Fucking heaven and all the spirits lining the way there.
Victor Anthony first among them, because only a spirit of some sort could hypnotize her with his sunshine-bright, earth-deep eyes and lift her into some sort of transcendence just by placing his body at her disposal. And that’s what he was doing, laying there like he wasn’t a vibrating cock attached to a neat slab of lusting torso.
Looking at her like he wanted her. Like he trusted her.
Like he cared.
She broke into twelve thousand pieces and let each one of them pelt down like hail upon him, spread thirsting across her bed. Taking it all. Every kiss, every touch. Every scrape and slide of skin to skin. Even when he sucked at her clavicle, nuzzled his way to her nipple, used those strong sure fingers of his to part her folds and trace her every intimate contour, he was taking her lead.
And damn it all, she loved it.
She loved how he paid attention to her every hitch and sigh. How he checked in with her but also told her everything she did to him filled him with more lust. How he fucking kissed.
Gillian adored kissing, with the right partner. The warmth and tension of it. The playing back and forth of pressure, breath, touch, taste. Lips soft or firm or lush or rough. Gentle tongues, teasing tongues, devouring tongues. It all sent her vibrating. Lifted her awareness of her partner to new levels. Turned her the hell on.
So she knew, racing Vic to her bedroom, she was in for hotness. Not based on those college kisses; those weren’t anything she’d held to for years. But every day since New Year’s Eve, she knew his kiss spun her in circles. And giving him free reign to kiss as they rolled in her bed? Dizzy. He made her dizzy. His touch, his taste, were everywhere. He nipped her neck and nuzzled her ear and navigated from brow to chin with light brushes of his sensual mouth. His moan resonated within her when their tongues tangled and his hands arced circles over her breasts. His smile burned past their interlocked lips as she spread her thighs wide to his questing fingers. His breath stole hers. Wrapped her air up to bundle it away along with her caution and her worries and her fluttering heart.
And that wasn’t even taking into account his body. Shoulders and arms that begged her palms to stroke them. The birthmark just at the base of his ribcage—that, she remembered. Not just because she’d seen it at pool parties and such over the years, but because she’d traced it with her tongue that time in college. He’d laughed because he was ticklish, and he’d forgotten he even had the mark, and he’d thought she was heading lower with her tongue when she took the detour to that reddish squiggle a couple of inches above his faint appendectomy scar.
She had been heading lower, to a destination she’d never imagined at any of those pool parties when they were young. And she did it again, because this, too, she remembered. The way he grunted, then moaned when she grabbed his cock. The way he got harder just from the whisper of her breath across the head. The way he palmed her nape as she took him into her mouth.
“Gillian, you’re killing me.”
She cut her eyes to his, and he grinned.
“A good death. Go for it.”
She pulled back and straddled him, leaning down to glare straight at him. “If you keep making me laugh, I can’t give you a blow job.”
He grasped her hips and flipped them over. “Guess I’ll have to go down on you instead, then.”
She moaned. Dying for sure. “If you must.”
He stopped lavishing her nipple with his tongue. “It seems I must.”
She let him splay her legs wide, lifted her ass so he could cup her closer. Laughed aloud when he nipped at the flesh of her inner thigh. Laughed more because his beard was a bit rough, but the stubble on his head was soft as velvet against her tender skin.
“Temptress. You smell like manna. Making me starve for you.” But then he stopped talking and started exploring her with tongue and lips and, just a little, teeth. She bucked in his hands when he closed on her clit.
“Vic. More.” And he knew what she meant. He knew to increase the pressure of his circling tongue, and reach a hand to her breast, and growl. It didn’t take long under his attention before she flew free. His murmurs were delight and praise, and she was left without words.
Well, with only the one word. “Vic.”
Smart guy, he read it as the order it was, and snagged a condom. Tucked a pillow under her ass. Licked his lips.
She moaned his name again, and then they were both laughing. He played his cock into her, and they grinned at each other. He drew back before thrusting home and she gasped his name and laughed again. How the hell did he make her laugh when she couldn’t feel anything but the points where they were joined?
Refused to feel anything but where they were joined. And laughter. And, okay, some spiraling warm buzz of thrill arcing between her laughing throat and her clasping vulva. But that was it. That was all she needed to feel in pursuit of a damn good session of sex with Vic.
And hell, it was good. His hands lifting her that half-hitch higher while his pelvis tilted that few degrees deeper and—damn. “Vic! Fuck, yes.”
“Got ya. I got ya, Gill.”
He did. He did, and more. She shook apart into another orgasm and forcibly dragged him along with her. Like he wasn’t planning to get there on his own. Like she twisted his arm tight to echo her cunt undulating around his cock.
She shoved at his bulk, and he flopped to the side, panting. It took too long to convince her heart to steady into a normal pace, for her fast-flowing blood to allow her face and her thighs and the tips of her fingers stop tingling.
