by Serena Bell
Jake got stuck on Disney World, his hand suspended with the page half-turned as he pored over the shots of Sam—in mouse ears, sandwiched between his grandparents, high above in the people mover.
“Did you ever go?” she asked.
“Yeah.” There was a look on his face.
“Good?”
“It was one of our better family trips,” he said. “It was not too long after my dad stopped being able to work, before he was drinking so much.”
Their ride on the Ferris wheel seemed like a paltry substitute for five days of watching Sam gleefully shoot neon aliens and communicate directly with characters from Monsters, Inc. Although on the plus side, Jake had escaped Sam’s pink cotton-candy vomit and his epic meltdown at the hotel pool.
She wanted to apologize to Jake for what he’d missed.
Instead, she reached out and took his hand. At first there was only passive resistance, his fingers lumps of unwilling flesh. Then, as if making a decision, his hand grabbed hers, hard. A lifeline.
“You know it’s not you.” He said it fiercely. “Why I—why I couldn’t—”
She did. “I know. And it wasn’t you. At the lake. I was a virgin.”
“I know.”
“I was scared. I was really young.”
“I shouldn’t have pressured you,” he said.
“You didn’t pressure me,” she said. “I was the one who rushed everything that night. I didn’t want to go off to college still a virgin. And—I wanted you.”
“I had more experience. I was older. I should’ve known better.”
“You were two years older,” she said. “That hardly makes you a real grown-up. It’s not like you were thirty-five, and had all this romantic past to draw on.”
He shook his head, refusing to let himself off the hook, and his eyes scanned the far corners of the room as if there were an answer hidden there.
“I was—confused.”
“Me too,” she said.
“I’d thought of it as a fling and then there we were and it felt like more. I was scared. And angry. At myself. For letting myself feel as much as I did.”
She felt a rush of warmth at his words. How much did you feel? she wanted to demand. As much as I did?
But she couldn’t, not without forcing this moment in the here and now. “We were really young,” she said instead.
He nodded. His gaze was faraway. Remembering that night? Did it have as much clarity for him as it did for her? Like something carved out of marble and animated, glossy, perfectly sharp and defined?
“Jake, there’s something I should tell you.”
His eyes found her face, startled and wary.
“I tried to find you. But only at first. Then—then I didn’t. I stopped trying.”
When the phone calls to bases had dead-ended, she’d sent printed letters to every army base in the United States, addressed to “Jake Taylor.” She’d Googled him. She’d had every intention of posting to Facebook to ask if anyone knew him but at the last minute, something had stayed her hand. Once she posted his name there, even if she didn’t explicitly identify him as Sam’s father, a handful of people, maybe as many as a hundred, would know. They would link his name in their minds with Sam, and there would be no turning back.
Still, she’d made one more round of phone calls before Sam was six months old. She remembered the last with perfect clarity. It was one of the more frustrating, the JAG on the other end of the line impatient and scornful. She put her iPhone down too hard on the table and turned to see Sam rocking back and forth on his hands and knees, his round belly hanging down, his bare arms and legs dimpled. She got down on the floor with him, sticking her face close to his so he chortled and collapsed on his belly and chortled some more. She blew raspberries on his face, and then she turned him on his back and blew raspberries in his belly, and he grabbed her hair and pulled it and shrieked at the top of his lungs. It hurt her scalp and it hurt her ears, but her tears had nothing to do with the pain. The tears were because she knew—knew in her gut—that she and Sam had everything they needed.
She wasn’t going to look for Jake anymore. Because, for better or for worse, she was giving him up—shutting down the possibility that he would be part of their lives.
“You couldn’t chase after me forever,” he said. “As much as I wish I’d had that time with him, we both had things we needed to do. I needed to fight and you needed time with Sam. You can’t beat yourself up.”
Even after she’d made the decision not to search for him any longer, she’d kept having the fantasies and the cravings. At odd, vulnerable moments, she wished that he’d arrive and rescue her. That he’d vanquish the allergies, the asthma, the first-day-of-school fears, that he knew the secret formula for comforting a child heartbroken about moving across the country from his beloved grandparents.
He stared down at where her hand covered his, opened his mouth as if to say something, and closed it again. Then he said, “I should go.” He set Sam’s photo albums to the side.
She turned away, hurt. For a moment there, she’d thought things were going to be okay between them. That they’d connected some piece of the past to the present, that—
But he was going to run away. Still.
“Mira.”
“Don’t say, ‘It’s not you.’ That’s the stupidest line in all of stupid linedom. Just—if you have to go, go.”
She wasn’t looking in his direction but she could tell he hadn’t moved. He sighed. Took an audible, deep breath.
“My knee got stuck, okay? My knee got stuck between the couch cushions, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. One minute I was so into it, so into you, and the next—I don’t know. I couldn’t get back to where my head had been a minute ago. I kept thinking about how I couldn’t do what you needed me to do.”
His voice was tense, rich, almost pleading.
“You should have told me that.”
“I don’t know who you think I am, Mira. Maybe some guys can do that, say whatever’s in their heads, but I’m not that guy.”
