BONUS CHAPTER
THIS BONUS CHAPTER is Luka’s perspective of this scene in chapter twenty- one:
I slept with my best friend last night. I slept with him two . . . three times last night. After we had collapsed in a boneless heap the first time, I woke up sometime around two in the morning, stomach rumbling. I snuck in the kitchen for a bite of pie out of the tin, only for Luka to shuffle in the kitchen after me, sleepily steal a bite from my fork, and then prop me up on the kitchen counter.
“Want this,” he had mumbled as he ducked down, teeth grazing my thigh, his mouth hot and wet on the inside of my knee.
LUKA
“LUKA.”
I grunt and burrow my face deeper in the pillow I’m curled around, desperate to hold on to my dream. Stella with her knees on either side of my hips. My hands working down the line of tiny buttons on her oversized flannel. Her bottom lip caught between her teeth and all those curls a curtain around us both.
I bet I could slip right back into it if I tried. See what sort of lacy thing dream Stella is wearing. My brain certainly has enough practice coming up with explicit fantasies involving her.
My pillow moves. A fingertip presses between my eyes. “Luka.”
I groan, edging further into consciousness and away from the bleary edges of sleep.
The huff turns into a laugh. Fingers drag through my hair. I peek open one eye, and it’s Stella smiling in the moonlight, her lips kiss-bitten and hair a wild, tangled mess. It’s so like my dream I have to blink four times and scrub a fist against my eye to make sure I’m not imagining it.
Everything comes back to me in flashes.
Stella in the front yard, snowflakes in her hair. Kissing her, the both of us tripping up the stairs to her house, unwilling to let go of each other. Peeling off her sweater until she was just bare skin in the glow of the lights from the tree. The freckle on the inside of her left knee. Both of her hands clenched tight in my hair. Her body, naked and wrapped around mine.
Everything she said when she stood in the kitchen, eyes right on me.
I stumbled off that step and he caught me, made sure I had my footing.
He’s sort of been holding me steady ever since.
I turn onto my side and brush a lazy kiss against Stella’s shoulder. A small sigh slips from her lips, and I think I like that sound better than any of the ones she made last night. Better than the husk of her laugh in the dark or the bite of her moan pressed against the hollow of my throat.
I like the sound of her settling against me. I like hearing her happy.
I’ve always liked that.
Her nails scratch through my hair again, and I wiggle my way closer through three down comforters and a novelty pillow shaped like an evergreen tree. I sling my arm around her waist and tug her toward me.
“Why are you awake?” I mumble. “And why are you poking my forehead?”
I can barely make out the lines of her face in the dark. I look for the little clock she keeps on the edge of her dresser. It blinks 2:23 a.m. back at me.
“I had a dream about pie,” she whispers. Her voice is low and rough around the edges. There’s a scratch to it that I like. Stella’s sleepy voice.
I shuffle down farther in the bed until I can trap one of Stella’s legs with both of mine. I nuzzle into her mess of chestnut hair. She smells like shortbread, whiskey, and wood smoke. I never want to move from this spot.
“Want me to get you some?”
“No, that’s all right. I’ll go see what we have.”
I peer open one eye. “I can make you a grilled cheese, if you want.”
I can feel her smile like a palm pressed to my cheek. “No,” she says.
“Though I’m tempted. You don’t have to wake up. I just didn’t—” She sighs and her mouth drops briefly against my forehead, bottom lip dragging. “I didn’t want you to wake up and find me gone.”
I smooth my fingers over the swell of her hip. That thing in my chest that’s always belonged a little bit to Stella shifts, rearranges. Pounds harder.
“Thank you,” I manage.
“Sleep.” I can feel her hesitate above me for one second, two, before she leans forward and brushes another kiss against my forehead. These new
versions of ourselves together, trying to figure out how much we can get away with. “I’ll be back in a second.”
She slips out from beneath the blankets despite my groping hands, and I watch as she bands one arm over her bare breasts as she rummages around on the floor for a shirt. Her skin glows in the moonlight, and my greedy eyes trace her silhouette in the quiet of her bedroom. It feels like I’m still caught in the edges of my dream, getting to watch her like this. The gentle swell between her waist and hip. The tangle of hair that cascades over her shoulders. The thin white scar at the base of her spine I know she got from trying to jump into the pond six years ago. The full, lush curve of her breasts as she finds a flannel she clearly stole from me and slips it over her shoulders.
It takes her a minute to get the buttons right, and when she finally does manage it, they’re haphazard and crooked. The one right between her breasts is left open, and I’m tempted to catch the end of that shirt in my fist and tug.
Stella presses her chin to her shoulder and looks at me, blue eyes a deep sapphire. Her lips twist up at the corner.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Promise?”
The twist of her lips turns into a pleased grin that she does her best to fight. But it tumbles out of her just the same, like the starlight spilling in
through her windows.
