Andy was gasping, clinging to Cadell’s arms. His white bedroom resolved around her, ghostly furniture against blank walls. When she could see in the dim light again, Cadell had scooped her up into his arms and was holding her to his chest. His heart beat under her ear.
Andy touched his shoulders and slid her arms around him, her heartbeat still throbbing in her body.
“I’ll bet I could make you come your first time,” he said, his voice low and dark in his throat. “I’ll bet I could make you come hard.”
She swallowed, the swollen tissues between her legs pulsing again. “I don’t know.”
“I do.” He nipped her shoulder, his teeth sharp on her skin. “But not tonight.”
He rocked Andy in his arms until she managed to breathe normally. She was limp, wrung out, from what he had done to her, but she felt her mind returning to her. “I’m okay,” she told him. “I’m all right now.”
His arms around her loosened, and she settled back. “What did you do, just then?”
“I was trying to teach you to relax so that your first time won’t hurt, or at least won’t hurt as much.” He leaned over and clicked on a small reading lamp beside the bed.
“Can you do that?” Andy asked him.
He looked up at her, his dark eyes wary and serious. “Sometimes.”
“How do you do that?”
He watched her. “Massage. Relaxation. Slowly, not hard, not fast. It’s almost more like hypnosis. You can’t get the woman wound up.” He gestured to the bed around them. “Not like that. Everything is slow and geared to teach her to open.”
Andy swallowed because telling the truth was hard, but she didn’t believe in lying because she didn’t believe in miracles. “I would have said yes, tonight.”
“Not tonight. We were both—” He sighed, raising his hands. “And I’m still—” He breathed hard. “No. Not until you’ve thought about it in the light of day. Not unless you decide not to marry that guy.” Cadell trailed off, and his steady, guarded gaze broke her heart.
“But I can’t decide not to. If I do, my parents will disown me. I’ll be dead to them. They will tell everyone that I am dead to them, and they will mean it. It won’t be like when your parents died, and you go on. It would be like I had died to them and to myself.”
He wrapped his arms around her and bowed his head to rest on her shoulder. “When you marry that guy, it’s going to be like losing you, too, but I can’t let myself fall this time. When my mother died, when my sister died, I fell. I fell into a pit of heroin and pain, and I didn’t care whether I died. I can’t, this time. I have Emily, and I can’t. But I know what you would be giving up, and I don’t want you to do that, either.”
She wanted to tell Cadell that she wouldn’t marry Mahadavan, that she wouldn’t let him fall, but she didn’t want to lie to him, either. When she left his cozy cloud of irresponsibility, good girl Andal Kumar would do what she had been raised to do.
Right?
But right now, the blinds were closed, the door was shut, and darkness surrounded them outside of the small circle of light from the reading lamp.
Cadell detangled his limbs from hers.
She asked, “Where are you going?”
He pointed toward the bathroom door. “I’m just going to take a shower. I need to condition my hair. It feels kind of stiff right now.”
“Can I come along?”
“Like, to talk to me while I’m in the shower?” He looked around like he was looking for an escape.
“No. Like, in the shower,” she said.
“I can shower in the guest bedroom if you want to try out this one,” he said. “The three showerheads rinse you fast, and the waterfall thing is kind of cool.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Andy crawled off the bed and walked past him, letting her naked hips and butt swing as she walked by. She hooked a finger in the waistband of his jammie pants and pulled him after her into the white bathroom, pristine white tile and snowy quartz countertops.
“Wait, you mean—” he said.
“Yep.”
“Woman, you are going to give me a heart attack.”
Andy almost stopped dead in her tracks with her feet on the cold tile and her hand in Cadell’s pants.
Woman.
Not a girl. Not a nice, homely, quiet, obedient girl.
A woman.
You’d think that someone who had been practicing medicine for years, holding other people’s lives in her hands with nothing but her expertise between them and bleeding to death, would think of herself as an adult woman. Yet, Andy had been called a girl and treated like a child at home so much—ordered around and told what to do and think—that the word hadn’t clicked over in her head.
Woman.
Standing here in front of Cadell—a tall being who towered over her, who moved with a powerful grace and had overcome so much, and who was responsible for his own decisions, including when to leave college, how to form a band, bringing that band to superstardom, and raising his child—here she felt womanly.
Or at least like she could be, if she reached for it.
She pressed her naked body up against Cadell, her curves and plush breasts soft against the muscular hardness of his bare chest. She slid her fingers around the waistband of his pajama pants. “Come on. Let’s get you undressed.”
