Hold on Tight

by Serena Bell

  She concentrated on his erection for a moment, rubbing, and he made a harsh, desperate sound that kicked her own arousal up a notch.

  His body under hers was lean and hard. Something about the way they moved against each other, something straining and ample, had gotten deep into her brain, deep into that well of mind-body where sex happened, where emotion met sensation, where the glow of physical arousal met longing, and she was tumbling down into it, faster than she’d intended.

  She lost the sense of where she left off and he began, a losing of boundaries that began at her mouth but spread all over her body, got in her arms and legs and her teeth. In her toes. She wanted even less definition, wanted the sense of her excitement building to get mixed up in the feeling of melting into him. There was all this body between them, all this technical stuff, the way he rubbed his erection against her, the building heat between her legs, the way their mouths fit—and sometimes didn’t fit—perfectly, the way their teeth clicked, the way their tongues battled over who was the boss. She liked the battle; it matched the way the rest of her body felt against his, one of them and then the other taking control of the encounter, trading off.

  Things were familiar and unfamiliar. No smell of the lake—algae, clean mountain water, whatever that strange recipe had been. But the smell of his sweat, distinctly male, salt and effort and drive, was so like that night. And the skin beyond the sweat, something human, vulnerable, superheated, and so personal, the scent of every pheromone, every strand of DNA that made him who he was. She wondered if the message of him was hidden, somehow, in Sam. As if she were reclaiming something she knew belonged to her because the fresh sunshine-on-warm-kiddo scent of Sam had been preparing her for this moment for years.

  Jake wove his fingers through hers the way he had in the kitchen, but more explicitly now, slipping them in and out, a parody, a tease, a delight. A small echo of their legs intertwined, the warm, real feel of him between her thighs, the prosthesis cool but its own kind of intimacy, part of who he was, part of where he’d been, part of what she’d missed knowing about him. If he had asked her right then if she wanted him to take it off, she would have said no. And not because of some nonsense fetish-y thing. Because it was him.

  Him. Rough. Not as polished as Aaron, not as nice. She’d been pleased by Aaron, by the fit of their bodies together, by his attentiveness. But this was different and better, partly because it had a messier feel, sandpaper edges, not only the scrape of his stubble against her face but the rough way he was kissing her now, like there was anger under his desire. He wasn’t hurting her, but he wasn’t treating her like she was delicate, either.

  She had a feeling he would not always wait for her to come first. But by the same token, that he would be right there with her. Not hovering some distance above, wondering if he’d gotten it all right, analyzing and calculating. He’d be down in his body, in her body, in the moment.

  “Can I get you out of some of these?” He had a fistful of her silk top. Against her bare arms, the couch had a velvety softness. Sex made your brain wake up and take notice of things. At the same time it made you forget things that should have been important, like the fact that you were taking off your clothes in the living room while your seven-year-old drowsed upstairs.

  “I’m going to run upstairs. Make sure—”

  “Go,” he agreed.

  On wobbly legs, she climbed the stairs to where Sam slumbered. “Good night, buddy,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead. He sighed and settled deeper into sleep.

  She stopped in her bedroom and grabbed a chain of condom packets, sticking them in her pocket. This time, she knew Jake would be on the sofa when she went downstairs. And she knew how she’d feel …

  Though not, she realized, when she stepped back into the living room and saw him sitting on the couch, staring into a middle distance, seeing God knows what, how deep in her gut she’d feel it.

  “He’s asleep.”

  She said it like a challenge, hands on hip, eyes full of suggestion. The provocation went straight to his dick, riling up some part of him that desperately wanted to run this show. That had been cowering under her because he didn’t know how to use his new body to flip her over, the way he would have before. The littlest things tripped him up, literally and figuratively. Sex was all new, complex, and so different from the regular motion of foot against the ground, different even from the various complicated things he’d learned to do in the meantime: go up and down stairs, lunge for something that was falling, catch his balance when he was the thing falling. But now he had a fresh chance, and he would get her under him on this sofa so he could pin her there with the weight of his body and pantomime the way he’d thrust when he was inside her.

