And somehow, as if this were actually all a dream—as if Aaron’s reality could bend to the whims of his own mind—there she was. Aaron pulled into the parking lot of a closed Burger King where Vanessa stood with her back along the chalky, stucco wall and a phone in her trembling hands. She looked lost there, shaken by a world that wanted to hurt her. Not knowing how to approach her, or even if he should, Aaron kept his distance, only to watch her face contort into something agitated, something powerful. Seeing her like that—seething into the phone—called him back to life again, shook off the dust that had formed on his psyche.
Without thinking, he zipped his car around to where she stood. “Do you need help?” He blurted out through the open window, as if they were old friends. In his mind, they were already entangled together, losing track of which pair of legs belonged to whom.
Looking up, her face glimmering with recognition, she hung up the phone. Vanessa chained her bike to a nearby pole and wordlessly got into the car. For the first time since high school, Aaron was nervous around a woman. She suddenly evoked this sense of inadequacy in him. The way she danced earlier left him unable to form cognitive thought, especially when juxtaposed against the relatable clumsiness, the humanness of earlier that day. And here she was again, sitting in his car in silence, controlling the aura. She was stoic and stern, a mountain his muscles were aching to climb.
“Hi,” he started, unsure of what to say, gripped by a panic that felt indissoluble.
“What are you doing here?” She asked defensibly, yet kept her position inside the car.
“I… saw you,” Aaron began, not wanting to divulge just yet that he’d been watching her dance. “I saw you here alone.”
The silence racketed in waves between them. Neither knew what to say, what to do, how to respond to the other.
“I don’t want to go home yet,” Vanessa said, finally, slicing the stillness that had fallen over the car.
Without a word, Aaron revved the Porsche and drove them away from Burger King, toward the direction of his hotel.
Chapter 11
Vanessa, at her wit’s end, knew she was making a mistake. She could count all the ways that what she was about to do was wrong, braiding them through each other like strands of singular missteps all their own in a rope of regret. And yet, there she was. She was on her way to a hotel room with a rich man she didn’t know, sloughing off her responsibilities to her little sister just to be able to get out of her own head for a while. Just to take back some of the life that had been stolen from her. Just to put some gas back in the tank.
Jessica finally got in touch with Vanessa as she stood there under the fluorescent lights of Burger King. “Emma is asleep with my kids,” her voice grumbled through the phone, groggily. “It would do more harm than good to wake her up now just to take her home. You need some sleep, too. I’ll take Emma to school tomorrow.”
She knew her neighbor was right, but it stung to capitalize on another person’s overwhelming generosity. But why? Why did Vanessa feel so stingy about taking Jessica up on her offer? What was stirring in her soul that prevented her from taking an outstretched hand? Why did she feel like she had to do everything alone, like life had to be more difficult than it actually was?
Vanessa was tired. Vanessa needed a break. Vanessa needed the rain of life to stop—even for just one night. Her soul cried out for sunshine, for hope, for relaxation. Even just a little bit of room to breathe. Her mind was overtaken by the stress of every day and converged into something she didn’t recognize anymore: a compacted mound of hardship and strife, operating on safe mode at all times.
As this man whose name she didn’t even know sped down Main Street in her sprawl of suburbia, Vanessa rescinded a promise she’d made to herself when her parents passed away. She’d resolved to abstain from sex for the foreseeable future. It didn’t seem like such a lofty goal at the time. All her emotion was thrust in the direction of her grief, and her energy was primarily sucked dry by Emma’s constant, unwavering needs.
And at the time, Vanessa thought back on her ex-boyfriend, the only guy she’d ever slept with, lanky and awkward, inexperienced, and unwilling to please. She managed to believe the fallacy that a mediocre sex life was all she’d get, that to experience actual, electrifying orgasms as a female was nothing more than a fallacy used to sell makeup and heels to women across the world. To Vanessa, sex felt more or less like cleaning her ears with a Q-tip: pleasant, but nowhere near orgasmic.
