it’s not progressing. They’re killing her.”

“They?” Pitor, white-faced and sick, clutched his hands together and tore his gaze from his wife long enough to look at the midwife.

“Your wife is carrying twins.” The midwife said no more when Ilina woke and began to scream.

Ilina’s daughter was born in blood and sweat and screams, and the midwife placed her into Pitor’s arms at once while she sought to stanch the flow of crimson from between Ilina’s legs. Pitor held the squirming, naked infant and watched his wife die in front of him, and then he handed the child to the midwife and left the cottage.

She found him in the garden, the place where his beloved Ilina had spent so many hours tending to her flowers. The midwife had cleaned and wrapped the child, who lay quiet in her arms, but when she offered the babe to her father, Pitor turned his face.

“Take them away.”

The midwife, a good-hearted woman who had seen many births and deaths but none so surprising as this one, offered the child again. “There is only one. I was wrong.”

She had never been wrong before and was uncertain if she was truly wrong now. One child had been born, yes, but the girl was unlike other babies. The midwife pulled the blankets away from the child’s face to show Pitor, who would not look.

“See,” the midwife said. “Her eyes? Her hair?”

Pitor shook his head. “My wife is dead. Take that creature away.”

The midwife looked into the face of the sleeping infant. The hair was silver gilt on one half of her head and black as grief on the other. The child’s eyes were the same; one pale blue and the other a deep, midnight black. Two faces…yet one.

“What do you want me to do with it?” asked the midwife quietly.

“I don’t care,” said Pitor. “You can kill it, for all I care. Now go away, and let me bury my wife.”

So the midwife crept away into the night, the bundle in her arms, and left the man to take care of the woman he’d loved so well.

* * *

The midwife, who had already raised more than her share of babies, did not want to raise another. Not even one that cooed so prettily or waved its dainty hands in the air. One that didn’t cry like other babies, but wept only from its dark eye and never from the pale.

The midwife’s husband, who was as good a man as the midwife was a woman, did not want to raise any more children either. “I’m too old to start over,” he complained. “We’ve done even with dandling our grandchildren on our knees and wait now only for them to bring us their children to love. Why do we need to adopt some ragamuffin child?”

The midwife did not disagree. “I’ll take her to the noblewoman on the hill. She has long yearned for a child of her own and has had none. Maybe she will adopt this one.”

So thus it was the unnamed babe with the mismatched eyes went to live in the large stone house on the hill.

* * *

The noblewoman, who was not nearly as beautiful as Ilina but whose husband loved her just as dearly, called her new daughter Miracula because of the miraculous way in which she’d been brought to them. Never was a child more cosseted and pampered, or more loved, than little Mira was by her adopted mother and father.

By the time she reached womanhood, Mira had become known as the most beautiful girl in all the land. Her hair flowed down to the backs of her knees in ripples of silver on one side and ink on the other. To any who looked upon her perfect features, the different colors of her eyes only enhanced the thick darkness of her lashes, the crimson of her lips and the sweet pink blush of her cheeks. Her body had grown lush and firm, with rounded breasts and buttocks, and hips just right for a man’s hands to hold.

Her father’s fortune only made her all the more desirable, but though many sought the hand of the nobleman’s adopted daughter, none were allowed to court her.

“She is a child, still,” insisted her father to her mother, who knew better but didn’t wish to disagree. “She’s not ready to be married, to go off and leave us.”

“Someday,” said the noblewoman, patting her husband’s hand, “she will have to.”

For though she loved her daughter very much, the noblewoman knew how it was to be a young woman without a suitor, and how her daughter must long for the time when she could be courted as all the other young women were.

“They only want her money,” grumbled the nobleman. “They seek her fortune as much as they do her heart.”

“That, too, might be true,” said the noblewoman. She looked out the window to where Mira walked in the garden, alone. “But someday, my husband, we won’t be able to keep her to ourselves any longer. Won’t it be better if we’ve chosen a husband for her? One who won’t take our beloved daughter too far from us?”

The nobleman thought of this, but harrumphed and garrumphed and would not give in.

And in the garden, Mira bent to smell the flowers, all alone.

* * *

Winter stole across the world like an illicit lover, taking the light and leaving darkness behind. Inside the stone house on the hill, there was food and drink aplenty, and warmth and all manner of entertainments. The nobleman and his wife hosted friends from near and far to help relieve the lethargy of the cold season.

Mira, no longer the child her father wanted her to be, wished the house were silent instead of filled with the shouts of cardplayers and the snuffle of hounds. She preferred the scent of snow to the savory smells of roasting fowl and baking bread. She even liked running through the now-dead garden, though it left her shivering, better than sitting in front of the blazing fireplace wrapped in a goose-down cloak. Only the year before she had longed for these long nights with a house full of company; the twelve months that had passed had turned her into someone new. Now, though her parents gestured for her to join them and their guests, she snuck away down dark and chilly corridors to find a place in the attic to sit alone.

She blew on the frost-covered windows to look down to the barren gardens below. They weren’t empty, as she’d expected them to be. Footprints marred the smooth whiteness of snow-covered plots. And in the corner by the gate, a huddled figure clawed at the ground. Mira watched it scrabble in the vegetable plot. Perhaps seeking the remains of a gourd or something else? Had some poor vagrant stolen into her garden to look for food?

Pity moved her, and Mira left the attic to sneak past the rooms full of merrymakers. She crept to the garden without shoes or even a cloak to keep her warm, so intent was she on finding out who she’d seen from her window above. The snow bit at her toes and the wind gnawed her fingertips, but it was nothing compared to what the traveler must have felt.

“You must come inside,” she insisted to the scarf-covered face. She couldn’t tell even if the visitor was a man or a woman, so bundled and wrapped in layers was the figure. “Get warm. Have something to eat.”

When they went inside, however, Mira’s father was not pleased at his daughter’s kindhearted gesture. There was no room at his table for a beggar, be it woman or man. Not even in his kitchen, not even to eat the scraps unfit for dogs, and he made the bundled visitor go back into the snow even before it had time to unwrap one of its many cloaks.

“Father-” Mira protested, but the nobleman wouldn’t hear her plea.

“I will go,” said the beggar, whose face was still hidden. “But you should know who you’ve turned away.”

The guests who’d gathered around the scene gasped when the beggar pushed back its coverings to reveal the face of a beautiful, if cruel-eyed, woman. Everything about her was dark. Her eyes, hair, even the blush of her lips and tongue were dark rather than red. She looked around at them all before settling her eyes upon Mira.

“Your daughter has far better manners than you, old man,” said the dark fairy. “She will be your salvation, as she tried to be mine.”

The nobleman was too smart to try to beg forgiveness from the dark fairy. “Don’t take her!”

The dark fairy laughed; in the garden the flowers shivered beneath their blanket of snow. “I don’t want her, old man. Just as you would like nobody else to want her either.”

“Please,” begged the noblewoman, stepping forward. She was no less wise than her husband, but women know the ways to deal with one another and the dark fairy was still a woman. “Please don’t punish our daughter because of our foolishness.”

The dark fairy laughed. “Worry not, lady. I won’t make your daughter hideous to the eye, nor make it so toads fall from her lips with each word. No, lady, I shall grant your daughter a gift, instead, for the generosity she attempted to show me. And in giving her the gift, I shall punish you.”

The dark fairy clapped her hands and the guests drew back as one, each hoping not to draw her attention. The dark fairy smiled and waved her hand. Her veil of cloaks and scarves fluttered.

“You shall be desired,” she told Mira. “And you shall desire.”

“That’s it?” cried the nobleman, perhaps not so wise as he believed himself to be. “That’s the curse?”

The dark fairy drew her hood back over her face and opened the door. Snow swirled inside and melted on the floor. The gathered company shivered in unison.

“Until your daughter finds completion, old man, you will slowly lose everything you have. Pray hope she finds it before you are beggared and must rely upon the unkindness of strangers.”

With that, the dark fairy was gone.

The nobleman reached out his hand to Mira, who didn’t take it. Nor did she reach for her mother, who wept with fists pressed to her mouth. Mira looked around the room, at the men and women gathered there, and something swelled inside her that she’d never felt before.

Heat flared inside her belly and lower, between her thighs. She pressed a hand to herself there, and the other to the swell of her breasts where more heat rose. She bit back a gasp at the look one of her father’s friends was giving her. His eyes burned dark with an emotion she couldn’t name, but that she felt echoed in her own.

Then she knew what it was, that fierceness, that burning, that flush on her skin and the flare in her gaze.

Desire.

* * *

It began at once.

Without regard to her parents or the guests assembled in their hall, Mira went to the man staring at her and let him put his mouth on her. Nobody stopped her. Nobody said a word when he took her by the elbow and led her upstairs and rid her of her virginity. Her mother wailed and her father gnashed his teeth, but neither of them stopped it.

Neither of them could stop it.

Mira’s first lover was not handsome, but he was bold, and he fucked her so thoroughly that first time she couldn’t walk the next day. Yet despite the hours of intercourse, the kisses he rained over her body, the things he did to her, she didn’t feel complete. In fact, when it was finally over and her lover stole away from the sweat-soaked bed, all Mira felt was emptiness.

Clearly, this would not do.

Already her parents’ guests had fled. The staff, no longer loyal to a house accursed, left as well. The hearths lay cold, the fowl uncooked. Her father had locked himself in his counting room, counting outhis money. Her mother had pricked her thumbs with every spindle in the house, but could not sleep.

Mira washed the scent of the man from her body and discovered that a fingertip slid against the pearl hidden inside her soft folds could bring her pleasure so intense it weakened her knees. Was this, then, completion? She stroked again and dipped a finger inside her heat much the way her lover of the night before had used his cock to fill her. She moaned and bit her lip, grasping the edge of the wooden bathtub, as pleasure coursed through her.

And then…nothing.

Frustrated, she stroked harder, pulling on her nipples. Heat rushed through her veins and she sank to the rush-matted floor of the chamber. She pumped her hips upward against her now-grasping touch, and still the sense of something building inside her grew and grew without cease. Without release.

She could not eat, nor sleep, for the fire consuming her took up so much of her attention. Yet instead of turning her ill, this fever only made her all the more beautiful. She saw it in her looking glass. Her hair was like shining silk. Her eyes, each as lovely as a jewel. Her mouth, ripe and plump and ready for kissing.

In the past her father had hoarded his gold, but now he received an uncommon summons from the king to pay some taxes to which he’d never before been held. He wept as the messenger carried away bag after bag of clinking coins. Her mother sought the solace of the wine barrel. This was but one day after the dark fairy’s curse, and Mira knew she had to find her completion soon or everything she’d known her entire life would be lost.

She made it known that she was now entertaining suitors, and as bad news travels fast, so did this. On the fifth day after the fairy’s curse, men had begun lining up outside the gate. Most of them, she assumed, had come for a chance to wet their pricks inside her, though a few of the more intelligent would have known that the man who managed to satisfy her would gain more than a willing cunny in which to spill his seed, but a vast portion of her father’s rapidly diminishing fortune, as well.

Mira cared little for her father’s fortune. She cared more for his happiness, and her mother’s, for though they had not bred or borne her, she loved them as dearly as if they had. Truth be told, she loved the line of men waiting to fuck her, too, for the fairy had been right about desire being a gift.

And still, no matter how many men entered Mira’s bedchamber and touched her, no matter how many urged her body to writhe and squirm beneath talented tongues and fingers and cocks, not one of them left her with anything other than emptiness when he’d gone.

By the tenth day after the fairy’s decree, the line had dwindled as fast as her father’s fortune. The men who now waited at the gate were those a little needier, a little less affluent. Men to whom a pretty wife who’d lain with a hundred men and a bit of a fortune were better than a farm-roughened wife and no fortune at all. Mira took them as she’d done the ones in fine leather and velvet, and like their richer predecessors, none left her complete. One by one, the men left her chamber, grumbling that there could be no man who would finish her.

“Daughter, don’t kill yourself to find the one,” Mira’s mother urged, voice slurred, dress askew. “A fortune can be re-won.”

“Tell that to my father,” Mira said from her place in front of the mirror, where she searched her mismatched eyes for any sign of something different. Something new. “He’s the one killing himself, sitting in the counting room enumerating his coins and gnashing his teeth at each one he must relinquish.”

She turned to her mother. “Both of you believe you can do nothing to change the dark fairy’s curse, but I know I can.”

Again, she looked at her face. She’d become a woman, with a woman’s secret smile. She touched her bare breasts, the tight pink nipples. The floss between her thighs. The box that would bring her pleasure if only she could find the right key to unlock it.

“And I want to,” she said.

* * *

Winter eased into spring with little fanfare. Mira’s parents had done little to fight the fairy’s curse. It pained her to see her beloved mother and father give themselves so quickly to despair, and she was determined not to let them wither away. The line of men waiting to sample her beauty had dwindled to nothing, no more than one or two a sevenday.

Until one day, as Mira sat in the warming garden where the flowers had just begun to show their heads, two men arrived. One as fair as sunshine, the other dark as shadows. They reached the gate at the same time, one from each direction. From her seat on the stone bench, Mira could see them both, but at first neither looked at her.

“Gerard,” said the dark-haired man.

“Alain,” greeted the fair-haired man.

Mira got to her feet. Both had put their hands to their belts, one to pull a dagger and the other a short sword. Neither moved after that, each watching the other, until the dark-haired man gave a slight nod and stepped aside just enough to let the one called Gerard pass. Both of them came through the gate, and both stopped when they saw her.

“Madame,” said Gerard with a half-bow. “We seek the lady Mira.”

“Many have sought her,” Mira said. “What makes the two of you any different than the hundreds of others?”

Alain stood an inch or so shorter than Gerard but still towered tall over Mira. He held out his hand for hers, and she took it at once. “I’ve heard she’s been gifted by the dark fairy.”

“Everyone knows that.” Mira tugged away her hand, still tingling from his touch.

“Ah,” said Alain with a half-bow nearly identical to the one Gerard had already bestowed. “But not everyone else has received the same gift.”

Mira looked at them, from one to the other. “And you have?”

“Lady,” answered Gerard. “We both have.”

* * *

Most of the other men had arrived intent on seducing her at once. Some had been kind, a few considerate, but none of them had wasted their time with conversation. Alain and Gerard, however, followed Mira into the large dining hall where they set about laying a fire in the long-neglected hearth.

“Wine, lady?” Gerard’s question seemed more command than request, and Mira found herself scurrying to the sideboard in search of a bottle.

Alain watched her, his gaze like sapphires. “Where are your servants, lady?”

“Gone,” Mira said as she poured three glasses of almost sour wine. “My father can’t afford to pay them any longer, and they fear the dark fairy’s taint. My good mother has taken to her bed. And my father has gone mad.”

She expected the blunt statement to take the men aback, but neither looked surprised. She offered glasses, one to Alain and one to Gerard, and both took them. Gerard drank his at once with a grimace, but Alain waited for Mira to sip before he drank.

Gerard gave a low grunt and put his cup on the long wooden dining table that had hosted so many guests over the years. “Come here.”

Mira did at once, though she stopped far enough away from him that he would have to reach to grab her, if that was his intent. Gerard didn’t reach for her. He studied her.

“You are beautiful,” he said. “The fairy didn’t give you that.”

Mira shook her head. “No, sir, I don’t believe so.”

She looked at him. His pale hair fell to his shoulders, loose. He had the sharp features of a hawk and the body of a warrior beneath his simple, solid clothes. She shivered, thinking of his muscular arms around her, of his thick legs pushing hers apart. He would not be gentle, she saw this already, and her pulse beat faster between her legs.

“Would you have me?” he asked her, his voice low and rough.

Mira’s mouth parted, and she looked toward Alain, who had not yet put down his glass. “What of your companion, sir?”

Gerard laughed. “What of him?”

“You both arrived at the same time. You both want the same thing. How am I to know which of you can provide me with what you need if I don’t sample you both?”

From another woman these words would have made her a doxy, but Mira had long ceased caring. The dark fairy had gifted her with desire, and it built and built inside her every day without cease. Her mother was trying to sleep away her life and her father had gone insane because of it. She would fuck a thousand men if it meant she’d find the one to complete her.

Gerard gave Alain a challenging look. “Would that you had traveled a mile faster, brother of my heart. You might have been the one to fill this lady’s bucket.”

Alain put a hand over his heart and bowed his head to Gerard. “Would that you had traveled but a mile slower, oh my brother. For then, indeed, I might have been the first to reach her.”

Mira looked at them. They had history, of that there was no question. “You are brothers?”

Without looking away from Alain, Gerard said, “wWe have different parents.”

Without looking away from Gerard, Alain replied, “We have fought at each other’s side and won. We’ve shared much, Gerard and I.”

They both looked at her, but it was Gerard this time who held out his hand. “Lady, take me to your room, and I will give you what the dark fairy promised would save you and your family.”

Mira, having no reason to decline, took his hand and led him to the stairs. Halfway up, she looked back. Alain stared after them, but only she saw him press his lips to the tips of his fingers.

* * *

Gerard wasted no time with pretty words. He took Mira in his arms the moment the bedchamber door closed behind them. His breath smelled of wine, a heady aroma more tantalizing that the taste of it had been. His mouth took hers without preamble, nudging open her lips to allow his tongue slide inside. Mira gasped into his kiss, and his arms tightened around her.

“She truly did gift you with desire,” Gerard murmured, tracing the line of her jaw with his mouth. Into her ear, he whispered, “You create it and feel it, both. Do you not?”

“Yes.” Mira shivered as his large hands roamed her body and cupped her buttocks through the simple linen dress she wore. Without maidservants to wash her clothes and help her dress, she’d gone without a shift or girdle beneath, and it was almost as if she wore nothing at all. “Yes, sir, I feel it.”

“You want me to touch you, as the other men have touched you?”

Mira sighed as his hands squeezed and one began tugging up her dress, inch by inch. “Oh, yes.”

“Tell me, lady,” Gerard said and bit into her soft flesh with a fierceness that urged a cry from Mira’s throat. “Tell me how they fucked you.”

She told him of men with hard, hot cocks who had used her mouth, her cunt, the tunnel of her breasts, the sweet back passage of her ass. How they had made her feel like she was meant to burst, how she had exploded with pleasure over and over, only to be left aching for more at once. Aching and empty.

Incomplete.

“And why should you be different,” she half-sobbed as his roaming hands found her slick crevice and parted her folds to allow one of his thick fingers to slide inside.

“Because I have to be.” Gerard, one hand still moving inside her, used the other to tear her gown from throat to hips.

Mira’s breasts thrust forward as she arched her back. She rode Gerard’s hand harder and harder as he thrust another finger inside her. His mouth found her sweetly aching nipples. When he suckled one, she cried out. Her fingers dug into his shoulder. She rocked her hips, seeking release.

But Gerard would not give it to her. “The others made you come, but none of them finished you.” He growled the words and withdrew his hand so swiftly from her body Mira stumbled. “Stand there, still. Don’t move.”

She did, though, taking a step on trembling legs toward him.

“I said,” murmured Gerard in a voice gone low and dangerous, “do not move.”

This time, Mira stayed still.

Gerard removed his belt, laid aside his scabbard, pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it unceremoniously to the floor. His body beneath was indeed that of a warrior, scarred and hard, with tight bronzed nipples and golden fleece around them and in a line disappearing into the waist of his breeches.

Watching her, he eased down his breeches and kicked them aside to stand before her naked. His cock, surrounded by its fluff of amber curls, rose straight and proud. Mira’s pearl beat with the pounding of her heart and her passage tightened in a brief spasm. She moaned, but stayed still as he had ordered.

“The others. Did any bind you? Beat you?”

“No!” Shock sent heat souring into her cheeks.

Gerard stroked his cock even more fully erect. “Turn around and put your hands on the post.”

His gaze flickered to the foot of her bed. Some of the men had taken her on the floor, or across the table. None had told her to hold onto the bedpost. Mira hesitated, but at the flare of heat in Gerard’s eyes, she did.

She waited, trembling. Her hair had fallen from its coils and lay across her breasts. Gerard threaded his fingers through it, twisting the gilt and midnight together. His hand covered her breast.

“Move your legs apart.”

She did, her muscles tense with waiting. Gerard slid his other hand between her legs from behind. His thick fingers probed her slick folds, finding the bead of her clit and rolling it. Mira pushed her hips forward, wanting more pressure, but Gerard withdrew almost at once.

When she stilled, he slid his hand between her legs again. His fingers dipped into her wetness and caressed her heat. His cock probed the softness of her buttocks from behind, and Mira pushed herself back against him. Again, Gerard withdrew.

“Please.” Mira moaned the single word.

“Please, what?”

“Please, touch me.”

“Is that what you asked them?” Gerard bit lightly at her shoulder, and Mira jerked away from him with a gasp.

“I didn’t have to!” Her chin lifting, she pushed at him. It was like pushing at rock, but he stepped back. Her chest heaved with each breath, and the surprising sting of tears burned her eyes. “They all just did it! All of them just did it!”

“Perhaps, then, that’s your problem.” Gerard made no move toward her. His cock rose proud and strong in front of him. It begged for Mira’s touch, the heat of her mouth, but she didn’t move toward him.

“You want me to beg? Is that it?”

Gerard shrugged and moved to the chair in front of the fire, where he sat without regard to his nakedness. Or hers. This, more than anything, moved Mira to anger.

“Please,” she said through gritted jaws. “Please touch me, sir. Please fuck me.”

“No.”

“Then why did you come here?” She demanded, crossing to him. Fury made her want to strike him, but Mira didn’t dare.

Gerard looked her up and down, caressing her so thoroughly with his gaze it weakened her legs and tightened her nipples further. “To make you complete. Isn’t that what the dark fairy said you needed?”

“What did she say you needed?” The words came out broken, edged with glass, on the verge of cruel.

Quick as the sunshine from which his hair had been woven, Gerard grabbed her wrist. He pulled her forward and put her across his lap like a recalcitrant child. His big hand came down across her buttocks, the smack not hard enough to bruise, though Mira cried out at the sting. Heat spread across her flesh and her hips pushed forward, pushing her cunt against Gerard’s thigh.

“She told me I needed to complete someone.” His other hand pressed her tight against him so she couldn’t move.

“By beating me?” Mira cried, voice hoarse, even as her hips rocked.

“This is not a beating,” said Gerard. “This is an appreciation.”

Heat covered her buttocks and spread to meet the fire already burning between her thighs. As Gerard’s hand caressed her skin, Mira sagged against him. Her legs parted, inviting him to fill her with his fingers again, but he didn’t, not even when she wriggled and strove to get free of his grip.

Beneath her, his cock pressed. His breathing had grown harsher, his grip tighter as she struggled. Yet he did nothing but rest his hand upon the heat his spank had left on her skin.

“I am making you appreciate my touch,” Gerard said in a low voice. “Feel the heat of my hand. Focus on that, not my cock. Not your cunt. Focus on the sound of our breathing. On the brush of your hair against your face.”

