There.
Holding his gaze, I grasped his face and painted a streak of flour across his cheekbone with my thumb.
He inhaled through his nose and shivered through a ragged exhale, his nipple piercings straining against the thin material of his shirt. But still, my gaze didn’t move from his as I searched them.
As I let my desire show.
My hope.
That I wasn’t making a mistake. That it wasn’t too soon.
Only then did I shift my gaze to the flour I’d drawn, and with slow, deliberate movements, I rotated my hand and cleaned it away with a brush of my knuckles.
Mine.
We shared breath after breath as we stayed like that, encased in the willow and its gracefully billowing branches. Liem’s arms almost mirrored them as they hung forgotten by his sides and drifted with the breeze.
“Liem,” I whispered.
His breathing stopped altogether then, and mine stopped with it, not willing to go on alone.
Now that he knew I was looking, it was time to show him. To give him a reason to wait for me. To not give up on me or let me go.
As breathless, countless time passed, a hint of vulnerability clouded his gaze, so foreign and misplaced on his beautiful face as he whispered, “Is this about Jeremiah?”
“No,” I answered immediately. “This—” I stroked my thumb across his cheekbone and then trailed my index finger down the curve of his ear, slow as molasses. “This is about not being able to live another second without kissing you, Cherie.” I snaked my other hand from his hip to his lower back and splayed it there. “Yes?”
“Yes,” my angel sang back with such conviction that my body sang, too, igniting in anticipation as I tipped Liem Lott’s head back and crashed my lips to his.
22
Liem
I was a cloud.
A cloud filled with both the buzz of a thousand lightning strikes and a cataclysmic rainfall begging for release, and if Cody ever stopped holding me or took his lips from mine, I was afraid it would lead to utter devastation.
Such a cloud as I was, I’d not reacted at all when his lips brushed mine, but when he pulled back and threatened to remove them, my previously forgotten arms found their way around his neck, and Ipulled,taking him for my own.
I knew well the shape of his slightly fuller bottom lip and had drawn the curve of it countless times. But the desire to know its taste struck me, so with heavy anticipation, I bit down on the lip that filled pages of my notebook and sucked.
Cherries, cinnamon sugar, and the salty, electrified atmosphere of an unexpected spring storm.
How would I ever express such a taste on paper? On canvas?
Cody groaned unabashedly, and I inhaled a sharp breath as the sound vibrated through my chest, somehow urging me to push up onto my toes and bring myself even closer to him.
Both of his hands were at the small of my back now, and his fingers flexed as our bodies melded together, every inch of us from thigh to chest touching. He made a strained noise again as he took charge, deepening our kiss and exploring my mouth with his tongue, the sensation so intense that my hands clenched into fists behind his neck.
I rose even higher on my toes as Cody pushed me further into the tree, moving his hands to my waist and pinning me in place with his hips as his kisses shifted from my mouth to the corner of my mouth. Then he painted a trail of masterpieces from my cheek to my ear and down my neck to my shoulder, the slight moisture left on my skin in his wake cooling against the breeze that trickled in through the vines.
My feet were barely touching the ground, just the tips of my boots grazing the sparse grass. My body, my heart—all my pieces were held up by the sheer power of Cody Desmond.
And there was nothing I could do but succumb to the feel of him and hope I would remain his canvas.
By the time the brush of his kisses returned to my ear and his breath warmed me again, we were both panting raggedly, time outside of us meaning nothing. There was only this, what lay within the scant space between us. I ran my hand up the back of his head and then lightly scratched a path back down to his neck, and he shuddered all over, eliciting one from me in turn. Cody drew back, chest heaving, and planted one more kiss to my cheek, his hazel eyes an earthy storm of bronze and jade as they locked with mine.
With a sure grip on my waist, he bit into his bottom lip as his eyes swept over me. When his gaze came back to mine, he heldme captive as he lifted me into the air, bent slightly at the knees, and rolled his hips forward.
