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SMOKING MADE HER HUNGRY. Jude rummaged through the cabinets until she found the box with plastic zip bags filled with dried fruit.
She stood and brandished her prize, suppressing a laugh at the blissed-out look on Sky’s face. He leaned against the refrigerator, his gaze following her every move.
“Apples, bananas, and pineapples.” Jude shook the clear pouch. “You want?” Because I could take a bite out of you.
“No, thanks.” He shook his head in slow motion. “Too many trail-mix desserts when I was a kid. My mother was a health nut.”
“A hippie health nut.” She continued to rummage through the box. “She ruined you for life. Now I bet you’ve got a real sweet tooth, craving chocolaty snack cakes, pies, and candy bars. We both know you’ve got a jones for sugary soda.”
“You could say that.” He grabbed a bottle of water, guzzled half of the warm liquid. “I got a jones for something else as well.”
Jude watched him wipe that sexy mouth with the back of his hand. She flashed on his face between her legs, his tongue on her pussy. Giving herself a mental shake, she refocused on the conversation. The color was high in his cheeks, and his hair was sticking up in several different directions. She walked over to him and ruffled her fingers through his thick tufts, smoothing them down the best she could.
He caught her hand and eased her closer to him, caught the tip of her earlobe between his teeth. She made a tiny, startled squeak and jumped back, surprised at how quickly he could raise her temperature. That was not a good thing.
“Slow your roll, cowboy.” She hoped her casual tone covered the fact that he’d gotten her shaking inside, little twinges of desire igniting her pussy. “Give a gal a little breathing room.” She snatched a bottle of water from the case that was sitting on the floor. “To the living room.” Jude gave Sky a look as she walked past him. “If you can peel yourself off the refrigerator.”
“I think I can manage.”
Passing into the next room, she twirled her hand. “I present the formal living room.” Feeling pleasantly light-headed and giddy, she smirked. “Enjoy the non-view.”
Sky wandered around the room, touched the plywood over the window, and ran his hand down the elaborate drapes. Jude dropped onto the sofa cushions and dug into her stash of fruit, an attempt to distract herself from the growing attachment to him. She shook the bag. “This is kind of my least favorite combination, but you make do, at least for now. Not like I can run to the store, right?” She laughed at her joke.
“You could, but that’s asking for trouble.”
Jude glanced at him. “That may be true, but if I hadn’t gone to the store, I wouldn’t have met you.”
Over by the mantel, he nodded. He was looking at the family pictures she’d put out one day when she was feeling low. If she could see the pictures every day, then she could remember her family, remember what they looked like. She was terrified that as time went on, they would fade from her memory like a photograph left out in the sun.
“This is you?” Sky indicated a picture of her in pigtails, one sticking out wildly from her head, the other hanging in an orderly fashion. Yes, the hairdo was cockeyed, but it was her favorite grade school picture.
“That’s me, fifth grade.”
“The braids are cute.” He looked at her, then the picture, seeming to compare the two. “You haven’t changed much.”
She covered her embarrassment with a joke. “At least my hair doesn’t look as bad.” The sofa creaked as she moved around on it, working herself into a comfortable position among the cushions. “I could never keep my hair neat at school. I liked recess and gym too much.”
“This your family?” He touched a wood-framed photo that was propped against a vase of long-dead flowers.
Jude nodded. “That’s me and my brother and our parents on my college graduation day.”
“Where’s your brother now?”
“Alabama? Texas?” She shrugged and popped a dried pineapple in her mouth. The sweetness of the fruit activated her salivary glands, and she wiped a hand over the corner of her mouth before she continued. “Not long after that picture, he left med school, got married, and left New Jersey.”
“You look very pretty.” Sky settled beside her and stretched out his legs. “But I like the way you look now better.”
Jude smiled and blinked her eyes coquettishly. “Why, thank you. You are too kind.”
“It’s the truth.”
Up close and personal, it was difficult to ignore his magnetism. He smelled so good. And he was here, right here. She popped a banana chip in her mouth, preventing any foolishness from spilling out.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“So your brother went to med school?”
“Yes,” she said, relieved the subject turned away from her. Compliments made her uncomfortable. “My father was a doctor. He...” She let the sentence trail off.
“Tell me what happened,” he said in a quiet voice and reached for her bag of fruit. He snagged a banana chip and ate it, crunched it between his teeth. “Not bad,” he conceded. “Tell me what happened,” he said again.
