Crave You (11 page)

Chapter Eighteen
(Finn)

My intention wasn’t to stop at all. I wanted to see her reaction to my stopping and to my words. And I got just what I was looking for.

It was that look in her eyes that I’d seen that night in the hotel, and that I’d seen again last night. It was a longing look of wanting me, needing me. It was a look I had deliberately tried to evoke with my words just moments ago, knowing all too well what it would lead to.

I wouldn’t be able to leave that store without fucking her.

I can’t say it was a spontaneous thought. I’d been thinking about it all day, ever since we woke up and I decided I would bring her to my store. As we’d gotten dressed earlier, I’d grabbed that third condom off her nightstand and put it in my pocket.

Rachel looked surprised when I produced it. She had been placing her handful of books down on the counter, and she did a double-take when she saw me holding it up.

“You didn’t think I’d be unprepared, did you?”

The corner of her mouth turned up in a knowing grin. “I would never…”

I lifted her up and put her on the counter, grabbing her leg and wrapping it around the backs of my thighs. “I don’t think I can get enough of you.”

She put her hands on my chest and pushed when I tried to lean in to kiss her.

“Wait,” she said. “Do you remember that email you wrote about how you liked to watch a woman’s reaction?”

She didn’t get any more specific than that. She didn’t have to. “Of course.”

Rachel moved off the counter and stood, looking up at me. “I want that. I want you to see my reaction.”

We were standing less than a foot apart. Without breaking eye-contact, I reached for her wrist and brought her hand to the front of my pants. Her eyebrows moved slightly up her forehead and her lips parted.

“That’s a good first reaction.”

She bit her lip and I thought I saw the hint of a blush taking over her face.

I stepped around her, went behind the counter and removed the seat cushion from the chair, before leaning back on my counter, ankles crossed. “I can’t see your reaction until you start.” I dropped the cushion on the floor before me.

She stepped toward me, putting her face against my chest. “I want to do it how you like it.” I felt her hands start to unbuckle my belt, and I stopped her.

“Just the zipper,” I said.

My pulse picked up as I was curious to see how she did it, what her technique was. All women do it differently. Some better than others. But there’s no such thing as a bad blowjob.

She kissed me as she worked the zipper down and freed my cock. I grew hard and heavy in her hands as our tongues twisted wildly together.

Rachel knelt on the cushion, stroking me and watching her hand as it moved back and forth along the length of my shaft.

I watched her hand, too, but mostly I watched her face as she played with me. Her lips were pressed tightly together, as if teasing me, making me wonder how long they’d stay so firmly closed.

I reached down and took my cock from her, gripping it at the base. My other hand went to the top of her head, and I guided her head closer to me with my fingertips on her scalp.

Those lips—pretty and pouty—weren’t opening for me yet, so I touched them with the head of my cock. I moved it back and forth across her mouth, painting her with the little bead of moisture that had formed at the tip when she was playing with me.

After a few moments like this, she looked up and her lips parted beautifully for me. Her tongue touched the tip of my cock as she held eye contact. Opening wider, she drew the head into her mouth, and I dropped my hand to my side. I felt the warmth close around me as she sucked a little, using her tongue to tease the very tip.

Her hand moved to the base of my cock, not stroking, but holding with just the right amount of pressure.

The visuals are always what push me over the edge. Yes, the physical pleasure is integral, but there’s nothing like the sight of a woman wrapping her lips around my cock and taking her time as she surrenders her mouth to me.

Which is exactly what Rachel was doing now—opening her mouth a little more, taking more of me, encasing my cock with the growing heat and wetness of her mouth.

I reached down and took her wrist, moving her hand away.

“Let me have the other one,” I said, and she raised her arm.

I brought her hands to my sides, pinning them down to the counter on either side of me.

“I like it when you just use your mouth,” I said.

She tried to murmur something, but I couldn’t tell what it was, nor did I care. I could tell it was something positive, maybe just a sound affirming what I told her.

