As my lips found the searing heat of her neck, Abbi clawed at my back with one hand and swung wildly to try to close the door to her dark apartment with the other.
"Leave it," I growled, nipping at the sensitive skin behind her ear.
The glow of the porch light fell over us as we tore at one another's clothes, illuminating us as if on a stage for any curious neighbours out for a midnight stroll. I didn't give a fuck. I wanted the whole goddamn world to know that at least for that night, Abbi Miller was mine.
Abbi groaned against me as she gave up her efforts to close the door and instead put that hand to better use unbuckling my belt. My cock was already straining painfully against the front of my pants. The brush of her fingers against me was enough to make me groan and bite my lip, fist pounding the wall beside Abbi's head.
"Fuck," I growled.
I couldn't remember feeling the kind of need I felt in that moment. It consumed my thoughts like a thick fog, electrifying my body in constant jolts. Up became down, left became right, and I was lost entirely, save for the beacon of Abbi's eyes in the yellow light.
"What is it?" Abbi whispered. Her chest was heaving like mine, the hazel of her irises erased by her large pupils like a lunar eclipse.
"This is a bad idea," I said, my voice like the gravel of the path my feet trod nine years earlier.
I couldn't need her like this. It would destroy my career, my success, my everything. It would destroy me.
Abbi sucked in a shuddering breath and nodded. "We should stop," she whispered.
I stared down at her and she stared up at me. Our ragged breaths filled the narrow hallway. We were sprinting in place, exhausting ourselves, wearing ourselves down. We were hurtling down a mountain road and the longer we rode the brakes, the harder we tried to stop, the faster the brake pads eroded till metal screeched against metal and sparks flew like fireworks in the night and there was no chance of us stopping.
"This is a bad idea," I whispered again, saying what I should like a line in play, stiffly and without conviction even as my white-knuckled fist shook as I held it against the wall next to her head.
"We should stop," Abbi repeated. But they were hollow words. Lip service against a fate inescapable.
We were applying the brakes, but the brakes were gone. There was nothing but sparks like the colours in her hazel eyes in the porch lights—gold, amber, bronze. They flashed in the dark and we were doomed.
My next words were as inevitable as fucking gravity itself. "Where is your bedroom?"
Abbi sucked in a breath, half startled, half relieved, and dragged my lips toward hers, nails digging roughly into the back of my neck.
"It's wherever we fall," she whispered, her mouth hot against mine.
With a growl, I grabbed her hips and lifted her into my arms. Her ankles locked around my back and my fate was sealed as firmly as if the key had turned on my solitary cell in a maximum security prison. I would go mad in the darkness; I would go mad in her arms.
I stumbled blindly through Abbi's apartment, my back and then hers colliding painfully with the walls. We left the square of light from the porch behind us and plunged into the depths of each other's heat, each other's gasping breaths, each other's yearning, desperate clutches.
I held her with one hand and gripped her golden hair with the other, tugging just hard enough to expose her throat to my exploring tongue. Abbi's fingers dug into the muscles of my back as she pulled herself closer to me, pressing her breasts against me, her nipples peaked to hard points.
My shins collided with something hard and Abbi and I went tumbling over onto the couch. She immediately tugged at the hem of my dress shirt, not caring that she was ripping the buttons and tearing the fine silk. I grabbed a handful of the sweet neckline of her dress and tore it easily down the centre. Abbi gasped as I followed my course of destruction with tender kisses along her exposed skin, like razing a city to the ground and planting roses in the ashes.
I tore down the length of her dress all the way to her black stilettos. The thin material spilled like a waterfall at midnight over the side of the couch and her bare skin was like the moon itself. Abbi's sparking eyes were fixed on me as I stood over her at the end of the couch. I slipped the tattered remains of my shirt from my shoulders and kicked off one shoe, then the next as Abbi lay there watching, her long, slender fingers resting on the black lace bra covering the swell of her quivering breast. My pants joined the pile of discarded clothes at my feet in a silence, heavy and thick and sweet. I was left in nothing but my black boxer briefs, my erection strained, the ache nearly painful. My desire for her was swallowing me whole. I needed her and I needed her now.
But when I moved to lean in toward her, to crawl across her prone body like a crashing wave against the shore, Abbi stopped me with a dagger-sharp heel pressed against my chest. I raised a confused eyebrow across the couch at her but remained still, as if frozen by a spell, as Abbi slipped from the couch, stood in her high heels, and walked toward a half-ajar door across the living room. I stood there unmoving as she glanced back over her shoulder and grinned wickedly as she unhooked her bra strap and let it fall to the floor