“Yeah, I promise.”
She pads out of the room and I flip onto my back. I scrub my hands through my hair and yawn so wide my jaw cracks. Stella drops something in the kitchen, and I hear a muffled curse, socked feet against the kitchen floor.
“Okay?” I call, trying to urge myself awake. Stella’s likely to lose a finger or set something on fire getting a slice of pie out of the fridge in the dark. I lift up on my elbows and try to see around the door. “Turn on the light, La La.”
A light blinks to life in the kitchen and Stella grumbles some more.
“M’fine!”
I snicker and collapse back to the bed. The sheets smell like Stella. Like Stella and me and sex and cinnamon, and my dream clings to me, the glimpse of Stella’s skin as she slipped from the bed tightening the edge of my desire.
My hands itch to touch every freckle I missed when we first fell into bed last night. I want to know every secret her body holds. Everything I’ve been thinking of for the past . . . decade.
God, ten years. It feels like a week turned into a year turned into a decade.
I don’t know how it’s been so long. I know Stella’s been afraid and I’ve been —I don’t know. I guess I’ve been content to go at whatever pace she needs.
Happy enough with her trust and the pieces of her heart I’ve slowly marked as mine over the years. It’s hard to be greedy when I’m already the first person she calls when she wakes up, half mumbling something about a dream she had involving nutmeg and dancing chestnuts. When I get her weird snort laugh instead of the charming, polite thing she manages in front of everyone else. When half of her closet is filled with my shirts she thinks she’s sneaky about stealing. I’ve always had Stella in the ways she’s allowed.
But now I get her like this too.
Naked in her bed. Clinging to the damn evergreen pillow I drunkenly bought her two summers ago when I was alone in my apartment—a little bit tipsy and wondering what she was up to so damn far away from me.
I’ve spent so long thinking about this, hoping for it.
And I’m lying in her bed alone while she’s in the other room half naked
and eating pie.
I’m an idiot.
I slip from the bed just as she drops something else, finding my boxers hanging from one of the bedposts. I slip them on and follow the sounds of her muffled cursing until I find her at the kitchen counter, tinfoil rolled back over a half-eaten pumpkin pie, fork in hand. She doesn’t bother glancing at me as I pad across the hardwood, scooping another bite of pie on her fork instead.
“Told you I’d—oomph—” Her sentence is cut off when I wrap myself around her, chin at her shoulder, arms banded low around her hips. She’s soft and warm and smells like cinnamon, the curve of her ass pressed tight against
where I’m aching for her. Again. Always probably. I don’t know if I’ll ever get enough of her like this.
“Did you want pie?” she asks, voice low. Her hips tilt back, and her eyelashes flutter against the curve of her cheeks. I nod and she lifts her abandoned fork, a bit of pie clinging to the edge. I curl my fingers around her wrist and guide it to my mouth, pumpkin and cinnamon exploding on my tongue.
“It’s good,” I say around a mouthful of flaky pie crust. She blinks at me, fork still hovering between us. All I can see of her like this is the blush creeping up her neck, the tempting rise and fall of her chest beneath her stolen flannel. I take the fork out of her hand until it’s back on the counter and set my hands on her hips.
I turn her until every bit of her is pressed up against every bit of me, and she’s looking at me with those dark, sleepy, wanting eyes. I’ve seen it in flashes over the years—the wanting. Shared glances in crowded bars.
Lingering touches when we’ve both had a little bit too much to drink, and the leash I keep on myself slips just a bit. But I’ve never seen it like this. Up
close. Constant.
Demanding.
I trace her cheek with my thumb to the little dip in her chin and try to memorize this moment. The hum of the refrigerator and wind creaking at the windows. Stilted breaths and anticipation pricking at my skin. Stella propped up against the counter with her eyes trailing down the length of me, smiling faintly at the cluster of freckles beneath my collarbone.
Her lips parted, candy apple red.
I drop my hands to her hips and urge her up. Her hip hits the pie tin and sends it skittering across the countertop. The fork goes . . . somewhere. Stella watches me with careful eyes, the insides of her knees pressing at my hips.
“What are you doing?”
I’m trying to go slow. I’m trying to hold myself together. I’m trying to look at Stella sitting in front of me in a shirt she stole from my closet and not tell her every word that’s pounding a drumbeat right in the center of my chest. I let out a shuddering exhale.
“Want this,” is all I can manage in response. Of all my fantasies of Stella, this has always been my favorite. The one I turn to when the wanting and the needing gets to be too much, and I have to fist my hand around myself. I close my eyes and picture her just like this, in front of me with her legs spread wide. Wild hair and kiss-bitten lips.
“You want some more pie?” she asks, voice shaky.
