“Watch out.” He slides his hands up from my knees. His thumbs press into my inner thighs. “I don’t think you’ve ever seen me when I have something to prove.”
I’m pretty sure Jay has always had something to prove. I shake my head. “So prove it.”
He gives me an intense, breath-stopping half smile. Then he bows his head and leans forward.
The first kiss against my inner thigh is tender. Then he pushes my skirt up and leans in, and the next kiss—a few inches up—is searing. My legs fall open. I tilt my head back.
He shifts, spreading my legs farther apart, hiking my skirt to my waist, and kisses me right between the legs—right on my clit.
The moan I make seems to reverberate in my chest. My toes. He glances up and his tongue flicks out, touching the bundle of nerves that makes up what is now my clit. It’s light, but sensation scatters through me.
The lights seem brighter. Hotter.
“Do you love it?” he growls.
“More.” My hands tangle in his hair, and he brings his mouth back to me. Licking. Caressing. Fingers spreading me open, petal by petal, tongue caressing my center.
I’ve held back everything I can, trying to close my heart like a fist. But I unfurl for him now.
If he was trying to prove that I was vulnerable—that after everything we’ve gone through, I’d open for him, soft and trembling—he’s done it. I can’t hold anything back. I let everything go, kiss by kiss, caress by caress. I let him know my secrets. Let him discover what makes me tremble.
“I love it,” I moan.
He looks up long enough to meet my eye with a knowing, triumphant smile.
I let him into me, one lick at a time, until my heart is beating in time with the rhythm he develops. Until it feels like he’s holding on to my soul. I let him in, and finally—I let go.
He holds me as I let out a little noise. Searing pleasure rushes through me on a wash of warmth. It overtakes me completely, wiping all thought from my mind. Then, it ebbs slowly away.
When I can finally focus again, he’s watching me. His eyes seem almost black.
My hands are tangled in his hair.
I smooth the strands back in place. I clear my throat, just to be sure my voice will work again.
Then I speak. “Are you done?”
“Not hardly.”
“Good.” I swallow. “Take me to bed.”
He does. I don’t really have a chance to see the house. It’s a blur of cream walls and exposed wood beams. His bed is low and long, white linen and turquoise pillow cases.
That’s all I notice before he catches me up and kisses me, pressing his body against mine. My eyes flutter shut. Our bodies fit together so perfectly when we’re standing. I can feel the hard length of his cock against me.
“Hey.” His voice is dark. “Maria. I want you so much.”
I let my hands fall to the button of his jeans. His hands encompass mine. We undo the snap together. He shifts the fabric over his hips as I undo the zipper.
I trace the length of his erection through the fabric of his boxers. His breath hisses out.
“Em. I’m so fucking horny.”
I take off his shirt. His chest is a light brown. The light gives it a hint of gold.
“How do I take off your dress?”
I turn around. “One zipper.”
His hands are warm on the nape of my neck. Cool air whispers against my spine as he unzips me.
I’m aware of the echo of my last orgasm, fading but still resonant. His fingers brush my hips. My shoulders. He undoes my bra.
I let my clothing slip to the ground and turn around.
That intensity in his eyes is dialed up. His gaze sweeps over me. I felt vulnerable before; now my breath is a hot miasma in my chest.
“Em.” His voice caresses me. “You’re…”
My eyes meet his.
“You’re utterly lovely.”
He pulls me to him and kisses me.
It shouldn’t be this easy to give up everything. To let myself relax against him.
It is.
It’s easy when he pulls me into bed. When he cradles me with his arms, making me feel safe. When he kisses my throat. My jawbone. The underside of my breast. I catch fire again when he kisses my nipple.
“Anywhere you don’t want me to touch?” I ask in return.
He shakes his head and kisses me again.
It feels so safe in his bed. So safe kissing him. Learning his responses touch by touch. Shifting his boxers down his lean frame, learning the way he clenches his jaw when something feels good.
He pulls away for a minute—to dart into a bathroom and come back with a condom and lube.
I roll the latex down his length. Let him push two slick fingers inside me.
I guide him inside me. “Shh.” I hold up a hand. “You’re big. Let me adjust.”
He kisses me. I lied. He’s perfect. It’s not my body that needs to adjust. It’s my heart. I’m not sure how it is that he’s fitting, but he is.
I love the feel of him inside me. Of him taking me. Of me opening for him. For the minutes when our bodies join, I love that I can almost let go of my lingering fears. I sink into the feel of his mouth on mine, his body on mine. I give myself over to the slide as we join, and the friction as he pulls out. He adjusts his hips so that he grazes my clit at the end of every stroke. I give myself over to the feel of him, the feel of us.
When he comes, I feel it.
I open my eyes first. His hair is damp, slicked back against his forehead. He lets out a shuddering breath. Then he opens his eyes.
I knew I couldn’t keep myself safe from him before. I knew I was going to care about him. That I was going to get hurt.
I was fine with it.
But right now, looking up into his eyes, having tasted perfection, I’m aware of just how much he can hurt me.
And I almost don’t care.
22
JAY
“Your bathroom is like a spa. Except that it doesn’t have any plants.”
