Mai Tai for Two

by Delphine Dryden

  Alan ran his hands over her shoulders, down her back, around her waist. She expected him to go up or down from there, but he held her, pressing his chest to her back, his lips to her temple.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Not too much. You know. Shower porn.”

  “Wow chicka wow wow... No, seriously, what’s wrong? You checked out.” Feather-soft kisses beside her ear, arms tightening around her waist. You’re safe, his body seemed to say. It’s okay, I’m here for you.

  Was that even what she wanted?

  “I’m a little tired from this morning. But it’s good, it’s all good.” She wiggled her butt a little, hoping to encourage him. He was still hard. She could feel it back there poking her.

  “Let’s finish washing the morning away, then, and take this to bed.”

  Chapter Ten

  He was thinking with his dick. Alan knew that, but he wasn’t all that worried about it, which was both the blessing and the curse of genital cognition. Later he’d probably be kicking himself, but right now he only wanted to bury himself in Julie. Drown himself, really, get totally lost. It wasn’t just a sex thing.

  Okay, maybe at that particular moment it was mostly a sex thing. It was the best sex thing.

  Not just because of the shower blow job, either.

  The problem was, what made it great was Julie. But he’d said something in the course of the morning to piss her off, and he couldn’t figure out what it was or how to fix it. He thought they’d moved past it, but the way she’d tuned out a few minutes ago suggested otherwise. The solution probably wasn’t in the bed, but maybe getting there would take them back to the magic. So reasoned Mr. Happy, at least.

  He helped Julie towel off. He was only effective at it because he was overcompensating, making sure he didn’t forget himself and jump her right there on the bathroom floor. It could easily happen. So he was very careful, drying behind her ears, inside her elbows, between all her toes one by one. It was a fun job. She had cute toes, and she smelled like his soap.

  “Hey, while you’re down there...”

  “Patience.” He was talking to himself as much as to her. “Bed.”

  He dropped the towel and picked her up by the waist, squeezing a startled squeak out of her as he carried her out of the bathroom.

  “You’re going to wreck your back. I’m the same size as you.” She wrapped her legs around his waist, helping support some of her weight. Warm, still a little damp. The sudden hit of skin-to-skin contact was making all the blood flow away from his brain at a fast clip.

  “Not quite. And I’m stronger than I look.” He considered propping Julie against the wall, but it wasn’t really convenient for his purpose. Instead, he staggered to the bed and let her down slowly, winding up on top of her. She felt fantastic. It was kind of a problem. He kept not wanting to change positions because whatever position they were in always felt so good. There was a plan for right now, though, and he was sticking to it.

  Working his way down, he paused at her neck. He’d already figured out it was one of her main erogenous zones. All he really had to do was breathe on the spot behind either ear to make her shiver. Biting there was worth a moan at least, and in this case she also whispered his name. He could have listened to that sound all day.

  The middle of her chest was weirdly ticklish. Her nipples weren’t as sensitive as the skin right below them, the satiny expanses that had never seen the sun. He loved the way her breasts fit into his hands, and the way her nipples flushed to a deeper pink when she was aroused. Julie arched her back and breathed a little harder when he licked there, circling, taking his time before moving on.

  Rib cage, belly button, the subtle topography of her lower abdomen and hip bones. He was especially fond of the transitional areas, like the crease between her hip and leg, or the petal-soft skin of her inner thighs where they dipped in toward her pussy. All of it, perfect. All of it, delicious.

  And he seemed to have her full attention again, which was his primary objective. One of his primary objectives.

  Finally, he teased his way to where he knew she wanted him, tasting a route over labia already slick with need. Julie sighed, spreading her legs a little wider in invitation. The movement exposed more of her, the frilled and delicate edges of his destination. Again, perfect in his eyes, though he knew he was biased.

  “How have we not been doing this for the past three years?” he murmured.

