“Seriously?”
“Seriously,” he says. He turns the key again. Nothing happens.
“Oh.”
“We could go back inside the restaurant,” he offers.
“We could.”
“Or we could stay here,” he says.
“What would we do if we stayed here?”
Before they have time to speculate, he’s curved an arm around her upper back and brought their bodies as close together as he can over the gear shift, close enough for his mouth to find hers, for his free hand to cup the side of her face gently, then her chin, holding her in place so he can direct and focus the force of his kiss.
He is panting when he breaks, lips still inches from hers. “I guess we could stay here and make out like teenagers.”
“Or discuss some extra credit,” she whispers.
“I’m not your teacher anymore, Miss Foley.”
At these words, her waist suddenly feels molten, liquid, a reminder that not only is she free from the risk of damaging her academic standing, he’s the one who set her free. He’s the one who made the effort to switch her to a different class. He didn’t lecture her or condescend to her or tell her that her fears were meaningless. Instead, he figured out what they were and did his best to make them disappear.
“Oh, yeah,” she says, cupping his chin in her hand. “Then get in the backseat with me and prove it.”
Even in the rainy darkness, she can see his eyes widen at this brazen request. She can feel the shudder of lust that moves through his body before she releases the back of his neck. She kicks the door open, blinks against the blast of rain, then she’s in the backseat only to find he’s beaten her there, which makes her laugh.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.”
He resumes their previous pose, only without the gearshift between them. Arm curved around her upper back, lips together in another determined kiss.
When he breaks, his left hand is kneading the inside of her thigh with a steady rhythm and a firm pressure that bathes her entire body with heat.
“And how exactly do you want me to prove that I’m not your teacher anymore?” he rasps, lips inches from her own.
Deftly, as if it were nothing, he unsnaps the button on her jeans, begins tracing gentle patterns along the newly exposed skin just above the hem of her panties.
“Why don’t you start by doing two of the things you always wanted to do to me in class?” she asks in between breaths.
“Just two?” he asks, gently taking her earlobe between his teeth, suckling it briefly, but loud enough to make a slight smack when he releases it.
“All right, before we come up with how many things I’m gonna let you do right here, you can give me a ballpark figure for all the dirty, no-good things you’ve wanted to do to me since the semester started.”
“Should I leave out the things that are only legal in other countries?”
“Let’s leave out other countries altogether.”
“Well, it’s not that I spent the semester wanting to do specific things to you…”— his fingers dip below her panty line, grazing her folds but avoiding her clit—“It’s that I wanted to make you respond certain ways. For instance,”—his fingers start a return trip and this time he’s narrowed the space between them so she’ll know what’s coming—“I wanted to see the expression on your face while I gave you absolute”— his fingers arrive at her clit—“total pleasure.”
First he grazes it on both sides, then he circles it several times with his index finger before shifting to the pointer finger and back again. The knowledge that he’s intently studying her every move while he tests, probes and massages the seat of her bliss causes the pleasure to intensify to such a point that her breaths stutter. He lifts his fingers to his mouth, savors the taste of her, and goes back to work without stopping his intense study of her every writhe and gasp.
“Do I look like you expected me to?” she asks in between gasps. “While you…”
“Oh, no. You look far more beautiful than I even thought possible.” His tongue travels the nape of her neck, as another finger joins the first two in their intensifying assault on her clit. “And you taste better than I could have dreamed.”
The rhythm of his tongue against her neck is exploratory and eager; the rhythm of his fingers on her clit is determined and confident. The combination of the two makes her dizzy. His husky whisper is in her ear.
“This is what I’d like to draw. This. Right here. You. The way you look when I do my hardest to make you moan, to make you come. You, right now, under my touch. You’re art in the making, Laney Foley.”
The rain veils the windows, and the blacked-out street offers no stray illumination strong enough to pierce the veil. But she still feels deliciously exposed. Wedged together in the cramped backseat, at first their pose seemed forced and awkward. But now, Michael’s half embrace feels all-consuming. His choice to keep one arm curved around her upper back doesn’t just steady her as jolts of pleasure shoot through her, it reminds her that he isn’t clawing at her in a desperate bid to secure his own release. He has devoted himself utterly and entirely to her pleasure, and that alone deserves some kind of reward.
When she moves to free him, he starts to dazzle her clit with three dancing fingers, as if he’s trying to incapacitate her with pleasure before she has a chance to release his cock. Maybe he relishes the power and the control. But she’s determined, and when she finally closes her hand around it, he groans against her neck.
“Laney,” he moans, all pretense of student-teacher role-play gone. Her name issues from him on another shuddering groan as her hand slides the considerable length of his erect cock. “Laney…”
“This is one of the things I’ve wanted to do all semester,” she whispers.
Just one? She expects him to ask. But he’s past the point of dirty talk. Instead, he lifts the fingers he’s been probing her with to his lips again, sucks her juices from his fingertips, teeth clenching, breath leaving him in a hiss at the raw taste of her.