Mira closed her eyes with a grimace. Her hips rocked again on Gerard’s thigh, but without much result. None of the others had done this. All had taken her, some rougher, some with gentler hands, but all had done it.

Gerard held her until her struggles ceased. Every line of Mira’s body had gone hot, as though he’d drawn a stick from the fire along her skin. She moaned into her fist as his hand shifted, the fingertips brushing the underside of her buttocks. He moved them lower, to tease her bottom lips. He felt how wet she was for him, how his touch had already teased her so close.

“Please, Gerard,” she whispered. “Please touch me.”

When at last he did, once more filling her with a phallus created from his fingers, Mira’s cry of relief rang around the room. His thumb rubbed at her pearl while his fingers moved inside her, and the ache that had built inside her, up and up, reached its peak and crashed.

Mira’s climax washed over her, no, thundered over her, and she jerked with it. She cried out his name, once. Twice. When the throbbing between her legs eased and she caught her breath, Gerard released her from his lap. Mira stood, her hand on his shoulder to keep herself from falling.

She drew in air scented like Gerard and sighed it out again. She wanted to weep. Her body had succumbed to his ministrations, she had reached her pleasure…and still…

“I am empty,” she said in a dull voice. She turned from him. She waited for the door to open and close behind him, for her body to cease its trembling. For her breath to fill again with air that smelled of smoke and stale bed linens.

“Lady,” said Gerard. “Did you think it would take but once?”

* * *

Alain listened for the sound of the lady’s cries as Gerard took her to orgasm. He knew too well the taste and touch of the man upstairs, and his cock rose in his trousers at the knowledge of what he would be doing to the woman. Once, they had shared everything, even women.

It had been a woman who drove them apart.

The dark fairy, who had no name any mortal knew, had stalked Alain through the forest and seduced him not once, but twice. She had used his cock for her personal joy, writhing on him and milking him of his seed even as he fought to remember where he was. Who he was. The dark fairy had cared little for Alain’s mind. All she wanted was his penis and mouth. His hands. She’d have continued sucking him dry had Gerard not come looking for him. She’d seduced Gerard, as well, and Alain could still recall the sound of their cries as she’d taunted Gerard into fucking her harder and harder.

Then, for fun or spite, she had caused them to quarrel. Not with swords, for at that they’d have been too well matched. It would have ended in death for the pair of them. No, she’d urged them to battle with their words. Accusations, old hurts, imagined slights and falsehoods had torn them apart.

Alain and Gerard had not known each other as children, though that had ceased to matter a mere three days into their acquaintance. They’d both been assigned places in the King’s Guard, an elite division of the Royal Army.

The first thing Alain had noticed about Gerard was his hands. Big, strong hands, scarred from work and battle. Gerard had been demonstrating his skill with his broadsword, using the flat of the blade to smack at his opponent. The sun had come out from behind a cloud, highlighting Gerard’s hair into shimmering gold and Alain had, quite literally, lost his breath.

“You there,” Gerard had said with a crook of his finger. “Get your ass over here and let me beat it.”

Even now, recalling Gerard’s surprise at not winning that first fight, Alain smiled. Arrogant from never losing, Gerard hadn’t paid enough attention to the newcomer and had ended up on his back with Alain’s blade at his throat.

It was the last time he didn’t pay enough attention to Alain.

They’d forged the deepest of bonds, the pair of them matched so well physically there were none who could stand against them. They fought hard for the king, and they made merry with equal fierceness…for themselves.

Alain had long known his cock rose without hesitation at both the curved softness of women and the hard, muscled planes of men. Physical love between men wasn’t forbidden in the King’s Guard, where it might be weeks before a man could find a woman, but it wasn’t exactly encouraged, either. Alain, who felt no shame at his proclivities, also felt no need to fight to defend them. He’d surely kill anyone who came up against him, and while his blade had tasted the blood of many of the King’s enemies, he had no desire to spill that of his comrades.

Gerard had never shown signs of liking cock, and Alain had never made a move to push their friendship into that place. They fought, they wrestled, they shared a room and a bath. They often visited the brothels together or sampled some of the same tavern wenches. Gerard had a heavier hand with his women than Alain, who had no desire to bind or beat his bedmates. When Alain sought the company of men, he did it discreetly, and without Gerard. It was the one thing they didn’t share.

Until the night Alain came home from an encounter with one of his favorite male partners to find Gerard waiting for him.

“Where do you go?” Gerard had asked in a deceptively gentle voice that didn’t fool Alain.

“I didn’t know I owed you an accounting of my time,” Alain had replied mildly.

Gerard had drawn his brows. “You stink of fucking.”

“I’ll wash.”

Gerard’s hand had flown out to grab Alain’s wrist as he’d passed. “I don’t smell a woman’s sweetness on you, Alain.”

Alain had looked down at Gerard’s fingers gripping his wrist but made no move to pull away. “No.”

They had trained together so often Gerard’s move shouldn’t have surprised him, but then perhaps Alain had chosen to be surprised. Gerard had turned him and pressed him forward, both hands tight on his wrists, in the time it took to draw a breath. Alain hadn’t struggled. Against his back, he’d felt the familiar breadth and width of Gerard’s body.

Gerard had pushed Alain toward the room’s rough-hewn table and pinned his hands to the splintered wood. He’d kicked his legs apart and pressed harder against his back. Alain had closed his eyes, breathing hard, making no offer.

“You like it this way?” Gerard had breathed in Alain’s ear. The touch of Gerard’s hot breath had sent a shudder down Alain’s spine and still he said nothing, made no move to get away, though he easily could have.

Gerard’s hand had let go of one of Alain’s and moved around to cup Alain’s hardening cock. “Your prick is hard, my friend.”

Gerard hadn’t fumbled with the ties of Alain’s trousers, nor had his touch hesitated when he took Alain’s hard length into his palm. He’d stroked, hard, in the way only men knew how to do, until at last Alain had pumped his hips forward with a cry.

“Yes,” he’d said. “Yes, Gerard, I like that.”

He’d groaned when the bluntness of Gerard’s thick cock nudged at the passage of his ass, and cried aloud when Gerard had eased his way inside. Gerard had fucked him fast and hard, jerking Alain’s prick at the same time, until they’d both exploded into pleasure.

“You can share everything with me,” Gerard had said then, and until the dark fairy came along, they had.

Alain’s cock had risen at the memories and now pressed uncomfortably against the front of his breeches. He turned at the soft noise behind him to see Mira, her lovely skin flushed and that marvelous hair hanging in tangled curls around her face.

“He sent me to fetch him some ale.” Her voice was scratchy, hoarse.

“My lady,” Alain said kindly, for he knew well enough how Gerard’s touch could leave one shaken. “Would you sit?”

He pulled out a chair for her, and she sank into it as though her legs had been about to collapse. He brought her mulled wine and a hunk of bread from the sideboard, but she neither drank nor ate.

“My lady,” said Alain gently and waited until she looked at his face. “What do you need?”

“I don’t need wine and bread,” she snapped suddenly, her intriguingly mismatched eyes flashing. “I need fulfillment!”

He’d been certain she’d find it with Gerard, and yet the moment she said the words Alain knew she spoke the truth. A smile tugged at his lips. Now it was his turn to try.

* * *

Mira’s buttocks still held the heat left behind by Gerard’s hand, but she refused to squirm on the hard seat of her chair. The humiliation of what he’d done-and without lifting the curse! — brought heat to her face equal to that in her bottom. She scowled at the dark-haired man in front of her.

“Bring me a dipper of cold water from the well,” she demanded and pointed out the window to the garden. “That’s what I want.”

She felt certain he’d balk at her imperious tone, perhaps even take her in hand the way Gerard had, but Alain only ducked his head and strode to the doorway on his long, long legs. The well of which she spoke hadn’t been used for a long time because the winch used to lift the bucket from its depths had rusted. Even so, the water drawn from it was the sweetest she’d ever tasted, and she wanted it now.

More than that, she thought as she watched him disappear through the door, she wanted to make someone suffer, even the tiniest bit, to make up for the way she had suffered upstairs.

But she hadn’t suffered, really, had she? Even now, thinking of the way Gerard had ordered her to hold tight to the bedpost while he plundered her body from behind caused Mira’s nipples to tighten and her pulse to throb harder between her legs.

As the beloved only child of doting parents, Mira had never been spanked in her life. No one had ever even raised their voice to her. Yet, she mused, her thighs slipping apart enough to dimplet the fabric of her gown between them, there had been nothing parental about Gerard’s treatment of her.

The other men had fucked her in all manner of ways, but none had commanded her so. Thinking of it now sent a shiver through her. Her sex, still wet with her own slickness, clenched hard enough to force a small moan from her lips.

“My lady.”

At the sound of Alain’s reverent voice, Mira’s eyes flew open. She’d arched back in the chair, her hips lifting at the memory of Gerard’s touch, but having Alain witness her reaction to those thoughts didn’t quench her arousal. She studied him, the pail from the well brimming with water.

“I brought your water.”

She didn’t know what made her do it, except that all at once she lost all grasp of the difference between memory and reality. Gerard had commanded her but now she would command Alain; all of it seemed to make sense the way light will suddenly shine through the one clean spot in an otherwise filthy window.

She kicked the bucket of water from his hands. It hit the floor with a thump and split into several pieces. The cold, clear water, sweet as honey, splattered Alain’s boots and breeches. Frigid droplets hit her bare toes and calves, but her gasp wasn’t from their small sting. It came when Alain went at once to his knees, his head bowed.

“My lady, I have displeased you.”

Mira had been protected and indulged her entire life, but just as Gerard’s treatment of her didn’t echo anything parental, neither did this new desire sweeping her have anything to with her previous experiences. She had always taken her clean clothes and prepared food as a fact of her existence and considered the servants who’d provided them a part of her family, like her parents. She’d never demanded anything from them.

The sight of Alain on his knees sent waves of pleasure through her so strong her head spun. Her legs parted further and she inched her skirt to her knees. Her fingers fisted in the fabric and she imagined how it would feel to bury them in the thickness of his dark hair.

“Tell me how I might serve you, lady,” Alain murmured, “and I shall do my utmost to please you.”

“I would have your face between my legs.” The words rose to her lips as haughtily as any queen might have said them, and emboldened by her own tone, she added, “Pleasure my cunt with your tongue.”

The dark fairy’s gift had stolen any shyness from Mira, but even so it was the first time she’d ever said such a thing aloud. Her heart pounded. She’d begged Gerard to touch her a mere hour before and now she ordered his comrade to do the same. Opposite ends of experience, yet both had made her heart trip faster in her breast.

“If it would please my lady to do so,” Alain said without hesitation, “then it will be my pleasure to serve her.”

His strong hands, only slightly smaller than Gerard’s but with the same delightful calluses, slid up her thighs and pushed her skirt to her hips. She was bare beneath. She’d washed upstairs, but her sex glistened anew with her arousal. The smooth bead of her clitoris protruded sweetly from its hood of flesh and her soft curls.

Alain used his thumbs to stroke along her folds and brought them together, one on each side of her clitoris. Mira hissed out a gasp and her hips rocked forward again.

“Your mouth,” she ordered.

He obeyed at once, dipping his head to press his lips to her flesh. His tongue, hot and wet, stroked her folds and anchored itself on her clitoris. He worked her flesh with his lips and tongue, and her desire coursed through her like flames consuming paper.

She fisted her hands in his hair and held him tight as his mouth moved. His tongue flickered, fast, then moved in slow, deliberate circles that had her writhing.

“Fuck me with your fingers,” Mira gasped when Alain’s tongue alone wasn’t enough to send her over the edge.

Alain did as she ordered. His fingers were longer but not so thick as Gerard’s, and in her ecstatic delirium Mira wondered if their cocks would be as disparate. He pushed two fingers deep inside her, curving them slightly upward as his tongue kept its steady pace. Bright sparks of fresh pleasure shot through her, and again when he pressed deeper and his knuckles provided additional pressure on her back passage.

She moaned his name, and again, louder. She closed her eyes and threw back her head to allow the ecstasy to take her over entirely.

“I want you to fuck me,” she gasped. “Fuck me, Alain!”

Her climax shook her, the pleasure so intense she went briefly blind. Her toes pointed, her thighs fell open, her hands clutched at nothing. The words spewed from her mouth, yet she knew what she said and meant it.

“Be careful, lady,” said a familiar male voice, dipping low with amusement. “For if you command it, Alain will feel compelled to obey.”

Mira opened her eyes as the vestiges of ecstasy seeped out of her. Alain still knelt before her, his mouth glistening and his eyes hot with desire, but it was to Gerard she gave her full attention. Her heart still pounded from her climax but now the pitter-pat stepped up at the sight of the man who’d so recently mastered her. What would he do to her? To both of them?

Gerard spoke in a voice that could never have been called kind but was at least not cruel. He put his hand on Alain’s head the way a man will touch his hound to prove his ownership and its loyalty to him. “It’s in his nature, you see.”

Mira swallowed hard, though her mouth had gone dry at the flare of lust in Gerard’s blue eyes. In front of her, Alain remained on his knees, his head slightly bowed beneath the weight of Gerard’s hand. He didn’t look frightened. She watched as he licked his mouth of her sweetness.

“How does she taste, Alain?”

“Like sweet honey, Gerard.”

Gerard’s smile sent a frisson from the base of Mira’s spine all the way to the sensitive flesh of the back of her neck. The curve of his lips affected another part of her as well, the soft and slick center between her thighs.

“Alain made you come, lady?”

She lifted her chin, almost defiant. “Yes.”

Gerard’s hand stroked down Alain’s hair. “His tongue is most talented, is it not? And yet you screamed for his cock, too?”

Even now, her body twitched and shivered at the thought. The dark fairy had blessed her with desire, and it had grown tenfold since Gerard and Alain had walked through her garden gate. She covered herself with her hand.

“Yes,” she said.

“You are not yet complete,” said Alain.

She shook her head. Alain got to his feet, shrugging off Gerard’s hand. “I can complete you, lady. Allow me to serve you.”

“The lady seeks to serve,” Gerard said in a deceptively kind tone. “She is natural at it, Alain.”

Alain turned to face the other man. “You didn’t complete her, Gerard. The weight of desire hangs heavy on her shoulders. Her burden has not yet been lifted, and nor has ours.”

Gerard stared at Mira. “I haven’t yet had my full way with her, Alain. Once I have-”

“Once I have,” Alain interrupted, “the curse will be lifted.”

“You?” Gerard turned his face to Alain and laughed. “I know well how your mouth can service, Alain, but you’re not the one for this lady. I can feel it.”

“I feel it,” Alain said in a low, dangerous voice, and while in the past he might have served Gerard the way he’d served Mira, it was clear to her that whatever rift had been torn between them had not yet healed.

“Will you ask the lady to choose?” Gerard asked in a frightening voice.

“I will not choose!” Mira cried so loudly the china in the cupboard rang. She got up from the chair, her skirts falling around her bare feet. “It is not for me to choose! It is for you to complete me!”

She pointed at each of them. “It is not a contest of who is the manlier!”

Alain ducked his head at her words and put his hand over his heart. “My lady-”

Gerard, however, had drawn his sword with a growl. “It is a contest, lady, for just as you seek completion and the breaking of the fairy’s curse, so I seek it. Alain!”

Alain had drawn no weapon but Mira, heart thudding again, had no illusions he was not as ready to wage battle as Gerard. “Yes, brother of my heart.”

“Outside.”

“Yes, Gerard.”

Again, Alain inclined his head, but though it gave the appearance of him following Gerard’s command, Mira was not fooled. Alain was his own man. Her breath hitched faster in her chest when Alain followed Gerard out into the garden.

When they fought over her.

* * *

The room was not the best he’d ever been given, but it was clean and bright, and the bed was softer than any had ever been in the barracks of the King’s Guard. The basins, one filled with hot water and one with cold, were of finer porcelain, too, as were the cloths Gerard now used to wash the worst of his wounds. Alain’s blade had some time ago become nicked, and the cuts it gave were ragged. He hissed as he smoothed the water over his bleeding flesh.

It gave him no small pleasure to hear the same pained noises coming from the room Alain had been given. Though the rooms were separated by a door, it hung open. Gerard could hear Alain’s measured pacing as he bathed and dressed his own wounds. He might have taken more pride had he known his comrade’s injuries to be worse than his own, but Gerard was no fonder of lies told to himself than he was of untruths told to him by another.

Neither had held back in their fight to prove who was better suited to bring the lady Mira her completion, but, as in all else, they were so even in skill neither had been able to win. They were not a pair of matched ponies to draw a carriage, he mused as he watched Alain’s shadow lengthen and shorten in the doorway. Rather they were as firmly opposite as the sun and moon. Like a lock and a key, Alain and Gerard were fair to useless without one another.

“Alain!”

The shadow paused and in the next moment, Alain’s familiar form appeared in the open doorway. “Yes, Gerard.”

“Come here.”

Alain did at once, and though he refused to show sign of it upon his face, Gerard ached inside for the days before the dark fairy had come between them. No woman ever had, not even the prettiest. No man had, either. Yet the dark fairy, on a whim they’d never understood, had taken the core of their friendship and used it to tear them asunder.

“I have missed you,” Alain said simply, and Gerard hated and admired him for his ability to put voice to his emotions. “It’s been overlong since we were able to practice together.”

It was just like Alain, Gerard mused, to make it as though they’d been exercising rather than trying to kill one another. He wanted to keep from smiling but felt his mouth curve anyway. “Aye, brother of my heart, I have long regretted our distance as well.”

Only Alain knew him well enough to know there was more to what he felt than what he said. Of all the lovers Gerard had ever taken, only Alain had also been his friend. He reached to grab Alain’s wrist and tug him forward, and Alain stepped toward him without resistance.

“We have never let a woman come between us before,” Gerard said. “Only that bitch of a fairy has ever separated us. Let us not allow this like-cursed lady to widen the gap.”

“Mayhap,” Alain said as he ran his hand through Gerard’s hair, “she can help us bridge it, Gerard.”

Alain had ever been the one of them to think more thoroughly, and Gerard had always been the one to take action. Together it had made them formidable foes to any who opposed them. Now Gerard would listen to his friend, to his brother of the heart, and they would take their action together.

“The fairy cursed us all three with desire,” Gerard said. “All the same curse. Might we all have the same cure?”

“I think we might.”

Alain’s fingers tightened in Gerard’s hair briefly as Gerard’s hand on his wrist pulled him yet closer. It was not often that Gerard was the one looking up, but he did so now. Alain’s gaze held a hotness he recognized. His cock had become thick and pushed the front of his breeches.

Alain gasped aloud when Gerard tugged open the laces of his breeches and drew forth his erect cock, and louder when Gerard slid the hot flesh between his lips, for it was not often Gerard’s pleasure to provide this service. Gerard opened himself to take in Alain’s length, sucking hard. Alain’s hips bumped forward as Gerard’s hands found his ass and gripped. The muscles of Alain’s thighs jumped and twitched as Gerard sucked and licked all the way down to the root and up again, paying special attention to the crown. One hand left Alain’s ass to grip the smooth foreskin and slide it back and forth as his mouth worked.

It might not have been Gerard’s habit to suck Alain’s cock, but he did it well nonetheless, for he knew just what Alain liked. In moments Alain’s guttural growls were becoming the slow, deep moans that signaled his release, and now it was Gerard’s turn to seek his own pleasure.

Without preamble he removed his mouth from Alain’s erection and stood so suddenly Alain had no time to react. With his fist gripping Alain’s prick, Gerard captured Alain’s mouth in a harsh, demanding kiss. It would leave them both bruised, but the small pains were as nothing compared to the damage they’d already caused each other, and Alain’s moan and the throb in his cock told Gerard he didn’t mind.

“You think you deserve to spill?” Gerard growled into Alain’s ear, his own cock as hard and thick as granite at the thought of what was to come. “Do you really think I’d take your seed down the back of my throat?”

Alain had his triggers and Gerard knew them all as well as he knew how to make him come. “No, Gerard.”

Gerard let his hand drift along Alain’s cock before letting go of it. “How long has it been since anyone’s taken a strap to your ass, Alain?”

“Too long.” Alain’s voice pushed from gritted jaws, and Gerard heard the truth in it. “Not since you, Gerard. That last time.”

That had been a long time then, for the dark fairy had cursed them more than three moons before. Until this morning with Mira, it had been just as long since Gerard had beaten anyone, though he’d taken countless women to his bed while seeking to break the curse.

Gerard gripped Alain’s chin in his hand and looked hard into the other man’s eyes. “It’s been too long then.”

He ordered Alain to take his position against the plastered wall, his hands at shoulder height and fingers spread. They had no safe word. They didn’t need one. The position of Alain’s fingers would tell Gerard how much pain he was able to take-today, with his previous injuries, it might be very little. The wider apart his fingers, the more he could take. If he closed them together, Gerard would know to ease off.

Just as using his mouth to service Alain was not his habit, neither was undressing him, but Gerard knew Alain was so close to coming, his cock already so hard, that bending to remove his breeches would only give him additional pleasure. Gerard intended to keep Alain balanced on the knife’s edge for a sufficient time, so he was the one who pulled off Alain’s breeches until Alain stood naked.

Gerard admired the lines of Alain’s back and ass as he pulled the sturdy leather strap from his bag. The leather was supple and oiled and fit his fist exactly. He tugged it between his two hands to snap it, and his cock twitched at the way Alain’s muscles jumped, though he showed no other sign he’d heard.

“By the time I’m done,” Gerard said, “your back and ass are going to be on fire, Alain.”

“Please,” Alain murmured.

Gerard laid the strap in even lines along Alain’s skin. His cock stiffened further at the red stripes and the low, strangled grunts of Alain’s ecstasy.

Alain’s head hung and his entire body quivered with exhaustion and still he did not push his fingers together, but it was Gerard’s duty to know when Alain could take no more even if Alain himself could no longer tell, and he put aside the strap. He ran his hand over the heated flesh of Alain’s back and delighted in his hiss. He slid a hand over Alain’s ass and felt the muscles twitch and jump. He pulled a bottle of soothing oil from his bag and poured a palmful and repeated the motion. Alain’s body tensed at the contact of the smooth oil on his flesh, and his hips pumped forward recklessly as he moaned.

He was so close Gerard knew it would take very little to send him over the edge, and for a moment he thought of allowing his friend that final release, but his own nature made him grin slyly instead. He ran his fingers, slick with oil, down the crease of Alain’s buttocks and teased the hot, tight circle of his anus with one finger. Alain bucked and cried out, but his hands never left their places on the wall.

“Such a good soldier,” Gerard murmured as his finger probed slightly deeper. “So good at following orders.”

Alain’s low, gasping chuckle sounded tortured, but he said nothing. He pushed back a bit against Gerard’s hand. From a true slave Gerard would have not tolerated the insubordinance, but Alain was not his slave even though they sometimes played at that game.

