Page 12 of The Stranger

“Oh, Jesus God in heaven, don’t stop. Please don’t stop!”

“Come for me. Let me drown in you.” He sucks my clit into his mouth, and I just…detonate. There is no other word for it. I go off like a rocket—I probably pull out half of his hair as I arch against his mouth’s heavenly assault.

“Holy…” The peak of my orgasm seems unceasing. I begin to fight against him, struggling to be free of his mouth.

“Keep still,” he growls in reprimand. And when he demands I come again, a hot sleekness rushes through me as I begins to convulse.

My insides continue to throb as I sink into my body again. The soft press of his lips to my thigh makes me squirm, hypersensitive, awkwardness quick to set in. Or so I thought until his arms come around me and he presses his head to my stomach.

“That was…” He sounds as dazed as I feel when he stands suddenly, his expression one of disbelief or astonishment. It’s hard to tell.

The light catches his face; his mouth smeared lewdly with my pleasure. A tempting beat starts up between my legs again.

His hand cups my cheek as he just stares at me, like I’m a treasure or a prize.

“Your hair,” I whisper, reaching up to run my fingers through the dark strands. “It looks like you’ve been electrocuted. And it sort of feels like I have.”

He smiles—and, oh my, he looks so heart-achingly lovely. Reaching for my hand, he kisses the back of my fingers before bringing them to his chest. My heart sinks like a rock in a pond when I notice the pale slice of skin where a wedding band would normally sit.

“You’re not—you’re not married, are you?”

I feel sick, really sick, as the warmth in his expression gutters like the flame. He drops my hand, looking anywhere but at me.

“I don’t…” know what to think. What to say or what to make of this moment when he suddenly pulls me close and presses his lips to my hair.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers fervently.

Behind me, metal grates against metal, and he steps closer. A beat later I realize closer isn’t his objective. He’s moving into me, using the slow, inexorable press of his body to usher me through the now-open door.

“What the…” My brain struggles to process what’s happening as he takes a step back, then swings the door shut. Leaving me wet and throbbing and confused and on the wrong side of it.

5

PRIMROSE

A breeze barely ruffles the bangs I’m trying to grow out as I drink my first café of the day. Despite being seated in the shade of the black parasol, I’m bloody boiling.

I press my water glass to my heated cheek. Cheeks that have been pretty much nuclear since last night when that… that good-looking clit tease pushed me into the brightly lit trash-smelling alley, knickerless!

Dammit! I said I wasn’t going to think about it anymore. I’d already spent the night alternately feeling sick, then rage-y, plotting his demise while trying to divine his marital status.

He wore no ring, but that pale slice of skin on his ring finger set alarm bells ringing. It could be the result of a recent divorce. But it’s more likely he left his wedding band in the console of his car.

I feel like I could disappear from shame because it’s the only reasonable explanation for his behavior. The way he suddenly developed an issue with eye contact and how he thrust me away as though worried I might burst into flames—it had to be guilt.

And I hope he’s feeling guilty. I hope he’s feeling at least as bad as I feel right now. What might’ve been the hottest moment of my life, my future nursing home glory story, my moment of breaking free from the past, has left me feeling lower than I ever thought possible. I feel wretched that he might’ve made me the other woman, no matter how unwittingly. I’m sad and disappointed and hurt on behalf of a woman I’ll never know.

The hottest moment of my life had the worst kind of outcome.

And that’s on him.

Probably.

There is another possibility. Another reason he might’ve shoved me out the door. And that’s good sex is something only other people have. In other words, I repel the opposite sex.

Enough, I think, as I tear a piece off my pain au chocolat and shove it into my mouth. I need to move on—forget last night. All of it in its entirety.

I have bigger things going on in my life right now. Like how I’m almost thirty and I’m still fucking up. That I’m on the lowest rung of my career ladder and playing catch-up thanks to finding myself on the wrong path at university.