“They aren’t that tight.”

I propped myself up on my elbows to watch the show and implore him to hurry with my greedy eyes.

“Yes they are, and right now they are in the way.”

He stopped messing with his zipper for a second to stare at me, but I was shimmying out of my yoga pants and that was enough to spurn him back into action. The denim and leather hit the floor with a clatter and I blinked in surprise when I was face-to-face with not only an impressive erection and ripped abs, but another hoop that I hadn’t been expecting. Since Shaw and I talked about everything, I knew that this group of guys was into this kind of thing, but I had never seen it before, let alone had one anywhere near me. I licked my bottom lip and twirled a finger in the air in front of him.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

He laughed a little and pushed his hair back from his face. “Enjoy it?”

I shook my head a little as he grabbed my ankle and pulled me to the edge of the bed so that I was way closer to it and to him than I was ready for. Anticipation was building and steaming under the surface, but the fear of the unknown was still lurking, and the metal in the unexpected place was a welcome distraction. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

He laughed again and I wanted to touch it. I was reaching out tentatively, worried that it would hurt him, worried that I was going to do something wrong. He grabbed my hand and wrapped the whole thing around the shaft and gave it a squeeze. “I’ve had it forever. I don’t even think about it. You can touch it, you can lick it—in fact why don’t you do both of those things on a regular basis?”

I slid my hand back and forth and felt him shudder a little under my light touch. I let go and used my index finger to gently brush the metal. It was hot from being pressed against his skin and the little ball in the center of the ring was smooth. I could only imagine what it felt like when he did his thing. It was as hot as it was intimidating.

“This should be interesting.”

He winked at me and leaned over to grab a condom out of the nightstand next to his bed. I was sure the anticipation was going to kill me. He handed me the little foil package and shoved me back on the bed. I wrapped my arms around his broad shoulders and looked up into eyes that held everything I ever wanted in them.

“We have to get you to step outside the box, Ayd. None of the best stuff is found in the mainstream.”

He was right. But the mainstream was safe, and no one ever got hurt or judged or ostracized in the mainstream. Now wasn’t the time for that argument, because he was kissing me again and doing things to my puckered nipples that only a guy who played the guitar like he did could do. There was something in the way he touched me, the way his fingers pressed into my skin, the way his teeth left marks, and the way the metal scattered here and there sent goose bumps chasing after it, that erased any and all others who had ever tried to get to me. He was hard and he was soft; his mouth was all velvet and steel, and I wondered if there was no going back from this point with him.

Only Jet made that happen. Only Jet had me forgetting that I wasn’t a girl who simply gave herself over to passion and mindless oblivion, and only Jet made me scream his name when he pushed my legs apart and touched me, stroked me, did all the things he did to me in that bathroom the other night. Only this time, it ended with me seeing stars and pushing him over onto his back so that I could climb on top of him. This boy could play a woman as well as he could play a guitar; there was no doubt about it.

I looked down at him lying beneath me and something inside me shifted. I had wanted him for so long. He was impressive, talented in a way that hurt, and undeniably gorgeous in a way that spoke to something primitive and instinctual inside me. I didn’t care about the future when I looked at him, didn’t care that his plans did not go beyond a guitar and a pretty song. All I cared about was that he never stopped looking at me the way he was right now, and that when he said my name in that beautiful voice, he said it like it was the lyric to his favorite song.

I used both hands to cover him in the latex, because I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what to do with that ring at the tip, and frankly I was nervous. Sex was just a thing I had done before. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it wasn’t, but whatever was happening here was on another level. I knew that once the bridge was crossed, that whoever came after him was never going to stand a chance. I could feel it as I breathed him in and watched him watch me. This had been a long time coming and now the actuality of it was as potent as the act itself.

There was something in the way he touched me just a little harder, the way he kissed me a little longer, the way he pushed me a little farther than I normally wanted to go that made this different. It was like every place he touched, every place his lips landed, became extra sensitized and overstimulated. I felt like I was going to come right out of my skin.

No part of me escaped his thorough and attentive ministrations; no one had ever been as attentive to my body. I think he even managed to discover new spots, parts of me that I didn’t even know turned me on, like the back of my neck and the inside of my wrist. Everywhere his hands landed—the curve of the underside of my breast, my rib cage—his mouth followed, and it felt like he was trying to leave his mark on every inch of my skin so that no one else could ever be there. There was just something about the startling contrast between the soft caress of the tip of his tongue and the hard metal ball in the center that was more erotic than anything I had ever experienced before. There wasn’t a place on any part of me that didn’t get a nip of teeth, and by the time I couldn’t take anymore, by the time I was past wet and wanting, it was all I could do to keep it together when he pulled me up and over him.