Jude swallowed the slick piece of apple she had in her mouth. “My father worked for an infectious disease control company.”
“Like the Center for Disease Control?”
“It was a private company.” She paused. “I’m not sure what he did, but it wasn’t for the government. He got infected.” Jude dropped her snack, no longer interested in the sweet fruit. “He didn’t know he was infected, and he came home. And now they’re both dead. They died two days before I got home.”
“THAT’S AWFUL, JUDE. I’m real sorry.” It was an empty phrase, always had been, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
To his surprise, she hitched her shoulders a little as she turned the banana chip in her fingers. She didn’t look up from her task as she started to talk.
“It is. Awful. But that’s how things are now. You know that. People, all the people you know, they’re dead. People you meet, maybe they want to kill you for what you have. Or worse.” She shivered a little and looked directly at him, her eyes narrowing slightly, delving into his conscience. “How many people you knew before are dead now?”
He didn’t think about it, tried not to think about it, and didn’t want to think about it now. But he would answer her questions. “My roommates. Probably my landlord. Teachers I worked with.” He paused to consider the question further, shying away from the thought of his students being infected. “I don’t really know.”
“It’s scary, isn’t it? So many dead in such a short period of time. And the world is like a jungle, survival of the fittest.”
There was no answer for this, because she was right. The world was a jungle, with pockets of humanity in odd places, some too afraid to join forces with others because of distrust. People would kill for the setup Jude had.
Sky took a slow, even breath. He was at that point where the initial high had leveled off. For most people that meant an onset of food cravings, a need to devour everything in sight. But for the gentle admonishment she’d given him in the kitchen, he would have satisfied his particular craving with her. His hostess picked up her bag of fruit again, chattering away. “So I said about a month because I stopped keeping track of the days after a while. What was the purpose?” She studied a banana chip and licked it before popping into her mouth, then slid the piece of dried fruit into her cheek, an unself-conscious gesture. The tropical fragrance, the heat of the closed-in room, and the proximity of her body to his. A perfect storm.
Desperately, he tried to think of other things to distract him from her presence not six inches away. Pay attention to the conversation.
He couldn’t remember what she’d said, so he gave a generic agreeable answer. “Yeah, that’s true.”
Sky let his mind wander, playing over select memories from the night before. Her breasts, for instance, full and soft under the cotton of her blue tank top. Her skin had been silky under his lips, and she melted when he swiped her nipples with his tongue. The glow of her skin in the lantern light, a sheen of perspiration giving it a gleaming luster. Her hair, the corkscrew strands bobbing around her face when she bent her head to the bag of fruit. When she was lying on her back, it fanned out around her head like a halo. He remembered the taste of her pussy, the way she squealed while he sucked her clit.
“Sky?” Her voice jerked him out of the running conversation he was having with himself. Jude was staring at him, a chunk of yellow pineapple held halfway to her mouth. “You okay?”
She flashed him a smile that kicked his simmering blood up another notch.
“Sorry. I was daydreaming,” he said. He sat up straighter on the cushions of the couch and tried to look more alert and less like he had a dirty movie running in his head. “What did you say?”
“I asked you what day it was. You must be spacing out from the pot.” She gestured with the piece of fruit, which was wet and shiny with what had to be her saliva. She must have had it in her mouth, sucking it between her lips, giving it a little lick before biting off a piece with her teeth. He dragged his thoughts away from lurid fantasies of her mouth and raised his wrist, squinted at the watch he had liberated from a pawn shop in Irvington.
“It’s Wednesday,” he said and dropped his hand. If he were still at work, it would have been an easy day, first through third periods free and only one duty period. They would be having turkey and stuffing in the cafeteria. Every Wednesday had been Thanksgiving Day.
Meanwhile, Jude stuck the pineapple chunk back in her mouth, sucked it and her fingers while she stared blankly at the boarded front windows. Sky followed her gaze, casually, to avoid watching her make love to that piece of fruit.
“Like it makes a damn bit of difference,” she murmured and chewed and swallowed, wiping her hand on her jeans. She lifted her hair off her neck and leaned back on the sofa cushions, took another swallow of her water. Every move she made sent a whiff of eau de Jude his way, a fragrance he inhaled like the last hit on a joint. Sky listened as she hummed, but the sound was too quiet for him to pick up on the melody. Instead, he used the lull in conversation to study her.