“You want this?” Gerard eased his finger into Alain’s hot passage. “Or would you like my cock there, instead? Fucking you? How long has it been since anyone’s been inside you, Alain?”

“As long as it’s been since anyone’s strapped me,” Alain managed to say, though his voice shook with effort. “Please, Gerard, for the sake of our friendship….”

Gerard could be cruel, but this was not about cruelty, and he reached to stroke Alain’s cock with his oil-filled palm. Once, twice, and Alain was crying out and pumping into Gerard’s fist. Once more and his seed spilled, hot and fragrant, into Gerard’s hand.

“Now,” Gerard said when Alain had ceased his jerking and moaning, “use your mouth on me the way you did for her.”

Alain turned and fell at once to his knees. He took Gerard’s prick deep down his throat and sucked. He used his hand in tandem, stroking and caressing Gerard’s balls in the way that made his mind go blank of any thought but the supreme pleasure between his legs.

It took only moments for Gerard to explode into ecstasy, and when he did he shouted Alain’s name. As Alain got up from his knees, Gerard put a hand on his arm to keep him from turning immediately away.

“I have missed you, as well,” Gerard said.

* * *

Whatever had happened between the two men, the last to come through the gate for a fortnight, they had somehow repaired their bond. Mira had expected them to leave when both realized they were unable to bring about the end to the dark fairy’s gift, but as the days passed and Gerard and Alain ingratiated themselves into the household, Mira realized they intended to stay. More than that, they were wooing her, each in his own way, and neither was competing with the other for her affections.

In the past, of course, guests of the house had sought to court her in proper fashion as befit her status as the daughter of a very wealthy man. No suitor would have dared do more than walk with her in the garden, much less have been so bold as to kiss her, and anything more intimate than that was strictly forbidden.

The fairy’s curse had changed all that. The first men who’d come seeking her had been satisfied to fuck her and move on when they failed to break the curse, but Alain and Gerard were not like any other men she’d ever met in her life.

Gerard set her to tasks such as polishing his boots and serving him his food, and his hand could be heavy when she didn’t serve to his pleasure. The first time he’d tied her hand and feet to the posts at the foot of his bed and strapped her, she’d wept tears of pain and anger even as her cunt wept with arousal, yet she hadn’t sent him from the house. Her body had grown to crave Gerard’s discipline, as harsh as it could be, and he brought her to climax over and over with the flat of his hand or the leather strap he wielded with such proficiency. He fucked her thoroughly as well, when she pleased him, and denied her that ecstasy when she did not.

With Alain, however, Mira played the mistress without a second thought. He was as eager to serve her as she was to submit to Gerard. Alain took whatever abuse she offered him, whether it be her refusal to allow him to achieve orgasm when he used his mouth to satisfy her, or the performance of countless meaningless tasks meant only to prove she controlled him. He made love to her with worshipful hands, when she allowed it, and Mira found his touch as satisfying as Gerard’s even if it was in a totally different way.

Both men pursued and pleased her over and over, yet no matter how many times her body sang with desire, something was still missing. She waited for one of them to finish her completely, to break the dark fairy’s curse, but no matter how many times she submitted to Gerard or governed Alain, nothing seemed to change.

Her father’s fortune continued to slip away in summons from the King, extra taxes, small disasters to the house. Her parents sought their comfort in elderberry wine and madness, leaving Mira to run the much-diminished household with no advice.

Summer had passed and turned to autumn, and still a space in her soul remained empty and bleak. She began to despair of ever saving her parents or ridding herself of the fairy’s cursed gift. Her two lovers might fulfill her body, but it wasn’t enough.

“It’s not enough,” she said aloud to the last nodding flowers in their beds.

The flowers didn’t reply, though the wind tossed their heads and ruffled their petals as prettily as if they were the dresses of innocent maidens. Mira hadn’t been innocent for the passing of several moons, and she wept now for that lost innocence and the life she should have had. She sank onto her knees in the browning grass and fragrant earth and buried her face in her hands.

“My lady, what ails you?”

Mira lifted her head at Alain’s low voice. She wiped her face as he crouched beside her to cradle her. He took a fine linen handkerchief from his pocket and dried her tears, and not for the first time, Mira realized Alain was no common soldier. He had wealth of his own, and status. Under other circumstances he might even have been of a high enough class to court her properly.

“If not for the curse,” she bit out through a fresh veil of tears.

Alain didn’t ask her to elaborate. Instead he bent his mouth to hers and kissed her through the salty wetness. His tongue slipped between her lips until she opened her mouth.

As always, that gentle touch set her body aflame with desire, but Mira struggled this time against the pleasure coursing through her. It would be fleeting, that ecstasy, and leave her with naught in the end.

“What can I do to please you?” Alain asked and cupped her face in his hands. “Only tell me and I’ll do it.”

Mira shook her head. “If you could do it, Alain, you’d have done so already.”

All he could do was kiss her, which he did, and touch her, which he did as well. His hands slid up beneath her skirts and found her bare and ready for him, as she always was. Mira muttered a curse under her breath when his fingers stroked her pearl and the first spasms of climax began building inside her. It was so easy to give in to her body’s longings. Nearly impossible, in fact, to refuse them. Alain brought her to the edge of orgasm with only a few practiced strokes, and when he slid a finger inside her to stroke from the inside as well, Mira shuddered and tossed her head back with a sigh.

“Well, well. What a pretty sight.”

Mira bit down on the strangled cry seeking escape from her throat and looked up. Gerard stood watching them, an unreadable expression on his handsome face. His lips tilted, finally, when Alain’s stroking hand tipped Mira into a helpless rush of orgasm that jerked her entire body. She didn’t look away from Gerard’s eyes the entire time.

Though she had made no secret of the fact both men shared her bed and her body, none of them had ever mentioned it aloud. She’d wondered privately if Gerard and Alain had worked out some sort of system so each could have their turn with her, for they’d never overlapped or intruded upon the other until now.

“Alain,” Gerard said in the voice that made Mira shudder anew with fresh longing. “Have you pleased our lady?”

Alain withdrew his fingers from Mira’s center and slid them along his lips. “I think so, Gerard. But only just once, so far.”

Gerard’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a grin so feral and frightening Mira let out a startled squeak. “We’ll have to remedy that, won’t we?”

They meant to take her at the same time, she saw, and her heart threatened to fly entirely out of her chest, so fiercely did it pound. She’d experienced every intimacy a woman and man could share with both men in front of her, but the thought of them both taking her, both touching her…both fucking her! She shook at the thought.

“What do you suggest?” Alain asked and pinned her with his gaze.

Gerard came up behind him and cupped the back of Alain’s neck in a gesture so intimate Mira’s breath lodged in her throat. She’d known the men were close, and had oft wondered at their friendship, but the way Gerard touched Alain gave proof to what had only been a thought. They were lovers, too.

She’d heard of men who preferred the company of their own sex, yet she knew both of these men to be fervent and skilled lovers. Gerard’s smile grew broader at what must have been a puzzled look upon her face. Alain reached to stroke her cheek, perhaps in reassurance.

“We only want to please you,” Alain said.

Gerard nodded and crooked his finger to her. So accustomed to obeying him had she become, Mira stepped at once toward him. Gerard kissed her as skillfully but with less tenderness than Alain. When he probed without warning between her thighs, she cried out. Her knees sagged a little, but Alain caught her.

“We will take care of you, my lady,” he said. “Don’t fear.”

“I’m not afraid.” Mira wet her lips. Something kindled deep within her. “I’ve been waiting for this.”

“Take off your gown,” Gerard ordered.

Mira didn’t hesitate, though the garden was bright with sunshine and would provide no shadow to hide her nakedness from the eyes of anyone passing. Gerard had commanded it, and so she did it, her nipples already peaked and throbbing and her sex dewed. She tugged open the laces of her gown and dropped the material to the ground, then stepped out of it.

“She is so beautiful, Gerard.”

“She is, indeed, brother of my heart. She is indeed. I want you to get on your knees for her and pleasure her with your tongue.”

Alain ducked his head in acquiescence and Mira parted her legs to allow him access. His tongue, hot and sleek, dove straight to her center and licked and swirled on her until her hips began to rock. She kept her balance with one hand on Alain’s shoulder, but the other drifted from breast to breast, pinching her nipples as Gerard watched, his eyes gleaming.

The front of his breeches tented and he pulled the laces free to push them down over his strong, muscled thighs. His shirt came off over his head until he stood as naked as she. The sun was kind to him, casting him in glittering rays of gold, as if he’d been covered in gilt.

Alain still knelt between her legs, his midnight-black hair streaming over his shoulders. Mira climaxed under his tongue as Gerard watched. Alain kissed her and drew back as Gerard came forward to claim her mouth. When he pulled away, Alain had stripped as well.

Side by side, their differences only proved how well-matched they were. Dark and light.

“Key and lock,” Mira said aloud. “Both of you.”

“And you the door that makes us worth our function,” Alain said as though teasing, but the instant he spoke the words Mira knew them as truth.

“Get on that bench,” Gerard told her. “Alain is going to make love to you now.”

“Oh, yes,” she breathed and settled herself at once onto the carved wooden bench overlooking her favorite flower bed. Far from being too hard or uncomfortable against her bare skin, the smooth, sun-warmed wood caressed her as she lay back and opened her legs for Alain.

He slid inside her with ease, both of them groaning when he sunk to the hilt. He paused before thrusting, but when he began his motions were slow and steady. The bench was high enough off the ground that he could stand, knees slightly bent, to press into her. His hands gripped her hips as he thrust, and when Mira cried out one of them left her curves to stroke her clitoris in time to his thrusts.

The pleasure swept over her in waves so strong they brought tears to her eyes. Alain moved inside her as Mira blinked away the blur and murmured words of encouragement…and love.

It was love, she realized with a wonder even the mind-fuzzing pleasure couldn’t conceal. She loved Alain for his tenderness and gallantry, and her orgasm swept over her as she cried the words over and over.

Alain shouted out his reply as his hips rocked inside her and slowed. They stared into each other’s eyes, smiling, and Mira only looked away when she saw Gerard appear over Alain’s shoulder.

“I love you, too, Gerard,” she said and gave a low cry as Alain’s thrust began another surge of climax building inside her. She loved Gerard for his command and discipline of her.

Each them gave her something different, something she’d craved without knowing it. She loved them both, and at last understood how to break the curse.

Gerard and Alain seemed to have come to the same realization as Mira, for Gerard again cupped the back of Alain’s neck with one large hand. Watching the men kiss sent a thrill through Mira unlike any other she’d experienced. It would have been easy to fear their fondness for each other, to worry she’d have no place with them, but Alain had said she was the door and now, more than ever, Mira felt it.

Gerard kissed Alain but briefly, for Alain still thrust ever so slowly in and out of Mira. Gerard moved behind Alain. His hands gripped Alain’s hips, and in a moment Mira felt the added pressure of Gerard’s thrust inside Alain. The two men moved in perfect tandem, in and out. Alain cried out, his fingers on Mira’s clit pausing their circling, and it was the hesitation in the stimulation that sent her over the edge once more.

Together, the three of them fucked. Together, they made love. And when Gerard cried out first her name and then Alain’s, and Alain shuddered and grunted with his climax, Mira tipped once again into a spiral of ecstasy so great all she could do was let it sweep her away nearly to oblivion.

When they had untangled themselves from her and from each other, Mira kissed and embraced the two men who’d come through her garden gate and changed her life forever. One fair, the other dark. Gilt and midnight, her own dual nature split into two lovers, each providing the final piece of what she needed to love.

More than that.

Each what she needed to be complete.

Newly Fallen

First night, two candles.

Hanukkah was Lilly Gold’s favorite holiday, not for the exchange of gifts or excuse to indulge in fried foods, but because of the concept behind it. Not necessarily the religious reason-commemorating a war had never seemed festive to her. But bringing light into the world, celebrating by creating sparks in the darkness, had always appealed to her.

So had the idea of a miracle.

It didn’t have to be something as incredible as a lamp burning for eight nights on oil meant to last only a few, or some grand victory over much stronger enemies. Nope, Lilly would be happy to settle for discovering a ten-spot in her coat pocket she’d forgotten from last year, or fitting into her skinny jeans, or maybe nabbing a sexy, out-of-season Louis Vuitton for twenty bucks at a yard sale in the rich part of town. Miracles like that might not change the whole world, but they’d change hers. And she was due for some change, she thought as she struck the match to light the first candle.

Thunder in the snow.

The noise came first, followed a bare second later by the bright white flash of lightning, fierce enough to outline the entire backyard. Blinking, Lilly paused, match in hand, to stare through the glass.

Weird.

With the lights on in the kitchen, all she could see was her reflection, two dark eyes in a pale face surrounded by a mass of dark curls, and beyond that, the cascading sheet of snow coming down as fast and thick as rain. The blizzard had been going on since that morning.

The match burned her fingers and with a hiss she blew it out and dropped it in the sink. Lilly stuck her fingertip in her mouth, sucking gently at the sting, as another boom rattled the window. A second later, another flash of light, so bright this time it seared her eyes and left her blinking away spots.

Wasn’t the lightning supposed to come first?

She gripped the sink’s metal edge, leaning forward to look out the kitchen window but unable to get close enough to press her face to the glass. She could hear the shush-shush of the snow against the house. Could feel the chill seeping through the glass. No more thunder, no more lightning. Lilly pushed back from the counter and lit another match, this time managing to get the shamash, the helper candle, lit before the match burned too low.

She said the blessings and used the shamash to light the other one for the first night of Hanukkah. Then she stepped back to admire the menorah of silver and brass. Her grandmother Lillian had given it to her. It was the most beautiful thing Lilly owned.

She set it in the kitchen window because it had no curtains and was close to the sink, which therefore meant nothing would be likely to catch on fire. Lilly had learned that lesson already, in her old apartment. Sure, by the time the super-hot fireman had arrived she’d managed to put out the flames and clear out most of the smoke, and yes, she’d gained a date out of it, but she didn’t want anything like that happening here in her new house.

Her house, hers alone. The one she’d bought and paid for all on her own, and in which she was spending her very first holiday.

Alone.

Hugging herself, Lilly stepped back to admire the tiny kitchen. Her appliances weren’t old enough to be retro-chic, they were just old, and the cabinets and linoleum would definitely need to be replaced, but all that would have to wait. For now, she was just happy to be making the mortgage payments by herself.

She’d lit that menorah every year since her grandma had given it to her just before dying. Five years. It looked different in Lilly’s kitchen window than it had looked in any other place, and Lilly couldn’t stop the grin from teasing her mouth as she watched the flames flicker.

She turned out the lights to get the full effect. The candle flames reflecting in the kitchen window looked twice as beautiful, but she wanted to see them from outside. That was the whole point of putting the menorah in the window, to share the light with the world. Grandma Lillian had always said it was a mitzvah, a good deed, to share the beauty of Hanukkah candles with people outside who might not have menorahs of their own to light. According to Grandma Lillian, when the world was new everything had been light until the vessels of God’s love had been broken, scattering all the sparks across the Earth. Every mitzvah helped gather up a scattered spark and return it. Good deeds were lights in the darkness, each one helping to make the world brighter.

Lilly put her menorah in the window to share her light with the world outside, but she liked to look at it, too, in memory of Grandma Lillian. So, even though at least half a foot of snow had already fallen and it looked like they were going to get another six inches, Lilly opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto her tiny deck.

Right into half a foot of newly fallen snow, all the way up to her shins. Shoot, she ought to have taken the time to slide into a pair of boots, throw on a sweater, at least. Preparation was never her strong point-impulsiveness was Lilly’s forte. With a yelp, dancing in the snow, Lilly pulled the glass door closed behind her and braced herself against the wind.

Uh-oh, what if that weird lightning struck again while she was out here? Danny, her most recent ex, would’ve said it was just like her to get struck by lightning in her backyard in the middle of the blizzard. Well, screw Danny, Lilly thought, eyes squinted against the snow whipping at her face.

She hopped off the deck, meaning to cross the miniscule patch of grass she called a yard to stand in front of the kitchen window. Her ankles were already frozen, her feet numb, so when she suddenly slid she was already bracing herself to end up in a pile of snow.

Heat.

“Huh?” Lilly looked down at the bare circle of earth into which she’d stepped. The snow had…melted? The earth was squishy under her toes and in the faint light from the neighbor’s yard she could see small wisps of steam rising from the bare earth. Even the grass looked…burned?

“What the…?” Lilly stepped back, heart thudding, eyes blinking.

The circle, if she stood in the center, looked to be as wide as her arms stretched out fingertip to fingertip in all directions. Though the snow was still falling heavily from the sky, it melted as soon as it landed on the ground. But she wasn’t in the center, she was still on the edge, because in the center of the strange circle was a man.

A naked man.

Lilly looked immediately into the sky, bracing herself for bright lights, more booming thunder, maybe a tractor beam getting ready to suck her up into the mother ship and probe her ass. Nothing but black sky and more pelting snow. She looked at him again. He crouched on hands and knees, his naked back curved and pale and glittering. Yes, glittering, like Edward from Twilight, only there was no sunshine now and the sparkles faded as she watched.

“Whoa,” Lilly said, awed into less-than-eloquent speech. “Did you just transport here, or what?”

Danny always said Lilly spent too much time believing in the unbelievable, too much effort accepting the strange as ordinary. Well, screw Danny, she thought again. She didn’t step closer, though. Not without seeing the dude’s face, at least. He could have tentacles or something super freaky getting ready to suck out her brains.

Earlier, the thunder had rattled the windows in their frames and pushed at her eardrums. Now outside with nothing between her and the sound, the boom pushed Lilly to her knees. She clapped her hands over her eyes, expecting the light to come next, bracing herself to be fried like an egg by the blast. Nothing came but another roll of noise, softer this time, still throbbing in her eardrums and in her stomach. She understood it this time, though. Words. She took her hands away from her face.

“No,” said the man in front of her, lifting his head.

Face-to-face, she could see he didn’t have tentacles or laser beams for eyes. If anything, he had an ordinary face, the kind designed to never get a second glance. In shadows it was hard to make out his features, but Lilly got a hint of dark brows, dark eyes, a curving mouth.

She was soaked and shuddering from cold, despite the freakish heat of the ground under her now muddy hands. All of this was too surreal, yet she heard herself say, “No what?”

“No, not transported,” the man said. He stood, tall, the sleet and snow parting around him, not even touching him. “Fallen.”

* * *

“So you…fell.” Lilly turned from the microwave with a mug of hot cocoa in her hand and set it on the table in front of him.

The man, still naked beneath the afghan Grandma Lillian had knitted, looked curiously at the mug, then her. “Yes.”

“From…a…plane?”

“No.”

“From something else?”

He smiled, slow. It was like watching chocolate melt. That sweet, that rich. That good. “You could say that.”

Lilly leaned against the counter, her arms crossed, and eyed him. “Unless it’s super cold where you come from, you’d better drink that cocoa so you don’t get pneumonia. Shit.” She had a very bad, very sudden thought. “Are you going to go all War of the Worlds on me?”

“Hmm? What does that mean?” The man shifted, the afghan slipping on his broad, naked shoulders.

“You’re not going to get sick and die on me if I sneeze, are you?”

“I don’t think so.” He gave her another of those smiles. He lifted the mug to his mouth and sipped, then let out a completely decadent, sensual sigh. “Ah, I had no idea. They told me this would be good, but…”

“They, who?”

“The others who came before me.”

Lilly let out a small, shivery gasp. “Others who came before you? Like, oh, shit…at Roswell?”

He gave her another curious glance. “You are very trusting.”

“Because I let you in, instead of calling the police?” She laughed. “Trusting, or stupid. But my grandma always told me it was important to be kind to strangers, since you never knew who you might be entertaining without knowing it.”

“Your grandmother was a wise woman, and you are not stupid, Lilly Gold.”

“You know my name!” She scooted along the counter a few steps away from him.

“Would you imagine otherwise, that I should land in your backyard without knowing who you were?”

“Oh.” She watched him finish the cocoa. He made another of those moaning sounds and licked his lips, and she watched his tongue. “What’s your name?”

“You could not pronounce my name.”

Lilly laughed, loud enough to offend him if he was the sort to take offense. He didn’t appear to be. He smiled at her while she guffawed.

“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.

He shook his head. The afghan slipped further down, baring his chest. She couldn’t see the rest of him hidden by the table, but she had no trouble remembering what he looked like. Underneath he might be tentacles and scales, but on the surface he was all very, very hot dude.

“I am not kidding. I have answered to many names. You couldn’t pronounce the one I use most often.”

All this was too surreal, even with Lilly’s admittedly very broad worldview. “So what should I call you, if I can’t pronounce your name?”

“You could call me Zachariah.”

“Is that your name?”

“I told you-”

“Right, right,” she said, waving a hand. “Okay, Zach. You show up naked in my backyard in the middle of a blizzard. Tell me, please, what I’m supposed to do with you?”

That smile again. Slow and creamy and rich and delicious. Lilly forgot, for a moment, to breathe.

“Anything you want.”

All this should’ve been too much. Too strange, too crazy-out-there, too…something. But all Lilly could do was watch, fascinated, as Zachariah’s tongue slipped over his lower lip. His eyes gleamed. He had lovely dark eyes.

“Anything?” she asked, her voice hoarse and not sounding like her own.

He nodded, just once, then tilted his head to stare at her with heavy-lidded eyes and that damned smile. “Anything.”

“What if I asked you to leave? Right now?” She pointed with a barely shaking finger at the sliding glass doors. Snow had melted in front of it, from her feet, not his. He’d tracked nothing inside with his bare feet.

“Do you want me to leave?”

He stood, the blanket falling off his shoulders. He might’ve come from some mother ship or some strange planet where they didn’t speak a language she could pronounce, but he looked every inch a human male. Broad shoulders and chest tapering to a lean waist. Strong thighs. Nicely muscled and curving ass she could see as he stepped out from behind the table. Lilly had never been a fan of full-frontal nudity on dudes-too often she felt like giggling at the sight of shrimplike dicks curled tight in shrinkage, or even aroused cocks, bobbing as their owners walked.

But this guy…this Zach, this stranger…

“Wow,” she said, throat dry. “Um…”

He held out his hands and fixed her with a stare she felt unable to look away from. “If you tell me so, I’ll have to go.”

“Is that, like, a rule or something?”

“Something like that.”

Lilly swallowed again. “Why are you here?”

“I told you. To do anything you want. Be anything you want. What you need.”

“Why me?”

At this, he tilted his head again. She thought there might be a flicker of something in those dark eyes, but she couldn’t be sure. “I wasn’t told the reasons.”

She shook her head at this. “What happens if I tell you to leave?”

“I will fail in my task.”

Damn, his voice was as soft and low and deep and rich and butter-creamy as his smile. As his eyes. This wasn’t a battle Lilly could readily win; she knew this about herself, at least, and didn’t try to pretend otherwise.

“And if you fail?”