  Her answer, if she had one, was swallowed up in a gasp as Alan tilted his head and kissed her. Made out with her pussy was the way he thought of it. In some ways he liked it even more than the other kind of making out. There was the taste, and the feel of her thighs tightening, then shaking. The sounds she made when she got close sent a jolt of fresh erotic energy to his groin. His dick, already hard for quite some time, started throbbing in time with his rapid heartbeat. He ground his hips into the mattress, trying to stem the tide of lust. When he shifted his mouth upward, finding her clit with the flat of his tongue while he slipped two fingers inside her, she cried out and came. Her body tightened like a pulled bowstring, every muscle taken over by pleasure...then released, in a series of slowly diminishing spasms he could feel around his fingers, and against his cheek where he rested it against her thigh.

  Alan clambered back up clumsily, feeling goofy and awkward, drunk on horniness. On Julie. Her face was still flushed, her eyes closed as he lined his hips up and guided himself inside her. Perfect. He’d never felt anything as true as the way they fit together. She felt like home. And man, did it ever feel amazing to finally be home.

  At his groan of pleasure, she opened her eyes and gave him a sleepy, sated smile. He admired the look for a second or two before he kissed her, thrusting deeper and harder.

  After distressingly few thrusts, he had to pull away to breathe. “I’m gonna last, like, ten seconds.”

  “I won’t count it against you. I’ll add in the b.j. time to your overall total when I’m calculating your stamina for my records.”

  “That’s gracious of you.”

  She was already recovering, moving into cuddle mode, her body soft and welcoming. Her hands flattened against his lower back when he came, pressing him closer. Galvanic jolts of pleasure jarred his thighs and belly, taking his breath away. His whole life condensed into that moment, the sheer pleasure and rightness of it, the sudden inability to deny that this was, in fact, love.

  When the orgasm finally finished with him, he saw stars dancing over Julie’s face for a second or two. He’d squeezed his eyes shut that tightly. He must have looked deranged.

  “Jesus.” He pulled out, blinking the stars away, and rolled over next to her. “How do you like my sex face now?”

  “Does anybody really want their sex face judged?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “I didn’t think so. But I have to say...” She turned onto her side, snuggling in against his arm and dropping a kiss on the tip of his shoulder. “I shouldn’t, ’cause it’ll go to your head. But I do still like your sex face. Dork.”

  “You’re the dork.” He liked all her faces. Sex face, kayak face, dinner face, work face. But he sensed she wasn’t ready to hear that yet.

  “Mmm.”

  “You’re about to fall asleep, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  She was halfway there already, he could tell. And that was good. He felt like he’d accomplished at least that much, made her feel good enough to require a nap afterward. Of course there was also the kayaking, but he’d rather put it all down to the orgasm.

  Yawning, he tried to stay alert long enough to decide whether he’d fixed whatever he’d done wrong earlier. It was hard to tell. Relationships should come with some sort of readout, a visual aid to let you know how you were doing. Bar charts, maybe. Or at least a line graph. He wanted to know that the trend line was pointing up. But the readout couldn’t be something creepy, like a Teletubbies stomach monitor. Maybe a chip in the brain, with an RF transmitter
. When you found somebody you liked, you could both sync up to your computer and it would give a compilation view of where everybody was emotionally.

  Or maybe some sort of color-changing nano-tattoo....

  * * *

  Julie knew Alan was asleep when his breathing settled into a deep, slow rhythm. He didn’t snore, which she should have counted as a selling point. At the moment, it seemed like another way in which the universe was stacking the deck in Alan’s favor to try to trick her into something.

  The sex was a good enough trick on its own, and then there were the giggles and a shared taste in bad movies. The universe was being unfair.

  Honey. It was on repeat in her mind, worse than a song virus she couldn’t shake.

  And now they were napping away the afternoon, as if one round of sex had been enough to knock them out. Yes, also kayaking, but whatever. It was vacation, they hadn’t slept together before yesterday, they weren’t supposed to be cozy yet. Alan wasn’t supposed to be that confident that she’d still be around when he woke up. He should be having to try harder than this, shouldn’t he?

