by Jo Goodman
She made a face. “Do guys actually think that? It’s not really an honor.”
He shrugged. “My penis thinks it’s an honor.”
Ramsey gave him a light slap on the back. “Just put it on.”
“I notice you’ve recovered your voice.” He started to roll on the condom. His cock remained attentive, even eager. “That other one is a little scary.”
Scary to her too. She didn’t tell him that. What she said was, “Shut up, Sullivan.” Since she was holding up the covers for him, it was not an entirely rude command.
Sullivan dimmed the light and rolled back under the blankets.
“Remember where we were?” she asked.
“Indeed, I do.” He slipped into the space she made for him between her thighs. Her knees hugged him. Supporting his weight on his elbows, he hovered over her, searched her face. Watched her blink as though in assent, then the nod. She lifted her hips a fraction. It was the invitation he’d been waiting for.
Sullivan slid home.
Ramsey thought she might weep. “It’s good,” she said, and her voice was husky, not scary at all. “Really good.”
It was good, but Sullivan didn’t think she was talking to him. It was more like she was reassuring herself. He said nothing and began to move.
Their cadence was easy until it wasn’t. There were no words exchanged. Except for an occasional whimper from Ramsey and a low, rumbling groan from Sullivan, they were largely silent. It was oddly erotic, that silence, the kissing and touching and rocking without questions or directions, as if they already knew what the other one wanted, or even better, what the other needed.
She came first. Fully expected to because it had been so long, and she was so ready, and he kissed like it was his job. She hoped she wasn’t selfish; it felt a little as if she had been. What she didn’t expect was that she’d come again before he climaxed. Oh, yes, the man had a slow hand.
Ramsey raised her head and then let it fall back heavily as he pushed away. She closed her eyes, secured them that way with a forearm, and waited for her heart to resume its normal rhythm. Her head was thrumming pleasantly, the same sound she heard when she held a conch shell to an ear. She blew out a breath. Slowly.
She lifted her forearm just enough that she could turn her head and glance at Sullivan. He was not lying on his back. He was on his side, propped up on an elbow and watching her. She immediately lowered her forearm.
“Are you hiding?” he asked. “Seems out of character, but then maybe it isn’t.”
“I am not hiding.” She peeked at him again. “Well, maybe a little. Just for a while. You about destroyed me.”
“Is that good?”
“I think so. I’m still collecting parts and pieces of myself.”
“Huh.” He threw back the covers and rolled out of bed, then padded naked to the adjoining bathroom and closed the door.
Ramsey heard water running. She hoped he wasn’t long. She needed to use the facilities. Sitting up, she looked around for her clothes and recalled with no little embarrassment that they were scattered from front door to bedroom door. She wriggled out from under the covers and went to the closet. It was a walk-in, a little less than half the size of the master bedroom, with a washer, dryer, ironing board, hanging rack, and fitted with customized rods, shelves, drawers, and cubbies for clothes and shoes. She pulled a crisp, barely pink, Oxford cloth button down shirt, off a no-slip hanger and put it on. She was still buttoning it when Sullivan came out of the bathroom.
He stopped a few feet into the bedroom and looked her over. “No question about it,” he said. “You wear it better.”
“And that towel looks good on you.” She rolled up the sleeves to three-quarter length. “Slate gray. Matches your eyes. Was that intentional?” When he gave her a look that said she had clearly lost her mind, she shrugged. “Guess not.”
Sullivan started to give way as Ramsey headed for the bathroom, but then he changed his mind, caught her around the waist and pulled her in. Not only didn’t she resist, she angled her body so she fit perfectly against him. “Hey,” he said quietly.
She smiled in return, looked up at him. “Hey.”
He chuckled. “I think we can safely say we’ve overcome post-coital awkwardness.”
“Not if you don’t let me go. I have to pee.”
He kissed her, and in deference to the urgency she noted, the kiss was neither too long, too slow, or too deep. She didn’t move when he lifted his head. She might have even leaned into him. He cupped her elbows and gave her a nudge in the direction of the bathroom.