  First, he wanted her naked.

  “Take your clothes off.”

  He’d been trying for suggestion, but his brain knew what it wanted, and the words came out a command. He had a split second to wonder how she’d feel about that before she crossed her arms and pulled her blouse over her head. Underneath, she was softer and rounder than she’d been at eighteen. Her bra was all lace, and through it, he could see her nipples clearly, the areolae larger and darker than he remembered. His brain was shorting out, seeing all the curves, the softness he wanted under his palms—he hoped his hands weren’t offensively rough, and then he realized he hoped they were, hoped she’d feel calluses against her skin, hoped it would turn her on the way it was turning him on right now thinking about it, the contrasts he craved.

  “Unzip your pants.”

  She made a small sound in the back of her throat, and her hand went to her fly.

  “You like it when I tell you what to do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Take them off.”

  She pushed them down, a slow tease of revealed flesh. Her legs were pale and smooth, and he wanted to pinch the soft skin on her vulnerable inner thighs. Better yet, bite it.

  “Step out of them.”

  She did. Her panties matched the nude lace of her bra, and through them, he could see the dark triangle of her curls. He wanted her to stand there and let him look. Let the pressure build in his groin, at the base of his spine, the demand expanding and unfolding in him, ancient and familiar, but brand new, too, as much a relief as a torment. Hello, old friend. He’d had no idea how much he’d missed the garden-variety experience of wanting to bang a woman into next week until he’d gone months without it.

  She took a step toward him.

  “Stand there a minute. Let me look at you.”

  “I’m self-conscious.”

  “There is not a fucking thing for you to be self-conscious about.”

  “You’re staring.”

  “I’ve had sex that isn’t as good as staring at you.”

  She laughed. “You’re full of shit.”

  “No.” He said it quietly. Because it didn’t need emphasis, it was so simply true. “Best sex I’ve had in over a year, for sure.”

  Her face stilled. She understood what this meant to him, or at least she was trying to.

  “You haven’t had sex since you lost your leg.”

  He shook his head. “No. I haven’t.”

  She didn’t say anything. He hoped she wouldn’t make too big a deal out of it. At the same time, he was glad that she knew.

  He’d been there the first time she’d had sex. It made cosmic sense she’d be here now, while his leg lost its virginity.

  He felt the smile under the surface, not quite making the connection all the way up to his mouth, trying to remember its old pathway.

  When she finally spoke, she said, “I want to know what it feels like.”

  “What what feels like?”

  “This purely visual sexual experience you’re having.”

  “You want me to talk dirty?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted.

  “I’m not a poet.”

  “I don’t like poetry.”

  “I’m like a locker room.”

  “J
ust talk.”

  “I’m supposed to be giving the commands around here.” Bantering with her this way was making him even harder.

  “Command away,” she said with a wave of her hand. “But if I’m going to stand here while you sit over there, you’re going to have to tell me what’s going on in your head. Big and little. Not that there’s anything little about you,” she amended quickly, and made him laugh. Again.

  “It feels fucking good,” he said. “My dick is harder than it’s been possibly ever, and you haven’t even touched it. This is like blow-job hard.”

  “Is blow-job hard the gold standard?”

  “You set a new gold standard, baby. Lie down.” He stood up.

  She stretched that gorgeous body of hers out along the length of the couch. He wanted to look some more, but he made himself pull his T-shirt over his head instead.

  The look on her face.

  He’d forgotten.

  “God, Jake.”

  “Shrapnel.”

  In his sleep, he could catalog them, the scars, every one. The ones like polka dots dug into the cap of his shoulder, the ones like claw marks a little lower than his kidney. The single, deep, puckered red gouge on his thigh. When he couldn’t sleep, he fingered them one by one, counting them, ticking them off in his mind, taking a strange comfort from them.

