Partial steam ahead, if you know what I mean.
Flame-colored sky, flame-colored night, flames on the edges of my skin… – "Flame Color" by Elise Davis
Quil
I know the second Claire walks into the fire station that something is up.
She holds up her hand, the keys to her mom's car dangling against her palm. "I have strict instructions from my mother to get into trouble. I stole the car and ran away, and I hope you have a bag packed, because you're coming with me."
She looks happy, even when things at home are less than… That's it. Just less than.
So I call her bluff. "So you mean your mom kicked you out and tossed you the keys?"
"No," Claire says quickly, her cheeks going red. Little liar. "I stole them."
Behind me, Dave and Omar snicker from where they play cards at the long dining table in the common area.
If Aaron didn't have such tact, I'm sure he would've blabbed to everyone after he took us for the helicopter ride. But he does—have tact, that is. So the crew doesn't really know what's going on with Claire and me.
They know something is, though. Which is probably why one of them makes a whipcrack noise under their breath. I ignore them, because Claire looks excited. I haven't seen this fire in her eyes in a while.
"Shift's over in an hour," I tell Claire. "We can hang here and head to my place after?"
She nods, looking toward Chief's office. "Will I get in trouble being here when it's not a family day?"
I cock an eyebrow. "I thought you had strict instructions from your mother to get in trouble."
Her cheeks blaze brighter, and she shifts on her feet so her thighs press together. Apparently, Claire likes my smart mouth.
We end up joining in the card game with Dave and Omar, and the others soon join us. If someone minds Claire's presence, they keep it to themselves.
Until Claire whoops everyone's ass at gin rummy.
Colton groans. "Your little friend needs to go home, Quil."
"I'm not trying to be dramatic," Claire says, grabbing at the cards for her turn to shuffle, "but there's not exactly anything 'little' about me. I can leg press more than you."
"Wanna bet?" Colton snorts.
"Hell yeah," she says, and pushes back from the table. I'll probably overlook that curse. That's the mildest one there is.
I watch Colton study her, her surfer's build. Not in a checking-her-out way, just a sizing-her-up one. And I watch as he swallows.
He sees what I always see. Strong, powerful thighs. Toned calves.
But my imagination takes them a step farther, firmly in checking-her-out territory—in my head, those thighs are wrapped around my waist, squeezing me closer. And her mouth, the one turned up in a devilish smile, is opened to her pleasure, breathing my name.
A heavy hand clamps down on my shoulder, and when I tear my gaze away, I find Aaron looking down at me. "Let's go watch Colt get his ass handed to him by a teenager."
It's a sudden and direct reminder of her age, something I usually don't let myself think about—specifically in relation to mine. And as we all head to the microscopic gym (one each of a treadmill, chest press, leg press, and recumbent bike), I think about the other gaps between Claire and myself.
I wouldn't call myself sexually experienced by any means, but I know what I like in terms of other people, how I like to be touched by hands that aren't my own.
She's never had that. I'm going to be the first person to touch her, be inside her. And sure, she knows what she needs in theory, but the mechanics of getting her there is uncharted territory.
In firefighting, when you're handling a large structure fire, it's important to have a layout of the building so you aren't rushing in unprepared. You need to know where all exits are, where people are likely to be congregating. Building contents, because a library full of books will burn differently than a warehouse full of old electrical equipment. Going in without these details is ill-advised.
I could, theoretically, get with Claire blindly. But I'd prefer to have a general layout of the place.
Have I told Claire about my recent conclusion? No.
I guess I'm looking forward to conducting a few… site visits.
God, this metaphor went off the rails quickly. It's been a long shift. We're all loopy after we got called out last night to a brush burn. I could use a nap, a drink, and/or an orgasm. And not necessarily in that order.
Aaron and I crowd into the doorway, the last to arrive.
"Who first?" Dave says, moving the pin. "And where are we starting?"
"Ladies first." Colton gestures for Claire to sit, and she does. The denim of her shorts digs in, and I look away as she pulls the hems further up her legs, into the crease.
"Start me at one fifty," she says proudly. "And we'll go from there."
By the time she reaches four hundred, Colton's looking a little green, and Omar and Dave are giggling like little schoolgirls, and Claire's legs are quivering, but she still doesn't give up.
"Ten more," she says, gritting her teeth. Another rep. "Five more." Another. "Five."
"I need to surf more," Mia says, looking mildly impressed. That's a shining compliment coming from someone as stoic and hard-edged as her. She could give Leah Clearwater a run for her money.
Claire adds another five pounds, and although the rep takes longer than the others, she still does it.
It's incredibly sexy.
She surrenders at four-fifty, and when she swings her leg off the machine, she stumbles.
I move in just as she reaches for me, and the air draws taut between us. Her pulse increases as she stares up at me, her eyes ignited with lust. Sweat beads at her temples, and she smells like hard work and pheromones and suddenly I'm a little weak too.
"Okay?" I whisper, studying her face. The little freckle just above her left collarbone. She really likes when I kiss her there.
Aaron clears a throat, as natural as he can. Like I said, the guy has tact.
Claire nods, and as she pulls herself upright, her hands trail my abs. The moment is still charged, but there are too many eyes here to resolve anything.