I blink, and look around me with new eyes. To me, it’s just a bathroom. The one I use all the time. From Maria’s point of view, though…
Warm sandstone contrasts with an inlay of polished river rock. The sink is poured dark concrete, and glass shelves hold fluffy towels in white and green.
There’s a console by the entry that controls radiant heating in the floor, and another one low on the wall for the bidet.
“Alas,” I say. “I kill plants.”
“Your housekeeper could water them.”
I look at her. “I don’t have a housekeeper.”
Maria looks around. She’s appropriated a T-shirt of mine, and it hangs just at her hips. “Oh dear. That makes this worse.”
I struggle to explain. “Um, well. When I bought the house, it was kind of falling apart. So I hired an architect—”
She laughs. “No, not that. I mean, you don’t even have a razor out on the counter.”
I rub my chin. “Courtesy of the world’s slowest growing facial hair. It’s not quite nonexistent, but…”
“Replace razor with comb. It’s a general comment.” She looks back at me. “I’m beginning to suspect you’re a neat freak.”
“Ah, that. Guilty as charged.”
She looks away. “This is never going to work. I’m going to leave hair all over your bathroom. You’ll resent my toothbrush and all my hair things. I’ll try to put them away, but it’ll end up a massive cluttered drawer of tangled cords. We’ll start arguing about my toothpaste. We’ll hate each other in months.”
I feel one of my eyebrows rise. “Or,” I say slowly, “we’ll accept that we’re different people and we’ll figure out an acceptable equilibrium.”
She wrinkles her nose at me. “Sure, if you have to be all reasonable about it.”
She’s been a little withdrawn since we got out of bed. I look at her. She produces one of her aforementioned hair thingies and pulls her hair int
o a ponytail, and from there does something that turns it into a bun.
“I’m taking a shower,” I tell her. “And I’m going to bed. You’re welcome to join me for either activity.”
I step under the faucet. The soap stings my eyes. I’m washing Em away—her skin on mine, her sweat on me—and I don’t know what she’s thinking.
Not until I hear the door to the shower open. I turn my face up to the spray. Her palm lands on my hip.
“Speaking of reasonable equilibria.” Her voice is low and sexy in my ear. “I’m not good at this.”
I turn to her and blink water from my eyes. She’s shed her temporarily donned shirt, and she’s totally naked. Her breasts are small and rounded, her nipples erect in the spray off the shower. She’s let her hair down, and it’s collecting droplets.
“Not good at showering? I’d never have noticed.”
She gives me a mock glare. “Not good at…afterward. I’m always expecting things to end. I know I shouldn’t, but…” She sighs. “I started my blog partly as a way to make fun of myself. I figured if I was going to catastrophize everything, I might as well have fun doing it.”
Her parents kicked her out of the house when she was twelve. I would never have guessed that to look at her. Maria is smart, self-assured, confident. I would never have known her shoes were armor, not until she took them off.
I’d catastrophize everything if I were her, too. Little beads of water trickle down her face.
“Are you getting cold?”
She nods.
“Come stand under the showerhead.”
She takes a tentative step toward me. Then another. She lifts her face into the steaming fall of water.
Liquid cascades down her shoulders, flattening her hair, darkening it to an almost black. She takes the soap, and works up a lather.
It takes her five minutes and a washcloth to get the last of her mascara off. Without her makeup she looks…young. Vulnerable, even. Although that might be the look in her eyes.
Somehow, her letting me see her like this seems like a measure of trust, maybe even more so than actually having sex.
“Are you making a list of things you need to leave on my counter?”
She looks up at me.
“Because you’re allowed.” I brush her wet hair off her shoulders. I don’t let go. We lean into each other, forehead to forehead.
“After one date?”
“It’s been two years, Em. We had a long date zero.”
Her eyes shiver shut. Our lips brush when she lifts her chin. I inhale the scent of soap. I taste warm drops of water. I’m not sure when Em became as necessary to me as air. Our mouths meld under the heated stream of water. My hands slide down the side of her body, rib by rib, hip, thigh.
She’s not cold, but she gasps under my touch.
I let her lips go only to kiss my way down her neck. She pulls me closer. Our naked bodies tangle and slide under the water—breast to chest, belly to belly, hip to hip.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible so soon, but I rise to the occasion—getting hard slowly, surely. Kiss after kiss, skin against skin.
I haven’t recovered so fast since I was a teenager.
I lift my head. I wonder if she sees in my eyes what I see in hers—the burn of hope, the unspoken wants.
The water washes away all the extra trappings, and we kiss again. And again. And again, my hands tangling in her hair, pulling her close. The air is humid and warm and her skin is hot. She kisses me as if it’s the last time. As if breath is unnecessary, as if all other wishes have failed and these are our final moments together.
“Hey, Em.”
She looks up at me, liquid glittering on her face. Not tears, I don’t think—but the fact that I can’t be sure twists inside of me.
She’s not worried about making a mess in my home. She’s worried I’ll leave one in her life. I’ve been the catastrophe in this relationship, and we both know it.
