by Sophia Reed
“I’m okay.”
She raised an eyebrow, and a mischievous look crossed her face. “Okay, I’ll make you a deal.”
“Okay,” I responded, knowing there was nothing she could say to convince me to eat a piece of pizza with fake cheese and no meat. That wasn’t pizza. That was bread with sauce.
“If you eat one whole piece of the vegan pizza,”—she took hold of my bold hand on her face and raised it, sticking her tongue out and sliding it up the side of my thumb—“instead of just dropping me off, I’ll invite you inside.”
6
Gabriel
The pizza barely touched the inside of my mouth. It wasn’t just that Stacy was perfect in every way, though that was a majority of it. I hadn’t been with a woman in well over a year. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but unlike my brothers’ playboy tendencies prior to meeting their partners, I considered myself a romantic. I dated one girl almost all the way through high school, and unlike the typical, cliche story, it was she who broke up with me when we got to senior year and still hadn’t had sex. Neither of us had lost our virginity yet, and I wanted it to be special.
My dad was careful not to spoil my brothers and me with unlimited access to our family’s money, and we earned allowances the same as other kids. I was trying to save up what I would need to rent out a nice hotel, buy dozens of roses and candles, maybe even get her a nice, sexy nightie, something to really commemorate the occasion.
Apparently, she wasn’t willing to wait that long.
The weekend I attempted to pull off our big lose-our-virginity night, I discovered that she was sleeping with someone else, someone she’d already given her virginity to two months prior. She liked my family’s money and clout and stuck it out for that reason. Even after sad, lovesick Gabriel was willing to forgive her and take her back, she told me she couldn’t be with someone so innocent and let me go. It took me a few years to recover from that. My brothers finally got me plastered on my twenty-first birthday and took me out to meet—and eventually have sex with for the first time—a woman whose last name I didn’t even know. I tried my hardest to get her to date me, not wanting to have lost something so special to a woman I wasn’t involved with. For a while, it worked, but eventually, she came to the same conclusion my first girlfriend did—I was too innocent.
I made Alessandro try and teach me how to be a dog after that. How to sleep with women and not call them back, how to date a woman just enough to get sex out of her and then leave her alone, how to find women who were only interested in sex and nothing more. I would call his efforts successful, given that I spent the next year sleeping around with any woman I could get my hands on, but it made me feel gross. My brothers called me soft, but I thought there was something to being with a woman you actually cared about, something they all eventually learned when they started meeting the loves of their lives and getting married. In truth, my father’s infidelity had made them all ideal husbands—the murderous line of work aside.
In all the women I’d dated or slept with, nothing ever felt as sure to me as Stacy did. I didn’t get that sinking feeling that we wouldn’t talk again. Things were moving fast, but I was okay with that, and I knew she was, too. We were smitten.
Stacy made good on her promise. As soon as we finished eating—packing up more to go than we might have, had something else not been etching away at our patience—we got in my car and drove right to her house. As if to boost that I was, in fact, invited inside, the second the car was in park, Stacy reached over and took the keys out herself, clutching them in one of her porcelain hands as she climbed out and started up the pathway to her front door without looking back.
I wouldn’t pass a test on what the inside of Stacy’s house looked like. The second we were inside her front door, my hands were already wrapping around her waist to pull her to me. She was facing away from me, but I buried my face into her blonde waves and took a deep breath of her shampoo, which mingled well with the flowery scent of the rose crown woven in. She leaned back against me, put her hands up, and linked them behind my neck. She was like a pristine statue. She had a lithe form with a modest bust and a pert, squeezable behind that was already arching up to tease a lower appendage of mine, which was already fighting against the restricting fabric of my pants. My hands massaged over the thin layers of her dress, working their way down her sides and over her stomach. The breath she let out when my fingers finally slipped under the article and made their first contact with her skin was intoxicating. It hovered somewhere between a moan and a gasp, saying it was a feeling she hadn’t prepared for but wasn’t opposed to.
She stepped away from me, seductively dropping my keys onto the table next to her door before looking over her shoulder at me. Her long lashes flicked up and down while she scanned the sight of me before turning her attention away again and started to slowly, deliciously ascend the stairs, taking extra care to step one foot over the other in a way that had her hips swinging like the pendulum of a clock. I moved to follow her but not too quickly, keeping the sight of her framed in front of me. I bit my bottom lip and did my best to memorize the view. If I were a lesser man, I’d take out my phone and take a picture, but we weren’t there, not yet.
When we got to the top of the stairs, the entire upper floor was an open layout that spanned out into a large bedroom. It seemed like a nice enough house, but my mind was on a single track. It had its eyes on the bed and Stacy heading straight for it. I’d had to make my peace with not having the things I truly wanted a long time ago.
Unlike my brothers, the Varasso lifestyle wasn’t for me, and each additional day I spent there was another day I was living a life I didn’t want. Such luxuries weren’t afforded to me, though. I did it because that’s what Varassos did. I did it because that same cold blood ran through my veins. I was used to just being a background character in the lives of my father and brothers, but in this moment with Stacy, I was center stage, and she was my co-star. I wanted her, and for the first time in a long time, I was going to get exactly what I wanted.
