It Takes Two

by Jenny Holiday

  The Lost Girls.

  The girls who’d had to harden themselves to survive.

  “But you and Jane did, too,” she said. She was right. Their mom had lost her mind after their dad’s accident. The depression she’d retreated into had taken a decade to lift. She’d never worked outside the house, but after the accident, she’d barely left the house.

  He cleared his throat to break up the chunk that had lodged there. “Jane told me that she blamed herself for our dad’s death.”

  “I know she did,” she said softly. “She told me that after all the drama at Elise’s wedding.”

  “Did she tell you she changed everything about herself after that? That her whole life became about trying to be good, to keep her head down and never cause me any trouble? And that she stayed that way the rest of her life, kind of by default? Until she…”

  “Met Cameron,” Wendy finished, sadness in her voice. “No, she didn’t tell me that, but I’m not surprised. She actually became the good girl she was trying so hard to impersonate.” She was silent for such a long time that Noah thought she was done talking. He kept shampooing. But then she spoke again. “Things can happen that calcify you. Actually change the kind of person you are.”

  He paused, his fingers tangled in her hair. “Did that happen to you?”

  She shrugged, and the movement of her shoulders drew his attention. He could probably not credibly continue with her hair anymore. He pushed it aside and started massaging her neck.

  “How could it not?” she finally said.

  Noah hated to think of Wendy as calcified. But that thought was pushed aside by a more astonishing one. Had that happened to him? Was that what Jane had been trying to tell him in Vegas?

  “How come I wasn’t in that club? The Dead Dads Club?” The question burst out of him before he could stop it.

  She did turn then. He didn’t try to stop her this time. She wrapped her arms around him, pressed her cheek against his chest, and squeezed. “You should have been.”

  And just like him with her earlier, she wasn’t offering him pity, just a deep, empathetic solidarity.

  Then she said it again, louder and with more feeling. “You totally should have been.”

  * * *

  Wendy was a lobster being slowly boiled to death in a pot, the temperature rising so gradually she was oblivious to her impending demise. It was the only way to explain how she’d gone from proclaiming that hand holding didn’t mix with meaningless fucking to hugging Noah in the shower after they’d spilled their guts about their goddamn childhood traumas.

  It was also the only way she could explain why, after standing there in silence for a few minutes, letting the water rain down on them, she let him wash her body. He was tender and unhurried as he slicked her with soap. It wasn’t sexual, but it wasn’t not sexual, either, even though that made no sense. He gave each part of her the same degree of careful attention, letting his hands slide up her back and then down her front. He didn’t stop at her breasts, but he didn’t skim over them, either. Her nipples puckered in his hands as he kneaded, and she hitched a breath.

  He covered every inch of her with soap, including the bottoms of her feet—he placed her arms on his back for balance as he crouched and patted her calves to get her to lift her feet one at a time. When he was done lathering her, he switched the water from the rain-style showerhead to the detachable one, and started rinsing her. The suggestiveness, the playfulness of earlier was gone, but there was something insanely erotic about being the object of such focused attention.

  When he finished rinsing her body, he turned her again so she was facing away from him, pressed his hand lightly against her forehead to get her to tip her head back, and said, low and raspy, “Close your eyes.”

  She did, and he rinsed her hair, using his fingers to separate the strands as he moved the showerhead back and forth. When he was done, he put the nozzle back and changed the setting back to the rain head. Then he pushed her gently to the back of the shower and stepped under the spray. Quickly, with much less care than he’d shown her, he soaped his own body. He didn’t switch the soap out for the shampoo bar, just continued on up to his head with the soap. She should probably offer to wash him, to swap roles. But there was something about watching him, about the difference between how attentive he had been with her and how careless he was being with himself, that was strangely, strongly compelling.

  She had thought maybe they’d have sex in the shower. But no, he merely turned off the water when he was done and opened the curtain. She stepped out, grabbed her towel, and got one for him from under the vanity. They dried off in silence.

