by Liora Blake
Simon shakes his head and lets out an annoyed snort, then grabs the last dumpling and bites it in half. I try my hardest to let that be the end of the conversation, because it’s what he seems to want, but there is still one question I need to ask. And if I don’t do it now, our clothes will be in a messy heap on the floor soon. After that, the questions between us will only require one-word answers. Things like “yes,” “harder,” “now,” and “more.”
“What happened to your mom?”
“Pancreatic cancer.” He visibly holds his breath after he says it, and then releases it after a long pause. “It came on hard. She was gone in six months.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
A warm, prickling sensation seizes my lungs, followed by the same feeling behind my eyes. Small tears threaten near the edges, but I don’t let them take hold. Instead, I take a long look at him, knowing I’m seeing more of him than I ever have before. The boy who always stood before me was just the surface. This guy? The one whose emotional scars are invisible when his mouth is running a million miles an hour? The one who drove me up a wall for two years with his never-ending loose-lipped bullshit while still paying enough attention to know my preferred takeout order? He is so much more than I planned on. Which makes falling for him seem like a truly terrible idea, but in a different way from before. The new problem is that the guy I’m starting to understand now isn’t someone you go halfway with.
“Would you please stop doing that?”
Simon sets his empty curry box down and tosses the chopsticks inside. Leaning back into the counter, he pulls his arms up and props his hands on the edge, then looks down at his bare feet.
“What?”
The small word tumbles out in a rough whisper from my lips, dry from the way I’ve been staring at him with my jaw slightly parted. Tense from the little tears that still want to leak out.
“Stop looking at me like I’m a stranger. Like you’re seeing me for the first time but you can’t decide what to do with me.”
“What if I like what I see?” His head jerks up to find my gaze. I take a small step closer. “And I know exactly what I want to do with you.”
Beyond the obvious innuendo, I nearly tell him more. That I’m scared to death that I might want this. For real. Until it makes us both whole again.
Instead, I let him drag me into his bed and make us both forget everything that ever hurt us before. Even if it only lasts for those moments when we’re wrapped around each other, it does. So we keep going, until our bodies insist we’ve had enough and my mind collapses under the possibility it never will be.
12
When his hand touches my cheek, I feel it through the last bits of sleep, through every other thing that would have normally kept me snoring and drooling on the pillow. Instead, the heat of his callused fingertips over my skin pulls my eyes open, just as he presses a few tendrils of my sleep-and-sex-messed hair behind my ear.
“I have to go. I didn’t want to wake you, but I couldn’t help it.”
He sits on the edge of the bed, dressed, but with a mess of still-damp hair from his shower. He smells of everything I’ve decided to really, really like. Soap, spice, coffee, and Simon. When he leans down to put his lips to mine, I can taste the dash of cream and heaps of sugar he adds to his coffee. Or maybe he ate some of that terrible cereal he likes so much. It could be the forty-seven tablespoons of sugar per serving in there I’m tasting. His tongue sweeps into my mouth and teases mine until he finally pulls back, reluctance covering his expression.
“You looked so beautiful, I needed to touch you. I wanted you to kiss me back before I walked out the door.”
Stretching my arms over my head, I writhe around a little and then move to sit up. “Just give me a few minutes to get dressed. I can be out of here before you go.”
Simon gently urges my shoulders down into the mattress again.
“No, no. I set the alarm for seven thirty for you. Just go back to sleep. That gives you plenty of time to get McKenna to school.”
“I don’t need to be in your house while you’re gone. Five minutes, that’s all I need.”
He leans over me on the mattress, resting his weight against his outstretched arms.
“Sunshine. Don’t be weird. I don’t care if you’re here unsupervised. You can snoop through my shit all you want. I’ll warn you, there will be a decent amount of porn. Possibly an autographed picture of me manhandling some chick dressed like Princess Leia. You might also stumble across my supersecret stash of very filthy romance novels. I have a soft spot for the ones with shirtless cowboys. But other than that, it’s all pretty square around here.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding about the shirtless cowboys.”
