“Get closer.”
Oh, shit. I switch hands. As soon as my slightly cooler fingertips touch my clit, my body responds, my back arching off the bed. “I need you, Russ.” I let my words float on my breath and nestle my lips against the mic. I’m barely saying them at all. “I need you inside me. I need you over me. I need you so, so much.”
“Fucking A, Penny. Fuck.” He growls again, and I hear him fisting his cock, the sound of his hand slapping against his balls. In the corner of the screen, I watch him tug at the skin, pulling it up over the smooth tip.
“Jesus Christ, this is so hot,” he says. His head drops back against the headboard, and he gasps up at the ceiling.
My vision tunnels in on those rippling muscles, that broad chest, the ruggedness of that line of stubble. “I need you like this all the time, I need…” But before I can finish the sentence, I’m heading over the cliff. In free fall, my body throbbing and pulsing, every single fiber his.
“Come for me, Penny. Let go…I’ve got you.”
“Tell me you’re coming, too.”
“Fuck yes, I am.”
“I’m coming.”
“I’m right with you.”
“Go.”
“Now.”
“Yessssss.”
I’d give anything to scream right now, but I stop myself. I turn all that energy back into myself, and it amplifies the orgasm ten times over. In that instant, five hundred miles is nothing. My fingers are his hands; my body is all his. Everything belongs to him.
He doesn’t have to be quiet and he isn’t. Every aggressive groan fills my ears at full volume. It is the sexiest sound that ever, ever was.
Together, we catch our breath, my pants coming twice as fast as his. It’s almost hypnotic, and the explosion he just pulled out of me makes me curl up into a ball, still facing the screen. I focus on his breathing, on the sound of his body on my sheets. I press my fingertips to the image of his abs, the warmth of the laptop playing tricks on me all over again.
“We’re in deep, Penny.”
“I know.”
“I never want to come up for air.”
“Me neither.”
“I wish I could touch you,” he says quietly. “So fucking much.” He swallows and repositions his head on the pillow.
My orgasm was so intense, though, and my day so long, that sleep is sneaking up on me fast, and he already sounds dreamy and far away. “I'll leave first thing in the morning. Before you’re even awake.”
On his end, sheets shift and my mattress creaks. “Are you fading?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m going to stay with you until you fall asleep. I don’t want to hear you say goodbye. Not now. Not ever.”
48
Russ
We’re in one of those Tahitian beach huts that sit on stilts over the water. She’s next to me, all curled up with her back against my chest. I shift her hair from her cheek and whisper, “I love you, Penny. You know I fucking do.”
But she smells kind of…not like Penny at all. Not like vanilla or something sweet. But more like corn chips. Or a hot vacuum about to burn through its belts. And she’s wearing something fuzzy, like maybe fleece sweatpants. Makes no sense at all. We’re in Tahiti, and she’s wearing fleece? But it gets weirder still, because instead of saying she loves me too, she says, “Marf, marf…”
I open my eyes, and I inhale hard, the bright light stinging my retinas. I’m not in Tahiti. I’m in her bed. And I’m not spooning her.
I’m spooning Guppy.
I roll away from him and rub my face. My weight makes a valley of the mattress; as I move, so does Guppy, sliding over onto his back right beside me. His tongue hangs out from one side of his mouth, and his paws are limp at the wrists. He really is just so fucking awesome. I wedge my forearm under the back of his neck to prop his head up. I grab my phone from the bedside table and snap a picture of us together, and then I send it to Penny with the caption, We’ve been spooning. You better get back here quick.
