by Jade London
I shower, taking my time in the hot stream. Scrub, lather, rinse, and then spend a few minutes just luxuriating in the relaxing heat. I towel off, wrapping the towel under my arms, and then twist another around my hair. I go back to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of cabernet.
I’m about to take the glass back to the bedroom with me when a shudder runs down my spine.
Conrad steps through the porch door, wearing nothing but a pair of sopping wet swim trunks. Water drips down from his hair to his chest. His breath is coming hard and fast, and his eyes are dark.
“I tried to leave,” he growls. “I couldn’t.”
“Conrad—dammit.” I stand in the middle of the kitchen, watching Conrad drip lake water onto the floor.
We stand staring at each other for a long tense moment, and then he moves. Slowly, languidly. As he reaches me, he takes the glass of wine from my hand and touches the rim to my lips. I drink three long swallows, and then he takes it and drains the rest. It goes to my head almost immediately. I clutch the towel at my chest. I’m breathing hard, as if I was the one who’d just swum a quarter mile instead of Conrad. He reaches up, untwists the towel wound around my hair, slowly and gently. Taking it, he towels off his body then tosses it aside.
“Stop me, Hannah.” He brushes aside my hands. Nudges a limp wet strand of my blond hair away from my eyes and tucks it behind my ear. “Tell me no. Tell me not here. Tell me not now.”
I can’t breathe. God, what does he do to me? What is this power he has over me? I just spent hours with him. In his arms, wrapped around me. But yet here he is, not even thirty minutes since I left, and I need him all over again, just as desperately as if it had been a day, or a week. I just…need him.
He just stands in front of me for a long moment, staring at me; not for the first time I wish I could read his thoughts, understand how his mind works. He wants me, he needs me as much as I want and need him…that much, at least, is obvious.
His fingers pluck at the folded towel and work it free. I shiver and shudder as the towel falls open and pools around my feet. My nipples harden, my belly tightens, and my core dampens. I meet his hot hungry stare, and I don’t miss the way his swim shorts tent as he becomes erect. I untie the string, pull his swim shorts down, and stroke his cock into a full erection.
I expect him to…I don’t know, pull me to the floor, or set me on the counter to wrap my legs around his waist. Instead, he turns me around, walks me backward to the counter, runs his hands down my arms from shoulder to wrists, tangles his fingers with mine as he presses me up against the edge of the counter. He sinks to the floor behind me, his nose trailing down my spine, and kneels in front of me. I stare down at him, gasp as he lifts up to lick at my nipples, one and then the other, as they hang over his face. He licks, sucks, and bites them until I’m gasping, and then I feel his fingers slip inside my pussy and I’m writhing for him. It takes but a moment, and I’m aching for him. Ready, needy.
His tongue touches my clit and I’m gone, crushing my core against his mouth, clutching the counter for dear life as his tongue lazily slithers against my cunt. I could reach orgasm in a moment, but he knows me, knows my body. He teases me. When I’m reaching the edge, he moves away, finds his feet. Spins me around so I’m facing the counter, bent over, my hands gripping the edge, ass pushed out. Palms skate down my spine, and then he caresses my ass.
“I’m gonna take you here,” he whispers, his voice soft and reverent. “Soon.”
“Is that a promise?”
He growls, wordless, feral. “Fucking right it is. You want that?”
“I want everything you have to give me, Conrad.” I push against his touch, undulating sinuously.
“We just fucked, Hannah,” he says, sounding as disbelieving as I feel. “How do I need you this badly already?”
He lines his cock up against my slit and nudges in. I gasp as he penetrates me, and then whimper as he fills me.
“Because it’s not just fucking,” I whisper, between whimpers and moans. “It’s…more.”
“I know, babe.”
He shuts me up by slamming deep without warning, so hard I cry out, rocked forward. I push back immediately, arching my back, feeling him fill me so completely I could cry for the fullness, the bliss, and the heady dizzying beauty of being united with Conrad. It’s everything, this, with him. Absolutely everything.
