“Speaking of rooms.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I can’t sleep in there another night.”
“Our bed? We don’t sleep anyway, so—”
“Lucy. Please.” He pressed his lips together. The room looked weird. Everything was placed wrong, like a stranger’s house. The Dutch-blue walls. She struggled to focus. It hurt to stay present, but something in her was screaming, and she thought that for once, maybe she had no choice.
“I wake up sometimes and I don’t know how it all happened. I’m lying there next to you and you’re in that fucking dressing gown.”
“In case she wakes up. Or the kids, one or the other. Christ, John, you know why.”
“And I don’t even recognize you.” She lifted her head, startled. He was looking at her and it was actually painful, she could feel cold anger in her belly.
This wasn’t John. The man who thought he could take on the world, including her mother’s snobbish relations, and not only charm them but make them happy at the same time.
“I—I love you.”
“You love everything day in day out without even thinking about it. It’s your job.”
“Are you sneering at me?”
He didn’t answer. The rage rose in her like something out of control, like an animal finally driven out of its hibernating place. She heard the kids arguing next door and the front door opened and her mother’s gentle, bewildered face floated in, looking at her like she’d seen a ghost she didn’t quite recognize.
Lucy turned and ran. Ran to the bedroom, and threw herself in among the crumpled sheets and the clothes and the mess. The door opened and without looking to see who it was, she screamed over her shoulder.
“Get out. Leave me alone.”
There was the crack of a door closing, Stephen’s voice raised short and sharp. She waited for the wails, and the kids to burst in, and her mother to start saying, “Excuse me,” over and over again, voice spiraling, as she did when she got distressed. They never left her alone. Never had, not for years. She buried her face in the pillow and felt her own hot breath absorbed by the feathers.
And then they did. The house that was never quiet became suddenly, weirdly so. She could hear a voice, murmuring, moving back and forth. Footsteps. Doors closing, gently. Outside the car’s engine started up and she lifted her head. Where was he going? Was he taking the children? She stumbled out of bed, ran to the window, clawed back the blind. Outside it was gathering dusk, the sky stained the color of strong tea.
“John!” She practically screamed it, voice strangled.
“I’m here,” he said, from behind her, and she jerked like she’d got an electric shock.
“The children—”
“Are with Sarah.”
“But she never babysits at short notice.”
“Now she has.”
“My mother.”
“With Missus Sweet, over the road.”
“Is she okay? Her pills.”
He shrugged. “She’s as well as she can be, and she can have her pills later.” He looked at her then, and the blue of his eyes was soft and warm.
“Let go.”
She looked at her hands, the off-white curtains bunched in them.
“Let go.” He crossed to her, but instead of bundling her into his arms and holding her, he gripped her shoulders and pulled her to the mirror. She tried to turn, but he held her fast, facing their dual reflection, shadowy and awkward.
“Look at us.”
She made a face. John remained impassive, his eyes traveling slowly over her, from head to foot. This was silent torture, and immediately she started to squirm, shaking her hair over her face, reaching for the door. He gripped her wrists.
“We don’t have time for this,” she said, tugging away.
“I’ve made time. I’ve bought us”—he glanced at the clock—“two hours.”
She heard herself bark a laugh. “If only,” she said. “Trouble is we’re in deficit, John, so two hours is a drop in the—”
“Enough.”
His voice was low and quiet, but it fell like a curtain.
“It’s enough. We need to talk, Lucy.”
She looked at the drawn-out curve of his mouth and the new, faint wrinkles that beamed from the corners of his eyes like a kid’s drawing of sunshine. Behind them, the day was fading. Her heart was thrumming in her chest, and she could feel the ache of tiredness in her wrists and neck.
“No.” she shook her head. “No, we don’t.”
He frowned.
This time, when she turned, he didn’t try to stop her. Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes.
“Talking won’t help. We don’t need arguments or explanations. This, this is what we need,” she said, relieved to find her voice steady. She thumbed John’s lower lip. Prized his mouth open. He leaned in toward her, and although she could practically taste the kiss, she stilled him.
“Wait.”
What changed, in that moment, so that a woman who couldn’t even look at her own reflection stood back and started to strip herself naked? Maybe she let go, like he’d suggested. Maybe for a minute she stopped thinking long enough for the glimmer of her feelings to start to show. And there wasn’t a trace of shame or worry, as she unbuttoned her blouse and skirt and dropped them on the floor. Maybe it was the turning of the year at last—by the time she’d pulled off her knickers and tramped them onto the carpet, unhooked her bra and felt the sigh of relief as her soft, naked self glowed in the half light, she didn’t really care.
“Now, you,” she said quietly, and reached to undo John’s shirt. He stood and let her do it. She unbuckled his belt and tugged at his trousers, smelling the good soap and body smell of his skin, feeling the heat of it as she drew close. He stepped out of his shoes, and looked for a moment like a boy who didn’t know what to do next.
She loved him for that. It gave her the confidence to sink onto her knees, and hug him, pressing her face into his groin, burying her cheek in his pubic hair and brushing against his half-stiff cock. For a few minutes, they stayed like that, holding each other, his hands combing her hair and the two of them rocking slightly. She could feel his knees against her breasts and his anklebone slide between her legs.