A definite flash that time. “I don’t intend to fail.”

“You drop out of the sky, naked, and come into my house telling me you’re here to be anything I want, what I need, for crying out loud, and I’m supposed to just accept this? How do I know you’re not just some random crazy stalker freak with a degree in theatrical special effects?”

“You can’t know,” Zach said, “but you should have faith.”

She scoffed at that. In the window, her candles had burned out at last. The wind whipped snow against the glass. There’d be no work tomorrow. The governor had already called a state of emergency, and not even Lilly’s boss would expect her to come out in this.

“I should feel weirder about this. Did you have something to do with that? Are you doing some sort of mind freak on me?”

“I am making this as easy for you I can,” Zachariah said, “but in the end, it’s your own heart and mind that must accept.”

“Right,” Lilly said. She clapped her hands together briskly. “Well, on that note, I’m going to bed. Alone,” she added when he seemed about to speak. “And I’m going to lock my door and sleep with my phone under my pillow. And I have a knife, too.”

“Under your pillow?”

“I’ll put it there,” she said, narrowing her eyes, though she could detect no signs he was mocking her. “You can sleep on the couch.”

“If that’s where you want to put me, then that’s where I’ll sleep.”

Lilly made a low, disgruntled noise, the one Danny had always hated. Screw Danny. She eased past the tall, naked man and down the hall toward her bedroom, half-tensed in anticipation that he’d follow her and half-hoping he would. He didn’t, and in another minute or so she opened her door again to toss him a pair of sweatpants too big for her.

“You can wear these.”

He made a shadow in the hallway. It stretched down to touch her, though he made no move at doing so. “Thank you, Lilly.”

“I’m locking this door,” she reminded him. “Don’t you try anything crazy. And if you’re going to steal something, make sure you break a lot of stuff, too, so I can prove the break-in for the insurance.”

“I’m not going to steal anything.”

She made that noise again, and this time thought she heard a soft chuff of laughter. It warmed her as much as his smile and voice had. As much as the look. He was definitely mind-freaking her, what else could it be?

* * *

In the morning, Lilly awoke to the smell of something good. Coffee, eggs. Bagels? She swung her feet out of bed, wincing when her toes touched the cold floor.

In the kitchen, Zach stood over the stove. He wore the sweatpants she’d given him but nothing else. He was thinner than she remembered, but more muscular. When he turned to face her, in the snow-bright light of day, she wondered how she could ever have thought his face was ordinary.

“Good morning, Lilly.”

“Breakfast?”

“You need to eat when you awake, or else you suffer.”

She smiled. “You mean everyone around me suffers.”

Zach inclined his head in the way he had of looking her over. “I don’t wish to suffer.”

She sat at the table, waiting again for a sense of unreality to wash over her. A sense of something other than perfect normality. It didn’t come. She only felt hungry.

He set the plate on the table and took the chair across from her. He folded his hands, one over the other. He watched her.

Lilly paused, fork halfway to her mouth. “You don’t eat?”

“I don’t need to eat yet.”

“You drank cocoa last night.”

“That was for the pleasure of it,” he said. “Not a need for sustenance.”

“They send you down here with like what, a week’s worth of stored-up energy?”

“Something like that, yes.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you saying that because it’s true or because you want to agree with me?”

“It’s true. You know more than you think you could, Lilly.”

“Mind freak,” she muttered and bit into the fluffy, perfectly cooked eggs. He’d spread her bagel with cream cheese and lox in just the right amounts. She washed down both bites with hot coffee brewed just right.

Zach sat and watched her. He had thick, dark brows to match his thick, dark hair. Dark eyes. Big, strong hands.

Lilly put down her fork and licked her lips. “Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“That’s no answer.”

Zach shrugged, never looking away from her eyes. “It’s my answer.”

Lilly sipped coffee while she thought. She looked out the sliding glass doors. The snow had piled up, drifted, waist-high. Outside she could see more drifts, more snow. She lived in at the end of a cul-de-sac, usually the last street to be plowed. She hadn’t yet heard the plows go by. They were stuck here for hours, if not the entire day.

“Tell me you know how to play board games, Zach.”

“I can learn whatever you want to teach me.”

She smiled. “Is that so?”

Zach smiled, too. She was prepared for it this time, but it still affected her. “This is so.”

“All right then,” she said. “Let’s play.”

* * *

Seven hours later he’d thoroughly kicked her ass in Scrabble, but she’d wiped him out in Trivial Pursuit. Zach, it seemed, knew a lot of big words but not much about pop culture. He had lit a fire in her never-before-used fireplace, waving a hand over the sodden wood from a pile on the deck Lilly hadn’t even known she had, and coaxing it into flame.

He hadn’t put on a shirt, which was fine by her. He had a very, very hot body, even with the strange and random sparkling thing his skin did. Not like Edward Cullen, Lilly thought as he got up to poke at the fire. Softer than that, more like ripples of iridescent color.

He caught her staring. “Would you like another game?”

“Why do you look like us?”

“I do not look like you, Lilly Gold.”

“No.” She scooted closer to study his bare skin. “I mean, like us. Like humans. Like a man.”

“I am as I was made. How else should I look?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But your skin…glows.”

He looked down at himself, then at her. “Does it?”

“Yeah. See?” She ran a fingertip down his arm to his wrist and watched the way the light subtly shifted over his skin. She put her arm next to his, to show him. Skin to skin, heat. Her breath caught.

Zach caught her wrist, turned her arm, traced a line down the soft inner flesh of her forearm. The faintest blush followed his touch. Lilly shivered, feeling it all over.

She was getting a pretty good idea, maybe not of what she needed, but what she might want from him. Which was just crazy insane, crazier even than him being from another planet. But was it?

She’d slept with three guys since she left Danny, and not one of them had she known more about than what she knew about the man in front of her-a first name. She hadn’t spent a day playing board games with any of them, either. She hadn’t done anything with them other than go home and fuck them.

“At least I know you’re not a vampire,” she whispered as his finger traced more heat over her skin. “You’re not cold.”

Zach looked surprised. “Would you think I am?”

Lilly shook her head slowly, aware of how close they were sitting. She could feel heat radiating from him, hotter than the fire. She could see the reflection of flames in his deep brown eyes. “Where did you come from? Does it have a name?”

“It has many names.”

She quirked a grin at him. “Could I pronounce any of them?”

His laugh, low and rumbly, tickled her belly like a sudden, sharp drop. “No. But your people have names for where I’m from.”

“Mars? Venus? Saturn? No, someplace farther away than that. Right? Has to be.”

“Both farther away and closer than you could ever think,” Zach said. His fingers traced another pattern on her skin.

Outside, night had fallen. Lilly got to her feet, a little unsteady in the aftermath of Zach’s tender touch. He looked up at her.

“The candles,” she said. “It’s time to light the candles.”

Zach unfolded himself from the floor and followed her to the kitchen. Second night, three candles. Lilly shook them from the box, concentrating on this simple task to keep her mind from going to other strange places. She placed the candles in their holders, lit the shamash and murmured the blessing, suddenly self-conscious until she heard Zach’s deep voice speaking the words along with her.

“Baruk atta Adonai, Eloheynu Melekh Ha-olom, Asher Kiddeshanu Bo-mitsvoytov viztivanu Lehadlik Ner Shel Hanukkah,” he said. “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by His commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the lights of Hanukkah.”

As with everything else that had happened, him knowing the blessing should’ve surprised her, and it didn’t. Together they stared at the candles’ reflection flickering in the window glass. Zach had a way with silence, of making spaces between words that were somehow as meaningful as speech itself.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Lilly said quietly, watching the wax begin to drip.

Zach, silent, took her hand. Their fingers linked. Palm to palm. Skin to skin again. That was reply enough for her.

* * *

Gray skies the next morning forecast more snow. Mid-state was being slammed with severe weather warnings. The plows still hadn’t gone by and a quick call to the local borough office earned Lilly a recorded greeting stating that all crews were working, but there was no guarantee of any service soon. In case of emergency, she was supposed to call the police or fire department, but Lilly had no emergency. Her boss had closed the office in response to the governor’s declaration of a state of emergency. Nobody was going to work.

“When I was a kid, I used to pray for snow days.” Lilly looked out the window at the falling flakes adding to the inches already on the ground. She yawned and stretched, feeling decadent, and shot him a grin.

Zach smiled. “I know.”

“Do you?” She studied him. He’d slept on the couch again last night. If in fact, he slept. Since he didn’t eat she couldn’t be sure. She hadn’t locked her door and had thought she’d lie awake in anticipation again, but had slept dreamless and hard. “What else do you know about me?”

“Much. Not enough. I could learn more. You could tell me.”

She thought of how his fingers had slipped into hers and of his warmth. “Do you look like you do because of me?”

Zach hesitated, tilting his head in that way he had. Like he was taking the time to really think before answering. “Yes.”

Lilly nodded. She thought as much. “Can I see what you really look like?”

“Your eyes can’t see my true form any more than your voice could pronounce my real name.” Zach shook his head and swept a hand over his body, giving her that look. “But this form pleases you, doesn’t it?”

“My grandma always told me it wasn’t what a person looked like on the outside, but what was inside that counted. What was underneath.”

“Your grandma said many smart things.”

Lilly looked him over, no longer waiting for this to feel weird. If it didn’t by now, it never would. “Do you want to watch a movie?”

“I would like to do whatever you want.”

“Well,” Lilly said with a laugh, “that’s a first.”

As was the way with gray days, she fell asleep on the couch halfway through the movie. She awoke to setting darkness and a warm chest beneath her cheek. A hand stroking her hair. And a sense of peace and satisfaction she hadn’t felt in…well, ever.

She didn’t move, her eyes still closed, though she was fully awake. Somehow they’d shifted so she lay against Zach, cradled on his strong thighs. His chest rose and fell beneath her cheek, and the steady, strong thump of his heart vibrated against her. Her hand rested on his tight belly.

She knew she should move, but didn’t want to. It was that not wanting that got her up, hair disheveled and eyes gritty. She rubbed at her face. He was smiling.

“It’s time to light the candles.” Lilly’s voice was hoarse, maybe from sleep. Maybe something else.

“Yes.”

Third night, four candles. She lit the shamash and the first and second, then held it out to Zach. “Do you want to light some?”

Those dark eyes widened a little. “I would like to. Yes.”

His hand closed over hers. Took the candle. He lit the others and settled the shamash back in its place, higher than the others. They both stared at the flames.

“I’m hungry,” Lilly said. “Let’s make latkes.”

Together they grated potatoes and onions, minced garlic. Lilly filled the pan with oil and turned on the burner. She scooped potato mush into the oil and the delicious smell of frying latkes made her mouth water.

They talked while she cooked and he watched. She told him jokes, and he laughed. She spoke of her childhood, her job, her past relationships. Zach listened, his silence again as much a conversation as anything he said.

“Nobody’s ever listened the way you do,” Lilly said when the latkes were cooked and set on the table along with the traditional applesauce and her favorite, sour cream. “I mean, people hear, but they don’t always listen.”

“Then they’ve lost a great opportunity, Lilly.”

“Don’t I know it.” She put two plates on the table and sat, adding latkes to hers.

Zach sat, too, and used a fork to stab a latke onto his plate. He cut it into smaller pieces and ate one as she watched. His eyes closed. His features smoothed into an expression so serene, so sensual, Lilly’s throat dried.

His mouth glistened with oil. He tasted like latkes when he kissed her, and of something else she couldn’t figure out. He tasted of laughter and comfort and desire, and she pulled away from him, shaking. Zach’s hand stroked her hair, then cupped her cheek.

Lilly looked into his eyes and lost herself inside his gaze. Everything she wanted, all she needed was right there before her, if only she could allow herself to take it. Every muscle tensed, but Zach didn’t kiss her again.

That night, she left her door not just unlocked, but open, and slept again without dreams all the way through the night.

* * *

“If you’re going to build a snowman, you’re going to need some warmer clothes.” Lilly looked Zach up and down on his place stretched out on the couch. “I don’t have boots or a coat to fit you. I can find a sweatshirt, I think. Hat, gloves. But do you even need things like that?”

He sat and looked at himself. “This body would suffer the cold the same as yours.”

“Oh, bother.” She tapped her finger against her cheek. Four days snowed-in was making her stir-crazy. They still couldn’t go anywhere, and more snow, incredibly, had been predicted, but they could at least go into her miniscule backyard and get some fresh air.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I think I have a box of some stuff that might work in the garage.”

Leftover junk from Danny she’d meant to toss in the trash but never had. Rummaging through it, she found a pair of worn boots that might fit Zach, along with a long-sleeved thermal shirt. The sleeves were too short and left his wrists bare, and the hem rode up a bit on his belly, but the fit was so tight it clung to him in a way she had to admit was delicious.

She couldn’t stop thinking of his kiss.

She didn’t really want to.

In the yard they made a snowman and a snow lady. Mrs. Peterson from next door leaned out her back door and told them they were crazy, but she was laughing as she said it, and she invited them both into her house for hot cocoa.

“Your new young man seems very nice,” Mrs. Peterson said when Zach excused himself to use the bathroom.

At first, Lilly was too busy pondering the fact that he had needed to use the bathroom to answer. She guessed if he ate, he needed to use the toilet, too. But then Mrs. Peterson’s words got through.

“Zach?”

“Oh, yes. He’s very handsome, Lilly. And so much going on in those eyes. How did you meet him?”

Mrs. Peterson didn’t know the half of it. Fortunately, Lilly didn’t have to come up with an explanation, since Zach came out from the bathroom. Cocoa finished, they went back across the yards, through the snow, as the sky got dark again.

Fourth night, five candles.

They shared the lighting of them, and the blessing, and when Lilly suggested they go outside to look at the menorah through the glass, the way she had the night Zach first arrived, he agreed without hesitation.

She should’ve been cold, but with Zach’s arm around her, all Lilly felt was delicious warmth. The light from the candles didn’t shine far, but looking at the light also made her feel warm. Everything about this felt right.

Looking down at Zach’s feet clad in the castoff boots of her ex-lover, Lilly realized that for the first time in the past six months, she’d thought of Danny without “Screw Danny” riding coattail.

Zach had done that for her. Led her to letting that go. She found his hand, neither of them wearing gloves. His long, strong fingers, fully male. Warm. She looked up at him.

“Let’s make snow angels.”

Zach blinked, then laughed. He kissed her. “If that’s what you want.”

Laughing, Lilly flopped back in the snow and moved her arms and legs, making the angel’s wings and robes while Zach watched.

“Don’t you want to make one?” she asked him, breathless with laughter, with chill, with desire.

He shook his head. She held up her hand for him to take so she could get up, but instead, he moved to her. He covered her with his heat. His mouth found hers. She opened for him, his tongue. She wrapped herself around him, arms and legs. Snow found its way into many strange places and made her shiver even as his heat kept her from being cold.

They kissed that way forever or maybe only a minute or two. There wasn’t enough light for him to sparkle, but she had no trouble seeing his face. Lilly touched his brows, his cheeks and chin. She kissed his mouth.

“Let’s go inside,” she said.

He got up first, pulled her to her feet. Together they looked at the impression they’d left in the snow. It looked nothing like an angel, and she laughed.

“We ruined it.”

Zach kissed her again. “I don’t think so.”

She wasn’t going to argue with that. Instead, Lilly took him by the hand. Inside, they stripped off their wet clothes and left them in piles on the floor, then their dry clothes, too. She’d seen him naked already and thought she might feel shy about being that way in front of him, but she didn’t.

Nothing about Zach made her shy.

“You are perfect,” she told him.

“You’re beautiful,” Zach said.

She believed him. It would’ve been romantic to lie down with him in front of the fire, to make sweet love the way it happened in movies, but she didn’t want to wait long enough for him to build a fire. All at once, Lilly felt she’d waited four days too long already. She jumped a little, and he caught her, not hesitating a second as she wrapped her arms and legs around him and found his mouth to kiss.

He was lean, but strong. He held her as though she weighed nothing, which definitely wasn’t true. His mouth opened under hers. His tongue stroked, his lips nibbled.

“Bedroom,” Lilly breathed, looking into his eyes. Fathomless, dark eyes.

Zach took her there.

Inside, they fell onto her bed in a tangle of limbs. Zach rolled them until she was on top. The soft material of her panties pulled snug as she straddled him. She already needed him so much the fabric had gone damp.

“Is that what you meant,” she asked him between kisses, “when you said you’d be what I need?”

Zach paused in his exploration of her mouth to stroke a hand over her hair. His mouth curved, smiling, but his eyes were serious. “Yes.”

“Sex? I need sex?”

Both hands skimmed her shoulders, her arms, down her sides to settle on her hips. “You tell me.”

“I’m telling you,” she whispered and bent to kiss him again.

It was what she needed. Simple, pure pleasure, unsullied and uncomplicated by anything as messy as emotion. No expectations. Nothing now but focused desire.

Her nipples went tight when his palms slid up to cup her breasts. In the next second when his fingertips tweaked them, Lilly gasped and rocked on his cock, her panties the only barrier between them. His cock thickened against her and his hips bumped upward.

He knew just how to touch her, and why this surprised her when nothing else about this entire situation had, Lilly didn’t know. Maybe because no man had ever seemed to know so how smoothly to touch her, or for how long, or with what strength to tug on her desire-swollen nipples. If this was the result of mind-freaking, she was totally okay with it.

She leaned to kiss him again. He tasted so good

Zach slid one hand from her breast to press his thumb between her legs. It circled her clit gently, and Lilly sighed. She put her hands flat on his chest.

If he hadn’t faltered, if the man beneath her had made every move just right, continued that mind fuck, Lilly would’ve been disconcerted enough to stall her orgasm. It would’ve been too much for him to know her so well, so perfectly, that she need say nothing to him about what she liked.

She realized even this was for her, this hesitation, as Zach ran his hands over her body. As he looked into her eyes, a question in his, waiting for her to answer. He really did know what she needed.

“Touch me,” Lilly said. Neither command nor demand, but a soft and subtle plea. “Please, Zach. Touch me. Here. Like this.”

She placed his hand in hers and stroked it over her body. Her breasts, the nipples tight, peaked, throbbing. Over her belly. The slope of her hips. Over the curves of her ass. Between her legs again, his fingertips stroking the soft satin of her panties and the tight, hard knot of her clit inside.

She lost herself in his gaze. Like looking into a night sky without stars-and thinking of that, she wondered again where he’d come from and why he’d found her. But when she parted her lips to ask, all that came out was a sigh quickly captured by his mouth. Suddenly, knowing didn’t seem so important. Not with the magic his hands were making on her skin.

She touched him, too. His skin, hot and smooth under her palms, tempted her lips to kiss, teeth to nibble. Tongue to slide out and taste. She bent forward to fix her mouth on the jut of his collarbone. She bit a little too fiercely when his thumb pressed just right on her clit, but Zach didn’t flinch.

Lilly pulled away to look at him. His cock, thick and long and lovely, was hard between her legs, but he was so silent it was hard to tell if he was enjoying this as much as she was. She curled her fingers around his shaft and stroked, slowly. She was rewarded with a groan.

His eyes fluttered closed, then open. His cock pulsed in her hand. His hands ceased their roaming.

Lilly paused in her stroking. She sat on his thighs, hard with muscle, and looked between them to her hand, full of his erection. She’d felt power like this before. Using her hand or her mouth to make a man come.

It was different this time. All of it was different. He was; she was. Together they made something a mere four days ago she never would’ve said could be true and now couldn’t imagine in any other way.

Lilly shifted enough to get her panties off and then tossed them aside. She couldn’t hold back her groan as the hot, bare flesh of her cunt at last touched him. She had to pause, shaking, her thighs clutching his hips and her head bent so her hair fell over her face. She had to catch her breath.

“Lilly?”

Again, his dark gaze drew her in, and Lilly stopped thinking about anything else but this. Moment. She shifted, took him in her hand, rubbed the head of his cock against her entrance. Wetting him.

She was so wet, so slick and hot, he slid in without effort. His gasp rumbled, deep and male and so thoroughly aroused it sent a shiver through her.

Lilly moved on his cock, torturously slow. Her thighs gripped him, her hips tilted. She ground herself onto his cock so her clit rubbed his tight belly. She placed her hands flat on his chest, ran her fingers through the crisp, curling hair over his nipples.

Her hair fell again over her face, and Zach drew his fingers across her forehead to push it away. Lilly had been with men who spoke more, but Zach’s every gesture, every look, said more than any lover she’d ever had.

They moved together, slow at first and faster. The first bright, sparkling waves of orgasm started moving inside her, and Lilly gave herself over to them. She gave it up to the overwhelming power of desire, of ecstasy. Passion coiled tight inside her and exploded, an internal big bang that left her shaking and crying out his name.

She opened her eyes when he moaned her name. Her fingers had dug grooves into his flesh, and she smoothed the marks with the pads of her fingertips and watched them disappear, leaving only redness behind.

Zach smiled. He drew her down for another kiss. “What are you thinking?”

She stretched herself out over him. “You can’t tell?”

His hands cupped her ass to press her against him. “Not everything.”

Lilly’s body ached in the best way, from fulfillment. She propped herself on her elbow to look into his face. When she kissed him, Zach tasted pleasantly of salt. “No?”

He traced her brows. “No. Every day…”

“Every day what?”

“The longer I stay here, Lilly, the less I will be able to see inside you.”

She blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“The longer I stay here, the more I’ll become like you. And eventually…”

She ran her hand over his chest. “Eventually, what? The mother ship will come and beam you back up?”

“Eventually, Lilly, if I don’t return to where I came from, I’ll die.”

* * *

Fifth night, six candles.

They hadn’t spoken further about Zach staying or leaving. He’d turned the conversation deftly away from that topic and Lilly had let him. In the morning, he made her breakfast again and they both looked out into the yard to see another few inches of newly fallen snow.

“We’ll never get out,” she said.

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Zach, wearing the sweatpants she’d given him but chest bare, drew her close. “I can think of a lot of ways to occupy our time.”

He sounded different today, unless it was her imagination. Lilly turned in the circle of his arms to face him. He looked a little different, too. Same dark eyes, thick dark hair, heavy brows. Yet something in his eyes had changed.

“Hmm,” Lilly mused and allowed him to pull her closer and nuzzle at her neck. “I wonder what that might be?”

“I can show you.”

She held him at arm’s length for a moment, studying him. “Zachariah.”

“Yes.” His gaze captured hers, held it.

“It’s an unusual name.”

“Depends on where you’re from.” He slipped his hands down to anchor at her hips.

His grin tempted her to return it. “True. I guess in Amish country it’s not so unusual. But you’re not Amish.”

“No, I’m not. But neither are you.” His mouth brushed hers and as his grin had tempted her to smile, so did his kiss.

Last night’s sex had been good enough to sate her for a few days-if this had been a normal situation, a normal man, but nothing about this was normal. His mouth and hands on her sent her mind spiraling straight into visions of sheer, blowing curtains and white, gigantic beds, of soft, pulsing music and writhing bodies.