“Laney…” He groans again.
She’s amazed and delighted that a backseat make-out session could blossom into this flowering of desire. She’s dizzy over the realization that simply by pleasuring her, Michael brought himself so close to release that the head of his cock is flame-hot and throbbing in her grip. And this thought brings her to the edge of bliss as well. The sight of her, every facial expression during this delicious assault, tasting her on his fingertips—all of these things have stripped quick words and any trace of restraint from the man of her dreams. She feels like a goddess of infinite power.
“Laney,” he cries. There’s an almost desperate tone to his voice. Someone outside of the car might have been able to hear him, she isn’t sure. The rain is still drumming against the roof and windows, but his fingers are still working a frenzied rhythm against her clit, which turns all of her worries about the outside world into something as light and easily lifted as a wedding veil.
When she’s confident he’s within seconds of release, she says, “Michael?”
He stares into her eyes, but he’s too breathless to answer with words.
“This is what I want to see,” she whispers.
He tries to kiss her, but his orgasm rips through him before his lips can make it to hers. For a few seconds his mouth is a silent O, until the rapid-fire groans tear from him like desire’s gunfire. To witness his orgasm from this close, their noses inches apart, his hot gasps bathing her lips, causes her scalp to tighten and that special spot in between her shoulder blades to tingle. Her hand is slick with his cum and her strokes have spread it down the length of his shaft.
Michael collapses against one side of her body, breathing against her neck. She figures he’s spent. His fingers have stopped their blessed work on her pussy. He’s now caressing her mound in lazy, inattentive circles with the heel of his palm, too exhausted to probe it but still to hungry to l
et it go.
But then suddenly, he’s shifting beside her. Sitting up, moving around, moving her. Before she realizes quite what’s happening, he’s pulled off her jeans, spread her down the length of the seat, her upper back resting against the door as his sweaty palms spread her thighs. Even spent and covered in his own cum, he’s still devoted to her pleasure. She’s just spotted the crown of his head through the shadows above her waist when his teeth graze her clit and he applies a sucking pressure with both lips that makes her feet feel like they’re about to float free from her body.
She’s close to the edge, feels the promise of a thundering orgasm building like approaching storm clouds. But she can feel resistance too, and with it, the sudden fear that she’s separating from her body, that her fear is taking over again. He’s working frenzied magic on her sex, but she needs more than his fingers and his tongue. She needs him.
“Up,” she manages.
“What?” he gasps. His wide eyes stare up her prone body, his jaw slathered in her juices.
“With me,” she manages, gasping. “Up here with me—be with me.”
He gets the message. Michael slides up the backseat, lips suddenly within inches of hers, arm curving under her back, his weight and his power blanketing her suddenly, making her feel both prone, exposed but also protected, all in the same delirious moment. She can tell he’s hesitant to give her a taste of her most secret parts, so she grabs his chin and brings their mouths together, and he takes this as a signal to drive the heel of his palm gently against her nub, before the tips of his middle two fingers take up a slow, steady, measured walk atop her throbbing clit.
Exposed, but protected. Probed, but held. These combinations make the specifics of their location—crammed in the backseat of a stranded car on a darkened street in a rainstorm—seem like vague abstractions. Suddenly anything beyond the feel of his fingers against her, the taste of his tongue and the low breathy growls as he seeks to drive her over the edge of bliss cease to exist. Suddenly there is only him. And that’s when her pure pleasure takes the form of a scream that could be mistaken for terror by someone who hadn’t just discovered what every inch of her tasted like. She expects him to close a hand over her mouth, to muffle her cries. But instead, he grinds his nose against the nape of her neck and laughs encouragingly, gently and with a sound of such rich satisfaction she wishes she could bottle it and save it forever.
When her sense of times returns, she’s still shuddering.
“I can’t move,” Michael finally says. He’s still right where he landed as her orgasm tore through her, on top of her and pinning her to the seat, his lips pressed to the nape of her neck.
“Me either,” she says.
“I don’t want to move.”
“Me either.”
“Let’s not move.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she says, stroking the back of his neck. “Or maybe just to the side. A little bit. So I can breathe again.”
“Sure,” he says, following her instruction.
It works. When they were lying in a cramped tangle, bathed in the afterglow of their frenzied climax, she couldn’t have cared less about breathing normally. All that mattered was the weight of him and his determination not to let her go, and she wouldn’t have said anything to disrupt it. But if they’re going to talk, oxygen is key.
Neither one of them has pulled up their underwear or buttoned their jeans, and as they lie together across the backseat, their exposed privates rest against each other, still pulsing heat.
“What are we going to do about your car?” Laney asks.
“Wait until the rain stops and see if someone from the restaurant will give us a jump,” he says. “I’m not in any rush, are you?”
“Hell, no. We’ve waited this long.”
“I probably shouldn’t say this now, but I would have waited longer if you’d asked me to.”
“And that’s why I didn’t want to make you wait another day,” she answers.
“So what happened?” Michael asks her.
