Do Over

by Serena Bell

  He grins. “Now I’m teasing.”

  It is so, so hard to hold still under him. I hope it’s as difficult for him as it is for me. I look at where we’re joined, then up at his face. His jaw is set in concentration.

  “It’s just, I fucking love this part, you know?” he says reverently. “Where you’re resisting me and I’m asking you to let me in, and you’re so tight but opening to me, and getting wetter, and I can watch the whole thing on your face. First yes, please, and then, more, please, and then, come on, Jack, give it to me. Your face…”

  There is something about the way he says your face that makes me know he means me. Not just a generic woman’s face, but mine.

  “You show it all to me. You give it all to me. You love it, and that makes me love it. I want to do this part all day. You know?”

  I nod, helpless. He eases forward another, I don’t know, millimeter, and my whole body is crying out for him. Like I’m this huge, empty space and he is the everything that’s going to rush in and make it okay. And I know that’s just the way it’s supposed to work; that’s the way sex works, right? I’m the empty vessel, he’s the thing that fills me, I’m supposed to feel this mad craving for him, but just like when he said your face he meant mine, when I say I want to be filled, I mean by him.

  He takes it so slow that I feel like I’m melting around him. Like I’m this pool of molten gold and he’s the furnace, and instead of pushing against resistance now he’s just stirring and stoking the heat of me, and the orgasm begins as just this whisper of desperation and builds and builds and builds until when he finally gives me the final inch of himself and then the last fraction behind that, I don’t so much break or shatter as flow out from myself in swirl after swirl after swirl, crying his name as quietly as I can.

  Chapter 18

  “I lied,” I say.

  Maddie opens her eyes. “Whaa?”

  She is pretty wrecked, which makes me exceptionally happy. That orgasm looked—well, it looked like it felt terrific, obviously, but also kind of like she was listening to a broadcast from outer space, you know? Like, she was so far away from me, so far inside her pleasure, that it almost hurt to watch her.

  Now she’s back, watching me with a hazy look on her relaxed face. I am still buried to the hilt in her, and she is clenching around me, aftershocks, and every one of those spasms threatens to push me over the edge. I have to concentrate with all my mental capacity to keep from coming.

  “This is my favorite part,” I say. “When you’re all satisfied and just lying there lazily watching me and you’re all swollen up and tight and every time I thrust—”

  I illustrate, and she makes a noise that sounds almost like pain, except I know it’s not.

  “—you make that little noise.”

  Yes, in case you’re wondering, I remember. I remember all these things about Maddie from before.

  I do it again, a few more times, for good measure, and her head falls back against the pillow and her face flushes and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to make her come again, and easily.

  If I hadn’t been teetering on the edge before, I am now. Each thrust feels so damn good, from the tip of my cock to the base and deep in my balls, not to mention that place low in my gut, almost at the bottom of my spine, where it’s all gathering itself for an epic orgasm.

  “C’mon, baby,” I cajole, and her eyes go a notch darker and she makes that noise—whimper, moan, I don’t know what you call it, Maddie’s sex noise. I thrust myself deep into her, feeling the heat and squeeze and hug of her around me, the long, sweet strokes of pleasure with no real beginning and no real end, and when I’m as deep as I can go and just a little deeper, I circle my hips and her eyes roll back in her head and she starts making her signature sounds one right after the other, whimper-grunts of satisfaction and need.

  “I love watching you,” I tell her, and her pupils shrink and her blush gets deeper. She looks right back at me, her gaze locked onto mine.

  I might be sorry later that I’ve said all this. But I’m not sorry now. It needs to be said. She needs to know. When someone makes you feel this good, you have to give her full credit and thank her for it however you can. Right now I’m thanking her by relentlessly continuing the bump and grind of my pelvis against hers. And I’m watching need rise in her face as color, like sap in a tree in the spring, and I watch and watch until I lose track of holding myself back and she’s coming again and I’m coming, every muscle in my body rigid and shaking, pleasure roaring up my spine and swamping me.

  I collapse more or less half on top of her, half next to her, trying not to crush the life out of her.

  “Fuck, Jack,” she says. “That was…”

  We both laugh because she’s clearly not going to finish the sentence.

  “There are no words?”

  “There are no words.”

  And then we’re both quiet for a minute. I think we’re both remembering.

  —

  After I fucked twenty-one-year-old Maddie against the wall of the boathouse in the woods near Revere Lake, I helped her unwind her legs from around me and set her back on the floor. She wobbled a little, and I reached out to steady her.

  I’d had a lot of sex by that point in my life. Drunk, sober, stoned, in bed, against walls, on horizontal non-bed surfaces, with high school girls starting when I was fourteen, and later women, older women and younger women, women who wanted to stay over afterward and women who were as happy as I was to scratch an itch and move on.

  Before Maddie, I used to say there was no such thing as “bad sex.” All sex was at least “good.” Some sex was “very good” or “fucking awesome.” Some women could do stuff with their mouths or their hands or their pussies that should be celebrated in a Sexual Hall of Fame. Some could energetically bounce themselves on a dick in ways that defied gravity.

