by Jones, Ayla
He turned to me suddenly. Grinned. I jerked my head away and waited for my face to implode from the heat. Such a stalker. Both of us. I reached across the grass for my water and my plate. “Did I really eat all those chips?” Couldn’t recall the taste of any of the food.
“No. I stole them while you were eye-fucking Charlie,” Denise whispered.
“Was not.”
“Eye. Fucking. Rough eye-fucking. With biting and hair pulling. I know how you like it, you freak,” she said, laughing.
“No.” I got up and went into the house before she could say it again. After using the bathroom, I didn’t go back outside right away. I checked out how beautiful the Morris home was. Pictures of Lux were everywhere. Like they couldn’t get enough of her. There was so much love here for her. Because your parents’ love for you was supposed to be unconditional. They didn’t have to love everything you did, but they were supposed to love you forever.
And I was still worthy dammit.
Movement caught my eye from a window at the front of the house. Charlie was outside playing with Lux. He would run away from her and almost let her catch him, before dashing away again. It was so damn adorable.
What a douchebag.
“Using the kid…” I said, shaking my head when I walked out the front door.
“Lux’s favorite toy is in her mom’s car. She asked me to get it.” After he reached into Samira’s Honda, he held up a plush Babar the Elephant. When he lowered it, Lux yanked it from him. She hugged it and Charlie’s thigh then smiled at me. Oh my God. They were co-conspirators!
“Whatever...” I turned to go back inside.
“Boog, wave goodbye to Nikki. Blow her a kiss.”
I paused at the doorframe. “I know what you’re doing.”
But just because I didn’t look at Charlie didn’t mean every hair on my arms wasn’t standing. That every square inch of my skin wasn’t remembering. Your body couldn’t unknow how someone who’d been inside you felt. Some traitorous pleasure-inducing hormone blasted through me. Your brain was always getting you high. Making you more suggestible to bad decisions.
“I haven’t done what I’m doing…” Charlie said as he strolled up the sidewalk. His lips slammed against my ear and his arm curled around my middle. “Because your nails aren’t in my back yet.” I shuddered out a sigh. We both knew it was an invitation.
Shaky, I tripped over the threshold. A soft set of footfalls dashed behind me, but I was worried about the heavier ones. They were right on my heels. I was clenching everything. My legs trembled. Diverting away from the backyard, I turned at the hallway and stepped into the first room I found.
Charlie walked in after me and slammed the door, putting me against it. The full strength of my arousal swamped me. He drew his fingertips along the length of my arms, a flash of heat trailing. He traced a soft circle over my navel. I threw my head back as his hand moved lower. Then he stopped at my underwear’s elastic band. His exhale spread over my neck before his lips touched my shoulder, his tongue flicking my collarbone. “I miss what you taste like.” Charlie thumbed my nipple through my dress.
A soft touch climbed my inner thigh and I bit my lip. I couldn’t pretend that he didn’t have an effect on me. I spread my legs wider the higher his hand went. His fingers grazed the seat of my panties. I tasted blood where my teeth were. He tapped softly on my clit. But he never increased the pressure, no matter how much my knees wobbled or my breaths increased. He gripped my chin then moved his hand down my neck. Charlie’s mouth touched my throat. “I don’t want anyone else to know that taste.”
My urges boiled over. Clasping his wrist, I pulled my underwear aside and ran his fingers over my clit. He clenched his teeth, his forearm pulsed in my grasp, and I heard him suck in a sharp breath as I pushed his fingers inside me. They went in with ease. Charlie didn’t move as I ground on his hand. The pressure in my core built to a peak. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me come. I was mad at him.
Okay, okay, not mad enough to stop doing this.
But mad.
“You miss my mouth?” Charlie finally moved on his own, driving his fingers up. Once. Twice. Hard. Deep. I gripped the front of his shirt.
“Yes.” I heaved the word out like it’d been trapped in my lungs until right this second.
“You want my mouth on your pussy?” Another harsh ‘yes’ from me followed.
But who were we kidding? We were going to fuck.