Rachel was moving a little faster now, her plump lips sliding up and down my shaft. My cock glistened from the mixture of her spit and my pre-come.

Watching her move like that…Jesus, I could have stayed there all day.

I was intently focused on watching her lips slide slowly toward the tip, and she sucked hard, pulling back, freeing my cock with a wet
pop
sound.

Her long blonde hair fell in her face just then. I reached out with one hand, gathering as much of it as I could in my fist, then held it together.

“I need to see your gorgeous face as you do this,” I said.

“My damn hair’s so long. Sorry.”

“Not at all. It makes a good handle.”

She smiled that perfect smile of hers as she looked at my erection, and I couldn’t have handled one more second of not being in her mouth. I moved her head back to my cock, sliding between her lips once more. Holding onto her hair, I didn’t have to direct her movement. She swirled her tongue around the head, then took me back in with one swift motion.

Moving faster than before, her head bobbing up and down. The friction of her lips sliding along my skin combined with her sucking…it was getting too intense to think. Though I did feel her teeth lightly graze across the swollen tip of my cock, which I didn’t mind and even encouraged on occasion.

Moments later, the visual got me. “I’m going to come,” I said.

I held off on telling her that I wanted to come in her mouth. I wanted to see what she would do on her own—pull away and use her hand or stay where she was and take my come in her mouth?

I let go of her hair. Luckily, it stayed out of her face, giving me a perfect view as she locked her lips around my cock as I came.

“Ah, Rachel, fuck…” I said as my stomach muscles clenched along with my thighs, as if being wound up for a big release.

Her eyes got big and she blinked rapidly a few times, closing them as I came more.

When it was clear that I had finished, she tucked me back into my pants, zipped me up, and said, “I know you don’t want to kiss me right—”

I reached for the back of her head, pulling her close to me, kissing her deeply.

. . . . .

“I can’t believe you went six months without telling me you owned a bookstore.”

She was standing beside me on the sidewalk as I locked the door. I shrugged. “Putting aside what just happened in there, I have a lot of self-control.”

She laughed and grabbed my arm as we walked to the car.

We had spent another fifteen or so minutes inside. Most of it was spent with me urging Rachel to take more books, but she declined. I didn’t force the issue. I knew she’d be back here.

“How far do you live from here?” she asked, buckling her seatbelt.

Goddamn. She was about to start with the one line of questioning I had hoped wouldn’t come up today. Wishful thinking. She was making me sloppy in my judgment lately.

“About ten minutes.” I started the car and looked out the driver’s side window to see the oncoming traffic but also to keep from having to let her see my face.

“Is that where we’re going next? I’d love to see where you live.”

“Not today,” I said, my face close to the window. “Sorry. It’s just a mess and my cleaners don’t come until Monday.”

She didn’t say anything in response as I pulled the car away from the curb.

I put my hand on her knee. “Soon. I promise.” I glanced over to see her nodding, but looking disappointed.

I never let anyone into my house. Had I planned this day better, I would have done a sweep through the place, making sure I didn’t have anything lying around that would look suspicious. A file, a stack of photos, an unopened disposable phone I hadn’t used yet…it could have been any one or more of those things that forced me to tell her the truth about my life.

I wasn’t ready for that.

She couldn’t have been, either.

Chapter Nineteen
(Rachel)

I didn’t want to push him and risk a repeat of him shutting down like he’d done in the hotel room that night. Yes, I was eager to know more about him. To know everything about him, in fact, and seeing where he lived would have been great.

But I knew all too well about the desire to keep parts of your life secret. I wanted so badly to know what it was about Finn’s life that necessitated his cloak of privacy. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, mostly out of respect for his space, but also out of fear of pushing him away again.

He drove us back to Washington, where we stopped at a deli, got some sandwiches, fruit, and drinks.

“Show me your bench,” he said, sliding his sunglasses on.

