by Julia Kent
“Yes. Were they ever—”
“No, ma’am. Never used, just for display. Fondled by hands, but I always sanitize them before a party.”
“Back in my twenties, a vibrator looked like a long, white, pointed tent stake. A little thicker.” She laughed shyly and picked up a pink jelly dildo, the kind with clit stimulators poking out. “This…this is a…I don’t even know.”
“That’s why you’re here,” I soothed. “To learn. Jolie came to a party and liked what we offered so much that she wanted to share with her friends.” Speak of the devil, Jolie walked over to us at the tail end of my sentence.
“Why didn’t you tell me!” her mother tsked at a very red Jolie.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t approve!”
“I don’t not approve! I just thought we were coming to buy grandma a nice pearl necklace. Not watch a video about how to help your husband give you one!”
“MOM!”
“Oh, you kids think you invented sex,” the grandma said with a dismissive wave. “Your grandfather would have loved playing with that pussy pocket. Give him a big tube of Vaseline and I’d be left alone for a week.”
Jolie and her mother gaped at Grandma, who looked a lot more alert and with it.
And by the end of that party Mom bought $233 and Grandma $155 worth of products, leaving Jolie insanely curious. Hostesses, though, never knew what their guests ordered. It was part of what made sales spike nice and high. If no one knows you’re buying creampie DVDs and a set of tunnel butt plugs, you’re more likely to order with abandon.
And I came home with a huge headache and a troubling sense that the Liam I’d known five years ago had changed more than I realized.
Chapter Eleven
Liam
There are very few things you can do at 3 a.m. after stripping for three different groups of people. You can go to the gym. You can go home and go to bed. You can find someone at an all-night diner and take them home and fuck them.
Or you can drive an hour west and sneak up on your ex-girlfriend’s window, pitching tiny pebbles at the glass in an effort to wake her up, but also to keep the other three hundred women in the dorm asleep, or fucking their boyfriends, or doing whatever you do on a Saturday night at three in the morning.
I’d driven here and sat in the back parking lot, far away from her building, and the two beers I chugged gave me a little liquid courage. Not much.
Absolutely zero, in fact.
We were supposed to meet for coffee on Tuesday and I couldn’t wait. Just couldn’t.
This time, I was going in there and telling her that it was all in the past and I wanted a future with her. Wanted to kiss her, wanted to touch her, wanted to hear her call out my name in ecstasy. Wanted to be the only name on her lips when she fell asleep and the first word she thought when the sun peeked into her bedroom and woke her up.
That all sounded so great in my head when I thought about it, but when she opened her window a crack and hissed at me with outrage, the only words I could say were, “Watch out.”
Crawling out of the window last week had been a breeze. Crawling in was another fucking story. God damned window nearly tore my sac off as I climbed over the latch.
“I think I have a scrotum left after all that,” I joked when I was standing properly. She had wet hair and a look of utter incredulity on her face. I walked to her like she had me hypnotized.
“Liam, what the hell do you think you’re—”
The feeling of a woman in your arms, slammed up against a wall, the pressure of your body against hers, is one that you can’t imagine will feel as divine as it does when it’s a person so special you just want to bury yourself in her.
Her lips were hard with surprise, then yielding and urgent as I tasted her—really explored her. She tasted like berries and peaches, like Charlotte and surrender, and I wanted nothing but the taste of her—all of her—on my tongue and lips for the rest of my life.
But tonight would have to do. It would have to be enough, because by the time we talked—after we acted—I had a feeling we might not have more than tonight.
Which was why right now, acting, touching, tasting, grabbing, stroking—senses—were more important than words.
Words could be uttered in the harsh light of day, could be parried and exchanged, volleyed and thrown like a weapon, a curse, a balm, and prayer.
But touch? There was really only one way to properly touch a woman.
And I needed so badly to show Charlotte exactly how I did it.
Her hand sank into my hair, roamed down my sweaty back, slid over my jeans-covered ass, making me clench and push into her, driving my hard self into her soft curves. My hands filled with her, the lean and the lush hills and valleys of that body that had changed so much in five years, yet felt exquisitely the same.
God, I’d missed her.
And then, with a massive shove, the cold air between us shocked me. Her eyes glittered in the security light that warped everything I saw in the dark room, and she wiped her lips with the back of her hand in a way that felt like I was being accused of something I didn’t intend.
And then:
“Is ‘The Kegger’ looking for something to tap?” Her eyes were wet steel.
Oh, fuck.
“Because sorry, bud. I’m not here for you to hammer into and make me squirt.”
Aside from the fact that that image made me hard as fuck, her words cut like a knife into my heart. “It’s…I…stupid nickname.”
“Fair warning: I have no intention of having your name tattooed on my shaved butthole.”
“You checked out my Facebook page,” I said grimly. “I never asked that fan to do that!”
“You slept around a little, I take it?”
I stared dumbly at her, cock throbbing, hands itching to touch her. I was pure energy and needed to move, to flow, to touch, to do something other than talk. If all we did was talk I’d go out of my fucking mind.
“I was a free agent.” Shit. That sounded about as stupid as it was. “So were you. You really want to air out a laundry list of all our sex partners for the past five years?” Please say no, I prayed, because not only did I not even know the names of a few of them, some were just known as Red Lipstick Circle Chick and another was named Boney.
I was not proud.
But I was not ashamed. And I hadn’t slept with anyone for two whole months, other than my hand. And my hand is a really bad conversationalist.
Her face froze, though, when I made the comment about sex partners. The thought of her on her back, crumpled sheets surrounding her, some asshole pounding into her body, made a wall of red fury fill my vision. I felt like fire was in my blood, and if she looked at me with that cocked eyebrow one more time I was going to kiss that look off her face, tongue and tease her until she was begging for more, and I was going to make her mine again.