She replies with a video message, and the timer wheel spins over her beautiful face as the video loads. As I hit play, I hear the noise of the car, the hum of the engine. The highway streaks past in the background. Every mile marker she passes brings her one mile closer to me. “Good morning, handsome!” Her hair is in a braid, like the first day I saw her, her bangs pinned back to show off that beautiful face. “I knew you and Guppy were going to fall in love; I knew it! Anyway, I’m on the road. I’ll be there by dinnertime. If you have to leave Guppy for the day, let me know and I’ll give Maisie a ring. She’s back, I think.” Penny glances at the screen, like she’s giving me a silent warning, and then turns back to the road. She hits a bump, and it makes her cleavage jiggle. Fuck. “And let me know if you want me to pick you up a souvenir from the World’s Biggest Cinnamon Bun, because I’ll pass it and I don’t want you to miss out.”
I reply with a video message of my own. “You’ve got all the cinnamon buns I need.”
She answers with a video snippet of her laugh, midway through the first big giggle. Two seconds of pure fucking heaven. Before Skype can swallow them up, I hit save on that video, and the one before it. Then I tell her:
* * *
Drive safe. No texting.
K. xoxo
* * *
In the kitchen, Guppy and I settle into yesterday’s same routine. Eggs, breakfast, and coffee are followed by the mayor playing clips of Dickerson’s hearing at the City Council. “Here we have the opening remarks of his argument to have the Glad To Be Alive Sanctuary condemned as blight…”
The audio bite is a furious buzz of kazoos.
“And that, Port Flamingo, is civil disobedience in action!” He plays a sound clip of canned applause, chuckling to himself. “It’s going to be a hot one, so make sure you bring some extra water, and don’t forget your sunscreen. Now, onto local events. The Kumquat Festival will be held…”
I turn down the volume and look out at the beach. This place might be the Gulf Coast Twilight Zone, but I fucking dig it.
More than all that, I dig her—the way she lives her life, and the way she exists in the world. But then I look outside at her grill, covered with a bleached black canvas covering. At her deck chairs and her potted plants. At her home, so much like her and rooted so deeply to this place. To her best friend next door, to her uncle, to her mom, to the mayor. I can come and go from Boston whenever I want and nobody notices but my cleaning lady. But Penny’s life has roots like mine has never had—like mine might never have.
And so, not for the first time, I get that sickening punch of doubt that this might not work. That it’s fucking insanity. Because she’d have to be crazy to even think about leaving all this. For Boston. For me.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, Guppy and I are back from our run, and I’m exhausted from sprinting full-on and working out the maybes. But the run helped me focus on what’s really fucking important now: her and our last few days together. More important than that is making sure she’s happy, that she really wants this. To be sure, I need to get up the courage to ask her, straight up and point blank, what she wants to do.
About us.
I grab a big glass from the top shelf and fill it up with water, then lie down on the chaise lounge. I listen to the waves and think about how to make tonight special, how to really show her how I feel.
But before I can get too far into details, a face appears in the vines above the patio wall.
Maisie is back. And she looks pissed.
Yet instead of saying, “You again,” or “How about I show you a thing or two about homemade napalm?” or “Go wear your dress shirts in some other zip code,” her face disappears from the vines quickly as it materialized, followed by some frustrated noises and grunts. Next to me, sprawled out on the concrete, Guppy whacks his tail and perks up his ears.
More grunts. More huffs. And also something clattering.
I don’t want to interfere, but
it really sounds like something’s seriously wrong, and there’s no fucking way I’m just going to lie here while Penny’s best friend is in trouble. So I plant my hands next to the planter and pull myself up to look over the wall. On the other side is Maisie, sitting on the floor of her patio. Scattered around her in every direction are particle board rectangles, plastic bags full of bolts, and a white instruction manual that looks like it got wadded up into a ball and smoothed out again.
She looks up at me, a hex wrench in her hand. She takes one of the plastic bags and rips it open with her teeth, sending bolts flying.
There’s a lot that my life is missing—home, warmth, happiness, the chaos of living every day to bursting, Penny herself. But one thing I definitely learned about, during my many years as a bachelor, was how to assemble IKEA furniture. That I definitely know how to do. “Need a hand?”
