Madly

by Ruthie Knox

  He was, with more than one part of his anatomy. “Perhaps I should have handholds installed.”

  “I think that would be advisable. For when you’re ready to cut loose. And you could get another soap dispenser, except it would be for dispensing lube.”

  “And a condom machine, I suppose.”

  “Safety first.” She soaped her feet and legs, and then between her legs, quite thoroughly, for some time, as she watched the water run down Winston’s calves and waited for him to touch her.

  It was so interesting, the way water moved over skin, how it split into channels and rejoined, changed direction abruptly, so enticed by gravity that it moved fast, almost too fast to keep track.

  Also interesting how her cupped fingers slipped so easily through her labia, her arousal to Winston’s presence so automatic, so interesting, her fingers, the water falling on the back of her neck, and his eyes on her, the way he was breathing, Jesus.

  “Allie.”

  And then he was on her, his skin touching her skin everywhere, his weight moving her into the wall, his hands at her shoulders, skimming over her arms, cupping her breasts, his mouth on her neck. “This is okay.”

  It wasn’t really a question, but she appreciated that he still bothered to obtain consent. “This is more than okay.”

  “Thank God.” She wasn’t sure if she kissed him or he kissed her, only that she needed his mouth on hers, hot and open, teeth and lips and tongue, his breath at her throat, his thumbs over her nipples, his hands between her legs as she found the crease at his upper thigh and gripped him tightly in a long, smooth slide of skin that made him say her name again, “Allie.”

  The tile was cold behind her, his skin hot in her hand, his fingers slipping inside her, deeper and faster than she’d been ready for, so she had to hitch a breath and clench around him, tight, tight, to keep everything okay.

  Her throat hurt, her emotions running high, and he had too many fingers inside her, and she didn’t think she could do it, actually. She didn’t think she could let go of one more thing, even for Winston, even if she wanted to.

  He put his forehead on hers. “Darling.”

  “Yup.”

  “Breathe.”

  Allie pursed her lips and exhaled. It was thin and fake and ineffectual.

  “Try again.”

  “Mm. No.”

  He began to ease his fingers out, and she grabbed his hand and held it where it was. “Nuh-uh. You’ll have to leave them there forever.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s so. Sorry. My junk has decided this is the way things are going to be from now on.”

  Winston smiled and kissed her. He kissed her lips, and the corners of her mouth, and her upper lip, tickling the fuzzy downy hairs that grew there. He kissed her eyebrows and temples and her forehead and the tip of her nose and her cheekbones, her earlobes, the space behind her ears. He kissed her neck, and the slope of her right breast, and her nipple, and he was somewhere between her underboob and her navel when her body remembered how to relax and be loved.

  She let him love her.

  She let him take her thighs in his hands and put his mouth on her, pushing her back against the shower wall, rain falling on his shoulders and slicing across his back, until she came silently, her head thrown back, her palms pressed flat against the walls in surrender.

  Allie surrendered.

  It coursed through her whole body, glorious and awful, pleasure and pain, joy and grief and loss, and she didn’t want it, but she took it anyway. She liked him too much not to take it from him, this gift of his attention and his time, his body, his heart.

  He wiped his mouth, kissed her thigh, rose slowly. She just watched him, his dark eyes, his face, her heart pounding, the heat making her a little unsteady.

  Allie turned around and put her palms on the wall. “Like this,” she said.

  He stepped closer, chest at her back, his erection pushing hard against her butt. “Forgive me for asking, but what, precisely, like this?”

  “Just the ordinary thing. You know. Stick it in, take it out?”

  He snorted and pressed his face into her shoulder. “Stick it in, take it out?”

  “Yeah.” She thrust her hips, a weak mimicry of the sex act. “Stick it in, take it out, stick it in, take it out, stick it in, take it out, ohhhuhhh.”

  At her imitation of orgasm, Winston began to shake with laughter. She closed her eyes, smiling, overwarm and tender, possibly a little bit manic in the wake of her orgasm and this terrible, wonderful intimacy.

  He wrapped his arms around her and held her, and for a long time they stood like that, bathed in warm water, together. “Allie?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want you to know that I’m grateful. Whatever happens in the next few days—and it’s not something we need to talk about, at least not this moment—I’ll always be grateful for this. For you.”

  She closed her eyes again, to keep the feelings inside, where they swooshed through all her wide-open postorgasm veins and infused her whole unprotected self with love.

  Love. Love, love, love.

  Oh, God.

  It wasn’t what she wanted, or what she was supposed to have been doing. But she’d already surrendered to it, and there it was.

  She’d fallen in love with the mailman.

  “Also, I should mention, perhaps, that I haven’t a condom. I purchased sex toys at the drugstore, and I thought to purchase condoms and looked at them for quite some time, but I must have been distracted by some of the other items for sale, because I found just now, when I checked before I came into the bath, that I’d not—”

  Allie arched her back and tipped up her hips to rub against him. “Get soap.”

  Winston pumped soap into his hand and smeared it into her outstretched palm. Allie lathered it across her low back and the crack of her ass, then reached back to yank him closer, urging him to press her into the wall. “Hang on.” He repositioned, and then he was hard between her legs, the head of his cock parting just her lips, sliding back and forth without going in. It was glorious torture.

