by Harper Bliss
“You’ve grown more sentimental with age as well.” I squeeze Jodie’s neck between my fingers.
“So what? There’s something to be said for becoming a sentimental fool.”
“Back to York Avenue…” Some serious down-sizing will be in order, but I don’t want to break the magic of the moment. Has anything been done to the place at all since I left?
“I know it’s cramped, but we’ll figure something out.” Jodie puts a hand on my thigh. Her touch makes me melt.
“I’ll start packing as soon as I get back.” And put my house on the market, I think.
“I predict we’ll be sitting on this very bench twenty years from now. Troy might have children by then. We can take our grandkids to the park.”
It’s the ‘our’ that almost makes me well up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Leigh is flying back to San Francisco tomorrow and I can’t sleep. It’s still the same alarm clock that sheds its faint red light into my room—these objects, if treated right, are indestructible. It makes me think of the sleepless nights I spent here on my own over the years. The weeks of agony before breaking up with Amy, during those nights that she believed I should have spent with her in Brooklyn. The long, frantic dawns worrying about what to do about Suzy, whose presence in my apartment—and my life—seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. Too big for my comfort.
But, mostly, I reminisce about the nights I tossed and turned while missing Leigh. She’s a wide sleeper, who likes to stretch her arms and legs, claiming her territory—funny how she’s even like that when sleeping. From what she’s told me, for the past eleven years, she has mostly slept alone, not having encountered many reasons to improve her sleep etiquette. I’ll need to get used to having her in my bed again. In our bed.
Even though I can’t sleep, it feels right. Leigh and I spent many a sleepless night in this bed together as well. She stayed up with me when Troy was sick and his fever worried me. She sat by my side until the morning light broke when a boy whose case I was responsible for committed suicide and I nearly went to pieces with grief and frustration.
One night, when we’d been together for about a year, we remained awake all night, giddy with excitement, dreaming up our future. Leigh would say silly things like, “I’ll become D.A. and you can be my trophy wife” or “we’ll move into a penthouse on Park Avenue.” I would tickle her until she took the trophy wife remark back. I ignored the Park Avenue comment.
Sometimes, just before falling asleep, she would say something along the lines of, “Are you sure you locked the door, Jodes?” Just to tease me, because she knew all too well I would need to get up and check. Afterward, she’d make sure I was exhausted enough to go to sleep right away once she was done with me.
Now, she seems to breathe heavier than she used to. A light purr comes from her side of the bed—which is also half my side. Just after we broke up, I was convinced that as soon as Leigh moved to the other coast, some lucky woman without any desire for children would snap her up and never let her go. How could that not happen? Turns out Leigh didn’t allow herself to be snapped up. The other day she said that, for her, the years we spent apart could be easily summed up in one word: lonely.
She turns on her back and shoves her hand into my shoulder in the process. Maybe in a few years a gesture like that will irritate the hell out of me, but now, on the cusp of our second life together, it only makes me smile. I take her hand in mine. I don’t want to spend our last night together asleep. I start stroking her palm, realizing that we are too old to pull an all-nighter, but I don’t care. I want to look into her big brown eyes. I want to make plans for our future again. Real plans.
“Can’t sleep?” she says when she opens her eyes.
“It’s not easy with someone like you in my bed.” I give her a mock sigh.
“Because I’m too sexy?” Her lips curve into a crooked grin. Her cheeks are slack with the remnants of sleep. She looks so relaxed, so completely where she needs to be.
“Because you take up too much room.”
“Would you like me to sleep on the sofa?” Her hand is stroking my belly, but she knows I don’t want to do what she’s thinking of because of Rosie sleeping in the other room. Not an issue I ever had with Suzy—because Suzy never made me scream the way Leigh does.
I curve my arm around her back to let her know she’s not going anywhere until she has to leave for the airport tomorrow.
“Remember when you lay here with me one night and you proclaimed you’d become D.A. one day?”
“I said that? No way.” Her hand keeps flitting along the sensitive skin of my belly and my C-section scar.
“That was before you got dollar signs in your eyes and joined Schmidt & Burke. When I still believed you were idealistic like me.” I let a finger skate along her cheek.
“I was never idealistic like you. Never to the same degree, anyway.”
“Perhaps we would never have met if you hadn’t worked for the D.A.’s office. Or I would have been put off by your criminal defense lawyer ways if we’d met later.”
“Too many ‘ifs’ for this hour of the night, Jodie.”
“What happened to the Leigh who could stay up until morning and dream with me?” My finger has reached her hair. I’ve spotted some gray ones above her ears, but I haven’t told her yet.
“She’s tired.” In the semi-darkness, I see Leigh’s eyes sparkle nonetheless. “But I’ll tell you this, just so you’ll never forget.” She inches a little closer. “You and I were destined to meet, I’m sure of it. And, no, I don’t care if that sounds too sentimental for the sane people we consider ourselves to be. Only a few days ago, I believe, I heard someone talk about sentimentality and such.” She chuckles. “A wise woman, I seem to remember, considering her age and so on.”
I dig my fingertips into Leigh’s scalp. “I guess it would be equally foolish to consider whether we’re going too fast?”