49
Penny
As I pull into the driveway next to Russ’ SUV, Maisie scurries across her yard and raps on my window about sixteen times in quick succession. Then she freezes with her knuckles hovering over the glass as her eyes dart back and forth toward my house.
I shoulder the door open. “What’s wrong? Why do you look like your washing machine just backed up again?”
She steels herself by hanging on to my door. “I…owe you an apology.”
Oh, my God. It wasn’t worry on her face. It was the courage to say the never-before-said. “Maisie. That’s amazing. What’s it like to learn a new language this late in life?”
It’s not easy, clearly. She’s looks as pained as she would in an IRS audit. “He’s actually very…” She draws in a breath and holds it, like she’s trying to get rid of the hiccups.
“Dreamy? Hunky? Good company? Smart? Sexy?”
She holds up her hand to say stop. “Very, very good at assembling complicated pieces of furniture from the Promised Land.” She gasps when all the words are out, exactly her hiccup technique.
I’ll be damned. So that’s her threshold for a nice guy. Someone who can make furniture pop out of a box. “Here I was, thinking you wanted me to find a man who didn’t have borderline personality disorder. All you needed was a guy who could put together your bookshelves.”
She glares, and pulls her lip balm from her bra. She uncaps it and coats her lips, finishing with a smack. “It’s a lovely dresser, I’ll have you know, but it’s got so many drawers. He spent three hours on my lanai putting it together, didn’t complain once. Then when it was assembled, and I told him where it went, he even took the doors off so it would fit into my bedroom and put them back on. Not even a grumble! And then, I made him a smoothie, and he didn’t even tell me it smelled like farm. Like someone I know.” She shoves a hostile little fingertip in my face.
We square off for a few seconds, and I stifle my giggles long enough for her expression to soften. She retracts her finger and looks down, almost shy, rubbing her lips together to spread the balm. “I’m sorry I doubted him. I’m also sorry that he doesn’t live here. For your sake and his.”
The words hit me hard, extra heavy after a very long day. “There’s always a chance,” I say as I slide out of the Bronco.
“I sure hope so.” Maisie steps back to let me get my stuff out of the trunk. “He left for a while and then came back with a whole bunch of grocery bags. Reusable grocery bags, Penny.” She claps her hand to her chest like she’s about to swoon onto the asphalt. “The man’s a winner,” she says. Then she plants a waxy, pepperminty kiss on my cheek, and scurries off back to her house.
* * *
As I walk through the front door, Guppy thunders toward me like a racehorse. I drop my bag and unlock my knees as he comes up on his hind legs, putting his front paws on my shoulders. He showers me in a messy slathering of dog-food kisses. There’s no point in resisting, so I hold my breath, shut my mouth, and let him have his way. Sometimes, after someone else looks after him, he spends a few minutes giving me disappointed looks from his bed before he forgives me for abandoning him for eight hours, but not this time. This time, he’s just plain happy.
When he’s covered me in kisses from ear to nostril and back again, and decided that I am, in fact, really home, he drops back down onto all fours and launches himself onto the sofa. I notice the table is set for dinner, with the napkins neatly folded and the silverware carefully arranged. On the table is a bouquet of real flowers, not bait shop carnations, but white lilies and red roses.
This time, the angel and the devil are in agreement. Maisie was right, and I knew it all along: He’s a winner.
“Hey!” he says, turning to me from the stove. The apron he’s wearing is new, and not one of mine. Don’t Be Afraid to Take Whisks.
“That’s…amazing.”
“Right?” he says, crumpling his chin into his neck to get a better look. “I found it in that kitchen shop in Manatee. Thought you’d like it. And I’m cooking you dinner. So how about that?”
I see a chopped onion. Tomatoes. Ripe avocados ready to be sliced. In a Pyrex dish, there are some marinating chicken breasts, and stuck to the microwave with my lobster magnet is a printed-out recipe from Cooking.com.
He was sexy in dress pants. He was dreamy in his boxer briefs. But here, in a punny apron he bought for me, cooking me dinner after a long day on the road, he really is all my dreams come true.