And yet, this man appeared. She mistook his interest in the office building for mere kindness, as rogue as it was. Vanessa could tell through his energy—through the way his voice reverberated into her ears, through the tenderness that bounced between them—that he wanted something more. But why would he? What did he see in her? To admit that there was something there was to deal in cards of fantasy, and Vanessa didn’t operate on wishful thinking anymore. She needed something concrete, something undeniable, and here it was. She was riding in this man’s Porsche, pulling up at his hotel, riding in the elevator, and walking through the door to his room.
“What’s your name?” She asked him once they got inside.
“Aaron,” he said softly, easily.
Vanessa sat on the bed, not quite knowing what to do next. She wanted him. She wanted to see how he looked under the three-piece suit he was wearing. She wanted to see how she could contort his face in ecstasy. But she only just now learned his name. He didn’t exist on the plane of her imagination until this morning. Vanessa couldn’t allow herself to go through with it. And yet, here she was, biting her lip. Not leaving, being compliant, complicit.
“Do you have any wine, Aaron?” She said authoritatively with a glint of seduction in her voice.
Smoothly, saying nothing, Aaron retrieved a bottle of unopened Pinot Grigio from the mini fridge and two glasses from the cabinet. His jacket was off and his sleeves were rolled up. Vanessa glared with intention as he jammed the corkscrew into the cork and popped the bottle with a satisfying click through the air, the muscles in his forearm rippling with each movement.
Vanessa lay on the bed as he poured, keeping silent. In a world where noise was constant and pleasure was nonexistent, Aaron’s hotel room acted as a haven for her, a reprieve from reality. He took a long drag directly from the bottle before pouring both glasses, keeping his eyes on her the entire time.
Aaron leaned across Vanessa strategically, placing his wine glass on the table next to her side of the bed. With his face turned toward her and a smirk streaking across his mouth, he kissed her, his lips still dripping with a sip of white wine. Her hands felt unsteady as she gripped the stem of her wine glass with one hand and felt around for the table with the other. Sensing her awkwardness, her scrambling, the way her body tensed as soon as his lips met hers, he pulled away.
“Do you not want to?” He asked sincerely.
“Oh, no, I do,” Vanessa said with a downward glance, her sweeping lashes taking her emerald eyes hostage. Setting her wine glass on the table next to Aaron’s, she sighed, sitting up against the pillows lining the headboard. “I do, Aaron. I want to. I just…”
“What is it?” Aaron replied, concerned. He sat up to match her posture, facing her. “Talk to me, Vanessa,” he said, turning her face toward his.
Vanessa wanted to talk. She wanted to gush about how she was overwhelmed simply by waking up in the morning, how the eviction notices kept piling up on her kitchen counter beside prescriptions for Emma that she couldn’t afford to fill. Vanessa wanted to bleed the words out of her: that she was lost in the world, that she couldn’t focus on how much she wanted him, that she was too twisted in the swirl of adulthood crashing down on her before she was ready. And yet even more than all of this, there was one piece of the puzzle that haunted her even more. One more detail, as adolescent and sophomoric as it may seem to someone as established, as powerful, as utterly impressive as Aaron: she hadn’t had sex in two years. In a strange way, she felt like she’d forgotten how, as
if they’d begin and she’d find herself utterly clueless on how to move, how to moan, how to slip away into the ecstasy of it all.
“I’m…” she said finally, inhaling sharply, “I’m… nervous,” she admitted, deflating. With eyes steeped by anxiety, she glanced up at Aaron, her stare bathing him in emerald-hued longing.
“Vanessa,” he said, curling one of her hands into his. “There’s no reason to be nervous. This is a place where you can feel comfortable. You can be yourself. I want you,” he said, shining his own neon-blue gaze at her.
Neither said anything for a moment, too lost in the juxtaposition between the emotions they’d already experienced together, and all the ways they had yet to explore one another. Finally—with a slide of his hand along the backside of her neck in a way so perfect it seemed almost rehearsed—Aaron drew her closer to him, pulling her face to his, kissing her with a torrent of lust that rendered her almost immobile with desire. Her mind was thinking of nothing now except him: how his muscles buckled across his abdomen, the way his biceps felt as she gripped them in euphoria, the way she craved his dizzying, gravelly voice whispering in her ear.