Raising his eyebrows suggestively, he lowers his voice. “I don’t know. You’ll have to find out. Those cowboys are so rugged. Everyone has a kink, don’t they? Mine might be a cowboy in just his hat and a smile.”
“If you ever ask me to say ‘giddy up’ when we’re having sex, I’ll know it’s true.”
My leg escaped the covers during the night and it lies exposed, along the side of the mattress, just next to where he sits. He smiles, distracted but contented, as his hand moves to the bare skin. My knee first, and then up over my thigh, so slowly, until his fingers rest against my naked hipbone. The tips of his fingers tickle just under the shirt of his I slept in.
Unfortunately, feeling his hand stop there isn’t working for me right now. His hand needs to move higher, under the shirt, to my breast and then back down over my belly. Not stopping until his palm moves against the ceaseless need between my thighs. The ceaseless effect is his fault, anyway.
Shoving one hand out from under the covers, I grab a fistful of his shirt and lock my eyes with his. “Come a little closer, Simon.”
A grunt leaves his slightly parted mouth, and he lolls his eyes back in his head. “I have to go. Don’t tempt me to be late to the board meeting. You’re so much prettier than they are.”
I allow a small grin to creep across my face. Tracing my tongue over my top lip, I sink my teeth into the lower one. “Five days. Five whole, entire days. That’s, like, I don’t know, three thousand hours or something, right? Think about that for a second. Five. Days.”
Simon pushes up off the mattress and stands next to the bed, pulling off his shirt and starting to unzip his loose jeans.
“Shit, you’re right. Not about the hours—five days is only a hundred and twenty hours, but I’ll forgive your atrocious math skills if you part your legs for me, right now. Quick, quick, baby. Can you come fast for me?”
“Like you don’t already know the answer to that question.” Sitting up, I start to pull his shirt off me, grasping the bottom with my fingers. His hands shoot out to stop me.
“Leave it on.”
“Don’t you want to see all of me?”
Maybe I’ve gotten too soft in the last few weeks and he doesn’t like to see it when he has me under him. Crap, I’ll have to get a few extra workouts in while he’s gone. Crap, crap, crap. He’s all chiseled, tasty muscle and now he wants me to keep my shirt on.
“I love seeing your tight little body, every goddam inch. But I want to picture you just like this when I’m gone. Your hair all messy, wearing my favorite Thor T-shirt, while I’m taking you in my sheets.”
“In these sheets specifically?”
Throwing my hands out to either side, I gesture to the sheets currently on his bed. The sheets he thinks are hilarious, because they have pink—I’m not kidding, pink—unicorns on them.
Last night, after I ventured into the kitchen for something to quench my sex-induced thirst, when I came back, I saw the bed illuminated from the dim hallway light and choked on my water at the sight of it. Despite being exhausted from our multiple rounds, when he saw my face, he laughed so hard he started tearing up a little.
Thankfully, I didn’t see them until after we were ready to go to sleep. I wouldn’t
have been able to say half the naughty things I had, knowing I was cradled in pink unicorns. I don’t know where you find king-sized sheets with pink unicorns on them, but he did, and he thinks it’s the funniest thing ever.
Given how he loves the irony of a grown man with unicorn sheets, he starts to giggle at my question. Finally, he tucks his head into my hair and lets out a long, heavy sigh.
“It depends. If I want a laugh, I’ll picture these specific sheets and your horrified expression last night. If I’m rubbing one out because I can’t stop thinking about getting inside you again, I’ll probably use a different visual.”
“Good,” I whisper into his ear, then tug on his earlobe with my teeth.
After that, his hands come under the shirt, discovering all the places I need him most. Trying to be quick but falling into every movement so intently we both want it to last.