I groan low in my throat as he pulls away, hesitates, grips my hips and yanks me back against him. I move with him, grinding into his thrusts, aching, throbbing, desperate to reach the edge. Desperate even more to feel him topple over into orgasm, to feel him come, to feel him lose control. I squeeze around him with my cunt, clamp down as hard as I can and push against him and moan his name and take his cock deep, again and again and again.
“God, Hannah,” he groans, “I’m gonna come.”
“Do it, Conrad. Come for me. Come inside me.”
“I can’t stop it.”
“Good,” I whisper. “Don’t. Just let go.”
He leans forward, kisses between my shoulder blades, and I feel the moment he decides to let go and just come. Sometimes he draws it out, drags two or three or more orgasms out of me first. This time, though? It’s about him. And I want it that way. I grind against his thrusts, undulating, writhing, moaning breathlessly, whispering his name, squeezing around him. He slams into me, faster and faster and faster, until his hips slap against my ass and I’m not moaning for him anymore, but because the way he’s fucking me just takes me there with him, the way his big, beautiful, thick, perfect cock hits me just right so deep inside my pussy. I can’t help it.
“Oh fuck, fuck.” His voice is ragged, and his thrusts falter, and then crash harder. “Hannah, god—”
“Yeah? Gonna fill me with your cum, Conrad?”
“Fuck yeah I am.” He slams deep once more. “Right now.”
And he does. I feel it spurt into me. Feel it feel in wave after wave as he resumes fucking through his orgasm, and I have no choice but to join him, to come with him, to come apart for him. I cry past gritted teeth as my climax rips through me, gripping the counter edge so hard my fingers ache, pushing back against Conrad to feel him fill me deeper.
He finally goes still, falls forward to lean over me, reaching under to cup my swaying tits. “Better every time,” he says. “Don’t know how that’s possible, but it is.”
He pulls out, straightens. I feel his cum inside me, a wet warm pool, and then it drips out of me. A droplet slides down the inside of my thigh. He’s still behind me, and I feel his hand smoothing and caressing my ass, then delving down and between my thighs. He wipes at my slit with a finger. He touches his finger to my lips, and I lick his cum away, tasting him and me together.
I stroke his slackening cock, wet and slick and sticky with our mingled essences.
He backs away slowly and steps into his shorts. He turns away, pulls at the back door. It squeals as he opens it. I’m aching, but in a different way, now. Needing him. Needing him to just…stay with me. To not leave.
I clench my eyes shut rather than watch him leave.
Slam.
The bang of the screen door closing is definite, final.
My heart judders and cracks, and I open my eyes.
Instead of an empty kitchen, I see Conrad. Standing in front of me, palm ascending to cup my cheek.
Leaning in.
Something breaks inside me as he touches his lips to mine, soft, wet, warm, familiar, comforting, arousing, making everything inside me twist and contort and go wild and cry out and plea and sink into bliss.
He’s kissing me.
I could weep with joy, and indeed I feel a tear slide down my cheek.
I lean into him, cling to his wrist with both hands, a physical plea to keep his hand there on my cheek, cradling, fingertips behind my ear, thumb on my cheekbone, lower edge of his palm at my jaw.
Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me and never stop—
….
It is t
hree twenty-one in the morning, according to the red digital readout on the stove in the kitchen. The house is dark. Silent. Empty, but for me.
I can’t sleep, so I get up and wander around the house, staring out the windows at the warm, clear May night.
The front window of the house faces the street. To the left is the reflective yellow diamond sign with thick black lettering: DEAD END. To the right, the dirt road stretches away, ending at the two-lane highway. I can see a pool of dull yellow-orange light bathing the transition from dirt road to old highway blacktop. Across the street are trees, thick and impenetrable, a new-growth forest, elm and alder and ash and oak and maple, the underbrush gnarled and tangled beneath them.
