Wild Night: A Second Chance Romance

by Charlotte Sloan

  I tugged at her wrists again, bringing her closer to me, and I breathed in her warm skin. My lips met her neck, her collarbone, pulling delicate skin into my mouth. Her hands wriggled in my grasp. She could easily have moved them away. I gave her wrists a soft squeeze and she stilled them, submitting herself to me, giving me her trust, her body.

  And then he was there, behind Macy, his hands on her waist and his lips pressed to the shell of her ear. The air shifted around us, becoming warmer, heavier with Brenn so near. The inaudible words he was whispering to her made her moan against my lips and I swallowed her sounds.

  His hands moved between Macy and me, pulling up her shirt. I released my grip on her wrists, allowing him to slide it off. With her arms free, Macy slid the buttons of my shirt free, fingers greedy to pull the fabric away and move her hands over my chest. I shivered under her touch.

  I stood and her legs slid down my body until she was touching the floor. I curled my fingers into the waistband of her jeans, and with her silent permission, I slid the button free and pushed them down. Once she stepped out of them, I ran my hands down her smooth body until I was gripping her perfect ass, raising her onto me again, feeling her warm center against me.

  I felt the familiar tug of Brenn’s hands on my belt, his firm grip dragging down, his eyes locking with mine over her shoulder. I saw his need, his desire to make this happen. And fuck it, so did I. I needed to know if she really could trust me like Brenn. Love me like Brenn. All my angst dissolved like salt in the rain under their touch on my body.

  Brenn grabbed onto my hips, walking us back to the wall. His one arm snaked around Macy’s waist, supporting her, while his other hand pinched at the stiff peaks of her nipples. Low moans filled the room and my cock began begging for attention.

  I traced her seam with the head, so warm and sweet, before pushing in. Her body tensed around me, squeezing me. I thrust into her with a pace that belied the need I felt building. Something about this moment made me not want to rush this.

  Macy leaned her head against Brenn’s shoulder, a moan leaving her lips, her fingers lacing into my hair. I braced my hands on his shoulders, no longer able to resist her lips. Brenn continued to tease her tits, his hands trapped between us, his mouth on her neck working her from behind. Macy’s lips pulled and teeth nipped. Her hunger matched mine and I fought hard to keep my pace even.

  Brenn’s hand threaded itself into Macy’s at the back of my neck and his mouth broke away from her, seeking mine. And then it was Brenn and me, the old familiarity enveloping. The one constant in my life, the one thing that made everything else seem less shitty. And permeating Brenn’s grip was Macy, all soft curves and hunger.

  Each gentle caress from her small hand was tempered by a nip, a long run of her finger nails along my chest, an indecent oath whispered from perfect lips. I lost track of whose hands were where, whose scent filled my nose. It was both of them, all of them.

  I had wanted to take her as far as she’d let me and to see if a future for all of us was even possible, but with every one of her caressing touches, every moan of pleasure she let go, she was proving it to me.

  My restraint snapped, hips pumping into her with abandon. The sound of skin against skin, the scent of arousal, the tightness of her pussy contracting against me did me in. The sound of our moans echoed in unison. Feeling Brenn’s grip on me tighten and Macy tremble in my arms undid me. I came hard inside of her, pulsing with pleasure and sweet release.

  I hadn’t realized how tight we had all been holding onto one another until I stepped back to let Macy slide down to her feet and I felt the heaviness in my limbs. With swollen lips and no trace of regret, Macy smiled up at me. Her pure acceptance, her willingness to trust when I showed nothing but resistance got to me, and I smiled at her.

  “I guess there’s no going back from that.”

  Brenn turned her in his arms and kissed her in earnest before stepping in to touch his lips to mine. He led the way to his bedroom, and as we settled into bed, all slick with sweat, Brenn threw an arm around my waist and pulled my back close to him. Macy curled up against me, long hair dancing across my arm and soft breaths cooling my skin.

  “This can be as simple or as complicated as we make it,” he said from behind me, and I understood. Resisting their pull would be like trying to stop a freight train.

  “True. And I know how much you hate to complicate life with trivial things. Like birth control, for example.

  He laughed into my skin. “A baby doesn’t complicate things, Mic. Just the opposite.”

  “How so?” Macy asked, voice thick with sleep.

  “It means that we’ll always share a link between us. No matter what happens, there’s proof that we love each other. That we’re a family.”

  Fucking Brenn. I hated it when he was right.

  I smiled against the top of Macy’s head, my hands finding their way to her soft belly, caressing the smooth skin there. Ceremonies and rings never held much appeal for me. Those things could be broken and tarnished as easily as words. This feeling, though, a bond that held Macy to Brenn and both of them to me was something that promised to last a lifetime.

  *****

  THE END

  College Affair

  “Now, Zoe, please be good for me while I get us all packed up and ready for the road trip. Mommy has work to do, unfortunately.”