When he leaves to go put his bags in the truck, I scribble out a note, laughing to myself as I do. His wallet is still sitting on the nightstand, so I tuck the note inside it just before he strolls back in to say good-bye. He shoves the wallet in his back pocket, kissing me once more before pulling the sheets around me in bed.
Twenty minutes later, he texts after finding the note when he stops to fuel up.
Dear Fellow Board Members:
I take full responsibility for making Simon late for your fancy meeting. The problem is he’s a sex goddess. Yes, goddess. Sometimes he giggles like a schoolgirl when we’re through.
He tried to leave this morning, at a very responsible early hour, but I had to have him again. The man can fuck like nobody’s business. Please send him back as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
Ms. Devon Jenkins
I’m really going to miss you, sunshine. Don’t let anyone else touch you while I’m gone. Only this sex goddess, OK?
As if I could even imagine being with another guy when he’s away. But the question he’s asking, what he’s really saying, is something else entirely. He’s trying to claim that there’s an us.
In his bed, it feels like the truth. If I didn’t know better, I might think it had been drawn in the stars like the Orion tattoo on my skin. That you could chart our individual histories and even if a million other experiences broke the span, the line to us would be so stark it might be the only thing you could see.
As I stare at the dark charcoal paint covering the walls and ceiling, the scent of us in the sheets and on my skin, the haunting sensation of him covering my body with his when he came in a breathless growl earlier, I want to claim there’s an us, too. Because Simon is equal parts of hot and sweet, brilliant and stupid, tender and brash, humble and privileged. The recipe for everything I claimed I never wanted, but possibly what I’ve always needed.
My reply seems easy then, because it is equal parts truth and instinct.
Only you. Only me?
Like anyone else matters. Yes. Absolutely. Positively. No question. Only you.
That’s when something swells inside my body as I lie there. A taut and anxious awareness, spanning from the base of my throat down to the space where my hips descend into the concave well of my belly. If I close my eyes, there is a sting bristling behind the lids as I try to hold off the crazy idea of wanting even more.
Instead of going there in my mind, to the place that would destroy me when this ends, I get up and make some tea in Simon’s kitchen. After it steeps for a few minutes, I grab the mug and walk around his house, not quite sure what to do with myself. I don’t snoop, unless poking around in his study counts, fingering the spines of books, and peering at the way he has nestled a hundred strange objects in between them.
A Mason jar full of marbles. Antique bottles of every size and color. Goofy action figures. A few arrowheads and weathered fossils. A bobblehead of what appears to be a Disney teen ingénue. Matchbox cars. An open shoe box filled with knitting needles and scraps of yarn. A stack of snapshots showing Simon playing board games with kids in hospital beds.
A small antique gilded picture frame is displayed on a stand, and in the photo, a sleeping woman lies on a couch, cocooned in a heavy afghan. She looks tired, even though she’s sleeping. I know immediately that it’s his mom, not long before she became a past tense.
When I go to rest on the window seat, I sit there cross-legged with the mug of tea wrapped in my hands. Then all those things I never knew about him rise into a full-color spectrum of weighted dimension around me, and it feels like he’s everywhere.
The alarm clock he set for me starts to ring in the bedroom. After shutting it off, I put my dress on again, slip on those wedges that made us even last night, and tuck his shirt under my arm. In my logical mind, I’m taking it because I need to wash it, only the polite thing to do. Would I sleep in it for a few nights before I did? Strong possibility of that.
13
Simon should never have given me the total number of hours in five days. When you think about it that way—one hundred and twenty hours—it makes time go by infinitely more slowly. In the small moments when I was distracted enough not to think about him or the way my body felt oddly adrift, he would pop up somehow. On Friday, he sent me a text referencing his fingers and certain key parts of my body, while picturing me in his shirt as he waited for the hotel elevator. It was only two sentences but enough to make my hair stand on end. Saturday, he left a message on my phone while I was working. Instead of something lewd, his voice was pure sweetness when he said he wanted to hear my voice, even if it was just on my voice mail.