On this side, at our house, one hundred and fifty feet of space is cleared of trees from street to lake. Thick green grass rolls gently down to the water’s edge. Our house, small, white siding fading and dirty, concrete porch with a wrought iron railing. Green door, aged, faded, pocked, dented. No screen, no storm door. The driveway, twin ruts in the grass leading up to the low carport. This is home, where Charlie and I have lived together for eight years.
Abruptly, I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move, can’t do anything. Surely I’m seeing things.
I’m not here, I don’t exist, I’m not seeing this.
I’m not seeing this.
But I am.
I see him out there, right now. Charlie, I mean. His car, his sensible red compact sedan is in the driveway, the engine is turned off but is still ticking. There’s another car out there, too, a red convertible, far less sensible. It’s exotic, expensive, the wheels black, the tires oversized, red brake calipers peeking between the wheel spokes. The interior is probably a creamy tan leather with a glossy walnut finish and digital readouts.
Her car.
Bitterness seethes inside me. It wells up, vile and burnt and acidic, in my gut, in my throat.
I see them.
They are shadows and profiles and silhouettes—I would recognize Charlie anywhere, but I don’t know the woman.
I can’t turn away. They are in her car and he fills the frame of the window. I see her on top of him, in the passenger seat. Her hair is long, wild, and loose. His hands slide up her back, grip her hair, tug her head back, and I see her in profile as she cries out, hand on the ceiling of the car, the other on him as she rides him.
Right out front of our house.
I keep watching. I can’t help it.
God, it’s all on display for me, the two of them. I can see her tits bouncing, the peak of her nipples, his hands clutching them. I watch him latch his mouth around them.
It lasts for…I don’t even know for how long, but I watch every minute of it.
I’m wrapped in my robe. Made of thin T-shirt cotton, dark gray, with a long belt I only loosely knot, it has a tendency to fall open even if I tug the edges closed and tie the belt. I tug the knot tighter and cross my arms over my breasts and watch, my heart in my throat, as she climbs off my husband. He gets out of the car, bathed in the interior LED lights. His jeans are still open as he exits the car, and his T-shirt is in his hand. He doesn’t bother fastening his pants or putting on his shirt, he just waves at her and walks toward the house.
She gets out and circles the car, says something I can’t hear, and he stops. He goes back to the car, and she leans her butt against the front quarter panel, the interior light illuminating her. Sharp, exotic, beautiful. Thick lustrous red hair, a vivid bottle scarlet. She’s wearing a little black dress, or rather, a Little Black Dress, worthy of the caps. It leaves little to the imagination, especially since she hasn’t bothered to even pull the garment back into place. It’s still rucked up around her hips to reveal that she’s not wearing underwear, and the strapless top is out of place as well, leaving her breasts all but bare.
He pushes her back against the side of her car, flattening himself against her. He kisses her. His hands roam, hers explore, and I begin to wonder if they’re going to start all over again, this time out in the open. But then he pulls back, a little shakily perhaps. Wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist.
My gut aches.
The way he looks at her…the way she leans back against the side of her exotic sports car, lounging like a contented feline, yet still managing to look somehow…wistful.
It hurts so fucking much, seeing that.
Loneliness guts me. I have no one. Nothing. Just this damn house, the lake, my little island where I go to get away when I need solitude. But I’m alone. So fucking alone.
And he has her, at least, but who do I have? No one.
He’s approaching the house now, t-shirt in hand, jeans still open, unzipped, unbuttoned. I leave the living room and climb into bed in my robe. I face away from the doorway of our room. Listen to him putter around in the kitchen for a while. As he steps over the transition from the hallway to our room I hear the slight creak there.
He sits on his side of the bed, shucks his jeans, and leaves them on the floor at the foot of the bed. He rolls toward me.
I smell him.
I smell her. I smell their sex.
