by Meg Maguire
“Yes?”
“I want you.” She emphasized the proclamation with a tug at his belt.
“You can have anything you want, mon ange,” he promised, pressing his lips against her forehead, slipping into words that felt as though they’d been spoken a lifetime ago. He felt unsteady fingers fumble with his buckle. He stroked her faster, the speed of his touch mounting with his excitement as she freed the button of his jeans then coaxed down the zipper. He moaned.
Fallon eased his pants over his hips and her fingers found him. He bucked from the shock of the pleasure, thrusting eagerly into her hands.
“Max.”
“Touche-moi.” Goddamn it, why did he always forget how to speak English at moments like this? Fallon’s slow, rough pulls were wiping his brain clean. “Ma peau—touch my skin.” He pushed his underwear down, releasing his cock into the cool, soft heaven of her palm. His hips convulsed from the potency of it, the sensation of her hand exploring him, controlling him. “Yes. You make me so hard.”
She moaned his name. Against his rubbing fingers, the cotton grew wet. The time for patience had passed. Max grabbed her underwear at either hip and tugged them down, peeling them off her legs before doing the same with his jeans and briefs. He leaned over her for the box on the nightstand and mangled the cardboard getting to a condom. He forewent the civility of trying to open it with slippery fingers, tearing the packet with his teeth.
“Dis-moi. Tell me you want this,” he said, unrolling it down his length and staring at her body in the fading light from the window above them.
“You have no idea.” Her eyes roamed him in return, growing wide as he knelt between her legs, looking transfixed by the view between their bodies.
He was awed by his own hardness as he guided himself to her center. Fighting the urge to plunge his cock as deep as she could take him, he eased in the first inch, gritting his teeth.
Her groan told him she was ready for more. Her hands held his backside as he gave her half his length. He drew back, then went further.
“Do you know what you need?” The words came out maniacal from the effort it took Max to stay in control.
“It doesn’t matter tonight. Just show me what you like.”
“Comme tu veux.” He abandoned his attempts at self-restraint. Inside she was as lush and deep as her full hips promised. In a matter of thrusts he was buried as far as he could go. “God, yes.”
“You feel so good,” she whispered.
And she was wrong—he felt amazing. The slick tightness of her made him feel even harder, even bigger and thicker. Inside her, he felt powerful. He leaned back on his haunches to watch their two bodies, to watch and feel her fingers and palms slide down his abdomen, slick with sweat. He grunted, animalistic.
“Tell me how I feel.”
Her hands gripped his hips, possessive. “You feel big. And hard—”
“No, tell me how it feels. Having me inside you.” He thrust deep and slow.
She seemed to consider her answer, closing her eyes, surrendering her body to his. “You feel…strong. And close. Like you’re more than inside me.”
“Like I’m a part of you?”
Her eyes opened. “Maybe.”
“Touch yourself,” he ordered, barely able to form the words. He watched as her fingers began to rub the point of her pleasure. “Good.”
She licked her lips as if parched, eyes on his surging cock. “Can you do it harder?”
“Oh, yes.” He lowered his body, braced a hand on either side of her ribs and gave her what she wanted. Her legs wrapped around his waist and he felt her tighten as gliding turned to pounding. The scent of their bodies, the slap of his hips on the backs of her soft thighs—it was a drug invading his bloodstream. Eight years since he’d last been like this with anyone yet he couldn’t imagine being any other way, now.
Fallon gasped. The fingers not touching her clit raked at his skin, frantic. She unraveled before him.
“Good…”
“More.”
He increased the length of his thrusts, leaving her warmth only to plunge deep, right to the base, again and again. As Max’s pleasure grew, reality slipped further and further away. He heard his own moans as if they belonged to some other man, some beast.
When Fallon came her body held him, tight and possessive, and a voice like an angel ascending unfurled from her lungs. If it hadn’t been for the rubber dulling the sensation, Max would have joined her—would have beaten her to the punch. As her body stilled and her cry died away he leaned back again, thrusting hard. His cock hurt, desperate for release, frustrated by the condom. He pulled out, stripped it off and stroked himself with a tight fist, frenetic with need.
Fallon whispered his name again and he saw through half-lidded eyes the hungry way she watched him. He came undone.
Lost in the sounds of his pleasure and the waves of ecstasy ripping through him, he released in hot slashes across her soft belly. He saw her fingers touch his come, rubbing it against her skin in a small circle as he gave her more. When the spasms finally subsided, Max felt close to fainting.
He collapsed beside her, wrapping them together into a tangle of limp limbs. For a long time he was aware of nothing apart from their two hearts beating.
As the moments became minutes, he reclaimed his sanity. Above them the sky had grown dark. Between them the atmosphere was warm and moist and deeply, achingly familiar.
“I have to tell you something,” Fallon said at length in a dreamy voice, lips moving against his temple.
“Oh yes?” He traced her spine with his fingertips.
“I looked through your sketchbook a couple weeks ago. At those drawings. The ones I didn’t pose for,” she said pointedly.
He smiled, hoping she was about to turn disapproving on him again. “Oh?”
“They’re…they’re quite beautiful.”