Colton takes the bench, and when Dave tries to move the weight pin he gets waved off.
"I'll start there." He presses. Grunts. The plate… does not move.
He coughs, and I stifle a laugh. My hand is on Claire's lower back, and with everyone in front of us, I feel comfortable leaving it there. She leans into me.
Colton leans forward, flicking the pin out to move it up a few notches. "I'll build up to it. Loosen the muscles first."
"You do that," Mia says.
So Colton starts where Claire started, and adds twenty, ten, five like she did. But when he reaches four-twenty, his legs start to quiver worse than Claire's. Claire's hardly breathing, the anticipation palpable.
There's only fifteen minutes left on our shift, and behind me, I hear the next crew starting to amble in and drop their bags in the bed bay. After we leave, I'll have Claire—a Claire whose mom is not expecting her home—all to myself.
Colton's going for four-forty now, but the plate only moves halfway before his legs give out. "Fuck," he grunts as the press comes crashing back toward him.
The crew erupts in cheers, and Omar leans over to hoist Claire into an Emmett Cullen-esque bear hug.
He sets her down. "You're welcome here anytime, squirt."
"I'm not a squirt," she huffs.
Omar laughs. "I know. I was talking to Colton."
"What'd I miss?" A familiar voice says from behind me.
When we turn, Brady Fuller eyes us, but mostly Mia.
Brady Fuller is Pack, one of the wolves who joined back when the shit with the Cullens was going down. He could have left four or five times over by now, but as he keeps saying, for what? He doesn't have a family to go home to, a wife who'd worry about his safety. He hasn't imprinted.
But that didn't stop him from falling head over heels in love with Mia the first time he saw her.
She knows—everyone knows. She also can't stand the sight of him most days, which is why now, she rolls her eyes and shoulder bumps him on her way to grab her bag.
Shift over.
"I'll go grab my stuff," I tell Claire. "You can tell Brady all about how you kicked Colton's ass."
"Tell me more about what your mom said."
Claire's head is on my chest. The two of us are at my place, and we only just woke up from my post-shift nap on the couch twenty minutes ago. It's around dinnertime, but seeing as how all my spare time these days has been spent at Claire's with her family, the grocery hasn't been a high priority. I have no food.
On tonight's menu: a porter for me and a freezerburnt popsicle for Claire.
She frees her mouth with a wet pop that travels straight to my groin. "She said I should be…" She waves the popsicle around. "Trying to sneak out. Breaking curfew. Drinking beer."
Sickness has softened Hannah up, it seems. It's a bittersweet thought.
Still, with a smile lifting my lips, I hold my bottle out to her.
Her eyes go wide, and her innocence peeks through. She accepts it gingerly, sitting up. "Do you think I'll like it?"
"I think you'll like doing something bad more."
She grins, and her eyes, full flame, stay locked on me as she lifts the bottle to her lips. She takes a full sip, and I watch for any signs of her opinion. But there's a reason she beat everyone at rummy earlier. Her poker face is impeccable.
She swallows loudly, then goes for another taste. One for feeling and one for flavor, she always says. When she pulls back, she wipes her mouth with the side of her hand.
I pry the bottle from her hands before she gets any crazy ideas. "Well?" I taste her on the rim with my next sip.
Her eyes flash darker as she watches my mouth where hers just was. Her thighs do the thing. That fucking thing that drives me crazy.
"I didn't realize bad decisions tasted so good," she says, raspier than five seconds ago. As if trying to cool herself off from the inside out, she looks back to her popsicle.
Her lips open, her orange-stained tongue darting out as she takes a long lick from bottom to top.
I think my A/C is busted. When did it get so hot in here? Blood rushes south, and I shift just a hair away.
"My mom also said I should be making out with my boyfriend," she says simply. She might as well be saying it's supposed to rain tomorrow.
My thought from earlier comes back to me like I smacked into a brick wall. Nap, beer, orgasm. Two out of three ain't bad. But Claire likes perfect scores. Hell, she got over a fifteen hundred on her SAT and she took that swimming in an ocean of life-changing news.
I swallow around the rock in my throat. "Yeah?"
She nods, sucking the tip of the popsicle. She even tilts her head down, so she has to look up at me through her thick lashes.
I picture her on her knees, tasting me instead. Would she want me to set the pace? No, I already know. Claire would want to learn. Do the work herself. She's never cut corners, and I doubt she'd want to start then.
I aim to set the beer bottle on the end table. I miss, and it clatters to the floor. I hear the liquid spill out, but I'm frozen by what I see. Which is Claire dropping her half-melted popsicle into the remnants of her water glass, slinging her leg over my lap to straddle me.
Her heat settles on the bulge in my sweats, and we both expel heady breaths. God, I haven't been this hard since… Okay, probably since the last time we were on this couch. I'm going to have to remember the next time a guest comes over to suggest they take the armchair.
I kiss her like I've wanted to all day, hard and bruising and lasting. Her tongue is cold from the popsicle, and it almost tickles. I pull back.
"You taste like oranges," I breathe, my hands tangled in her hair.
