“Come back with me,” he says, moving barely in, and back out again. A torture. “Please, Mia. Just for the summer.”
I shake my head no, unable to find words, and he groans in frustration and pleasure as he slowly pushes inside. I lose my breath, lose my ability to breathe or even care that I need to, and pull my legs up high, wanting him deeper, wanting to feel him entering me forever. He’s heavy, thick, so hard that when his hips meet my thighs I hover at the edge of discomfort. He’s the one making me lose my breath, making me feel like there’s not enough room in my body for him and air at the same time, but nothing has ever felt so good.
I’d tell him I changed my mind, I’ll come with him, if I could find words, but with his arms braced beside my head he starts to move and it’s unlike anything else. It’s unlike everything else. The slow, solid drag of him inside me builds an ache so good it’s enough to make me feel a little unhinged at the thought that the feeling will end at some point.
He’s giving me a gentle warm-up, his eyes on mine as he pulls slowly out, even more slowly pushes back in, occasionally ducking down to slide his mouth over mine. But when I scrape my tongue over his teeth, and he jerks forward, sharp and unexpected, I hear my own tight gasp, and it unleashes something in him. He starts to move, hard and smooth over me, perfect curling thrusts of his hips.
I don’t really know how many times we had sex the other night, but he must have figured out what I need, and he seems to love to watch himself giving it to me. He pushes up on his hands, kneeling between my spread legs, and already I know that when I come it will be unlike anything I’ve felt before. I can hear his grunting breaths and my own sharp exhales. I can hear the slap of the front of his thighs against the inside of mine and the slick, smooth strokes of him moving in and out of me.
I won’t need his fingers or mine or a toy. We fit. His skin slides across my clit again and again and again.
Lola was right when she teased about how it would be with Ansel and me: it is missionary, and there’s eye contact, but it isn’t precious or soft-focus the way she meant. I can’t imagine not looking at him. It would be like trying to have sex without touching.
The pleasure climbs up my legs like a vine, building into a flush I can feel spreading across my cheeks, across my chest. I’m terrified I’ll lose this sensation, that I’m chasing something that doesn’t really exist, but he’s moving faster, and harder, so hard he has to hold my hips with his hands so he doesn’t push me off the bed. His eyes rake over my gasping lips and my breasts that bounce with his thrusts. The way he fucks me makes my slight body feel voluptuous for the first time in my life.
I open my mouth to tell him I’m falling and nothing comes out but a cry for more and yes and this and yes and yes. Sweat drops from his forehead onto my breast and rolls onto my neck. He’s working so hard, holding so much back, waiting waiting waiting for me. I love the restraint and hunger and determination in his beautiful face and I’m at the edge, right there.
Warmth rushes throughout my body a split second before I fall.
He sees it happen. He watches, mouth parting in relief, eyes blazing in victory. My orgasm crashes over me so hard, so consuming, I’m not myself anymore. I’m the savage pulling him down onto me, rutting up into him and gripping his ass to pull him in deeper. I’m pure desperation beneath him, begging, biting his shoulder, spreading my legs as wide as they’ll go.
The wildness unhinges him. I can hear the sheets pop away from the mattress and feel them bunch behind me as he grips them for leverage, moving hard enough that the headboard cracks into the wall.
“Oh,” he groans, rhythm growing punishing. He buries his face in my neck, groaning, “Here. Here. Here.”
And then he opens his mouth on my neck, sucking and pressing, shoulders shaking over me as he comes. I slide my hands over his back, relishing the bunching definition of his tense posture, the curve to his spine as he stays as deep as he can. I shift beneath him to feel his skin on mine, mixing my sweat with his.
Ansel pushes up to his elbows and hovers over me, still pulsing inside as he presses his palms to my forehead and slides them over my hair.
“It’s too good,” he says against my lips. “It’s so good, Cerise.”