A sound rumbles low in my chest. A laugh, I think, if I could manage such a thing right now. “No, La La. I want more of you.”
The floor is cold beneath my knees when I drop down in front of her, but Stella is warm everywhere else. Her thigh twitches when I brush my lips against the inside of her knee, and she smacks her head against the cabinet when I move three inches higher and nudge at the edge of the shirt barely covering her. I glance up at her from between her spread legs, and that seems to do something to her too. Me, like this, on my knees before her. Her breath comes faster, and I can feel my heart in my chest pounding to match.
“Okay?” I ask, and I know she knows I’m asking about more than her head.
“Yeah, um.” She nods, eyes glazed. Her fingers clench the counter so tight her knuckles turn white. “Yes. This is good.”
I huff a laugh against the inside of her thigh and her knees tip open just a bit wider. Lust roars through me. “Hopefully it’s better than good.”
She laughs back. “I guess we’ll see.”
I tease her with gentle swiping kisses against the inside of her legs— higher and higher, just below where she wants me most. Her skin is so soft here, so impossibly sweet. I drop a light kiss against the crease of her thigh, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut tight when I feel how wet she is. How warm.
“Luka,” she says. The heel of her foot drums between my shoulder blades from where I draped her thigh over my shoulder. “Luka, please.”
“All right. Okay, I’m—” I’m falling apart is what I am. I relent and curl my hands around her thighs as I press my mouth to the heart of her—a long,
languid lick that has us both groaning.
“Luka,” she says again. “God. Luka.”
Her voice, like that, saying my name—it splinters my restraint. I yank her to the very edge of the countertop and drop my mouth to her. Again and again and again until she’s gasping, yanking, tugging at me. I lick and suck and bite with both of her hands clenched tight in my hair, guiding me into the rhythm she likes best. Rough, fast, messy. I slip one hand into the waistband of my boxers and curl my palm around myself just as I thrust two fingers into her. She makes a sound that I’ll hear in my dreams for the rest of my life. A whimper that blurs at the edges, mussed by desire.
It’s perfect. She’s perfect. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted. Hoped for.
Dreamed of. Her taste beneath my tongue is sweeter than that damned pumpkin pie left abandoned on the counter. The feel of her hot and wet and wanting is a goddamn revelation. I don’t want to do anything else, ever.
“I’m—I’m so close,” she says, voice two octaves higher than it usually is.
I suck her clit into my mouth and she makes a whimpering sound that echoes in my bones. I do it again and her whole body trembles. I’m greedy for it.
“Make me come. Please.”
I pull away and rest my forehead against her leg, watching the way my fingers move against her. Her hips move with me, and it’s a wonder I’m capable of any rational thought. I feel like I could come just from this.
Watching her chase her pleasure.
I drag my gaze up until our eyes catch and hold. “What do you need?”
I drag a sucking kiss against her thigh. Her whole body shivers.
“Could you—” She drops her head back against the cabinets, watching me from beneath her lashes. “Could you put your mouth on me again?”
“Yeah.” I nudge her with my nose and press a kiss right below her belly button. I tap my thumb over her once, and then again when a sound catches in the back of her throat. I’ve dreamed of exactly this so many times, Stella flushed and panting and asking for me. I try to gather the threads of my control. “I can do that.”
I can do anything you want, is what I want to say. Anything you’ve ever thought of. I bite back the words and set my mouth to her instead. Firm, unrelenting pressure and quick strokes of my tongue. Her thighs tighten
around my ears, her moans muffled. I close my eyes and feel the way she unravels against me, her whole body giving in to her release.
I stay with her through it, gentle kisses and careful touches until she calms, legs spread haphazard and limbs loose. She watches me with dark, interested eyes as I drag the back of my hand against my wet mouth.
“That was—” She blinks twice, the blue in her eyes luminescent. “It was good. If you were—if you were wondering.”
“I gathered that.”
“Oh? What gave it away?”
I grin at her and stand. I thumb at the blush on her cheeks, the strand of hair sticking to her neck. “The look on your face.” I gather all of her hair into a fist and then release it with a wistful sigh. Her head lolls into my touch.
“The way you shrieked my name.”
One imperious eyebrow rises on her forehead as she flicks me in the center of my chest. I catch her fingers with my hand and hold. “I did not
shriek.”
“You shrieked.”
She curls her hand around my jaw and tugs me closer until she can angle her mouth to mine. She licks into my mouth with a sigh, and goose bumps light up my arms.
“I didn’t shriek,” she whispers against my lips.
The bottom half of my body feels like it’s a hairpin away from something devastating and embarrassing. Probably equal parts both. I wonder how Stella would feel if I yanked my boxers down and touched myself to the sight of her, messy and spent. God knows it wouldn’t take long.
