by Piper Lennox
“Here.” He guides my hand. The light flickers to green; he pushes the door open and turns me, kissing me so hard we both stumble inside.
I expect more teasing. But the second the door shuts behind us, he drops to his knees.
The dress flutters over him like a tent. His thumbs hook into my panties. They drop to the floor as he grips my hipbones in his hands, pulls me closer, and makes contact.
“Cohen,” I moan, as soon as his mouth touches me. My knees shake, threatening to buckle; I have no choice but to lean against him, more and more as he traces shapes around my clit, then glides his tongue inside.
We’re wasted and the darkness is thick and God, I need this so much. I want Cohen like the fix to a craving. No rhyme or reason. Just relentless, engrained desire.
“Put something inside me,” I tell him. I gather my dress and pull it off over my head. Something rips. I’ve probably popped the eyehook or a seam. Good.
“Like what?”
“Anything. Please.”
Cohen keeps his eyes on mine. I feel the tips of his fingers at my entrance. Then, slowly, gloriously—finally—he pushes them inside.
“Shit, yes!” I brace my hands against his shoulders when he finds my G-spot. Colors erupt behind my eyelids as he licks me again.
I can’t even warn him. I come on his fingers like an avalanche sweeping down a valley, one continuous, trembling crash. Somehow, when my knees give out, he holds us both up.
When I recover enough to find my balance, he rises, fingers still inside me.
“You’re loud,” he breathes, smirking as he kisses me.
“I am not. I’m just drunk.”
“No, you’re loud. And I love it.” He spins his fingers inside me again and catches my bottom lip between his teeth when I moan.
I’ve never been loud, even when wasted far beyond the level I am now. I can’t help but wonder what it is about Cohen that changed that.
His erection strains against his khakis as I find the belt buckle and undo it. He rewards me for unzipping him by moving his fingers that much harder.
“Stop,” I breathe, laughing and silently praying he’ll do anything but listen. “I can’t get your pants off if you do that. You’re making my hands shake.”
Cohen grins and fingers me even harder, until my knees give out again.
“Got you,” he says, when he catches me with his other arm. I feel the hotel bed on my back, suddenly, and wonder how on earth he managed to get me here. I didn’t even feel my feet leave the ground.
This time, Juliet grabs a pillow to muffle herself.
“Don’t do that.” I pull it off her face and throw it behind us. “Let me hear.”
“No. It’s embarrassing.”
“It’s sexy as hell.” I get up, step out of my pants and boxers, and get back on the bed. She rocks back and forth with my weight, the mattress shifting, and eyes my erection.
“I don’t have condoms on me.”
“I’m on the Pill.” She shivers.
“Here.” I get up and tug the covers out from underneath her, then pull them over us as I climb back in. “Better?”
“Yes.” She bites her lip as I enter. The sight is more than enough to make up for all the alcohol in my system. When I roll my hips against her, filling her and reveling in the shudder of her sex around mine, she gasps.
The faint moonlight reveals glitter on her collarbone, her shoulders, everywhere shimmering as we move. I laugh.
“What?”
I lift her arm to show her.
“I hate weddings,” she grumbles.
“Me, too.”
The airy, high-pitched noise she makes when I drive deep is like a Pavlovian tone: every time I hear it, I get the uncontrollable urge to kiss her and feel the sound vibrate through me.
“Do you mind,” she whispers, panting as I pick up speed, “if I...if I touch myself?”
I can’t help but laugh again. “Not at all.”
Her hand slips to her stomach, then stops. She looks embarrassed.
“Here.” I angle my hips so she can reach. When she still doesn’t move, I grab her hand and slip it between us.
Figuring it’ll help if I don’t stare, I lean down and kiss her.
“Show me how you touch yourself.”
Her breath catches.
Her hand moves.
“That’s it.” I kiss her again as her pace quickens. The rest of her goes still as a doll, the higher it all builds. My hips drive faster.
