by Lisa Ferrari
I prop myself up on one elbow and twist to face him. His mouth devours mine. He tastes sweet with vanilla.
We stare into each other’s eyes as he pushes into me.
“Come inside me, Kellan.”
Kellan’s eyes widen, the pace of his thrusting increases, and a minute later he erupts inside me. I feel the warmth of his ejaculate.
“I’m coming,” he moans. “I’m coming inside you, Claire.”
I vigorously massage my clitoris and orgasm again at the same time Kellan is erupting inside me.
We both cry out in ecstasy, staring into one another’s eyes as we climax together, until we collapse, with Kellan on top of me, still inside me, both of us completely spent.
Kellan looks into my eyes. “God, I love you.”
I return his ardent gaze. “I love you, too.”
Chapter 16
I’M STANDING IN my apartment, trying to decide what to do with all my stuff.
But, mostly, and to be perfectly honest, I’m still thinking about Kellan eating vanilla ice cream out of my booty and making love to me until we came together.
Oh how I want to do that again.
Exactly that sequence of events.
I flop on my sofa and shove my hand down the front my new red jeans, finding my clitoris. I caress my breast and nipple with my other hand and close my eyes, recalling Kellan’s tongue in my ass, and the way I came while he was eating the ice cream out of me, and the way he came inside me. I love having his semen inside me. The thought of it makes me come. My thighs press hard together and I roll sideways on the sofa, lost in the memory, until at last the orgasm wanes, leaving me quivering in the aftermath.
I put my feet on the sofa and lie down, breathing heavily, suddenly sleepy.
Kellan and I spent our time at the Del Coronado naked and in bed. Our only excursions from our suite were to visit the fitness center and the restaurants. We also looked at the beautiful ballroom again as a possible venue for our wedding. We first saw it the weekend we had our now-infamous though quite insane beach workout with Kellan’s Navy SEAL buddies. Kellan remarked that the ballroom would be a lovely place for a wedding reception, with the ceremony taking place either on the beach or on the grassy circle in front of the hotel. It terrified me the first time and it terrified me this time as well. I’m not certain why it frightens me so. I love and adore Kellan without reservation and am wholly committed to him, now and forever, as long as he’ll have me, with or without a marriage. I love the big fat diamond ring he put on my finger after he proposed on the beach in Maui last Christmas. But something about being married frightens me. I have often thought this has something to do with the example set by my parents. They’ve stuck it out for more than twenty-five years, despite there being times when it was obvious to Beth and me that they both wanted out. Beth always said dividing the business and assets would be too messy, so that’s why neither of them actually went through with it.
Seeing the debacle that was Denise’s one and only marriage doesn’t instill confidence, either.
I understand those are isolated incidents and have absolutely nothing to do with Kellan and me and our relationship.
But I’m still scared.
I know I could never find anyone else like Kellan. Not even close. There are times, many times, when I can’t believe my luck for having met him and for having fallen insanely in love with him. And he with I. I often think I should elope with him immediately before he comes to his senses and goes back to Stacy or to Calista Roth or to any one or two or three or ten of the myriad other gorgeous women who would kill to be with him. I should marry him and get it over with. Lock him down while I can.
But that feels like a trap. I don’t want to be with a man only because he’s scared of the stigma associated with divorce. I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me.
My phone pings.
It’s a text from Kellan.
Hi, gorgeous. Whatcha doin?
Thinking of you.
Naked, I hope. ;)
Not quite, but my hand
is still down my pants.
WHAT???
I got so horny
thinking about you
eating vanilla ice cream
out of me.
I want to do it again.
So I masturbated.
It feels very sexy and exciting to openly tell Kellan that I masturbated.
You are so
going to get it.
I’m not sure what that means. But I am confident I’ll find out. I return to the task at hand: evaluating this cave where I once lived.
I look around, feeling like a stranger in my old life. My furniture has a layer of dust on it. There’s no food in my fridge; just condiments. Can’t eat those. But that’s fine; I’m not staying. I’m packing. Kellan is going to be here in a little while with a rental truck. And it’s not like I’m moving out for good just now. I’m merely taking the essentials.
The place feels vacant.
To combat this, to feel more at home in my own home, I turn on all the lights and turn on my old stereo and press Play on the CD player. It whirs to life and makes that clicking sound that can’t be good, even though it’s been doing it for five years and seems to be working fine. One of my old Moby CDs plays. “Extreme Ways” comes on. One of my all-time favorite songs. I have no idea what it’s about, what Moby intended or was trying to say. It was in the Bourne Identity movie, I forget which one; maybe all of them. But I don’t associate it with that. I don’t seem to have an association. The song simply speaks to me in ways I have never understood.
Kind of like I don’t understand how this is my apartment.
I used to love this apartment. I used to love being home, relaxing on the old crappy sofa my mom and dad gave me, with my laptop, working on my books and watching movies and Game of Thrones and a zillion reruns of Friends.
The night I met Kellan, I had been sitting on the sofa feeling disgusting and hating myself because I’d eaten an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s
And an entire package of microwaved bacon!
despite having gone to the gym that afternoon after work.