  Julie couldn’t believe she was actually thinking that way, because it was horrible. She’d never been a game-player, and she didn’t expect a knight in shining armor or proposals in skywriting over the Super Bowl. Grand gestures had never been on her romantic wish list. Easygoing and fun was more her style.

  Still...she couldn’t help but wonder if she was selling the grand gesture short. Now that she’d actually seen one close up and personal, she was pretty damn impressed by the level of commitment it implied. Jeremy was an intensely driven workaholic entrepreneur, but he’d flown eight hours and given up four days of helicopter-bossing at his new business to come to Oahu, all for a chance to win Amanda back. Not to mention what the trip was costing him. His company was doing well, so he could afford the expense. What mattered was that he had given up the time to do this, because time was what Jeremy valued. He had taken a big risk, done something wildly unexpected, and it was kind of glorious.

  Would Alan ever do something like that? Would he even think of it? Julie couldn’t imagine it. She’d seen him with girlfriends over the years, even helped him shop for a few. He did exactly what one expected a decent, gainfully employed boyfriend to do—chocolates in a heart box with some roses at Valentine’s Day, a pretty scarf or some preapproved perfume for a birthday or Christmas. His typical dating sequence was date-movie-then-dessert, wine-bar-and-live-music, then cool-little-museum-and-dinner if he actually liked the girl and thought he had a decent chance of getting laid afterward. The museum nearly always did it, because most girls thought that was something unique he only shared with special people. After that, things got trickier, but there was a fundamental sameness to the stories he brought back to share with Julie over lunch or when the friend-gang gathered. The theme was that he’d grown weary of the girl, because she wasn’t the magical One. Pretty soon there would be no more stories of that particular girl.

  He wasn’t a dog, by any means. He usually went a long time between girlfriends, and he always seemed to like and respect the women he dated. He didn’t flinch like some guys did whenever the conversation turned to marriage or kids. As far as she could tell, he wanted to find a nice girl and settle down. It was, after all, the expected thing, and he was Mr. Predictable. Alan was a genuinely nice guy, and Julie didn’t think he even realized he’d developed a date routine. But she knew it. And she thought she knew what it would look like when he finally fell in love and things were different. A special light in his eyes, a new way he might smile when he talked about the girl in question. The One.

  She had dreaded seeing that look for years now. She was only admitting it to herself now, but it had been there all along. The fear that one day Alan would bounce into the office, practically sparkling with brand-new emotions, and describe some other girl and Julie would know even before he did that this was the real thing.

  That hadn’t happened. And her worry now was that it still hadn’t happened. She hadn’t seen any special light these past few days, the shiny “I’m in love” version of Alan she’d always envisioned. He’d been the same old Alan. And she’d been the same old Julie, who obviously wasn’t the One. If she had been, they would have found that out a long time ago, wouldn’t they? Sure, they were great in bed. But Alan hadn’t really pursued her, hadn’t broken out of his routine for her. He’d had lunch with her most days of the week, eaten countless pizzas and chips at her house, shared his beer and his DVD collection, been a friend. A fixture in her life, as she was a fixture in his.

  You didn’t build your life around a fixture. You didn’t have to pursue it or make a special effort to acquire it. It was just there. If it wasn’t what you wanted, or it didn’t perform as expected, you went to the store and got another one. A better, newer one. An upgrade, usually. Possibly the fixture of your dreams.

  You didn’t spend thousands of dollars flying to Hawaii because you couldn’t live without a fixture. You did that for the person you loved. For the One.

  It wasn’t just a matter of convenience or a casual hookup. He might actually think it was love—in fact, she figured he probably did think that. His mother had advocated a relationship, teasing them about it whenever Julie showed up as Alan’s plus-one at family occasions. Their backgrounds were similar, both from biggish families with Italian roots. Sedate, middle-class, suburban, college-educated, common interests. Working in the same field. Already friends. And now it was time for marriage, so Alan was doing the expected thing with the expected girl, because that was what he did. Who he was. He’d go with the one who was part of his existing routine, who was automatically “honey” and already knew how he liked his eggs. Julie was the one he should be with, in his mind, so he would be with her.