“Yeah,” she said vaguely. “Right. I remember.” She slipped into the bathroom, closed the door, and leaned against it. “Breathe.” She remained there for a good long minute until the taste and pressure and warmth of that last kiss faded to memory. “You’re rolling in the deep,” she said under her breath, then she pushed away from the door and attended to her needs.
Sullivan traded his towel for a pair of jeans from his closet and then retraced the path he and Ramsey had blazed from the bedroom to the front door, following the discarded clothing as if the items were bread crumbs. She was still in the bathroom when he returned, so he set her things down on a wicker chair and tossed his on the ironing board in the closet.
“Are you all right?” he called.
“No,” she called back. “I can’t find a toothbrush. Don’t you have a spare?”
“I have replacements, not spares. They’re in the bottom drawer of the cabinet to the right of the sink.” There was quiet on her part and he imagined she was rummaging around, then he heard water running and figured she found one. He wondered if she squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle or from the bottom, and then wondered if this might be one of those daily living details that would trip them up.
“Whoa,” he said, dropping to the edge of the bed. “Slow down. Slow the hell way down.” The door to the bathroom opened. He looked up just as Ramsey flicked off the light. She’d taken down her hair, probably ran her fingers through it or maybe used his brush because it fell forward over her shoulders in two curling cascades. He’d never seen her without her hair pulled up or back, and even as he was thinking it, thinking that she transcended lovely to stunning, she was raising her arms and sweeping up that glorious fall of hair into a tail that she secured with an elastic band she was wearing around one wrist.
Ramsey patted the back of her head. “Better,” she said, stepping into the bedroom. “Did you say something?”
He shook his head, still thinking about her hair. “Why’d you do that?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Your hair. Why’d you pull it back?”
Frowning slightly, Ramsey didn’t answer immediately. “Habit, I suppose. It’s practical for work or exercise or, really, anything.”
“Huh.” His eyes followed her as she walked to the chair where he’d placed her clothing. “It looks good down, like you had it.”
She didn’t glance his way. “Thank you, I guess.”
Sullivan’s eyebrows puckered. “Have I embarrassed you?”
“No…maybe…it’s mostly that I don’t know what to do with compliments like that.”
“Like what?”
“About my looks. I didn’t do anything to earn them. They just are. I get that they’re an advantage, but they’re simply genetics.”
“Do you feel the same way when someone compliments your smarts?”
Her short laugh was bereft of humor. “That’s never happened, but I get your point. Genetics again. Mostly. You can study and enhance your intelligence.”
“Enhance your knowledge, certainly, but I’m not so sure you can do much about your core intelligence.”
Ramsey picked up her boy shorts. “This is a bizarre conversation.”
Sullivan ignored that. “I think you’re smart. Seriously smart.” She didn’t say anything, but he thought he detected the faintest curling at the corners of her mouth. She was pleased, even if she couldn
’t say so. He watched her balance herself on the arm of the wicker chair and begin to step into her shorts. “What are you doing?”
“Is that really a question?” she asked. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“I’m thinking past the obvious. What happens next? Do you keep getting dressed? Are you coming back to bed or are you planning to go?”
She stood, straightened, and hiked up the boy shorts under the Oxford shirt before she regarded him with a cool eye. “You gathered up my clothes and set them out where I couldn’t miss them. That’s a pretty big hint about your druthers.”
“You know, you could have reasoned I was being considerate. I didn’t realize I had given you cause to think otherwise.”
Ramsey had picked up her cargos, but now she dropped them over the back of the chair and remained where she was, not exactly feeling awkward, but not confident either.
“Stay,” said Sullivan. “Spend the night. I’ll make you breakfast in the morning.” When Ramsey continued to hesitate, he added, “I have Cap’n Crunch.”
That decided her. She walked to the bed and stopped when she was standing between his splayed legs. When Sullivan set his hands on her hips, she laid hers on his shoulders. “I really like Cap’n Crunch.”