“At least take a fucking shower, Charlie,” I snap.
“Goddammit.” A long slow sigh. “It’s not what you think.”
I only laugh, bitterly.
“What are you going to do?” He asks. “Leave me?”
“And go where?” There’s no bitterness in this, only resignation. I’ve wrestled with this for weeks.
“Exactly.” He leans toward me. “For what it’s worth—”
“Nothing,” I interrupt, “whatever you’re about to say is worth nothing.”
“Whatever.” He sighs, stands up, and the bed shifts as he leaves it.
I hear his step, then the shower running. I pretend to be asleep when gets back in bed, but I’m not.
I’m seeing her. Her hair, her breasts, her effortless sex appeal. The way he looked at her, the way he touched her.
As if he couldn’t get enough. As if he was just…drawn to her.
He doesn’t look at me that way. Doesn’t touch me that way. Doesn’t see me that way. Doesn’t want me that way.
I don’t even have the courage to cry. I want to, the tears are building up inside me, but it hurts too much to even cry—
*
There’s paint everywhere. The window is wide open, letting in the cold, late fall air. Tarps are tacked on the walls and draped across the floor. But they are not those blue plastic tarps—these are white painter’s drop cloths. There are buckets of paint in every corner, in every color, the tops off, pools of paint mixing on the floor. Green, red, yellow, orange, blue, black, white, taupe, mauve, olive, maroon, sienna, canary, azure, all the colors and shades mixing merging smearing mingling in a lake of pigment.
In the middle of it all, naked, are Conrad and me.
Skin to skin. Hot flesh on hot flesh, cooled by the sharp bite of the November wind from the window.
We roll, twist, kick, and flail. His hand stutters down my spine, dragging five colored trails from shoulder blades to tailbone, each trail a different smear of a dozen mixed shades. His thigh presses against mine, leaving a green splotch, and then my toes scrape his calf, spreading a splash of blue across the muddy coral-yellow-green already there.
He’s inside me, moving, sliding, gliding, pushing. Slowly, unhurriedly. Pausing now and then, letting the need build, pulling us both back from the edge.
I fall to my back and he’s levered over me, and I cling to his waist with my thighs, hook my feet together behind his back. The paint on my toes is actually toenail polish, ten ovals of vivid red applied moments before Conrad appeared in my bedroom. His hand covers my breast, pressing an imperial purple palm print onto my pale flesh, and then his mouth covers mine and I feel tears start in my eyes and trickle down my cheek, and he feels them and knows them and allows them and doesn’t wipe them away or shush them. He just kisses me until I’m sobbing and the paint on my cheeks is swirled with tears, turned t
o Picasso-like abstractions. He lets me sob while he kisses me, and kisses me, and kisses me, and fucks me with delicacy and gentility.
I clutch him with one hand, slashing forest green smears from the round of his shoulder to his nape, and then I’ve got two handfuls of his taut hard ass. I smear my hands in the paint at my sides and push at the floor to roll him away and onto his back so I can straddle him, gathering ochre on my index finger and gliding it in rune shapes on his chest, nonsense lines and whorls, his cock seated deep inside me and throbbing and I’m content to sit on him like this and feel him inside me and just hold him there and feel the stretching wondrous aching perfection of him and paint on his body. He holds still, hands tucked behind his head, uncaring of the paint matted in his hair. He watches me, and for once I can read his expression:
LOVE.
It’s there and clear and obvious, and we both know it but neither of us say it or even address it. He just lets me see it. I smear my palms across his chest to wipe away the designs I’ve traced. I swirl my hand through a puddle of charcoal on the floor to my right and then glop it on his chest. Spread it around. Find a puddle of red and drag it through the white to make pink, like I would on a palette.
I draw a heart on his chest.
It’s a ragged, uneven heart. Intentionally lopsided, angular, broken.
His brows furrow, and his hands grasp my waist and he thrusts up into me, and I cry out.