  The sex that Maddie and I had just had was a different beast entirely. It wasn’t a physical act. It didn’t seem to be about sexual skill or experience at all, although something superhuman had definitely helped me take her up against that wall. It was about how it felt to see Maddie crying on the shore of the lake. How it felt to take Maddie in my arms and discover that she was perfectly familiar, like I’d held her a thousand times already. How it felt to kiss her as if we could just pick up where we’d left off when I was thirteen.

  How it felt to bury myself inside her and forget everything else.

  My chest tightened. I’d just started to come down off the sex high and remembered that she was going to go back to college. And even if she weren’t going back to college, she was Maddie Adams and I was Jack Parker and this sex wasn’t a thing that could keep happening. It was a moment in time, like a shooting star.

  “Jack,” Maddie said. Her voice was unsteady. “Are you always that good?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And I wanted to tell her the truth: that no one is that good by himself, that it always takes two, but—

  It was too fucking complicated and she was leaving.

  “Yup,” I said.

  I was that kind of asshole.

  She sighed.

  I helped her put herself back together. She smoothed her hair down and wiped a finger under each of her eyes to get rid of the smeared mascara.

  “Okay?” she asked, showing me her handiwork.

  She was so pretty, even with lake-damp hair and messed-up makeup. Maybe more so because I’d been the one to ruin the makeup. “You look—” I’d been about to say “beautiful,” but I didn’t want to sound like a tool. I’d just fucked a good girl against the rough wood wall of a boathouse with the smell of mildew all around us, and now I was going to send her back into the world with my cum still hot between her legs, and telling her she was beautiful would be a sad half-assed attempt to make us both feel like we hadn’t crossed some line that shouldn’t be crossed.

  “You look fine,” I said roughly.

  I thought that was it. I hugged her and she walked awa
y, and five minutes later I walked out of the boathouse, and I don’t think anyone gave our disappearances and reappearances a second thought. Maybe Maddie told Mia what we’d done, and maybe she didn’t; maybe she was starting to feel shame about fucking in a boathouse or against a wall or with all her clothes on or for one-night-only, or because it was me and I wasn’t the kind of guy she’d seriously date. But overall, I felt like we could both pretend it hadn’t happened. And that was good.

  Right?

  Wrong.

  I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep that night, and I couldn’t sleep the night after, and nothing I did—not mining the spank bank for every kinky hookup I’d ever had, not counting sheep, not going for a 1 a.m. run—nothing helped.

  I just wanted her. It was so plain and simple and elemental. I wanted her. Up against the wall of a boathouse. In the sand, at the water’s edge. In my truck, over my kitchen table, in my bed.

  But I might have resisted. I might have.

  She was the one who showed up at my apartment, three nights after the party at the lake. I was in a studio over the drugstore at that point, and she rang the doorbell. I opened the door and there she was, wearing a flimsy sundress and looking uncertain.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, confirming my asshole status.

  “I don’t know.”

  It was so honest, and she looked so lost, that I opened the door wide and let her in. I let her sit down on my couch, and I poured her a beer and we sat awkwardly.

  “No,” she said suddenly. “That’s a lie. I know why I’m here.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I want to do it again.”

  “You. Want. To—?” Pretty sure my mouth was hanging open.

  “I want to have sex with you again.”

  “You know that’s not how it usually works. You don’t just show up and tell someone—”

  “Fine,” she said, crossing her arms. “Tell me you want me to go. Tell me you don’t want to have sex with me. I’ll leave, I’ll leave you alone, and that will be it.”

  She glared at me, all dare and challenge.

  I thought about it. About telling her I didn’t want to have sex. About her walking out the door. About me closing the door behind her and spending tonight the way I’d spent the last two nights, with my hand on my dick and my mind hopelessly tangled up in the way sex with Maddie had made me feel.

  Then I thought about telling her the truth. That I hadn’t stopped thinking about what we’d done for five minutes straight. That I was hard as a rock, that I’d been hard more or less as soon as I’d seen her in that sundress, that when she’d said she wanted to do it again I’d nearly passed out from the rush of blood from my head to what I’d thought was an already fully flushed dick.

  The first way was smarter. Safer. Neater. But I couldn’t make myself take it.

  “I lied, too,” I said, my heart galloping.

  It was her turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “When you asked, after we fucked, if I was always that good? The answer is no. I’ve never been that good. It wasn’t me.”

  “If it wasn’t you, who was it?” She looked hopelessly confused.

  “I mean, it wasn’t just me. It was us. How we were together. We were that good.”

  She made a soft, surprised noise. Pleased. She licked her lips.

  I wanted my tongue where hers had just been.

  “Come here,” I said.

  She did.

  We had sex fifteen more times during nine more nights over a total of seventeen days.

  I don’t seem like the kind of guy who would remember those numbers, do I?

  I remember everything.

  Chapter 19

  Jack gets up to throw away the condom. And I wait in the bed, unsure about what will happen next. Or what I want to happen next.

  He comes back and slides under the covers beside me. I roll close to him, rest my head on his chest. He puts his arms around me and kisses my hair.

  I’m flooded with warmth and relief. Also sadness. Because he just made me feel so good, so happy. And it’s so—temporary.