“Everyone loves the Captain.”
Ramsey nudged his shoulders and he obliged her by lying back on the bed. She followed him down and this time she was the one who initiated the kissing. Eventually they rearranged themselves on the bed after Sullivan shucked his jeans and Ramsey slithered out of the boy shorts. The barely pink shirt stayed, although she unfastened the buttons while he put on a condom.
“The shirt smells like you,” she whispered when he returned to nuzzle her neck. “I like it.”
“It smells like the dry cleaners,” he said.
“I still like it.”
He tugged on her earlobe. “Anyone ever told you that you’re just over the far side of strange.”
“No, but I think that might be a good thing.”
He smiled against her mouth. “I know it is.” Then he kissed her and eased himself in. He held himself still when he saw her wince. “All right?”
She nodded, bit gently on her bottom lip. “I guess you can tell that it’s been a while.”
“Ah, it’s been less than an hour. I’m to be congratulated for my recovery and stamina.”
“Congratulations,” she said, nudging his mouth with hers. “But I was talking about me. That hour respite aside, it’s been a long time for me.”
He ran his tongue along the ridge of her teeth and then lifted his head to ask, “How long?”
“Since my divorce.”
Sullivan’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Since your divorce? How long are we talking about exactly?”
“Exactly?” She frowned, thinking, and was glad it took some effort. To her it meant she was putting the past in the past. Sullivan probably thought she was slow at math. “Four years, three months, and twenty-one days.”
“Jesus,” he whispered. “And what? Nothing. No one?”
“Do battery operated toys count?” Before he could answer, she felt him stir inside her. Suspicious, she asked, “Did you just get harder?”
“Yeah, I did. You tickled the little guy’s imagination.”
“Are you fishing? The little guy’s not so little any longer. I’m not sure he ever was.”
He chuckled deeply, a shade wickedly, and then he began to move. She rose to meet him, felt the rhythm change as urgency overtook him. She matched it, let him know that her confession didn’t make her fragile. She was powerful, resilient, in or out of his hands, but she liked being in them, liked their deft touch, their insistence on her pleasure, the heat they left in their wake.
Her fingertips walked up and down his spine, splayed across his back, felt his muscles bunch. She pushed her fingers through his thick thatch of hair much that way he did when he was thinking…or exasperated. She palmed his tight ass and hugged him with her knees. When he rocked her so hard that only the bunched pillow behind her kept her from bouncing against the headboard, she surprised him with a quick move that levered him onto his back and put her in the catbird seat.
“Before I’m concussed,” she said by way of explanation.
Sullivan grasped her hips. “Hey, I’m all in.”
Being on top was a novel experience for Ramsey. Jay liked to cover her, either hovering or from behind. She wasn’t ignorant of other positions, only untried. She felt the faint pressure of Sullivan’s fingertips, urging her up. She rose, resumed the rhythm that he had begun. Leaning forward, she invited him to cup her breasts, and hummed her pleasure when he took her up on it and his thumbs passed over her stiff and sensitive nipples.
She watched the play of tension and anticipation in his features, the hooded stare, the catch in his breath, the thrust of his lower jaw. He arched his throat, his back, pressed his shoulders into the mattress, and gasped or groaned something unintelligible as he came, and he still had the presence of mind to slip one hand between their bodies, flick her clitoris like his finger was a battery-operated toy, and make her lose her mind.
Ramsey collapsed, closed her eyes, and repeated the words Oh, God as if they were her mantra. It felt like a long while before she tried to move, but even then, he told her to stay where she was. She did, and still joined, she managed to stretch. Later, but not too much later, she fell asleep.
