by Piper Lennox
“Yes...fuck, yes, let’s do that.” I kiss him so hard, I almost make him slip. He laughs against my mouth and removes his finger, telling me to hurry up and dry off; we’ve got a lot to do.
The wine I drank and the light sunburn I got hit me once we’re back in the room, me climbing overtop him to sink onto his erection. I feel dizzy, but the good kind that helps you let everything else go.
“Reach into that drawer,” he whispers, jerking his head to the nightstand with a smile that, I already know, means I’m in for some glorious trouble.
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
I strain to reach the drawer handle, but finally get it open to fish around inside. I come up with a small bottle of lube.
“Did you plan on getting in my backdoor tonight, Wes?”
His smile brightens. “One way or another, yeah.”
I palm it to him and settle back into place, sighing as his erection sinks deeper until the fullness feels unbearable.
Then I feel his finger back there again, ten times slicker than it was in the shower, and know he’s about to give me an entirely new idea of fullness.
“Relax,” he whispers when I squirm away, instinctive. His free hand rubs my thigh in calming, wide circles. “I won’t hurt you. I want to make you feel fucking incredible, Clara.”
I force myself to breathe as his finger enters me again. He goes deeper this time, to his second knuckle, and laughs deep in his chest when I buck back and ask for the entire thing.
“Whatever you want, baby.”
He wraps his arm around me and pulls us back until we’re almost sitting up, propped against the pillows and headboard so he can get his finger deeper.
The moans rising out of me are guttural. Animal. Each one gets Wes’s chest moving faster.
With his finger pulsing inside me, riding his cock feels automatic. He barely needs to rock his hips. My body’s taken over, and my brain is swallowed up in sun and cabernet and the absolutely beautiful filth of what he’s doing to me.
“Bring your head up,” he whispers. “Let me kiss you. I want to be inside you in every way I can when I make you come.”
The instant his tongue tangles with mine, his finger goes wild inside me.
When my thighs tremble too much to keep the pace, he thrusts upwards and drives his cock as deep as he can, as fast as he can.
I’m sweating. The room is spinning.
The familiar sensation begins...but now accompanied by a parallel feeling in some deeper part of me.
“Wes,” I pant, breaking the kiss, “my orgasm, it...it’s—”
“It’ll be deeper,” he breathes, kissing my chin. That’s all he can reach as I lift my head and groan. “Your ass is gonna come at the same time as the rest of you. It’ll be intense. Watch.”
And with that, he brings his free hand up to the back of my head, pulls me down hard to kiss me again, and moves so fast and hard I can’t tell if it’s his finger or his erection getting me to the edge. All I know is I’m suddenly there, halfway crying against his mouth as the sparks shower through my brain and my muscles convulse.
He was right. The orgasm is intense. Deeper.
Burning through me with a force I know I’ll never recover from.
For the rest of my life, this will be the standard.
Wes will be the best I’ve ever had, and ever will again.
Thirty
This might be my favorite place on the planet.
Not the Hamptons, really. But the bay just after sunrise, when everyone else is still asleep, and it’s just me with my guitar on the wooden steps leading from Theo’s deck to the narrow shore below: that’s what I love most. Maybe even more than New York in all its neon, in the dead of night that never dies.
My fingers pluck out the notes on their own. I hum along. The melody’s there, so accessible I don’t mind I can’t find lyrics yet. I just want to get the essence right.
I want to remember last night in a way not even a video could have captured. Not that it wouldn’t be nice to have both—but I’ve got a feeling nothing’s going to beat my own memory.
Watching Clara shake on top of me when she came, feeling both her holes contract and shudder around me like I’d unlocked her entire body....
Her practically screaming against my mouth when it happened.
The tears on her face, and how I felt every single one when she collapsed against me.
I shift my guitar a little, in case anyone happens across me out here. Let them enjoy the music, not my morning wood.
As promised, I’d finished in her ass—pressing the head of my erection to her reddened, sensitive entrance and releasing right into it without having to think.
I never had to think about it. Not with her. It felt programmed into me, like I had to leave myself behind inside or on her, so that she’d think of me later.
I love that no one had ever done that to her before.
I hate the thought that anyone else might ever get the chance.
My guitar echoes down the steps. I shut my eyes and sing another half-formed line, then pause to scratch it all down in my notepad.
“Wes, that was beautiful.”
I start, relaxing when I realize it’s her behind me at the top of the steps. “You scared me.”
“Sorry.” She smiles and hugs her cover-up closer in the early breeze. “What song is that?”
“Doesn’t have a name yet.” Yes, it does. But I’m not about to tell her I’ve titled it “Clara Rose.”
Van was right yesterday, after I made that joke about not knowing whether Clara sees me as a great fuck and a good time, or something more: I am scared to ask. I’ve got no idea what she wants from this. I might just be a nice rebound after that Ewan asshole, or a confidence boost until she meets some other boy on a bench.
For all you know...she just wants her email back.
I shake this thought right out of my head, because it’s fine to be curious; it’s not fine to turn into some paranoid psycho.
