“Well?” I ask, wanting to hear it from her mouth. I heard it from her body already.
She stirs slightly, looking back at me. “When can we do it again?” she asks, and the unexpected response makes me laugh. I bend my neck to kiss her, full on the mouth but slow and soft.
“Soon,” I tell her. “Really soon. But I don’t want to wear you out too much tonight. We’ll rest a little first.”
“You mean we’ll rest for a few minutes, right?” she says, twisting herself a little in my arms to prop herself up on her elbow. “Not like, we’ll rest until tomorrow?”
I chuckle, tucking her hair back behind her ears, my eyes straying to her lovely breasts. “A few minutes,” I promise. “I should have known at your age, you’d have better stamina than me.”
Her gaze rakes down my body, a raised eyebrow following. “I don’t think age comes into it,” she says. “I think you might have spent more hours at the gym than I’ve been alive for.”
That makes me straight-out laugh, throwing my head back. “Well, at least we’re already laughing at how elderly I am.”
“You’re not elderly,” she says, pouting. She puts out a hand and almost shyly trails a finger across the muscles of my chest. “I think you just proved that.”
I study her for a moment. “It doesn’t bother you, does it?” I ask. It’s more of a statement of recognition than a real question. Ever since I realized she wanted me back, it hasn’t seemed to be on her mind at all that I’m so much older than her.
“No,” she says, bluntly, shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe it should, but I don’t care. You’re… you don’t act like you’re old. Not, like, old. And, I don’t know. Maybe I don’t act like people my age either. Sometimes I find them irritating.”
I smile lightly, thinking about it. “You might be right, there,” I say. “So, if you’re old before your time and I’m still youthful despite my years, maybe we’re not so far apart after all.”
“Exactly,” Gabby says. She nestles a little closer to me, laying her hand flat on my chest. I like it. How she’s slowly becoming more confident. How she’s nestled in my arms like she belongs there, and she does. “Although, um. I guess you’ve had a few more life experiences than me.”
“Like what?” I ask. “You mean going to college, graduating? Getting a job?”
“And other things.” She isn’t meeting my eyes, still looking at my chest. “I guess it never really came up in conversation before, with my… at home. But what were you doing with your life? Who were you spending it with? Before...”
Ahhh. The penny drops. “You’re trying to ask me if I’ve been in relationships before?”
She clears her throat a little uncomfortably, then looks up at me. “Well, how about it? I mean, a man like you… you haven’t been married?”
I almost want to laugh out loud at that again, but I don’t want her to think I’m laughing at her. Far from it. I could see she was serious about the question. I take her hand from my chest and press it to my lips before putting it back where it came from. “I’ve never been married,” I say. “I’m a businessman. I’ve worked hard for a very long time.”
She squints at me a little. “But you’ve had serious relationships.”
Now, I do laugh. “Listen, Sherlock Holmes, there’s no secret to dig up here,” I say. “I am as you find me. I wasn’t ever serious about anyone before.”
She pauses for a moment. Then, before I have a chance to ask her where she’s going with that serious look, she leans forward and kisses me square on the mouth.
Before I can really get it together to figure out what I want to say, the kiss deepens, and I feel it shoot straight to my growing erection – which has apparently had enough time to recover. In a rush, we’re lost in each other again, and I roll onto my back to haul her on top of me, to knead her ass with my hands as we make out. And she’s the one, this time, who reaches down to touch me, exploratively at first and then with purpose, lining up my cock to enter her a second time.
And it’s only once we’re done and laying in a drowsy haze, just before I fall asleep, that I wonder, did she hear how serious I am about her, and did this to deflect? Did she want to avoid the conversation?
Could it be because, even though I know she’s mine, she still hasn’t accepted it herself – and she still wants to go home at the end of this week and forget about everything that’s happened between us?
Chapter Twenty-One
Gabby
Before.
The word still rings in my head when I wake up the next morning, wrapped in the sheets of Oz’s bed. Before.