“Feels so good,” he murmured, and it did. She could have stayed there forever, exchanging warmth, reveling in the pleasure like a warm bath. Only other impulses were starting to gather, from somewhere far away. Her knees were weakening at the familiar, delightful feel of his skin on hers. And every time he rocked, his cock moved a little closer to her mouth and her clit slid against his ankle. She nuzzled into his groin. Felt the silky skin against her lips.
One of the things she loved about John was the noise he made in bed. Those low moans, the soft, emphatic swear words, were enough to make her wet without even touching him. Now, as she took the head of his cock in her mouth and sucked it hard, he whimpered as though he were almost in pain.
“Oh god, Lucy, please,” he said.
She flicked her tongue back and forth over the globe of his glans, and smiled.
“I like it when you beg,” she said, grabbing his hand and pulling him to the floor beside her. She needed to feel him intensely, intimately—there was a feeling like the tiniest flame between her legs and it had to be paid attention, coaxed into life.
“I want your tongue on me.” She pulled his hand to the place she wanted it. “Right here. Lick me.” She felt herself blush as she said it—these were not the kind of words she’d exchanged with her husband for as long as she could remember—if ever. Not sober, not out loud. But she kept going, and the nerves only seemed to make her bolder. Lit up the blood in her veins. As John knelt in front of her and slid the point of his very skilled tongue right between the lips of her pussy, she kept talking.
“Yes, yes, yes.”
He worked at her, lightly and with total concentration. Every so often, he would pull back and look up at her, that stran
ge new frown still darkening his brow. And she would grip his hair and move him back into place, to feel that sweet, sweet tongue on her again.
“Keep going, baby.”
At last, he pulled back, pushing their discarded clothes aside, tossing stray pieces of Lego and odd shoes across the room, clearing a space. He shoved her knees apart, and she grabbed him by the hips. They were moving fast now, no longer tender.
“No need to rush,” she said, warning him. “Two hours.”
He barked a laugh. “Unlikely. I think I’d implode.”
“Make it last,” she said. “I want to feel every minute with you, John.”
Then he stopped. She saw his eyes dull. “Why d’you say that?”
“Why do you think? I’ve needed this for so long. Missed it.” She ran a hand down the hard, sculpted curves of his arm, over the softer skin of his belly. She knew his body so well, but it was a revelation every time she unwrapped it and saw it naked. Now, she noticed a new scratch on his side—from fixing the fence last week, and how the hairs on his chest were starting to spring up white instead of brown. The way his shoulders were starting to curve.
“You make it sound like it’s the last time.”
Her eyes widened. She buried her hand in the scribble of his pubic hair and held on tight.
“God, I hope not. Not yet.”
His shoulders relaxed, and he shook his head. A smile broke out on his mouth and he closed his eyes, let himself lean into her hand.
“Lucy. I never know what’s going on in your head.”
“That makes two of us,” she said, working her hand lower, reaching for his erection. It had faded a little, but she felt him leap under her touch. “Most of the time I’m just getting through the days.”
“I thought you’d…”
“What?”
He sighed. “Stopped. Wanting me.”
“Are you mad?” she fastened on his cock tighter than she’d meant to, saw him jolt a bit.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. No, don’t stop. Please. And no, I’m not mad, just tired and sleep deprived and confused, and it may be the same thing.” His voice was starting to break as she worked his cock nearer to her, pulling him in to her body and spreading her legs wide.
“Imagine waking up with you,” she said, whispering into his ear, now, as he positioned himself and held her hips, pressed the head of his cock against her slit. She groaned at the resistance, and her breath caught in her throat when he drove into her, sliding fast as he met the wetness inside her. “Every day. That’s what I thought.”
“Huh? When?”
She looked at him, held his chin in her hands and met his gaze. His eyelids were half closing as he slid his cock in and out of her, his mouth open and his breath coming fast.
“When I first started seeing you,” she said, struggling to keep talking, refusing to drop eye contact. “I felt like I was dreaming.”
“God, Lucy, I’ve wanted you.”
“Shhh. Listen.”
She tensed her legs, caught his hips and stopped him from moving. He tried to thrust, but she held him fast and they laughed.
“I thought we didn’t need to talk?” He leaned in to nip at her throat with his teeth.
“I’m not talking. I’m trying to work something out. This is important, babe.”
“Okay.” He nodded, relaxed. Held himself steady for a minute. “I’m listening.”
“Everything was so good it seemed like something out of a dream, a book. And I would imagine how it would be to live with you, you know, be close all the time.”
“Cause I was never allowed to stay over.” He sank into her, a smile curled in the corner of his mouth. She relaxed her legs and drew him in, pressed the small of his back.
“Close?” he asked.
“Mm-hm. But I thought—how will it be when we’re really living, once we’re married, parents, in a house, once we’re…grown-up.”
“Oh, god—I’m listening, I’m listening,” he said, moving his hips so slowly and deep that it felt like her lower half was dissolving with intense pleasure. “But I can’t help fucking you, okay?”
