: Chapter 28

I didn’t realize Vincent was being gentle with me downstairs.

Not until right now.

Because there’s nothing gentle about the scrape of his teeth against my bottom lip or the press of his thumb against my jaw, urging me to open wider for him. Downstairs, our kiss was all relief and elation and tender longing. I thought it might take the edge off. It hasn’t. All we’ve done is broken the seal, and now when Vincent’s tongue strokes into my mouth, it’s like a gallon of gasoline tossed right into my bonfire.

Boom.

My hands fly up to grip Vincent’s broad shoulders, white-knuckled as my nails dig into the slick fabric of his jacket. His hands slip inside the front of my cardigan and bracket my hips briefly, in a way that feels like we’re at a middle school dance.

I giggle. And then he’s smoothing his palms down over the curve of my ass and gripping me through my jeans so tightly that my giggle breaks off into a gasp.

I have the strangest sense that Vincent is thinking about lifting me up against this bookshelf the way he did the night we first met. I’d let him. Happily. I’d love nothing more than to let my thighs fall open, hook my heels around the back of his legs, and have him press into me where I ache the worst. But it appears Vincent has other plans—plans that include sliding his hands up under the hem of my shirt and tracing a path from the hollow of my back to my stomach and then up over my ticklish rib cage.

The warm, rough drag of his touch against my bare skin makes me a fluttery, squirming mess of goose bumps and hitched breaths.

And then his fingertips brush the underwire of my bra, and I’ve never hated a piece of clothing so badly in my life. I want it gone. Burned. Buried. Out of the fucking way, so there’s not a single thing blocking Vincent from doing whatever he so chooses.

All week, I’ve been haunted by the fact that he didn’t touch my tits on his birthday. I saw the hunger in his eyes when he traced the neckline of my borrowed bodysuit. I heard the wobble in his voice when he complimented my tits, half teasing and half serious. But he was too worried about getting everything else right—figuring out the snaps on my bodysuit, making sure I was comfortable and slack-limbed, asking if he should stretch me out with one finger or two—and my poor breasts got the short end of the stick.

I arch against him, blindly hoping that he gets the message and won’t step back to make some kind of smart-mouthed comment about being greedy, because we’re well past that. I’m fucking desperate.

But he does step back.

Except, instead of tormenting me, he looks me up and down like he’s trying to commit the sight of me to memory. It’s too much. Like direct sunlight in my eyes or the blast of music through my headphones when I forget I had the volume all the way up.

“What?” I demand self-consciously.

Vincent squeezes hard against my ribs.

“I’m still so mad at you,” he whispers, bending to catch my lips with his. “Can’t fucking believe you thought I didn’t want you.”

I rake my fingers through his hair and pull him closer, trying to kiss him hard enough that he’ll know how sorry I am. That he’ll know I’ll never doubt him again. I loop my arms tight around his neck and push off the bookshelf behind me, plastering myself against him so our knees knock and my tits are pancaked against his hard chest.

Vincent briefly tenses up at the contact, and then—with a low, primal rumble somewhere in the pit of his chest—he drops his hands back to my ass and grinds his hips into me.

Oh my God, he’s hard.

I actually whimper against his mouth.

It must startle Vincent as much as it startles me, because he tears himself away.

“Sorry,” he says. Then he laughs in that breathless, self-deprecating way and angles his hips toward the shadows like he could possibly hide the tent he’s pitching in his jeans. “I got carried away. I like kissing you a little too much. We can slow down. Just give me a second.”

I can’t believe he’s apologizing for getting an erection.

There’s so much that I missed about Vincent—so much I had to mourn when I thought I’d never see him again—that I’d sort of forgotten how close I’d come to getting my hands on his dick during his birthday party. I’m still bitter about that, I think, because my first thought is: I’m going to help Vincent commit premeditated murder.

My second thought is: I’m not letting this opportunity pass me by twice.

Despite the fact that Vincent has just gallantly proposed that we pump the brakes, I choose to floor it by reaching between us and palming the hard length of him through strained denim.

Vincent’s eyes flash, and his breath catches.

“I thought of something else I want,” he croaks.

God, I hope we’re thinking the same thing.

“Tell me.”

The words come out like I’m some kind of 1950s movie star who’s taken a break from her hundredth cigarette of the day to goad her lover into confessing his feelings. Splotches of pink appear high on Vincent’s cheeks. He blinks like he’s coming out of a daze and cuts a look up and down the aisle, checking if the coast is clear. But even the confirmation that we’re alone up here doesn’t stop him from chewing on his kiss-swollen bottom lip.

“I feel like I shouldn’t say it.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t tease me.”

“Forget it, Kendall,” he says on a groan, pitching forward and burying his face against my neck like he wants to hide. “Please forget it. I just want to kiss you. Kissing you is more than enough.”

He tries to catch my mouth again.

I grab the collar of his jacket and twist it around my fist.

“Vincent. What do you want?”

“You. On your knees.”

The admission, delivered in the ragged voice of a man fighting for his life, sends a shot of heat straight between my legs.

Giving a guy a blow job always seemed like something I’d eventually have to learn how to do—sort of like how I knew I’d eventually go to the DMV to get my driver’s license, or eventually take a nice piece of clothing to a dry cleaner, or eventually file federal and state taxes. A rite of passage. A chore. Something adults just did because they had to. But I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t thought about it since meeting Vincent. Not my taxes—a blow job. I’ve wondered how he would taste. How he would feel in my mouth. What he’d look like standing above me and if he’d ask nicely or grip my hair and take what he wanted.

So, yes. I’ve thought about it. In great detail.