  Then he led her to her bedroom and started making love to her.

  There was no other way to describe it. Wendy valued linguistic precision, which was why she’d referred earlier to the “meaningless fucking” she had expected the evening to bring. It was probably also why her friends had labeled her a potty mouth. Maybe they were right, but she believed in calling things what they were.

  Her previous couplings with Noah had been hot, athletic, even a little bit rough.

  This was none of those things. No, that wasn’t right—it was one of those things: hot.

  As he laid her back on her bed, he started again with the slow worship of her body, but this time instead of a bar of soap, he used his mouth. And his hands. He used long, firm strokes, almost like he was still trying to give her a massage, running his hands up from her knees to her hips and back down again, while his mouth moved over her inner thighs.

  “Oh my God,” she breathed. She almost couldn’t take it, this slow-burning torture.

  “Mmm.” She didn’t know if he was agreeing or trying to soothe her.

  She reached for his head, putting her hands in his hair, needing to anchor herself to something, but he shook them off, moving up her body and transferring his intensive ministrations to her breasts. He stroked, kneaded, kissed, licked, and sucked, and she just about lost her damned mind.

  It went on and on. Her body was languid and limp as he spread slow, smoldering fire through her. Every time she mustered enough strength to try to touch him, he batted her away, sometimes shushing her in the process, though she hadn’t said a word.

  They were silent, in fact, aside from the moaning noises she was making—the noises she couldn’t stop making as the torment ratcheted up and up and up.

  When the noises turned more frustrated, he came farther up her body, covering her mouth with a kiss he seemed to mean to be soothing, but it only made things worse. Better. Both. His tongue swept against hers, with the same gentle but firm pressure he’d been using on her body, again and again.

  She couldn’t stand it anymore. The clichéd way to describe such an extreme degree of sexual arousal was to say she felt like she was ready to combust, to burst into flames. But it was more like an unraveling, like he was pulling her soul slowly out of her body. She wanted to ask him to fuck her. To finally fuck her. But the words seemed too strong for what was happening. Or not strong enough, she wasn’t sure.

  So she tried to say it another way, one that came less easy but felt more true. “Please.” That got his attention. He lifted his head and looked at her with concern etched across his features. “Please, now? I can’t wait anymore.”

  He closed his eyes, almost like continuing to look at her was too hard. But when he opened them, he smiled. They’d been doing a lot of smiling today. Smiling and laughing. But this was different. This was part relief, part surprise…and all gorgeous. It lit up his whole face.

  She wrapped her legs around his waist, as she had done at some point every time they’d been intimate together. It was beginning to feel like that was where her legs belonged.

  He exhaled a shaky breath, like he was surrendering a great burden, and took his cock in hand—God she loved the sight of that, of his strong hand holding his beautiful cock. Nudging her entrance with it, she lifted her hips off the bed to meet him.

  “Oh!” she bre
athed when he finally, finally entered her, relishing the little burn as he slid past her body’s initial resistance. He pressed down on her clit with a thumb as he did so, and she saw stars.

  But then he stopped. Went totally still. Instinctively, she tightened her grip on him, with both arms and legs.

  “Condom,” he bit out. “We forgot a condom.”

  They couldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. She shook her head violently and her hips bucked off the bed, knowing, in a way her brain did not, that she couldn’t lose him. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s not the right time for anything to happen—my period is due any day now.”

  “Fuck,” he bit out, the curse giving way to a groan as he slid back home.

  She let out a shaky exhale, relief and lust swamping her at the same time.

  He made love to her the way he had done everything that evening—slow and steady and relentlessly. He covered every part of her body with his. His impossibly deep kisses were a drug as he worked her breasts, enveloping them entirely with his hands. His hips ground into her slow and dirty, and at the end of every stroke, when he was buried in her seemingly as deep as he could go, he kept grinding, getting a little deeper. Because he was lying on top of her, every stroke put pressure on her mound, and she was close, so close.