Leigh pushes herself up a bit, her hand falling away from my belly in the process. She looks fully awake now. “It’s not foolish at all, but, like you, I just… know. I know that I want to be here with you. Being anywhere else right now would make me more miserable than I’ve been in the past eleven years combined.”
“I’m not having any seconds thoughts, either.” I scoot closer and wait for her to kiss me.
“We should get some sleep though, Jodes,” Leigh says after.
“Fine.” I crash down and turn on my side, my back to her. “Spoon me, please. And don’t fall asleep before I do.”
Leigh folds her tall body around mine and whispers, “You know what happens when you’re too bossy for your own good.” She’s asleep within minutes.
I still can’t sleep, not even with Leigh’s arm resting on me, with her breath in my ear. Or, perhaps because of it. The short conversation we just had about her becoming D.A. reminds me of the day she got hired at Schmidt & Burke.
“I solemnly swear to you, Jodie Whitehouse, that it will become Schmidt, Burke & Sterling within the next ten years,” she’d proclaimed. By then, I had seen Leigh in various states of ecstasy, but never when her job was involved. Pure happiness seemed to radiate from her skin, and I absorbed it gladly. I wanted nothing more than for Leigh to be happy, for her to get everything she wanted in life. She’d had to go for several interviews before they finally offered her a contract, and I had supported her every step of the way.
I’d even considered it a privilege to see Leigh with her confidence frayed at the edges—she was never one to totally crack—and to see her fidget with her fingers uncontrollably, her eyes going all dark and serious.
“I hadn’t pegged you for the nervously pacing type,” I said, the night before her last interview. “It’s in the bag already, surely. I’m certain all you’ll need to do at this point is manage to hold a pen in your restless fingers long enough to sign on the dotted line.”
“This is no joke, Jodes,” she said in her formal court voice. “I’ve wanted this
for a long time.”
I guess I could see it then, on full display, how blind desire can make a person behave. How having eyes on the prize can chip away at their common sense.
Although Leigh had made it clear from the very beginning that she wouldn’t be a career ADA, she had consulted me extensively before finding the law firm she wanted to join and getting to work on accomplishing that goal.
“You’re an inextricable part of my life now, Jodie,” she had said, “I need to know how you feel about this.”
By then I had worked for the ACS for more than five years and I had seen many an excellent ADA join law firms. It always made me a little sad because it meant that the private sector would, once again, gain what the state was losing in experience. I didn’t object, of course. If that was all it took to fulfill Leigh’s deepest wishes, she could become the slickest lawyer she needed to be, put in the required hours to make her name partner ambitions clear, and attend after work drinks to suck up to people who were silly enough to need it. Leigh always had my support. Between the two of us, Gerald, a string of regular babysitters, and Muriel and Francine, we had Troy’s wellbeing more than covered.
Most of that blind ambition has gone now. She got what she wanted—and life has changed her.
Carefully, I extract myself from her grasp and watch how she rolls onto her back. I’m ready to start again with this new, mature, wiser version of Leigh Sterling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Your house is so big, but you hardly have any stuff,” Jodie says.
“I’ve gotten rid of a lot of things already.” It strikes me that I brought zero lovers to this place. I invited one woman back once, but I had to ask her to leave before we could actually become lovers because I’d totally misread her and she tried to shove me against the wall.
“All the sex toys you used with other women, you mean?” Jodie stands by the window, looking out. The things I want to do to her in this house.
“I told you. I had one semi-serious relationship and I screwed that one up as well.”
“Was she”—Jodie turns around, curling her fingers around the edge of the window sill—“kinky like me?”
Jodie seems to be suffering from the same affliction as me: irrational jealousy of ex-partners. “Oh yes,” I tease because Karen might have been the right amount of kinky for me, but it was never the same as with Jodie.
“Did you… do things with her that you didn’t do with me?” She sinks her teeth into her bottom lip and that’s how I know this is foreplay. So much for both being the jealous type.
I discard the box I’m filling and walk over to her. She’s already positioned perfectly in front of the window. I stop a few feet away from her and look her in the eyes. “I did.” It’s not true, but it doesn’t matter.
“Do it to me.”
Blood rushes to my clit. Since our reunion, I’ve let Jodie fuck me a lot more times than when we were first together—as though I’ve been in a constant, unquenchable state of arousal. As though merely dominating Jodie isn’t enough anymore.
“I let her tie me up and fuck me any way she wanted to,” I say.
Jodie narrows her eyes. She doesn’t believe me. That too doesn’t matter. If I tell her to fuck me, she will.
“Any way she wanted to?” Her voice quivers.
I fold my arms over my chest. “Yes.”
“With your hands tied up?”
I nod.
“Do… you want me to do that you?” Jodie understands that this would not be a matter of reversing roles, and that, throughout, I would be in full control.
“Yes.” I keep my voice steady, but lust rages in my blood.
“Now?” Her fingers hold on to the ledge a bit tighter.
I nod again.
Jodie sucks her lip into her mouth. It turns me on more. I don’t crave to have my hands immobilized, but I do want to see what tying me up would do to her. I want to see the look in her eyes when she loops a belt around my wrists.
