Tempted Ch 7 - Distressed
Here are the after-shocks from the dinner party. A John-Ellie moment gets a little out of control.
Rating still PG-13 for minor language.
Ch 7 Distressed
Devon went to bed. Ellie was bone-tired, but she wasn’t ready to sleep, and the house felt claustrophobic. So she slipped outside to sit near the door and breathe in the night air.
It was calming as always, and reviewing the dinner in her head, Ellie began to feel the humor of the situation. But only with reluctance. Across the way, lights were on in John’s house. And after a minute - well of course, she thought - his door opened. He’d seen her sitting alone out here, and was coming over. She watched him move in her direction with a sense of inevitability. And narrowed eyes, because she hadn’t lost her annoyance with him.
He halted in front of her and stood there looking down in the twilight, without a word. She didn’t rise, just tilted her head back to glare at him. He saw it in the light from the window and grinned, unapologetically; and God help her, it was sexy and adorable and she found her resentment slipping a little. She grasped it tight and bolstered it back up. He tilted his head questioningly at the step beside her; she responded with a sigh and a wave of her hand. When he lowered himself onto the step, he was close enough that she could feel the heat of him. She knew she was playing with fire, letting him so near; but surely her irritation at his recent ridiculous behaviour would be enough to shore her up. He didn’t speak; she didn’t speak. The air was crisp around them. Somewhere nearby a cricket chirped.
Finally, Ellie broke the quiet.
“You’re a very bad influence on my language,” she told him tonelessly, propping her elbows on her knees and sinking her chin into her palm.
“How’s that?” He folded his long legs with movements that should have been awkward from a man his size, but which he managed to make graceful. That was an aggravating trait in a man she was trying hard not to want, even if his insanity this evening had helped dial down her attraction to him by quite a bit.
“I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to do so much swearing in my entire life,” she articulated, rather less tonelessly, “as I have these past few months.” He liked that; he grinned. She rolled her eyes and looked away, because she liked his smile too much. “Tonight,” she continued, “I was mentally calling you names I’ve never before called anyone.”
From the corner of her eye she saw that his grin became a smirk; he liked that too. Ellie shook her head.
“You know, if you objected that much to me setting you up with someone, you could have simply refused the invitation.” Ahah, there came her very genuine anger, spilling into her voice. Ellie was glad to note that down as proof that tonight, John’s sexiness wasn’t enough to completely deprive her of her senses. She stared out toward the street, feeling her jaw muscles tensing. “The message would have been received, loud and clear. And much less painfully! What was that all about?!”
She felt John hitch his shoulders once. “Not exactly sure,” he answered, “except I know that I wanted to make damn sure you knew that what you were doing wasn’t gonna work.”
He sounded as frustrated as she felt. Maybe that was where his dinner-table craziness had originated, but she wasn’t in a mood to be sympathetic. She kept her head turned away from him. “What isn’t going to work?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” he asserted firmly. Ellie sat up straight and crossed her arms stubbornly. John grumbled under his breath.
“Maybe I don’t,” she challenged him, clenching her jaw. “Maybe all I know is that tonight, for some completely obscure reason, you were an unmitigated bastard.”
He rumbled something inaudible again. Good, Ellie thought. He deserved a bit of the aggravation she’d gone through at dinner.
“You know,” he reiterated, through gritted teeth. “So maybe we’ll be able to get past this, after awhile. Dammit, I hope so. But you can’t just throw a pretty woman at the problem and expect it’ll go away. We can pretend all we want - and we should, for everybody else’s sake! - but we need to at least acknowledge the truth to ourselves. You can’t just turn things off like a faucet!” The tone of his voice was getting more and more irate.
“What things?” Ellie threw back, recklessly. She did turn and look at him now, and their gazes tangled like they always seemed to do. Even that was infuriating, because dammit, she hadn’t asked for any of this! “Maybe you’re completely off-base,” she exclaimed, “did you ever think of that?! Maybe I have no idea what things you’re talking about!”