I put my mouth by her ear. “Come for me, Juliet,” I urge her.
“Cohen! Cohen, yes....” Her shoulders lift from the bed; she buries her face in my neck.
I sink inside completely as my orgasm collides with hers. She keeps clinging to me even when it ends, right through the aftershocks.
“Oh, my God.” Finally, I feel her hold loosen. She lowers herself back to the pillows and puts her hand over her heart.
A flush sweeps across her breasts, pale pink and spreading to her neck. It might just be the liquor. But I hope at least part of it, even the smallest bit, is because of me.
I push her hair off her neck and kiss the baby-soft arc behind her ear, the hair there blonde and fine like the skin of a peach. As I slip out and lie beside her, pulling the blanket higher around us, she turns to face me.
“Not bad,” she chokes, “for a cotton candy guy.”
My laugh echoes in the darkness. “Not bad yourself. For a wedding slave.”
Juliet smiles and shuts her eyes, rolling closer. I slip my arm around her and watch the progression of her breathing: fast and heavy, normal, then the drawn-out ribbon of sleep.
I don’t know when I drift, myself. The last thing I’m aware of is the moonlight, caught inside every speck of glitter on her skin.
4
“Fuck!”
I wake up to a panic alarm.
No, I realize, when I see Juliet dumping her purse across the bed: I’m hearing a cell phone.
“Hey.” I smile and reach for her, intent on a repeat performance of last night before grabbing breakfast together. Levi will be pissed if I don’t bring the van back soon, but he’s probably already enraged I didn’t bring it back last night. Oh, well. In for a penny.
“I’m late. I slept through my first four alarms. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
It makes me dizzy just to watch her; she throws a suitcase onto the bed, right on my feet, and starts shoving in clothes. “Do you have to work today?”
“No.”
“Then what’s your rush? Slow down.” I reach for her again and catch her hand. “Stay.”
Her eyes could melt my hand down to nothing. I let go.
“I’ve got to get back to the venue. I’m supposed to have all the decorations cleared out by noon or my sister gets a huge late fee.”
“Relax, I’m sure everyone else has already taken care of it.”
“There is no ‘everyone else,’” she snaps. “It was my job.”
I reach out and shut the suitcase. “Wait a second. You’re the only person, out of God knows how many, who offered to clean up your sister’s reception?”
Juliet does a double-take at me as she dresses in a T-shirt and black leggings. They lend new meaning to the word “skintight.” Shit—I really wanted that encore.
“No,” she says, after a minute. “She asked me.”
“You. She asked you, and only you, to do all that work. By yourself.”
“I don’t have time for this, okay? Call me a doormat or pushover, whatever you want. It’s still got to get done, so I need to get over there—now. Have you seen my car keys?”
“Not that you need them,” I remind her, as I toss the mess of metal and keychains her way. “We took a car here.”
Juliet furrows her brow at me, then curses again.
“I’ll get us another one,” I assure her. She goes back to human-tornado mode.
When we’re both dressed, I heft her suitcase into the hallway. “Anything else?”
>
For the first time all morning, she holds completely still as she looks around the room. “No, I think I got it all. Um...thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
During the ride to the reception hall, she fidgets, bites her lip, and spirals into general madness. It makes me tense just to watch.
“Can I ask,” I say suddenly, “why did you tell your sister yes? I get the basics of it: she asked, you have a hard time saying no to her because of your mom and all that, but—”
“How’d you know about my mom?”
I risk glancing at her. “Um...you told me. Last night.” What else doesn’t she remember? Seeing her sister drive off in the limo? Our kiss on the wall?
The way she sighed my name and relaxed against me, just before she fell asleep?
“Oh.” Her face softens. “Right.”
I clear my throat. “Anyway,” I go on, “why didn’t your sister hire a wedding planner, or a venue coordinator, or a—a decorator, at least? Like literally anyone whose job it is to do that stuff? And why didn’t you suggest it?”
