Turn Up the Heat

by Serena Bell

  All those disclaimers aside, it was gorgeous here. The woods had never been properly cleared, and it reminded him of the forest where he’d grown up, dark and close, almost primeval. From the big front window in what passed for a living room, he saw only the Pacific. There was a fireplace, too, even if it didn’t throw much heat. At the time he’d rented it, he hadn’t been thinking about it, but it was a pretty sweet setup for seduction.

  Not that Lily needed to be seduced exactly. More—mastered. Contained.

  Dominated.

  She got out of her VW Jetta, which was no spring chicken either. But it looked mint next to his wheels. He hoped she wasn’t looking, or if she was, that she assumed his automotive choice had been made from frugality, or a love of vintage, not the sheer necessity and poverty that had actually motivated it.

  He reminded himself that he wasn’t supposed to care. That it didn’t matter whether she thought he was rich or poor, suitable or not, because this was only what it was.

  He opened the front door and led her inside. She went immediately to the big window and looked out. The moon was waning but still bigger than a half circle and bright enough to show the frothing surface of the ocean.

  “This is beautiful!”

  “Thanks,” he said, pleased. “I’ll probably have to find a new place this winter—”

  “Why?!”

  “It’s not winterized—no heat, no protection from storms.”

  “Does that matter here?” She turned away from the dark view and swept her hand over the back of his couch, which—improbably—turned him on.

  He supposed she must be comparing it to Chicago, and it was true that the winters on the coast were much more temperate than their Midwestern counterparts, but coastal storms could be vicious. “I could stay here if I were really determined. It might just not be the most comfortable November through February I’ve ever spent.”

  Although it couldn’t be as damp, as clammy, or as dark as the last seven winters. And no matter where he was, he would never stop appreciating the peace. Even with the ocean roaring below, his house felt deeply, soothingly, silent after the constant grating of prison’s never-ending noise—metal on metal, a hundred televisions blaring, men shouting, swearing, moaning, crying—even at night. And worst, the way the sound echoed riotously through the open spaces, no insulation or baffle to break it up. You could go mad from it, and men had.

  The thing that had almost driven him insane, though, wasn’t the noise. It was the starkness of it, after the green richness of his Nan’s woods. There was nothing that grew or nourished in that metal world—not even trees in the yard. The food was no exception—prison fruits and vegetables were barely recognizable, and the best eats came packaged in plastic from the commissary. He’d had elaborate fantasies about broccoli. Among other things.

  “Here,” he said. “Sit. I’ll get you—what can I get you? Coffee? Beer? I guess that’s kind of it.” He felt himself blushing at the realization of how meager his supplies were. He wasn’t sure of the last time he’d blushed, but it had probably been ten years ago.

  She smiled. “Beer’s great.”

  He grabbed two bottles and an opener and came back into the living room where she perched at the edge of the couch, more uneasy than he wanted her to be. Maybe she didn’t know what to expect, or was worried about being alone with him in a deserted cabin, which was a reasonable fear. She’d told him she’d texted her sister her whereabouts—joking, “Because then they’ll know where to look for my body”—and he’d understood that she meant it lightly, but that it was not without some basis in truth.

  Jesus, if she knew the truth about him…Yet another reason for him not to tell her.

  He sat beside her and caught her scent—the diner’s food smell and the bright floral of her hair. If anything, her back got stiffer. And he didn’t know how to get back to where they’d been.

  “Markos giving you a hard time?” he asked.

  “Nah, not really.”

  “Work going okay?”

  “It’s okay.” She shrugged. “I can’t complain. It’s good work and I make good money. Townies tip better than tourists.”

  “But you wish you were cooking.”

  “Yeah.” She ducked her head.

  He still had the two beer bottles in his hand, and he flipped the tops off now with an opener and handed her one. She took a long swig and licked foam from her upper lip. Damn. People got on about how you didn’t see the sky in prison, how you didn’t see the sun, but you did when you were out in the yard. What you didn’t see was how beautiful a woman’s mouth could be, wrapped around a bottle.