She tugged at his pants, pushing the black flannel over his hips. Tight muscles bound his torso. The soft fabric slid over his ribbed abdominals and the braided cords of his obliques, and Andy’s fingers bounced over his muscles.
Something held the pants up in front, like the waistband was caught on something.
Oh.
She glanced up at him, unsure what to do. She didn’t want to hurt him.
He asked, “You change your mind?”
Andy shook her head. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re a doctor. Surely you know how these things work.”
“My patients have physical bodies with reproductive organs. It’s different. And they’re usually unconscious. Anesthesia prevents—” she gestured with both hands, “—this. Entirely. There’s shrinkage.”
“Have you seen one like this before?” The little strangle in his voice sounded like he was trying not to be aghast.
Andy shook her head and felt a little less womanly.
“Okay.” He reached down and lifted the loosened drawstring waist of the pants over the top of it, exposing the dusky rose bulb at the top, like an arrow.
He paused. “Change your mind?”
Andy’s mouth felt swollen from kissing him or something. She licked her lips.
His voice was lower, huskier, when he told her, “Go ahead.”
Andy meant to finish undressing him, but her fingers stroked over the top of his cock. The soft skin was almost velvety under her fingertips.
A bead of something slippery touched her finger. Her mind supplied medical school definitions of seminal fluid and anatomical structures, but she ignored them. She smoothed the drop over his skin, feeling the slipperiness, the lubrication between her fingertip and the darkening head of his cock.
She glanced up. He was watching her, his dark eyes steadily gazing at her eyes, not about to leap on her in a frenzy nor throw her down.
Because he was a man, not an animal, not a monster.
He reached down with one hand, found her jaw and the side of her head, and kissed her gently.
Andy moved her hands around to his hips, found his waistband again, and tugged the flannel down his hips and thighs. The soft fabric fell to the floor, and he stopped kissing her for a moment to shake the pants off of his ankles.
She wanted to look down and see the whole thing, but he framed her face with his hands and kissed her again.
Cadell stepped forward and steered her, kind of like waltzing, across the bathroom to the shower. Past the shower, a huge soaking tub took up the back of the room.
Andy held onto his waist, following him, feeling the muscles flexing under his skin as he moved. He reached behind himself and twisted the faucet handle in the shower and tapped something. Cool mist filled the shower, then warmed.
He lifted his mouth away from hers, took her hand, and led her into the wide shower stall.
The shower area was larger than most half-bathrooms. Shower heads poked out of the walls, spraying warm fog instead of water.
Andy looked over his broad chest covered in scrolling tattoos, down the bricks of his abs, to the black fuzz and cock standing up, curving back nearly to his navel.
It looked bigger than the pictures in the medical school textbooks.
A lot bigger.
Thicker, too.
She snapped her gaze back up to his face, and he was still watching her solemnly, not laughing at her. He said, “Come on. You need to be washed.”
Her thighs were damp and drying to an uncomfortable stickiness.
When she walked into the fog, the mist clung to her, making her skin instantly wet all over. Beads of water began to roll down her skin.
Cadell held his hand out to a device bolted to the wall, and something expelled onto his hand. He said, “Turn around.”
She did, turning so that her soft butt was toward him. The fog filled the air, and he stepped up behind her, swirling the water particles around them. She crossed her hands over her breasts.
Warm hands caressed her shoulders, and sandalwood-scented foam dripped over her skin.
Cadell washed her all over, walking around her to slide his hands and scented foam over and under her heavy breasts, her waist, and her curving hips. He stooped and gently washed the insides of her thighs, her back and ass, stepping to press her against himself for just a moment as he reached around her.
His erection was a hard rod against her back, and she leaned against him, feeling it, touching him first with her back. Andy’s appetite was so sated that she wasn’t particularly turned on, just enjoyed his touch.
He lifted a shower head off the wall. A silver hose led to the base of it, and he sprayed the soap foam from her skin.
Andy sighed, overly relaxed.
He leaned down and whispered in her ear, “Now wash me.”
Okay. She could do this.
Womanly.
She held her hand up to the soap dispenser, hoping there wasn’t a trick to it, and foam spiraled onto her palm.
Cadell had turned his back toward her, so she started by reaching up to his shoulders, smoothing the soap over his body and the dark ink that swirled over him. The foam rolled down his skin, a few shades paler than her own skin that she thought of as brown, but the color wasn’t that different.