“What is it about you,” she murmured against his lips, “that makes me feel like I’m in an early eighties high-concept music video?”

“Should I sing?” Zach traced the line of her jaw with his lips.

Lilly’s eyes had drifted half-shut with pleasure. She smiled. “Mmm, only if I can tease my hair and wear shoulder pads.”

“You may choose to do whatever you like with your hair, Lilly, but I’d prefer you to be naked with me now.”

She looked at him. She’d put on a loose cotton robe imprinted with a Japanese flower print. It should’ve been too light for winter temperatures, especially with all the snow, but even though she’d kept the thermostat low, the house had stayed at a comfortably warm temperature. Because of Zach, she thought, running her hands over his warm, bare skin.

Now she untied the belt and let the robe fall open. She was naked beneath it. There hadn’t seemed much point in putting on clothes now, as though they would be going outside or doing anything but what’d they’d done all night.

Did she need this? She still wasn’t sure. But she wanted it.

There in the kitchen, without fanfare, he went to his knees in front of her. He pressed his face to her belly, his hands cupping her rear. Every inch of her tingled at his touch, and again Lilly’s eyes fluttered closed. She had to force herself to open them. She didn’t want to miss a moment of this.

It wasn’t going to last.

That was why it was so easy to let him kiss her, touch her, lick her, stroke her. It wasn’t whatever mind-freak powers he had or the snow outside making it impossible for them to leave. It wasn’t her innately horny nature, which had led her to many a bed she’d later regretted. This wasn’t going to last and she didn’t want to waste a second. Not one breath, not one kiss.

Zach kissed her belly just over the small tattoo of interlocking hearts that formed the shape of a star and then looked up at her hiss. “Does that tickle?”

Lilly put her hand on top of his head. “Feels good.”

“I would have all this feel good.” He bent back to nuzzle along her hip and down her thigh.

He guided her back one step as one long arm reached to pull one of the kitchen chairs closer. The sound of the legs scraping the linoleum sent a shiver through her, but she giggled as he pushed her gently to sit. Her knees were already parting for him.

Zach stood long enough to shuck off his sweatpants before getting back on his knees. If the floor hurt them he didn’t show a sign of it. He looked into Lilly’s eyes and smiled, one side of his mouth tipping higher than the other.

“Wicked,” she murmured and touched his cheek. “You look wicked.”

“Some might say so,” Zach said in a low voice, but before she could ask him what he meant, he’d bent to kiss between her legs.

All speech became sighs. With everything they’d done the night before and into early morning, he hadn’t yet gone down on her. Lilly’s hips tipped up under his lips. Her fingers gripped the chair on either side of her. She slid her tongue over her lower lip, capturing the faintest flavor he’d left behind.

His mouth moved slowly, softly, sweet kisses interspersed with gentle suction on her clit. It was often hard for Lilly to abandon herself to a man’s tongue on her pussy-too often she worried about whether she’d shaved enough, if it was going to take her too long to come, if he really wanted to go down on her or if he was doing it out of a sense of obligation.

She didn’t worry about any of that with Zach. As she’d done from the moment she’d met him, Lilly gave herself up to whatever lay ahead. To his fingers stroking her inner thighs, to his lips and tongue on her clit. The chair creaked as her body moved.

Zach slid one of her legs over his shoulder and focused his tongue in smooth circles against her clit. Not too hard, not too fast, but with enough direct and constant pressure to build the desire that hadn’t really left her despite her earlier orgasms.

Lilly looked down at him, her fingers tightly wound in his hair. His eyes were closed. She’d never looked at him without him looking back. Now all she could see were those brows, the fringe of black lashes and the slope of his nose. Broad shoulders and if she peeked, the expanse of his back and a hint of his ass. His right hand gripped her thigh, but his left had gone between his legs, moving on his cock.

“That is so fucking sexy.” The words spilled out of her on a gasp.

Zach didn’t say anything, but she felt his smile against her and saw it in the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. His breath huffed out as his arm moved a little faster. Oral sex and hand jobs had always been foreplay, but she wasn’t going to last long enough to get that far.

His tongue moved faster, steady, smooth flat strokes in perfect time with his arm’s motion. Lilly shifted, pushing herself against his tongue. Her hands held the chair so tight her fingers had gone a little numb; she’d think about that in a minute when she could think about something other than the bright, blinding pleasure flooding her and overflowing.

She came with a low moan. Her eyes closed, so she didn’t see the furrow of his brow, the jerk of his shoulders as Zach came, too. She could imagine it, though, on the sound of the moan answering hers. Then the climax rippled through her and made it impossible to imagine anything at all.

Blinking as sweet pleasure faded, leaving behind warmth and heaviness in every limb, Lilly looked at the man still kneeling in front of her. Sweat had pasted a few strands of his hair to his forehead. He licked his lips, drew in a breath. He kissed each thigh and withdrew just enough for her to see all of him.

His belly gleamed, wet. Zach drew his fingers through it and rubbed them together, then shook his head. The look he gave her was bemused.

“This body,” he said. “What a great miracle, to make life.”

Lilly, languid and sated, pulled him by the shoulder to bring him close enough to kiss. “I’ve met a lot of men who thought what came out of their pricks was magic, but never one who thought it was a miracle.”

He laughed. “But it is.”

He took her hand and ran it across the sticky wetness. With anyone else, Lilly would’ve squirmed, wrinkled her nose, pulled away. With Zach, she let him make her feel it, already drying on his skin.

“Nes Gadol Haya Sham,” he murmured into her mouth. “A great miracle happened there. Yes?”

This struck Lilly so funny she giggled, and the giggle became a guffaw. “Nun, gimmel, hay, shin. Just like on the dreidel!”

Zach got to his feet and pulled her up with him, into his arms. “Yes. Just like that.”

“Dude, I have to tell you, I’ve never met a guy who compared his come with spinning a dreidel.” She laughed a little more, interrupted by his kisses.

“All of this,” Zach told her, “is a miracle.”

And Lilly believed him.

* * *

Sixth night, seven candles.

They’d eaten all the latkes and decided against more. Spun the dreidel, playing for peanuts, literally. Lilly’d shown Zach how to crack the shells and eat the nuts inside, and now when she kissed him she thought of baseball and the circus.

“Do you know baseball?” she asked, curious.

“I do.”

“How? From inside my head? Intercepted space transmissions? What?” She was straddling him on the couch, their bellies touching, the tips of her breasts brushing his chest.

Zach shifted her weight just slightly to stretch out his long legs. He was silent for so long Lilly wondered if she’d somehow misstepped. Then he said, slowly, “Lilly, I should tell you something.”

She tucked his hair behind his ears and cupped his face. “If you tell me your real name is Joe Smith and you’re from Milwaukee, and all of this is some elaborate setup, I swear to you I will kick that very fine ass from here all the way back to Wisconsin.”

“No. I’m not from Milwaukee. But I’m not what you think I am.”

They’d made love on and off all day, his stamina impressive and hers unexpectedly astounding. Even so, his cock stirred, half-hard between them. Lilly shifted to press her belly to him.

“Nobody ever is, Zach.” She’d meant this to sound light and not philosophical. Certainly not sad. She surely hadn’t meant for tears to fill her eyes or clog her throat.

He looked solemn and brought up a thumb to brush away the tear Lilly was aching to pretend she hadn’t shed. “I’m sorry for the hurts that have been done to you.”

“I’m not the only woman who’s had a shitty love life. It could’ve been worse. I could’ve been with men who abused me or stole from me. Addicts. I could’ve been with men who treated me a lot worse than simply not…loving me.”

Spoken aloud, she sounded more pathetic. Lilly bit down hard to keep herself from saying more. She didn’t want to look at his face, but she did. This time when he kissed her, he breathed in as she breathed out.

Zach unclipped the barrette keeping her hair piled high. “You have beautiful hair.”

Her dark curls fell down over her shoulders and back, tickling and erotic. He pulled the locks forward over her breasts, covering them yet with no pretense at modesty. Heat, not a blush, swept over her at his scrutiny.

“Should I dance for you?” she asked.

Zach tilted his head, giving her that curious look she’d seen less and less of since they’d had sex. “Would you like to?”

“With my hair this way I feel like I should be doing the Dance of the Seven Veils or something.”

Zach laughed. “If it would please you to dance for me, Lilly, I’d be happy to watch.”

“Wait here.” She got off his lap and went to the bedroom for a handful of silk scarves she’d collected over the years. From her jewelry box she grabbed a belled ankle bracelet that had been a holiday gift in an office gift exchange-she’d given a gift certificate to a local restaurant and felt cheated in return, but was grateful for it, now.

Swathed in silk and lace, jingling with each step, her hair unbound and wild, Lilly returned to the living room. Zach hadn’t moved. On her iPod she found an old playlist, all songs with sexy, sensual beats. Songs to fuck to. She couldn’t remember who she’d made it for, if anyone, and decided it didn’t matter.

When the music began she turned, hip cocked, to face him. “Are you sure you can handle this?”

“Yes.” Zach’s cock had gotten harder as he watched her. His hand gripped the base with fingers loosely curled. Not stroking just yet, but if she had her way he’d be full-on fucking his fist before long.

Lilly loved to dance. In a club, at the gym in aerobics class, in her kitchen while making dinner. She never felt self-conscious about it. Music moved her. If she wanted to shake and shimmy, she did it.

It was different with an audience.

A cock of hip, a twist of her ankle made the bells jingle. The scarves fluttered as she lifted her arms. Step, step, shake, shake. The music filled her and she spun until she was dizzy. She stopped, and the world kept on, moving though she was still.

Zach didn’t move.

He’d seemed like something from another world the first time she’d seen him, but now with his prick in his fist Lilly had trouble seeing him as anything but a man. And this, she discovered with something akin to wonder as she shifted her hips and moved closer, was not a bad thing.

He’d changed, but so had she. Not enough time had passed for her to love him. And yet she did. Lilly would never have believed such a thing could happen. But watching him watch her, looking at his eyes gleam as she twirled and dipped, moving for him, it didn’t seem so unlikely.

This dance had no steps, no choreography, and so sometimes she stumbled. It didn’t matter. She didn’t have to be a ballerina to make beauty with her body. Not when she was doing it for him.

One by one, the scarves fell away until all that remained was the jingling anklet. She danced closer as the music changed. Again, she straddled him, her hands on his shoulders and her pussy a slick, hot channel clutching tight on his cock as she slid down on it. They moved together.

His hands gripped her ass as she rode him. Her hips circled, grinding her clit on his belly. Their skin, slick with sweat, slipped and stuck and skidded. She was so wet she coated his thighs and belly and cock, so wet she sank so deep on his cock it would’ve hurt if it didn’t feel so good.

Everything about this felt so good.

Lilly moaned his name when she came. She pressed her forehead to his, eyes closed, breathing hard. Her fingers had tangled in the hair at the back of his neck. Zach’s hands came up to press at her shoulder blades. They rocked together a few more times and he shuddered with his own release.

The music sounded louder when she wasn’t consumed with passion. The lyrics made her laugh. Lilly pulled away from Zach, their bodies sticking, and she kissed his mouth softly as she looked into his eyes.

“Mmm,” she murmured.

His stomach rumbled. They both looked down between them. When he looked at her, something had shifted again in his gaze. Zach opened his mouth to speak, but she stopped him with a kiss.

“Food,” she told him. “Then sleep. Tomorrow, who knows? Maybe the snow will have mysteriously melted and we’ll be able to get out of the house.”

“Food,” Zach agreed. “Then sleep. But the snow isn’t going to melt by tomorrow.”

Lilly smiled. “Then I guess we’ll just have to stay inside another day.”

Later, Lilly curled herself against him and timed her breathing to the in-and-out regularity of his. It was the surest way she’d found to fall asleep. She was drifting into dreams when he spoke, so softly she almost didn’t hear him.

“Lilly,” Zach said into her hair, his breath caressing her as easily as his fingers had. “I don’t want to leave.”

She didn’t want him to go, either, but nothing about this had ever been promised as permanent. “So stay.”

He didn’t say anything after that, and neither did she.

* * *

Seventh night, eight candles.

She watched the candles, their flames bright and steady and strong. The candles in her grandmother’s menorah weren’t fancy and hand-dipped, but they lit her kitchen as they shone through the window to the world outside as prettily as pricey candles would’ve.

“Pretty.” Zach had come up behind her to put his arms around her, his chin resting on her shoulder.

They’d barely bothered with clothes at all today. The warmth of his belly pressed Lilly’s butt, and she pushed it back against him and smiled when his cock stirred. She turned her head to look at him.

“It always is.”

“Yes.”

Together they watched the wax dripping, the candles burning. Zach linked his fingers through hers and laid them flat against her belly. Lilly was considering making something to eat-her pantry had been sadly depleted by this near week of forced seclusion. The weather forecast had called for warmer temperatures and the governor had called off the state of emergency, but tonight was Friday. No work tomorrow even if it all melted away in the night.

Earlier she’d called her mother to wish her happy holidays and reassure her that she was fine. She hadn’t mentioned Zach. That would’ve opened up too many questions she wasn’t sure how to answer. He’d listened to the conversation but said nothing. Until now.

“Your family would want to know who I am. Your friends. You have a life I’m not a part of, Lilly.”

She didn’t turn, just pressed his hands more firmly to her belly and her back against his chest, her ass against his crotch. “We can figure out something to tell them.”

“Lilly.” His voice turned her. His gaze, concerned, pinned her. “One of the things I find so appealing about you is your ability to find the brightest side of any situation. But my time here is almost finished. And there are things we have to talk about before that.”

“I don’t want to.” She shook her head, broke his grip. Stalked away. “I know this is all some sort of fantastic, crazy thing. I know it, Zach. But why shouldn’t it be? Why should something that feels this good and right be anything less than fantasy? And I want to hold on to it for as long as I can. Is that so wrong?”

“No.” He shook his head, watching her. “But we have to talk about this. My time here is almost finished, whether I want it to be or not.”

“Why did you come here?” She threw the words at him as she backed away, her arms crossed. Wishing she’d put on a robe. Wishing a lot of things.

“I told you-”

“Why me? Of all the millions of people on Earth, why me?” Lilly demanded.

He hesitated, but didn’t reach for her. “I want to tell you that you’re special. Words fail me, in every language, to tell you how I feel.”

She drew in a slow shudder of breath that dried her throat. “But I’m not, right? I’m nice and all, I get it. Oh, I have a great personality and my body’s fine, too, but there’s just something lacking, right? That’s it. Believe me, I’ve heard it before.”

“No.” She’d never seen Zach angry, but his brow furrowed now, his voice got low. Hard. “You are special. But you are not the only one. We are sent to where we’re needed. This world, your world…it needs help. And we are sent to do our best to help where we can. It’s necessary. It’s chesed.”

Chesed. Loving kindness. Lilly took a step back, looking at Zach. Zachariah.

He followed her. “At the beginning of time, everything was light, contained in the vessels.”

“They broke.” So did her voice. Lilly knew the story, the Kabbalic retelling of the origin of evil. Grandma Lillian’s story. “Scattered the light here on earth. We’re supposed to perform mitzvot, good deeds, each one helping return one of those bits of light to its origin. I thought it was just…a story.”

“It’s tikkun olam. Repairing the world.”

She knew the words but hadn’t expected in a million years, no, in ten million, to hear them coming from his mouth. She drew in another breath, fighting to keep herself steady and unable to, until Zach’s hands were there to keep her from falling.

Blinking to focus, she looked at him. Now she understood how he’d become so beloved to her, so fast. Why he’d been naked in the snow.

Why he’d fallen.

“Turn around,” she told him.

He did, obedient. He was tall, but not so tall she couldn’t stand on tiptoe to pass her palms over his shoulder blades. His skin was smooth to the touch, but looking now in the kitchen’s bright, work-strength light, Lilly leaned closer. She studied his skin, saw the faintest of scars he bore, instead of wings. They grew harsher as she watched, then faded to nothing.

“I never looked,” she murmured. “Not that closely.”

“You didn’t want to see tentacles or lizard skin.”

Lilly’s laugh crested on a surge of tears. He was teasing her? “I was worried about the wrong things.”

Zach looked over his shoulder at her. “It’s a manifestation, only. This body.”

She turned him to face her. “A solid body. A beautiful one.”

He nodded and put his hands on her waist, his head tilted as he looked down at her. “A temporary body, held just long enough to do what I was required.”

“For how long?”

He smiled and looked at the menorah on the windowsill. “Eight days.”

Lilly put her head on his warm chest. His heart beat under her cheek. “What a coincidence.”

“Not really. A great miracle happened there, remember?” His arms tightened around her. “It’s not my place to question the length of time we’re given on our quest.”

She stayed in silence for a moment or two. “And if you don’t succeed?”

“Have I failed you, Lilly?” He used a finger to tip up her chin so she could look at him. “You’ll have to tell me. I’ve been here too long, now, simply to know.”

She wanted to lie, tell him yes, so that maybe he’d stay. That seemed like a pretty bad idea, not to mention a selfish one. So instead, she closed her eyes and let herself…feel.

She hadn’t done that for a long time. Simply given herself permission to open her heart and mind to her emotions and let them fill her. She’d spent too much time pretending she didn’t ache inside, and it was difficult, now, to recognize that instead of pain, she felt peace.

She opened her eyes. “No. You didn’t fail.”

Zach brushed her hair off her face and cupped it with his hands. He kissed her, soft and slow. “I’m glad.”

Lilly kissed him, too. “But sex? Really, Zach? I’m pretty sure that’s not what they taught me in religious school.”

“There’s nothing as sacred as the joining of two bodies in celebration of love,” Zach said, totally serious yet with eyes twinkling in mischief. “Let’s just say not everyone requires the same attention I gave you.”

“Huh.” She tweaked his nipples until he laughed, squirming. “So I’m not your first?”

Zach captured her hands with his, holding her still. “Actually, you are. Not all of us are chosen to serve here.”

“But I was chosen? For you?”

Zach hesitated again. His kiss was harder this time, though sweet all the same. He pressed her against him, naked flesh hot on hers. When he pulled away, his dark eyes blazed with passion, setting spark to her own.

“No, you weren’t chosen for me. I chose you.”

“I think that is the sexiest, most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” Lilly told him, and as she’d done that first time, jumped into his arms.

They didn’t make it to the bedroom this time. With one hand holding her firmly, Zach swept the kitchen table clean with the other. Then he laid her down on top of it and kissed her mouth until she gasped.

Zach kissed her throat and collarbone. The slopes of her breasts, taking time to suckle at each nipple until they tightened, tingling from his mouth. Down her belly, painting with his tongue. Over each hip. Her thighs, knees, ankles. Standing, he lifted her foot and kissed each toe while Lilly giggled and gasped.

“Not here,” he told her finally, when she moaned. “Someplace softer.”

He lifted her again, cradled in his arms, and took her to the bedroom. The bed welcomed them with the fresh, clean sheets she’d put on earlier. Zach stretched out beside her to kiss her mouth.

She clung to the taste of him, the scent, the feeling of his fingertips tracing patterns on her skin. Lilly wanted never to forget a second of this, but in trying so hard to capture and keep the moment, she was afraid she’d lose it.

“Relax,” Zach whispered as she tensed. He slid a hand up her thigh and found her heat, dipped a finger inside and out to smooth over her clit. “Let me do this for you.”

He’d done so much already, and Lilly didn’t want this to end just yet. “Wait,” she told him as she got to her knees. “Let me do this for you, instead.”

They’d done so much, but she hadn’t used her mouth on his cock. She wanted to now. She would taste every inch of him, experience every pleasure before he left. She wasn’t going to regret not taking every chance she had with him.

He said her name with what sounded like surprise as she took him deep into her mouth and drew back, sucking gently. Her hands cupped his balls and she stroked with her thumb. She wanted Zach to feel as much pleasure as he’d given her. His thigh muscles tensed as she sucked him slowly, then a little faster. His fingers tangled in her hair, not pulling or guiding. Encouraging.

Pleasure built inside her even though she wasn’t even touching herself. It came from knowing that what she was giving was making him feel good, judging from the sound of his low moans and sighs. Lilly moved, her hair caressing him where her hands and mouth didn’t, until at last Zach gripped her shoulder.

“Wait,” he pleaded, and before he could say more, she was already moving up and over his body to settle him inside her.

He rolled them both so he was on top, her legs locked around his back. They’d made love slowly, fucked fiercely, come hard within moments of each other. This was all those times and more, made precious with knowing it was the last. He looked into her eyes and Lilly gave him everything she was, had ever been, would be.

She gave him all of herself and took what Zach gave her. He moved inside every part of her. Ecstasy surged and she fought not to control or delay or prolong it, but to allow herself to let it take her fully away.

They didn’t need words; if he murmured in a language she couldn’t pronounce, Lilly had no trouble understanding his meaning. She spoke with her eyes and mouth, hands, her slick, hot pussy clutching at his cock. Everything had been distilled into this pleasure, this desire, the sum of their parts making up a whole.

She didn’t tell him she loved him.

She was sure he already knew.

* * *

Her body craved sleep, but Lilly forced herself to awake when the sun came up. She turned to look at the man-not a man, but something greater, only wearing the suit of a man-snoring lightly beside her. She brushed his hair back from his forehead.

Zach awoke.

“And now you go…back?” She gave a self-conscious glance upward and saw nothing but the ceiling.

Zach didn’t look up. He didn’t look away from her. “I have until sundown.”

“And if you don’t go back, you die.”

“Yes.”

Lilly bit back a sob and clung to him, tightly. “And what will happen to me?”

“You will go on with your life,” Zach whispered into her hair. “That is what’s meant to happen for you.”

She couldn’t argue with him, or rail against how unfair all this was-whatever had led her to accept this entire situation from the start now forced her to accept it, too. No matter what she wanted with her heart, her mind told her this was what was necessary, and right. What was meant to be.

“So this is our last day?” She looked up at him, her vision unblurred, her voice steady. “Let’s make the most of it.”

He lifted her as he’d done that first time. She felt safe in his arms. Protected. Cherished.

Loved.

Now that she knew how it felt, she would seek it again and recognize it when it came. She’d be ready for love when it found her the next time, and not settle for something less. This was the gift Zach had given her, his act of chesed, and though Lilly had no idea how her smallness could affect the entire world, she believed him when he said his task was to help with tikkun olam.

They made love slowly this time. Savoring. It lasted for what seemed like forever, and though she wept at the end of it, Lilly was anything but sad.

“I’m hungry,” Zach said into the quiet.

She rolled on her side to face him. “Then let’s eat.”

They did. Anything they wanted, digging deep into Lilly’s freezer to pull out chocolate and ice cream, fried mozzarella sticks, pizza. They drank cold glasses of beer and she danced for him again. He danced for her, too, with grace and humor, his steps fumbling sometimes but never faltering.