And as I let my eyes drop down to the erection straining against his fly, I realize I’m about to do something that will make Nina and Harper lose their fucking minds when they inevitably ask me how my weekend without them went.

Because yeah. I want me on my knees too.

I hook my fingers through Vincent’s belt loops and twist us around until he’s the one with his back to the bookshelves.

“Holiday,” he says warily, “what are you . . .”

But he knows. He definitely knows, because when I reach up and start gathering my hair to twist it up in a low bun, he swallows hard and looks at me like he’s been stranded in the desert for weeks and I’m an oasis. It’s both deeply flattering and incredibly inconvenient, because I’m pretty sure the way my stomach just clenched means my underwear is going to be soaked.

“We’re celebrating your birthday.”

He lets out a strangled laugh. “Fuck off.”

“That’s my line. And keep your voice down.”

Vincent watches with equal parts horror and wonder as I slide the hair tie off my wrist and then smooth my palm down the back of my head, checking that I haven’t missed any pieces.

“I didn’t mean right now, Kendall.”

“Why not?” I challenge.

“This is a bookstore. People come here to read.”

It’s a bucket of ice water on my red-hot desire. Just because I let him eat me out at a party doesn’t mean Vincent is totally cool with the threat of accidental exhibitionism. He’s right. Our local bookstore definitely isn’t the place for me to be so overcome with lust that I throw common sense to the wind. I need to respect his boundaries—and not wanting to get arrested for public indecency is a pretty reasonable one.

I won’t take it personally if Vincent turns me down right now. I won’t.

“Do you want me to stop? Or do you want—” I gesture vaguely at his crotch.

“No.”

Brutal.

“That’s fine!” I hold my palms up in concession. “Completely understandable. Yeah, no, I totally get it. Sorry, I just got a little carried away with—”

Vincent catches my chin between his thumb and forefinger.

“Holiday,” he says very slowly. “No, I don’t want you to stop.” The naked desire in his eyes is enough to end me—because he wants this, wants my lips wrapped around his cock—but what really does me in is when he adds, solemnly, “But only if you want to.”

I laugh in his face.

And then I drop to my knees.

“Tell me what to do.”

Vincent blinks down at me with the kind of baffled expression I’m pretty sure he’d be sporting if I started reciting Chaucer in the original Middle English. I wait for him to catch up, fidgeting with one of the buttons on my cardigan impatiently, but it’s like he’s stuck, buffering, staring down at me with a half-open mouth and wide eyes. I sigh. It would appear that I’m on my own down here. That’s fine. I can definitely get his jeans unbuttoned without a user manual. After that, we’ll just have to take it one step at a time.

The sight of my hand approaching his crotch seems to jolt Vincent back to reality.

Lightning quick, he catches my wrist.

“Wait.”

I’m fully convinced he’s about to drag me back up to my feet and tell me he’s changed his mind about the whole thing, but then he drops my hand and shrugs off his jacket. I wait patiently as he folds it up, crouches in front of me, and offers me his shoulders for balance while he tucks the makeshift pillow under my knees one at a time. They’ll probably bruise anyway. I don’t really care—but I’m touched that he does.

“Such a gentleman.”

Vincent shakes his head as he stands to his full height again. “I’m not thinking like a gentleman right now.”

“Tell me what you’re thinking, then. What do you like? What feels good?”

A weak laugh rips out of his chest. “You could literally just look at me and I think I’d come in my pants, Holiday.”

This earns him a blush and an eye roll.

“Seriously, though,” I say, wiggling into a comfortable kneeling position, “give me some tips. I want to be your best.”

“That . . . wouldn’t be hard.”

I look up at him, eyebrow arched in question. He looks down at me, fully blushing.

“I’ve only ever done this drunk,” he admits. “It’s usually not great.”

“Like this specifically? A blow job?”

I’m proud of myself for saying the word in an even voice.

“Yeah,” he says. Then, quieter: “But also . . . the rest of it.”

I keep staring at him.

Vincent groans and scrubs his hands over his face, like he can’t believe I’m making him say it.

“I’ve only had sex drunk, Kendall.”

Unbelievable. For the better part of a month, I’ve agonized over the fact that I told him (in a horrible burst of panic-fueled oversharing after mauling him in the library) that I’d never kissed anyone sober. I still have to fight back a full-body cringe every time I think about the breathy, nervous pitch of my voice.

“And you decide to tell me this now?” I demand, thoroughly offended.

Vincent’s lips twitch. “Well, it feels relevant.”

“It was relevant a while ago!”

But even as I say that, I realize I’m not upset he hasn’t told me until now. Not really.

“Hey, I wasn’t totally sober on my birthday,” Vincent says, echoing the argument I’ve already made for him in my head. “I had two shots before you got there. I might not have been drunk, but I wasn’t technically sober, either, so what was I supposed to do? Tell you it was my first time eating pussy while slightly tipsy?”

I will not laugh.

And I will not be distracted by the way the word pussy out of his mouth makes me want to do unspeakable things to him.

“Well, I told you I’d never kissed anyone sober within, like, fifteen minutes of meeting you.”

I don’t mean to sound so petulant. I really don’t. But I’m a little bit furious that I’ve spent so long beating myself up for another thing that—surprise—was only an issue in my own head. Once again, Vincent and I are more alike than I realized. And the way he’s looking down at me, half amused and half affectionate, makes me feel stubbornly disgruntled about it.

“You also kissed me sober within fifteen minutes of meeting me,” Vincent points out.

I try to frown. His lips twitch. Mine follow suit. Now he’s full-on grinning.

Before I can crack, I say, “Fuck off.”

And then I reach for the button of his jeans.