“Well, that’s abundantly clear.”
He sighed again, but he was still there. Still sitting beside her, with her, listening, talking, despite what he’d said about himself. Maybe he was a man’s man, maybe he didn’t want to be psychoanalyzed, but everything about him right now told her he wanted to be there. Right now, despite all the times he’d walked away from the possibility of her—the notion of Sam—right now, he wanted to stay. And even though she was terrified it wouldn’t last, she wanted to do whatever she could to keep him there.
“So you lost your erection because you started thinking about your knee, and how you couldn’t do what you thought I needed you to do. You know you were doing exactly what I needed you to do, right? God,” she said, and let it all into her voice—all the heat, all the lust, all the built-up longing he’d infused her with—“exactly. What. I. Needed. You. To. Do.”
“I wanted to …”
“You wanted to what?”
“I wanted to fuck you into next week.”
She felt the words, hot and explicit, as laden with desire as hers had been, a surge to her core. She felt the expression on his face, raw and real and male.
“I could see that on your face,” he said, with awe evident in his voice. “I just watched you get turned on.”
“Yeah,” she said, because it was all the language she could manage, and because she knew what he meant, had felt the flush come into her face, had felt her lids grow heavy and her jaw go slack.
“I’m really fucking hard right now.”
“I can help you with that.”
She watched the color rise in his face now. She leaned in and kissed his lower lip, suckled it, and the growl that came out of him felt as direct and explicit as if he’d set his hand between her legs.
“Can I make a suggestion?” she asked him.
He was breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling, the rhythm calling her. “Yeah.”
“Let’s go upstairs. I have a queen-size bed. Your knee won’t get stuck.”
He hesitated.
“What?”
She could tell he didn’t want to answer her.
“Are you worried about Sam? Don’t. He’s sound asleep and there’s a lock on the door.”
“No.”
“Just. Tell. Me.”
“I don’t want to screw it up again.”
She put her hand out, ran her thumb over the stubble on his jaw, touched the pad to the softness of his mouth. His mouth opened, involuntarily, and she watched his eyes darken.
“Dude,” she said. “I already think you suck at sex. What’s the worst that could happen—you can’t get it up?”
She got to see him laugh this time, got to see how it softened him and made him bright.
Chapter 20
He followed her up the stairs. She’d wrapped the little throw from the sofa around herself. It covered her, but only barely, and he wanted to flip it up and investigate the shadowy space where her thighs met. Or tug it off entirely. He was not, however, confident of his ability to take her on the stairs. That would have to wait until he’d mastered the simpler things.
She’d been …
She’d been perfect. There weren’t a lot of women who could have carried off what had gone down between them without making him feel either like a failure or a eunuch. She’d managed it, though. She hadn’t tried to strip him bare and read his thoughts. She hadn’t reassured and she hadn’t panicked. She’d been herself¸ the girl he’d let himself feel too much for all those years ago, the woman he could find himself caring too much for now. The sort of person it was worth doing something crazy for, worth taking risks for.
She dropped her clothes by the side of the bed, let the blanket fall. He wondered if the impact of her naked body would fade with familiarity. He wasn’t used to it yet. Her voluptuousness, emerging from under the fleece, hit him like a ton of bricks, as it had downstairs when she pulled off her T-shirt.
He reached for her, his mouth finding one breast, his fingers the other, one nipple between his fingers, the other hard against his tongue. Hell, yeah. She whimpered, and he felt her knees buckle. “Too much?”
She shook her head.
“Do you want more?”
She nodded.
His palm slid down her belly, warm and soft, and he parted her curls and cupped her. Her clit was swollen, and his finger slipped easily over it. He paused there, watching a flush mottle her chest and face.
“Mmmph,” she said, or something like that, and she pushed her face into his chest and rocked against his hand.
“Lie down,” he said, and followed her down. He loved the slick feel of her clit, the reckless expression on her face, the red of her lips and cheeks.
“Unh.”
“What? Tell me.”
“If you keep doing that, I’m gonna come.”
“Is that supposed to be a threat?”
She came then, her body tightening all over, her head thrown back, making small, helpless noises that made him have to wrap a hand around the base of his cock to keep from coming too.
“God,” she said, when she could talk.
“Condoms?”
She pointed to where she’d dropped them on the bed, then said, “You’re probably too stubborn to let me help with that, right?”
“Oh, hell no. Whenever any woman asks if she can touch my dick in any capacity, I always say yes.”
She made a face at him. “Way to make me feel special.”
He tilted his head to one side. “If you’re not convinced yet that you’re special, I’m not sure what I can say to convince you.”
Her expression softened. “You could show me.”
“Happily.”
She tore the packet, then bent her head and licked a drop of pre-cum from the tip of his dick. “Holy—” Whatever he’d been about to say—and he had no idea what it was—got strangled off. He was going to be having blow-job fantasies about her round-the-clock until they got around to her using that talented tongue in other ways. If they did. This was assuming the sex actually happened and wasn’t yet another laughable disaster.
She rolled the condom down.