The day passed, no way to stop it. Night fell early in the winter and Lilly shook the last few candles from the box. She placed them all in the menorah.

Eighth night, nine candles.

She lit them with the prayer, tasting all the words this time as though they were something new. She supposed they were. She felt new, anyway. New and strange.

She faced him. They’d both dressed by unspoken agreement, Zach in the sweatpants from the first night and she in the cotton robe. She thought there should be fanfare. A ceremony, maybe. She waited for Zach to vanish in a burst of blinding light.

Night fell. The candles flickered. He took her hand and drew her to him for another kiss.

“Is it time?” she asked against his mouth, and he nodded.

“I love you,” Lilly said. She took his face in her hands and made sure he saw everything she felt in her gaze. “Even though it was only eight days. I was blessed to have you. Thank you, Zach.”

“Lilly…” He looked pained, his hands coming up to take hers from his face.

She cried out when he collapsed and she knelt beside him. Zach crouched on hands and knees, forehead placed to the floor. His skin, for the first time, had gone chilly. Under her palm, his shoulders tensed, relaxed. He let out a small noise that sounded like her name.

And then, he was gone.

* * *

Surely he wouldn’t mind if she wept.

Tomorrow, Lilly would get on with her life. Tomorrow, she would venture out into the world, the snow melted, back to work. Back to friends, family. Back to the possibilities she knew were waiting.

But for now, surely Zach wouldn’t mind if she cried.

The candles hadn’t even burned low enough to sputter when the first boom of thunder cracked the air and shook the house. The lightning came a second later, but Lilly was already on her feet. She threw open the sliding glass door, mindless of the snow burning her feet as she ran into the backyard.

And there, in a circle of earth made bare by melted snow, lay a naked man.

Did she cry his name, or did her voice echo only in her head? It didn’t matter. Lilly ran across the deck and slid in slush and ice, down the steps, onto frozen grass. Into the mud. On her knees she took him in her arms, his eyes dazed but his smile burning as bright as the candles now nearly gone out in the window.

“Lilly,” Zach said. “I’m here.”

Questions could wait until they were inside, away from neighbors’ prying eyes and the cold making her shiver. Him, too. She noticed that, noticed how his skin was still not as hot as it had been. How his lips turned blue and stayed that way until she got him into the heat of the shower.

Once again, he’d changed. Some things hadn’t. As she rinsed him free of the mud that hadn’t covered him after his first descent, Zach shivered at her touch and laughed when his cock roused. Lilly laughed, too, tipping her face into the stream of water and letting it wash away her tears.

The water was turning cold by the time they got out of the shower. She pushed him onto the thick bathmat and slid him inside her. She leaned to kiss him. They moved, they rocked. They made love as though it was the first time, not the last time.

She wouldn’t forget a moment of this, either.

Later, wrapped in towels and snuggled under the blankets they both needed now, Lilly sighed and pressed her face to Zach’s still-damp skin. “I thought you would die if you stayed.”

“I will die.”

She sat up, heart hammering, gut twisting. “What? Then why did you come back?”

His smile soothed her, his kiss even more so a moment later. “We all die, Lilly. My time will come as any other. I won’t know when, but none of us do.”

“Us?” She eyed him, then looked upward.

Zach’s kiss was sweet. His answer was sweeter even than his kiss. “Lilly, this time I didn’t fall. This time, I jumped.”

She’d believed she would know when love came for her, and she’d be ready for it because of what Zach had given her. Now, in his arms, his mouth on hers, Lilly was ready.

Love was here.

The Challenge

“You’re late. Again.” Katie Donato barely glanced away from her laptop as Dean Manion slipped the nonfat, sugar-free white chocolate latte onto her desk and his lean, long body into the chair next to hers.

“But I brought lattes.”

She glanced at him then, taking in the smug grin, the artfully careless hair, the slightly loosened tie. “You know, traffic is a good excuse for being late. Lost car keys. Forgetting you had to pick up your favorite suit from the dry cleaner’s, even. But not last-minute blow jobs from the dude at the Copy Cabana.”

Dean laughed and sipped from his own cup. “Not last-minute, not Copy Cabana.”

At this, she swiveled in her chair to study him. “Don’t tell me you had a sleepover last night?”

Dean grinned in answer and drank deeply. “Ahhh, sweet caffeine. I’m going to need it.”

“Is that your subtle way of saying you were up all night fucking?” Katie lifted a brow and sipped at the drink, then tipped the cup toward him. “This is a peace offering but it still doesn’t let you off the hook. We have a meeting with Smith and Simon in half an hour and I’ve been here since eight putting this proposal together.”

“Sorry.” Dean’s brows knitted and he leaned forward to rub his knees against hers, but Katie pushed him away with a laugh.

“Stop. I’m not some eighteen-year-old, just-out-of-the-closet emo-banged pretty boy. I’m immune to your wiles.”

“Bullshit.” Dean said this with the utter and absolute confidence of a man who oozes sensual appeal and knows it. He leaned back and propped his feet, shod in expensive Italian leather, on her desk.

Katie shoved them off. “It’s not bullshit. I know you too well, Dean. You’re like a Lladro figurine. Pretty to look at but too expensive to be practical and not at all useful.”

“Hey.” He frowned at this and set his cup on the desk to lean toward her again. He touched her knee. “The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

Katie, spreadsheet completed, hit the Print button and stood to smooth the wrinkles in her skirt. “It means you should’ve been here at eight this morning to do your part of this project and you weren’t, because you were too busy getting your dick sucked.”

She wasn’t angry-not really. Annoyed but not furious. She’d worked with Dean long enough to understand him, so when he sidled in late to work with a latte for her, she knew better than to be surprised. Didn’t mean he was free of blame, though.

“I said I’m sorry.”

She knew he meant it, even as she knew without even looking at him he was giving her a patented Dean sexy stare guaranteed to bring most anyone to their figurative knees. She pulled the papers from her printer and stapled them, then slipped them into the presentation folder she’d carefully prepared. She gathered the rest of her materials while he watched in silence, but damn it, lost it all when she could no longer stifle the yawn that had been doing its best to sneak out of her.

“Ha!” Dean stood, looming. “What’s that?”

Katie feigned innocence and swigged coffee. “What?”

“You yawned.” Dean had no problems invading anyone’s personal space if it benefited him, but he was one of the few who could get away with such a thing with Katie. Now he sidled up close, blocking her retreat by pressing a thigh against hers to keep her pinned with the desk at her back. “Up late?”

Katie bit hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from giving in to a grin. “None of your business.”

“Katie,” Dean said in a low, sultry tone. “Of course it’s my business. Who was he? Guy from the dry cleaner’s? The gym? Don’t tell me he’s that loser from college who looked you up on Connex.”

“Time for the meeting.”

It was useless, and Katie should’ve known better. Dean put out one long arm and kept her from moving past him. “Spill it.”

She sighed. “Fine. You don’t know him because I’ve never mentioned him before. I met him in a coffee shop a few months ago.”

“The Green Bean? Which guy?”

“No. The Morningstar Mocha. And you wouldn’t know him, he’s straight.” At least she thought Jimmy was straight. She hoped he was.

“A few months ago? You’ve been holding out on me?” Dean frowned. “Damn.”

“Not holding out.” Katie rested her butt on the desk, an eye on the clock, and drank her coffee. “There isn’t anything to tell you. Unlike you, I don’t bang just any guy who comes along.”

Dean put a hand over his heart. “That hurts. You act like I don’t have standards.”

It was nice to have a friend good enough to understand that a single raised brow meant so much. “Uh-huh.”

He leaned against the filing cabinet across from her. “He kept you up late. That’s something.”

“We weren’t fucking, Dean.”

He made a face. “Why the hell not?”

“I don’t know,” Katie teased. “Maybe I’m wrong and he is gay.”

Dean snorted into his coffee and tilted his head to study her. “You like him?”

“You like the guy you were with this morning?” She deflected the question easily enough.

“I like all the guys I’m with, at least at the time.”

Katie ticked off the list on her fingers. “You let him sleep over and were late to work because of him. Granted, that doesn’t mean much, but add to that the fact you haven’t been describing every inch of his cock to me in precious, explicit detail, and I’m pretty sure that means you like him.”

Dean’s gaze shifted. Ah, she was spot-on. Wow.

“Dunno what you mean.”

“You only keep quiet about the dudes you like, which are few and far between lately.” Actually, there hadn’t been any. Katie kept the tone light, not wanting to bring up old flames just for the sake of needling her friend-there was plenty to tease Dean about without bringing Ethan into it.

“Sure, I like him. I like lots of stuff.”

Katie laughed. “I know you do.”

With this laid out between them, Dean seemed satisfied. “So long as he’s not that douche from Connex. That guy was bad news.”

Katie laughed at the way Dean bristled on her behalf. “Umm…no. I wouldn’t even fuck him with your dick. C’mon, move that pretty ass. Time to shine.”

“We have a few minutes.”

Katie sighed again. An old argument. She liked to be prompt, even early. Dean preferred to make a grand entrance. She eyed his practiced pout. “I told you, that doesn’t work on me.”

“It works on everyone.”

This was very close to true. “Only because everyone else doesn’t know you like I do. All promise, no delivery.”

Dean leered, once more leaning so close Katie could get a full whiff of his delicious cologne. “Shut your mouth! The fuck you mean, no delivery? I deliver.”

Katie leaned, too, so her breath would tickle his earlobe. “No, babe. That ass and that smile promise a lot but Dean Manion only delivers to addresses on Penis Avenue. Vagina Street’s out of your delivery zone, remember?”

He turned his face half an inch so his lips brushed her neck. “Just because I don’t doesn’t mean I couldn’t.”

At this boast, so typical, Katie burst into laughter loud enough to make her happy she had her own office with a closed door. She pushed at his chest. “Please. You’ve never fucked a woman. Have you ever even kissed a woman?”

“I’ve kissed you,” he reminded her, letting her push him away but not making it easy.

“A New Year’s Eve kiss under mistletoe. Besides,” Katie said as she gave his tie a fond yank, “there was no tongue. Doesn’t count.”

“Doesn’t mean I couldn’t,” Dean repeated stubbornly.

Katie cast another glance at the clock. Fifteen minutes to make it from her office, down the hall, up three floors in the notoriously slow elevator, down another two corridors to get to the meeting room. “Look, your reputation as a sex bomb is safe with me. I swear I will never reveal to all the women crushing on you that you’d rather get a paper cut on your tongue than eat pussy.”

She laughed again at his outraged expression. “Don’t act like it’s not true. I’ve seen you with the girls in reception, the ones who always give you doughnuts. You can whore yourself for a bear claw all you want, but when it comes right down to it, you won’t put out.”

Dean was the part of their team who came up with the brilliant ideas; Katie figured out how to put them into action. Dean orchestrated the flash and bang while Katie made sure all the pieces fit into place. Yet it was Dean who fought the hardest to win the accounts, even when Katie’s careful financial summaries determined the risk wasn’t worth the effort. Dean who worked long hours ripping apart campaigns and sewing them back together until nobody could possibly offer something better. The same competitive edge that made him killer at racquetball drove him in his work, too, just as Katie’s intrinsically neat and tidy personality did in hers.

She’d just tapped Dean’s warrior nature. She saw it in his eyes and stance, so briefly fierce she’d have stepped back from it if the desk hadn’t already been under her butt. Any other man in the office-hell, anywhere-who gripped her hips and pulled her close up on his crotch that way, who ran his mouth along the curve of her neck to find her ear and breathe heat into it-any other man would’ve earned a knee to the nuts and possibly the heel of her hand into his Adam’s apple.

Instead, Katie tensed under Dean’s practiced touch, head tipping to give him greater access. There was no denying he was scrumptious. Probably more so because they were such good friends, and she knew his quirks. Most definitely because he was gay and triggered the “never gonna get it” hormone. Now she closed her eyes while he ran his lips lightly over her skin.

“This is so out of the boundaries of appropriate workplace behavior it’s not even funny,” she murmured.

He moved away, not quite enough. “Since when have I ever been appropriate?”

“This is true,” Katie said, amused to hear the sex-syrup tone of her own voice. God, it had been too long since a man had put his hands on her. “However, it doesn’t mean you could make me come.”

Disgruntled, Dean stepped back. “You think it would be so easy to get me off?”

“I do, actually. Now c’mon, shake that oh-so-fine ass, please. We really have to move.”

Dean crossed his arms, still looming over her. “What makes you think that?”

“Because I’m looking at the clock.”

“No.” Dean shook his head. “That I’d be so easy to get off, but you wouldn’t. What makes you so sure?”

He was, Katie saw with genuine surprise, seriously wounded. She tugged his tie gently. “Because you have a penis, sweetie, and penises are notoriously easy to please. And I like sucking cock. I’m sure if you closed your eyes, you’d never know my mouth was attached to a set of breasts and a cunt. On the other hand, the fact you’ve never made love to a woman and aren’t turned on by women, would probably mean that providing me with the same favors wouldn’t be as successful.”

She paused, deciding to go for the truth simply because Dean was a friend and a good one, at that. “And because I have a hard time getting off with straight men who are into me. I think managing an orgasm with a guy I knew was cringing the whole time would really be impossible.”

“Is that a challenge?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. No.”

Dean gave her the full force of his flirting grin, the one she’d seen slay the girl who brought around the bagels, random guys on the street and everyone in between. “You’re afraid to take me up on it?”

“Are you suggesting I…fuck you?” Katie didn’t even look at the clock this time. The idea was intriguing. Tempting, even. It wasn’t like she’d never wondered what it was like to get in Dean’s pants. And to be the first woman to ever have him?

Fucking delicious.

“I’m saying we should fuck each other. We’ll see who gets who off first.” Dean ran a hand through his hair, pushing it away from his eyes. “And fastest.”

“Sex is always such a game to you.”

“And that’s wrong…because…?”

“Because we’re late, for one thing,” she said sternly. “For real, this time. Let’s go. If you want this account-”

“Say yes, Katie.”

She looked him up and down, taking in every detail. She knew every inch of Dean already, having spent so many hours with him, and suspected he was probably as familiar with her. She looked at him with new eyes, now. She’d gone to bed with men she was less attracted to than she was to Dean, so really, where was the issue? Sex was with him was unlikely to lead to one of those three-in-the-morning talks about what it all meant, and if it did, both of them would be fools. At the very worst, she’d be proven right, and even with that, how could getting a full serving of the delicious, deep-dish pie of gorgeous that was Dean be wrong?

“You’re on,” Katie said.

* * *

“You did what?” Jacob, standing at the sink and rinsing a pot of steaming hot pasta, turned so fast a few strands of limpid spaghetti slopped over the sides.

Dean leaned against the counter, bottle of beer he hadn’t yet tasted in one hand. “You heard me.”

“Oh, I heard you.” Jacob turned back to the sink and ran cool water over the pasta before dumping it all into the bowl. “I just can’t believe it. You’re going to have sex with a woman?”

Now Dean drank. “Yeah.”

He watched Jacob’s shrug, wondering whether that meant the other man was dismissing the possibility or expressing jealousy. Or maybe Jacob didn’t give a shit, Dean thought, tasting the richness of the beer. Would he have cared if Jacob had told him the same thing? What would Dean have said?

Jacob turned again and brought both Dean’s bottle and Dean’s hand to his mouth to drink. He licked his lips, then mirrored Dean’s stance against the counter, both hands gripping the marble at his sides. “And she agreed to it?”

“Of course she did.” Dean drank again and set the bottle on the counter to grab Jacob’s wrist and pull him closer. Jacob stood just an inch shorter, his sandy hair cropped in a buzz cut shorter than Dean usually liked. Eyes bluer, ass just a little too flat. But a mouth made of perfect, one Dean had no trouble kissing or fucking.

Jacob opened his mouth when Dean kissed him. Their tongues teased languidly until Dean slid a hand down to cup Jacob’s crotch. Then Jacob drew in a hitching breath and pulled away enough to center his gaze on Dean’s.

“I can figure out why she agreed to it, but why did you?”

Dean tasted Jacob on his lips but didn’t go in for another kiss. He shrugged. “Because she thought I couldn’t.”

“Ah.” Jacob tilted his head. “Well, I guess you can’t let her get away with assuming that just because you like cock that makes you, oh, I dunno, GAY or anything.”

“Hey!” Dean didn’t like the insinuation, especially since Jacob didn’t know him well enough to judge him that way. “She knows I’m queer. I never pretended otherwise.”

Jacob gave an exaggerated shrug and made a face. “You don’t have to prove anything to me, sugar. Just wondering if you need to prove it to yourself or something.”

“I’ve known I was queer since the eighth grade,” Dean said flatly.

Jacob’s gaze dropped to Dean’s crotch. “Uh-huh. Like I said. You don’t have to prove it to me. I had your dick in my mouth this morning, remember? Then again…”

“Then again, what?” Dean looked at the door, thinking how he should’ve walked out on this conversation ten minutes ago but hadn’t, and not quite willing to ponder why.

“Even straight guys can be convinced getting head from another dude isn’t gay.” Jacob grinned, showing white teeth just a tiny bit too crooked.

Dean snorted lightly. “Yeah? The fuck you getting at, Jacob? You want me to suck your cock?”

Jacob rubbed at his crotch without breaking the gaze. He knew just how to work this, that little bastard. He’d known Dean all of two weeks and already had his number. Not that Dean was going to admit it, hell no. No guy got under his skin, not that he’d let on. Ever.

“Sure,” Jacob said with a raised brow.

In answer, Dean grabbed Jacob’s belt. Undid the buckle. Then the zipper. He freed Jacob’s dick, stroking it from half-hard to full-on wood in half a minute after that. Jacob swallowed hard, eyes getting heavy-lidded.

“You think I don’t suck cock?” Dean breathed, voice husky in anticipation.

“Well,” Jacob said, feigning a nonchalance made obviously false by the tremor in his tone, “you haven’t sucked mine.”

Dean laughed at that, still stroking until Jacob pushed his hips forward. “Your spaghetti’s going to get cold.”

“I…like…cold spaghetti.” Jacob’s voice broke on a gasp, and that was all the impetus Dean needed.

He went to his knees and yanked down Jacob’s jeans at the same time, baring the other man’s body and gripping his tight ass. Jacob’s cock was thick and hard, bobbing upward at the release from tight denim. Dean captured it at the base with one fist. His mouth found it next, and he slid Jacob’s cock deep into the back of his throat.

Dean closed his eyes.

Not because he didn’t want to see what he was doing. He liked watching, as a matter of fucking fact, but this was different. On his knees, giving head, was different than looking down at someone in the same place. On his knees, Dean liked to lose himself in the smells and sounds, the taste of whoever he was fucking. He let go of Jacob’s ass to put Jacob’s hand on the back of his head, curling Jacob’s fingers into his hair. Urging him to guide the pace, if he wanted.

Yeah, Dean liked being on top. Fucking. But he wasn’t averse to giving pleasure, either, and it was always, always better when the other person felt comfortable enough to say what they liked. Or show him. Dean wasn’t above admitting he could be an asshole, but never let it be said he was a selfish lover.

“Fuck.” Jacob’s fingers tightened in Dean’s hair and his hips pumped. “Fuck, baby, that’s so fucking good.”

Baby?

Dean paused at the endearment, his fist sliding up to meet his lips as his mouth came down. Jacob didn’t stop moving, fucking into Dean’s hand and mouth. And after the barest moment, Dean went on. Sex talk didn’t mean anything.

Then it didn’t matter what Jacob said, because Dean unzipped his own jeans and pulled his cock free. Now came the complicated dance of hands and mouth, stroking and sucking at the same time. He had to catch up-Jacob was already making the low sound in the back of his throat Dean had come to recognize as his prelude to coming.

“Wait, wait.” Jacob tugged harder on Dean’s hair until Dean looked up.

It took Dean a second to understand Jacob wanted him to stop. Who the fuck ever wanted him to stop when he was blowing him? Dean looked up, one fist still pumping Jacob’s dick, the other his own. “What?”

“I just…want…” Jacob licked his lips and swallowed, then cupped Dean’s cheek. “Stand up.”

Dean did with a quizzical laugh. Two men, pants around their ankles, cocks hard. His laugh slid into a groan when Jacob pulled him by the back of the neck to kiss him. It was a hard kiss, but not punishing. Jacob sucked Dean’s tongue as his hand curled around Dean’s dick.

“Use your hand on me,” Jacob said as he stroked. “I want to make you come. I want your mouth on mine when you come all over my hand.”

This was not what Dean had expected but fuck, Jacob was jerking him just right and the kiss went on and on, getting hotter by the second. Nothing to do but stroke Jacob’s cock, too. They fell into mutual rhythm.

His balls got heavy, his cock impossibly harder. The kiss stuttered and broke as Jacob gasped. Dean didn’t have the breath to gasp. He was going to come….

Jacob came first. Heat and slickness filled Dean’s palm. Pleasure exploded out of him. He found the breath to groan.

Panting, Jacob kissed him again. Soft, this time. He still cupped Dean’s cock, but his other hand came up to hold the back of Dean’s neck. Forehead to forehead, he smiled.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Dean said.

Jacob looked between them. “That was hot.”

Dean laughed, shaking his head. “It was definitely not what I was expecting when you told me you wanted me to suck you off.”

Jacob reached behind him to grab up a dish towel, wiping his hands and handing it to Dean. “Baby, I am not what you are expecting.”

Dean wiped his hands and put himself back in his jeans before stepping back. “Is that so?”

Jacob licked his forefinger and drew a “one” in the air. “That. Is so.”

It was a good cue to leave. After all, they’d both already gotten off. Dean’s stomach was rumbling, but dinner was cold and he could pick up something on the way home. He’d already spent last night with this guy. And the morning.

Jacob looked over his shoulder at the sink and the pot with the now-cold pasta. “This will only take a minute to warm up. You staying?”

Dean leaned to kiss him, relishing the taste of salt and beer on Jacob’s mouth. “Sure.”

* * *

Late-night conversations. Katie loved them. Darkness and distance provided by the phone made intimacy, and she loved that, too.

Jimmy was good at late-night talk. Jimmy had a voice like melting butter, all warm and soft and sweet. Rich. It didn’t matter what he was saying, really. He told stories like some men built houses, layer by layer and piece by piece, until Katie realized hours had passed and dawn was breaking.

He’d make love like that, too.

Katie wondered if she’d ever find out. She’d met Jimmy weeks ago. He’d flirted with her right away. Asked for her number. He’d actually called, too, something that had surprised her since guys like Jimmy always said they’d call but never did.

Katie wasn’t sure just how they’d fallen into late-night discussions about old movies, art, books, music. About their favorite colors and foods. All she knew was that she told Jimmy things she hadn’t told any guy in a long time, and nothing she said ever seemed to put him off or be too much. Katie had spilled her guts about a lot of things from her most embarrassing moment to her secret fetish for knitted slippers.

They had become friends, and that was great, but Katie was beginning to wonder if that’s all it would ever be.