  She looked up and caught him staring, and her mouth tipped up. She licked the rim unnecessarily, and he felt the hard clench of his dick empathizing with the slender cylinder of brown glass and huffed out a breath.

  She laughed. “Really? That’s all it takes?”

  He grabbed the back of her head with one hand and unbuttoned himself with the other.

  “Holy fuck,” she said, the words addressed to his lap.

  He had a moment of terror that he’d misjudged and let her go.

  She sat up and stared at him, wide-eyed. No, wild-eyed. He’d seen that look on her face before, twice. Once two weeks ago when he’d wedged her against a brick wall; once earlier today when he’d yanked her hair hard enough to make her eyes tear.

  He could smell her sea-sweet arousal, too. God.

  “Really?” he mocked. “That’s all it takes?”

  With a whimper, she finished what he’d started, working his zipper down. She slid off the couch and knelt between his legs, her hands gripping his thighs, hard. The blow job was sloppy, clumsy with haste, and he loved it, loved the way she gasped for breath, moaned and hummed against him, licked and sucked without finesse but with an enthusiasm no one had ever showed him before. And he’d had plenty of blow jobs, high school backseat blow jobs, prom-night blow jobs, trying-to-redeem-a-bad-date blow jobs, lovingly given serious-relationship blow jobs. Once, even, a prison-desperation blow job, payment he shouldn’t have accepted for legal work tendered, but he’d been too out of his mind with frustration, years of deprivation, a craving for human touch he’d been too weak to resist.

  This, however, was the platonic ideal of blow job, the archetype of blow job, that wet heat all around him, tightening and loosening, forcibly moving the blood out of his extremities and drawing it into the solid column of his dick, so after another moment there was nothing in his head except the concentrated fierce wonder of it. The occasional slight scrape of her teeth, the smooth, frictionless feel of the inside of her cheek, the mounting need in her voice moving against his skin.

  She gave him the back of her throat, and at first, he held himself in tight check, but then she reached under him, grabbed his ass, and urged him upward, and even though years of caution tried to hold him back, those hands on him, squeezing and kneading, unleashed something he’d been trying to rein in and he thrust until he felt resistance. She didn’t gag or pull back. She tugged him harder, and then he pulled back, because if he didn’t, he was going to come down her throat and it would all be over. And he didn’t want it to be over. He wanted it to go on and on, this strange, unexpected, almost unwanted union.

  He withdrew from her mouth, and they both reached for him at the same time, their hands overlapping, slipping in the slickness she’d left on him, on the taut, glistening surface of him. She used her thumb to smooth wetness over the tip, and he had to jerk back from her again.

  “I wanted to do this so bad the other night.”

  He wanted to know if she meant it. How much she meant it. She was wearing another of her short skirts, this one loose and flirty, and he flipped it up and put his hand to the vee of her thighs. Her panties were damp, which made him a notch more frantic than he already was, and he slipped his hand inside. When he parted her lips, she was slippery and swollen and open.

  She meant it.

  “God,” he said. “You’re�
��”

  There was no way to say it nicely, and he knew she didn’t want it that way, anyway. “You’re a fucking wet dream. You’re a goddamned porno movie.”

  She made a small, needy sound. She liked it, as he’d known she would.

  And then, perversely, he wanted to tell her. Where he’d been, for how long, without even the pale imitation of this. And now she was here, like a gift, like a reward for good behavior. He wanted her to know. The dark, the noise, the chaos, the deprivation, punishment that had been, exactly, justice, and yet so far from it. And what it felt like to come to her, as if he were coming back to her. As if she were the long missing thing.

  If he had known she existed, he wouldn’t have survived imprisonment. He would have dreamed of her every night, sweating through the threadbare blanket. He would have died from not having.

