Page 107 of The Sweetest Return

“And I wanted you and your perfect pink pussy before I was even all the way awake.”

I touched my clit and had to close my mouth around the first small sound. The ring there caught beneath my fingertip, a tiny stroke of pressure that made my hips shift under the sheet. I had gotten it years after Dre and I ended, one of those private choices I made for myself because I liked pleasure, liked my body, liked knowing certain secrets belonged to me before they belonged to anybody else.

But somehow, even that felt like something he would understand.

Dre went silent for half a second.

Then his voice deepened.

“You touching yourself?”

My eyes closed tighter.

“No.”

“Liar.”

I should have denied it again.

I didn’t.

He didn’t tease me either. Not the way he could have. He only let his breathing settle into the line between us, quiet and present, like he understood that something in me needed room to want without being laughed at for it.

“Keep going,” he said.

My fingers moved in a slow circle, sliding over my clit, around the ring, then lower to gather more of the wetness he had talked out of me like he had every right. My body was soft and open beneath my own hand, skin alive, breasts still aching from the sheet and the memory of his mouth. I could feel myself everywhere. The tender pull in my nipples. The wet heat between my thighs. The pulse at my clit every time his breathing changed through the phone.

“Dre.”

“I got you.”

Those three words nearly pulled the sound out of me by themselves.

“Remember what happened after that?” he asked.

I did.

Every reckless second.

“You put your hand under the sheet,” I whispered.

“Mnhmm.”

“And then you got very pleased with yourself.”

“I had reason.”

“You always thought you had reason.”

“Baby, you were soaking wet.”

My hips moved into my own touch.

The endearment had slipped out of him like no time had passed, and my body received it before my mind could decide whether it should. Baby. In that voice. In the morning. With his memory wrapped around both of us.

“I remember sliding my fingers through that pussy,” he said. “Slow at first, because you were still half asleep and sensitive everywhere. You kept your eyes closed, but your hips were moving. You remember?”

“Yes.”