Chapter 4

“So ... I talked to my mother today.”

Nikki was leaning in Stone’s bedroom doorway. She bit her lower lip and studied the top of the doorframe while he let her statement settle in his mind. But she didn’t make statements. She dropped soft grenades. He couldn’t say he was getting used to it, but he couldn’t say he disliked it, either.

She was wearing a thin, white tank that didn’t reach the bottom of her ribs. It had spaghetti straps and gave her breasts an impudent look, making them seem bigger than they were. Her panties were white, too. They were tiny, but didn’t ride her body as snugly as they must have when she first put them on in the morning. One bare foot was crossed in front of the other, and the wash of moonlight in the windows was sliding up her smooth legs.

He flashed back to a month ago, that night she snuck into the center in the middle of a freak, late season blizzard. Now, already, the windows were open and she was padding around the house in panties. The world had changed three or four times in three or four different ways, yet he still kept her off in her own bedroom.

Biding his time.

Biding his mind.

Biding ... just biding.

“Ok.”

He kept watching her and let a half smile show. She might have been an expert at tossing grenades, but he would always know how to outwait her. He was sprawled across rumpled sheets, wearing dark boxer briefs with his head and shoulders propped halfway up on a wedge of pillows. He had a splayed open paperback in his hands called The Girl with Curious Hair.

Since the blizzard, the house had felt cloaked in a shroud of unspoken awareness of the other’s constant presence, even if one of them wasn’t entirely present physically while the other was an innately physical creature she’d barely begun to understand. It wasn’t as if there had been a sudden, definable change, but a few hundred tiny ones, as if everything was the same but deeper, somehow.

Blue curtains were a little bluer now. White panties were just a little whiter.

“I think she’s getting tired of Dogface already,” she said. “She was hinting around about coming back.”

Her eyes were darting everywhere but his face, and the more she avoided his face, the more he realized how much she wanted to be able to look at him.

“Stop talking to the ceiling,” he said. “I’m over here. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

She sighed but still didn’t look him straight in the eye. She took a few slow, toe-dragging steps into the room and then spun and jumped backward onto the mattress, making everything bounce. She settled herself sideways across the bed and lay back, using the book on Stone’s lap as a pillow. He reached to brush a spray of hair behind her ear and rested his hand against her neck. She sighed again. Maybe a little calmer this time.

He felt the pulse in her neck against his fingers and outwaited her. The weight of her head and soft texture of her hair felt good against his thigh.

“I don’t want her coming back,” she finally said.

“What makes you think she is?”

“Just ‘cuz of stuff she said. Her wanting to come back and be with you again. Stuff like that. She practically came out and said it. She asked those kinds of questions she does. The sneaky kind when she’s after something.”

“Such as?”

Stone’s hand slid down her neck, over her collarbone and inside her tank. He cupped the soft warmth of her breast in his hand and worried her nipple between his fingertips until it started to thicken. Her chest rose and fell with deeper breath.

“Stuff about you and me,” she said.

“Like if we’re fucking?”

“Not in so many words, but that’s what she really wanted to know.”

He outwaited her again, patiently massaging her breast. She finally blew an impatient sigh.

“I told her the truth. That you’re not fucking me. I didn’t say ‘yet’, but she knows damn well I was thinking it.”

“Just because someone says something like that doesn’t mean it’s about to happen,” he said. “If she were serious she would’ve had that conversation with me.”

Nikki chuckled. “You don’t know her as well as you think,” she said. “She knows there’s a reason I stayed here with you.”

Stone inhaled deeply. The scent of Nikki’s new bodywash curled faintly around his head. Her nipple was fully distended in his rolling fingertips now, and his cock would not be far behind.

“I’m a little misty on the reason for that myself,” he said.

“Pfft, that’s ‘cuz you think like a whore.”

He didn’t admonish her for the name calling. His usual urge to correct her coarse declarations had relaxed significantly since the blizzard. It was better she call him a whore than someone else, and something about the way she’d finger fucked his ass while he was cumming in Rena had a way of changing things. But everything was changing everything, and they were in the middle of a detour on a journey he hadn’t known they were on until they were too far gone.

“You don’t like her very much, do you?” he asked.

“Of course I do. She’s my mother. I love her. No one has sacrificed so much for me as she has, but I know her enough not to trust her on certain things.”

“You don’t have to worry. She’s not coming back.”

She went silent a moment, the way she did when she was too happy about something to let it show with anything more than the impudent smirk she could never suppress. Her nipple loomed hot under his fingers while his cock began to prickle with pinpoints of heat. He pulled the book out from under her head and put it on the stand by his bed. Nikki turned her head and licked his thigh. The wet swipe of her tongue sent deeper shivers of heat through his cock and he gave her nipple a tight squeeze. She uttered a sound Stone couldn’t think of a name for.

“That’s getting me wet,” she said, licking him again.

“Show me.”

She snickered and raised her legs, sliding off her panties all in the same motion. She tossed the panties at his face and shifted her position on the bed until she was lying with her head toward the foot and her pussy toward him. She scrabbled closer until she was able to plant one foot on his chest and the other on the mattress. She slid her hands down her thighs and framed her pouting slit with her hands, pressing into the meat of her thighs and parting herself open.