The rain hasn’t let up in the slightest and the power in the surrounding neighborhood isn’t back on. But they’ve managed to arrange themselves in a comfortable, intimate tangle in the Kia’s cramped backseat, and right now, Laney wouldn’t trade these cramped quarters for a beach lounger in the south of France.
“I mean, I know I give good e-mail, but it wasn’t that good,” he says. “Or was it? I feel like something else happened, something that made you change your mind. Or your heart.”
A change of heart. That’s one way of putting it.
Too bad she can’t think of any normal, everyday terms to describes Lilliane’s visit. Michael seems to feel these thoughts moving through her and props himself up, smoothing her hair away from her face.
“Was it not being your teacher anymore that did it?” he asks.
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?” he asks. “Seriously. What happened?”
The same resistance that knotted itself through her muscles the night before when he kissed her in Jackson Square returns. But this time she feels justified. If she tells him anything about Bastian or Lilliane, he’ll think she’s a lunatic. But another voice joins the chorus of fear in her head, and this one sounds more steady and clear. What happened today happened, the voice tells her. There’s no way around it, and if she doesn’t tell Michael about it, it’s as good as keeping a secret. And is that really how she wants to cap off a night of total honesty and total bliss?
There will always be a reason not to tell her truth. There will always be a reason not to bare her heart. There will always be the fear that she is too poor, too angry, too blunt, too smart for her own good. Fear, she has learned, will latch on to any self-doubt or insecurity you have in its quest to keep your life small. Fear tells you it’s protecting your heart when it’s really just starving it to death.
“Laney?” Michael asks into the sudden, growing silence between them.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
She can sense a smart remark on the tip of his tongue. But the seriousness in her tone takes a second to wash over him. He grunts before answering. “I’m—well, I guess I’m willing to believe in a lot of things, if someone gives me proof, yeah.”
“Okay. A few things first.”
“Sure.”
“First I need to say I’m not on any drugs, legal or illegal. I have no history of mental illness, although I’m probably a good candidate for anxiety disorder.”
“Many of us are,” Michael says gently.
Michael sits up suddenly, then gently pulls her to a seated position next to him and begins tugging her jeans up partway. She does the rest of the work of covering herself, allowing him to do the same for himself. Then, just when she thinks she’s going to have to tell this story with the two of them awkwardly sitting side by side in the backseat, he leans against the door next to him and invites her to wilt into his body, a small gesture that makes what she’s about to do feel much easier.
“Okay,” she continues, “and I want you to know, I’m just telling you what I saw and what I heard. I still don’t know what any of it means.”
“You can tell me whatever you need to tell me, Laney,” he says.
And she does. Starting with the moment she ran from him the night before, she takes Michael through her visit to Bastian Drake’s shop, describing the candle, its smell—his smell—the notecard and her strange but inspiring conversation with Bastian. Next, she describes Lilliane’s visit, complete with its stalkery opening act, doing her best to leave nothing out, which isn’t easy. Every now and then she has to circle back to fill in some detail of Lilliane’s crazy story she left out the first time. All the while, Michael remains silent, listening to her intently as rain drums the roof.
By the time she’s finished, the afterglow of their first shared orgasm is gone.
She prepares herself for an interrogation spiced with accusations.
“You’re safe?” he asks, but it take
s her a second or two to realize it’s a question. “This woman, Lilliane. Whoever she is, she assured you that you’re safe from whoever these people are, right?”
“I love that that’s your first question.”
“Of course it is,” he says, and kisses her forehead. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well, you could have gone with, Are you fucking nuts?”
“Someone else could have gone with that. Not me.”
“Someone like my father, you mean?”
“That’s not my place to say. Yet.”
“You did just go down on me, remember?”
“Like I’d ever forget, Miss Foley,” he whispers, tracing the edge of her chin gently with one finger, as gently as he traced patterns along the bare flesh of her stomach before he explored her pussy for the first time. It’s true that she’d asked him not to call her Miss Foley. But that was a different time, a different time only twenty-four hours in the past, but it still felt like a dark and remote period of her life—a before time when the fear that he’d never taste the most intimate parts of her dogged her every step. Now that he’s not her teacher anymore, any role-play to the effect will send gooseflesh up the insides of her thighs.
“Let me guess,” she says. “Your parents are perfect. Your mom sends you baked goods and your dad welcomes you home with a box of cigars and man talk around the fireplace.”
“My parents are perfect at sending checks and asking me when I’m going to get some sense and apply to law school. But I’m not complaining. The checks are big, but I put as much of them as I can in savings. As for the man talk around the fireplace, ever since my father retired three years ago, they’ve spent a grand total of five minutes in the continental United States. I think it’s better that way.”
“Do they come home for holidays at least?” Laney asks.
“Nope.”
“Not even Christmas?”
“Not even Flag Day,” he says with an arch smile that does little to hide his bitterness. “It’s better that way. Trust me.”
“Why?”
“Because then I only have to justify the meaning of the creative arts to my students.”