Then on Sunday, while I am inconveniently standing in Trevor’s kitchen, he sends me a picture of a cupcake. It’s white cake with a heap of perfectly peaked pink frosting and one impossibly ripe-looking sugared raspberry placed on the tip. In the frame, his index finger and thumb are resting against the raspberry, as if he is going to pluck it off. Or simply rub his fingers there until the raspberry moans and begs for his mouth.
You were the first thing I thought of when I saw these. I tweaked that berry off, licked the frosting, then shoved the whole thing in my mouth. Delicious. Remind you of anything?
In the background of the muddled indecent thoughts now running through my mind, Kate is talking to me. Something about their dog, Dax, and a fancy new organic dog food I’m supposed to feed him while they’re gone. I’m half listening, if that, because my mouth is watering at the sight of Simon’s naughty fingers and the memory of them on my skin. If his goal is to drive me completely out of my gourd before he gets back, he’s doing a bang-up job.
Well played, Mr. Cole. You have me in a semipermanent state of desire with just a few dirty texts in your absence. Well fucking played. This means I have to get him just as wound up, because I don’t care for being at a disadvantage.
Bring some of those back with you. I’ll let you do a taste test. Tell me which you like best. Mine or theirs.
Immediately after I hit send, Trevor strolls into the room, dragging one rolling bag behind him with another bag slung over his shoulder.
“Mosely, we’re going to be gone for three days. Do you really need this much shit? We’re going to Cleveland, not Europe.”
“Do you really think those are full of clothes or something? You married a dorky novelist from rural Montana. That heavy bag has my laptop, weirdo writer notebooks with my inspired scribblings, and books. I need that crap because we’re going to Cleveland, not Europe. If you were taking me to Paris, I wouldn’t need such a plethora of distraction.”
Speaking of distraction, my own vibrates from the back pocket of my jeans.
You can’t fucking text shit like that to me when I’m in public. There are a handful of indecency laws I’m currently violating. Also, I don’t need a taste test. YOURS! YOURS! I LIKE YOURS BEST!
Excellent. That’s exactly what I was going for. Good luck trying to stay focused the rest of the day, Simon. Smugly slipping the phone back into my pocket, I silence it so there is a remote possibility my mind won’t wander again before Trevor and Kate f
inally leave.
“Sorry, I spaced out there for a second. Tell me about the goofy dog’s food again?”
Kate looks up for a second from the piece of paper she’s writing on and gives me a suspicious little smirk. Dropping her eyes back to the paper, she gives a small laugh. “I’m writing it down for you, since, based on the glazed look in your eye, your distraction must be worth it.”
Kate’s straightforward way of not letting this slide catches me off guard, and I can feel heat rising in my cheeks.
“Holy shit. Good enough to cause made-of-steel Devon to blush? The man must have a superpower of some sort.”
With a husky groan, I let my upper body collapse onto the cool concrete countertop in their kitchen, pulling my forearms around my head protectively. “You have no idea.”
“I swear to all things sacred, if his name rhymes with . . .”
Out the corner of my eyes, I see her look up at the ceiling and then around the room aimlessly, but she doesn’t say anything. Because nothing rhymes particularly well with “Simon,” does it?
From my still-crouched-over position on the countertop, I mumble into the crook of one arm, “Don’t bother, you won’t think of anything.”
I stop short of adding something about how this makes composing dirty limericks in his honor much more difficult. Just as Kate starts to mutter nonsensically about not believing me, Trevor stomps into the room and I think I can hear her slapping a hand over her mouth to stop from saying any more.
“What the hell is going on? Why is Devon slumped on the counter and you look like you should have feathers sticking out your mouth, Katie?”
When I raise my head up, my poor stupid brother is standing there, looking confused and suspicious as his eyes dart between the two of us. Kate won’t move the hand from her mouth, like she’s afraid she won’t be able to control the words that might try to escape. I wave my hand into the air at him and shake my head.
