by Helena Maeve
Had she also told him about my sudden burst of violence? Somehow, I thought it likely.
“She called you?” I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even concerned with what she might have said. I felt drained, exhausted. If this was the moment our almost-relationship ended, I was pretty sure I could handle it. At the very least, I wouldn’t weep. I was too tired for that.
“I called the house,” Elliot said. “I was hoping you’d pick up and I had every intention of hanging up when you didn’t, but… Bridget figured it was me.”
No surprise there. Mrs. Hamilton knew everything about everyone. There were no secrets in her house. Why should my love life be an exception to the rule? “Oh. So… She told you.” I didn’t want to prolong this. Couldn’t we just rip off the Band-Aid and move on with our lives?
“Told me what? Miriam, I don’t understand what happened. Bridget wouldn’t say—”
Too busy protecting her husband, I thought, and building her case against me.
I was facing off against a Harvard-educated lawyer who knew everyone who was someone in this city. I didn’t stand a chance. I thought of Dustin’s suggestion that I press charges and nearly laughed out loud. Retribution was the last thing on the docket for me. My best bet was to disappear into the ether and hope that Bridget Hamilton didn’t make it her life’s mission to chase me down.
“Are you still there?” Elliot breathed into the phone. “Miriam, please… You’re scaring me.”
“I’m sorry.” I was sorry for ruining what we’d had, I was sorry for storming out like a teenager and slamming the door behind me when I’d left—I was even sorry I’d hurt Mr. Hamilton, though the bastard had deserved it.
Mostly, I felt sorry for myself. The life I’d cobbled together after college had been far from perfect, but it had had its moments. I’d miss it.
“Just… Tell me where you are and I’ll come get you,” Elliot entreated. “Or we can meet somewhere downtown. I know a bar—”
I rattled off Penny’s address before I could think the better of it. Sitting there, alone in the dark, I couldn’t quash down the reckless desire to see Elliot one last time. “I’ll wait for you downstairs,” I said.
“I’ll be there in five.”
It was late and the traffic between the Clift and Market Street wouldn’t be as dense at this hour as it was during the day, but I wasn’t going to hold it against him if he was late. I hung up the phone feeling strangely hollow, like the vital parts of me had been carved out while I slept. I shivered under my borrowed blanket.
Penny’s shuffling footsteps alerted me to her presence long before I saw her. “Everything okay? I heard voices.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I called Elliot.”
“Oh.” Penny scrubbed a hand over her eyes. Her long, silky black hair was tangled and she looked exhausted.
“Go back to bed,” I advised. It was my turn to mother her—as if I could. “I’m just going to head down for a bit.”
“He’s coming over?”
I told Penny that he was. If she disapproved, she didn’t let on. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember her disapproving even the first time I slept with Elliot, when we were still in school and the prospect of banging older men had this veneer of danger and maturity about it that we quickly outgrew. Some of us more quickly than others, I thought, spying a framed wedding photograph of Penny and Dustin on the sideboard.
“Okay, well…” Penny mustered a smile. “I’m going back to bed, so… The view from the roof is nice, if you two want some privacy.”
“And so I don’t wake you guys again?”
“There’s no chance of that. Dustin sleeps like the dead.” Penny grimaced. “And he snores.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t just mean for the tip, though that counted, too. The thought of bringing Elliot into Penny’s condo only to have him end things between us would have been in poor taste and I couldn’t dredge up the energy to change.
The rooftop would have to do.
I donned my hoodie and the slippers I’d been wearing when I left Clay Street and trooped down the stairs to meet my not really boyfriend.
Elliot was already there waiting, a hunch-shouldered silhouette leaning miserably against the glass doors. He must’ve been trying to peer into the darkened lobby. The security lights only switched on when I walked past the sensor.
Elliot’s expression instantly morphed into one of relief. “I was worried I got the address wrong,” he breathed when I opened the door.