“I did. Viola felt it was a waste of money they could put to other things.” She looks like she wants to roll her eyes. I know I do.
“Uh-huh. Other things like that violinist during the cocktail hour, or the seven-tier cake, or—not to shoot myself in the foot here, just saying—a cotton candy guy?”
Juliet eyes me and pulls back her hair. “It’s not really your business how people do or don’t spend their money.”
“But it is your business,” I counter, “when it means you working yourself to the bone to pick up their budgeting slack. That’s not fair. And I see it happen all the time in this industry. I mean, these are people’s sisters and best friends, but they treat them like slaves just because they’re getting marr—”
“I get it, all right?” Juliet’s words are shrill, filling up the car. The driver stares at us.
“Sorry.” I look out my window. A restaurant has a wait for brunch, people smoking on the sidewalk and laughing with each other; two moms push kids in jogging strollers across an intersection. It’s always strange, the morning after a wedding. You forget the whole world wasn’t there, too.
We pull up to the reception hall. Juliet scurries to the backdoor while I thank the driver, then follow at my own pace.
“It’s locked.” She rattles the door again, then throws her hands into the air. “Fantastic.”
I try the door, too.
“What, you don’t believe me?”
“No,” I say coolly, flinging her attitude right back. “Just double-checking.”
While she paces in a circle and rubs her face, I notice the glitter still on her skin. Every time she circles into a patch of sunlight, she shimmers. It’d make me laugh, if I thought she wouldn’t murder me for it.
And, if I didn’t think she’d write me off, I’d tell her she’s just as beautiful now as she was last night—drunk, sober, or hungover. Makeup perfect, smeared, or gone. Glitter and all.
“I have an idea.”
She looks at me through her fingers. “You do?”
“Yeah. I see a way inside.”
Juliet walks to where I am and squints against the sun. “Where?”
“Right there.”
“Right....” Her voice trails. “Cohen.”
“I’m serious.” I motion to the window again, opened for ventilation last night by a custodian with a pole-hook. It’s positioned right next to a drainage pipe.
Well, not right next to it. But close.
“I’m not climbing up there. It’s two stories over nothing but concrete, and you don’t even know what’s on the other side of that window.”
“It’s directly over a ledge, and right below that is the stage where the deejay was.” I pause, cutting my eyes at her. “And you wouldn’t be climbing it. I would.”
“What?” She backs away from me, like I’ve just told her there’s a bomb strapped to my chest. “Cohen, no—”
“It’s either this,” I say patiently, “or you let your sister get hit with that fee. Except, knowing you, you’ll pay it before she even gets billed.” I wait. “Am I right?”
Juliet bites her lip and looks at the window once more. “I couldn’t ask you to do that for me. It’s too dangerous.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No.” She shakes her head and turns back to the lot, digging her keys from her purse. “I’ll just call Vi and explain. Or maybe I can call the venue woman and talk her into dropping the fee, if I come in really early on Monday….”
The sound of my keys hitting the ground makes her spin back on her heel.
“Cohen,” she barks, snatching up my key ring, then my dress shirt, and finally, my tie. She tries to shove them into my arms, but I jog away backwards to the drainpipe.
“Oh, my God, this is insane! You’re going to crack your head open!”
“Only if you keep screaming and distracting me,” I huff. I’m already halfway to the window when she catches up, complaining from the ground below.
The pipe is held on with brackets drilled into the brick, perfect hand- and footholds. It’s probably not built for the weight of a human, but feels solid enough. I tune Juliet out and concentrate on the cement blocks under the window, already hot from the sun. They’re plenty strong.
Even so, as I swing from the pipe to the ledge by nothing but my fingertips, I feel afraid. You’d have to be a moron—or my brother, in his reckless days—not to get scared, up here.
Juliet screams.
“Stop,” I order, and lift my other arm to the ledge, hefting myself up. My dress shoes aren’t the best for gripping this kind of wall, but they get the job done; it takes me just a few seconds to get up and over the window frame.