  I smiled to my cooing, six-month-old baby girl as she rolled around happily on her blanket. Zoe was the center of my world, a world that had once been focused on nothing but getting onto the tenure track in academics. Looking down at my gurgling ball of happiness, I couldn’t believe how narrow my world had once been. From staying up late searching for the perfect sentence for an essay, to being up all night warming bottles and settling cries.

  After finishing college, I had moved to a small town ninety minutes away from where I had studied, which had houses cheap enough for my modest inheritance from my late parents. I moved after finding out I was pregnant. A small group of local moms had helped me out with some baby items, along with a few traditional women who most certainly did not.

  I sighed at the task ahead of preparing us for a road trip and looked around our happy, little home. I was proud of what I had achieved on my own with limited means. The house was a wooden home with a green roof, white paint, and a little garden that I tried to tend (and failed at most days), and a bright interior of soft yellows and creams. Despite struggling budget wise, one luxury I never scrimped on was fresh flowers from the local market; it was difficult being a single mom and sometimes I just needed cheering up. When spending the careful five dollars for a bunch, I told myself a happy mom is a good mom.

  Zoe and I were packing for her to go and stay for the evening with my old college roommate, now a mom of her own who hadn’t gone the grad student route but married after our undergraduate years. I was getting ready to attend a conference at my old college, Harwood University.

  In between everything that had been going on in my life, I had managed to write a published essay in a Slider Magazine on my former studies material, consumer fashion, and I had been invited to a conference on the topic of consumer behavior and fashion. People from the academic world and the fashion industry were flying in and it was big moment for me to be invited, given how small the audience for Slider Magazine was and for my article.

  I had spent the last six months juggling between being a single mom, trying to breastfeed, failing miserably, grappling with the mommy wars, and all the while trying to retain some semblance of my former career and past life, and tonight was my night to revel in it all. I felt in Zoe’s case, seeing her mom make something of herself was the best present I could give my daughter. Especially seeing as her father couldn’t be in the picture to provide that while I stayed home all day with her, which some days I seriously wanted to do forever. Well, until my brain craved adult conversation.

  My passion to continue with my career was what was leading me to the conference tonight. I
may have had to disappear after grad school and give my future academic career away temporarily, but I hadn’t given up on it completely. Creative consumer fashion and developing theories, ideas, case studies, and more on how to see fashion companies produce clothing in a better way was my driving dream.

  One I had given away, to some extent, when I had Zoe, but Zoe as a name meant life, and to me life meant more than just being a mom: it meant being a person who was a mom and that person, to me, is someone who believes where there is a will there is a way—a way to have a career and be a mom.

  I had been really lucky to have studied under the notorious Professor Ben Arbour, former luxury fashion company CEO turned rebel against the whole industry. He held a position at our small, liberal arts college lecturing and researching in consumer affairs and fashion while making a big noise in a small place.

  His op-eds were on everything from exploitation of models to the notions around “Paris Thin” to sweatshops and had been featured everywhere from the New York Times to CNN. That he had left behind a career that had made him rich, celebrated, and cool to come to a college town to comment on it all from an academic perspective made him the ultimate former insider turned outsider. On campus, it also certainly helped he still loved fashion—just not some parts of the industry—and he still dressed like the male model he ruefully admitted to having been in his younger days.

  Ben Arbour. I looked down at Zoe gurgling on the blanket as I tickled her tummy. Zoe Callister, my daughter. Zoe Arbour. Our daughter. Ben and I had had one, ill-thought-out fling, but Zoe, my life, was anything but ill thought out in being there in my sunny living room with its comfy, second-hand couches and hand-me-down, blue rug from my parents, a rug I had dragged from one dorm to another, to one shared apartment to the next.

  Ben. Six foot, rakish, dark hair, lean, muscular build gone a bit more Dad bod in his late thirties, clear, blue eyes that hide what they are thinking when they don’t want to be expressive. Eyes that are expressive when they want to be in a way that keeps you captive and looking at them. Eyes that pleaded with me not to leave when I said I couldn’t possibly take up a position on his research team after finishing grad school. Because I was having his baby. Not that I could tell him that. Eyes that now firmly looked up at me from my baby on the rug—Ben’s eyes in our daughter.

  How could I tell him when he was just about to launch a damning report into how fast fashion was creating disposable clothing and a kind of waste that was not just unethical, but was damning the fashion industry itself in terms of its artistic expression? He was having an affair with his student. It would have ruined him. I closed my eyes against my will and pictured Ben holding court in the bar near campus, Tellers, we used to gather at after class.

  He would sip his whiskey, neat, and lean back in his chair and expansively proclaim, “How can an industry that says you can throw you t-shirt away and buy a new one, after a month’s wear, produce fashion of any value?”

  I would argue back with him, “But luxury fashion still exists! They produce lasting pieces of quality.”

  Ben would smile at me, his eyes warm and enjoying the intellectual banter, “Ah, but May, couture is just for show, it’s just to sell the accessories you need to replace each season; that’s not driving people to create fashion art of lasting value.”