There was a beauty mark on her collarbone that he hadn’t noticed last night, the exact size and shape as if someone dipped a pencil eraser in black ink and touched it briefly to her skin. He wanted to touch it, to brush his fingers across to see if it would smudge.
“Where did you get your name?” She turned her head a little to the side, a frown creasing her brow as her gaze darted over his face. “Are you okay? You look flushed. You want some water?” A giggle came from her. “You are fucked up.”
Sky cleared his throat, knowing his face was probably bright red even in the low light. “I’m fine.” Once again, his brain scrambled to recall her question. “My mother liked musicals.”
Her eyes lit up. “She named you after Sky Masterson?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your middle name?”
“River.”
“So your name is Sky River.” She favored him with a wind-chime laugh that settled into a grin. “Goes with the tattoos. Where are you from?”
“Tennessee,” he said, leaning back to be on eye level with her, paying attention to every detail.
“You told me that. Yes. What’s in Tennessee?” Her eyes grew wide. “Elvis? And country music?” Enthusiasm shone in her eyes. “Do you live near Graceland?”
“Close enough, about an hour away, but I’ve never been.”
“You’ve never been? People travel from all over the world to see that house, and you live less than an hour away, and you’ve never been? Shame on you!”
He had to laugh at the look of shock on her face. “It’s just a regular old house.”
“I guess. Now that I think about it, I’ve never been to the Empire State Building.” She extricated a banana chip and crunched it. He found himself slightly disappointed she didn’t lick it like she did the last one. “Do you think your parents are still alive?”
“Not sure. After everything started, I couldn’t get in touch.”
“But that’s where you’re going, right? You’re on your way to find out?”
“Something like that.”
Jude gave him a smirk and looked at him sideways. “You’re very noncommittal. You know that?”
“I guess,” he said, and they both laughed.
Jude rolled the water bottle between her hands. Sky watched her do it, listened to the plastic crackling in the silence of the room. His heart beat too fast, and he licked his lips.
“I hope you’re not planning on sitting over there all night.” She gave him a significant look.
“You said you needed a little breather.”
“I did, didn’t I?” She raised her shoulders in a quick shrug. “Now that I think about it, breathers might be overrated. We should go for it.”
“I agree.” Sky slid his arm around her waist and pulled her against him, nearly onto his lap, his lips finding hers in an urgent, hungry kiss. The water bottle dropped from her hands, making a barely audible clunk on the rug below. He marveled her sweet taste.
Jude wrapped her arms around his neck and returned his kiss with equal urgency, flicking her tongue against his. His cock hardened and strained against the fly of his jeans. She moaned softly against his lips, the seductive vibrations stoking his desire. The second time around with a woman was better for him, because he knew what she liked. The fumbling experimenting of the first time was out of the way, and he could ensure that it was good for both of them. He pulled her shirt over her head and pressed his face to the smooth, fragrant skin of her breasts.
She straddled his lap, grinding against his trapped erection, and sank her teeth into the tender flesh of his neck, then his lip. Her kisses were savage and greedy, giving him little room to breathe.
A low sound, half sigh, half moan, carried to his ears. The scent of her hair, the taste of her mouth, and the pressure of her weight on his dick was almost unbearable. Never mind about going south. They could stay here together while he fucked her into forgetting what was happening outside. Yes. His fevered mind closed to every other possibility than being right here, right now.
Twisting her hips, she traced a slow, dreamy swirl against his cock, her hands on his shoulders. The room was hot—shit, she was hot—but that little movement of hers raised goose bumps and sent a chill through him.
The glow of the battery-powered lantern illuminated her face only slightly, but it was enough for him to see her gaze fastened on his as she unhooked her bra and drew his hands to her naked, luscious breasts. He kissed her long and hard, first stroking her skin, then kneading her tight nipples between his fingers. He sucked a taut peak into his mouth, eliciting a tiny cry of pleasure. The pressure against his dick increased, which was now aching with raw, brutal desire. If she continued to grind against him like that, he would burst right in his pants.
He released her breast with a small pop of his lips only to fasten upon the other, flicking his tongue across the tight bud until her back arched, and she moaned in pure rapture, her body writhing against his.
“Oh, don’t stop, please.” She gasped and dug her fingers into his shoulders. He fumbled at the button on her jeans. Getting them off and out of the way was the first step to pleasuring her with his mouth on her pussy, to hear her call out in ecstasy just as before.
In the space between their breathing, there was a distinct thump outside, then a sliding sound, as if there were something dragging against the wooden shingles of the house.