Their lips were magnets: the force between them too tenacious to be pulled away. Vanessa took her time unbuttoning his shirt, going one by one from the top to the bottom, intoxicating Aaron with the sensuality of restraint. He was rock hard by the time she reached the middle of his shirt, but her tantalizing meticulousness—her poised moderation—made him feel as if he were going to explode before she ever laid a hand on him.
Aaron flung his shirt across the bed and concentrated on Vanessa, who had already taken off her shirt and unzipped her jeans. With a hand wrapped around his cock, Aaron watched with intensified observation as she wriggled herself into nudity, bunching the denim in a pile at the foot of the bed, out of sight beneath the covers. He wanted to feel her immediately; he wanted the contours of everything she kept hidden away to wrap around him like a warm, wet hug. He wanted to feel her in secret, unshared places. He wanted to thrust into her, joining their bodies in the delirium of elation.
And yet, it wasn't quite time for that. He could tell that she was apprehensive, even before she confessed it to him. She was skittish and inexperienced, a newly minted adult trapped in the web of teenage know-how. Their age difference meant that Aaron would need to go slower, cater to her, create an atmosphere where Vanessa could grow into her sexuality. As much as he wanted her, Aaron understood that finding the specific combination to the lock of her orgasm was the top priority.
Vanessa lay down on the bed and Aaron moved to straddle her, his boxer briefs jutting out in a pyramid from his body. She felt him graze along her leg, concrete and gargantuan, immense in his excitement. Looking down at her, Aaron traced along the perfect, youthful lines of her cleavage with his index finger. With a maddeningly slow sensuality, Aaron laid a line of light kisses across the mountains of her breasts, stuffed into lacy red lingerie, jutting up at him just as he jutted out at her. He kissed along the milky softness of her skin as goose bumps began to form in the trail of where his mouth had journeyed. He nibbled around her lacy thong—black, not matching her bra but mind-numbingly sexy nonetheless and soaked through—and slowly pulled it with his teeth, exposing her to him now, gleaming and dripping with desire.
Aaron changed positions, wiggling between her legs and wrapping his arms around her thighs, pulling her onto his mouth. Vanessa tensed as each warm breath hit her, buckling and stiffening with every short inhale of her own. Looking up at her from his vantage point, her face painted the picture that she was utterly terrified, ashamed somehow, awash in her own anxiety. But from what Aaron could see directly in front of him, this wasn’t the case. Vanessa was constricting her pussy involuntarily to control how wet she was, how he’d saturated her already.
“I can stop, if you want,” Aaron whispered into her, the sound waves rippling through her body like electricity. Vanessa bucked her hips, letting out a guttural moan that filled the room and Aaron smiled, running his tongue along the gates of her ecstasy.
“Is that a yes or a no?” He teased, whispering into her once again as she jerked in euphoria. “I can stop, Vanessa. Do you want me to stop?”
“Don’t stop,” she gasped, and fluttered in her exhilaration as Aaron took her into his mouth—voracious and hungry—as if he hadn’t eaten in days. She wrapped her hands around his head, holding him in place, and looked down at him. He was wearing her legs like a scarf, drinking her in. He was dehydrated and she was a fountain, bubbling and squirting into his mouth. Vanessa could feel her orgasm mounting, building on itself, stacking up from the pit of her stomach, beginning to sizzle and radiate into her arms and legs. No, not yet, she thought. Not so soon. Vanessa wanted more, she wanted this feeling to last all night. She never wanted to leave this aura of warmth and dizziness. It was all too much, swirling in a tornado of fervent tension. Her legs were vibrating, she was losing the grip on Aaron’s head. Her hips were jolting and bouncing, alive with the sensation bubbling up within her. In what felt like a snap of rapture through her body, Vanessa’s eyes rolled backwards and she gasped, caught in a riptide of ferocious energy electrocuting every synapse before short-circuiting into a wave of bliss all over her body.
Aaron pulled away from her, taking off his boxer briefs with one hand and wiping his mouth with the other before smearing her essence all over his cock. He was ready to burst. Just the sight of her hips bucking and pulsating, the sound of her moaning, the way her hands forced him to keep drinking from her turned him on more than he could’ve imagined. Aaron took his middle finger and swabbed it over her pussy—glazed with liquid euphoria—and Vanessa’s whole body pulsed with pleasure. Aaron gripped his cock and felt Vanessa, felt what he’d done to her, looked at her voluptuous curves as he stroked himself, kneeling over her.
