Free Beyond Repair by Charlotte Stein

she didn’t know how that had happened—and
her hand was almost on his skin. She could near feel him through the material,
all smooth and slick with soap, muscles bunching and flexing as she worked. It
took a monumental effort to keep any sound in under that sort of pressure—though
even after she’d succeeded at restraining herself she couldn’t exactly
celebrate.
    Mainly because he didn’t restrain himself at all .
    “Mmmmm yeah,” he said, in a way that could have been
perceived as innocent. Just like with those words he said—it was possible that there wasn’t any sexual meaning in there. But it was also possible she was
pretending that this was the case in order to stop herself from having an
orgasm.
    She was already fairly close as it was. Hearing him make
that husky, breathless sound and accepting that it might be a sex thing was
simply a step too far. It was all too much. She had to count to ten and stay
very still just to maintain her sanity, but apparently sanity wasn’t intent on
giving her a break today.
    The moment she slumped against the tub he turned and tilted
his head a little, in a way that put his face far too close to her face. She
could almost feel his breath against her cheek—which was bad enough on its own.
But then he went and asked her a question like this one. “Did my groan of
delight accidentally paralyze you?”
    After which she just wanted to throw in the towel.
    How did he make it sound both suggestive and considerate?
    How that was even a thing? That wasn’t a thing.
    “No, no, I…I’m just resting here for a second.”
    “Really? It doesn’t look like you’re just resting there. It
looks much more like you collapsed over the edge of the bathtub.”
    “That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe my back gave out.”
    “Well, that is a possibility,” he said, but she knew
he didn’t think it was a possibility at all. She could tell by the way he
touched her hair as he said it—just one little damp curl—with the tips of his
enormous fingers.
    It was quite possibly the sexiest caress of her entire life,
and it wasn’t even skin-to-skin. Christ knew what would happen if it was
skin-to-skin.
    “Or it could be that I have a rare freezing disorder.”
    “I had entertained the notion.”
    “And then there’s how close your face is to mine, right now.”
    “Is that making it harder to move?”
    “It’s making it impossible to move.”
    “And you mean that in the bad way.”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know. What’s the bad way?”
    “The bad way is when you’re so terrified by all of this that
you can’t escape, as opposed to not really wanting to go anywhere at all.”
    “I think I’m both of those things at the same time,” she
said, but she didn’t quite understand in what quantities until he turned his
head just a little. Barely more than an inch, she thought, but an inch was all
it took. One second they were only talking—in a heated way true, but still only
words—and the next he was actually moving in for something that made her heart
seize up.
    He was doing it. She knew he was doing it. She should have
known but somehow she hadn’t and holy crap he was really going do to it, he
was, he was, and suddenly the terrified part of her punched the part that
didn’t want to move right in the fucking face . It got it in a chokehold
and squeezed until the excited bit of her passed out.
    And that manifested in the worst possible way.
    She actually skittered back across the floor, in a
manner last seen on a Discovery Channel special about bugs. Her entire body did
things it hadn’t been able to do in years, and it did them just because he’d
been about to do that thing she didn’t want to think about. She didn’t want to
think about it so much that she almost took out the bathroom wall in her effort
to escape, and even after she’d lost her unearthly speed and grace the fun
didn’t stop.
    She stumbled into the toilet and flailed around for about
five