20
Sullivan managed not to wake Ramsey when he slipped out from under her and then out of bed. She was still sleeping when he returned from the bathroom, but now she was sprawled on both sides of the middle. Even on a king mattress she took up a lot of room. Carefully, he moved an arm then a leg closer to the center line and made space for himself. He turned off the lamp and climbed in. He wasn’t one for cuddling. Sometimes it seemed that the bed wasn’t big enough for him on his own, let alone with someone joining him, yet when Ramsey rolled into his space, he didn’t move away, and when she flung an arm across his chest and bumped him with her knees, for all that it was out of the ordinary, it wasn’t precisely outside his comfort zone.
He slid into a surprisingly easy sleep and woke six hours later alone in bed. But not alone in the house, he realized. The shower was running in the bathroom and Ramsey’s clothes were still on the chair. That meant she’d probably emerge wearing his shirt. Goodie.
Sullivan got up and made for the closet, picked out a pair of gray low-rise trunks, a clean tee with Baby Groot silk screened on the chest, and his favorite pair of sand washed jeans, slipped barefoot into a pair of loafers and headed for the kitchen. He hadn’t made it to the door when Ramsey entered from the bathroom. For just a moment she was surrounded by a cloud of steam. He forgave her for using all the hot water because she was indeed wearing his shirt.
“Don’t change,” he said when she moved to the chair.
She looked up, gave him a crooked smile. “Just looking for something for my feet. I noticed the slate floor in your kitchen. It’ll be cold.”
“Nope,” he said. “It’s heated. Same as the bathroom.”
“Oh.” She looked back over her shoulder at the bathroom. “And here I was thinking it was the shower that warmed it up.” She caught the pair of white athletic socks that Sullivan tossed her from the closet and sat on the edge of the chair to put them on. “Thanks. I have a feminist’s aversion to being barefoot in the kitchen.” She stood. “Cap’n Crunch still on the menu?”
“Sure, unless you’d like something else. I have eggs, steel cut oats, clementines. I can make French toast. Pancakes, if you’d rather.”
Dramatically, she asked, “You cook?”
“Don’t get excited. That was my entire repertoire.”
“Coffee? Half and half?”
“Yes, and yes.”
“Then lead the way.”
He did. In the kitchen, he pointed out a stool at the breakfast bar for Ramsey and took out two Fiestaware mugs, one sunflower, one poppy, and set them on the cou
nter. He showed her the carousel of coffee pods. “What’s your poison? I’m warning you, I don’t have any flavored coffees.”
“Suits me. I’ll have a Dunkin.”
He plucked one out, set it in the maker, added water, and pressed the flashing orange button. “You decide about breakfast?”
“Just cereal, please.”
“Sugar high it is.” He bent, pulled out the box from under the counter and set it on the bar. He removed two Fiesta bowls, this time plum and scarlet, and let her chose her color. By the time he got out the milk and the half and half, the first cup of coffee was done. He slid the cup toward her along with a napkin and a couple of spoons. “Anything else? Sugar? Sweetener?”
“No. I’m good.” She opened the cereal box, poured his and hers, added milk to her bowl, and then set the box in front of her so she could read about the Captain’s adventures while she ate. When she saw Sullivan was staring at her, doing nothing to hide his amusement, she waved him off. “Old habits,” she said, and continued reading.
Sullivan turned on the small screen counter TV to a twenty-four-hour cable news channel, kept the volume low, and sat on the stool beside Ramsey.
She glanced at the screen. “You took a risk there,” she said. “Turning that on without knowing my political leanings. Could’ve been a deal breaker.”
“And it’s not?”
“Nope. We’re still good to go.”
“You had me worried for a second. Diane and I didn’t discuss politics.”
“Opposing views?”
“She didn’t have a view. Never voted in her life, at least not when I knew her. She said she didn’t see the point. What about your ex?”
“Jay’s view was the only one that counted. I didn’t say much so he assumed I agreed with him. It was the path of least resistance. We had more important things to argue about.”
When she didn’t elaborate, he decided to prompt. “Such as?”
“Oh, we’re going there this morning.” She added half and half to her coffee, took a sip and nodded, satisfied. “You think I’m stalling?”