Stacy reeled around to face me, and with a playful smile on her face, she fanned her arms out and fell straight back, landing on her queen-sized, cerulean comforter-topped bed. I grinned at the way she backed further onto it and beckoned me forward. I certainly didn’t need to be told twice. I unbuttoned the jacket of my suit, threw it aside, and then threw caution to the wind. I took my undershirt off, as well, leaving only my tank on. Stacy’s eyes grew to small orbs, and the minx-like grin on her face grew into an elated smile. No one had ever looked at me that way before. It was addicting.
I made my way to the edge of the bed, and it was as if a different man took over my body. I grabbed Stacy’s ankles and yanked her towards me, allowing her dress to bunch up and reveal her thighs and black lace bikini underwear. I propped my arms on either side of her and tucked my head in, taking my first taste of her succulent lips. There was a sweetness to them that almost seemed natural. If I’d tried to guess before kissing her that that’s what they’d taste like, I might have guessed it. They were warm but for the lingering cool touch of the outdoors, which simmered away immediately with mine pressed in place. It was all it took for me to feel like I was floating ten feet off the ground with no fear of falling. Stacy’s arms dipping under my tank to drag her fingers in gentle scratches along the small of my back was enough to hold me aloft.
I left her sweet lips in search of a spot on her neck, and when my lips skipped across her skin, she made that same surprised-in-a-good-way, desperately intimate sound she’d made before. It snaked around me and shot jolts of excitement down my spine and into my groin, a truth Stacy rapidly discovered when her hands lifted off the bed and cupped me. Bold and beautiful.
I undid the tie that held Stacy’s dress in place, and it immediately drifted away from her form as though it was more excited to be parted from her skin than we were. My hands passed my head as they moved from her stomach up to her chest while my lips traveled lower. When I met the
hem of her underwear, I took the fabric between my teeth and dragged them downward.
Her legs naturally crooked themselves over my shoulders as I let my knees find the floor and ducked my head into her. She let out a quiet moan in response to my ministrations and combed her slender fingers into my hair. My other senses deadened as I took in the taste of her. She was the most delicious thing I’d ever enjoyed, and with each additional taste I got, I knew I had to have more. It was creating a void that might never be filled.
“Gabriel.”
Never before had my name been said with such passion, such conviction. It was like it was laced with magic that burrowed under my skin and flowed into my bloodstream. It made my body exist solely for her, desire only her. Her legs shivered in my hands, and her mewls of pleasure developed into a booming beg for more, and more she would get. I was a fiend with a drug—the more she displayed, the hotter she got, and more injected straight into me. I allowed my tongue to travel along every pathway it could find until Stacy’s voice was getting louder again before snapping silent and turning into nothing but a figure writhing against me. I was aware of her back to back orgasms but was like a hunter on its prey. I continued on with fervor until Stacy was pulling at my shirt, forcing me to come up for air.
Somewhere in my torrent, Stacy had removed her bra, and she was laying totally bare against the black and blue cloth of her undone dress splashed beneath her. Her previously pale cheeks were totally flushed, and her pupils were large inside her emerald irises.
“Condoms,” she huffed at me, breathless and hungry. She pointed back towards her bedside table. “There.”
I walked over to the bedside table and opened the drawer, shocked to find a couple of toys inside alongside an unopened box of condoms. There was a part of me that wanted to analyze the contents, but there wasn’t time. I snatched out the box of condoms, ripped them open, and pulled one out. I returned to my spot at the foot of the bed and made a show of pulling the rest of my clothes off. Peeling my shirt up my torso and over my head, and finally unbuttoning my suit pants, and pushing them and my boxers off of my body. Stacy took in a sharp breath as I sprung free, and she splayed her legs out a bit wider, inviting me in. The innocent yoga instructor was gone; the woman before me was a seductress.
I rolled the condom on and stepped up to Stacy. I perched myself where she was begging for me most and wrapped my arms around her waist to pull her up to me. The motion alone popped me just inside, and as I brought our lips together, I moved even further. My tongue walked along her bottom lip, and she took it between her lips to suckle gently. She squeezed around me below the same way she squeezed around my tongue, and I felt myself start to revert to the most primal form of man. She sapped me of my civilization, of my thoughts, of my stress. Yoga didn’t compare to the way my mind emptied out everything that wasn’t Stacy or the heat slowly crawling its way up my body.
Stacy pulled against me, and I relented, allowing her to bring me to my back on the bed. She straddled herself over me and returned to nestle herself against me, tossing back her head when I was seated inside. I took her hips between my hands and relented all control. Stacy started to rock at a rapid pace with her hands braced on my stomach, digging her fingers into my abs. I focused all of my energy on lasting in spite of the halo of light surrounding her cream skin. She was unearthly, alien, but in a way that made me want to visit whatever planet she was from. Something fused us together, stronger than the attachment of our physical selves. It was as if I didn’t realize I’d been missing my own arm my whole life, and now suddenly, I had it back.
My hands clawed into her, fighting against the surge of pleasure bubbling up in my stomach and seeping its way towards my groin. I wasn’t ready to be finished yet, but the feeling of her had my body on another course of action. Afraid that I might hurt her, I loosened my grip, but her hands encircled my wrists.