  She could see what would happen to them. Ten years down the line, Alan was going to look up and see the One in some random place, and he’d realize what a mistake he’d made. And then he’d do whatever it took to win her, leave Julie to go be with her, and wouldn’t Julie be royally screwed?

  Because today she’d finally accepted that Alan was her One, and had been all along.

  Chapter Eleven

  The text from Amanda came as a huge relief. Girl’s night for dinner, just the two of them. Julie jumped at the chance. She needed some time and space, a chance to restore her perspective after all the damage that sex hormones and suppressed tears had done.

  “I’ll find you later, though, okay? I’ll text you or something,” she reassured Alan as she pulled her gritty clothes back on. He was still in bed, looking drowsy and sexy. She wanted to go wring a romantic declaration out of him, make him feel the way she wished he would. Better to go instead, sooner rather than later. Waking up next to him after the nap had been almost too delightful to bear, until she remembered what she’d been thinking about when she fell asleep. She couldn’t let him see the dejection stealing over her. Distance would help.

  “Yeah. I’ll probably be here or in one of the bars after dinner. I was thinking of trying that one in the shack sorta thing, off the main beach. The kayak guy said it’s pretty relaxed. Some of the locals hang out there after work. Maybe I can find Jeremy and play darts or something.”

  He’d be more likely to find Jeremy and spend hours talking about Python scripting, but she gave him the benefit of the doubt. “Cool. I don’t really know what Amanda will want to do. I might be a while. If it gets late I may head back to my room. We can play it by ear.”

  If that prospect bothered him, it didn’t show. “Go and talk, have fun. I can entertain myself.”

  “Heh. Yeah, I’m sure you can.” She leaned over the bed to give him a kiss, intending it to be a quick peck. He clasped her upper arms and kept her longer, exploring her mouth as if they had all night. Kissed the hell out of her, really. He was so very good at it. Julie was light-headed and overloaded with a fresh batch of sex hormones by the time he finally released her.

  “It has to last me all evening
,” he explained, his smile too bright and not touching his eyes. He wasn’t happy. She didn’t know if his unhappiness was her fault or responsibility. She wondered if it made her a terrible person that she wanted to sleep with him at least once more before she faced the truth about that. He’d sort of ruined her.

  Not ruined. He just raised the bar...a lot.

  “Right. Well. Um. Okay, I’m gonna go. Have a good...darts or something.” Words—they were a thing she usually knew how to do. Not at the moment, apparently. Desperate for an adequate parting line, she wiggled her fingertips in a cutesy-pie wave. “Turtles!”

  That seemed to jog him into better humor, and his laugh carried her out the door.

  Amanda was in their room when Julie arrived, sitting on the end of her bed and looking anxious.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, yourself.” Julie took in her roomie’s crisp red polka-dot sundress, and went to her suitcase for fresh clothes. “So, how are things?”

  “I don’t even know. Ask me tomorrow.”

  “That great?”

  Amanda shrugged. “You know what my biggest concern was about this vacation? Before I got here, I mean.”

  “That you’d cancel at the last minute because some work thing came up?”

  “Hah! Close. That I’d lose my conviction and check an email or something, respond to that and get caught up in it, and end up spending the whole trip doing work.”

  It was a valid fear. That was usually Amanda’s pattern on weekends or holidays. Her company adored her, but Julie had known her long enough to see the danger of burnout. She’d done the same thing in middle school and college, then grad school. Work until she dropped, then crash for days. She’d wake up vaguely aware that she’d missed out on a lot by staying so laser-focused.

  “I thought that’s why you left your laptop home.”

  “It’s in the bottom of my suitcase,” Amanda confessed. She sounded almost wistful.