“I’ve never heard you sing like that,” she says, a bit of awe in her voice. “Your music is usually so...so gritty, and kind of—” She stops herself.
“What?”
It’s hard to tell if she’s blushing, or still burned from yesterday’s poolside hours.
“Off-putting,” she blurts, finally. “Almost like you’re trying to do stuff you know most people won’t like.”
This doesn’t even sting. She’s left similar sentiments in her comments as Kawaii43 on my videos. I’ve thought about telling her I know who she is, but she hasn’t left one in a while.
Of course, I haven’t uploaded anything in days—but still. Why ruin a good thing, even if I don’t know just what that “thing” is?
“But that,” she goes on, and scoots to the step beside me, “was so soulful. Really smooth and clean and.... Like, God, that high note? Those runs? I almost didn’t believe it was you.”
“Classically trained,” I mutter. Mom made sure my sister and I were verified triple threats—until, I suspect, she realized my singing voice sounded just like my father’s. My vocal coach was swiftly kicked off my team of trainers, tutors, and other pros brought in to sculpt me into a Hollywood commodity. Pretty up the package enough, and nobody can tell it’s damaged goods.
“Why don’t you ever sing like that on your channel?” Clara wraps her arms around her knees when the breeze returns. “You would definitely see an increase.”
“I don’t do bubblegum.”
“First of all, that song wasn’t bubblegum. It was more...I don’t know, folksy, Sunday-drive sounding. Second, you don’t have to sing all rough and gritty just because the genres you do are rough and gritty. And third—what’s wrong with a little bubblegum, now and then? There’s a reason billions of people like similar songs and movies.”
“Because they’re sheep?”
Clara puts her hand on my guitar, stopping me when I start strumming again. It might be the first time I haven�
��t scolded somebody for touching one of my instruments while I’m playing.
“Why do you do that? Look down on people just for liking what they like?”
“It was a joke.”
“I don’t think so. You used to say all that shit about my glitter eye shadow, and the music we played on our channel, and the clothes I wore—”
“I used to do a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have.” The wind dries out my mouth; I shut up. She pulls her hand away so I can strum again, filling the silence.
“My point is,” she says, after a moment, “you seem to look down on things that are popular, solely because they’re popular.”
“Do a few years on some sappy sitcom and you’ll feel the same way, I promise.”
“I’m just saying: if you reject something because you genuinely don’t like it, that’s one thing. But to only play a certain kind of music because you’re trying to subvert expectations? You’re not being any more true to who you are than those artists who only play poppy stuff to get popular, not because they actually like it.”
I consider this, then shrug. Not because I disagree—it’s just not a conversation I want to have in my favorite place on earth.
Clara sighs and stands, brushing loose sand from her legs. My eyes trace the imprints of the wood grain in the backs of her thighs.
“You really think I should play stuff like this?”
“You like playing it, don’t you?”
After I turn her words over in my head, I nod. But when I look back, she’s already gone.
Everyone else in the house is awake, and being loud as hell, when I return. Theo’s local friends who crashed on the sofas flip pancakes at the stove, while Van slings shots of espresso down the counter to anyone who asks. Somebody’s blasting Sublime and everyone’s singing, with too few of them actually knowing the lyrics.
“Have you seen Clara?” I ask Theo, who, other than having showered and changed his clothes, looks exactly the same as he did last night: slumped dead center on the sofa, playing video games while his friends order him to stop and come eat.
I often get the feeling he has people over because he hates how empty the house feels, not because he actually wants them here. He enjoys a crowd, but easily tires of being inside one. Even when he’s doing his own thing, he never asks anyone to leave.
Realizing he’s in his own little antisocial routine right now, his friends give up. I do the same, when he blinks at me and asks me to repeat the question.
Van hasn’t seen her, so I head upstairs. At the second landing, I stop: Clara’s sitting on one side of a huge majesty palm in a stone planter, with Juniper on the other.
“Oh...hey.” I lift my guitar, to make it look like I’m just passing through to put it away.
Juniper (who I almost stupidly called “Fairy Lights” to her face, when we ran into each other at the fridge in the middle of the night), watches my feet with red, swollen eyes while I pass.
It’s a few minutes before Clara slips into the room.
“Hey.” When the door’s shut, I nod at it. “What was that about?”
“That was Juniper Summers,” she whispers, in the same way she recognized Van yesterday: mildly fangirling, even though both of them have follower counts far below Clara’s, with recognition to match. I love that things like that don’t even cross her mind. “Did you know she was here? She’s been, like...hiding out in the storage room ever since last night.”
“I knew she was here. Van brought her.” I watch her closely while she changes out of her cover-up and shorts into a sundress. The tension in her limbs is clear as day. I wonder if it’s because of our conversation, or her encounter with Juniper. “Why was she in the storage room?”
“Van’s been...less than kind to her.”
“Yeah,” I laugh under my breath, “Van’s not crazy about her.” I decide to lighten the mood; this morning’s been weird, and I don’t like it. “Maybe they’ll grow on each other, though. Like we did.”
Clara sits on the farthest corner of the bed from me to fasten her sandals. “I don’t think so. She said he’s been pretty shitty.”