She acknowledged to herself that she had no idea what she, herself, was talking about. But she was just so angry right now. Angry enough to ball up a fist and punch him, hard, in the shoulder, even though she was certain there was no possible way that she could hurt That Man.
But then she knew provoking him had been a mistake, because he caught her clenched hand in a vise-like grip. Startled by the speed with which he moved, Ellie tried to pull back, but didn’t have time before she was caught doubly, once by John’s hand and once by what she saw on his face. The usual hardness of his expression had cracked, somehow. But she had only a second to see something distressed and vulnerable underneath there before he moved again.
In one lightning instant, he was no longer posed tensely beside her; he was on his knees before her, leaning over and into her. So close that he was touching, which her brain maintained just enough sanity to chant was dangerous, dangerous. So close that the wordless rumble rising from his chest reverberated through her own body. A great hard fist pressed into the step on either side of her hips, touching, and her bent legs were trapped by the breadth of his torso, also touching. Ellie’s breath caught in her throat, first at the shock of it and then at the heat of his body. Heart thudding, she swallowed with difficulty and leaned back, but he only pressed in closer until his chest was flush with her knees. And then he dipped his head down. He spoke, and his lips brushed her ear, which halted her breath completely.
“I’m talking about these things,” he growled harshly, the warmth of his breath sending shudders to her soul. His voice engendered an inner ache that swelled to encompass her heart as he tilted to set those lips roughly on the skin below her earlobe.
“These things,” he rasped, quieter. He opened his mouth on the skin of her neck. Ellie felt the scrape of his teeth, and she was on fire; lost, as her nerve endings exploded in sensation. Her breath came back to her in a forceful gasp that quickly turned into a moan as her head arced backwards. It met the support of his hand, large and warm and strong, which gripped the base of her skull while his other found the ridge of her spine and yanked her to him. She tilted forward onto her knees between his thighs and all the carefully constructed distance between them was gone, like that, in an instant.
Kneeling, pressed roughly against him, all of Ellie’s world telescoped. It collapsed in until everything she knew was contained and defined by the perimeter of John. She had nothing else but his muscled chest crushing against her softer one, his corded hands fisting into the back of her sweater, his hard legs clenching around hers. The pounding of his heart and the raggedness of his breathing were echoed by her own until she wasn’t sure where she ended and he began. It was agonizing, it was beautiful, it was turning her into a purely physical creature capable only of desire and want and need.
But then, just as Ellie’s trembling hands began to move to touch him in return, the distance was back with jolting force. John pushed himself away from her so abruptly that she half-fell onto the step behind her. He sat back on his heels, staring at her, and for a long minute it seemed neither one of them were going to be able to move. For a moment the only thing Ellie’s bereft senses could register was his absence.
Slowly, her stunned brain began to function. At first all she knew was that she’d had him a second ago, and now she didn’t. Loneliness of an intensity she’d never known broke over her. She had to shake that off, she told herself, gaining cognizant thought at last and registering that John looked as steamrolled as she felt. But it hadn’t been so much, had it, what had just happened? Those, those things John had been so insistent about? They hadn’t even kissed.
But she didn’t fight that battle for very long before she admitted that she was lying to herself. Staring into the hot, hard eyes of the man who’d just held her in his arms, Ellie was forced to honesty. The look they shared, long and fraught, was a silent acknowledgement that they both knew the truth; that what they’d just done was something.
Something they might not be able to backtrack from, or ignore, or cover over.
Overwhelmed, Ellie squeezed her eyes shut and wrapped her shaky hands around her knees. The sound of their still-rapid breathing was loud in the night air. She heard small pebbles grating against concrete as John got to his feet. She wasn’t, right at that moment, able to follow suit. When she re-opened her eyes, though, somehow she met his gaze. It glittered in the dim light, and she knew he wasn’t going to apologize.
She was glad.
“Good night, Ellie,” he finally said. His voice was still rough, hardly recognizable. It sounded the way her soul felt - rubbed raw, almost to bleeding. She nodded, the motion jerky. He pivoted and left.
Ellie sat with her forehead pressed to her knees. It was a very long time before she went inside.