House of Payne: Steele (18 page)

“We’re doing this, sweetness, and we’re doing it quiet, you got that?” Unerringly his questing hand found the juncture of her thighs. A thrill shot through him when his fingers slid through her slick channel, and he sent up silent thanks that such a responsive woman had been sent across his path. “Essie.
Damn
.”

She squirmed against his touch. “What?”

“You’re always so fucking wet for me, like I’ve already made you come your ass off with just a kiss or two.”

He sensed more than felt her withdrawal. “Steele, don’t.”

“I’m not complaining.” Pushing up to a sitting position, he took her with him so that she straddled his lap. With one hand he made sure the blanket was tucked around her hips while his other hand continued to massage her clit. A rush of lust ballooned when her frown dissolved into an expression of hazy, mindless bliss. “I’m communicating how pleased I am that you get off on me, long before I even touch this sweet pussy of yours. You understand?”

“I. Um. Mm.” Her hips began to rock with the rhythm of his stroking hand, and she licked her lips as she began to pant, clearly losing the thread of their conversation as she sank into the euphoria he gave her. He was all for that, but he had something to prove.

“Tell me you love getting wet for me, Essie.” He ground down hard against her nub, and her head fell back on a ragged gasp, before he slowed his rhythm. “Say the words, Pet. Say them out loud so you can hear the truth of who you are and what you like. You love getting wet for me.”

“I…” Her hips still pumped while her chin lowered so she could look at him. A powerful wave went through him when her eyes glittered in the dark with what could have been tears. “I love getting wet for you.”

“Yeah, you do.” Wild delight nearly crushed his chest, but he wasn’t done. “You know what else you love? You love it when I play with you.” When she didn’t immediately repeat the words, he lightened his touch further, a wordless threat of leaving her. “You love it when I play with you, Essie. Say it.”

“I love it when you play with me. Keep touching me. Don’t ever stop, please.”

“Sweetness, I’d do anything for you when you say
please
.” Her body followed the retreat of his hand to pump against him, and he rewarded her by renewing his intimate massage with an increased pressure designed to push her over the edge. Her response was all he could have hoped for. She writhed almost trance-like in his lap, and when she brushed against the fiercely throbbing head of his cock he almost exploded. “Oh, fuck…
yeah
.”

“Please.” The whispered word shook as she moved back just far enough to look into his eyes, and the wanton hunger he saw in her rocked his world. It continued to rock when her hand moved between them to wrap around his dick, her thumb coming to toy with the super-sensitive ridge until he could do nothing but groan and thrust into her hand. “Please put this inside me and fill me until I feel like I’m going to burst.”

“
Jesus
.” He hadn’t prayed in well over a decade, but he was on the verge of it as he moved to do exactly what she wanted. Urging her to lift up on her knees, he positioned the head of his cock at her threshold, then yanked her down over him all the way to his hilt. Pleasure burst inside him so violently he nearly came right then. Groaning soundlessly, he pressed his head back against the truck’s rear window as her white-hot slickness sheathed his stiffened flesh.

Fuck, she felt like heaven.

Tight.

Searing.

Wet.

A perfect fit.

“Touch me.” The whispered entreaty bubbled out of her as she leaned into him. Her lower back arched, her pelvis tilting so that his penetration went deeper still. “Oh… yes. Steele,
yes
.”

“You like my cock in as deep as it can go when I fuck you, don’t you, sweetness? As deep as your sweet pussy can take me.” His teeth clenched as he pushed up into her, and she rode his dick with an ever-increasing urgency, her breath gasping out of her soft, open mouth, her faraway eyes glazed and almost closed. God, she was beautiful in sex. The most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “You can’t get enough of me, yeah? You love my cock buried in you just as much as I do.” The hand he had at her hip moved between them so he could press his thumb into her clit.

Her gasp hit his ears at the same time the elastic walls gloving his cock clenched so hard he groaned. Then she was a wild tornado in his arms, bucking hard as she worked to impale herself on him as if her life depended on it. Little mews of incoherent pleasure escaped her, and he slammed his mouth over hers. To muffle her cries, yes, but also to muffle his own as he felt himself slipping into a sudden, violent release triggered by hers.