He dropped to his knees, pulling my underwear down in his fist. He brought me to the floor next to him. Charlie spread my legs after he pushed my dress up to my navel. He trailed his lips down my stomach before his tongue touched my clit. The sudden explosion of pleasure made me slap my arm over my mouth. I bit my forearm and made a futile attempt to clutch the carpet as he licked me.
Charlie didn’t let me fight my orgasm. Didn’t give me a chance. I surrendered, arching off the floor and shivering on his face. He sat up between my splayed legs, furious hunger beating in his eyes, and I frantically unbuttoned his jeans. Pulled the teeth of his zipper apart instead of using the slider. Forcefully ripped his shirt up with all my might. I thought I heard seams tearing somewhere.
He kissed my wetness onto my lips. The kiss was rough. It made my lips hurt. I didn’t care as I took his tongue into my mouth. I didn’t care what he wanted to do to me right now. I lifted my ankle to his shoulder, and my other leg was hooked around his forearm. I twitched—still sensitive—as he ran the head of his cock against my clit.
“Fuck. Charlie.” I think my bones melted when he slammed into me. And then he pounded me into serenity. The tips of my hair were trapped beneath me, yanking with each thrust. Pain and pleasure collided. I didn’t care a bit. I just wanted Charlie to fuck the last awful, lonely month right out of me.
I bowed upward when his fingers found my swollen clit between us, and his lips closed over my nipple. As the wave of my orgasm swelled, I bit my lip until it trembled out of my mouth from the force of my moans. He mashed his own grunts to my collarbone, my breast ballooning in his grip. His entire body shook when he came.
“Well, we just ruined Samira’s carpet.” I was so great at pillow talk. As soon as Charlie pulled out of me I reached for my underwear. They were looped around one of my ankles. My entire left breast was perched on the edge of my bra, my skin cold from the air flowing over where his mouth had been. His shirt hung on a diagonal across his chest, an arm still in the sleeve. For two people who were anything but, we looked exactly like a sordid fuck. Okay, well, we’d just had sex on the floor at a kid’s birthday party.
Pretty sordid.
But I didn’t think we knew how to want each other timidly. We had to tear at clothes. We had to kiss until it bruised. We had to fuck senseless. We had to almost implode. When you were in love was there ever not a riot inside you?
As we straightened our clothes my orgasm haze faded—the frenzied need gone—leaving reality to intrude. Neither of us spoke right away, but Charlie and I were good at silences by now. We could accurately assess each other if we observed long enough.
“Yeah, dude, you win. You made me come. Point proven. After all my self-righteousness and holier-than-thou stuff, I still get wet for you,” I said, going for mobster cool. I even gave him a weak shrug when I sat on the bed.
I was really great at pillow talk.
The comment hurt him, and he grimaced for a second. Then he released a grunt of frustration. “Okay, maybe that was a little part of it, but this was me missing you, Nik.” Charlie sat next to me, never taking his eyes off my face. “Even just being able to talk to you like we used to.”
His gaze was moving between my lips and eyes. He wanted to kiss me. “We can talk, Charlie…only talk.” Where was my unwavering determination, like, ten minutes ago?
“You regret having sex with me.”
“No…never.” I didn’t. I just wished we weren’t like this.
“Okay…talk…” he mumbled to himself. Ne
ver imagined a world where Charlie and I would be awkward. We should’ve been swinging each other’s dicks or something. “Wanna hear what I got Lux for her birthday?”
I laughed. “A lot of stuff she’s only going to play with for a week.”
“Yeah…but there’s more. I told Mira I’ll pay for a year of whatever Lux ends up falling in love with…maybe like dance or writing or an engineering and science camp, even clown school.”
I snorted. “Clown school…”
“Yeah…whatever she wants to do. When she gets really passionate about something.” He bumped my shoulder with his. “We both did at young ages. Like a gift she can grow with over time…definitely better than a toy, right?”
“Right…” Only he would think to do something like this for Lux. My heart clenched and I looked away from him. Because this kindness was how I had fallen for Charlie in the first place, and this was what I had to guard myself against now. “I bet they’re going to have cake soon. We should go back out.” When I stood up he took my hand, and I indulged in the intimacy until we were in the hallway. “We can’t hold hands or act like we just had sex, okay? It’ll cause more drama.” One minute we were fighting, fucking the next.