I’d been texting Denise about it and she joked that I could go to the gym again for a second time that day.
So I did; I went.
When I got there, I was pretty much the only one there. I started doing cardio and a little while later a guy in a hoodie got on the machine next to mine and started talking to me.
It was Kellan.
Only the hottest guy I’d ever seen in real life.
In the Hot Guys Pantheon, Kellan could compete with the best of them.
He invited me to work out with him, which I did. And we talked for almost twenty minutes in the parking lot afterwards. That’s how this whole crazy journey began, through Denise daring me to go to the gym twice in one day and me being crazy enough to actually do it.
It seems so long ago…
Meeting Kellan seems very recent. But living here feels quite foreign.
As I look around, there’s really nothing I want to bring. I’m supposed to be packing the essentials. I guess none of this stuff is essential.
I take a magnet off the refrigerator. It’s a photo of Kellan and me taken at the Hollywood Classic, the first fitness expo I attended with him (the first fit expo I attended ever!). Kellan guest posed and blew everyone away. The crowd loved him and it showed me just how popular and well-known he actually is.
Kellan has his arms around me in the photo and looks happy.
And sexy.
And gorgeous.
And good enough to eat, like always.
I look uncertain. As usual.
And Stacy is in the background, along with her tits, photobombing with some gang-affiliation wannabe bullshit thing she’s doing with her fingers, and sticking her tongue out like she’s Gene Simmons.
Part of me thinks Sta
cy ruined the photo. But part of me likes that she’s in it because Kellan has his arms around me; not her. I’m the one pressed up against him; not her. And I’m the one who went back to the hotel room with him and slept in the same bed, despite both of us being too exhausted to get naked or enjoy any kinky fuckery.
I go to my closet and dig out my old suitcase. My new one that Kellan bought for me is at his house, in his closet, empty, as most of my clothes are there, where I unpacked them after we flew home from L.A. last night to do laundry and re-pack for our drive (move? Holy rental agreement!) to L.A.
Things are happening so fast, so quickly.
So . . . effortlessly.
Kellan says that’s how you know it’s right.
My mom would say it was divine intervention. Certainly not this, her baby shacking up with a roided-out meathead and flitting off to the City of Angels, which of course everyone knows is every bit as demented and lost as Sin City itself. I heard once that Van Nuys used to be (and perhaps still is) the porn capitol of the world, and that it became so due to its proximity to Hollywood. Combine tangential filmmaking and massive video tape duplication facilities sprinkled with a dash of women willing to do anything, and you get . . . that.
Anyway.
I flip through my hangers, considering each item. No… no… no… no… ew, God no…
There’s nothing I want to wear. Nothing I want.
I consider the shoes in my closet. Not that I have many. My old, stinky running shoes that I don’t wear anymore (ugly, all-white New Balance; what was I thinking???) because my new ones are at Kellan’s (sexy pink-and-black Asics I love).
Bras and panties?
Nope, nothing but raggedy granny panties I haven’t worn for six months and a few bras that are way too big now. Over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders. I want to burn them. Putting them in the trash can under the kitchen sink would be easier.
Man, I don’t want any of this stuff.
Can you donate bras and panties to Goodwill or is that just creepy? I bet the guys who work in the warehouse receiving the giant bags and boxes of donations would find my bras and panties and shove them in their pockets and when they got home that night they would smell them and jerk off. At least my old underwear would be making someone happy. Or perhaps I’ll simply put them in a plastic bag and then inside of another plastic bag and throw them away. In another county. Or state.
I look at my coats and jackets. All four of them.
Nope.
Big and bulky and, well, ugly.
Something I would never wear.
Something I would never buy.
Who bought these?
Clearly, I did, but why? Who was I then?
The worst coat, a big puffy grey unisex bell-shaped parka thing, was a gift from my mom six or seven years ago. It has no pockets (why don’t women’s garments come with pockets?! We have tons of stuff to carry!). The inner lining is a rough brown material that feels like burlap (yuck!) and makes me itch just looking at it. It is a singularly hideous garment. And it smells like mildew and pee because I wore it in the rain on my way to a Saint Patrick’s Day party (aren’t garments like this supposed to have some measure of water resistance???!).
I think that was the last time I wore it.
But why would my mother have bought it for me? I’m certain she believed she was doing a good thing out of love, buying what she perceived to be a coat which I would like and would enjoy and would wear and which would keep me warm so I might think fondly of her.
Or perhaps she thought me incapable of purchasing a coat for myself, thereby preventing my own impending death due to exposure.
Or, and this is interesting, perhaps by selecting such a hideous coat she was hoping it would render me so unattractive as to prevent the receipt of any male suitors. Sperm armor, if you will, thereby assuring that I, unlike she, would not get knocked-up out of wedlock, thereby also assuring that my eternal soul would not be in peril, unlike hers.
Huh.
I wonder if that’s it. It does seem to mesh with the notion of her constantly plying me with food, fattening me up for the same purpose (an act in which I was wholly complicit, of course; I was the one doing all the eating; I was the one who turned to food).
Could the coat have been the hideous icing on the big, fat, unfuckable cake?
