CHAPTER 15 - NOT YET

He said tonight and he wasn’t lying.

He didn’t knock. He never knocks. The door opens and closes and he’s leaning against it with his arms crossed and his eyes already dark and I’m sitting on my bed in a t-shirt and underwear pretending I wasn’t counting the minutes since the stairwell, which I was, and I counted four hundred and thirty-seven of them.

“Stand up.”

I stand, and he drops to his knees.

The sight of Knox Voss on his knees in front of me is so disorienting that my brain stalls for a full second because this man does not kneel – kneeling is MY position, kneeling is what he makes ME do, and seeing him on the floor looking up at me with his hands already sliding up the backs of my thighs rearranges something fundamental in my understanding of what’s happening between us.

He pulls my underwear down to my ankles and I step out of them and his hands guide me backward until my shoulder blades hit the door, and my mom’s bedroom is fifteen feet down the hallway on the other side of this wall and I can hear the faint murmur of her television through the wood, and Knox either doesn’t care or the proximity is part of it, and based on everything I know about him it’s the second one.

He hooks my left leg over his shoulder and his mouth is on me before I finish processing the position, and the first drag of his tongue from my entrance to my clit is so deliberately slow that my head falls back against the door with a thud that I immediately regret because sound carries in this apartment and we both know it.

“Quiet,” he says against me, and the vibration of the word against my clit makes my hips jerk forward and staying quiet becomes exponentially harder.

He seals his lips around me and sucks while his tongue works in tight circles on the left side – the side he mapped, the side he told me about during the voice-command night, the side that makes my thigh shake against his ear – and his hands are gripping my hips hard enough that his thumbs are pressing into the hollows of my hip bones and holding me pinned against the door.

His tongue pushes inside me and curls forward and I shove my own fist into my mouth because the sound I almost made would have woken my mom and possibly the neighbors, and he pulls back just long enough to look up at me with wet lips and say, “I said quiet, not silent. I want to hear you. Just not loud enough to get us caught.” Then his mouth is back on me and the challenge of finding the volume between audible and disastrous while his tongue is doing things that should require a license is making my legs shake so badly that I’m staying upright through sheer stubbornness alone.

He alternates between fucking me with his tongue and sucking on my clit in a rhythm that feels calculated, like he’s testing which combination makes my breathing stutter the fastest, and every time I get close he changes the pattern just enough to keep me climbing without letting me crest, and I realize he’s been edging me with his mouth the way he edged me with his voice and my body is starting to understand that Knox Voss doesn’t give me anything until he’s decided I’ve earned it.

“Knox, please–”

“Please what?” He says it against my clit and the vibration makes my vision blur.

“Please let me–”

“Not yet.” His tongue speeds up and his hands tilt my hips forward and the angle changes so that his mouth covers me completely and his tongue is hitting the exact right spot with every stroke and I can feel the orgasm building like a wave I can see coming but can’t reach.

Just when I’m about to break he slows down again and the sob that comes out of me is embarrassing and desperate. He rewards it by sucking hard on my clit and flicking the tip of his tongue against the underside of it and I cum so hard my knee buckles and my back slides down the door and he catches me before I hit the floor.

Knox scoops me up like I weigh nothing and carries me to the bed and puts me face down on the mattress, and before I can roll over his hand is on the back of my neck pressing me into the pillow and his body is behind me and he pulls my hips up until I’m on all fours with my face in the sheets and him kneeling behind me still fully clothed.

His hand slides between my legs from behind and finds me swollen and soaked and his fingers circle my clit with a lazy pressure that makes my arms shake, and I can feel him pressed against my as through his jeans.

He grinds his hips forward so that the rigid length of him drags along the crease of me through the fabric, and the friction against my bare skin is maddening because I can feel exactly how much fabric is between us and I want it GONE.

“Knox, just–” I push back against him and the pressure through his jeans makes us both groan and his hand comes up from between my legs to clamp over my mouth from behind, and his other hand replaces it, his fingers sliding through my wetness and circling my clit while he grinds against me in slow rolls that rock my whole body forward with each thrust.

“You want more?” His mouth is at my ear and his hand is tight over my lips and I’m nodding frantically against his palm. “You want me inside you?”

I nod again and try to push back harder against him and his hand over my mouth tightens and he stops grinding and stops touching me between my legs and the sudden absence of all contact makes me whine against his fingers.

“Not yet,” he says, and his voice has that edge to it that I’ve learned means the conversation is over. “You’re not ready for what I’m going to do to you.”

He holds me there for five seconds – on all fours with his hand over my mouth and his body pressed against mine through his jeans and nothing else touching me – and then he lets go and climbs off the bed and tucks himself back into his waistband and walks out of my room and closes the door behind him softly, and I am face down on my mattress shaking and soaked and so unsatisfied that I could scream into this pillow and I’m about to, I’m absolutely about to.

I grab my phone from the nightstand and text the number I still haven’t saved.

I hate you.

The reply comes in four seconds.

You will.