  On a groan, he stopped kissing her, pulled back, and looked into her eyes. He kept up with everything else—the lazy, torturous grind of his hips, the steady sweep of his hands on her breast, but he did it all while staring at her. He stared so intently it was like he was daring her to look away, like he was extending a thread between them, weaving a web to catch her in.

  She felt her climax cresting all through her body, in her arms and belly, and between her legs, of course. “Oh,” she gasped as she came and came and came. Still she stared at him, trying and failing to read what was in his face.

  As if to thwart her efforts, suddenly his face contorted, like he was in terrible pain. “Wendy,” he said quietly, with such heaviness in his voice he almost sounded sad. Then, with a groan that seemed obscenely loud given how hushed and almost reverential their lovemaking had been, he pulled out. He was already coming, and he spent on her stomach.

  He was already coming. Meaning some of it was inside her.

  Jesus freaking Christ, what was the matter with her?

  Panic started to swirl through her body, almost as powerful as her orgasm had been.

  Wendy had never understood people who got pregnant “by accident.” Those failure rates associated with condoms? They didn’t apply to her. Wendy used condoms correctly, and she used them religiously. She’d never been too caught up, too drunk, too anything, not to stop long enough for her partner to sheath himself. It was a first principle.

  She could only tell herself that since her period was set to arrive tomorrow or the next day, she almost certainly wasn’t ovulating. And she was clean, and she would bet the farm Noah was, too. So it was fine.

  Probably.

  But, honestly, she was disgusted with herself. The idea of being carried away by passion to such an extent that you abandoned a principle like that? It was—

  “What was that?” Noah rolled off her, grabbed some tissues from the box on her bedside table, and started cleaning her up.

  “What was what?” There was a thunk and, already on edge, she jumped. She knew that thunk. It was the sound of Gia dropping her enormous handbag on the counter in the kitchen.

  Not only had Wendy not used a condom, she’d totally forgotten she had a houseguest.

  “Oh my God.” She banged her head on the headboard a few times. “We have to stop doing this.” Rolling away from his ministrations, she scrambled out of bed. “Just once, I would like to have sex without Gia arriving immediately after the deed is done. Is that too much to ask?”

  “Wendy? You home?” She heard the clack of Gia’s high heels on the hardwood floor.

  Apparently, it was.

  She ran to the door, opened it a crack, and said, “I am! I’ll be out in a minute.”

  She turned back to Noah. He was back to his joking ways, lounging naked in her bed and doing a poor job of suppressing laughter.

  Well, okay. She could deal with jokey Noah better than serious, intense, lovemaking Noah.

  She put her hands on her hips. “You’re lucky I live on the twelfth floor, or I’d make you climb out the window.”

  “Eh.” He stretched but otherwise made no move to get out of her bed. “It’s only Gia. She’s already on to us.”

  “You’re not going to be so blasé when I come back with your gross sweaty running clothes and make you get dressed so you can leave.”

  * * *

  Short of keeping Noah locked in her bedroom indefinitely, there was no way to hide what had happened. So Wendy got dressed, retrieved Noah’s clothes, and threw them into the bedroom, leaving him to his own devices while she went to face her fate.

  “You go for a run?” Gia asked when Wendy, her hair still damp, appeared in the kitchen.

  “Yep.” Wendy braced herself.

  “I should take up running.” Gia was in the process of opening a bottle of wine. “Instead, I’m going to drink, because I just came from Jane’s house.”

  Wendy heard the door to her bedroom open, and her face heated.

  “Hmm. I was at Jane’s house, and Jane’s brother is at your house.” Gia splashed some wine into a glass and whispered, “How interesting.” Then she raised her voice and said, in a singsong tone, “Hi, Noah!”

  “Hi, Gia.” He was the picture of composed nonchalance, strolling through her living room in his running clothes like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Gia held up her bottle of Cabernet. “You want some wine?”