She was content, worn out from the fury of her own orgasm. He could see it in her eyes, dreamy and faraway, her smile crooked on her face. She was lightly panting in blissful gratification. Aaron could barely control himself now, and he didn’t want to disturb her post-orgasm satisfaction. His arm motioned wildly as he leaned his head back, succumbing to euphoria, clenching his teeth as he fell into the tidal wave of his own orgasm crashing through his body.
Silence clung to the air between them and Aaron looked down at Vanessa. Her face was a fantasy, an almost romantic abstraction of pleasure and gratitude, and her hands drifted to the puddle he’d made on her stomach. She glanced at him playfully, not knowing what to say or how to act, as she’d never been in this position before. The only boy she’d ever had sex with had always used a condom. Vanessa had never even seen what semen really looked like before. It was so gelatinous, so slimy. Somehow, this discovery energized her. It was as if she were checking some sort of box on her to-do list toward real adulthood, turning a page in a book she was required to read before being able to wear the label.
Aaron grinned at her and inhaled, crashing beside her in bed, worn out. With his last drops of energy, he grabbed his shirt from where he’d tossed it moments before and rubbed her stomach clean, sending the soiled shirt flying toward the hamper once all that was left were streaks on her skin. Exhaustion gripped Aaron, who nestled an arm across Vanessa’s body and fell asleep with her by his side nearly instantly.
Chapter 12
Aaron roused himself as the sunlight streamed in across the emptiness of his bed. She was gone. Was it all an illusion? Was Vanessa an intricate stitching of all the other odd events that had befallen him in the last twenty-four hours? He could barely remember what happened last night before she’d taken over his night, that inexplicable stretch of time when the clock sped up, when reality faded away, when he lost himself in a whirl of confusion.
Work began hours ago. Aaron’s absence would absolutely be noted by Mr. Lee, who seemed more like an old-world spy than Aaron’s Vice President. Dreading the lecture he’d get from this man who held the mystifyingly strange position of subordinate even though he’d b
een working at Kümertech since before Aaron was alive, Aaron sighed and padded off to the shower, racking his brain for some excuse he could give. Not unlike a teenager caught skipping school, he decided to use the age-old alibi that sickness had gripped him while he slept.
* * *
The first bus departed at dawn from the stop down the street from Aaron’s hotel. The sky was purple fading to pink, which blazed into a robust orange as Vanessa stepped off at the stop closest to the Burger King where she left her bike. She raced home to shower, to get away, to look at who she was and what she’d done. Shame crawled across her like ivy on a brick façade. How could she have done this? What was she thinking when she merely took a glass of wine from a stranger, let alone crawling into bed with him?
Disgusted with herself, with her behavior, with everything she’d allowed her life to become, Vanessa wailed through her empty house. Her sobs ricocheted off the walls where family portraits used to hang, where her mother used to mark her height as she sprung up through the years. She acted rashly, jumping the gun and muddling herself in the process. Girls who behaved that way—jumping into cars with strange men, blacking out in ecstasy in hotel rooms—had no self-respect. Vanessa didn’t have much anymore, but at least she had that.
* * *
Aaron didn’t know what time her shift began, or whether she was even working that night, but he knew he had to see her again. He craved her. He wanted to discover every bit of her body with his mouth. She was flitting through his mind, zipping through his stream of consciousness, rendering him useless and swimming in a sea of his own lust. Aaron waited at the strip club from 7 p.m. onward, scanning everyone who walked through its doors.
After a few hours of examining a stream of middle-aged, thoroughly bland men with cowboy boots and pickup trucks, Aaron saw her ride up to the front of the club around 11 p.m. Quickly bolting out of his Porsche, he strode toward her with a sense of urgency. She winced and cowered, not realizing who it was. Or perhaps, maybe she had realized it was him, he thought with a sinking sentiment as she skidded out of his path, away from him. She didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with him, locking her bike furiously, maniacally, and scuttling off toward the doors to the club.
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