“My bench…”

“Where you have lunch everyday and read my emails. I’d like to see it.”

We were standing on the sidewalk in front of the deli, a block or so from the National Mall. Finn held our lunch in a cardboard box.

“I know what you meant,” I said. “I just wasn’t expecting it.”

I showed him the way to the bench, and I was surprised to find it unoccupied. Groups of people used the vast expanse of grass to play touch football, sometimes Frisbee, and the sidewalks were jammed with joggers and groups of tourists.

Finn looked around as I unpacked the box. “Nice views,” he said. “All around. I can see why you picked this spot.”

I handed him a sandwich. “Actually, it was just random.”

“Right. Because you’re always looking down at a screen.”

I shrugged, opening a cold bottle of tea. “It’s 2014. We’re all looking at screens. That’s our brave new world, three-hundred-and-however-many pixels per inch at a time.”

Finn let out a little chuckle. “Cynical.”

“It’s true,” I said. “But, in my defense, I spend a good amount of time looking at pages, too. Real ones, not ebook pages, thank you very much.”

“Don’t get me started,” he said. But it seems that I already had, as Finn launched into an impassioned defense of physical books. His thoughts on the issue matched mine exactly.

“You’re just worried about going out of business,” I teased.

He shook his head as he popped a grape into his mouth.

“I’m kidding,” I said. “I agree with everything you said. I think we’re in the minority for people our age, though.”

“Resistance is not futile.” He sipped his drink. “It’s nice to finally be able to visualize you sitting here reading my emails.”

We ate and people-watched for several minutes.

Finn balled up the wax paper that his sandwich had been wrapped in, and put it in the box, then moved closer to me, putting his arm around my shoulders. “All these people walking around with their families, others rushing off to a meeting, seeing what looks like an innocent lunch taking place here, a seemingly innocent girl looking at her phone. All the while, nothing innocent about it.”

I let out a little laugh. “That about sums it up. But they weren’t all dirty.”

“I’ve never written anything
dirty
,” he said, the sarcasm heavy in his tone.

I looked at him. “Uh, right. Lots of them were filthy as hell and you know it. I loved all of them, by the way.”

“I liked the way yours were all about you by yourself.”

“Why’s that?”

“It told me you hadn’t been with a man in a long time, so I had a challenge before me. You were a mystery,” he said. “I like a little mystery. It made the chase more exciting.”

“Is the chase over?”

“Not even close,” he said.

I wanted to ask him something, but gave it a little extra thought, then just let it fly. “All the stories about other women. You said most of them weren’t true. So…why’d you do that?”

Finn took a deep breath and sighed it out. “What can I say? I have an active imagination.”

I nudged him with my elbow. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“It turned me on,” he said, “knowing it was turning you on as well. And now I no longer have to imagine what your face looks like when I’m blunt with you. I can see it for myself.”

I recalled the previous night and this morning in the bookstore, thinking about the things he’d said to me.

“Tell me your favorite,” he said.

“Favorite email?”

“Yes.”

I pretended to think about it for a moment, even murmuring sounds and words like I was giving it some thought. But I knew which one it was. An email he had sent about three months ago, one that I must have read at least a hundred times, sometimes just to read it, other times when I was touching myself.

“She sits on the edge of the bed, naked, wearing only heels. Her clothes are in a pile, pantyhose ripped from my tearing them off of her legs. I kneel in front of her, telling her to drape a leg over my shoulder. I want her to feel like she’s somewhat in control, but she’s just following what I tell her to do. I instruct her to hook her leg tighter over my shoulder, the heel of her shoe pressing into the middle of my back. I tell her to pull me closer when she wants, as hard and fast as she wants…”

It went on like that, in increasingly graphic detail, but as I sat there on the bench with him I had to stop thinking about it. “The one with the ripped pantyhose,” I said. “And she’s wearing heels…”

Finn nodded. “That was a good one.”