Ecstasy washed through him with such savage intensity his whole body jolted with it. For several airless moments he forgot where they were. All that mattered was that he poured all of himself into her as he came so hard he thought it would never end. He wrapped his arm around her at the last, still moving inside her because he couldn’t make himself stop. Then another, impossible wave of pleasure surged from out of nowhere, tightened his balls and turned him inside-out as he came again. All he could do was hold on as the madness engulfed him anew, and the only thing he wanted to hold onto was Essie.

Chapter Seventeen

The sun beat down with unrelenting brilliance, but all Essie could see was black. Her inner world had been storming for hours, and no matter how hard she tried to shove it away, it rumbled on with increasing darkness.

It was all Steele’s fault.

“Got any more quarters over there?” Carla’s head poked around the cinderblock wall separating the two car wash bays. “I’ve still got to vacuum out all the cereal in the backseat. The equivalent of a full box of Cheerios has been spilled back there.”

“Yeah.” Essie grabbed up the small stack of quarters off a metal ledge by the sprayer and handed them over without fanfare before going back to jet-spraying the crud off her back tire. “Help yourself.”

“What’s with you, Es?” Instead of disappearing back to her side, Carla rounded the wall to lean against it, arms crossed. Her usually smirking face was devoid of humor, replaced by a frown that would have frightened her children if they had been there to see it. “You’ve been snippy from the moment we left the apartment. If I’ve done something to piss you off, tell me about it so we can both be mad at me and call me a bitch.”

Guilt crept in to make her inner world that much darker. “You haven’t done anything, Carla, I swear. I know I’m in a bad mood, but it has nothing to do with you.”

“What does it have to do with?”

Essie’s mouth tightened as she stared at her friend. They were similarly dressed, in cut-offs and T-shirts. Carla’s shirt sported the face of Archie and Betty from the comic strip, and the words “True Love” underneath. Her own shirt was much more boring, a white scoop-neck cap sleeved tee with the word “Nope” splashed across it in black lettering. That one word exactly described how she felt about absolutely everything in life, and she didn’t know how to make it better.

“Hello? Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nope.” Then she saw anger and hurt zip through Carla’s expression and grimaced when the guilt inside grew.
Ugh
. “It’s just that you wouldn’t understand, okay? Try not to take it personally.”

“How can I not take it personally when you snap my head off every time I’ve tried talking to you today? Is it because I didn’t pay you for babysitting last week? You said you didn’t want to be paid, but I still feel like Patrick and I took advantage of—”

“No, it has nothing to do with that.” With a gusty sigh, Essie turned off the power spray and hung up the wand where it belonged on the wall. Knowing Carla, there wasn’t going to be any dodging this, so she might as well get the whole thing out in the open. “Last night I… I had sex with Steele. Actually,” she added, shooting for accuracy while Carla’s eyes widened to the size of silver dollars, “I had sex with Steele several times yesterday, starting around dinnertime at his place, all the way up until we got permanently kicked out of Cascade Drive-In for having sex in the back of his truck while the end credits were rolling. But we were already pretty much tapped dry by then, since we’d started having sex during the
opening
credits. Getting caught by that point was kind of anticlimactic.” Indeed, the climaxes had definitely all happened by that point.

“Oh-kay.” Carla watched her for a few seconds, as if she expected there to be more, though Essie couldn’t imagine what that could possibly be. “So… why has this put you in a bad mood, exactly? I mean, considering the amount of times you went to Pound Town with the big man, I’m assuming you had a pretty good time.”

Good grief, Pound Town
. “You assume correctly. Sex with Steele is about as fantastic as anything I’ve ever done in my life, and I can’t seem to get enough of it. Of
him
. And that’s part of the problem.”

“How could that ever be a problem?”