“You stand in front of three doors,” Jimmy said. “What color are they, what is behind each, and which do you pick?”

Katie laughed. “Where do you come up with these?”

“I have a book. Two hundred and seven of the most obscure questions to ask a beautiful woman.”

At least he’d said she was beautiful. Katie cleared her throat. “Let me think about it. You go first.”

“That’s not fair. I’ve had time to think about it longer than you have.”

“Tell me anyway,” Katie told him and settled deeper into the blankets.

“The doors are red, blue and purple. I pick the blue one.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Jimmy said, “blue’s your favorite color and I bet you’re behind it.”

Heat twisted through her. “And what about the other doors?”

“I don’t open them,” Jimmy told her, “so I have no idea what’s behind them.”

“Good answer.”

“Your turn.”

Katie couldn’t begin to think about doors and colors and what was behind them. Or rather, she could think, but every door she imagined was glass, each had Jimmy behind it, and no matter how hard she tried, she could open none of them. She sighed.

“Tell me something else, Jimmy.”

“Like what?”

“What’s your favorite poem? Do you have one?”

Jimmy laughed softly, and Katie imagined the brush of his breath against her neck. “Unless you count Jim Morrison lyrics as a poem, no, I guess I don’t. What’s yours?”

“I like e.e. cummings. My favorite starts off ‘the boys I mean are not refined.’” Katie thought of the girls who bucked and bite, the boys who shake the mountains when they dance. She recited it to him from memory, and Jimmy was quiet for a moment after that.

“I never liked poetry,” he said. “I had a…teacher…in school who made me recite lots of poetry. It was a way to…well, it doesn’t matter why. I hated poetry because of that teacher. I never thought I could actually like a poem. But I like that one.”

She heard him yawn and frowned, safe in knowing he couldn’t see her. She was already making a face in anticipation of him ending the conversation, but her voice was neutral in reply when he told her he had to hang up.

“Yeah,” Katie said. “It’s late.”

The invitation was on the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back. She didn’t want to invite him out, not even to the coffee shop where they’d first met. He might say no. Worse, he might stop calling her.

“Night, Katie. Sleep tight.”

“You too,” Katie said and clutched the phone tight in her fingers after he’d disconnected before she did, too.

She was still thinking of that conversation when she got home with Dean in tow.

“Maybe that’s your problem,” Dean said as he flipped through a magazine she’d left on her coffee table. He tossed it down and looked at her. “What? Maybe he knows too much about you already. Destroyed the mystery.”

“So then why does he keep calling me?” Katie nudged off one shoe with a sigh and then the other before flopping onto her couch. “Do men often call women late at night just to chat because they long to hear the sound of another voice? I think not.”

“You’re asking the wrong guy about that.”

“Do you ever call someone late at night just to hear them talk?”

“Only if I’m jerking off at the same time,” Dean said.

Katie made a face and wriggled her toes, free of the high-heeled pumps. “Maybe he’s jerking off.”

Dean shot her a grin. “Do you?”

“That,” Katie said, “is none of your business.”

Dean slid onto the couch beside her. “You do.”

“Maybe. Once or twice.” Katie curled her feet underneath her, looking at him. “He has a very sexy voice.”

“So why not invite him over? Put on some soft music, make him dinner. Guys love that sort of shit.” Dean tweaked her knee through her soft skirt. “Make the first move.”

Katie shrugged. “I don’t know. I like him. Maybe too much. I don’t want to fuck it up, Dean. If he was into me like that, don’t you think he’d have asked me on a real date or something instead of just calling me and talking for hours?”

“Maybe he’s afraid, too. Guys can be afraid,” Dean said.

“Are you?” She tilted her head to study him.

“I’m not afraid of anything.” Dean frowned.

She let it go. She knew him better than that. After Ethan left, Dean hadn’t said his name again. He’d erased Ethan from his life as thoroughly as though his lover had never existed as part of it. In some ways Katie admired that about Dean, his commitment to forgetting the past. On the other hand, she knew there had to be fond memories among the bad ones. She never regretted remembering relationships, even ones that ended.

So why was she so afraid to take a chance on one with Jimmy? Even if it didn’t work out, she wouldn’t have lost anything and might be missing something great. Katie sighed.

“Hey.” Dean squeezed her again. “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”

“Huh? About Jimmy?”

“Focus,” Dean said. He pulled out a strip of condoms from his back pocket and unfurled them, dangling, before tossing them onto the coffee table. “About us. This.”

“Oh, the challenge.” Katie drew out the word, then smiled. “No. I’m up for it.”

Dean smiled too. “Good.”

Katie was used to Dean encroaching on her personal space. He was a hugger, a toucher, a stroker. Working together on projects, bent over a computer screen, it wasn’t uncommon for him to stand behind her with his chin on her shoulder to see what she was doing, or to put an arm over her shoulders while they walked someplace. Dean’s physical affection was constant and casual.

This was going to be something totally different.

She wasn’t sure what to expect when Dean kissed her. It was nothing like the New Year’s Eve smooch. That had been rough and teasing, both of them a little drunk and laughing. Not serious.

She should’ve known better than to think her experience with that kiss could’ve prepared her for the sensation of Dean’s mouth for real. He slanted his lips over hers as his hand came up to cup the back of her neck. The couch gave as he moved, dipping under his weight as he braced his hand on the back of it. His knee moved between hers. His mouth opened. He tasted of mint.

She’d closed her eyes automatically when he kissed her and opened them when he pulled back. Dean blinked, eyes heavy-lidded, mouth wet. He slid his tongue over his lips.

“That’s a start,” Katie said.

Dean laughed, low. “You’re not going to give me one fucking inch, are you?”

“No. You’re going to have to work for this, Dean.” She moved closer and brushed his lips with hers back and forth before pausing a breath away. “I told you it wasn’t going to be easy.”

His fingers tightened at the base of her skull. When he licked his mouth again, his tongue teased her lips. They kissed again, deeper this time. Longer. When they pulled apart this time, Katie’s heart had started up a determined thunder-thump she felt in all her pulse-points.

“Your mouth,” Dean murmured, “is so soft.”

She laughed and tipped her head back when he moved to kiss her jaw and throat.

“All of me is soft.”

Dean pressed his teeth to her skin and in the next moment, Katie felt sharp suction. His hands shifted, sliding down her body to her hips. She was on Dean’s lap a moment after that, straddling him with her knees pressing the couch’s soft cushions and her hands on his shoulders.

The kiss got harder still. Tongues tangling, teeth clashing, lips nipping. Dean gripped her hips. Katie pressed herself against him.

This was definitely working for her, but for Dean? Not so much, at least so far as Katie could tell from the lack of stiff, hard cock pressing against her. She broke the kiss and cupped his face in her hands.

“Close your eyes.”

He narrowed them, but didn’t close them. “Huh?”

She took his hand from her hip and put it to her breast, shifting his thumb to rub over her tightening nipple. “These are distracting you.”

Dean looked at his palm full of breast and gave her a rueful grin. “Naw.”

Katie laughed softly. “Close your eyes. Wait. I have a better idea.”

She’d tied her hair back this morning with a soft vintage scarf. Now she pulled it off and unwound it, letting the silky fabric slide over her fingers. She folded it in half as Dean watching, eyes still narrowed.

“I didn’t know you were kinky, Katie.”

“Shh.” She tied the scarf over his eyes and smoothed the fabric, letting her fingers trace his cheekbones and chin before running a fingertip over his lips. He tried to bite her finger but she pulled away before he could.

Then she kissed him again. They kissed for a long time without a break. Katie unbuttoned Dean’s shirt and put her hand inside, flat on his bare chest. His heart had begun thumping, too. His cock had also gone satisfyingly hard against her crotch.

Still kissing him, she moved off his lap and unzipped his fly. Dean lifted his hips to help her push his pants over his hips. He wore navy boxer briefs, the front tenting impressively. Katie took his prick in her hand through the soft material of the briefs and stroked.

Dean groaned into her mouth.

If she spoke, it might spoil the illusion for him, whatever that might be. Whoever he was imagining. So Katie kept silent. Instead, she kissed and stroked him, eventually freeing him from the confines of his briefs. She couldn’t help the small groan of her own when at last she held Dean’s silky hot cock against her bare skin.

Katie’d been serious when she told Dean she had no doubts she could make him come. Now, with his prick in her hand and his mouth open beneath hers, begging, Katie was determined to enjoy it. And not just because it would mean she’d win this challenge.

She moved her mouth down his body, kissing and sucking gently on his smooth, warm skin. Sucking harder when Dean’s breath caught and the tight muscles of his belly jumped beneath her lips. A great hand-job wasn’t about showing off, in Katie’s opinion. It was about paying attention.

It was also about being smart. With a quick glance at Dean, Katie reached for the bottle of lube she kept in the drawer of the end table. She filled her palm with thick, slippery fluid. This time when she stroked him, Dean muttered a low curse.

With this beautiful body in front of her, Katie wanted to worship it. Take hours kissing and sucking and licking every curve and line. Her cunt ached, sweetly aroused at the erotic fantasies stroking Dean gave her. She’d never been a fan of denial, either, saw no point in it, so as she stroked Dean’s cock a little faster, she also slid her hand into her panties and gently squeezed her clit between her thumb and forefinger.

She moved from Dean’s lap to the couch without letting go of his erection. She leaned to kiss him and his greedy mouth took hers in a kiss deep and long and fierce. Her fingers in her panties moved faster as she jerked him off.

When Dean put his hand on hers, changing the pace, the pleasure building in her clit leaped up a notch. This was everything she loved about sex-a little fast, a little rough, a little furtive and dirty. Yet safe, too. Nothing would change between them because of this. Nothing really could.

“Fuck,” Dean muttered as his hand gripped hers, moving it faster. “I’m gonna come….”

“Me too,” Katie murmured as her fingers circled her clit faster.

Dean let out a short, startled gasp. Maybe at the sound of her voice, maybe at his orgasm. His cock throbbed in her fist and he shuddered. Heat spilled over her fingers and the scent of him, along with his low, desperate growl, sent Katie tipping over the edge right along with him.

His hand kept hers from moving more. Panting, Katie fell back against the couch cushions and took her hand out of her panties. Then she laughed, soft at first before getting slowly louder.

Dean hooked the scarf from his eyes and tossed it at her. “You cheated.”

“I didn’t cheat,” she protested. “I told you I could get you off. I did.”

Dean glanced at her lap, her skirt rucked up around her waist, and gave her a smug grin. “So did you.”

“Ah,” Katie said, leaning in to brush a sweet kiss against his mouth, “but you didn’t do it for me. I did it myself. So it doesn’t count, does it?”

“Cheater,” Dean murmured against her mouth, but didn’t pull away.

The kiss lingered. She was surprised. Surprised more by the look on his face when she finally pulled away to rearrange her clothes.

“What?” Katie asked. “Like I was going to leave myself high and dry?”

Dean reached for a handful of tissues from the box on the end table, and took care of cleanup before tucking himself back into his pants. “I call do-over.”

“Do over?” Katie guffawed and got up, letting her skirt fall back down around her ankles as she headed for the kitchen. “You want something to drink?”

Dean caught up to her in the kitchen. He trapped her between his body and the counter as she reached for a glass. “I mean it, Katie.”

She paused. “Dean, it’s no big deal. Really.”

“It’s a big deal to me.”

Before she could answer or protest, her cell rang. She recognized the ringtone. “That’s Jimmy.”

Dean frowned and stepped back. “Guess you’d better answer, then.”

“Is this going to make trouble between us? Because I’d never have agreed to it if I knew that.” Katie grabbed her phone but didn’t answer it. The call went to voice mail and beeped while she waited for Dean’s answer.

“No trouble. I’ll see you at work tomorrow, okay?”

“Dean-”

“Hey,” he said, frown erased by a classic, sunny Dean grin. “This isn’t over, Katie. Don’t worry, I’ll let myself out. See you tomorrow.”

Her phone beeped with a text message. Also from Jimmy. Katie looked at it, then at Dean, who was already waving goodbye as he ducked out the door. “Dean!”

But he was already gone.

* * *

It hadn’t been the best hand-job he’d ever had, so why the hell couldn’t he stop thinking about it? Her hands had been small and soft, her mouth soft and sweet, her curves sweet and lush. Katie was a gorgeous woman and he liked her. Being queer didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate her attributes, but until she put the blindfold on, he hadn’t been able to really get into what they were doing.

He was more determined than ever to prove her wrong.

“Your face is going to stay that way,” Katie said serenely from behind him.

She was the one who’d brought the coffee today, two paper cups of it bearing the familiar logo of The Green Bean from down the street. She handed him one and sipped from her own. She looked fresh and bright-eyed, a habit that annoyed him most days but particularly on this one.

“You couldn’t even see my face. My face is fucking fabulous,” Dean said.

“Your eyes are squinty,” she said in a low voice as she passed him, like she was sharing a secret though there was nobody around to hear them. She bumped him with her hip.

He followed her into her office and closed the door. She looked up with a sigh and set her cup down. Dean didn’t sit.

“We didn’t even fuck,” he told her.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Are you still on that?” Katie flipped her fingers at him and leaned back in her chair.

“We said we were going to have sex.”

“We did have sex. Sort of.” Katie crossed her legs and her skirt rode up, giving him a flash of thigh and something that looked suspiciously like pink satin panties.

“I want to try again,” he said.

He’d known Katie for a long time. She often had a witty comeback or a response as subtle and effective as a raised brow. He got her, that was the thing, and knew she understood him, too. It was what made them great partners and better friends. Now, though, he could read nothing on her face, nothing in her eyes.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Katie said after a minute.

“What? Why not?” He wasn’t used to this, someone turning him down. That was a cliche and arrogant, but true. Mostly because Dean had a finely honed sense of who to hit on, not necessarily, as Katie had so often said, that nobody ever wanted to refuse him.

Dean had been refused before, all right. He knew how it felt. It sucked.

“Because we’re friends, Dean, and I don’t want to mess that up.”

“You agreed to it before.”

“That was before,” Katie said calmly enough, but he didn’t have to hear a tremor in her voice to see she was sort of upset. He could tell by the way she didn’t drink her coffee.

“Hey. What’s going on?” Dean slid into the chair across from her and moved forward, forcing her to uncross her legs so his knees could press hers. “Something up with that douchebag Jimmy or whatever the hell his name is?”

“Nothing’s up with Jimmy. That’s the problem.”

“Forget him,” Dean said. “If he can’t see what’s right in front of him…”

She laughed at that. “Right. Because you’re the expert on seeing what’s right in front of you?”

Dean frowned and stood. “The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

Katie shrugged and swiveled her chair back and forth. “Maybe I want more than a quick fuck from him, that’s all.”

“Isn’t the problem you’re not getting any sort of fuck?”

She sighed, her shoulders lifting and dropping with the force of it. “Forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”

“So…the challenge is off?”

Katie eyed him, one eye squinting and her head tilted as though she were seriously studying him as something foreign. Incomprehensible. “Why do you have such a bug up your ass about this sex thing?”

“You said I couldn’t,” Dean told her.

And that was the truth, mostly.

His phone rang, the ring tone a snippet of classical music he’d assigned to Jacob. His fingers slipped a little on the phone’s glass face as he looked, anyway, to make sure that was the number. He didn’t answer it.

Katie was smiling at him when he looked up, her smile half-quirked. “Was that him?”

“There is no him,” Dean said.

Her grin got a little broader. “Right.”

She swiveled again, kicking her foot up and down, showing off an expanse of shapely thigh he knew she’d never have revealed to anyone else in the office. Katie didn’t do shit like that, use her tits and ass to get attention, even though she could. She was always more comfortable with him than with the other men in the office, and for the first time, this stung a little.

“Is it because you don’t think I’m manly enough?”

Her grin wavered, her brow furrowed. “What?”

“You don’t think I’m manly enough,” Dean said, convinced.

“Oh, Dean. Really? C’mon. You should know better than that.”

Her scoffing didn’t make him feel better, especially when she turned her chair to face the computer, dismissing him. Dean spun her around to face him again. Katie looked as surprised as he felt.

“I want to do it,” Dean said in a low voice.

Katie drew in a breath. She smelled good. She always did, but today he seemed to notice it more. He seemed to notice everything about her more than usual today, most of it accompanied by the memory of her hand on his cock.

“Would it change your mind,” Katie murmured, her gaze bright, her voice throaty, “if I told you I absolutely believed you could make me come?”

“I’ll prove it to you.”

Her laugh this time snagged, rough and sultry. He’d never heard her sound that way before. “Fine. Prove it to me if it’s so important to you.”

“Done,” Dean said as his phone rang again, the same bit of classical music. “When?”

“Tonight? There’s no point in waiting.”

“Your place?”

“Be there at eight,” Katie said. “I don’t want to be up all night.”

“Oh, you’ll be up all right,” Dean said. “Maybe until tomorrow morning.”

* * *

It was no big thing, Katie told herself. It wasn’t like she’d never thought about what Dean would be like in bed, or that she’d never gone to bed with a friend before. As a matter of fact, a few years ago she’d had quite a successful “friends-with-benefits” experience with a man she still kept in touch with, unlike many of her friends who’d tried that sexual experiment and had it end badly. So it was no big thing, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. How he’d smell and taste and feel, if he could indeed get her off the way he promised.

Katie was sure hoping he could.

Distracted by thoughts of Dean’s hard cock, she nearly got hit in the face by the door to the coffee shop as she was heading in and someone was heading out. An old woman, layered in scarves and carrying a monstrously large cup of coffee, barely even looked Katie’s way as she pushed through the door, but fortunately instead of clipping her face on the glass, Katie only banged her elbow.

“Excuse you,” she muttered, turning to watch the woman pass.

It was the only reason she looked to the street corner and saw Jimmy, wearing familiar and delectable denim jeans, his longish hair tousled, his face scruffy. He was leaning against the street sign talking on a cell phone. If it had been anyone else, even an ex-boyfriend, Katie would’ve had not even a second’s hesitation in approaching him. But this was Jimmy, master of the late-night phone call. Things were always different in daylight.

She didn’t have time to scoot inside the coffee shop before Jimmy looked up, still talking, eyes getting bright. He smiled and said something that must’ve been goodbye, because he slipped the phone into his front pocket and headed toward her.

“Katie.”

“Hi, Jimmy.” She sounded too breathy, too gooey, too junior high. Katie tried again. “How’s it going?”

“Good, good.” He nodded. The breeze moved his shaggy hair, and the sunlight lit up his face. He had eyes the color of caramel, something she hadn’t remembered. “You going in?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Oh. Yes.”

“Good.” Jimmy grinned again and held open the door, then followed her.

It was the same coffee shop where they’d met, but this time, Jimmy bought her latte and brownies for both of them. He pulled out her chair, too, something no man had done for Katie in a long time. Sitting across from him, their knees bumping every so often, Katie tried hard not to think of this as anything romantic.

It was hard, though, with Jimmy keeping eye contact and laughing at her jokes. Or at the way he casually brushed past her on the way to get more napkins, some cream for his coffee, a fork. He touched her, hand flat on her back between her shoulder blades as he passed. And on the upper arm, and on the shoulder when he got up to greet another friend who’d come into the shop.

He touched her seven times, never in any way that could’ve been construed as anything more than casual, but Katie counted each time, her nerves tingling more with every press of his palm against her. By the time she’d finished her coffee, the brownie not even touched as she’d lost the capability to eat anything while Jimmy flirted with her, Katie thought if he touched her again she was going to melt into a puddle right then and there.

“Well, hey, it’s been great,” Jimmy said suddenly with a glance at the clock on the wall behind her, “but I have to scram.”

He stood, leaving Katie blinking and thinking of something witty to say, but he’d already squeezed her shoulder again and was pushing in his chair.

Damn.

He’d reduced her to speechlessness, which was not her normal state at all. She really hated not being herself around him, that somehow he’d made her the sort of woman who got all giddy and dumbstruck with crush. More than that, though, she hated that Jimmy seemed either oblivious to his effect on her, or so used to creating that response in women that he took it for granted.

“Thanks for the coffee.” Katie stood, too.

“Any time. I’ll call you,” Jimmy promised and shot her a grin.

Katie watched him go, wishing she could believe his offer was real and for her, instead of just his standard response to every female in the world.

* * *

Jacob hadn’t been too happy that Dean was going to Katie’s tonight. If any other man had snapped at Dean like that, told him off, said he’d better get his priorities straight instead of fucking around just because he “could” and not because he “should,” well, Dean would’ve told him to fuck off. It had come close to that, actually.

“You want me to cancel?” he’d asked, still tasting garlic and red sauce and wishing Jacob had brought all this up before they’d started eating.

Jacob had cocked his head and looked Dean up and down with a flat, cold gaze. “Would you, if I asked?”

“No.”

Jacob had shrugged. “Then do whatever the hell you want to, Dean. I won’t be that guy.”

“What guy?” Dean had asked, though he was pretty sure he knew.

“The one,” Jacob said as he got up and took his plate, food uneaten, to the garbage can to scrape it, “who waits around for you to figure everything you want and need is right in front of you, while you just keep walking away.”

“Is that a threat?”

Jacob had shrugged and given him another long look. “No, baby. It’s a fact.”

Then he’d pointed at the door, and Dean had gone with his tail between his legs, a fact that pissed him off so much he thought he might just delete that little prick from his phone entirely. But he didn’t. Sitting here in the car in front of Katie’s house, Dean held the phone and waited for it to ring.

But it didn’t.

The last guy he’d wanted and needed had cheated on him, lied to him and finally, left him. What still hurt wasn’t that Ethan had fucked around and been dishonest about it, but that in the end Dean had forgiven him and Ethan had still walked away.

The one who waits around for you to figure everything you want and need is right in front of you, while you just keep walking away.

“Fuck that,” Dean said aloud and tossed the phone into his glove compartment so he wouldn’t hear it not ringing. He looked at the house and wet his lips with his tongue.

He was going to do this, all right. The reasons had gone blurry-he was sure Katie would be okay if he cancelled, but then she’d always look at him when she thought he wasn’t looking and think about how he’d been a pussy. Hell, did that even matter? Why had this become so important? Why couldn’t he just let it go?

The porch light blinked twice. Katie. He probably looked like the biggest douche ever, sitting here in the car like he couldn’t make up his mind. Dean drew in a breath. In, out. Game time.

She greeted him at the door with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Hey. I thought you weren’t going to make it.”

“No. I’m here.” He paused, suddenly feeling like maybe he should’ve brought flowers or something like that. Feeling lame. This was Katie, for fuck’s sake, his friend. He could’ve at least brought a bottle of wine.

“C’mon in.” She stepped aside and closed the door behind him.

They stood in the entryway, more awkward than they’d ever been with each other. Dean remembered his senior prom, standing with his date and feeling the same way. Feeling like he was putting on a show that wasn’t fooling anyone.