“No. Don’t. It feels good.”
There was a kink for roughness buried deep inside this woman. I only hoped I’d have plenty of chances to discover everything she liked, but for the moment, I settled for digging my hands in and giving in to my body’s demand for release.
Our voices intertwined and filled the room with such roaring, audible clues of our pleasure that Stacy’s neighbors need not guess what we were up to. The heat of her around me seared to the point that I didn’t think I’d be able to stand it anymore. Stacy slowed, but I held on, even after she collapsed on top of me, bringing her head to rest against my undulating chest.
Had we been there minutes? Had we been there hours? There was no way to say for sure. All I cared to see was the angel on top of me, letting out rhythmic hums as her orgasm finally crept away from her.
“Wow,” Stacy managed to breathe out. “Just…wow.”
It was far the best sex I’d ever had. “Yeah. Wow.”
7
Stacy
My parents had always boasted a holistic lifestyle. They weren’t the wheat-and-grass hippies that people think of when they see our flower crowns and long hair. They were people who truly and firmly believed from the depths of their souls that our bodies were intricately latticed with nature and understood that relationship is the key to health and happiness.
As such, my parents had taken a very progressive, forward-thinking approach to sex, as well. They made sure that I didn’t shy away from nakedness and that the concept of sharing all of myself with another person wasn’t taboo but worked hard to teach me how to be healthy and honest with myself. There were hundreds of ways a person could use natural energy to their advantage in the bedroom and create a sexual experience unlike any other, and once I’d reached the appropriate age, my mom was very outspoken with me about all of it.
Even her carefree self, ‘sex isn’t a big deal unless you want it to be’ lessons had included, “At least wait until the third date, Stace. Never let a man think that you’re easy.”
Mission failed.
Ordinarily, I would feel embarrassed or be on a tear to make sense of what I would otherwise consider a huge mistake. I was trying to list the reasons why I would drop my typically rock-solid resolve to let Gabriel in, but nothing I reached was the truth. I could tell myself it was the liquor, or his good looks, or his charm, but the truth was deeper and more frightening than any of that.
My mom once told me about a moment she experienced when she was young. She was at a party with some friends and accidentally knocked a drink into someone’s lap. She flailed about, trying to clean up her spill when her hand accidentally brushed against the hand of her soda pop victim. She claimed that time froze. The second their hands touched, it was like she could feel the world knocking into alignment, and when she looked up into the man’s eyes, she knew in an instant that he was her soulmate.
That man was my father.
I looked over at Gabriel. His eyes were still closed, and a cute, quiet snore was puffing out at a tempo that aligned with the gentle beating of his heart. My experience wasn’t like the one my mom had, but it was just as profound. Time didn’t freeze, and I didn’t feel the world knocking into alignment. It was more like when the ancient earthquakes caused Pangea to split. It was powerful and terrifying and totally out of my control, but once the dust settled and the astronomical shaking finally ceased, what was left behind was something that was always meant to be there. The sudden entrance of Gabriel seemed to be peeling away pieces of me I would have otherwise thought belonged there.
It was almost like he was an extension of my true self.
I didn’t believe in love at first sight or soulmates. Auras are ever-changing, and so are people. Twenty-four hours ago, I would have climbed the hill that the strongest relationships are not divine but the cornucopia of hard work and died there. Something different was filling me now. The connection I felt with Gabriel the second he wrapped his arms around me took my breath away like it didn’t totally belong to me in the first place, but the breath he gave back was fresher than any I’d breathed before.
I made a note to discuss the matter with my mom later as I watched the sun peak over the horizon through my bedroom window and rise into the dark blue sky. I’d always been an early riser, and that didn’t compare to Gabriel laying next to me. I definitely wasn’t going back to sleep. I tossed aside my blanket and kicked a foot off the bed, but before I could get the other over, Gabriel’s arms tightened around my waist and pulled me even closer to him. It was as gentle as it was strong, and I released myself to it, allowing him to nestle me back into him.
“Just a few more minutes.”
His voice was like silk. If I could have recorded it and made it my ringtone, I would have. His deep, gravelly voice; his strong, careful arms; his beautiful, youthful face; his tender, but animalistic love making—what sort of beast had I stumbled upon?
I turned my head enough to peck against his lips. “I was going to make breakfast.”
“Real breakfast?” he grumbled against me, and I laughed.
“What the hell is real breakfast? As opposed to what?”
“Tofu bacon and fake cheese.”
I snorted. “I have real bacon and real cheese. I cook for my best friend and my assistant all the time, and they both would murder me if I tried to feed them anything that even shared an apartment with tofu bacon.”
“Smart friends.”
There were soft, warm kisses against the nape of my neck, and they sent chills down my spine. If I wasn’t careful, I wasn’t just going to slowly descend the cliff to Gabriel, I was going to jump headfirst, the sharp, jagged rocks at the bottom be damned.
“Breakfast and Netflix.” I giggled. “We already took care of the chill part.”
His body shifted around me as he laughed. “I would say we started the chill part. I’m not done yet.”