Essie searched her friend’s face, unsure how to put it in terms that wouldn’t mortally embarrass both of them. “You know I’m new to this relationship thing, so please bear with what’s probably going to seem like a really stupid hang-up on my part—”

“Essie,
don’t
.” Putting the quarters back on the metal ledge, Carla turned to tug her over to lean against the still-dirty trunk of Essie’s car. “The natural growth of your life and the intimate experiences that come along with that growth all screeched to a halt when you were still in your teens. It’s as though that part of your life has been…” Futilely she groped around for the right words

“Lying dormant in a cocoon.”

“Exactly. Lying dormant in a cocoon,” Carla agreed, nodding. “I won’t put up with you kicking yourself for not knowing everything there is to know about relationships and sex just because you’re now an adult. That kind of knowledge only comes with experience. Experience,
and
asking your best friend any and every question you can think of without fear of ridicule or judgment. So ask. I’m sure I’ve got an answer for you. And if I don’t, I’ll make one up.”

Carla. Seriously, what would she have done without her? “I don’t have any questions, and sex isn’t a mystery.” At least it certainly wasn’t a mystery to her
now
. “It’s just that there were a few times where I was kind of… reminded of when I was attacked.”

Carla’s arm curled around her shoulders, her expression devastated. “Oh, honey. Was it because Steele was rough with you, or was it the act itself?”

“Neither. In fact, there is nothing better than that moment when he makes himself a part of me. Oh shit, did I say that?” Horrified and wishing she could disappear right there, she covered her hot face with her hands. “I can’t believe I said that.”

“Girlie,
relax
. It’s
me
, the one person on this planet you can talk dirty to and not die of embarrassment.”

“There.” With a glum sigh, Essie dropped her hands and looked at her. “That right there.
That’s
the problem.”

“Huh? What problem are you talking about?”

“Talking dirty.”

Carla’s concerned expression melted into one of confusion. “Okay, you’ve lost me. How can talking dirty be a problem?”

“It’s humiliating, for one thing. For another, it reminds me of my attacker. Some of the things he said to me…” She shuddered in the sizzling summer heat, and her skin crawled as the memories rose to the fore. “He talked the entire time he tortured me, did you know that? He’d say things like he knew how much I’d wanted it and that was why he was there, and that I was a come-whore, whatever that is, and that I could fuck the chrome off a bumper once I got going like the filthy slut I was. It was awful and degrading, every second of it, even though I didn’t understand half of what he was saying at the time.”

“That cocksucker,” Carla gritted with such quiet fury it shocked Essie. “Of course you didn’t understand.”

“The thing is, I understand
now
, and… and the problem is that Steele likes to talk dirty when we’re, uh… doing the Netflix and chill thing.”

“Oh. Oh, boy.” Carla grimaced and gave her a squeeze. “Yeah, that would be a mood killer, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s the thing. It isn’t.”

Carla’s brows went up. “What?”

“Maybe I am a filthy slut or whatever, because what Steele says gets me so hot and bothered I could just climb all over him like he’s my own personal jungle gym. But at the same time part of me feels that horror and shame that my attacker made me feel. See? I’m crazy. I love Steele’s dirty talk while hating myself for loving it.”

“Stop that. You’re not crazy, you’ve got a wound you didn’t know was there until Steele opened his mouth and showed it to you. He needs to know he has to watch what he says when he’s in the heat of the moment with you,” she went on when Essie made a sound of distress. “You have to talk to him about this, Essie.”

“I don’t know if I can. It’s such a stupid reaction.”

“Stop saying it’s stupid. Anything you feel, good or bad, is meaningful in a relationship, and if your partner makes you feel uncomfortable even accidentally, you need to set a precedent now and talk about that sort of thing openly and honestly.”

She hated to admit that Carla made sense, but there it was. “Anything else?”

“Just a little more. You need to understand that there’s a difference between verbal abuse and honest, clean, sexy-times dirty talk. Does Steele belittle you or call you condescending names like your attacker did?”

“Steele would never do that, he has too much respect for both me and himself.”

“So it’s not really the same kind of dirty talk, is it?”

“No.” She paused, biting her lower lip. “But he does kind of crow about how I obviously like what he does to me.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that? Is he lying?”