I didn’t get the chance to answer before he swept me into his arms, his body broad and strong and so warm against mine. It was just as well. I really didn’t have anything worth saying.
I was ashamed of myself for holding on just as tightly as Elliot held me. I couldn’t help it.
“When Bridget said you’d left, I thought… I don’t know what I thought.” Elliot kissed my ear, my temple, his lips a hard pressure against my cheek. I wanted him to be the one bruising me for a change, not the other way around. I wanted something to remember him by. “What happened?” he asked, pulling back.
He wasn’t like Penny or Dustin. He couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.
“I think I lost my job.” My efforts to sound flippant fell short of the mark. I blinked the tears out of my eyes. “Do you want to come in? Penny says there’s a roof terrace with a nice view…”
“Penny’s the friend you’re staying with?”
I had done such a good job keeping Elliot in the dark that I hadn’t told him my best friend’s name. The joke was on me, though. There would always be that one thing I couldn’t control.
“Penny and Dustin,” I said. “They’ve got a condo on the third floor. It’s really nice…” I led the way to the elevator as if in a trance. Elliot kept a hand on the small of my back as we waited. I kept telling myself to shake him off, stop this getting any more painful, but I couldn’t.
I let him touch me. I reveled in his proximity.
A cool breeze struck my cheeks as we stepped out onto the roof. I could smell the ocean, the wet and smoky scent of city streets. Penny was right. The view from the rooftop was lovely, even if there was no chance of seeing the stars with so much light pollution.
“Do you want to talk about what happened?”
Elliot stroked his fingers through my unbound hair. I wanted to turn my head into the touch, but I resisted. I needed to get this out without relying on his strength to see me through. I wouldn’t have it for much longer.
“I kneed Patrick Hamilton in the nuts.”
For just the briefest instant, Elliot stilled his hand. “What did he do?”
It wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting. Surprise stopped me short for a long, breathless moment. “He tried to cop a feel.” He had done more than that, but I wasn’t in a hurry to make myself into some sort of victim. I wasn’t angling for empathy.
I saw Elliot clench his jaw and my resolve wavered. To hell with it, I thought, I’m protecting a guy who doesn’t deserve it. “H-he might have implied he wanted to get to know me better. In the biblical sense.” Just say it. “He wanted to fuck me and he didn’t seem to care that I didn’t,” I blurted out, digging my fingernails into the meat of my palms.
Elliot stepped away from me, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“I’m surprised Bridget didn’t tell you,” I said. Once I opened my mouth, it was hard to shut up. “She’s probably burned all my stuff, told the kids I stole her pearls… Anything to protect the family, right? It’s okay if you don’t believe me, I don’t expect you to. But I thought you should know. I didn’t run out on you, just on them.” I shrugged. “Not that it makes much difference, I suppose.”
“What are you talking about?” Elliot asked, his forehead wrinkling like papyrus.
“You’re Patrick’s friend. You went to school together.” I thought of Penny and my naïve conviction that she was perfect in every way. It had nothing to do with reason and objectivity. I needed someone to look up to.
<
br /> Elliot scoffed. “That was almost twenty years ago.”
“You’re still his friend.”
“And what am I to you?” Elliot asked. “Nothing?”
I shook my head, but it was useless to lie. We’d made every attempt to avoid putting a label on our non-relationship. “You’re leaving soon.” Tomorrow night. I felt my heart constrict at the thought. “I didn’t want to end things like this, but…”
“But what? You were assaulted!” Elliot opened his arms wide. He cut an imposing figure, but I could never imagine being afraid of him. “Miriam, I’m in love with you. If I regret anything it’s that Patrick isn’t here. I swear to God, I’d pitch him off this roof.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“Okay,” he said, recanting, “I probably wouldn’t. But I’d give him a good scare.”
“It’s not your place to protect me.” If I focused on that, if I didn’t acknowledge what he’d said, maybe he wouldn’t realize it, either. I worried he might take it back.
Elliot deflated. “I know that. I know you don’t need me.”
