“What? Making s’mores while drunk was the most fun I’d ever had.”
“You got chocolate all over your lips,” he said. “You told me to help you get it off.”
“Where was Dillon?”
“He’d wandered off to piss in the woods.”
“Oh, that’s right. He got lost and it took him an hour to get back.”
The memory was hazy. She’d been fourteen, Chris sixteen, Dillon seventeen, if she remembered correctly. Chris had his hair pulled back in a blond ponytail, and he wore board shorts instead of his usual ratty jeans. That night he’d looked almost handsome and she’d been a raging ball of vibrating estrogen capable of orgasming from a hard sneeze and able to fall in and out of love with total strangers all in the span of one day or less. The Jack Daniel’s they’d all dipped into had made her head fuzzy and Chris ten times more talkative than usual. He’d told her dirty stories like the one about the three guys who had to share one bed up at Timber Ridge Lodge, and the guy on the right of the bed wakes up the next day and says, “I had a dream somebody gave me a hand job,” and the guy on the left of the bed says, “Crazy, I also had a dream somebody gave me a hand job,” and the guy in the middle of the bed said, “Weird. I had a dream I was skiing.”
That was what it was. He’d told her the skiing/hand job joke and she’d snort-laughed chocolate from her s’more all over her mouth. And she’d told him he had to help her get it off since it was all his fault that she’d laughed while eating and made a massive mess of herself. She’d expected a napkin, a towel, a leaf, something to clean herself off.
Instead, he’d kissed her. Not a kiss, a lick. He licked her lips, and quickly it turned into a real kiss, her first kiss. Before anything else could happen, they heard Dillon tramping back to camp. She’d hated her brother right then and right there. Why couldn’t it have been number two instead of number one, Dillon? Until that moment in her young life, she had no idea having a male tongue on and in her mouth could be the single greatest sensation of all the sensations she’d ever sensated. He’d tasted better than a s’more, and if that wasn’t the highest compliment a fourteen-year-old girl could give a guy, she didn’t know what was.
“I still think about you when I eat s’mores,” he said. “Is that weird?”
“I still think about you every time a Nirvana song comes on the radio.”
“That’s the sexiest thing any woman has every said to me.”
He kissed her again before she could laugh and then she didn’t want to laugh anymore. All she wanted was to kiss and kiss and kiss some more. He was a wonderful kisser and she was quickly getting used to the soft tickle of his beard on her lips and chin and cheeks. And a small evil part of her was relishing the knowledge, even reveling in it, maybe also wallowing in it, that Ben would blow a brain gasket if he knew what she was doing right now. He’d always had a jealous streak, which she’d found flattering at first and increasingly irritating over the past few months. It had seemed out of place, uncalled for. She’d never given him a reason to be jealous. Now she knew he’d been projecting, covering up for his own guilty conscience. Well, fuck him. He had no say in what she did anymore.
She pulled back from the kiss only to open the bedroom door. Chris flipped the lights on but only long enough to turn on the lamp and then the overhead lights were off again. There was a definite chill in the air so she sat on the edge of the bed patiently while Chris threw a few logs in the woodstove and started a fire. It was a pleasure to watch him work. He had quick and efficient large hands that moved with surety at every task. Door open, logs in, newspapers in, more logs, match lit and then...fire. Warmth infused the room, which might have had something to do with the fire in the stove and might have had something to do with Chris taking his shirt off. Not the T-shirt, not yet. Just the flannel he wore over it, but the sight of his strong bare arms was enough to raise her temperature a degree or two especially since he was taking it off while walking toward the bed.
“You’re not supposed to be this sexy,” she said as he came to stand in front of her.
“Sorry?”
She put her hands on his hips, slid them under his white T-shirt and felt his hard flat stomach.
“I accept your apology.”
“I’ll never do it again.”
“See that you don’t.”
“Do you want to take your shirt off?”
“That’s not fair. I only have a bra on under my shirt. You had a T-shirt on under yours.”
Chris sighed, a put-upon sigh. Then he took his T-shirt off.
“Better?”
She stared at his chest, at his bare shoulders and stomach. This was a man who worked very hard and his body showed it.
“Much, much better.”
Chris reached down and gathered the fabric of her sweater in his hands. She raised her arms and let him pull it off. It joined his flannel and T-shirt on the floor. She really hadn’t planned on seducing Chris or being seduced by him tonight, but apparently her subconscious had known better because she’d chosen her favorite plum-colored lace bra to wear under her sweater. Did she remember to put on the matching panties? Oh, yes, she had. Chris would probably assume she’d planned this when he saw them. She hadn’t, but she didn’t care if he thought that.
He bent and kissed her again. Inch by inch, he eased her onto her back with kisses as he crawled onto the bed, his knees on each side of her hips, his arms bracing himself over her. She might be on her back but she refused to lie there passively while he kissed her lips and neck and chest. With her right hand she cupped the back of his neck. With her left hand she went exploring. He was lean, almost thin despite the presence of some impressive muscles, and when she ran her hand down his back, she could feel the outline of his shoulder blades under his warm skin. She lingered a long time on his back, loving the width of it, the length, the strength. And she couldn’t think clearly enough to do much else at the moment as Chris was nuzzling her neck with his mouth, and his beard tickled the tender skin under her ear.
“You feel amazing,” he whispered. “And you smell amazing.”
“What do I smell like?”
“Like you did in high school. Like cookies.”