“Fuck.” He laughed flatly and rocked his head back against the wall. He reached for me again, but retracted his hand because he knew touching me would burn. “I don’t know how to do us broken up, Nik. Not when you’re right in the same fucking room with me. Seems like you got it all figured out, though.”
“No, I didn’t say that. I miss you, too. I love you, but I won’t have it used against me, Charlie. I won’t get caught up in some back-and-forth, roller coaster situation with you. I want to be here for you, but I am not the woman who saves tortured men from themselves. Especially while she’s sacrificing every fucking thing about herself in the process, trying to fight her way into all the stuff he has closed off. I’m too busy trying not to destroy me. Let me tell you…that’s turning into a long-term project.”
“You think I want to be saved?” Charlie pushed off the wall and stood directly in front of me. “You think that’s what’s happening here, Nik? Fuck saving me.”
“Then, what is happening to you! What is fucking happening to you?”
He shrank an inch. I could tell he was fighting the need to protect himself. He looked torn and embarrassed. “When we met, you told me you fell in love with Kings of Leon because you wanted a voice in your head that wasn’t your own. I would kill for that. Because it’s Richard fucking Mauser in there every day. Every fucking day. I think about my work being trash. I think about all the shit he said to me in his office. I think about whether any of this matters. It’s his fucking voice reminding me all the fucking time that I’m not good enough. That I’ll fail, anyway. That I’ll keep failing because he couldn’t see any talent or worth in my work. And to make it all worse, I never really got to tell anybody that eventually I believed him. That I still do.”
I gasped, surprised by the admission. I did know Charlie was hard on himself, but I hadn’t thought he’d taken on what Mauser said at such a deep level. I didn’t know what to say as disgust crossed his face.
“I have my parents and my sisters. I grew up in a stable household, and it’s still that way. I got into the school I wanted. I have friends. There’s no trauma in my background. There’s no devastating event. I can’t even count the death of my bio dad because I never knew him. So, I have a great life, right? But I guess my pain is somehow less real. My struggles—anything that hurts me—it’s all bullshit…because someone always has it worse than me. I have to be quiet and bury it all down deep. And I get it, in a way.
“Deacon particularly drove the point home. He laughed at me when I called freaking out over what happened with Mauser. I was depressed and fucking scared and hurt. He asked me if I was serious. While he was laughing. He asked if I was fucking serious. Then he told me how he had real shit to worry about. And hung up on me. This was basically what happened every time I tried to explain how I felt. I didn’t ask for my life or how I grew up, but somehow it all means I never get to be sad—”
“Charlie, you thought I would do the same because of my problems? We were in a relationship and I love you. I would’ve been sad with you.” I shoved him backward. “I would’ve been sad with you. We were equal. Your demons were safe between us, too. They were always safe between us. I thought you knew that.”
For the first time since we’d known each other, I didn’t know how to read him. He looked away for a moment. “If for a few hours, some pills stop me from thinking about how I let him take what I love, then so be it. You had to draw a line. I guess I do, too. I’m sorry, Nik.”
Chapter Fifteen
Charlie
You know what I could write a script about? Breakups!
They were so fucking easy!
All you had to do was transfer all the time you spent with your ex-girl to other shit, like getting drunk with your boys, bro’ing out with your boys, catching up on the Netflix shows she didn’t like (how could she not appreciate the epicness of Entourage’s early seasons, anyway?), and I had so much more time to review all the shows Kenny was sending us that were looking for producers.
Yeah, when you got to this stage of the breakup you were halfway to not giving a shit. About the relationship or her.
The problem was, I was still stuck on the staring at the wall, listening to Ed Sheeran, and wanting to die part.
I reached for my iPad on my nightstand and blew away the dust speckling the screen. It was the residue from three or four crushed pills. No, I didn’t snort them. I was trying out that technique Nikki used with alcohol: destroying what destroys you. The rest of the pills were in the city’s sewer system.