She giggles, her mouth finding the column of my throat. "You taste like beer."
"I thought I tasted like bad decisions." She sucks hard on the skin of my Adam's apple, and I groan. My hips have a mind of their own and fly upward.
She lets out a soft moan, her hold tightening on my shoulder. "You're not a bad decision, Quil. This isn't." She pulls back, catching my eyes. I smooth back hair from her face, trace the lines of her swollen lips. "You can fight it all you want, but I'm pretty sure this is the best decision we'll ever make."
I chuckle, letting my hands come to rest on her ass. "I just want to make sure you're ready."
Claire reels back, surprised. "I'm actually not talking about sex right now, believe it or not."
My forehead creases in turn. "Then what—"
"Love," she breathes.
My chest fills with light at the word.
I've loved her as long as I've known her, but I can't pinpoint the moment it changed to being in love. So it wasn't so much falling in love, as realizing I already was. When Jacob, Embry, and I went skydiving a few months ago, there was only one or two seconds of fear before I settled into the feeling. With Claire, I skipped the two seconds and just got right to the good part.
"I get why you're holding back," she says in between taking bites of her lip. "But I don't want you to. Withhold sex, sure, whatever. But I want to be able to be in love with you and not feel weird about it." She lifts one shoulder weakly. "Because I am. In love." Another pause. "With you."
My pulse is racing, but I have to say what's banging around in my brain before I kiss her senseless.
"Claire Elizabeth Young. You are the only woman I will ever love this way." At my words, her thighs squeeze my hips, aching to press together. I file that away for a later date. Turns out my sweet words get her just as good as my dirty ones. "I'm in love with you, too. Every piece of me is yours."
The kiss I place on her lips is meant to be sweet. But with our admissions out in the open, there's nothing holding us back, and it landslides into grabbing hands, gasped breaths, and pounding hearts.
She pulls away from my lips on her ear.
"When you said every piece of you, did you mean this one, too?" She grinds her hips down to mine, eliciting a heavy groan from me and a whimper from her.
"Yes," I say without thinking. I squeeze her ass. She moves her hips again, faster. I see what she's trying to do, but it isn't going to work. I lift her up by the waist and adjust myself.
She huffs. "Quil, I'm—" I reposition her, centered directly on my cock, and drop her down. "Oh!"
"That's better," I say, moving her hips for her. "Better for both of us, sweetheart."
Her flush spreads down her neck as she takes in our position. "You can—will this—this will work for you?"
If it were anyone else, the answer would be no. But this is Claire. She's flustered, red faced, worked up on top of me. It has me nodding. "Fuck yeah it will."
And her smiling lips crash back into mine. We're all lips and tongues and hands. I notice she loves it when I drag her lip between my teeth, so I do it just often enough to drive her crazy. And somehow, she figures out her fingers in my hair make me harder, so she lives there for a while.
I can't keep track of time, but I keep count of her: fourteen whimpers, six moans of my name, and three times she throws her head back in pleasure.
Despite never having witnessed it before, I can tell she's close. Her hips move feverishly, and she's gone from kissing me to leaving her open mouth pressed to my jaw. I tighten my grip on her ass and drag her faster. My pleasure is secondary to hers. I feel like I could hold off forever if she was still climbing.
My lips find her ear. "Are you ready to come, sweetheart?"
"Please," she moans. "Quil."
I grit my teeth hard, holding back as I trail my hand under the bottom of her t-shirt, to her soft stomach. "I'll use my fingers next time. And then my mouth. I'll spread you bare on my bed, make you squirm just like this underneath me. You'll see stars, even if it's cloudy."
She whimpers, grinding down harder into me. Makes a noise that sounds like a mix of oh God and mmhmm.
"And one day soon, I'll give you this." I thrust upward, and even with our clothing firmly on, the illusion is there. I want her like this. I want her every way. I just want her. "I'll fill you up so good."
"How soon?" she gasps.
"Soon enough." My fingers breach the bottom of her bra, slipping to her nipple.
Her eyes screw shut, her face twists. Her pulse skyrockets, and I know she's there even before she manages to choke out, "Quil, I'm—"
"Come for me, sweetheart."
I've never seen her more beautiful. There were so many obstacles at times, I never thought we'd get to this point. And sure, we have obstacles now, but the thing about imprinting is that it makes you stronger when you're together.
Like now, when Claire's writhing on top of me, gasping little gasps because she can't get enough air to fully moan, I feel like I could climb Everest, fly to the moon.
My body knows it's my turn now, because it rises up in me like an old thermometer held under hot water. I haven't come in my pants since puberty, but I'll be damned if I'm stopping now. She's too good, too beautiful, too in love with me.
Everything.
And when I give myself body over to it, to her, she's there, still moving on top of me, kissing my neck and pulling my hair.
"Claire," I groan. I release into my sweats, head thrown to the back of the couch as I picture a time soon enough where we'll be closer still, and I'll do my best to be not only everything she needs but everything she wants.
I draw her to my chest, arms wrapped around her back. She nestles into my neck, and after a quick peck, her breathing slows so much I think she might fall asleep again.
But she mumbles something that makes me smile and laugh all at once.
"How's that for trouble?"