“See? You should know I would never joke about getting wet.” She was wet enough to glisten, and when she trailed her finger along her slit her finger started to glisten, too.

Stone’s cock swelled until the tip was seeping with ooze. He covered the bulge in his briefs with his hand and rubbed his length as he watched Nikki’s fingers stroke and play in the nest of her flushed sex lips.

“And I shaved,” she added. “Hardly an hour ago. My juicy little peach is just as smooth and wet as it gets.”

She pressed and rolled her hand against her slit, but then forked her left index and middle fingers over the V of her pussy, spreading herself while the middle finger of her right drew circles around her swollen nub. Stone pushed the waist of his briefs below his balls. He gripped his shaft and stroked as he watched Nikki lacquer her fingers with honey from her heated slash.

“Fuck,” she muttered softly, breath turning to sighs.

“What?” He watched as she slipped two of her fingers inside herself and let them glide while his shaft twitched in his fist.

“I like your balls,” she said. “I love the way they look from down here, especially when you’re hard. Makes me wanna lick ‘em so bad.”

“Then stop talking about it and do it,” he said.

She made a purring sound that was both arousing and annoying all at the same time. Classic Nikki.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m already getting used to this. And then if my mother comes back ... I’m fucked. Before I even get fucked.”

Stone sighed. “Suit yourself. If you really think there’s any possibility I’d get back with her now then don’t touch me. Go away.”

She snickered briefly, but instead of leaning over to lick Stone’s balls, she pulled her fingers out of her sheath and reached over to caress them with her hand. Her fingers were slick with syrup and it felt almost like being licked. He reached for her bare thigh with his free hand while she began massaging her slit with her left. Then she leaned in and licked the smear of her own juices off his balls.

“Oh god, they taste like my pussy now,” she whispered. “There’s something I’ve kinda been wanting to do,” she added, half haltingly. “Kinda dying to, actually.”

Stone waited for her to keep going despite her expecting a response. His view of her fingers playing with her pussy made it easy. The caress of her slick fingers on his balls while he stroked his cock made it even easier. He knew the time would soon come that she would understand how to spin his brain like a top, but for now, he enjoyed leading her down the same path toward her own sensual strength. She didn’t even need guiding. The best Stone could hope to do was save her a little time and a few detours. She was his protégé now, not just academically, like Rena, but in every other way he could imagine. And something else.

He loved her.

He loved her in a way he knew he would never have been able to love her mother or Rena or anyone else. She was a whole different force of nature slowly unraveling before his eyes. He was patiently waiting to be drenched by the deluge when it finally arrived.

“Remember that day you shaved me?” she asked.

“Of course.” He was close to being sure he knew where she was leading, and the idea sent shudders of both apprehension and eagerness through his cock.

“I always feel a little sad doing it myself now.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel good?” he asked, digging his thumb into her inner thigh.

“Yeah, it does,” she replied, “but when you did it for me it made me feel special. Pampered. And then you made me cum like a little whore.” She punctuated the statement with a giggle.

He thought about telling her not to call herself a whore for the umpteenth time, but finally just sighed. He thought about what she was trying to offer now, wondering if she’d figured out he already knew what she had yet to come out and say. He finally decided she hadn’t.

“Don’t you know how much I’d love to shave you again?” he asked.

“Mmm, I’d love that,” she sighed, pressing her fingers hard into her dripping pussy. “But there’s something else I’d love, too.”

Stone lifted her foot off his chest and got up. She giggled behind him as he walked into the bathroom and switched on the light. She giggled again when she came in because his cock and nutsac were still hanging over the lowered waistband of his boxer briefs. Without a word, she knelt and pulled them down so he could step out of them. She caught his stiff shaft in her hand and kissed the syrupy dome, then closed her eyes and rubbed him against her cheek. He reached to brush the other cheek with the backs of his fingers.

“You’re a beautiful girl, Nikki,” he said. “Much more than you realize.”

When she smiled, he could feel her cheek muscle bunch up against his cock. She opened her eyes and licked the whole length of his shaft one time slowly before standing back up.

“Then how come you haven’t even really kissed me? I mean really kissed me,” she frowned.

“I have,” he said.

“I mean like you mean it,” she said. “And constantly.”

He lifted her top over her head and she raised her arms to let him pull it off. With their height differential, the head of his cock was touching her sternum, just between the bottom curves of her slightly upturned breasts. He touched her face on both sides with both hands. Then his palms slid down the sides of her neck and shoulders, until he was cupping the modest scoops of her breasts in his hands.

“Kissing is really personal,” he said. “It’s about the most personal thing two people can do.”

The part he left out was how he was afraid to go falling head first into a deep well filled with pure Nikki.

“Like more personal than when you shaved my cunt and made me cum all over your mouth?”

“Yeah,” he said. “More personal than that. And you shouldn’t say cunt. It’s...”

“Yeah, Stone, I heard it before. It’s one of those words people use to hurt women. Ya know, sometimes I wish you’d just quit being so fucking polite all the time and just bang my cunt fulla spunk like a whore.”

Stone was quiet a moment, but then broke out laughing. Nikki took hold of his cock and watched him laugh while she stroked him. He pinched her nipples firmly and then touched her face again.

“I swear,” he said, “sometimes you have the nastiest fucking mouth.”