“Indeed? I wondered if perhaps you were about to call me a pervert.”
“Nah. Not now. You’ve grown on me.”
“Then I shall refrain from calling you a snoop.” He cleared his throat, trying to coax himself back to lucidity. “Dear God.”
“Good?”
He grinned, blinking up at the evening’s first stars. “I can’t tell you how good.”
“Welcome back.”
“Back among the common fornicators,” he said in an unctuous voice and pulled her closer. “I so often call you an angel, but really you are a temptress. Delilah.”
She smirked. “No one’s ever accused me of corrupting them before.”
He grinned and made a luxurious, happy sound before burying his face against her neck.
Fallon pulled away a few minutes later, extracting herself from his sweaty arms and legs and the comforter, the octopus of sexual conquest. “I need a glass of water,” she said quietly and let him flop over in satisfied delirium. Max fell asleep immediately.
Fallon found a mug in the near-dark of the kitchen and filled it. She wandered to the rear windows and stared out over the back lawn, tall grass bathed in the weak, early moonlight. The broken statues in the garden glowed like opal, eerie if not for their familiarity. It was so quiet she could hear Max’s deep breathing above her, the padding of the cat’s feet as it made its evening rounds, doing whatever it was it did when the humans were preoccupied.
She refilled the cup and crept back up the steps. For a long time she stood beside the bed, gazing down at Max’s body beneath the skylight, curled into an S. S for satisfied. His ribs expanded and released in lazy intervals. Fallon’s eyes took in all this evidence—proof, finally, that she was a part of this club. The Society of the Sexually Successful. It bothered her that it had taken her so long to find her membership card.
What was the definition of a fetish, she wondered? An object—a something—that made sexual excitement or gratification possible. Something like that. She swallowed, anxious Max might be her something. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe she was fixed, now. Maybe she could go back home in an
other month and join the rest of the world in its glorious orgasmic pursuits. Or could this man be her elusive, singular something?
Lying before her could be the key that unlocked all that missing pleasure. Her own body tightened and warmed, remembering the visual—watching Max getting hotter, watching his face transform as he drove closer and closer toward release. She’d feasted on his strong body, those muscles clenched, voice a harsh rasp, uttering exotic words she didn’t understand but thrilled to hear.
Max tensed and then relaxed atop the bedclothes, adrift in some dream or other. She studied his shoulder and back, his tattoos. She wished she could stamp him with some permanent brand of ownership. She wished she could turn him over and find the diagrammatical outline of his heart etched across his chest, with her name in the center as its tiny caption.
She wished she’d stop thinking things like this.
“I’m going to knit you a scarf,” Fallon announced from her seat in the bay window the next morning as Max came downstairs, freshly bathed and dressed. She took him in again—hers, somehow.
“Are you?” He put the kettle on to boil.
“Yup. I just found an ad in the paper. There’s a woman in town who sells yarn and needles out of her home. It’ll be cold soon. And it’ll give me something to do all day aside from crosswords.”
He nodded. “I would very much like you to knit me a scarf. I will make sure the cat does not destroy it, like it did my old one. My mémère—my grandmother—made that one. I was very sad when it was ruined. You will make me one just as good, I’m sure.”
“Well, I don’t know if I can compete with anybody’s grandma. But what colors would you like? I can only do solid or stripes—no patterns.”
He thought for a moment, filling the French press. “Yellow and black. Like a bee. Une écharpe abeille. Very good.” He made a zuzzing noise with his lips and planted a kiss on her cheek as he passed by.
Fallon smiled, delighted and surprised by this playfulness. “You got it. I’ll start tomorrow.”
As the conversation died away, she noticed there was something different about Max this morning. He was smiling but there was a strange energy to him, an underlying baseline of strain and anxiety. Fallon worried it was because of the sex. She suddenly wished she hadn’t brought up the scarf, wondering for a moment if she was being too familiar, too much of an infatuated schoolgirl. She wondered for the first time what The Rules might make of her.
Max wheeled the marble to the center of the floor and gathered his tools. Then, as if reading her troublesome thoughts, he came over and sat beside her.
“I am having a very hard time concentrating,” he said, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“Oh?”
She felt him nod.
“Because of the sex?”
Another nod.
She bit her lip for a moment, nervous. “Was it a mistake, do you think?”
“How do you define ‘mistake’?”
“Do you wish we hadn’t done it?”
He laughed, sitting up straight. “That is the best thing I’ve done in years. But I think we need to establish some ground rules, yes? Otherwise, I won’t be able to think about anything else.”
Fallon glowed a little inside, released the fear and tension knotting her stomach. “What kind of ground rules?”
“We need rules so that I don’t forsake this commission in favor of attacking you every hour of every day.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” Fallon said.
“Here is what I think. I think that from the time we finish coffee in the morning until four o’clock each afternoon, we cannot touch. No flirting, no kissing. Less wine and more dry, political discussions over lunch. Very sad discussions about genocide and climate change. Very unsexy things like that.”
“Okay. I can do that.”
He nodded. “Good.”
Max stood and she asked, “What happens after four o’clock?”
He turned to fix her with a disapproving glare. “You are clouding up my mind,” he said, hands gesturing to illustrate their exasperation.