“Yes. Don’t stop.”
For a minute they were silent, reveling in each other’s bodies, how they fitted together so well, how good it felt to be so close again. Outside the day had sunk into darkness, and Lucy thought how clean and black and absolute it was—how certain. She lay on the floor with her husband and thought of the things she knew for certain. Who she loved. What her body needed. That things would change, whatever happened, the days would pass—shorter or longer.
John shifted, and held her in place, and she could tell from the catch in his breath that he was close to coming.
“And now we’re there, grown-up, and I feel like I’m half-asleep. I went from dreaming to half-asleep.”
“And now?” John moaned. He held her by the hips and thrust deep.
“Now, I want to wake up with you,” she said, slipping her hand between them, feeling the quickening and the bloom of the orgasm. “I want to be here.”
“Here?”
“Yes. Now. Now. I want to be with you, and know it, and live wide awake. Right here. Every moment. Good and bad.”
He nodded his head and looked at her straight on, his blue and white eyes as bright as a sudden summer’s day in midwinter. His body drove into hers and locked there. She smiled. He said, “Okay.”
And they came.
A COMPETITIVE MARRIAGE
Victoria Blisse
I looked out of the window on a gray Mancunian winter’s evening. It was pitch black and the pools of egg yolk–yellow streetlights showed it was still raining, the ripples impacting the puddles left from days of the same kind of weather.
“I’m not going out there tonight,” I said, shaking my head. “No way, it’s too cold and wet and miserable.”
“All right, love,” was my husband’s chirpy reply. He was on his laptop, deeply involved in tending to imaginary vegetation or flinging some poor animated animal to its doom.
“I hate to miss my exercise, though. The wedding is only a few months away.”
“Do something on the Wii, then. Exercise indoors.”
“Oh, now that’s a good plan.”
I’d been walking every day since my sister announced she was getting married and wanted me, her older sister, to be a bridesmaid. It had sent me into a spiral of panic, worried I would look more like the wedding cake than the cake itself, or I’d be the size of the other two bridesmaids put together.
So I decided to lose some weight by walking every day and attempting to eat right. The walking was pleasant when I started in the early autumn sun, the crunching of crisp leaves and the scent of bonfires and nature on the air. By the time Christmas arrived it was less pleasant, though I did enjoy walking in the cool crisp snow, the only sound the crunch of my boots, the world a soft blanket of white around me.
I was ready for winter to be over, though. We were securely into the new year but not quite deep enough to be seeing signs of spring, and the incessant rain got me down. I’d come back in from my walks cold, wet and grumpy. I couldn’t face it again.
The Wii had been a Christmas present for the lads, Jake and Charlie, who had played nicely with it so far. They’d have a remote each and sometimes they’d play racing games and other times they’d be up and bopping to music. I’d watched them several times but never felt the urge to join in. The little men were in bed and sound asleep, both ready for another busy day at infant school the next morning, so it was all mine.
The first challenge was switching the damn thing on.
“It’s the long, thin button on the front.” My husband’s calm and slightly amused voice carried from behind his laptop.
“Thank you dear, I’ve got it.” I smiled triumphantly. Nothing happened on the TV screen even though the little light on the game box thing turned green.
“Hang on, I need to change the TV channel.”
Ag
ain, Ian came to my rescue. He did it a lot; we’d been married for ten years and he’d always been my geek in holographic armor. We met in a music store. He was playing on one of those daft games; I was looking for the latest Take That album and not looking where I was going. I backed into him, he yelled at me for getting him killed and from there love blossomed.
“Urgh, Ian, I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I finally admitted. “Can you help me?”
He sighed a little impatiently, still engrossed in his computer screen.
“Please?” I added, with a cute pout and one of those looks, the ones I’d always used to get my way.
“Oh, go on then,” he sighed. “What do you want to play?”
“That dancey one the boys bop about to.”
“Well, you grab it off the side. I’ll just finish up in my game.”
I looked through the plastic packs until I found one that had the word dance on it.
“Got it,” I crowed, “What now?”
Ian put down his laptop and shook his head.
“You’re going to have to join us in the computer age sooner or later, dear,” he chuckled and took the game out of my hand.
“Well, I can Google, what else do I need?” I was very good at Googling in fact. I’d got many bargains online, cheap shoes and bags for me and the weird geekery stuff all my boys, including my husband, liked to receive for birthdays and Christmas and such. “I’ve got you for all the other stuff.”
Ian laughed and bent to put the game in the machine. He also picked the remotes up from their position beside the box and passed one to me.
“Slip it around your right wrist and tighten the strap,” he said, “then I’ll get you started.”
“Don’t you want to play?” It had just hit me how daft I’d look prancing around the living room. I didn’t want Ian behind me, giggling or even worse recording me on his phone to send into You’ve Been Framed.
“I’ve got to get my cabbages—”
“Fuck your bloody pretend brassicas, mate. Come on, play with me. Please?”
My darling husband’s face was set in its determined line. The one he used for denying the boys one more game of Mario before bed. “I don’t want to, Manda. I’ve never played that game, I’m no good at dancing.”
Best Erotic Romance 2014 Page 2