And then he reaches between us to grip the condom, pulling out and slipping it off. He drops it blindly in the vicinity of the bedside table and collapses beside me on the mattress, dragging his left hand down his face, across his sweaty chest, where it comes to rest over his heart. I’m unable to look away from the gold band on his ring finger. His stomach tightens with each jagged inhale, jerks with each forceful exhale.
“Please, Mia.”
I have one last refusal in me, and I squeak it out: “I can’t.”
He closes his eyes and my heart splinters, imagining not seeing him again.
“If we hadn’t been drunk and crazy and ended up married . . . would you have come with me to France?” he asks. “Just for the adventure of it?”
“I don’t know.” But the answer is, I might have. I don’t need to move to Boston yet; I plan to—soon—because I had to leave my campus apartment but don’t want to move back in with my parents for the entire summer. A summer in Paris after college is what a woman my age should do. With Ansel—only as a lover, maybe even just as a roommate—it would be a wild adventure. It wouldn’t carry the same weight of moving in with him for the summer, as his wife.
He smiles, a little sadly, and kisses me.
“Say something to me in French.” I’ve heard him say a hundred things while he’s lost in pleasure, but this is the first time I’ve requested it, and I don’t know why I do it. It seems dangerous, with his mouth, his voice, his accent like warm chocolate.
“Do you speak any French?”
“Besides, ‘Cerise’?”
His eyes fall to my lips and he smiles. “Besides that.”
“Fromage. Château. Croissant.”
He repeats “croissant” in a small laughing voice, and when he says it, it sounds like a completely different word. I wouldn’t know how to spell the word he just said, but it makes me want to pull him on top of me again.
“Well, in that case I can tell you, Je n’ai plus désiré une femme comme je te désire depuis longtemps. Ça n’est peut-être même jamais arrivé.” He pulls back, studies my reaction as if I’d be able to decode a word of it. “Est-ce totalement fou? Je m’en fiche.”
My brain can’t magically translate the words, but my body seems to know he’s said something wildly intimate.
“Can I ask you something?”
He nods. “Of course.”
“Why won’t you just annul it?”
He twists his mouth to the side, amusement filling his eyes. “Because you wrote it into our wedding vows. We both vowed to stay married until the fall.”
It’s several long seconds before I get over the shock of that. I sure was a bossy little thing. “But it’s not a real marriage,” I whisper, and pretend I don’t see it when he winces a little. “What does that vow mean anyway if we plan to break all the others about ‘until death do us part’?”
He rolls over and sits up at the edge of his bed, his back to me. He curls over, pressing his hands onto his forehead. “I don’t know. I try not to break promises, I suppose. This is all very weird for me; please don’t assume I know what I’m doing just because I’m holding firm on this one point.”
I sit up, crawl over to him, and kiss his shoulder. “It seems I fake-married a really nice guy.”
He laughs, but then stands, moving away from me again. I can sense he needs distance and it pushes a small ache between two of my ribs.
This is it. This is when I should go.
He pulls on his underwear and leans against the closet door, watching me as I get dressed. I pull my panties up my legs, and they’re still wet from me, from his mouth, too, though the wetnes
s feels cold now. Changing my mind, I drop them on the floor and put on my bra and my jersey dress and step into my flip-flops.
Ansel wordlessly hands me his phone and I text myself so he has my number. When I hand it back, we stand, looking at anything but each other for a few painful beats.
I reach for my bag, pulling out gum, but he quickly moves to me, sliding his hands up my neck to cup my face. “Don’t.” He leans close, sucking on my mouth the way he seems to like so much. “You taste like me. I taste like you.” He bends, licking my tongue, my lips, my teeth. “I like this so much. Let it stay, just for a bit.”
His mouth moves lower, down my neck, nibbling at my collarbone, and to where my nipples press up from beneath my dress. He sucks and licks, pulling them into his mouth until the fabric is soaked. It’s black, so no one but us will know, but I’ll feel the cool press of his kiss even after I walk out of the room.
I want to pull us back to the bed.
But he stands, studying my face for a beat. “Be good, Cerise.”