“We haven’t even started drinking our coffees yet.”
He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “You are right, that’s true.” He pulled her to her feet and turned her by the shoulders, pushing her back against the front door. A strong hand locked her thigh against his hip and he pressed tight against her, already hard. He caught her bottom lip between his and suckled it for a few moments. “We will do lots of things at four o’clock,” he said finally.
“Like what?”
He glanced away for a few seconds, thinking. “We will sit face to face on my bed with our legs wrapped around each other, and I will rock you in my lap until you come on my cock,” he said casually. He released her thigh and stepped away from her.
Fallon swallowed as she watched him walk back to the stove. Four o’clock couldn’t come fast enough.
Chapter Ten
Sex. Sex sex sex.
That was all Fallon could focus on or remember in the following two weeks. Somewhere in her periphery a statue was taking shape, meals were being cooked and eaten, a yellow and black scarf was growing longer and longer between her fingers. Sun was shining or wind was howling or the moon was rising or falling. Beach grass and birch trees were changing color, she suspected, but the only thing she was aware of was Max: sitting beside her, standing across the studio from her, lying beneath her back in a bathtub by the fire, buried deep inside her body in his bed once the sun went down.
Addict, she thought to herself accusingly, watching him from across a display of pumpkins in the co-op market one afternoon, three days before Halloween. She ran her hand over a particularly perfect one and caught his eye.
“Yes?” he asked.
“I bet you’re very good at carving jack-o-lanterns.” She held it up to show him.
He raised his eyebrows. “It’s not my usual medium. But I can give it a try.”
Fallon smiled and hugged it to her chest.
How many nights since she’d slept in her own cottage? Twenty, perhaps. She was basically paying thirty bucks a day for a very big closet and washer-dryer access. Somewhere in her little rented fridge a carton of cream had probably long since curdled.
“I’m almost done,” Max said, tossing a net bag of garlic into his basket.
How dangerously easy it had become to pretend all this house they were playing was real. Fallon paid for her pumpkin and preceded Max out the door of the market, welcomed by the cool autumn air.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked as the door jingled shut behind her. When Max didn’t reply, she turned to find him standing stock-still, a paper bag in each hand, eyes glued across the street on a curvy woman leaning into her car, rummaging for something.
“Max?” Fallon felt a fluttering of familiar, hateful emotion. “Max.”
His eyes broke away. “Sorry.”
Fallon frowned against her better judgment and hugged the pumpkin against her middle. “See something you like?”
“Hmm?” Max looked at her, then back to the curvy woman and her car. The woman finished her arrangements and slammed the door. She turned to cross the road and she was easily eight months pregnant. She smiled politely as she passed Max and Fallon and disappeared into the co-op.
“Oh,” Fallon said stupidly.
Max smiled, understanding. “Did you just think what I think you did?”
“I didn’t think anything.”
“You thought I was panting over some other woman, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t realize you were only ogling her insides,” she admitted. “Do you have some kind of pregnancy obsession too?”
“Obsession? No.” He smiled sideways at her, still looking triumphant. He set the bags of groceries on the grass and stepped behind her to wrap his arms around her waist. He fanned his fingers and placed his hands over hers on either side of the pumpkin. Her heart beat fast, and she felt both embarrassed and proud at this open displa
y of affection. She hoped no one could see. She hoped the entire world could see.
“What are you thinking?” she murmured, turning her face to his.
“I’m thinking about how you might feel,” he said simply. He released her after a couple of seconds, picked the bags back up and began the walk to the studio.
Fallon followed, shocked. She had no clue whether to take his strange proclamation personally or chalk it up to his anatomical fixations. It sobered her.
She caught up and flanked him. “You’re so weird.” This time the observation was largely a fond one.
“Probably. I have learned not to ask strangers if I may touch their bellies.”
“Is it the baby or the biology?”
“It’s the miracle of it, I think. And the miracle of something so normal.”
Fallon thought about it—childbirth—as something simultaneously miraculous and mundane. “I guess it is normal.”
“You’re always telling me I am weird,” Max said, staring off into the distance. “And you’re right. Something as normal as a family… Sometimes I wonder if I am too weird to ever have such a thing.” He looked over at her, and his eyes transmitted the most intimate warmth and vulnerability and sincerity she thought she’d ever felt.
She tried to picture Max with a toddler and was surprised to find she could. The idea made her feel oddly and acutely immature.
“I’m sure you could,” she said. “Even if you are weird, I mean, plenty of people weirder than you have marriages and kids. You’re as qualified as anyone else.”
“Thank you. That compliment means a lot to me. I began to worry a few years ago, after all the chaos subsided, if I had forfeited my chances at ever having a regular kind of life. Sometimes now I think maybe not.”
“Nah. You can have as boring and normal a life as you want.”
“Thank you.”
“You’d probably have to cut back on your art, though,” Fallon offered.
“Yes, I would imagine so. But I have a suspicion that if I ever found myself creating and cultivating some new life with some remarkable woman one day, I would feel quite fulfilled indeed. I do not think I would miss all of my selfish freedom very much.”