  “Oh, jeez.”

  “Like this, then?”

  “Just like that.”

  Winston moaned.

  It should have felt like getting banged in a shower, pushed into a wall, used like a slippery toy, impersonal, unknown. She’d been here before, in a different shower, with a different man.

  But now was not then, and Winston had taken the most minimal of cues from her and turned it into this slippery, soapy, frictionless symphony of goodness.

  It shouldn’t have felt like it did with Winston, but here she was, here she was, fully present, her body a gift for him, her heart in her throat as they moved together, both of them here, both of them aware of what this was, what this meant, what they’d gotten themselves into.

  She came a second time without meaning to or expecting it, a surprise pulled from her by Winston’s harsh movements and the sounds he made, falling apart.

  Afterward, he leaned into her, breathing hard, fog all around them, and Allie started to feel dizzy, floating ten feet above herself.

  He shut off the water and handed her a towel. Her hands worked automatically, wiping droplets from her legs and belly, twisting her hair into the towel, brushing her teeth. He did the same, readying himself for bed. She tried to act normal, like she would normally act after what they’d just done, but there was nothing normal about their situation and she’d never acted normal around Winston, never tried to play any kind of part for him.

  He’d never seen her the way her family saw her—not as crazy, impulsive Allie who couldn’t make a good decision to save her life. And not as the other Allie she knew how to be—the Allie who tried to be responsible, tried to be good, tried not to give in to her nature.

  He’d only seen her.

  They slid between the sheets naked, and Winston found a movie to watch, the remake of True Grit. He held her hand in the dark, but he fell asleep with
in minutes and left her alone with gunfire and death and her spiraling anxiety.

  She laid beside him, silent and still through the entire movie as he softly snored and she tried not to imagine what it would take to make more nights like this. How many sacrifices and changes it would require, just to try to make something with a man who would leave, who hadn’t bought any furniture and would sooner or later go back to London, probably, where she’d never been, to live in a country she didn’t know, with thousands of strangers. He had a daughter, a mother, a father, an ex wife, a business, an older man’s life, and she was barely a grown-up at all, a girl from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, who’d seen nothing and knew nothing and had her hands full with the overwhelming prospect of her family falling apart and coming back together in some new configuration.

  Ben would be in Manitowoc by now. Where were they—out in the garage, or talking at the bar in the basement, or sitting at the kitchen table? She couldn’t imagine it, needed to, couldn’t imagine where her mother was sleeping or what she might be thinking, what she’d been thinking all these years, what she wanted or who she really even was. She thought about Chasity, about chasing the money, about Beatrice whose mother was planning to climb the tallest mountain in the world. The air-conditioning came back on again with a blast, the temperature dropped, and Allie imagined what it would be like to fear her mother would die on a mountaintop alone. She thought about money, how much it would cost to invest in Ben’s restaurant, if he’d even let her, all the changes he’d have to make.

  She would never fall asleep. Never.

  Quietly, slowly, she slipped out of bed and into the dark bathroom, where she located Winston’s robe. She tied it around her waist, shut the door behind her quietly, and roamed the living room until she found her phone.

  It was one-thirty in the morning. She pulled up her recent calls, dialed the number without letting herself second-guess the wisdom of this move, paced back and forth for three rings until finally she heard her sister’s voice.

  “What’s the matter?” May sounded muzzy and panicked.

  “Nothing. No emergency. I’m sorry, I just needed to talk. But it was shitty to wake you up. Go back to sleep.”

  “There’s nothing wrong? Dad’s okay?”

  “Dad’s in Wisconsin. He’s fine as far as I know.”

  “No, he is. That’s right. Ben says he’s fine.” May was starting to sound more like herself.

  “You want me to let you go?”

  “I’m awake now. I haven’t been asleep that long. It’s weird here without Ben. I think I’d just really fallen asleep when you called. What time is it?”

  “One-thirty.”

  “Oh. I guess it’s been a few hours. So what’s going on, then?”

  “Nothing. I’m just…Winston’s out like a light, and I’m just laying there, spiraling. Does that happen to you?”

  “Like when you realize right before you fall asleep that a check you just wrote is going to overdraft your account, and you lay there thinking about it for hours?”

  “Yeah. Kind of like that.” Allie mentally promised herself that regardless of what happened tomorrow, May would have a big fat balance in the bank by the end of the day.

  “I think everybody feels like that sometimes.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Yeah, I know. Me, too.”

  “Like, really scared.”

  “Mostly about Mom? Or Dad?”

  “Both of them. And I’m scared about Winston.”

  “He’s really into you.”

  “I’m into him, too.”

  “Yeah, I got that impression. Does he want you to stay in New York?”

  “He hasn’t said. I think so. I don’t know if he’s staying here himself.”

  “All right. I’m going to need details. Spare me nothing interesting, and give me a rundown of exactly how you met him and everything that’s happened.”

  Allie sank into the couch and pulled Winston’s robe tighter around her. It was good to hear her sister’s voice. Good to have someone to tell.