  We would argue back and forth as the night wound on and the drinks kept coming and the people faded away. Until it was just us. I argued a man shouldn’t be head of a fashion company designing for women, Ben laughing and teasing me because he already accomplished that. How does a man know what should go on a woman’s body? And then one night, I dared him to prove to me he knew a woman’s body well enough to decide what should be sold to clothe it.

  *****

  Ben and I sat in the corner of Tellers, sipping our drinks as Pete, the bartender, made last call. Ben was trying to talk me into trying neat whiskey, his favorite, and ungluing me from my white wine. His ability as a mentor and professor to get me to try new things was why I liked him, even if I was usually resistant at first. I stared at the whiskey, unwilling, and smoothed down my casual, cream-colored dress over my thighs. I had chosen it as it went so well with my long, dark hair, which I had twisted up into a messy bun for the evening. The dress showed just enough cleavage to keep things tasteful.

  Since coming to study under him, I had learnt Ben’s rebel ways extended beyond what he taught in the classroom. Ben believed a professor to grad students should be like it used to be, where the professor took an interest in their best students’ lives and taught them knowledge that went beyond the lecture hall.

  So far that had included learning to appreciate early American cinema, screened at his palatial apartment on the luxe and hip north side of town, along with cigars (Cuban), fine leather work (Italian), and lessons on how to be upgraded by a flight attendant. Tonight, it was learning to drink neat whiskey.

  “Now, May,” Ben said in his best professor’s authority voice, “it looks like it is just you and me left for tonight's lesson.”

  I looked around at the table of eight now down to us two. Sarah had had to dash off early in the evening to grade papers for juniors. Paul and Alex had a band to catch. Sasha, Greg, and Cait had just drifted off over time, casually picking up jackets and papers and leaving with a laugh. Normally everyone wanted to stay around Ben as late as possible, picking his brain on this or that or hearing his dirty, funny stories of the steamy side of the fashion world.

  “Yes, Ben, what is tonight’s lesson? We didn’t get to it in time for the others,” I said with concern leaning in to him.

  Ben smiled. Surprisingly to me when I met him, I noticed Ben didn’t have a model-perfect smile. They were his natural god given teeth, he liked to say. His slightly off center smile gave character to his face and had helped him stand out as a male model amongst the blandness of the current standard.

  “May…maybe I deliberately left the lesson till last just for you,” he said teasingly.

  I blinked. I was surprised by his attention and I liked it. I was the top student in the class, but he didn’t seem to pay much attention to me, nor comment much on my top marks or smart comments. He never praised or commented on my clothes or appearance, not like how he teased the very serious Sarah about her anti-fashion grey wardrobe or Greg for constantly buying leather jackets in search of the perfect one, all the while agonizing over whether he was making the right consumer choices.

  Ben liked to tease us, saying that we may be studying consumer science, but we could still have fun with our consumer choices. But not me, he never commented on me, not even when I wore something from the label he had taken to the top: Brinkton.

  “Well, Ben,” I replied with a hint of flirtation I couldn’t hide, “How lucky am I to be given a private lesson by the Great Ben Arbour?”

  Something flashed in Ben’s eyes as I spoke, something unknown to me. He quickly recovered his poise though, shrugging his shoulders in his navy blazer, which he wore over a plain, white-shirt with jeans and tan, leather shoes.

  “May, let’s get something clear,” he said, “No one needs to be in awe of me. I grew up in small town, grew up poor, happened to look like what the market wanted to see more of, and then got lucky to be in the right place at the right time when Brinkton needed a savvy, new CEO. It’s nothing special; don’t build me up.”

  I paused and replied, “Ben, cut it out. No one gets to your level of success without hard work. Is that not what you’ve always told us to put into our studies?”

  Ben considered this for a moment, then ignored my point, which he had an annoying habit of doing. It left me hanging; was my point in class not worth considering? Was it foolish? Did he just not have an answer? Was he being an asshole like so many in the industry and academia world said he was when they disagreed with his blunt points?

  Ben spoke, “Try this,” and he pushed the spare whiskey he had ordered across the table to me.

  I knew I didn’t have a choic
e: Ben didn’t take no for an answer. He was determined to drag us—me—out of the comfort zone. He didn’t see how we could make uncomfortable studies in consumer science that went against the grain or were unpopular when we couldn’t even bring ourselves to read a different book or watch a different movie than we usually did.

  I picked up the whiskey and kept my eyes on Ben. I drained the drink in one go—that will show him. He may have pushed me outside of my comfort zone, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of enjoying it like I was some hick who didn’t know what was good. I grew up modestly, just like him, and I resented his cultural authority sometimes. I know he never intended to make me feel foolish about not knowing cool things, but I couldn’t help feel that way sometimes.

  That was all well and good as a resistance strategy until I choked on the neat whiskey and went grasping for a glass of water. Ben was in peals of laughter, his arms folded up in front of his muscular chest, his eyes crinkled and a big bellow of a laugh escaped from him as he took in my misfortune.