  He was wrenching her roughly out of her clothes, yanking the skirt down, tearing the scrap of her panties, popping a button on her blouse in his haste. And she was whimpering and pleading, rocking her hips against whatever he gave her—his palm, his thigh, the air when he took everything away so he could pick her up off the couch and carry her down the short hall to his room, where he slung her onto the bed, shucked his own jeans and T-shirt, and wrenched open the night-table drawer.

  He’d done this before, and he knew his cues and prompts. Now he would hold up the condom, a question in his eyes. He’d ask, “Do you want to—?” Now he would crawl over her and lick her nipples. Now he would find her clit and tease it until she was wide and ready. That was the way you played this game. He knew the rules.

  He didn’t ask her. He didn’t even hold up the small plastic packet for her nod of approval. He just tore it open and rolled it down, and she watched with those big, wild eyes. He put a knee on either side of her, fitted himself, and thrust. No preliminaries.

  She made an mmmph noise that could have been pain or pleasure, but he knew now that it didn’t matter, and he thrust again. Her head tipped back, her eyes rolled, and she hummed, hummed once for each time he buried himself deep in her, in the heat and clutch of her, in the clamp and grip and caress of her. “Lily,” he said, not meaning to, but it was impossible to shut up the way he knew he should, and her name rolled out of him again and again, with each sinking and withdrawing. Her nails scraped down his back; her teeth found his shoulder.

  She squirmed under him, lifting her hips to meet him, rubbing against him, circling, and he recognized in her sounds a rising frustration, a reaching for something just out of her grasp.

  “What do you want? Hmm? What do you want?” Not a question—a taunt. And he held himself back a little, wrapped control around his own unruly madness, and was gentle with her. Still working himself deep, but not rocking himself against her that last little bit, not letting her rub. That last half-inch, that tug and pull, that place where she was taut at the edge—he teased her with it.

  She writhed and swore at him.

  “You’ll come when I say.” He felt like someone else, someone he’d never met before. He felt like himself, a self he’d denied.

  He stroked in and out a few times, gentlemanly, and she glared and wriggled and tried, but he just smirked down at her.

  She reached down and found his balls, slid a hand back through the slick she’d created, to press a slippery fingertip against the pucker of his ass, and he grabbed her hand and held it over her head. Then found the other one and held that one high, too, so she was splayed under him, helpless.

  He lowered his body fully onto hers. He was crushing her. He was a beast. She was tiny, flimsy, under him, she was bucking and making desperate sounds, and he had to tell himself she knew how to make him stop, she knew the word, but she wasn’t saying it, she was straining against his grip, straining against his weight, and he said, “Now,” and then she was crying out, one long, continuous yell of triumph and pleasure, her voice breaking as she came in spasms so intense he could feel them, milking him, and he followed her over the edge, like being turned inside out, like letting go, like becoming that strange, lost self.

  Chapter 10

  They were silent for a long, long time. His body still lay heavy on hers, although he had lifted himself off her to toss the condom into a bedside wastebasket. She listened to his breathing as it slowed to normal, felt his heart leave its patter and find a steady rhythm against her breast. Her own did the same, and for a while she waited to see if they’d sync up, the two rhythms, but they beat opposite each other instead, like a quiet conversation.

  When so much time had passed that it had started to feel awkward, like it would be impossible to talk about what had just happened, he said, “Well, damn,” thoughtfully, and they both started laughing.

  He rolled off her and she turned toward him and traced the ink on his arms. First the tops of the evergreen trees, their trunks curving over the cuts of his biceps, their spiky tops pointing down toward his hand. Then the other arm, where he’d been tattooed to look as if the skin was peeling off his arm like a snake shedding its skin, to reveal his true self beneath.

  “Moss,” he said, when her fingers stroked over the velvet texture of his skin.

  “You love the woods.” She touched the trees and then the moss, and it was a contradiction, her fingertips gliding across smooth skin but her eyes and mind telling her that he was carved out of two different textures.

  “Yeah,” he said simply.

  The moss under the shed skin was so realistic that it made her want to peel back more, to see if he was like the forest floor all the way down.

  “I’ve never done this before,” he said.