“Shittier than I was?”
She lets her foot slap the floor. Not angrily. Just like she’s tired, before the day’s even started.
“Hey.” I walk to her on my knees across the mattress, massaging her bare shoulders. “You all right?”
When she turns her head, I see her biting her lip. She nods, but doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve been thinking.” I lie beside her on my stomach. My arms stretch out so I can mess with her shoes; she laughs under her breath and swats my hands away.
“Then miracles do happen.”
I gently sink my teeth into the side of her thigh, perfectly exposed and irresistible. She relaxes, finally, and winds her fingers into my hair.
“What were you thinking about?”
“That stuff you said outside. About the kind of music I play. Have you ever heard of a blog audit?”
“Yeah.” Lowering her head until we’re eye-level, her upside-down, she asks, “Why?”
“I want you to do one for me. Of my channel.”
“For real?” Her skepticism’s obvious, and I can’t blame her one bit.
“For real.”
“So you’re honestly asking me,” she says, “to tell you everything you’re doing wrong? To criticize something you never let anyone criticize? To—”
“I can’t promise I won’t fight you on some of it,” I laugh, scratching my face on the comforter, “but I promise I’ll listen. It kills me to say this...but obviously, you and Georgia are doing shit right.”
“You’re doing pretty well on your own.”
“See, you’re sugarcoating it already. Don’t do that. I can handle the truth.” I trace a path between the freckles on her thigh. “I don’t care about subscribers or views, really. I mean, I do—but only because I want to get my music out there.”
She’s quiet for a while. The sound of her nails brushing my scalp almost puts me to sleep.
“I thought you were an actor.”
“Only on my résumé.” I roll over and stare at her. “Music always made way more sense to me.”
“I can tell you right now, you’re going to despise my first suggestion.”
“Please don’t tell me it’s that I should do that fucking reunion special.”
“No…but I am going to tell you to embrace that part of your career.”
When I flop my arms across my face, she moves them slowly and peeks at me.
“You have so many fans who adored that show. They adored you. And after all these years, it still resonates with them. You should embrace it, instead of fighting it.”
“I never turn a fan away,” I remind her.
Then I promptly, silently correct myself, Except you.
“I know.” The way she gets up and starts filling her purse makes me stand, too. She probably had the same thought I did. “But you never post anything about the show, you never respond to your costars’ posts about it—”
“Most of them are bigger assholes than me, believe it or not. Always were.” My tongue fumbles with his name, and I wish it didn’t. “Especially Burke.”
“Are you kidding? Bernard Chase is, like, everyone’s favorite TV dad. Burke was the nicest dude ever.”
My face gets hot. “No. He wasn’t. Anyway, I’m not missing anything by letting all the Regram and Retweet trains roll on by.”
“You act like you’re embarrassed by it.” She balances her Chapstick on her finger before letting it topple into the bag. “That’s the biggest thing, honestly. People will talk about it less, and your new projects more...but only if you embrace who you used to be.”
“What, the pill-popping, awake-for-days train wreck version of Wes Durham?”
“The Charlie Chase version of Wes Durham.” Clara quiets and steps close, fixing a button in my shirt I missed. “The one you keep running away from.”
“Charlie Ch
ase was a character.”
“Maybe so.” Flattening her palms on my chest, she rises to her tiptoes to kiss my cheek. “But we loved him. And we refuse to believe there’s not at least a piece of that sweet kid somewhere in there.”
It’s strange to hear her lump herself in with all the other viewers and fans, even if it’s true.
It still kills me to think of how I treated her.
“Trust me, you’ve got a built-in fan base that will go crazy for that other music. Show your softer side. I think you’ve more than proven your point by now.”
“And what point was that?”
“I’m not sure,” she chuckles, swinging the door open to check for Juniper. The stairs are empty, so we make our way down and slip outside to the rental car. I assume the subject’s dropped, until we’re on the street and she turns down the radio.
“Are you going to tell me?” she asks. “What the point was of all that...rebelling?”
“Most of it wasn’t intentional. Just me making shitty decisions to deal with shitty stuff, and then getting pissed off at everyone judging me over it.” When her silence doesn’t let up, I sigh, “Like...my mom, for instance, and that whole lawsuit thing.”
Clara’s hand drops from the dial into her lap as she sits back. “That’s right. God, I forgot about that.”
“We wanted everyone to forget about it. That’s why we settled out of court. She agreed to pay me half of what she took from my childhood earnings.”
“That’s it? Only half? Why didn’t you fight for all of it?”
“Because she couldn’t afford all of it. Not if she was going to pay my sister back everything she took from her, too.” I pause. “She would’ve needed to sell her house and liquidate a bunch of stuff, and I couldn’t do that to her. Even if she deserved it.”
“Wow. That’s…noble of you, honestly. That you gave up half of what she owed you to help her out.”
“To help my sister out, mostly. But I wouldn’t call it noble.”
“What would you call it, then?”
“I wouldn’t call it anything.”
Clara gets quiet again, but not for long. “So if you weren’t rebelling, why have you always pushed back against the Cut to the Chases hype?”
