Perfectly Unmatched (13 page)

Her chuckle shakes her body once, twice, then so hard her shoulders are bouncing up and off my chest and slamming back with the force of her gasping laughter.

“It’s not even that funny,” she insists, and this time the tears are toxin-less and laugh-based. “You make me laugh, Cormac.” She turns her eyes, bright blue and shiny with a whole variety of tears, my way. “No one’s made me laugh in forever.”

It’s an opening, an opportunity. And I have a million reasons to put my foot down and tell myself ‘no,’ but not a single one is as compelling as the curve of her lips, the way her eyelashes lower like a lacy veil over those cobalt eyes, the smooth rub of her skin against mine in tiny, clandestine amounts that are pure torture.

I punched a man for her. Multiple times. That took guts.

So why is this singular moment so much more risky?

Because she’ll bolt if it’s off, if it’s too much, if it somehow isn’t enough, and I’ll be left here, probably without another chance.

I’m methodical by nature.
A thinker. A muller. A researcher. Not a guy who rushes things that need to percolate.

But
Benelli jumpstarts crazy impulses in me.

I close the space between us before she’s finished laughing, so the first kiss is majority teeth, and she starts backwards for a single second, eyes popped wide.

“Cormac.” The way she says it makes it sound half like a question and half like a plea.

So I answer.

I kiss her again, and this time her lips mold softly and press on mine. I run my hands down from the round of her knees to the tops of her thighs and squeeze her hips, pulling her tight against me. She knocks over the bag of groceries, and a few apples roll out and bob into the water.

My arms circle her waist, my tongue licks at her lips and persuades them to open, teases her tongue to lick back. She does, a sweet moan rising from the back of her throat and echoing in my mouth. She knots her fingers behind my neck and rises up on her knees, making clumsy movements in my direction until she knocks me back onto the stone. The back of my head hits hard enough that pain shocks though my brain, and she pulls back, her mouth open, I assume to apologize. Before she can say a word, I pull her on top of me with a grunt and cover her mouth with mine, kissing her lips, along her neck, down her shoulders, and back up behind her ears until she pants fast and fierce.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” I growl low, sucking her lobe into my mouth and biting down on it gently. “I know I should stop. I know you and I make no sense.”

I say those words, but I can’t quite convince myself. My hands race over her body, rumpling her clothes and wanting to skip the part where I have to be patient and slow, because it’s killing me to not be able to touch her bare skin, hot and flushed and pressing up into my hands.

“I wish...I wish we did make sense,” she says, her voice a hiss from between her teeth. Her small fingers link around my wrist and tug my hand up under the hem of her shirt, letting the rough skin of my palm glide over the long, flat stretch of her stomach and pressing my fingers up to the swells of her breasts.

My thumbs trace under the curves of her breasts and
the callouses on my fingers catch on the thin lace of her bra. My head spins when I feel her nipples tighten under my fingers.

“We might make sense.
Maybe not to get married. Maybe not forever. But right now...” I still my hands, even though I want to squeeze and press and make the moans come out of her mouth without interruption until her entire body shakes under my touch.

But, honestly, I expect her to recoil at my words. They’re not reflective of all I want from her. Not that I want marriage. But I definitely don’t want this to just be some kind of groping in the woods. I want...her.
As much as she’s willing to share with me. However she’s available. And I guess that means I’ll have to be content with less than what I may have ever imagined.

“I want marriage.” She closes those eyes, sky blue,
water blue, immensely and overwhelmingly blue. “But I want something of my own
before
I get married.”

She pushes closer to me, and the soft swell of her tits fill my hands and almost override the stretch of my fingers. It’s perfect, it’s all I want.

And nothing I want.

“Before you get married?” I ask.

She nods, dark hair falling over her breasts and tickling my forearms.

“I need to go ahead and do that. But...” She screws her eyelids tight. “But, before I do, I need to have something that’s mine.
Something that I’ll be able to look back on over the years. Something that’s my secret. Only mine.” When she opens them again, her eyes ping-pong everywhere but on my face and, when she bears down against me this time, it’s with less passion and more desperation.

I savor one final second of contact with her perfect breasts before I draw back, so there’s more distance than I ever would have thought I’d willingly put between our two bodies again.

“Is something wrong?” Benelli asks, blushing a hot, quick red and placing her hands protectively where mine were possessively just moments before.

“Not with...” I gesture at her chest and summon my lagging courage. “Your breasts are perfection,
Benelli. There’s this rumor that Helen of Troy’s breasts inspired the champagne glass. Which is ridiculous, since champaign was developed in France in the 17th century, and, besides, a flute is a much more reasonable vessel for champaign enjoyment.” Her expression is mostly unreadable, but the emotions I can decipher aren’t remotely happy ones, so I rush to the point. “The point is, if any one woman’s breasts were going to be used as the template for a champagne glass, yours would be the best choice, hands down. Because they’re completely, absolutely perfect.”

She nods, but her brow is furrowed and her hands are squeezing her own tits in a way that goes past alluring and makes me wince. “But, you don’t want to touch them?” Her voice parades right around accusatory.

“I don’t want to be your dirty little secret,” I explain, and I expect her to ask me to explain. I have an entire explanation at the ready, all drawn up and hammered out with details I continue to finetune as each second ticks by.

She sits cross-legged and nods again. “Okay.”

That’s it.

That’s all she says.

Her hand reaches into the bag and pulls out the wine, turning the bottle around and around before she releases a hollow laugh and announces, “We have no corkscrew, do we?”