  She got up and came toward him.

  He couldn’t have said why, but he did not want her to touch the scars. “Don’t.”

  She looked startled. His voice had been much harsher than he’d intended, a voice you’d use to call off a focused soldier, not a woman who only wanted to be gentle with you.

  “Lie down.” His voice still rough.

  She did it, and he saw something on her face that wasn’t fear and wasn’t surprise. She liked the harshness.

  Everything that had happened up to this point had been playing. He could see that now. He could see it on her face; he could feel it in the surge of blood that rocked his erection. He got his clothes off fast. He got himself on the couch over her, wearing only his briefs, a thin layer of cotton and a thinner layer of lace between them. She moaned and clutched at him, and he clutched back, kissing her face, kissing her mouth, biting her, licking her, rubbing himself all over her, and she was struggling with his briefs, trying to get him free, and he helped her shove them down. “Condom,” she whimpered. “They’re in the pocket of my pants.”

  He levered himself down and grabbed them, but he couldn’t brace himself properly over her so he could get the condom on. He had to stand up. Fucking prosthetic leg. He should take it off. He knew most guys did, when they had sex, so the socket wouldn’t get in the way. But he should have done it sooner. Now it would be a thing. An awkward, weird, moment-killing thing. Better to do the best he could. He rolled the condom down, watching her eyes on his hands.

  He wanted to redeem what had happened between them at the lake. He wanted to prove to himself that he could still do what men did.

  It was too much pressure to put on anything. A smarter man would have stopped. Would have put some space between his own expectations and what he was about to do. But he wouldn’t. Maybe because she was lying there and looking at him like he was a fucking god, and no one had looked at him like he was anything other than a peculiarity in so long he’d forgotten what it felt like. Or maybe because he liked her so goddamned much. Or because the demand in his body, the tightness of his balls, the roar from his chest down to his knees, was too much to ignore.

  He wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop.

  Getting himself back on the couch was awkward. He knelt with his good leg beside her hip and swung his prosthesis over her. He had to brace himself, hard, on his hands, but his body, even broken, remembered the routine. There was still the same magnetic pull, the way her desire tugged on his, the deep need to bury himself in her. She licked her lips and he took the bait, falling into a long, sweet tangle of tongues that wrenched him outside his head, brought him without conscious thought to the brink of her, the tip of his dick pressed to her wetness, as she thrust her hips up at him. The heat between her legs, her curves and swells and generosity all around him, wrapping him, inviting him. The scent of her—rich, salty, primordial—boring down right to the center of his reptile brain. He knew exactly what came next, and he did it, pressing up into her with a long, thick slide that drew a harsh groan of pleasure from her.

  She was tight. Hot. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back, her lips parted. She was panting and begging, still, his name, over and over, and please, and his body responded. The urge to thrust boiled up in him, deeper than brain, deeper than balls, deeper than heart. He withdrew, got ready to plunge again, all the way this time. He wanted to drive into her with all the force he was capable of. He wanted to press her so deep into the couch cushions that they would hold an imprint of her body for days. He wanted every stroke into her to shove her toward the head of the couch—hell, he wanted to inch her up the cushions until she had to brace herself so he didn’t drive her head into the arm of the couch. So she’d be pushing back against his thrusts with equal and opposite force, a primitive balance. He wanted to rut, to rub, to fuck the hell out of her.

  His prosthesis slipped between the couch cushions and the back of the couch and wedged there.

  He didn’t have enough control or enough mobility to unstick himself. He still had enough leverage to fuck her, but not as deeply, not as thoroughly, as he wanted to.

  Instead, he was stuck with the narrow range of motion allowed to him by his wedged knee. And the reality of the knee had also tethered his brain. His mind was stuck in that broken, aching, fucked-up part of him instead of in his dick where it was supposed to be, or inhabiting his body fully as she arched under him and her skin slid, slick with sweat, across the roughness of his chest hair.