Her mouth moves to my neck and I’m tired of teasing. “Okay, okay. You didn’t shriek.” She did though. “Can I—” I fumble with the mismatched button over her breasts that I’ve been fixating on. I want to see her skin. I want to watch the way she moves when she takes me inside her. “Can I have you again?”
She nods, pink on her cheeks. A little bit bashful. Entirely adorable.
Completely mine.
“How do you want me?”
Every way, my mind supplies. Here, in your house. In this kitchen and in your bed and up against the door to your horribly unorganized closet. With me always.
Her eyes flash a shade darker, like she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
After ten years, she probably does. I urge her from the counter with gentle hands and spin her in my arms until she’s bent at the waist. I tug the shirt off her until it’s a crumpled heap on the floor. She’s nothing but smooth curves in the low light, elbows resting on the countertop and ass in the air. Another
fantasy.
“Is this okay?”
She nods, frantic. “Very okay.” Her hands are busy fighting with the hem of my boxers as she tries to urge them down with her body twisted away.
“Come here, please.”
It’s the please this time that sends me over the edge. I grab one of the condoms Stella helpfully left by the pie tin and roll it over myself, one palm on the small of her back. I press into her slow, slow, slow until I’m buried in her. Until I can lean forward and tuck a deep sound of appreciation against her neck.
I hold myself there, overwhelmed by the feeling. I nose through her hair and catch the edge of her ear with my teeth.
“Did you plan this?” My voice sounds like it’s coming from someplace very far away. I roll my hips and heat rolls up my spine. Back down again.
Everything pulls tight.
“What? The pie?” Her breath is almost as fast as mine, her hips rocking back like she’s too impatient to wait. Like she’ll take me however she can get me. It’s driving me wild. “Of course I planned the pie. I’m always planning for pie.”
“Not the pie.” I smooth my hand down the length of her spine. I pull out slowly and then thrust back in with all of my pent-up . . . everything . . . I’ve been feeling since I woke up with Stella naked next to me. She makes me feel like I’m out of control. Like I can’t have everything I want fast enough, hard enough. Like I need to bend her over her kitchen counter just so she can understand how badly I want all the damn time.
I thrust into her again, and the mugs we left on the counter earlier rattle.
We both make strangled sounds of pleasure. Matched as always, even in this.
“You wanted me to fuck you, didn’t you?”
“There you go with that word again.”
“I knew you liked it best.”
“I don’t know, I’m—” Her breath hitches when I angle my hips and hit that spot. That spot I found last night, when I pressed her flat to the bed and curled my hands around her hips, chasing our pleasure until she was shaking beneath me. “I’m pretty partial to bumping uglies.”
I’d laugh if I wasn’t so focused on the way she’s still reaching for me, her nails biting into the skin of my hip. The way her breasts bounce every time I move against her. Christ. This is better than any dream, anything I could have ever thought up.
“Noted,” I grit out, and then I lose myself to her. To the wet heat between her thighs and the flush of her skin. The way she pushes back into me harder when I try to slow down, try to make it last. I tilt my head back and catch a glimpse of us in the tiny window above her kitchen sink. Stella and all those alabaster curves glowing like stardust. Me right behind her, making her shiver.
“Fuck.” The sight of us together tosses me right over the edge. I drop my chin to my chest and grind my hips against Stella, deep and slow and messy and perfect. I come the moment just before she does, her hands scrambling against the counter, knocking over an old coffee canister. It rattles across the floor as I collapse in a boneless heap against her back, my ear pressed to her shoulder. The steady thump of her heart lulls me into some sort of hypnotic trance. I could fall asleep right here. Just like this.
“Do you remember that time you took me to that food court in Annapolis?” I mumble against the curve of her back. She’s still plastered against the kitchen counter, but she doesn’t seem to be complaining. She tilts her face to the side until she can glance at me out of the corner of her eye.
The pads of her fingers sooth over the marks she left on my skin.
“The one with all the different pizza places?”
One food court. Fourteen different pizza options. Deep dish. Stuffed crust.
Flatbread. “That’s the one.”
Her eyes crinkle at the corners. “You told me it was the best day of your life.”
I blow out a deep breath and leverage myself off her. My legs feel like Jell-O. Like someone just shot me with a tranquilizer gun. I haul Stella up after me and tuck her neatly against my chest. I collar my hand around her throat and trace her fluttering pulse, a zigzag line all the way to where her heart is thumping a steady beat. I press my palm there and close my eyes.
I hope she can feel it. Everything I haven’t said yet. Everything I want to.
“New best day,” I mutter.
She tangles her fingers with mine and raps our hands against her heart.
Like maybe she wants to tell me some things too.
She tilts her head and presses a smacking kiss to my jaw. “Back to bed?”
Soon. I’ll work up the courage to tell her everything else soon enough.
I smooth my hand down her hip and smack her ass. “Anywhere with you.”