I’m recovering as best I can from the whiplash of this situation by getting to work solving this very non-emotional, physics-based puzzle. I slide the bottle out of her hands, noticing how carefully she avoids letting our fingers touch, and look it over with focused consideration. I rummage in my pockets and find a few paper clips, a highlighter, a pen, some sticky notes, and a
piece of peppermint candy. I hand her the candy, trying not to watch as she unwraps it and slips it between her lips so it disappears into her mouth, where she sucks on it with gentle slurps that make my male mind riot painfully.

Why didn’t she ask me to explain my ‘dirty little secret remark’?

Why can’t I be the type of guy who’s okay with being someone’s dirty little secret?

I straighten two of the larger paper clips and feed them down on either side of the cork, then turn them so the hooks catch on the bottom. I twist the straightened wires on top together and wrap them around the pen until I can leverage the cork and wiggle it out, bit by bit. It pops open, and I pass the bottle
Benelli’s way.

“You opened it.” She looks at the green glass for a long few seconds before she sets the bottle to her lips and tilts it back, guzzling a series of long sips. When she pulls it away, the insides of her lips are stained a deep purple and her eyes look unusually shiny. “Thank you.”

She holds the bottle out to me with one hand and wipes her lips with the opposite wrist.

I need a drink. Wine is quickly becoming too tame a beverage for me to consume around her, but our stomachs are empty, and this is a particularly strong vintage, so a few rapid passes back and forth, and the strangled air has loosened and fills with her giggles. What we’ve done and said is softened around the edges, with no more sharp-studded pieces to pierce at us.

“What are we laughing about?” she asks suddenly, the bottle suspended between our bodies, our hands carelessly close to touching.

“The apple that got stuck between those rocks.”
I point at the piece of our lunch that got knocked into the water when she straddled me. Saying it out loud is suddenly, soberingly unfunny, and the irony of this crazy non-joke hits us at the same time and jostles out more laughs.

She takes a swig. “This bottle will be empty soon,” she laments.

“Good thing,” I mutter. “Much more and you and I may drown in that creek or fall and crack our skulls before we reach civilization again.”

“I’m a virgin,” she slurs out of the deep blue nowhere of heavily drunk conversation.

“Pardon?” It’s a defense mechanism response, and she knows that and ignores me.

“I’ve done...things. My ex-boyfriend was very...into sex.
Very into sex. With...” She waves her hand around, the last of the wine sloshing darkly in the bottom of the bottle. “With whores. Whores who were not me.”

“He was an ass.” I don’t need a single shred of evidence beyond what she just told me to know that for certain.

She wipes her fingers under her eyes with quick, broad swipes. “Or I was. What would it have mattered? To lose it to him? I may have stayed with him. I might have been able to marry him, and this summer would have been...so damn uncomplicated.”

She flops back, and I try not to bristle over the fact that I’m her complication and that she’s wishing me away by wishing to go back into the past and fuck her two-timing ex.

We listen to the roar of the water, the crow and coo and trill of a medley of birds, and the strong gusts of wind that shake the leaves out of the trees.

“If he was
was a cheater, he would have cheated on you whether you were having sex with him or not,” I argue, sliding the bottle out of her hand before she lets it smash on the rock.

“But he would have proposed to me.” She lays the back of her forearm over her eyes.

“But he would have cheated.” Perhaps she isn’t understanding.

“Everyone cheats.” Her voice is stomped on, deflated, and makes my blood magma hot and poisoned.

“What did you say?” I ask, swilling the last of the wine and tossing the bottle into the water with a hard throw.

She sits up quickly at the sound of the glass smashing, and when she sees my face, she points an accusing finger.

“Why are you always so mad when I tell you things?” Her words are fuzzy around the consonants and lazy on the vowels. Her drawl is a turn-on under usual situations, but let loose like this, it’s become my own personal aphrodisiac.

“Why do you always tell me such idiotic things?” I grunt and pull the sack of groceries over, rustling through without any real interest.

“What’s idiotic? I’m just...I’m regretful, that’s all.”

I take the last surviving apple out and toss it in the air, letting it smack against my palm with bruising fury over and over again as I catch it in my still-sore hand. After a few repetitions, I’m calm enough to talk.

“You’re regretful? Of what, exactly? The fact that you narrowly escaped being engaged to a cheating bastard? The fact that you wound up here, now, on this rock with me? Some stupid professor with a fucking pen collection and his nose stuck in some stupid ancient story? Some half-assed clown who’s fun enough to hang around with on the sly, but not worth consideration in your holy book of books?”

Benelli
leans over and swipes the apple in midair, then hurls it at a rock a good ways downstream. We listen to the smash and she turns back to me, nostrils flared, eyes glistening with that fire I’ve missed.

“You would be worthy of my book if I could choose.” She leans close to me, and I can feel her rough breathing on my skin.

“You can choose,” I counter, putting one had almost on her hip. “You can choose any damn time you want. Just say the word.”

“It isn’t that easy,” she whimpers, and, at the sound, my hand moves up and closes on her arm.

“Yes it is, love,” I say, my voice low, my thumb caressing her in the same place Akos bruised her just the other day. “You can choose. And you can do better than giving your virginity to cheating boyfriends or your hand to abusive assholes. You can choose anything you want for your life.”

She hangs her head and grabs fistfuls of my shirt, dragging me close. Her eyes are wide and unfocused and her breath smells overly sweet with too much heavy wine.

“I can’t choose for my whole life. You don’t understand why, but I can’t. But I can choose this one minute. This one minute that’s all mine, and I choose you, Cormac. I don’t want to be a virgin. I don’t want to talk about my family. I don’t want to talk about getting married. And I choose you right now. You go in the book in my heart, and you’re the only name there.” She scoots maddeningly closer and tugs my hand up, laying it between the gorgeous silky tits I want to run my hands over again, but don’t.