He sets down his spatula and takes me into his arms. One of his hands slides down to the small of my back, straight past the point of polite, down, down, down my ass to the very center of possessive.
With the other hand, he tips my chin upwards for a kiss, but he lingers there before he goes in all the way. “You know, there’s a theory about kissing.” He lips are near mine, but not close enough. “Called the rule of 90/10.”
I put one hand into his rear pocket, touching that yummy curve of his wallet first, and then his ass after that. “I couldn’t do math right now if I had to.”
“The theory is that I come in 90% of the way, and then it’s up to you to decide if you want to come the last 10%.” He nudges my cheek with his nose, cupping my jaw in his palm and supporting the back of my neck with his solid, confident grip.
I put both my hands into his back pockets and get closer to him by going on my tiptoes until we’re almost eye-to-eye. “How about I meet you 80/20?”
“That’s my girl.”
50
Penny
He is sweeter this time than ever before, and yet more focused, too. He keeps his eyes closed and drives into me so hard that every muscle in my body vibrates with the impact. Each time he pounds into me, he scoots me backward on the bare sheet, until I’m pinned against the headboard and have no other option but to reach up to the oak frame and hang on tight. He’s an animal right now, and he’s going to have what’s his. And I want nothing more than to get devoured.
I don’t know how long he keeps me like that, but long enough for every single nerve ending in my body to be thrumming and pulsing, until I’ll either explode or dissolve in his arms. It feels so good, so intense, that it brings tears to my eyes. I blink one away, and it slides down my cheek.
As soon as he sees the tear, he freezes. “God, I get so fucking lost in you. Are you okay?”
“You make me feel like I’m everything. Like I’m the only woman in the world.”
He sweeps the lone tear away with his rough thumb and stays deep inside me, letting me recover and catch my breath. “Because you are.” He gets up slightly onto his knees, unpinning me from the headboard and sliding me down the sheet, using my hips to maneuver me. Then he flips us together so I’m on top of him, my hair spilling down my shoulders so it brushes the skin of his chest.
He gathers up my hair, and not with the practiced, smooth movements that I have, but with rugged grasps, like he’s doing something he’s never done before, as if he’s being tender in a way he’s only just learning to be.
I let myself ease down onto his cock. He runs his hands up my calves, then my thighs, then my ass,
before finally wrapping his arms around me, forearms to my hips.
When I take as much of him into me as I can comfortably handle, he says, “I had a dream I told you I loved you last night.”
I run one finger down the rippling ridges of his abs, down the line of hair that runs down into his treasure trail. “You did?”
From below, he finds a slower, less intense rhythm. But he’s so deep, I can barely see straight. He grips my ass and pulls me up slightly so he isn’t making my eyes roll quite so far back into my head.
“Did I answer you?”
He smiles. “No. We got interrupted. But what I said was, ‘I love you, Penny. You know I fucking do.’”
He lets it hang there. Doesn’t ask me to answer. Doesn’t ask me to say more. But instead says, “And I bought you something else, besides the apron.”
Still staying inside me, he reaches across to open the drawer of my bedside table. From the drawer he pulls out a little silver egg, on a wire, attached to a tiny remote.
“Oh God.” I let my body slide all the way down onto him. Everything is pleasure, except for the pinch in my feet from the tight curl of my toes.
He turns on the remote, and the egg starts to buzz. Taking it between two fingers, he places it to my clit.
I’m no stranger to a good vibrator, and I’d buy stock in Hitachi if I had the cash. But because of the way he’s been talking to me, because of the way he’s been fucking me, because of the way we are together, this little tiny egg puts the Magic Wand to shame.
I plant my palm on his stomach and take him all the way in. “You take this,” he says, putting it in my free hand. “You do you. And I’ll fuck you the whole way through it.”
“I love the way you talk to me.”
Just Like That Page 26
