For a moment she just looked at him, the rise and fall of her chest dramatic.
“Yeah,” Naomi said, and then gave him the filthiest kiss he’d ever received. Quite possibly, he corrected as her tongue pressed against his, the filthiest kiss anyone had ever received.
She pressed herself against him, and he rolled his hips helplessly intime with the greedy press of their mouths. It was all Ethan could do to keep from rubbing his dick, well, all over her, anywhere he could reach.
Naomi pulled his hair until he moaned against her mouth, out-of-his-mind wrecked, but then she stepped away so suddenly he actually stumbled forward. Barely keeping from breaking his nose by catching his arm on the door frame.
“I should go.” Her lips were swollen and her hair was mussed. She looked like the first meteor shower he’d ever seen—impossible and brilliant, so far away but somehow also right inside his chest.
Ethan briefly considered dropping to his knees and begging her to stay.
Instead he said, “Of course.”
“This was great. Again.” She pressed the back of her hand to her cheek, eyes somewhat incredulous before smiling at him and reaching under her dress to slip off her panties and shove them into his hand. “Bye, see you tomorrow.”
The door crashed closed before he had time to process his good fortune.
He slumped against it, jerked open his belt buckle, dragged down his zipper, and fisted his cock, pumping a handful of times against the slip of silk, warm from her body, until he came, shaking like a leaf.
If that was what a first date with Naomi Grant was like, how on earth was he supposed to survive the second one?
Chapter Twenty-Two
MODERN INTIMACY—LECTURE 4:
Friends don’t let friends lie to themselves
NAOMI WAS Afirm believer that if she told herself something wasn’t a big deal, and then forced herself to behave in accordance with that version of reality, she could conquer just about any type of social anxiety. Unfortunately, ever since she’d started dating Ethan Cohen, that strategy had gone completely to shit.
For example, she currently stood behind a now-familiar lectern at the JCC, preaching about the modern dating milestone of introducing the object of your affection to your group of friends, while a drop of sweat snaked down the back of her top. Before she and Ethan had started actually following the steps she’d written for their experiment in love, she’d gotten into a groove with the syllabus. Each lecture flowed pretty seamlessly. Organic connections started forming in their conversation. Participants actually started to show up with positive anecdotes about people they interacted with, rather than the negative—albeit funnier—stories from the first few weeks. But now...
“If you’re afraid to introduce the person you’re seeing to your friends,” she said, reinforcing the key theme of the evening’s seminar as they hit the midway point in the session, “it’s probably because you know they’re not right for you.”
Smile, your grimace is scaring the audience.
“So,” she continued after a deep breath, reading directly from her notes, “quit kidding yourself and cut your losses, or prepare to face the truth you’ve buried about the inevitable failure of your relationship because you’re afraid to die alone.” Yikes. She’d written the outline for this module a few weeks ago. Now each easy proclamation fell from her lips like a personal sentencing.
“And with that”—she forced herself to release her death grip on the lectern—“let’s break up into groups of three to five. I want you each to go around and share some commentary you received from your friends about your last significant other. See if there are any patterns that you’ve been ignoring.”
Had her outlook on dating always been so bleak? She needed to find the thermostat and crank up the A/C.
Okay, yes, she was nervous about introducing Ethan to her friends. Not because they weren’t wonderful. She loved them with her whole heart. But they were going to make fun of her mercilessly for throwing her well-loved independence manifesto out the window for a man with great hair and a decidedly squeaky-clean vocation.
She walked over and began to futz with the old-fashioned thermostat on the wall.
Ethan’s friends were easy. He spent most of his time with Morey and the other members who made up the core of his congregation. The softball team seemed to like her well enough after her crowd-pleasing bunt. Maybe they could count that and move on to the next milestone?
Except their next lecture was on sex. Her brain practically hummed the word.
She glared at the thermostat. She had no idea how this dial worked, but at least while she stood over here facing it, she could avoid making eye contact with Ethan.
She considered herself exceptionally well-versed in the erotic arts for obvious reasons, but still, last night had been an outlier. Sitting close toEthan while he watched her perform, both of them fully clothed and not even touching on the couch, had given a whole new meaning to the wordforeplay. It had been so perfectly Ethan—restrained and powerful and surprising and devastating in the best way.
Naomi wiped her palms on her pants and let her thumb brush just barely against her inner thigh.
Her first thought when she got home wasHoly shit, having sex with him might actually kill me, and her second wasWe have got to shoot a piece of content about filming yourself masturbating and then watching it with your partner, forcing yourselves not to act until you achieve climax on screen.
Naomi finally gave up on adjusting the temperature and turned back to her class to see a hand up.