It occurs to me only now that we’re married, and I would be cheating on my husband if I slept with someone else this summer. But the idea of anyone else getting this man makes something simmer in my belly. I don’t like the thought at all, and I wonder if that’s the same fire I see in his expression.
“You, too,” I tell him.
Chapter SIX
I’M SURE I know what the phrase “weak in the knees” means now because I’m dreading having to get out of my car and use my legs. I’ve been with three people other than Ansel, but even with Luke, sex was never like that. Sex where it’s so wide open and honest that I know even after it’s over—and the heat has dissipated and Ansel isn’t even here beside me anymore—that I would have let him do anything.
It makes me wish I remembered our night in Vegas better. We had hours together then, rather than the paltry cupful of minutes tonight. Because somehow I know it was more honest and free and doubtless than even this was.
The heavy thunk of my car door slamming echoes down our quiet, suburban street. My house looks dark, but it’s too early for them to all be in bed. With the warm summer weather it’s most likely that my family is out on the back patio, having a late dinner.
But once I’m inside, I hear nothing but silence. The house is dark everywhere: in the living room, family room, kitchen. The patio is quiet, every room upstairs deserted. My footsteps slap quietly on the Spanish tile in the bathroom but fall silent as I move along the plush hallway carpet. For some reason I walk into every single room . . . finding no one. In the years since I started college—before I moved my things back into my old bedroom only days ago—I haven’t once been alone in this house, and the realization hits me like a physical shove. Someone is always here when I am: my mother, my father, one of my brothers. How strange that is. Yet now I’ve been given some quiet. It feels like a reprieve. And with this freedom, a current of electricity curls through me.
I could leave without having to confront my father.
I could leave without having to explain anything.
In an impulsive, hot flash, I’m certain this is what I want. I sprint to my room, find my passport, tear off my dress, and pull on clean clothes before hauling the biggest suitcase from the hall closet. I shove everything I can find from my dresser into it, and then practically clear my bathroom counter with a sweep of my arm into my toiletries case. The heavy bag thuds down the stairs behind me, falls over in the hallway as I begin to scribble a note for my family. The lies tumble out, and I struggle to keep from trying to say too much, sounding too manic.
I have an opportunity to go to France for a few weeks! A free ticket, too. I’ll be with a friend of Harlow’s Dad. She owns a small business. I’ll tell you about it later but I’m okay. I’ll call.
Love you,
Mia
I don’t ever lie to my family—or anyone for that matter—but right now, I don’t care. Now that the idea is in my head, the idea of not going to France pushes me into a full-on panic because not going to France means staying here for a few weeks. It means living under the dark cloud of my father’s controlling bullshit. And then it means moving to Boston and starting a life I’m not sure I want.
It means the possibility of never seeing Ansel again.
I look at the clock: I only have forty-five minutes until the plane leaves.
Lugging my bag to my car, I hurl it in the trunk and run to the driver’s side, texting Harlow: Whatever my dad asks you about France, just say yes.
Only three blocks away from my house I can hear my phone buzz on the passenger seat, no doubt with her reply—Harlow rarely puts her phone down—but I can’t look now. I know what I’ll see anyway, and I’m not sure when my brain will quiet down enough for me to answer her WHAT??
Her, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING??
Her, CALL ME RIGHT THE FUCK NOW, MIA HOLLAND!!
So instead, I park—I’m being optimistic, and pull into the long-term parking lot. I drag my bag into the terminal. I check in, silently urging the woman at the ticketing counter to move faster.
“You’re cutting it very close,” she tells me with a disapproving frown. “Gate forty-four.”
Nodding, I tap a nervous hand on the counter and sprint away once she’s handed me my ticket, folded neatly in a paper sleeve. Security is dead at night on a Tuesday, but once I’m through, the long hallway to the gate at the end looms ahead of me. I’m running too fast to be worried about Ansel’s reaction, but the adrenaline isn’t enough to drown out the protesting of my permanently weak femur as I sprint.