  He was a piece of silicone and metal and wire buried between two couch cushions.

  And he was losing his erection.

  Chapter 19

  “Don’t run away.”

  Jake was struggling back into his clothes. He wouldn’t look at her.

  She pulled a fleece throw off the back of the couch and covered herself, sitting up. “I’m serious, Jake. I’m not upset. You warned me. You said yourself, this is how it’s been. And there’s obviously nothing wrong with you physically, so—just—don’t run away. Please.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  His face was hard, expressionless, as he zipped and buttoned and dragged his T-shirt over his head. When his head reappeared she saw it—the humiliation in his eyes.

  “Maybe I don’t. But I want to.”

  It had been good, so good. She didn’t have words for how full of him she had felt even when they were just kissing, for how the reality of his cock inside her had pushed that fullness over some edge she’d never even imagined existed. She didn’t have words for the silky slip, the glossy slide of him against her sensitive opening, the heaviness of his weight, the look on his face when he’d finally gotten all the way inside her, prayer and curse, blessing and blasphemy. She didn’t have words for how she’d wanted to receive everything about him, the anger she could see on his face, his need begging in his eyes, the way he braced himself as if he were going to deliver something that was part gift, part mean withholding. She wanted it as rough as he wanted to give it; she wanted it for as long as he could hold out; she wanted it now and then again after the first time. She feared she would never be done wanting it.

  “I don’t want to talk. This isn’t some talk-show therapy session about erectile dysfunction. This is my fucking life, okay?”

  He said it over his shoulder. He was walking toward the door. He was going to run away and she couldn’t let him. Not again.

  He was so angry. All the lust and the desperation that he’d needed to pour into her had nowhere to go now. Everything about him—the stiffness in his shoulders, the tightness of his jaw, the way he’d half turned away from her—kept her at bay. Until the moment when h
e lifted his chin and turned to her, and she saw his eyes. They were dark and naked and needy and she was willing to be slapped down by him if that was what was going to happen, because he was Jake and he’d taken care of her, of Sam, today, and if he needed her, needed something, needed anything, she would not run away from him, no matter how scary he looked.

  “So don’t talk. Just sit here. I won’t ask you questions. Just don’t run away. I don’t care if you talk. You can sit there and stare into space and say nothing. But stay. Stay with me.”

  For a moment, she thought he would ignore her. Then he turned and came back to her. Sat heavily on the couch. “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  They were quiet, so quiet she could hear the ice moving in the fridge ice-maker in the next room. The low hum of her next-door neighbor’s heat pump kicking on. But it was not a bad silence. It was a silence in which she could feel him doing what she’d asked. Staying.

  “Don’t move,” she said. She got up and went to the bookshelf, pulling several thick volumes off the bottom shelf. She came back and sat beside him, not close enough to touch, but close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body. She set the volumes next to her and pulled one onto her lap. Opened it.

  “Is that him?”

  She nodded. The first page was all Sam, on the warming table, swaddled in the bassinet, held in various people’s arms. She’d bled, badly, so they’d been busy stabilizing her and she wasn’t in any of the pictures, not those early ones.

  He examined them closely, one by one.

  She felt a wave of regret and remorse. It was partially the memories the photos brought on, the terror of being alone with such a vulnerable little creature, the desperate wish for someone who would take half the responsibility for keeping him alive. But it was also the awe on Jake’s face, the realization that when she’d made the decision to stop searching for him, she’d also made a decision about what moments in Sam’s life to deprive him of.

  She led him through the moments, through the photos. Sam sitting up for the first time, canted forward, in imminent danger of a face plant that came the moment after she took the picture. Sam crawling for the first time, chasing one of her shoes across the room. Sam’s first step, Sam’s first restaurant, Sam’s first insipid, folksy kid-music concert.