“Feels so much fucking better when you do it,” he said.
She wrapped her hand around him and squeezed.
“Don’t add premature ejaculation to our list of sex disasters,” he said.
“But you’re big. And hard. And you feel really good.” She jerked her hand up and down his length a few times and he groaned.
She lay down on the bed. “Can we try that again?”
He eased himself down and braced himself beside her.
“What if I just do it?” he said. “No frills.”
“You mean, wham bam thank you ma’am?”
“I meant—yes, I guess that’s sort of what I meant. I guess more that it might not be such a bad thing if I did it instead of—”
“Instead of thinking about it and talking about it so much?”
“Yeah.”
“Go for it.”
He rolled his weight onto her and did exactly that, a rough thrust, a slow satin slide, his groan, her whimper. He kept his focus on her, on the way his thrusts made her breasts bounce, on the way each withdrawal and surge rolled her eyes back in her head. On the wet heat enveloping him, her tightness, her little squeezes, the fact that she seemed to know at least ten different angles at which to hold her hips, each of which contacted some brand-new part of him.
His dick felt bigger and harder and more capable of delivering pleasure straight to his brain than he remembered. Maybe it was lack of use. Heightened sensitivity. Or maybe the difference was her, either the series of throaty little noises she was making or the soft, slick sounds coming from where her body clasped his, or—
“If you do that, you’re going to make me come in about thirty seconds,” he warned.
She’d tipped her hips and squeezed her inner muscles at the same time. Grinned at him. Stared right into his eyes.
He tried to thrust forward but the goddamned socket of his prosthetic leg hit her thigh and stopped him.
No. No, no, no.
I can’t.
It made his head hurt to think it. “Can’t” wasn’t a word he wanted in his vocabulary. It wasn’t a word he’d ever had in his vocabulary.
Fuck the socket, fuck the leg. He’d made it this far, had come up the stairs to do this thing, and he wasn’t going to fail her again.
“Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
That turned off his brain in a hurry. Got all the blood back where it was supposed to go.
“Jake, you’re killing me. Come on. More. Please.”
He wanted to. He needed to. Somehow. Some way.
He pulled out
She groaned. “Why’d you do that?”
“Turn over.”
“Like this?”
She lay on her stomach on the bed, her knees slightly bent, ass tipped a little so he could see the wetness glistening on her swollen lips.
“Fuck,” he said. He knelt behind her, palmed her ass with both hands, squeezing, then spread her and slid into her folds. The heat alone almost made him lose it.
It wasn’t perfect. The socket still got in his way, but the heat and tightness around his dick was blotting out thought. He pivoted his hips so he could thrust deeper without the prosthesis impeding him. It was awkward, but she couldn’t see him, and that made it tolerable.
He thought of the night he’d done this solo, and how much better this felt, and how much worse. That night there hadn’t been anything but him and his body, however damaged, however unfamiliar. Tonight, there was silicone and titanium and the distance between what he wanted and what he could have. He wanted the curve of her ass slapping against his abs, the give of her flesh as he pressed her hard into the mattress.
Instead he was getting this. This halfway thing. And it sucked, but, fuck, it was working for him
anyway. The jiggle of her ass as he thrust, the way her hands gripped the fitted sheet, her fingers white where they dug into the bed. The noises she was making, a cry for each stroke, before he withdrew and stroked again. The way she tilted her hips higher and higher, reaching back for him, ratcheting him up faster than he wanted. Unless he stopped, he was going to come.
He didn’t want it to be over. He wanted to be in her, forgetting himself, forgetting the part of him that wasn’t him, feeling the familiar and unfamiliar sensation of being heated and surrounded and gripped.
But this thing was far beyond his control. The way he felt around her, in her, was way beyond his control. The way he’d felt when he looked up to see her at Discovery Park, the way he’d felt beside her in the Ferris wheel car, the way he’d felt sitting on her couch while she was upstairs tucking Sam in. And then—without meaning to, because he knew that she didn’t do it on purpose, it was just the person she was—she had dismantled him. She had made him talk without trying, the way she used to, the stories pouring out of him, a perfect flow, all those words, all the things he didn’t mean to reveal about himself, the leg, Mike, the wedged knee. And somehow this, this sex with her, was part of what she could make him reveal, part of what she could draw out of him, part of what she could take from him against his will. Only afterward he would find that it hadn’t been against his will at all, that it had been what he needed to give and give up, that it had been everything that was missing.
The feeling that gathered in his chest, in his gut, in his throat, was too much—it couldn’t be held back. Her wet heat, the rub of her mons against his balls each time he entered her, each time he pulled back, a vague but insistent friction. God, he wanted that last inch or two, wanted it like nothing fucking else, but it wasn’t his, not tonight, and instead of taking it and shoving the edge of the socket deep into her flesh, he used his hip to press her down as hard as he could into the mattress, pushed her tight against the resistance, and she arched under him, cried and shook, involuntary squeezes tight around his base until he couldn’t hold out any longer and gave himself up to the sensation, coming in long, draining pulses that were a stew of frustration and triumph.