At the gate, our flight is already boarding, and I have a panicked moment thinking maybe he’s already on the plane when I can’t pick him out of the mass of heads lined up to head down the jetway. I search wildly, self-consciously, and it’s a horrible, anxious feeling now that I’m here: telling him I changed my mind and want to come to France and
live with him
rely on him
be with him
requires a type of bravery I’m simply not sure I have outside of a hotel room where it’s all a temporary game, or in a bar where liquor let me find the perfect role to play all night. It’s possible I mentally calculate the danger of being relatively drunk for the entirety of the next few weeks.
A warm hand curls around my shoulder and I turn, finding myself staring up at Ansel’s wide, confused green eyes. His mouth opens and closes a few times before he shakes his head as if to clear it.
“Did they let you come down here to say goodbye?” he asks, seeming to try out the words. But then he looks closer: I’ve changed into white jeans, a blue tank top under a green hoodie. I have a carry-on slung over my shoulder, I’m out of breath and wearing what I can only imagine is a look of sheer panic on my face.
“I changed my mind.” I hitch my bag higher on my shoulder and watch his reaction: his smile comes a little too slowly to immediately put me at ease.
But at least he does smile, and it seems genuine. Then he confuses me even more, saying, “I guess I can’t stretch out and sleep on your seat now.”
I have no idea what to say to that, so I just smile awkwardly and look down at my feet. The gate attendant calls out another section of the plane to board and the microphone squawks sharply, making us both jump.
And then, it seems like the entire world falls completely silent.
“Shit,” I whisper, looking back down the way I came. It’s too bright, too loud, too far away from Vegas or even the enclosed privacy of his San Diego hotel room. What the hell am I doing? “I don’t have to come. I didn’t—”
He shushes me, taking a step closer and bending to kiss my cheek. “I’m sorry,” he says carefully, moving from one cheek to the other. “I’m all of a sudden very nervous. That wasn’t funny. I’m so glad you’re here.”
With a heavy exhale, I turn when he presses his ha
nd to my lower back, but it’s as if our heated bubble has been punctured and we’ve stepped offstage and into the even more glaring lights of reality. It presses down on me, suffocating. My feet feel like they’re made of cement as I hand my ticket to the gate attendant, forcing a nervous smile before stepping onto the jetway.
What we know is dimly lit bars, playful banter, the clean, crisp sheets of hotel rooms. What we know is the unrequited possibility, the temptation of the idea. The make-believe. The adventure.
But when you choose the adventure, it becomes real life.
The jetway is filled with a strange buzzing sound I know will stay in my head for hours. Ansel walks behind me, and I wonder if my jeans are too tight, my hair too messy. I can feel him watching me, maybe checking me out now that I’ll be invading his real life. Maybe reconsidering. The truth is, there’s nothing romantic about boarding a plane, flying for fifteen hours with a virtual stranger. It’s the idea that’s exciting. There’s nothing escapist or glossy about overlit airports or cramped airplanes.
We stow our bags, take our seats. I’m in the middle, he’s in the aisle, and there’s an older man reading a paper next to the window whose elbows press into my space, sharp but oblivious.
Ansel adjusts his seat belt and then adjusts it again before reaching above us for the vent. He aims it at himself, then at me, then back at himself before turning it down. He turns on the light, and his hands drop back into his lap, restless. Finally, he closes his eyes and I count as he takes ten deep breaths.
Oh, shit. He’s a nervous flyer.
I am the worst possible person in this moment because I don’t speak freely, not even in moments like this when some easy reassurance is required. I feel frantic inside, and my reaction to “frantic” is to go completely still. I’m the mouse in the field and it feels like every unknown situation in my life is an eagle flying overhead. It’s suddenly comical that I’ve chosen to do this.
Announcements are made, disasters prepared for, and the plane is off, climbing heavily through the night sky. I take Ansel’s hand—it’s the least I can do—and he grips it tightly.
Sweet Filthy Boy Page 8
