“Why?” she challenges me with both her voice and her eyes.
“Because I want to feel you.”
She huffs out an unusually soft laugh. “You are full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“Is that a problem?”
I smile as I wait for Pia’s snarky retort, but it doesn’t come. Instead, her eyes glaze over and her expression turns momentarily serious. My smile disappears.
“It might be,” she says, but doesn’t give me a chance to ask why when she climbs off me, off the bed, and starts to take her jeans off.
I shouldn’t be surprised when she shoves the jeans down and there’s no underwear. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised when I see athick triangle of dark hair. I definitely shouldn’t be surprised when the sight of her naked – lean limbs, slim waist, wider hips than I’ve given her credit for – has me literally salivating. But I am surprised. I’m surprised when all three of these things happen in one revelatory moment.
“Pia, you’re” – I pause, wanting to choose the right word – “you’re magnificent.”
“Fuck off,” she says, giving me her famous middle finger, but it doesn’t distract me from the colour that lands in her bronze cheeks. Have I just made the imperturbable Pia Lindberg blush?
I kneel on the bed and move to face her. “I mean it,” I say as I run a hand down the centre of her body, my fingertips coasting over warm skin pulled tight by her ribs before it gets softer over the small curve of her stomach. When they dance around her belly button, I finally realise something that has never crossed my mind before; Pia is human. Pia is just like me and all of us: made of flesh and bone, feelings and maybe, possibly fears. And Pia is standing naked in front of me, studying me with those intense brown eyes, waiting for my next move. “You don’t know how amazing you are.”
Her hand comes to my neck like it has enough times this evening that it starts to feel familiar. “I’m not here for compliments, pretty girl. I’m here to fuck you until you forget all those wastes of spaces who touched you before.”
Her words are delivered with precision and volume, but I have spent enough time with Pia today, as well as watching her from afar over the years, to know this is more part of a performance than anything. And I don’t want her to perform for me. I want the real her. I want Pia naked in all possible ways, not just free of clothes.
So I bring my hand toherneck and I squeeze the sides, just like she’s doing to me.
“Well, I’m not just here to be fucked,” I say. “I think that’s where all those idiot men went wrong before. They wanted to use me, takewhat they wanted and then discard me until they needed another release again. But I’m not going to let that happen tonight.”
“Oh?” Pia’s eyebrow is a perfect arch, but her lips twitch a little, like she can’t decide whether to smile or scowl.
“No,” I say. “Tonight you’re going to show me what it’s like to make love to a woman. And I’m going to shower you with compliments until you believe that you really are something special, Pia.”
Her lips twitch again, as do the corners of her eyes. For a heart-stopping second, I think she’s about to cry, but then she blinks and the moisture in her eyes has gone.
“My God, you talk some shit, Cassie Everard,” she tells me in an icy cold voice, but then her mouth slams against mine and we’re lost in another kiss so passionate I’m breathless.
Suddenly, it’s impossible to keep track of her hands or mine. They’re everywhere. Roaming, grabbing, gripping, stroking, claiming. I can’t keep up with where she touches me, and I don’t know where I’m touching her, I just know it’s not enough. What I want is more.
“Please,” I pant as she drags her teeth across the sensitive skin of my throat. “Please, can I…”
“What?” She pulls back.
“I want to…”
Her crafty smile riles me up in more ways than one. “Spit it out, Cassie.”
“I want to … taste you.” I drop my eyes to her naked crotch and then bring them up again. “Down there.”
She leans back even more, and her expression is not forgiving. “It’s not an official rule, but in my opinion, if you can’t say the words ‘eat pussy,’ you shouldn’t be allowed to do so.”
“Pia!” I protest, pushing her shoulder, but she barely moves. She’s completely serious.
“And say it loudly, so I can hear it clearly.”
“I … I want to…Just let me.”
She glides a hand down her body, and it disappears under that triangle of black curls. “If you can’t say it, you don’t get to taste it.”
My frustrated groan echoes off the bedroom’s walls. “But Pia…”