I’d quit cold turkey two weeks ago, and the withdrawal was a bitch. It wouldn’t kill me; just make me feel like shit for a while. Once or twice over the past few days, I’d been tempted to get more pills. Like when I felt the crushing weight of my plummeting serotonin levels. When Elliott kept pressing me to buy. When Mauser’s voice filled my head too much. But the Internet said I could get through this. Lots of people were trying to get off prescription speed.
I beat back my anxiety—which was hitting me like bricks to the head these days—as I opened my mail app, and every time I saw an email address from Hillington I wished for a pill. The last script for How to Fuck up a Friendship had already gone out to the cast and crew, so I wasn’t sure what they wanted. Maybe they were finally dropping us. Maybe they’d caught on to the fact that I was a fraud. That I was just a stupid kid who thought he could prove an old man wrong.
“Sweetheart?” my mom called through my bedroom door.
“Just a sec…” Let me hide my drug paraphernalia. “Come in…just Mom.” I knew Ahsha and Pree were lurking because they’d been romanticizing how miserable I was the entire time I’d been here. I‘d heard Pree joyfully telling someone on the phone about it: “My brother literally won’t get out of bed or eat. He and his girlfriend broke up. He, like, can’t live anymore. Oh my god. She’s, like, his everything. How come boys at school can’t be like that? All they want are nudes.” First, who the fuck were these shitheads trying to get naked pics from my underage sister? Second, she wasn’t wrong about my present condition. I really didn’t want to see what kind of shit I looked like, either. Bloodshot and brooding, probably.
A fucking Ed Sheeran song.
I heard two other sets of footsteps shuffle by as my mom walked in. “They’re just worried about you. And I have been, too. You’re always welcome here, but you still haven’t worked things out with your roommates?”
My heart lifted a little when she sat next to me and squeezed my arm. We used to do this a lot when I was younger. Whenever she was away on cases, I’d stay up late on nights she’d get back and we’d talk for a while. We stopped the summer before middle school—when she went from Mamma to Mom—because I thought I was too cool to talk to her anymore. Fuck that. At my age, I knew better now.
I wasn’t ashamed to admit it. I would never get too old to need her.
“What’s going on, kid?” she asked.
“Nikki and I broke up.”
“Oh…honey. She hasn’t said anything to me at all the past few times I’ve seen her. I’m so sorry. Are you…okay?”
“Well, if you wanted to toss me out the window right now, I wouldn’t stop you because when I land, it will hurt way less.” I shook my head, my throat shrank, and my heart erupted into projectile shrapnel. “How is she?”
“She was upset a while back, but I thought it was just about her family—”
“What about her family?” I said, getting concerned.
“She’s having them over to her apartment for dinner soon. She’s nervous about talking to them about a lot of things that have happened between them. She hasn’t really gone into details, but she said her brother said awful things to her and…apparently my very sweet son handled it. Will you need a lawyer?”
“Not this time.”
“I really like her, Charlie, but I don’t want to make this harder on you.”
I shook my head. “I’m the one who screwed up. I put her in a difficult situation because of stuff I’m dealing with.” I’d been thinking a lot about the story Julian told me. I saw so much in what I’d done to Nikki in his words in hindsight. Absolutely there was danger in knowing someone could love you enough to do what you wanted, even if it went against their own best judgment and wishes.
My mom’s brow furrowed and she rubbed the top of my head. “What are you dealing with exactly, Charlie?”
“I’m gonna blow this thing with Hillington at some point. I can feel it. I just don’t want to disappoint you and Dad again.”
“When did you disappoint me, kiddo?”
“I’m gonna screw it up just like I did with Richard Mauser. It will all come crashing down again.”
“Oh God. That motherfucker?” She was up on her feet with her hands on her hips and glaring at me. So, my mom was usually prim and proper…until it was something involving the twins or me. Then she was…this. Ready to take no prisoners and shit. “Oh…don’t give me that look. You’re twenty-five and we both know you use that word, too. And he is a jackass motherfucker, Charlie. I have no tolerance for people in power who mistreat those beneath them. We all get where we are because we work hard but someone also lends a hand. He handled the situation like an asshole. There’s no harm in being a decent person.”