“Come here,” she says, and I bridge the gap between us.
Her hands go straight for my belt and when she unbuckles it, liquid lust pools between my legs. She tugs the belt from the loops of my jeans and inspects it. She might not have laid her eyes on it many times, but she sure has felt it crack against her ass on numerous occasions already. Last night, for instance, when she arrived at my house. She’d said she wanted to see it before I left for good and promptly booked a ticket to San Francisco. That particular belt and Jodie’s behind became intimately acquainted all of last night. She barely got a chance to see the house.
She unbuttons my jeans next. “You do the rest,” she instructs, in a voice more sure of itself than I had anticipated.
Methodically, I take off my clothes, and just to grate on her nerves a little, let them fall to the floor.
“Sit on the window sill with your arms stretched above your head.” Jodie moves away from the window. It looks out over a bunch of backyard bushes and I know that, disappointingly, nobody will be able to see.
Once I’ve found my position, Jodie looks me over for a second, and I can see the excitement glitter in her glance. It matches the thrills chasing up my own spine. I hike my knees up and spread wide for her without her having to ask—my own little triumph at this moment.
She proceeds to fasten my wrists to the handle of the window. They’re not tied very securely, but it’s the thought that matters most. Jodie has never seen me like this. I’ve never been in this position. The newness of the situation sets something off in my blood, and I need to swallow the words ‘fuck me now’ because they have no place in this scenario.
Jodie hoists her t-shirt over her head and stands before me in her bra and jeans. My clit stands to attention more. My nipples are so hard they almost hurt.
“Let’s see how many fingers Leigh Sterling can take,” Jodie says, and the way she pronounces the words, without a trace of doubt in their tone, makes my head spin. She doesn’t bring her fingers to my pussy lips, though, but instead circles one around my clit—something I hardly ever do to her. “You’d better not come,” she groans, and I can tell that, now that she’s touching me, she has trouble controlling herself. How wet she must be. The prospect of touching her cunt later brings me another few seconds closer to climax. “Because I haven’t fucked you yet.” She keeps trailing her finger around my clit, and I make a mental note to commend her on her torture technique later, but right now, I need to wriggle my ass and hold on to something inside myself in order not to come at Jodie’s finger.
“How many do you think, Leigh?” she asks. “Three? Four?” Her finger halts its motion. “All five?”
Admittedly, I have to swallow hard at these questions. It could be that I overplayed my hand. Speaking of hand… Jodie’s hand is now lowering itself between my legs. Her fingers lightly skate over my drenched lips. I look down at her hand and my pussy, but I don’t have a lot of room to maneuver so I can’t make out how many fingers she’s actually planning on fucking me with.
I don’t reply to her question because I realize that the biggest thrill lies in leaving it up to her. How far will she go? Can she even do this? Jodie has fucked me before, of course, but never like this. And never with more than three fingers.
“Let’s start with two and work our way up, shall we?” Jodie looks astoundingly gorgeous in the moment that she says it. The light illuminates her face and brings out the green in her eyes. And those lips that always go a bit crooked when she speaks. I wouldn’t mind those on my clit later… Two fingers inside of me stop my thought process. Jodie is gentle, but with her other hand, she finds my breast and pinches my nipple.
I’m so aroused I could probably come after a few more strokes, but I know the rules of this game better than anyone.
Jodie increases the rhythm of her fingers and I wrap mine around the belt tightly. She doesn’t say she’s adding a third finger, but I certainly feel how she spreads me wider. She doesn’t give me a lot of time to adjust, eith
er, and amps up the speed with which she’s fucking me again. I’m starting to unravel. It begins somewhere beneath my ribs and soon seizes my muscles.
“Jodie, I—” I can’t take it anymore, I want to say, but the words die in my throat and the grin Jodie shoots me saturates my flesh with another bout of lust and the thrill of coming for her like this, hands tied, surprises me with its strength.
Jodie’s fingers retreat and she holds two of them up to me. They’re wet with my juices. “I lied,” she says. “I only used two.”
I burst out in giggles while she unties the belt. Once my arms are free I pull her toward me. “I’ll have you for this.”
“I was hoping you would.” Jodie pushes herself back and glares at me.
“Very well.” I hop off the window sill and tell her to take off her jeans and take my place.
I don’t bother with tying her up. I only have eyes for what lies between her legs. Her pussy is soaked, her lips puffy and a deep red, her clit so swollen she’ll probably come with just one flick of my tongue against it. And I can’t help myself. I need to taste her. When I kneel in front of her, I think that not everything has to stay the same. We’re not the same people anymore in so many more ways than I had first believed.
Jodie’s hands are in my hair as I let my tongue touch down on her lips first, trailing between them, and then I feast on her clit. I suck it between my lips and flick my tongue against it while my nose inhales everything of her.
“Oh, Jesus.” Jodie’s fingers tug at my hair. Her heels dig into my shoulders.
I lick Jodie in a way that I hardly ever do: gentle, deliberate, not withholding anything. Soon her thighs are clasped against my ears and she expels a high-pitched roar.
When I push myself free from the grip of her thighs and look at her, she’s snickering with her back pressed against the window.
