We’re both breathing heavily. Rex puts his mouth back on mine and kisses me softly as he slowly slides his fingers from me. I groan, shuddering against him, and I can’t help but clench up. Hands now free, he hefts me a bit higher, holding me against him.
He keeps kissing me, and then, like he can’t help himself, he dips a fingertip back inside me.
“Rex!” I mumble, and wrap my arms around his neck. We kiss softly, our mouths moving together, warm and liquid. As he slides his finger inside me, my cock gives one last shivery jolt against Rex’s stomach and I hiss. My head falls back against the tree and I take a deep breath. My head is spinning. Rex nuzzles into the curve where my neck meets my shoulder and I can feel his moist breath on my skin. He slips his finger free and gently lowers me to the ground.
My legs are shaking and my ass is a little tender. He must see it on my face because he pulls me against him, one arm around my waist, the other braced against the tree as he catches his breath.
His body engulfs mine so that all I can feel is his heat and all I can smell is his scent: fabric softener and pine and light, clean sweat. I can’t actually remember the last time I was held like this; maybe I never have been. I hug Ginger, but she’s small and it doesn’t feel anything like this. Other than that…. No one. I feel like I could melt right into Rex, and I want to stay like this as long as I can.
It freaks me out—how much I want this.
“I, uh,” Rex says, and with my ear pressed to his chest his low voice rumbles through me. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.” The feeling of comfort drains out of me, leaving me exhausted just thinking about waking up that morning, hopeful and unsure, and finding him gone, without even a note to say good-bye.
“I didn’t think you wanted to,” I say, and I can hear the resentment in my voice. Rex shifts backward so he can see my face. I make sure my expression is neutral.
“Not true. I just wanted to get Marilyn to the vet. And, like I said, it seemed pretty clear you’d take any job over one here. I didn’t think our little town made a real good impression.”
“I dunno. You were a pretty good welcome wagon,” I say. “Even if you didn’t say good-bye.”
“Hmph,” he says. His expression has shuttered. It makes him look sterner, older. “Well, you’re here now. I suppose you’ll be using this job as—what’d you call it? As a springboard?”
“Maybe,” I say. I’m amazed that he remembers our conversation so well. He even remembers the word I used. “I’ll have to see. I’m here for this year at least. Um….” I make a vague motion toward my pants, which are bunched at the bottom of the tree.
Rex lets me go and I try to go about putting my twisted underwear and pants back on with some semblance of dignity. Not that there’s much room for dignity when you’ve just been wrung dry against a tree in the middle of the night.
“Suppose you walked?” Rex asks. I nod.
“Hey, you’re not from here, are you?” I ask.
“Nope. Texas, originally,” Rex says, doing a much better job of putting himself back together with dignity than I’ve done. “But I lived all over. Why?”
“Your accent. You don’t have that nasal Michigan thing. And you say suppose.”
“What’s wrong with suppose?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. Just, usually people who say suppose are either, like, being formal or they’re from the South. So I just wondered. Texas, huh? So, are you into that whole cowboy thing?” I’m babbling again, but there is just something about Rex on a horse—or a bull, or whatever the hell they have in Texas—that’s incredibly hot. Rex with a whip.
“For a professor, you’re kind of into stereotypes, aren’t you?” Rex says, but he doesn’t seem offended. “Serial killers are from the Midwest; everyone in Texas is a cowboy.”
I groan. “You remember that, huh?” I was desperately hoping that, what with the orgasms and all, maybe he wouldn’t have registered that part of our exchange.
“It only happened a few minutes ago, Daniel,” he says, and he chucks me under the chin.
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t actually think those things. I just—”
He pulls me into his chest and tips my chin up. He kisses me lightly and smiles, then strokes my stomach. I look down and see his come has dried in white streaks on my black T-shirt.
“That’s pretty grim,” he says.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m doing laundry tomorrow.” Rex’s eyes darken and that predatory expression is back.
“I’m not sorry about that,” he says. “I mean your shirt. You sure know how to put a guy in his place.”