I looked at his face, wishing he didn’t have those sunglasses on. I even thought about reaching up and removing them before I asked him what I wanted to know, but thought better of it. I wanted to trust him to tell me the truth. “Was that a real one, or made up?”

“Made up,” he said without hesitation.

“So that’s never happ—”

“No, not like that. But I sometimes think about what it would be like. Obviously you do, too. We’ll find out soon,” Finn said, touching my cheek with the back of his hand. He picked up the box, stood, and walked to a trashcan nearby.

As he walked, I thought about how long we had talked by email, how slow the process had been—getting comfortable enough to actually meet. And now, in such a short time, we were moving fast. Not just physically, either. I was feeling myself becoming more emotionally involved with him. I kept warning myself that it could be a huge mistake, that I could very well be setting myself up for misery. But something about this man made me want to go a little further, have a little courage, a little faith.

And damn, did he look absolutely gorgeous walking back to me. There was a swagger to his walk. Nothing overdone. Certainly not forced. It was just something about the way he moved confidently, his tall, fit body striding as if he owned the ground before him.

Doomed. I was doomed. No matter how much I tried to protect myself from getting hurt, I was going to make myself vulnerable no matter how much I knew I probably shouldn’t.

I realized then what I was dealing with—a proverbial high-wire act. Finn was drawing me closer to him, whether he meant to or not, and the closer I got the more I wanted to know, but I was well aware of his insistence on privacy and the consequences of breaching those lines.

Maybe if I shared more of myself, he would lower his defenses as well. I was ready. It was worth a try.

. . . . .

When Finn suggested we walk before going back to his car, I thought it was the perfect opportunity.

“Now that I know where you work,” I said, “I’ll show you where I work.”

We walked up 9
th
Street, past The Smithsonian, crossed Constitution Avenue, then took a left on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Don’t tell me you’re taking me to The White House,” Finn said, an easy smile on his face, but still a lingering curiosity, as if I just might be leading us that way.

By then, we were in front of the building where I worked. I stopped. “Here’s where I am Monday through Friday.”

Finn looked up at the building, then down to the drab brown sign with plain white lettering: J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building.

“I can’t show you exactly where I work in there, but…this is it.” I turned to him.

He took off his sunglasses. His eyes were darting back and forth and up and down the building. “Really.”

“Yup.” I held onto his arm and whispered, “I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but I work in the basement. It’s the last stop for all incoming packages. They’re checked off-site, but they go through one more scan here.”

“Interesting.”

“Not really,” I said, looking at the building, and then back at Finn. I noticed his facial expression had changed. The muscles in his jaw clenched, making that little knot I’d noticed when he walked into the hotel lounge the first time we met. “But, hey, it’s a paycheck.”

The place never closed, of course. The FBI is a 24/7/365 operation. So as we stood there, men and women in suits came and went, in and out of the front door. I always wondered what each of them did when I saw them. And it looked to me like Finn was wondering something similar.

“How long have you worked here?” he asked.

“Going on four years.”

“Have you ever used a work computer to email me?”

I shook my head, looking up at him. “No. No way, why?”

He casually dismissed it by saying, “It’s just that we’ve been—I’ve been—pretty graphic in some of my emails. I just wouldn’t want you to get caught reading personal emails on a work computer. But,” he said, catching himself quickly, “I know you wouldn’t. I didn’t mean to imply that you were careless.”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

“All right, then. Ready to go back to your place?”

He seemed suddenly unimpressed. Maybe it was the way I told him the job wasn’t interesting and I only had it for the paycheck. I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t spend too much time worrying about it. The thought of having him in my apartment again, alone, wiped out any possibility of worrying or thinking about anything.

There was nothing in the world I wanted more.

I’d had a bit of a revelation as we were sitting on the bench. It wasn’t a huge epiphany. It was just a thought I couldn’t deny: I had fallen in love with Finn. Irrevocably, undeniably in love for the first time in my life.

There was one bit of doubt, though, and it was enough to keep me from telling him how I felt.