Stranger Read online

  “Why are women’s clothes so complicated?” he grumbled from his place at my feet. He didn’t wait for an answer before tossing my clothes to the floor.

  I was bare from the waist down and he was fully dressed. Unacceptable. “Take yours off.”

  Sam stood and watched as I lifted my shirt off over my head and threw it to add to the pile on the floor. Beneath my skin, the couch cushions were nubbled rough. I shifted, crooking my finger. “C’mon, Sammy. Naked.”

  “It’s Sam,” he protested, but his fingers had already worked open the buttons on his shirt.

  Sam shrugged out of his shirt and undid his belt and the zipper. His jeans gaped open but the hem of his T-shirt hung down too far. He bent and pulled off his socks, one at a time, and I knew he was deliberately teasing me. A sexy bump-and-grind striptease would have made me giggle. Sam’s deliberately slow removal of each layer of his clothes was made more erotic by its pure masculinity and normality. I wasn’t watching some rentboy tantalize with glimpses of flesh.

  I was watching Sam strip down to all his naked glory as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do in front of me.

  “God bless denim,” I murmured, watching the way his belly tightened when he pulled his T-shirt off over his head. “Where do you find jeans that long, anyway?”

  “Big and Tall.” Sam grinned and tucked a thumb into the waistband, dipping it just low enough for me to see the sleek dark tuft of his pubic hair.

  An incoherent noise slipped from my throat. He pushed his jeans a little lower, and the briefs he wore beneath slid, too. Down, down, down each long leg the material moved until at last he stood and kicked off the jeans. Naked at last, a hand on his cock as it grew.

  “Are you going to fuck me on my couch?” I scooted back onto the pillows.

  “Nope.” Sam’s penis was getting harder as I watched.

  “No?” Confused, I swung my legs around to put my feet on the floor.

  Sam stopped me before I could stand. “No. I’m not going to fuck you on the couch. I’m going to go down on you on the couch. Sit back.”

  I did, voiceless. Sam kissed my mouth as his hand went between my legs, priming me. He didn’t waste time kissing down my body or lingering on my thighs. He went straight from my mouth to between my legs, parting me with his thumbs to suck gently on my clit.

  The electric, sudden shock of it forced another inarticulate noise from me. I arched instinctively before I could force myself to still, but I’d already wrapped my fingers in Sam’s thick, dark hair. I wanted to look down, to see him there between my legs, but pleasure forced my eyes to close as it parted my mouth in a silent sigh.

  Sam paused with a shuddering sigh to murmur something sweet, something sexy, something like, “Oh, fuck, you taste good.” Something that said in the context of anything but sex would sound fake, but I didn’t doubt he meant it.

  He pushed my legs open wider and used the flat of his tongue in smooth, even strokes. The pressure, the heat, the wetness of his mouth were perfect. He didn’t pinpoint the sensitive bead of my clit or drill me with his tongue. Instead he kept the pressure steady and constant, just above my clit, using my own shifting flesh to further arouse me. White-hot pleasure balled in my gut and burst.

  I came the first time.

  Sam withdrew, but not far. His breath still caressed me, but now he slid a finger inside me before I had time to do more than gasp and shudder with my orgasm. He curved it and found the small, sensitive spot just behind my pubic bone. I’d experimented with my G-spot before and never found it particularly exciting. Too often it distracted me from climax, or worse, made me feel like I had to pee. But Sam didn’t rub me there, just pressed gently in time to the small, pointed flutters of his tongue.

  Oh, fuck, he did the nibbling-lick thing. I’d thought it was good on my mouth. On my cunt it was utopia. He licked, nibbled and pressed.

  I came again, hard on the heels of the first time. I drew in a deep breath, hard, and opened my eyes. He wasn’t looking at me. He was still kissing my cunt, clenching tight around his finger. I blinked, streamers of red dancing in my vision and fading as the waves of my orgasm abated.

  “God,” I said. “Sam—”

  “Shh…”

  He didn’t lick me. Didn’t nibble, or push, or press inside me. Sam put his mouth on me, not even kissing. Just touching me with his lips and breath. His finger was still inside me, but he wasn’t moving it.

  “I like to feel the way you move when you come,” he said, his lips forming the words the only motion he made. “I can still feel it. You’re still beating.”

  I was, no longer in the rapid-fire burst of contractions my body made during climax, but an occasional slow throb. The spaces between each stretched out. I got my breath back. Sam didn’t move. I thought about shifting, but was too sated for the moment to do anything but recover.

  After a second he licked me again. Different this time. Softer, but not hesitant. His finger moved, too, twisting.

  “Sam, I can’t.” My protest was weak, and I didn’t try too hard to move away. From him.

  He said nothing, just continued what he was doing. I knew my body well enough. Its limits. Yes, I’d made myself come three times in a row and once a memorable four, but I’d been watching a Justin Ross marathon and had been at the point in my cycle when everything turned me on. Even then it had been hard work, the final climax more like an afterthought than a real orgasm. “Sam—”

  “Shh.”

  I didn’t protest again. What he was doing felt good, even if he wasn’t going to get me off doing it, and if it made him happy, who was I to complain? I’d have been happy to return the favor or even finish by making love to him without trying to come myself, but I’d also learned not to struggle too hard against Sam’s persistence.

  I thought for sure he’d get tired, or too horny to wait, but he kept going. Long after I’d have given up, Sam licked and kissed and stroked me. He used his mouth and hands, but he used his words, too. Sam was a talker. The things he said should’ve sounded ridiculous, but coupled with the gentle seduction of his lips and tongue they only sounded beautiful.

  I love the way you taste. I love the way you sound. I love the way you move. I love the way you say my name, just like that.

  Sam.

  I love you.

  And I, selfishly caught up in the ecstasy he was giving me, didn’t have to say anything. I only had to burst apart.

  Sometime after that I took him to my bed and made love to him for too short a time. I wanted it to last, but didn’t have the heart to torture him after he’d been so generous. He closed his eyes when he came and I watched his face and marveled at how this had all happened.

  Later, in the dark, Sam turned his back to me and said so quietly I almost didn’t hear, “It’s because it’s easier to pretend.”

  “What is, baby?” My voice sounded as sleepy as his had, but my eyes had flown open wide and my heart pounded.

  “Staying at my mom’s. At night, in that room, it’s easy to pretend I’m a kid again and my dad’s still alive.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I did what I could. I spooned myself along his back, my arm around his waist a comfort I wasn’t sure he wanted. His shoulder beneath my lips rose and fell with his sigh.

  I spend my life helping people mourn, and yet I don’t believe I’ve seen grief in all its forms. Sorrow, like songs, is never the same.

  “He never saw me play,” Sam said. “He told me if I went to New York to try and make it, I’d fail. We fought about it. I didn’t come home for a long time, and when I did, he never asked me how I was doing. Not one fucking time, Grace. I sent the write-ups I got in the indie papers.

  Not one fucking time.”

  The muscles of his arm tensed, bunched. He drew his legs up and trapped my arm between his knees and belly. He curled over himself, a big man making himself small.

  “And then he died, the fucker.” Sam’s voice broke. “And I was