I fucked this up. I hurt her. And once again, all I know how to do at this point is…everything. Do everything right, and hope that if I do it long enough, someday she’ll expect more of me.
“Wait.” She pulls away from me a moment. A wave of cool air hits me as she opens the shower door.
I hear her rustling around in the cabinets, but her form’s a blur of hair and skin through the steamed glass.
She comes back with a condom.
“You see?” I smile at her. “And here you were thinking there was no good reason to keep the medicine cabinet alphabetized.”
She bursts into laughter. Every smile I win from her, every heartfelt expression of mirth, feels like a victory.
“It was not!”
“Maybe not.” I want to do everything right. But her hands are on my cock, gliding in sure, sweet strokes. Touching the underside lightly, then more heavily, the water lubricating everything.
This time when her eyes meet mine, she smiles.
I return the favor. It would be stupid to say she’s wet, because she’s dripping water. But she must have found the lube in the bathroom, too, because she’s slick inside and out. Her eyes shiver shut as I run my thumb over her clit.
“Oh, god,” she whispers. “There.”
“One second.”
I give thanks to genetics that she’s tall. That the angle works so perfectly for us, with me pressing her into the tile, pushing up into her, her leg curling around my thigh.
There’s just room for my hand between us. She lets out a little noise.
If I do this right, maybe one day she’ll expect this of me. I push the growing sensation of pleasure away. Refuse to let my desire pull me into mindlessness. I find the angle where I can tease her. Her chest expands against mine.
“Em. Sweetheart.”
She makes a ragged noise. Her hands clench hard on my hips. “Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
I don’t. Not until she’s shaking in my embrace. Not until I feel my own orgasm coming. It’s like lightning seen at a distance—a flash of light, signaling the inevitable, and then a low rumble that shakes my entire world.
I return to reality. To the feel of water hitting my back. To my knees, scarcely holding my weight up, and Maria around me, looking into my eyes.
I touch my fingers to her cheek. Something about statistics and path-dependence flits through my mind. I am so lucky to be me, here, with her.
And because I want this to work, I tell her exactly what I’m feeling.
“Months ago,” I say, “you told me I was enough. I didn’t want to keep hold of it. I didn’t let myself believe it. But I kept wishing it would be true.”
My fingers trace her jaw.
“What I want,” I tell her. “What I really, really wish for at this moment, is that I will be your enough.”
I want her to say it now. You are enough. I want it more than anything.
Instead, her eyes round. Her lips part. I think my heart breaks just a little in the two seconds that pass.
Then she touches my face. “I want that, too.”
* * *
MARIA
* * *
It’s seven in the morning when I slip into my house to change.
Tina is, unfortunately, awake. She’s sitting at the breakfast table with a mug of coffee, reading the news on her phone. She looks up when I come in.
Our eyes meet, and I feel myself inexplicably flush. There is no such thing as a walk of shame, not unless you buy into moral disapproval from a half-century ago, and neither of us do. It’s not even the fact that she knows. I texted her that I was staying last night. I don’t know what this stupid emotion is.
Tina holds up a hand. “Way to go!”
I raise my own hand almost reluctantly. My fingers meet hers halfheartedly. We manage something more like a somewhat-elevated four than a high five.
She looks at me, then at her coffee. “So, that turned out. I guess?”
“I guess.” I know myself too well. I’m quick to care, quick to
forgive, and slow to let go after everything’s burned to the ground. It’s a dangerous combination.
“I need to change and get ready.”
She nods. “I’ll make more coffee.”
I bury my feelings in routine. I don’t have to think about anything except picking shoes. Choosing a blouse. I make choices deliberately, perfectly, as if they had as much weight in my life as…Jay.
It’s eight thirty by the time I’m ready, and that means there’s not a lot of time to talk before we have to get to campus for our first class.
Tina knows precisely how long it usually takes me, but she doesn’t call me out on my foot-dragging. Instead, she hands me coffee in a thermos. I know before I take the first sip that she’s adulterated it with condensed milk and cinnamon—coffee the way I make it for her when she’s feeling like crap.
I’m not feeling like crap, but I take another sip as we set off for campus at a walk.
“You okay?”
I nod.
“Come on. Spill. Was it good, bad, terrible?”
“It was great.” That’s the simple truth.
I think about Jay last night, about the way he looked at me, the way he held me.
“And it’s serious,” I say instead. “Even if it doesn’t last. Let’s be honest—I like him. And…there’s this weird forced vulnerability between us because we have this history. But give us enough time in real life, and we probably won’t get along. We didn’t, after all.”
“Okay, but does he like you? Is he treating you well? Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. And…I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t know.”
She frowns and looks at me.
“It’s like a rollercoaster,” I tell her. “It’s going to end, and you’re going to feel like you’re falling, so you might as well throw your hands in the air and scream the whole way down. There’s no point talking about it now.”
We’re nearing the edge of campus. I can see the dark green tiles of the computer science building where Tina’s first class is.
Tina has no thermos of coffee to occupy her hands, and so instead, I see them fluttering at her side. But she knows there are some times she can’t push me. I’ve put my foot down; the conversation is over.