Man, I could go nuts thinking about that.
Whatever.
It was probably on sale.
But it’s just so fugly.
WTF?
And why oh why did I not exchange it? The burlap alone should’ve done it. Combine this coat with my dingy granny panties and asexual bras and singularly unflattering old and no-longer-white running shoes and it’s no wonder I ate myself into oblivion, cementing hundreds of thousands of calories onto my body until I looked like the Michelin Man with a vagina no one wanted to enjoy, especially once the burlap coat began to reek of piss. Is it any wonder I went home alone from that Saint Patrick’s Day party?
I quickly close the closet door on the hideousness of my past, the memories of my former self, the fashion-offensive asexualized snakeskin detritus girl I once was.
With the closet door firmly and resolutely closed, I’m standing in front of the mirrored door.
I see before me quite the opposite of granny panties, dingy D-cups, and pee-pee coats.
I see a person I scarcely recognize. Every time someone shows me a recent picture or a video of myself, I see this person, whom I now see in the mirror, looking back at me. She is beautiful and sexy and out of place in this apartment. She is wearing red skinny jeans and silver strappy heels and a turquoise halter top. Her boobs look amazing. Everything about her looks amazing. Striations are visible in her shoulders. There’s a subtle but distinct separation between her shoulders and arms, the three heads of the deltoid tying in nicely with the two heads of the bicep. The lateral head of the tricep. There’s a hint of a vein in each of her forearms. This girl works out. This girl goes to the gym regularly and works hard. She watches what she eats. She has worked hard to get where she is, to look like this. She has busted her ass. And she continues to do so in order to keep what she has earned. Her physique is solely hers. Such a physique is its own reward. It cannot be bought. It cannot be faked. It must be earned through hard work and dedication and discipline. And only through hard work and dedication and discipline can it be maintained.
The girl in front of me is taller than I am, too. She has nice cheek bones and good hair. She has nice shoulders and a good shape. She looks like a girl I would like to be friends with because she knows what’s up and has her shit together.
But I would never approach her.
I would wait and hope chance would bring us together. I would hope she’s as kind and funny and smart and caring as she is gorgeous and fit. I would want to wear pants like hers. I would want to stand tall in shoes like hers. I would want to wear a turquoise halter top bustier thing like hers because she looks so good in it and I would hope I would look as good. I would want her to take me shopping to whatever magical place she found these clothes in the hopes that they could do for me what they clearly do for her.
And maybe, through knowing her, I could find the zipper on my soul and unzip it and remove the husky exterior that doesn’t feel like me, the burlap pee-pee coat I wake up in every morning and go to sleep in every night and detest every time I stand there brushing my teeth looking in the mirror at someone I’m surely not. And in so doing would shine the real me, the golden light inside me that can make the world a better place, even if only a little bit and for a little while, because each of us has the power to live up to our potential and to fill the world with our own special ray of light and love and hope and friendship and goodness and trust and faith and charity and kindness. That’s what Kellan would say. And he would be right.
The pretty, uber-fit girl in the mirror fingers the buttons on the front of her halter top. Kellan was the one who found it in th
e boutique on Melrose. It has two rows of antique brass buttons on the front, with a flappy thing that hangs open. It reminded me of a Civil War uniform. It reminded Kellan of something Captain Kirk wore in The Wrath of Khan, if Kirk were a woman with, as Kellan put it, a rack sculpted by God Himself. I felt sexy and stylish and hip when I wore this outfit in the boutique. And at Sheila’s party. And at the airport. And on the flight home. I felt like these were the clothes a person in First Class would wear.
But standing here in my old apartment, they seem out of place. Inconducive. If that’s even a word. My old orange-and-black UOP sweats and a faded grey tee shirt seem more appropriate.
But then sitting on the sofa eating Chunky Monkey and feeling my belly fat hanging over my waistband used to be appropriate, too.
How things change.
I lift up the hem of the Civil-War-Captain-Kirk halter and look at my stomach. I can see my abs. I exhale and squeeze them tight and they pop. Not like they did on Friday morning when Kellan had me ready for our meeting, especially since we’ve been a bit more loose with our nutrition, but they’re definitely still there. They’re not just a dream I was having, a dream in which I’m married to a towering hunk of a man who is also kind and sweet and generous and, privately, very vulnerable and complex. A dream in which I’m a movie star. Are you kidding me? A movie star! With hair and make-up people fussing over me and a stylist adjusting this sleeve or that drape, and a director looking at me through one of those handheld lens things, framing up his shot, or whatever it is they do, giving me my motivation. Do they still do that? I don’t know. I know nothing about that world, the world into which I am being drawn more and more each day. I haven’t thought that much about it. Kellan and I have discussed it, and he’s helped me see it in a fun way that makes it not so scary, not so intimidating. I sense that if I stand here in my old apartment and dwell on it, I’m going to freak out. It’s all going to become real in a way it hasn’t yet been. And I’ll get scared and I’ll poop my new red pants and I’ll sabotage the whole thing. Sabotage my future with Kellan. Sabotage my life. Myself.
I mustn’t do that.