  Noah opened his mouth, and Wendy was pretty sure he was about to accept, so she sent him a death glare. But, truthfully, part of her—some dangerous, unhinged part of her—wanted him to stay. Wanted to kick back and have a glass of wine with one of her best friends and her…what? Her what? That was the problem. He could never be what she wanted him to be.

  “No, thanks,” he said, clearly having got the message. “I, ah, should be going.” He looked at her as if he wanted her to confirm that he’d spoken his line correctly.

  She turned the volume up on the death glare.

  He let himself out, giving her a stupid little salute before he disappeared.

  Gia poured a comically large glass of wine and slid it across the kitchen island to Wendy, her eyebrows lodged high on her forehead.

  Wendy took a long, undignified chug, then said, “So what’s up with Jane that’s driving you to drink?”

  “What’s up with Jane’s brother that’s driving you to drink?”

  “We went running,” she tried, even though she knew deflection was futile.

  Gia gazed down the hallway. “In your bedroom?”

  Wendy sighed. “Okay. I admit that Noah is turning out to be…a problem. But he’s going home in a few days, and that will be that. Anyway, that”—she gestured back to her bedroom—“was that. Done. Finished. So please don’t tell Jane.” She hated asking that. She hated that she’d put herself in a position where she had to ask that. She and Jane didn’t keep secrets from each other.

  They hadn’t, anyway, not historically. They did now, thanks to her.

  Gia took a sip of her wine and regarded Wendy thoughtfully over the rim of her glass. “What if you could have whatever you wanted?”

  Wendy blinked, taking a moment to adjust to the strange, vague question. She had been expecting the Inquisition. Or a guilt trip about going behind Jane’s back. She deserved both. “Nobody can have whatever they want.”

  “Yeah, but what if? Humor me.”

  “Okay, um…I’d wave my wand and make my aunt immediately better—no rehab required—and I’d make partner at the firm.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.”

  Annoyance flared in Wendy’s chest. That jet-setting Gia thoug
ht she could just parachute in and start getting pushy about Wendy’s love life—or lack of it—was kind of irritating. “It doesn’t even matter. He lives in New York.”

  “Which you visit on the reg. And, dude, I think you just answered my question with that protest.”

  “Gia. It’s just sex.” She was lying. Because whatever had happened earlier, in her room, had not been just sex. Goddamn Noah.

  “It was just sex,” she declared in an attempt to make herself believe it. “Past tense.”

  “Really? Because from my vantage point, things look a little different. He’s rubbing your feet while you’re watching baseball. You’re off every night going running with him. Every time you guys start talking about law, the pheromones get so thick the rest of us have to go outside for some fresh air.”

  “Gia, stop. You can’t—”

  “No, you stop.” Gia held up a hand to punctate her command. “Why are you so determined to be unhappy? I mean, I know your dad died. You raised yourself. Or Noah raised you—whatever.”

  “You can’t just dismiss my whole life history!”

  “Maybe you should think about dismissing it. Because that seems like a better option than letting it paralyze you.”

  Wendy’s retort was cut off by the fact that all the breath had left her body. Blinking rapidly, she thought back to her conversation with Noah in the shower. What had she said to him? Sometimes things happen that calcify you. That change who you are. She had never thought of that as a bad thing, per se, just a fact. Of course, her father’s death had been sad. She wasn’t glad it happened. But it, and its aftermath, had made her into the driven, accomplished woman she was. She did good work. She had great friends.

  That was enough.

  Wasn’t it?

  Horrible, mortifying tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. She refused to let them fall, though, so she pressed her lips together and swallowed hard.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Gia’s voice had lost its edge. She slid her arm across the island and grabbed Wendy’s hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a bitch. I just want you to be happy, and sometimes I think you need a little push. So don’t answer my question out loud, but think about it. But not just with your current lawyer brain. Think about it with your whole self, the kid who lost her parents and the modern-day, independent, kick-ass lawyer.” She paused, then posed her question again. “What if you could have whatever you wanted?”