I placed my hand over his heart. I felt the steady thump under my fingers and looked at the skeletal mask of the angel of death peeking out at me from between my fingers. Jet put his hands around my waist and lifted me up like I weighed nothing. Before he could pull me back down, before he could impale me with all the burning flesh that was stretched out taunt between us, I hissed out a breath between my teeth and dropped my forehead down so that it was resting against his.

“This is going to change everything.”

Those words were strangled out as just the tip, and that damn little ball, pressed into places that were greedy for it all. I could feel his stomach contract under me and feel my own reaction. It burned in the best way possible. He was hot, he was hard, and he touched places inside me that I swore had never been touched before. That little ring at the tip of his cock dragged and pulled across tender flesh that couldn’t resist the sensation, which made my breath come faster and my heart race. I wasn’t going to last long at this rate. Between the wait for this to happen, and just the fact that this was Jet, I was going to be over the edge between one stroke and the next. Flutters ran along the length of his cock that I felt all the way to my toes as he pulled me all the way back down, and we both gasped at the intensity of the contact. His dark eyes drifted shut as I began to move, to find a rhythm that made me pant and had him growling at me low in his throat. Nothing was ever going to be this good, feel this right. I put my hands on the planes of soft and inked skin, stretched taut over straining muscles and let the way he moved, the way he touched me, like I was something precious, take over.

When I was getting close, he put his hands under my ass and flipped us over in one neat move. He kissed me long and hard, put his hands in my hair, and I discovered in short order that really, all I had to do was sit back and enjoy when it came to that ring at the end of his dick. The metal ball brushed against my clit one time, one single time and it was over. I caught my breath and let him manhandle me however he wanted, and when he was done and we were both lying spent and limp, he turned and looked at me out of eyes that were as dazed as I felt.

“Sometimes, things need to change, because there just isn’t any way for them to stay the same.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. We were supposed to do this, should have been doing this for the last year—that was all too clear now. Sex was incidental and forgettable. This was not.

After he came back to bed from cleaning up, he wrapped an arm around my middle and hauled me to his side. As he reached over my head to flick off the light, I thought this was a change that I liked too much for my own peace of mind. I fell asleep with him winding his fingers through mine across my stomach and humming the chorus to “Tennessee Whiskey” by George Jones. Jet was going to undo me in every way he could, and I just didn’t know if I was going to be able to stop him.

The next morning, the alarm on my phone went off and I had a moment of panic when I woke up surrounded by a lot of naked skin. I hurt in really good ways, and had to fight not to cuddle back into him instead of slipping silently away. It took me a minute to find my discarded clothes and get back to my own room. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror above my dresser, I cringed; I looked well and thoroughly debauched. My hair was sticking up everywhere and my eyes looked heavy lidded and dreamy. I had a very distinct bite mark on the side of my neck and there was no denying that I looked like I had been truly worked over.

There was no ho-hum with Jet. He knew what he was doing, and it was stamped all over me from head to toe. The fact that I had absolutely and completely lost control with him and gotten caught up in the moment was not lost on me or in my reflection, either, and that had me fighting back a heavy flood of panic.

I changed into running clothes and pulled my snarled hair up into a stubby ponytail. I was going to grab my iPod, but for some reason, listening to cookie-cutter songs about love and loss just didn’t sound appealing, so I dashed down the hall hoping Jet would stay asleep and that Cora would still be holed up in her room. I was filling my bottle of water in the sink when Cora’s singsongy voice came from the living room, “Someone looks well rested.”

I closed my eyes for a second and swore under my breath. I looked over my shoulder at her. She was still in her fuzzy pink jammies and her dual-colored eyes were gleaming with mischief.

“Yep.”

She wagged a finger at me and suddenly looked more serious. “You need to be careful, Ayd.”

I frowned because it was too early, both literally and figuratively, for this conversation. “Careful is my middle name, Cora.”

“But Jet’s is passion, and he can get really wrapped up in things that are important to him. If you don’t want to be wrapped up, you better be honest with him about it.”

I couldn’t talk about this with her, not when I didn’t know what I was doing myself, so I grabbed my lightweight fleece and zipped it up.

“Noted. I’ll be back in a few.”

“Hey, keep an eye out. Weird stuff has been going on.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “You noticed the guy lurking around, too?”

“What? No! But some creep tried to break in yesterday.”

A shiver of alarm worked from the base of my neck down my spine. Between the calls from Kentucky and the repeated sightings of the same guy over and over again, I couldn’t chalk an attempted break-in to coincidence.