When Andy walked around the front of him with another palmful of soap foam, his eyes were closed. Water beaded on his dark lashes near his cheekbones.
Because he wasn’t watching her, Andy explored Cadell’s body, wiping the foam down his muscular arms to his long, callused fingers, and over his strong thighs and calves to the top of his feet. She ran her hands over the round, hard globes of his ass and let her fingers trail across the deep crevices between his abdominal muscles.
She was running out of places on Cadell’s body to explore.
There was just one region left.
Andy stood in front of him and soaped the sides of his hips as she let her fingers creep inward.
He didn’t open his eyes as her fingers drifted over the bulb at the top of his cock and slid downward over the shaft. She hoped that she wasn’t tickling him, but the smooth expression on his face didn’t look like he was going to laugh at her.
Cadell’s hand rose, and he lightly plucked her hand off of his erection. Was she doing it wrong? Had she hurt him?
He stepped backward, moving out from under her hands and reaching with the fingers of his other hand behind him. Still holding her wrist, he pulled her with him until he leaned against one of the shower area’s walls.
Yes, that was probably a good idea. Leaning against the wall seemed sturdier. Andy hadn’t thought of that.
Cadell guided her hand back to the stiff shaft of his cock and wrapped her fingers around himself.
She asked him, “What should I do?”
“Whatever you want to.”
She wanted to roam his body with her fingertips, exploring every crease and mound of his muscles and every vein and swath of velvety skin of his organ.
He said, “You can just see what it’s like.”
Andy moved her hand down his hardness, and her palm skipped over his skin. When Cadell had touched her, his fingers had glided smoothly. “That can’t be right.”
Without opening his eyes, Cadell said, his voice calm, “Water doesn’t make good lube. Try this second dispenser.”
She held her hand up to the device. A creamy slurry poured into her palm. The white cream smelled like rosemary and mint.
Andy touched the white cream to the head of his cock, rolling the bulb under her hand.
It bobbed against her hand, drawing a line on her palm.
That was kind of funny.
She slipped her hand down the length of him, feeling the thick veins running down the side.
The shower heads hissed above her, warming the air with their mist, and the one he had sprayed her with poured water onto the floor. Cadell grunted low in his throat.
Well, that was interesting.
She tried it again, gently running her palm and fingers first over the shaft, then the length. Her small fingers didn’t even wrap all the way around it.
He swallowed hard, and his deep breath out sounded like a hum.
That must be encouragement.
Andy tried it again, running her hand down and up, stroking him.
Cadell arched his neck, and his closed eyes creased.
Her hand slid over his skin and the conditioner, his skin slipping over the shaft inside, gathering as she pulled up and stretching tight as she pushed down.
His torso widened like a bellows as he breathed more deeply. His lips parted. She was playing his whole body like an instrument as he responded to her touch.
It was all so fascinating to watch.
She asked, “Am I doing it right?”
“I don’t think you can do that wrong.” His voice was hoarse, tight.
“Can I do it better?”
He wrapped his hand around hers and squeezed, tightening her hand on him, and stroked longer, deeper strokes all the way down to the base. His head tipped farther back.
“You know what’s going to happen, right?” A line creased the skin between his eyebrows.
“Yes,” she said.
His breath roughened, and his abs and chest expanded and clenched as he breathed. “Just let it hit the floor.”
“Okay.”
He let go of her hand, and she stroked him hard, sweeping her hand down his long, thick cock a few more times.
Cadell’s whole body jerked, his muscles heaving, and his hands clawed the rough tile behind him.
White ejaculate pumped from his cock, splatting on the wet floor.
The running water swirled it away from her toes, down the drain.
Cadell grabbed her, wrapping his arms around her, and held her wet body against his. He was trembling.
Andy slid her arms up and over his shoulders, and she laid her head on his chest.
He was breathing in deep breaths and blowing out his mouth like he was controlling something.
Andy reached her fingers up into his hair. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No,” he said, still panting. “It’s just emotional for me. That’s all. I just wanted you in my arms.”
She curled his shaggy hair at the back of his neck around her fingers. Under her cheek, his skin was almost hot, and water beads trickled down his chest.
“What were you thinking about?” she asked.
He chuckled a surprised huff of soft laughter. “You had my full attention.”
“So, you were thinking about me.”
He smoothed her hair and kissed her forehead. “Yes, always about you.”