  Startled, she propped herself up on an elbow.

  He frowned. “I don’t even really know what to call it. Do you? Have you done it before?”

  Her world seemed to yawn open, full of possibility, and she wanted to grab hold of something for fear of falling. They were going to put words to it; they were going to talk about it. They were going to give her some vocabulary to express what she had known about herself but not known what to do with. But at the same time, she didn’t feel completely safe. She felt afraid that he was leading up to telling her it had been fun this time, but that he didn’t want to do it again. Didn’t want to make a habit of it. That it was wrong for him, as it had been for Fallon. And she didn’t think she could stand that.

  So she made light of it. “You mean had sex? Nope, not a virgin.”

  But he wasn’t going to let her off the hook. “That kind of sex.”

  That kind. She couldn’t read whether that was awe or disgust in his voice. Maybe he was holding it carefully neutral. They were feeling their way around each other.

  By this point in the proceedings, Fallon had long since withdrawn his limp self to the bathroom and was taking a shower while she lay in the bed and wondered whether it was possible to die of hurt and embarrassment.

  “I think,” she said carefully, “that most people would still say that was just sex.”

  “It wasn’t just anything,” he said. “It was fucking amazing.”

  Warmth rushed through her.

  “That was—okay, look, I don’t care what most people would say. Fine, I’ll say it. I’ve never held anyone’s hands like that. I’ve never grabbed someone’s head and pushed her into my lap. I’ve never thrust into someone’s mouth, and I’ve never fucked anyone that hard before.”

  Hearing him put it into words—she couldn’t even say what it did to her. It took her apart and put her back together again. There was the truth of it, and the way he was looking at her, it wasn’t a dirty truth he wanted to put up on a shelf somewhere. It was some part of his truth, too. And she had to, suddenly, had to hear him say it.

  “And you liked it?”

  “Liked it?” He groaned. “God. Lily. I fucking loved it. I haven’t come like that in—” He laughed. “Ever.”

  She laughed too, relief choking her.

  “Yes.” It was hard for her to force the word out. It felt like undressing in p
ublic. It felt like the one time she’d tried improv comedy. “I’ve done it before.”

  He nodded. Waited.

  “With my ex-boyfriend. Fallon.”

  She had never told anyone this story. All the rules said she shouldn’t tell it to Kincaid. She hardly knew Kincaid. They had a relationship that consisted of a few words exchanged here and there, and this physical connection that they hadn’t even managed to explain to themselves yet. And it wasn’t considered a good idea to tell your current lover tidbits from your amorous past.

  But Kincaid had asked. Kincaid was listening. Kincaid had just made her come so hard it had actually strained muscles in her face and neck. She had never wanted to talk about this before, but Kincaid made her want to talk about it.

  “Blame Fifty Shades,” she said. “There were a million news stories about all the women who had experimented with rope and duct tape—the hardware stores ran low—and I…I asked Fallon if we could…experiment.”

  His mouth tipped up. “You’re sparing me the details, huh?”

  “Do you want to know them?”

  He shrugged. “If they’re relevant.”

  “I don’t know how relevant. The point is, there was rope, there was duct tape, Fallon tried to be all rough and dom—”

  This was the part that was like being naked in front of a crowd. Like having your comedy bomb, your karaoke suck. It was the part where you put your truth on the line and someone laughed or lost his erection or walked out. When the part of you that had come out of the closet crawled back in.

  Except Kincaid’s color was high, his eyes dark, and he was leaning closer to her.

  “You loved it, didn’t you. You loved the rope and the tape and even whatever dorky thing Fallon was trying to do. You were wet and panting and begging—”

  He was making her wet right now. The way he was looking at her, the way he was celebrating what she’d felt that night, the bite of the rope into her wrists, her mouth clamped shut so breath had to come fast and narrow through her nose, the way the words and the moans and the need had swelled in her throat, and when it couldn’t find its way out, had swollen her breasts and made her nipples tight and sharp, had flooded her lower body with heat.