  “Maddie,” he whispers.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “I want to do it again.”

  I smile against the groove where chest meets shoulder. “Right now?”

  “Fifteen minutes from now,” he says decisively. “And possibly one or two more times before the sun comes up. And tomorrow night. Can we do it again tomorrow night?”

  I laugh. But part of me isn’t laughing. The part that’s watching from a little outside the situation, thinking, How do I protect myself from this? From the way he makes me feel and the way he makes me laugh?

  “Jack,” I whisper.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Just while I’m living here, right? When I move out, it’s a logical end point, and then we don’t have to do the awkward dance when one of us is ready to move on. I don’t want this to make things complicated between us, because we still have to do what’s right for Gabe. I mean, I’m on the rebound, and you’re—you’ve been honest from the beginning about liking your life the way it is.”

  I want him to contradict me. I want him to say, That was then; this is now. I’m ready to have my life be different. I’m ready to have my life include you and Gabe.

  He’s quiet. Then he says, “That’s smart. Yeah. Just while you’re living here.”

  I’m still lying in the same spot, my cheek against his skin. His arms are still around me. But I feel a chill I can’t shake.

  He shifts suddenly under me, and for a moment I think he’s pulling away. Then I realize he’s sliding down under the covers, turning as he goes, his mouth trailing across my collarbone and finding a nipple. His hand settles over my other breast, and the contrast between what he’s doing with his mouth—the barest, slightest flitters of sensation, toying with me with his tongue—and what he’s doing with this hand—rolling my nipple tight between two skilled fingers—has me gasping in a second.

  “Jack—”

  “I like the sound of that,” he murmurs against my breast. He backs off my nipple and teases me with light fingertips, circling closer and closer to where I’m drawn tight but not quite touching it, until, the next time I say his name, I’m pleading.

  Then he slowly trails his mouth down my belly, until his shoulders are pushing my legs apart. He pauses there, blowing lightly across my curls, using those callused fingertips to trickle sensation across my spread thighs, touching his lips down here and there until he has me squirming.

  He uses his thumbs to open me.

  “You’re so pretty,” he says, slicking my moisture all over me, teasing the folds and curves, finding my clit with one fingertip. Then his mouth replaces his fingers, and the whole world shrinks to what he’s doing, to the warm flat and skillful tip of his tongue, to broad strokes and swirls and flicks and the gathering, tightening, urgent, God, violent need he’s conjuring out of me, and then I’m coming, coming, coming, coming.

  When I open my eyes, I find him grinning at me over my pubic bone.

  “Well,” he says dryly. “Look at us making the most of the shitty housing market.”

  Chapter 20

  I’m on my way home from work the next night, Sunday, when I get a phone call from a landlord I’d called a few days earlier about an apartment. It’s a two-bedroom in Ballard, and it had sounded really promising from the description.

  As per Jack’s wishes, we had (amazing) sex again twice more last night after he went down on me. “We’re going to do this as much as we possibly can until our time runs out,” he said, after his third and my sixth orgasm, right before I sent him back to his room. Light was beginning to seep in the window and Gabe would be up soon.

  It was a brutal day of work on just a couple of hours’ sleep, but orgasms have magical power to combat sleep deprivation, so I managed to be pretty cheerful through all the usual workday crises. So much so that one of my coworkers asked me if I had any good news to share w
ith her.

  Somehow, I’m doing the dirty (again) with my baby daddy wasn’t going to come out sounding like something I should be celebrating, so I kept my mouth shut about that and just shrugged and said I was in a good mood.

  When the call about the apartment comes through, I almost tell the landlord I’m not interested in seeing the place anymore. It’s pretty hard, after what happened last night, to imagine just blithely continuing the apartment hunt. And yet, what else can I do? I can’t squat at Jack’s house forever, and both of us know sex between us has to have a definite end. Because: history and hurt and incompatible views of monogamy and family.

  So I head into Ballard to take a look at the apartment. And I’m glad I did. It’s small but beautiful—two tiny bedrooms, and a combo living room–kitchen with huge windows. Wood floors, in reasonably decent condition, and a bathroom that looks like it was redone in the last couple of years.

  Of course, I’m flooded with mixed feelings. So much relief at finding a place that’s perfect for Gabe and me. But also fear that we won’t get it. The landlord told me, just before she took me through, that she had already shown it to a couple of people earlier today. I couldn’t get here any sooner, though, because of work.

  On top of all that, there’s my ambivalence about leaving Jack’s place. Because it’s one thing to put an expiration date on the sex and something else entirely to know that it’s just ten days out. This place is available in a week and a half.

  But the truth is, I really need this apartment to be The One. Not just because I need a decent, safe place for Gabe and me to live, although of course that’s a major consideration, but because I need to get out of Jack’s house before I get in any deeper than I already am. Which is starting to seem more and more likely. Not just because of the sex, but because of moments like the one Friday night when we were watching the movie together. Those moments aren’t about chemistry or the size of Jack’s package or how well he knows my body. They’re about Jack and me and how easy it is to be with him, like it always had been. And that’s the problem.