“No.” Duh, obviously. Just thinking about it now made her panties heat up. “But my attacker said the same thing—though what he did to me was the worst living nightmare I hope to God I’ll ever know.”

“Your attacker was a monster who enjoyed the added cruelty of blaming the victim for inspiring his despicable actions.”

“True. He was a monster, and I hate that I give him even a fraction of head space. He doesn’t deserve it.”

“Then talk this over with Steele and get it—and the monster—out of the way.”

“Steele will probably think I’m nuts.”

“Essie, you’re not alone when it comes to not being comfortable with dirty talk, especially if you’re not used to it. Patrick had never really been into any kind of kinky talk during sex when we first got together, so I had to ease him into it over time. But we communicated about it, and I’m glad we did because I learned what his boundaries were. Boundaries he’s since left behind, all thanks to my diligence in exposing him to the raunchier, throw-my-legs-over-your-shoulders-and-have-at-it side of life.”

Somehow it didn’t surprise her that Carla was the one with the naughty mouth, and not Patrick. “You really think I should discuss this with Steele?”

“I think it’s
necessary
that you discuss this with Steele. That way, he can protect you from anything that might trigger you. When it comes to this sort of thing, the only thing that’s not okay is if someone goes out of their way to make you feel ashamed for enjoying a little down and dirty pillow talk. And believe me, if you do it right, it is
thoroughly
enjoyable.”

Now there was a concept she hadn’t fully thought about. “Seriously?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Curiouser and curiouser. “And… you do more dirty talking than Patrick?”

“Honey, I
own
dirty talk. Patrick was such a repressed Catholic boy when we first started dating, he didn’t even know what dirty talk was. When I told him I wanted to give him a deep-throat blowjob so I could get the thrill of watching his eyes roll back in his head, he wanted me to talk to his family’s priest. Thankfully I’ve got him pretty well-trained by now, but it’s taken years.”

“Poor Patrick.” Then Essie reconsidered. “
Lucky
Patrick.”

“You know it. Better still, Patrick knows it too.”

“So how do you, uh, you know…” Essie blew out a breath before mentally shrugging. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. “How do you talk dirty? I mean, I’m not even sure what to say under normal circumstances, much less find words that would turn a guy like Steele on.”

“First off, don’t ever
try
to talk dirty. If you try, it just comes out sounding weird and twisted and makes you look like a first-class freak.”

“Yeah, if I could avoid that whole looking like a freak thing, that’d be great.”

“Just keep it simple by talking about only two things—what you want him to give you, and how you feel once he gives it to you. After you become more familiar with how things go, you can branch out and tell him what
you’d
like to give
him
. But be patient. That’s expert level. You’re still at the beginning stages, so pace yourself.”

“You can say that again. I don’t even know what I don’t know,” Essie griped, aggravated. “Screw it. This is getting way too complicated. There has to be like, a basic template or script I can find online for this.”

“Trust me, girlie, this is one skill you should never leave to the online trolls who’ve never been beyond their mom’s basement. You’re just going to have to muddle through like the rest of us poor saps and do the best you can. Just don’t be weird and you’ll be good.”

And what, exactly, defined
weird
? Before she could ask, the sound of her text chime had her fishing out her cell phone. Then, when she saw the name on the screen, she tried not to hyperventilate like an idiot.

“It’s Steele.” She announced it in the same way she would have announced royalty, but she was too keyed up to notice.

“Oh, yeah?” As relaxed at Essie was not, Carla craned her neck around when she clearly failed at reading upside down. “What does Mr. Dirty Talk have to say today? Did he ask what you’re wearing? Is he picturing you wearing no underwear beneath your clothing? Does he want to know if you fantasize about him when you touch yourself? That’s always a good one.”

“Holy crap, Carla, he wants to know why I didn’t wait for him to take care of washing my car, because he thinks that’s a man’s job.” Her mind was so boggled by all the steamy suggestions her friend came up with—seriously, if she couldn’t talk Carla into writing a how-to book on dirty talk, the world would clearly be missing out—that it took Essie a second to realize the text’s implications. “Wait. How could Steele possibly know I’m washing my car?”