  They stayed up together, talking, until the sky began to lighten and the traffic picked up on the street.

  Chapter 20

  “Welcome to the landing strip of the rich and famous.” Jean pointed to the sign that read TETERBORO AIRPORT. “Maybe you’ll see some celebrities milling about.”

  “It doesn’t look as jet-set as I’d imagined. But then, the celebrity gossip websites mostly only show the stars getting off the planes, and not so much the airport itself.”

  “It’s an airport,” May said. “It looks like an airport.”

  Her sister was grouchy. Allie had been trying to cheer her up all afternoon, but May wasn’t having it, and Allie’s stores of good cheer weren’t bottomless. She’d had as shitty a day as her sister.

  May checked her phone. “Ben texted. The pilot said they should be landing in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “The planes get stacked up to land here,” Jean said. “Don’t be surprised if it takes longer.” He dropped them at the curb.

  They waited in leather chairs in a glass-and-granite executive airline lobby. “Are you as nervous as I am?” Allie asked.

  “I’m pretty nervous.”

  “I feel like I’m going to puke.”

  May’s eyes could have cut glass. “Don’t.”

  Allie sighed and fidgeted in her leather seat. It was as hard as a rock, as if no one had ever put their butt on it before. When she tried to sit up straight, her back hurt. When she slouched enough to be comfortable, she slid off the edge and onto the floor.

  “Sit still.”

  “Has Dad ever been to New York, do you think?”

  Allie couldn’t imagine it. Their father was a creature of Wisconsin, traveling from home to work to as far afield as the cabin at the lake, Green Bay for a Packers game, and once, memorably, all the way to Minneapolis when they got tickets to a playoff game and went to the Mall of America.

  “I don’t think Dad has ever been on a plane,” May said.

  “Sure, he used to fly with that kid in high school on the next farm who had the plane. They would go to the air show in Oshkosh together.”

  “I never heard that story.”

  “Oh. He’s told me a couple times.”

  May looked out the window. “You’re the one he tells stuff to. Not me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  It was, though. Allie didn’t know how it had happened. Somewhere along the way she’d just become the daughter Bill Fredericks talked to, the daughter he drove to the antique store on weekends, the daughter he helped out with Sal’s inventory and the renovations on an empty building downtown.

  Maybe it was because she wasn’t actually his daughter. Maybe it was easier to talk to the kid you raised who didn’t belong to you than to the daughter who looked just like you.

  “He doesn’t tell me anything personal,” she said in apology.

  “Even if he’s been on crop planes, I’m pretty sure he’s never flown commercially.”

  “This isn’t commercial, though.”

  “Whatever.”

  Allie had been dismissed. May was tired, nervous, and not in the mood for sisterly sharing.

  Allie walked to the bank of snack machines by the bathrooms and used the change machine to turn twenty dollars into quarters, which she began methodically plugging into the slot. She wanted a candy bar and some chips, and it never hurt to get extra. Someone might be hungry. It was four-thirty, and she didn’t know when dinner would happen or what it might be.

  It had been such a dogshit day. Probably it was her fault for talking to May all night instead of sleeping. She’d grabbed a few hours for a nap after Winston went to the office, but it was the kind of nap where she felt as though she was awake the whole time, hearing phantom buzzing from her phone, dreaming of incoming calls where she learned her father had been in a plane crash and her mom blamed her.

  She woke up too late to do anything but throw her
hair into a bun and slap on one of her few remaining outfits before it was time to meet May and her agent for lunch.

  When May had told her about the meeting on the phone last night—scheduled weeks earlier, and apparently giving May an ulcer—Allie volunteered immediately to tag along for moral support. But May’s agent, a busy man with heavy teal glasses’ frames and a tendency to look past May when he spoke to her, had clearly not been comfortable with Allie’s input or her questions, and he hated her outfit, a vintage wraparound apron dress in red flowered cotton that had a tomato linking arms with a bloody Mary glass on the pocket.

  The lunch was all about what he wanted May to do, which was scrap her current story and focus on what was hot right now. Allie started to feel that if he said “the market” one more time, she would scream.

  When the bill came, she’d snatched it nearly out of his hands and paid it, triumphant to have wrested this tiny bit of control from the man who was ruining her sister’s career.

  To say this had not been May’s interpretation of the lunch, however, would be to understate the train wreck that followed.

  I thought he was supposed to work for you, Allie had said as they left the restaurant, then May spent the next twenty minutes explaining that she didn’t understand how agents worked, or the children’s book market, or how difficult it was to get representation at all, much less someone as prestigious as her agent.

  Running on fumes, Allie had gotten annoyed, which made May snippy, and then they yelled at each other until May’s eyes filled with tears she refused to shed. Then they sat on a rock in Central Park while May talked about how she didn’t want to do any of the things her agent had suggested and she was convinced he’d signed her by accident and didn’t like her art or her stories at all.

  Allie squatted down and retrieved her snacks from the bottom of the machine. She used the top layer of her dress to carry them outside, where she presented Jean with a soda and his choice of junk food.

  “You can wait inside with us if you want,” she offered.