Too long. It gave him time to prop himself on an elbow and nuzzle at her neck. To murmur her name in that sweet-rough voice. To blast a smile full of affection and joy and satisfaction at her.
She resisted being snared by his beautiful eyes, but Vic didn’t care. He wrapped her in his happiness anyway. “You’re amazing.”
She grunted.
He smirked, which was nonsense. She didn’t like people who smirked. She didn’t even like the way the word sounded, and her whole thing was words and how they signified, so she was an authority.
Didn’t stop him smirking. Or smizing. Or softening his voice as he asked, “You’re good, yeah?”
“I wasn’t faking, Vic.”
He ignored her dry tone. “I know that. But we agreed there’s more to us than hot sex, Gillian.”
She ignored him.
“Gilly-Bean.”
“I hate that nickname.”
“Okay, Pickles.”
“That’s worse.”
It was. It was an over-elaborate elementary school construct of her brother’s. Gillian Bellamy to Dillian Bell Pepper to Dill Pickled Pepper to Pickles. Anton had charted it all out on the back of a posterboard, and debuted the name at dinner one night. He’d peeled the label off a Claussen’s jar and cut pics of bell peppers and dill out of one of their mom’s recipe magazines as illustrations.
Their mom stuck it to the fridge, even though it was an inch wider than the door and needed seven magnets to hold it in place. It stayed up even after Gill ‘accidentally’ smeared grape jelly across a corner. She’d never been more glad when report cards came home so they could displace the thing in pride of place.
“You know I helped him with that, right?”
Years too late, she shoved his shoulder. “Jerk.”
“Don’t get me wrong, only Ton’s mind would have labored to come up with the idea. I just suggested reusing our science project to display it.”
She should banter at him. Something like, “A thousand thanks for that.” Or, “I always knew you were the devious one.” Or, “I hope you enjoy waiting for my cold, cruel revenge.”
But they were naked in her bed. She could spy the condom wrapper just past his hip. And it wasn’t the sweat drying that made her skin grow cold. It was the visceral image of her brother at nine, scheming with his best friend. And the two of them at twelve, rolling around giggling at some terrible joke Vic made, because the only time her brother rolled around laughing was when Vic made a juvenile joke. And then, the two of them at fifteen, her first weekend home from college, and she saw how Anton’s eyes followed Vic’s every move. How it was more than the years of friendship that got them moving in sync to finish up dinner and get it on the table. More than being pals when Anton squeezed tight up against Vic so they could all fit on the sofa to watch a movie. She’d known her brother was gay; she hadn’t realized her was totally gone over Vic.
When they were all off in college and Anton got into a relationship with the guy five dorm doors down, she figured that was the end of it. That it had mostly been convenience, falling in pup love for one of the few people Anton ever made time for anyway. His social circle was only ever as wide as Vic made it with his constant flitting from one interest to the next, anyway. So it made sense that her brother’s nascent crush would land on the safe haven of his most constant companion.
She’d convinced herself he was over it. She hadn’t even mentioned Anton, later, when she found herself responding to Vic’s intent, if not adept, flirting during the spring break when they’d all been cleaning out her parents’ flower beds and ended up spraying each other’s muddy limbs down with the hose. Anton, as always, managed to garden without a smudge and had disappeared to his room as the dusk and mosquitoes settled around her and Vic.
So, fine. She’d been swayed by a couple of beers and the water tracing enticing trails down his chest. And maybe by feeling rebellious about her mother’s domestic aspirations for her life while she was on edge waiting to hear about grad school. They’d made out behind the house. Climbed through her window and tumbled to her bed. She never did manage to re-attach the bug screen flush in its frame.
And the next morning, her brother confessed about a bad breakup and the fear he’d never find anyone who really wanted him. Gillian worked to comfort him, suggesting that college was a great time to explore different types of relationships, to figure out what he really wanted. Then Anton went bright red and choked on a sip of his always-bitter coffee.
Maybe she’d forgotten—allowed herself to forget—the intimate details of that night with Vic. But she’d never forget the way Anton stared with such apparent and painful longing at his best friend coming out of her bedroom that morning.
It wasn’t the same now. She knew that. She knew Anton’s heart was hitched to his cowboy, and he hadn’t outlined his romantic future on Vic’s pattern for years. But he still centered his social life around Vic. She’d been surprised when he met Cisco on his own, since half his previous boyfriends were people Vic brought into his orbit.
After everything Anton did to put his life on a keel he could navigate, the last thing she could handle would be to threaten one of his sturdiest supports. Or two of them, counting herself, because—lying next to Vic, reeling from the combination of their mingled scents, her pounding heart, her buzzing limbs. She was teetering. And if she fell, or if she flung herself at Vic in an attempt to not fall, that was twice the danger to Anton’s stability, and an infinite whirl of problems he would be forced to navigate to resettle himself.
And that wasn’t acceptable, and it wasn’t fair, and it made the points where her limbs brushed and tangled with Vic’s go ominously cold.