I do. “Neither do you,” I insisted. If our arrangement had any appeal, it was that it left us both open and free to do whatever we damn well pleased. No-strings kinky sex had sounded so good when we’d first started. We must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way. Sex wasn’t supposed to be this complicated. Losing a fuck buddy shouldn’t have hurt.
I watched Elliot bridge the distance between us with slow, shuffling steps. One of his scuffed Converses was undone, laces trailing along the cement. “That’s true,” he murmured, “but I’m not going to want you any less just because I don’t need you beside me. You’re—smart and you’re strong. You make me laugh.”
“I’m good in bed,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“We’re good together. Tell me you don’t feel it, too.”
I felt his hands settle on my shoulders. The scent of his cologne was faint but familiar, a lure I had never tried very hard to resist. I couldn’t deny that we had great sexual chemistry. I loved being with him, exploring new things, laughing when we messed up.
I even liked sleeping beside him, which I’d seldom done with past boyfriends.
“You believe me,” I breathed, surprised.
It wasn’t a question, but Elliot nodded anyway. “Duh.”
“But… Why?” I refused to believe I had been pessimistic about this. “I don’t have any proof.”
“I trust you.”
“Blindly, just like that?” I hadn’t done anything to persuade him.
Elliot hitched up his shoulders. “Don’t know if you heard me before, but—I’m in love with you. So, you know… Trust is sort of a prerequisite.”
“Oh.” I gaped. He wasn’t taking it back. He wasn’t breaking up with me.
It suddenly felt like the world had just shifted one hundred and eighty degrees when I wasn’t looking.
“You don’t have to say it back,” Elliot added quickly. “That’s not—this isn’t some ploy to get you to commit. I’m just saying. I’m not going to doubt your word. I may cut off all contact with Bridget and Patrick for being a bag of dicks, but that’s another story.”
I sniffed. “I think that’s an insult to dicks.”
“Yeah?” Elliot smiled. “You’re probably right.” He put his arms around me and held me so tight that I couldn’t tell if it was my heart I could hear thudding violently against my ribcage or if it was his.
“How long?” I asked, my words muffled in his shirt. He heard me, though. I knew it by the hitch of his breath.
“How long what?”
He was trying to buy himself time. “How long have you been in love with me?” I pressed him. “Did it happen just now? Because I don’t mean to criticize but I’m not exactly at my best tonight…” What I meant to say was that I hoped he didn’t think this blubbering, helpless creature was who I was most days. I knew I came across as a hardass sometimes, but I would rather he think I was steel and vitriol than thin skin and waterworks.
“Two years,” Elliot murmured.
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish,” he drawled. “Would’ve made getting over you so much easier… Truth is, the more I thought about that night, the more I wanted to kick myself. I thought about trying to track you down, but—”
“It would’ve been weird?” I suggested and he nodded. I breathed in the scent of his cologne, the warmth of his skin. “Stay with me tonight,” I heard myself beg. It was pathetic, but I couldn’t bite back the plea.
Elliot pressed his lips into my hair and said, “Staying right here as long as you want.”
I didn’t tell him that I thought that might be a long, long time, that two years was just an amuse-bouche of sorts.
I lost track of the hour in his arms. I allowed myself to drift, to think of the future in terms other than my own hapless panic. Whatever happened with the Hamiltons, with my job, I would pull through. The thought of having Elliot beside me as I struggled to find some way to land on my feet was no small reassurance.
We stayed like that for ages, our bodies pressed together tight, my head resting on his shoulder. Eventually, I turned in his arms, let him take my weight as I gazed out over the city. I might have been cold without Elliot to hold me tight.
“Do you want me to…?” he murmured against the shell of my ear. I felt his hand drift tentatively from my waist to the swell of my hip and down, cupping me through Penny’s PJs.
“Yeah,” I breathed.
