Chase

SLOANE

**Chase:** *I'm lying here thinking about the pool house.*

My breath caught. The pool house. His mouth on me. The blue light and the chlorine and the way he'd said my name like it was a prayer he didn't believe in yet.

**Me:** *Which part?*

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared. A long pause that hummed with intention.

**Chase:** *The part where you came on my tongue and your whole body shook and you said my name like it was the only word you remembered.*

Heat flooded my face, my chest, the space between my thighs. I pressed my knees together under the blanket like that would help. It didn't.

**Me:** *That's specific.*

**Chase:** *I think about it every night. Every single night, Sloane. I can still taste you.*

I closed my eyes. My hand drifted to my stomach without my permission, fingers resting just below my navel, feeling the jump of my own pulse through skin.

**Me:** *What else do you think about?*

**Chase:** *Your thighs on my shoulders. The sound you made when I slid inside you. How tight you were. How you looked up at me in the water like I was the only real thing in the world.*

My breathing went uneven. Shallow. The room felt too warm, the sheets too rough against my bare legs. I was wearing his old Dalton Hockey t-shirt, the one I'd stolen from his drawer the last morning. It still smelled like his body wash if I pressed my nose to the collar.

**Me:** *Chase.*

**Chase:** *Tell me what you're wearing.*

**Me:** *Your shirt.*

**Chase:** *Fuck.*

**Chase:** *What else?*

**Me:** *Nothing else.*

The three dots pulsed for a long time. Then my phone rang. His name filled the screen.

I answered on the first ring. No point pretending.

"Hi." His voice was low, rough, wrecked already. The midnight version of Chase, stripped of all the armor.

"Hi."

"You're wearing my shirt and nothing else."

"Yes."

"Jesus, Sloane." A ragged exhale. "You know what that does to me?"

"Tell me."

"I'm so hard it hurts. I've been hard since you texted back. Probably since Tuesday." A low, strained laugh. "You've ruined me. I can't even look at another girl without comparing her to you and finding her completely fucking irrelevant."

My hand slid lower. Beneath the hem of the t-shirt. My fingers traced bare skin and the heat pooling there, slick and undeniable.

"Are you touching yourself?" he asked. Quiet. Almost reverent.

"Not yet."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes." The word came out smaller than I intended. Honest in a way that made me feel exposed, cracked open, like he'd peeled back every defensive layer I'd spent eighteen years building and found the raw nerve underneath.

"Then do it. Let me hear you."

I slid my hand between my thighs and my breath hitched on contact. I was already so wet it was embarrassing, the evidence of two weeks of deprivation pooled warm and slick against my fingertips. I circled my clit with two fingers, slow, the way he'd taught me. The way he'd done it in the pool house with his thumb while his mouth was on my breast and his other hand was tangled in my hair.

"Talk to me," I whispered. "Tell me what you'd do if you were here."

"If I were there?" His voice dropped another register, velvet over gravel. "I'd pull that shirt up over your head. Slow. I'd want to see everything. Every inch of you in the dark."

I pulled the shirt up with my free hand, baring my breasts to the cool air. My nipples tightened. I imagined his mouth closing over one, hot and wet and relentless, the way he always started gentle and then sucked harder when he felt me squirm.

"Then I'd kiss my way down your body. Your throat. That spot behind your ear that makes you gasp. Your collarbones. I'd take my time with your breasts because you always arch into me when I'm there and the sound you make is the best sound in the world."

My fingers moved faster. The pressure built, slow and warm and achingly familiar because my body had memorized him, memorized the rhythm he set, and now I couldn't get off any other way. Only his pace. Only his pattern. Even alone in the dark, it was his hand my nerve endings remembered.

"And then?" My voice was barely there. Breath and vowels.

"Then I'd spread your legs and settle between your thighs and lick you until you couldn't think. Long, slow strokes with my tongue until you're grabbing my hair and begging. You always beg so pretty, Sloane. You don't even know."

A moan escaped me, soft and desperate, muffled against the pillow. I heard his breath catch on the other end, a sharp intake that told me he was touching himself too. I pictured it. His hand wrapped around the thick, hard length of himself, stroking slow and tight, eyes closed, jaw clenched, thinking about me.

"I want you inside me," I whispered, and the words felt like jumping off a cliff. "I miss the way you feel inside me, Chase. I miss being full of you. I miss the way you look at me when you're as deep as you can get and your forehead is pressed against mine and we're just breathing."

"Fuck." His voice cracked. "Sloane, are you tryna make me come?"

"Yes. Why don't you come with me? You always take too long to come and I hate that about you. Uhhhh...."

I pressed harder, faster, two fingers circling with increasing urgency while the pressure coiled tighter, tighter, a spring compressed past its limit. His breathing was ragged in my ear, harsh exhales and low groans that sent electric pulses straight through me. I could hear the wet rhythm of his hand and it shouldn't have been as hot as it was but it was, it was, because it was him, because he was two hundred miles away doing this because of me, because of the memory of my body, because I had wrecked him the same way he had wrecked me.

"Say my name," he breathed. "When you come. Say my name."

The orgasm hit like a wave crashing through a wall. My back arched off the mattress, my thighs clamped together around my own hand, and his name tore out of me in a broken, shaking whisper that I muffled with the collar of his shirt pressed against my lips.

"Chase. Oh god. Chase."

He followed seconds later. A strangled groan, low and raw and beautiful, and then silence except for our breathing, ragged and unsynced, two hundred miles of highway and phone signal between us.

\* \* \*

We didn't hang up.

The silence that followed wasn't awkward. It was the kind that held you. The kind that existed between two people who'd just been as close as distance would allow and weren't ready to let go yet.

"Chase."

"Yeah."

"I hate you."

"You keep saying that and I start thinking you don't."

"I do. I fucking do." Silence. Then I continued. "You have to be so fucking good at sex. So annoyingly perfect. Fuckkkk..."

"And you’re frustrated."

"Gosh... fuck you. Fuck you and that nine inch or ten inch or whatever."

"Okay, chill. What's going on with you right now."

"YOU! ARRGHHH..." I groaned in frustration. "You fucking spoilt me. You made me fucking addicted. I crave you all the time. It's like a sickness. I... I..."

Unless it's not a sickness. Unless I'm actually falling in love with my stepbrother.

FUCK.

"You knew what you were getting yourself into. Remember. So control yourself and your horniness."

"You think this is me being horny?"

"We're both horny. Stupidly, insanely horny."

I chuckled.

"Chase."

"What?"

"I think I'm... I'm..."

"You think you're what?"

"Can you just let me finish?"

"Fine. Finish."

"Nevermind. Get your arrogant ass out of here." I ended the call.

Fuck.