Should he kiss her? He’d have kissed her on the cheek or hugged her, at least, if they hadn’t agreed to fuck. He’d have at least slipped an arm around her waist as he followed her to the living room to give her a squeeze as he asked about her day. All things he’d done before but now couldn’t quite manage.

“Something to drink? I have some of that wine you like,” Katie offered.

“Actually, I already poured it, so you’d better be having some. I can’t finish the bottle myself.”

She pointed to the coffee table. Bottle, two glasses. It was his favorite.

“Yeah.” Dean sat, took a glass, looked at her. “Do you need this?”

Katie looked a little surprised as she sat next to him, reaching for her own glass. “You mean…for tonight?”

“Yeah.” Dean cleared his throat. “You want to back out? Or you need to be a little drunk?”

Katie laughed and shook her head. “No, sweetie, I totally do not need to be a little drunk to fuck you. Unless…you don’t want to?”

She looked wary and hesitant, an expression Dean felt on his own face and didn’t like. “No. I mean…unless you don’t want to.”

Katie sighed heavily and sank into the couch cushions while sipping the wine. “Oh, Dean. Listen, this was your idea, so if you don’t want to, I totally get it. We don’t have to have sex. Believe me,” she added somewhat sourly. “You won’t be the first man today who didn’t want to make love to me.”

That sounded bad. Maybe even worse than his own trials with Jacob. Dean turned to face her. “That fucker Jimmy?”

She shrugged and ran a fingertip around the top of the wineglass, making it sing. “I saw him today. I mean actually saw, not talked to on the phone.”

She detailed how they’d met by accident. The coffee, the touching. It pissed Dean off to hear how sad she sounded about it.

“He’s a fucking moron,” Dean said flatly. “A foron. Really, babe.”

Katie’s sigh was shaky as she put her glass on the table. “I should just forget him.”

To his alarm, because Katie wasn’t a wilting flower at all, Dean saw she was on the verge of tears. “Hey. C’mere.”

He pulled her close so she could snuggle in at his side, her cheek to his chest. She fit just right in the curve of his arm, his chin against her hair. She sighed heavily again and put her arms around him.

“I’ll be fine,” she assured him, voice muffled.

He stroked a hand down her hair and they sat that way in silence for a few minutes. The words that came out of him next surprised him, quiet though he said them.

“He wants to be in a real relationship with me.”

“Of course he does,” Katie said, brushing her cheek against his chest again.

“You’re fabulous.”

“…no. I mean…yes,” Dean said. “But that’s not what I mean.” More silence.

“You’re afraid,” Katie said softly. “I get it. I know about you and Ethan, remember?”

For the first time in a long time, Dean didn’t stiffen at the other man’s name. For the first time, Ethan’s face had faded enough another face could replace it. “I don’t want to be like him, Katie, and that’s what Jacob said I was like.”

She looked up at him, her eyes wet though her cheeks were dry. “He said that?”

“Not exactly,” Dean admitted. “I mean, fuck, he doesn’t know about Ethan. Not like you do. But he said he wasn’t going to wait around while I just keep walking away.”

“Ah.” She didn’t move away from him. “Well, sweetie, maybe he has a point, you know?”

“I don’t want him to have a point,” Dean said.

She smiled sadly, her mouth quivering. “We’re a pair, aren’t we? You’ve got someone you’re not sure you want, I have someone who doesn’t seem to want me.”

To her chagrin, because Dean didn’t want to be the reason Katie cried, her tears spilled over her lower lids and traced their way down her face.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t, okay?”

He swiped the tear with the pad of his thumb and Katie shuddered, turning her face to press her mouth to his palm, holding his hand close to her face for a moment before looking up at him with still-sad eyes. A lot of women had cried on Dean’s shoulder over the years, but Katie never had. Looking at her now, all he could think was how good a friend she’d always been, and how much he didn’t want her to be unhappy.

She murmured against his mouth when he kissed her but made no protest. Her mouth opened. She tasted sweet, the way she had the other day. His hand went naturally around the back of her neck to cup it, her hair a soft, thick weight on his fingers. Somehow she ended up on his lap, straddling him, their kisses turning from soft and slow to hard and demanding.

She’d tricked him before, with the blindfold, but he didn’t need it this time. His mind put together the taste and smell of her with the memory of pleasure, and his cock responded. He pulled her closer, kissed her deeper, put a hand on the small of her back to grind her down a little harder against his dick.

“Dean,” she murmured into his mouth, but his kiss stopped her.

Dean favored men close to his size and build. Compared to that, Katie was so much smaller and softer, he had no trouble putting his hands under her ass and lifting her. She let out a small, strangled gasp but didn’t stop kissing him. Their tongues twisted, tangling, and fuck, it felt good. Really good.

He didn’t try to make it to the stairs, much less up them. Her rug was soft and thick and deep, and he laid her down on it, settling between her thighs as he closed his eyes and sank into the sensations. The semi-desperate surge of pleasure coiling in his gut surprised him, making him think his cock really did have a mind of its own.

Somehow she got him undressed, a feat he could only admire since they never stopped kissing and he was fumble-fingered about her clothes. In her bra and panties beneath him, Katie laughed softly as he tried to figure out how to unhook her bra and got it off herself.

“You really never have done this,” she said.

“Of course not.” Dean slid his hands up her sides but stopped just below her breasts to look into her eyes. “Did you think otherwise?”

She got up on her elbows to look at him. “I guess maybe I thought I wasn’t that special.”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Dean told her before kissing her again and saying against her lips, “you’re special.”

She laughed again into his kiss, and that was better than her tears had been. She lay back with him between her legs. Her hand found his dick and stroked it from half-hard to fully erect, and Dean shuddered at how good it felt. When she stroked her fingertips over his balls, he drew in a breath, holding it for a moment, before opening his eyes to look at her.

“Oh no,” he said. “The challenge was to get you off.”

“Sweetie, seeing you enjoy yourself goes a long way toward that.”

Dean couldn’t argue with that, since he was a fan of such tactics himself, but he shook his head. “I’m going to make you forget anyone else tonight, Katie. I promised.”

“Already done,” she breathed, eyes gleaming, and ran her hands up over his thighs. “Touch me.”

He slid his hands up her sides again to cup her breasts. Her nipples tightened against his palms and she drew her lower lip between her teeth. She liked that, he thought, trying to imagine what a woman would like. The same things as a guy, probably if only he could figure out the right parts to focus on. If only he could find them, he thought as Katie parted her legs a little and arched her back.

Fuck, this might be harder than he’d thought.

He bent his mouth to a nipple, sucking gently. Not flat like a man’s, Katie’s nipple peaked and grew as he stroked it with his tongue. And wow, she bucked her hips up against his belly. Dean did the other nipple, too, until both of them were rosy red and hard.

Dean had seen plenty of hetero porn-his college roommate had been addicted to the stuff, leaving skin mags around and playing a nonstop collection of VHS tapes he rented from the video store. It had all seemed sort of vague and mysterious, unlike gay porn in which everyone had erections and came in great, spurting jets of jizz, on camera. Katie wasn’t acting like a woman in a porn video. Aside from the lack of Lucite platform shoes, she was squirming only a little when he touched her.

Kissing her, though, was getting better and hotter. She pulled him to her mouth, her soft body wriggling under his. She was an amazing kisser, knowing when to pull back and when to suck his tongue just hard enough to get him moaning.

She shifted against his cock, hard on her belly, and ran a hand down his bare chest to tweak one of his nipples before pushing her panties down and wriggling until she got them off. She lay back, naked, her gaze bold but her chin lifted a little.

Dean wasn’t stupid. “You’re beautiful,” he assured her.

She raised a brow.

He kissed her, hands stroking over her sides and hips, over her belly, then up again to cup her breasts so he could use his mouth on her nipples again. “You are.”

“That feels good,” Katie murmured, laying back onto the rug and running her hands through his hair.

It wasn’t going to give her an orgasm, he knew that much. Dean might not like pussy, but he wasn’t ignorant about anatomy. All those hours of trying to study while porn ran in the background might pay off now-at least he had an inkling of where to find her clit, something his college roommate never seemed to have managed if the sounds his girlfriends made in their bunk after lights out were any indication.

He rolled onto his side, kissing her mouth again, as his hand slid down her soft belly and through the tangle of curls covering her pussy. His fingers stroked down. This was utterly foreign, completely unexpected…and absolutely erotic for all that. She was soft and hot and wet, and when he found a small, hard bud with his fingertips, she cried out.

Bingo.

Katie opened her eyes. “Right there. That’s good.”

She put her hand on his wrist, shifting him a little, slowing his pace, but letting go as soon as he adjusted. Fascinated, Dean watched her sink back against the rug, her cheeks flushing as she closed her eyes. She bit her lower lip again before breathing in, lips parted.

This was so unlike anything he’d ever done. Cocks came in a lot of sizes, but they were all big enough to grip. To stroke. Beneath his fingertips was the one small spot he had to keep his attention on. This was the real challenge, and Dean wasn’t going to fuck it up.

His cock ached, his balls heavy, as he stroked her, but he didn’t move to do anything about it. He couldn’t afford to lose track of what he was doing. Female orgasms, to his knowledge, could be tenuous and easily lost.

They kissed forever, and he didn’t care. The longer they went, the better it got. He found a rhythm that turned out not to be so different than what he was used to, and the way Katie reacted-moaning softly, rocking her hips, he thought she was enjoying it.

She stiffened, her hand going to his wrist again, her mouth open beneath his but no longer kissing. “Oh…”

Dean paused, fearing he’d somehow done something wrong. “Katie?”

“Oh, god, so close,” she whispered, and looked at him. “Just…slow down a little. Make it last.”

Dean grinned, slowing his circling finger. “Like this?”

Her eyelids fluttered. “Oh, god…”

The sound of pleasure suffusing her voice sent a throb from the root of his cock all the way through it. She moved against his hand. The flush on her cheeks had spread down her throat, across her breasts, and without thinking too much about it, Dean bent to suck gently at her nipple again.

Katie cried out, something wordless and ecstatic. The feeling of her moving, the sound of her-fuck-the smell of her arousal sent slickness oozing from the head of his prick. His balls tightened. When she kissed him, he felt her clit pulse under his fingertips. She moaned into his mouth.

“Fuck me,” Katie said, not like a command but more like a plea.

He wanted to, but there was the matter of logistics. Katie blinked again, her gaze clearing for a minute, and she pushed at him to roll him off her as she reached into the drawer of her end table to pull out a box of condoms. Just as she’d figured out how to get them both naked before he could, now she pushed him to sit up as she opened the box, tore open the package and sheathed him in latex before he could do more than shift his hips. Straddling him, her thighs gripping his, Katie put her hands on his shoulders. His cock rubbed at her belly and then lower as she looked at him.

“You sure about this, sweetie?”

“Did you come yet?” Dean asked, voice hoarse at the pressure of her cunt pushing his cock against his stomach. Her ass was smooth under his palms.

Katie smiled and reached between them to grip his dick at the base. She bit her lower lip, looking down, as she shifted and then…oh, fuck.

“Oh, fuck,” Dean said aloud. “You’re so hot. And tight.”

Blinking, surprised, he let the pleasure wash over him as she sank onto his cock all the way. She was tight, and hot, and slick, too. Her cunt gripped him better than any fist ever had, and he had to breathe out, slowly, to keep himself from shooting off like a kid with his first strokebook.

Katie pressed her forehead to his shoulder for a second. “Oh. God.”

He’d never fucked in this position before, but it didn’t take him more than a second to figure out how to shift and thrust upward. His cock slid inside her without effort, and she bit down, hard, on his shoulder. Dean had never been one for painplay but that was too fucking much. His cock throbbed and he made a low, grinding noise.

“Yes,” Katie breathed into his ear. “Fuck me. Just like that.”

Soft, low, distinctly feminine, her voice was in no way like a man’s. Her body, soft and curved, not like a man’s. Nothing about this was like anything he’d ever even fantasized about, but Dean discovered it didn’t fucking matter, not then, not with her cunt wrapped around his cock like that. Not with her tongue licking at the sore spot her teeth had left. Not with her moving on him, riding him. Fucking him as pleasure built and built and built.

“Touch me,” Katie said into his ear. She took his hand, slid it between them, pressed his thumb to her clit. “Oh, yes. Right there. Like that, just like that…oh, god, Dean. Yes!”

Until this point, everything he’d promised her had been all talk. Until he felt her shudder and heard the soft sighing gasp of her breath as orgasm swept over her, Dean hadn’t really been sure he could make her come. But now Katie rocked against him and his own climax shuddered through him. Perfect timing.

She blinked rapidly and looked at him, then laughed. “Wow. Well, I guess I’d say you won. Very well done, sir.”

Dean blew out a breath, fingers tightening on her hips as his breathing slowed. “Saying I told you so would make me sort of an asshole, wouldn’t it?”

Katie kissed him lightly on the cheek and eased herself off him, stretching as she reached to snag up her panties and T-shirt. “Sort of.”

He watched as she got dressed without appearing to be the least bit embarrassed. He admired that about her. Not that he was embarrassed, exactly. Just more like wondering what the hell he’d just done.

Katie looked over her shoulder at him as she pulled on her clothes, then frowned. “You all right?”

Dean nodded, sitting there on the floor with a condom on his getting-limp dick, after having fucked one of his best friends. A woman, at that. It wasn’t his most shining moment.

But Katie, still frowning, crouched next to him and pulled over a small garbage can and handed him a box of tissues, then his clothes. “I didn’t think you’d be the one to get all emo, afterwards.”

“I’m not emo.” Dean frowned and took care of cleaning up, then pulled on his briefs and jeans.

Katie studied him. “Uh-huh.”

“I’m not.”

She smiled and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek again. “We fucked, Dean. And it was good. For me, anyway, and I’m pretty sure you enjoyed it. It doesn’t make you straight. Just…open-minded.”

Her smile urged his, even though none of this was as gratifying as he’d expected it to be. He’d thought it would feel like a conquest. Instead, he found himself hoping Jacob would forgive him.

“Damn it,” he said, suddenly miserable. “Remind me that I like sort of being an asshole?”

“Why? Are you going to say you told me so?”

“No. Not about that.”

She knew him too well, Katie did. “Ah. It’s him, huh?”

“Jacob.”

“Him has a name?” She looked impressed. “Wow, Dean. Wow.”

“Fuck.” He sank onto the couch and cradled his head in his hands. “Fuck, Katie, what did I just do?”

“Hey.” She sat beside him and took his hand, linking their fingers. “Seriously, you’re going to give me a complex, here. What happened…do you really think it was all just that stupid challenge? I mean, I know you don’t do pussy as a general rule, but…maybe that’s why you did it. Not why you suggested it, sweetie-that was all your huge ego. But…maybe it’s why you actually went through with it.”

He wasn’t getting it, and she could tell.

“What I mean is, being with him scares you. I know why. But being with me isn’t scary. Right?”

“No. Of course not.”

She smiled. “Because you and I both know that no matter how stellar that living room rug fuck just was, and it was pretty delicious, it’s not going to lead to anything. Right?”

He gave her a cautious nod. “Well…right.”

“And for me,” Katie said, “I really just needed someone who was into me. Even if only for an hour.”

“I’m into you for longer than that,” Dean told her and squeezed her hand.

She laughed, sounding better than she had earlier, which made Dean feel better.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. I do.” He leaned back against the couch cushions and stared at the ceiling.

“He makes it all seem so easy.”

“It’s not how he makes it seem,” she said. “It’s how he makes it feel.”

Jacob made it all feel easy, too. Dean frowned as Katie’s cell phone rang, vibrating the coffee table. She looked at it and sighed, but didn’t pick it up.

“It’s Jimmy.”

“Douchebag,” Dean said and picked it up. “Hello?”

“…Katie?”

“She’s busy,” Dean told the guy.

“Oh. Um, can I leave a message?”

“No,” Dean said, and hung up.

“Dean!” Katie looked shocked, but was laughing.

Dean shrugged. “Maybe he’ll think better of jerking you around.”

“Maybe he’ll never call me again!”

“Would that be a bad thing?” Dean asked. “For real?”

Katie frowned without answering, and Dean pulled her close to hug her. They sat like that for a while without speaking. Then she sighed and pushed away from him.

“Go to him,” Katie said.

Dean nodded and stood, then handed her the cell phone. “Call him back.”

* * *

Katie almost bailed.

She’d waited until the morning to call Jimmy, not sure if she wanted to go down that road, maybe waiting to see if he’d call her first. He didn’t. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

It didn’t matter how she felt now, though, since she’d already called him and asked him to meet her for coffee. He’d hesitated before saying yes, a pause that had lasted a thousand years while she forgot to breathe. She wasn’t, in fact, sure she remembered to now when he walked through the door.

He looked too damned good, she thought. It wasn’t fair.

“Hey,” Jimmy said as he slid into the chair across from her with a cup of coffee he put on the table. He shook his shaggy hair out of his face and shrugged out of his coat. His grin was at half-wattage.

“Hi, Jimmy.” Katie had a mug of coffee in front of her, but she hadn’t even sipped it. It was cold now, but she clutched it anyway as though the porcelain would warm her hands.

“This is nice. Meeting like this. Thanks for asking me.” Jimmy sounded hesitant, uncertain. Not his usual self at all.

But what was his usual self? Did Katie even know? She had to admit she probably didn’t. Everything about Jimmy was late-night conversation, and just because she’d bared her soul to him didn’t mean he’d done the same.

“Thanks for coming. It’s nice to see you.”

They never talked like this. Even the first time he’d called her, they’d slipped into a loose back-and-forth that had only gotten easier over time. Now it was as though they’d only just met and had no reason to get to know each other better.

Jimmy’s smile amped up a notch, still far from his usual bright grin, but noticeable. “Yeah. Two times in one week, that’s some kind of crazy, huh?”

Katie had always believed honesty to be the best approach, but facing Jimmy across the tiny cafe table, all she could think of was how she wanted to make up some lame excuse for why she wanted to see him instead of just telling him the truth. “Yeah. Super crazy.”

Jimmy seemed to relax a little bit, his long fingers turning his cup around and around on the table. His knee nudged hers. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

This was going nowhere. Katie hated it. She wanted to ask him if he liked her, or if she was just some myth, a story he liked to tell over the phone. She wanted to tell him about how she smiled at the sound of his voice. Of how she wanted more.

Jimmy glanced over her shoulder toward the counter. “I’m going to grab a refill. You want one?”

Katie shook her head. “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

He touched her again as he passed. A hand on her shoulder, fingers curving and squeezing just momentarily. It was too much, the final straw, that casual touch that felt too good.

She got up without thinking, without looking back, heading out of the coffee shop and down the street. The wind burned her eyes, not tears, she told herself as her heels click-clacked on the sidewalk.

She was almost to the alley before he caught up to her.

“Katie!” Jimmy hooked her elbow, turning her as she stiffened at the sound of her name. He didn’t let go. “Hey. Wait.”

Katie opened her mouth to protest or maybe just to walk away without a word, she wasn’t sure and had no time to decide before Jimmy was kissing her. Openmouthed and hungry, his hands on her hips pulling her close up against him. He tasted better than she’d imagined, his kiss deeper, his body harder.

He pulled away, shoulders rising and falling with his breath. His gaze searched hers. “I didn’t…was that…”

Katie kissed him. Softer than he’d done, her tongue stroking his as her fingers wound in the hair at the back of his neck. She pulled a little as his hands gripped tighter on her hips. She felt the bulge of his crotch through denim against her belly, and she pulled away, her own breath coming fast and sharp.

Jimmy smiled, his lips wet. “I should’ve done this a long time ago.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t sure you wanted something like this,” he said. “With me, I mean.”

People passed them on the street, some giving them curious glances but most ignoring them. He stepped her backward into the relative privacy of the alley and leaned against the brick wall of the storefront without letting her go. Katie pressed against him, noticing he’d run out after her without a coat.

“Why on earth not?” she cried, pushing at him with her fists but not too hard. “God, Jimmy. We’ve been talking for months. You know the color of my favorite panties and the name of my first dog!”

“I know, I know, but…hell, I’m better on the phone than in person,” he said.

Katie frowned and swiped her tongue over the taste of him lingering on her lips.

“That sounds like a very bad excuse.”

He sighed, looking serious. “I know. B-but…” Jimmy paused, drew a breath. “Well, I’ll tell you. Until I was about fifteen, I stuttered.”

Katie raised a brow.

“I grew out of it, or taught myself not to, whatever,” Jimmy said slowly. “But by then I’d already found out I was better on the phone than talking to someone face to face. On the phone I could take my time or something, I don’t know. It became a habit.”

She shook her head. “I don’t care if you stutter. You could’ve told me.”

Jimmy nudged her just a bit closer into the space between one cocked leg and the opposite thigh. “I liked you the first time I met you, Katie. But then we started talking…”

“And you didn’t like me any more?”

“No.” He laughed. “I liked you more. A lot more. I didn’t want to ruin it.”

She made a disgruntled noise, already forgiving him because to do anything else would only spite herself. “You almost did.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Jimmy kissed her again, lingering this time. “Do you think we could start over?”

“Hell no,” Katie told him, wrapping her arms around him and getting up on her toes to return the kiss. “Start at the beginning? No way. Let’s go straight to third base. Unless,” she paused meaningfully, “you really are better on the phone.”

Jimmy grinned, eyes gleaming, and leaned in close to whisper in her ear. “Why don’t we go to my place and you can decide for yourself?”

“That,” Katie said, “sounds like an excellent idea.”

* * *

Dean had brought flowers.

He didn’t even know if Jacob liked flowers.

Dean liked flowers, purple and red and yellow, tied with a green ribbon. He liked them in vases around his house. Dean liked flowers because they were pretty and they didn’t last long, and he didn’t have to take care of them the way he’d have had to be responsible for a potted plant.

Maybe it was time he stopped being so afraid of taking care of things.

He’d just tossed them into the bushes by Jacob’s front door when he was caught by the door opening. Jacob looked at the bushes. Then at Dean.

“Why are you throwing flowers into my bushes?”

Dean tried to look innocent and knew he failed by the way Jacob’s eyebrows rose.

“Uh…”

Jacob peered behind the bushes, then put a hand on his hip. “Did you bring me flowers and then throw them away?”

“Yes.” Dean’s jaw tensed.

Jacob smiled.

When Dean kissed him, it felt right. Like coming home. When Jacob kissed him back, it felt even better.

“I like flowers,” Jacob said against Dean’s mouth. “Thank you.”

Dean pulled away just enough to look into Jacob’s eyes. There was probably more to say but nothing came to him just then. He spoke with his body, his mouth using kisses instead of words to express what he wasn’t sure he should say aloud. Jacob seemed to understand, though.

He smiled against Dean’s mouth. “Come inside.”

Dean nodded. Then he smiled too as he followed Jacob through the doorway, walking behind him.

Not walking away.

* * * * *

Content

Megan Hart
An Erotic Collection Volume 2

Reason Enough

Gilt and Midnight

Newly Fallen

The Challenge