I wanted him constantly, with an intensity that scared me. It didn’t matter that we were high up on a rooftop in the heart of the city, or that anyone with a pair of binoculars could likely see his hand slipping into my drawstring pants. I needed him and that was all there was to it.
The first press of his fingertips against my inner folds had me rising up on tiptoe, my breaths hitching in my throat. Elliot kissed my neck, the shell of my ear and though I couldn’t see his face, I had a feeling he was grinning. I rocked back into his lap in penance and was gratified when I heard him groan.
“Be still,” he growled as he sank two fingers deep into me, pressing his palm against my sensitive clit.
“Or what?”
There was no answer. Elliot wasn’t the tease between us and I didn’t want him to take on a role he didn’t feel comfortable playing. Instead, I gripped his forearm for support and played at using his hand for my own pleasure. As if the desire to touch me didn’t originate with him. As if those talented fingers curling so deliciously into me needed guidance.
I could feel Elliot’s cock swelling against my backside. He’d never ask for it himself, but if I offered—
“I want you to fuck me,” I said, throwing caution to the wind.
“Here?”
I nodded. Here, now, with our pants around our ankles and his breaths warm and harried in my ear. I wanted the cold bite of concrete against my palms. So what if we could be seen? I spread my legs as far as the pajama pants would allow and wriggled back until Elliot got the message.
He fumbled for a condom in the pocket of his jeans, the rustle of foil and denim music to my ears. I braced both against the concrete.
Elliot entered me in one clean stroke, gripping my hips for support. “Fuck, Miriam—”
“I know,” I wheezed. “I know. It’s good, right? It’s always good with you.” Part of me felt embarrassed to admit even that much, as if I was confessing some great secret. He must have known.
We didn’t keep tumbling into each other’s arms because it was unpleasant.
To any peeping Toms watching us from afar, perhaps it looked like Elliot had control of our lovemaking. It was true that for the first time since we’d met, I was bent over and he was behind me, setting the pace and stroking his fingers reverently down my spine. But I was also the one clutching at him from within and keeping him deep inside me when he made to pull out too far.
He set the pace because I allowed it. When he dug his fingers i
nto my skin as he neared his peak, I knew I could deny him, ask him to restrain himself. It didn’t even cross my mind to try. Not tonight, not like this.
Elliot came first, spending himself into the condom, into my pussy as I reached back in an effort to bring him ever deeper into me. “Don’t move,” I bit out, when what I meant was Don’t leave me.
I had spent so much time telling myself that one of those was pathetic and the other had to be earned that I couldn’t remember which was which.
“May I touch you?” Elliot panted into the messy twist of my tangled hair.
I nodded fervently. I was too far gone to resist and I couldn’t muster the energy to play games. Elliot didn’t let me worry about that for long, though. He brought me off with talented fingers and a wet, sucking kiss against the column of my throat.
I nearly shouted his name as he stroked me past the point of no return. I came like that, holding onto Elliot and the rough concrete ledge, my hips twitching in his lap as his hands roamed, never still, over my flushed, sweaty skin.
Small, stubborn shivers arced through me like electric current in the aftermath. My body sagged into his hands, utterly limp. I didn’t lose my footing. Not even close. It was enough to know that there was someone to catch me on the off-chance my knees should give out.
Elliot held me tight until the eastern sky began to brighten, the first tendrils of a timid sun peeking over the rooftops. He didn’t let go, just like he’d promised.
* * * *
Penny and Elliot hit it off the moment I introduced them. By the time I was done with the eggs, they were discussing Vonnegut—a shared favorite—and picking apart Stanley Kubrick’s filmography.
“Let me give you a hand,” said Dustin, and joined me by the cooker. “I’ve never felt more like a third wheel in my life.”
I caught him smiling, though, so I knew there was no real aggravation behind the complaint. He was careful not to brush against me as he liberated a box of muesli from the cupboard. Penny was a vegan, as I remembered from our college days, but her husband was not. It should have been a problem, but somehow they managed to keep both lettuce and pork in the house without igniting a war.