The building’s eerily quiet and cool. I look down. The brick ledge I remembered being here is farther away than I thought, so dropping to it sends a shock through both ankles. But that’s nothing compared to the next one.
When I unlock the back door through the kitchen and wave Juliet inside, she punches me.
“Ow!”
“That,” she fumes, “was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do. Ever.”
“We got inside, didn’t we?” I walk ahead, holding the door to the reception hall. “It really wasn’t that dangerous, by the way. I’m an excellent climber—in case you couldn’t tell.”
“Then why are you limping?”
My ego hurts more than my ankles. “Let’s just say that stage I saw, under the ledge last night? Yeah.... Apparently that belonged to the deejay.”
Juliet whirls to face the corner, where I dropped from the brick ledge onto... nothing.
“You’re an idiot,” she sighs, immediately setting to work gathering up the remnants of her sister’s dream day: wooden signs, fake flowers, and miles of ribbon. But even as she hustles from table to table, refusing to look at me, I see the faintest smile.
“So,” she says, after we’ve worked in silence for at least twenty minutes, “where’d you learn to climb? Get bitten by a spider?”
“Just lots of painful practice, growing up.”
“Ah,” she nods. “At the nudist trailer park, I’m guessing.”
“Actually, yes.” I throw a fake flower at her. She volleys it back, her laugh ringing through the hall like church bells. It’s almost as good as the sound of her calling out my name.
Levi taught me well.
When we were kids at the Freak Farm (his name for the nudist colony, actually called Freedom Farm: A Clothing-Free Community), we’d scale trailers, swing ourselves up into treetops, and balance on fences like tightrope walkers.
Our mother screamed whenever she caught us doing it. But that was before our neighbor caught her catching us, put his hand on her shoulder, and said, “Relax, Liz. Think about what you want those boys to learn.”
Normally, Mom was more than willing to listen to Alvin Thompson’s hippie/Buddhist, high-off-his-rocker wisdom, but not that day. “A
l, I don’t have time for this.” She leveled her gaze with mine: I was the easiest to break. “Cohen Barclay Fairfield, you get down here this instant.”
To her credit, what we were doing was dangerous: gripping the top of the chain-link fence that lined the community, kicking ourselves off, and managing to hold ourselves in a perfect vertical line, essentially hand-standing on the fence. Levi was better than me and could stay upright for minutes at a time, even moving his hands in a jerky walking motion, back and forth.
I, however, kept crashing back against the fence, raising an unholy racket that drew attention from our neighboring community, a regular trailer park. A little girl in a sundress pointed at us through the trees. “Look at that!” she told her friend. “They’re naked!”
Mom’s voice shot through me like ice, so I let myself crash back against the fence and began my descent while Levi called me a chicken. When I looked down to see just how angry she was—and gauge how bad a whooping I’d get—she wasn’t there.
A few yards back, she was turned away from us, listening while Mr. Thompson spoke in that riddling, soft way of his.
I crept up behind them, my silent, bare feet so filthy, they were almost black.
“...moved them here for a reason, right? Freedom? A purer life, yeah?”
“Yes,” my mother said, a little sharply, but I saw her shoulders relax. “I wanted to show them a better way to live than being ruled by—by money, and profit, and rigid expectations.....”
Mr. Thompson smiled as her voice faded. “I’ve seen the way they climb all over this place. Trix and I heard them on top of our trailer last night, matter of fact. And you know what? We loved it. What your boys are doing, Liz? That’s living as free as they can. You can’t bring them to a place like this, preaching freedom, then tell them to keep both feet on the ground.”
My mom closed her eyes and sighed. “You’re right,” she said, after a moment. She turned around, already drawing a breath to call up to us again, but started when she saw me by her feet.
“Cohen.” Bit by bit, her face transformed with a smile. “I...I didn’t see you.”
“I’m on the ground now, Mama.” I pointed to the dirt underneath us, proof. “Please don’t punish me.”
