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  I gave up to desire, rocking with it. Harder. Faster. The pounding of the dildo against me wasn’t quite on spot enough to get me off, but I kept going, and teasing pleasure edged me closer and closer until I was lost in it. No longer in control myself. Letting my orgasm steal away my reason.

  Fuck, how good it was. Over and over, thrusting, my hands on his bent knees, occasionally reaching to stroke his cock from base to head. He cried out and shook when I did that, but a nice, firm grip on the base of his cock kept him from ejaculating. I wasn’t done yet—I hadn’t believed I’d come from this, but I was so close now, so fucking close, I wasn’t about to stop.

  “Beg me to let you come,” I ordered in a low voice.

  His gaze met mine and locked. “Please, Goddess, please fuck me harder and make me...oh...”

  I shuddered with my own climax, my thrusts ragged. I didn’t mean to keep stroking his cock, but caught up in my own pleasure, I forgot to tease and deny him his. At the searing wet spurt of him covering my hand, I came. He jetted all over his chest and my hand, once hitting his face, and we both tangled into that final roller coaster plunge of simultaneous orgasm where nobody knows what the hell is being shouted out of their mouths or what parts are whose because everything has become a last thirty seconds of pumping, grinding, clenching, pulsing oblivion.

  There was silence.

  Slowly now, gently, I withdrew and pulled free the ribbons at my hips that held the harness in place. I wriggled out of it and fell onto the bed next to Esteban, who hadn’t moved, not even to wipe his cheek. I did it for him, tenderly, with the edge of the pillowcase, though the mess on his belly I left for the moment. I curled next to him, my lips pressed to his shoulder. I tasted the salt of his sweat and breathed in his scent.

  “Wow,” Esteban said after a while.

  I’d started to fall asleep. I smiled against his skin. He shifted to have me settle on his chest, and his hand stroked, stroked over my hair. He kissed my forehead.

  “Wow,” he said again.

  I shifted to look at him. He smiled at me, though his eyes were more serious. He let a finger trace my brows, the line of my nose. Over my lips.

  “I want to see you again, soon,” he said then added, “May I?”

  I thought about it. “Next Friday?”

  Esteban sighed happily and pulled me close. “Yes. Next Friday.”

  We were quiet for a few minutes. I pushed up on my elbows to look at him. “What are you thinking?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing isn’t an answer,” I told him.

  He opened his mouth but then closed it. “Nothing I want to say out loud. Words might break what I am thinking.”

  I knew the feeling. I didn’t press him. There were things I’d been thinking that were best kept inside, too.

  18

  I didn’t recognize the number that came up on my cell phone, which was why I let it go to voice mail and then promptly forgot about it until after I came back from lunch and checked my phone to see if Esteban had messaged me. I was still going over our amazing night together, over and over, unable to keep myself from grinning when I thought of it. We’d seen each other for three Fridays in a row, and I was planning on this Friday, too. Alex had tried to call me out about it, but I wasn’t saying a word.

  “Hey, um, Elise. This is Niall. Black,” he added as though I knew half a dozen men named Niall. “I was wondering if you’d want to go check out a movie at the Allen Theater with me. It’s supposed to be really good.”

  He named an indie movie that had been getting rave reviews. It wasn’t showing in any of the multiplexes, though I figured if it really took off, some big distributor would eventually snatch it up. I had, however, been thinking about going to see it, probably alone, since there wasn’t anyone I knew who was into that sort of thing.

  “Hey.” Alex stuck his head around my office door. That was all. Just his head.

  I paused in listening to the voice mail. “Um...yeah? What?”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  I gave him a wary, narrow-eyed look. “Why?”

  “It wounds me,” Alex said, “that you don’t trust me. Not that I blame you. I’m fucking unreliable as fuck.”

  I had to laugh at that and shake my head. “Have I told you lately how lucky I am to work in a place where reliability is rated in terms of fuck? And for fuck’s sake, come all the way into my office. Stop hovering...” I stopped when he came through. “What the...”

  Alex was not wearing pants. I blinked and blinked again at the sight of him, shirttails hanging down over what looked like a pair of soft pink women’s boy-cut panties. Then I covered my face.

  “What the hell!”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I spilled coffee.”

  He’d been wearing white pants earlier, a bold fashion move that I’d thought couldn’t be topped...until I saw the pink underwear. Embarrassed laughter choked me, and heat flooded my cheeks, because the last thing in the world I wanted was to get a crush on my married partner. “Good Lord, Alex.”

  “Hey, they’re super comfortable.”

  “I don’t disagree with you. I just don’t need to see you in your wife’s panties.” I swiveled in my chair to avoid looking at him. Sweet Baby Elvis in a pompadour, do I love boys in lingerie.

  Alex snorted. “They’re not hers. They’re mine. Why should women get all the cool underpants?”

  “Aghhh!”

  “Okay, hold on.”

  I heard shuffling as he ducked outside the door, then came back inside a minute or so later with a skirt made out of sheets of paper stapled together, clinging to him in a way that was definitely not going to keep him covered if he did more than stand very, very still. But it was an improvement over him flashing his junk at me, and so I turned to face him. I shook my head.

  “Don’t judge,” he said. “You’re the one who insisted I come inside.”

  “Fair enough. Now that we’ve lost half an hour of work time, what is it that you wanted?”

  “I just wanted to know if you wanted to come out with me and Olivia tonight. Dinner. Show. We have extra tickets to see the Chinese Acrobats at the Hershey Theater.”

  I twisted in my chair, considering it. “Sounds fun.”

  “Nice. We have two tickets. Maybe you can invite your...” He paused to give me a look. “Your lover?”

  “No.” I shook my head. I’d already asked Esteban to come out with me once at the last minute and been turned down. It wasn’t a trend I wanted to start. “But I might be able to scare up another date.”

  He pretended to stagger. “God. You’re killing me. You have some other guy, too?”

  “It’s the life of a crazy single lady, yeah. I know. To an old married guy like yourself, it must be shocking. Two men at the same time!” I grabbed my pearls. The fact they were fake and from a thrift shop didn’t keep them from being perfectly clutchable.

  Something flickered across his expression, and his smile slipped a little bit. “Oh, the horror.”

  “Hmm,” I said thoughtfully. “It kind of sounds awesome to me.”

  “Depends on the men, I guess,” Alex said. “So, who’s the other guy if he’s not your lovah?”

  “Oh, this other guy I met who works with my brother. He came to the gallery show, and then we hung out a little, after. He just left me a voice mail asking me to the movies.”

  “See if he’ll come along to the show, instead. You’re down for a double date?”

  “Let me call him, see what he thinks, okay? Maybe he didn’t even mean tonight.”

  “If he’s calling you right now for a date tonight,” Alex said, “you should just say no anyway, on principle.”

  “There are so many reasons why I like you. You know that?”

  He buffed his fingernails on his shirt front. “I am pretty fucking likable.”

  “Get out of here. Let me make this call in private. And get another pair of pants!” I waved him out and thumbed