Mine.
And no other man would get between us again. Ever.
“You want a list of all the sex partners I’ve had in the past five years?” she said in a deadly tone. The room spun a little and it was not from those beers. The entire atmosphere tilted a little, like the earth shifted a little to the left, adjusting itself because its boner had a pinch point.
“I—”
“You want a complete list of every sexual partner I’ve had since when, exactly? Please clarify your request so that I may serve you properly.” She sounded like a really officious phone sex operator. “Would you like that notarized as well? Need it in calligraphy, or perhaps with gilded edging? There’s a monastery nearby that might have a monk who can create a lovely scroll for you.”
What just happened?
“No, Charlotte, you’re being—”
She marched over to her desk and picked up a clipboard and a pen. Scrawled out sharp, hard letters, each pen stroke making me angry and confused.
“Charlotte, you started this. Calling me by my college nickname. Obviously you’ve been digging around about me,
and that’s cool. Really. I get it.” Her nostrils were flared, lips pinched shut, and I hadn’t seen her this pissed since the time I forgot to pick her up after work one time, back in high school, when the new band was practicing so much and finding its groove, and time disappeared.
Kind of like how it felt a second ago.
“I didn’t start anything, Liam. You started it. Tapping on my window like a vampire, coming in, shoving me against the wall and kissing me like you were about to fuck my brains out—”
“I was.”
That stopped her cold. She stared at the sheet of paper on the clipboard, breathing so hard I started to think she was hyperventilating. Then, with a little too much care, she slowly tore the sheet of paper off the clipboard and handed it to me like it was my own death sentence.
“There, Liam.”
At the top, in angry block letters she’d written:
THE LIST OF PEOPLE CHARLOTTE HAS FUCKED SINCE LIAM
And it was completely blank.
Charlotte
Oh, it’s on.
You come to my apartment at three in the morning smelling like beer and tasting like desperation, a whiff of two or three other women’s perfumes on the oil of your sweaty, musky, delightfully tanned skin and you kiss me so hard and so long I can feel it in my clit—and you want to talk about who I’ve fucked?
He stared at that sheet of paper like it was the Golden Ticket and he was Charlie.
“Get out,” I growled. “Get the fuck out of here, Liam.”
“I don’t understand.” He held the paper up. “It’s blank.”
“GET OUT!” I shouted, then immediately lowered my voice. If the women in my dorm ever knew what was going on in here—who was in here—I’d never hear the end of it. You lose your credibility in a dorm with three hundred women and that’s it. Game over. Job done.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Then I’m calling security.”
“Wait—no! I don’t mean it like that. If you really, really want me to leave, Charlotte, I will.” Those eyes burned into mine like they were liquid gemstones. My core clenched, the sound of my own breath like a steam engine roaring in my ears, down to my lungs, through my organs and infusing every part of me.
“I just told you to go,” I said, but even I could tell I was weakening. Because I didn’t want him to go. I wanted his heat against me again, that mouth on my earlobe, telling me he was sorry, he was stupid, he never meant to hurt me five years ago. All the sweetness and caring and protection I never got, not one drop from the day of that phone call, I needed.
Now.
Here.
Forever.
But not from a half-drunk stripper who fucked anything with a slit and who was coming on to me like I was just another piece of meat.
“I’ll go, but I have some things to do.”
“Not me, buddy. You’re not doing me tonight.”
“Then I have some things to say.”
“You have words? Great. Let ’em out.” I crossed my arms over my chest, the gesture defensive. I didn’t care. Here we went—five years of pent-up steam about to burst. The ceiling can’t hold us.
“Why is this page blank?”
“You lose fifty IQ points over the past five years, Liam? You can guess.”
“No one?” His eyes bugged out of his head. “Not a single damn guy.”
“No.”
“Not even a—”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Of all the questions I’d imagined Liam asking me over the years, this wasn’t one of them. I had thought he’d ask whether I’d gotten an abortion, or how the miscarriage felt, or whether I’d decided to keep the baby or put it up for adoption, or what the baby looked like when it came out, or—well, a lot of questions. A ton of them, in fact. I’d had five years to torture myself. I’m good at that.
A pro.
But why hadn’t I slept with anyone since Liam? How could that be the first question he asked?
“Why did you fuck everything that looked at you?” I challenged back. His eyes went flat with rage, his face slack. I couldn’t have pissed him off more if I’d tried. I remembered this look. It was the expression of a Liam gone over to darkness, to a place where he’d be raw and real and not hold back.
Don’t hold your punches. Let’s get this over with and out in the open, because five years of tucking it behind the couch and under the rug and in the closet and flushing it down the toilet hadn’t really gotten us anywhere good now, had it?
“Because when I fuck, I lose my mind. And I lost my mind the day you—well, that day, and it was better to lose my mind with someone than to be alone and do it.”
Holy shit.
Because that was exactly what I’d done. Gone batshit crazy alone, losing my mind day in and out, thinking and rethinking and analyzing and wondering and crying and then, slowly—recovering.
It never occurred to me that shutting out the world was worse than throwing myself into it.
Liam had done the opposite.
But I wasn’t buying it.
“That is bullshit,” I hissed. “Tell me the real reason why.”
He flinched, then shook his head, hard and fast. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Know me so well.”
“If I know you so well, then you should know me better. Why do you think I didn’t fuck anyone for five years?”
“Because once you have this, everything else isn’t worth it?”
And that’s when I threw the clipboard directly at his face.
Chapter Twelve
Liam
I knew she was strong, but holy shit, she snapped that clipboard at my head like a well-trained Australian aboriginal ninja. The metal part of the clipboard hit my hairline with a sickening slicing sound, and the next thing I knew I was half on her couch, half on the floor, eyes open and full of water.
I reached up. Red water.
Charlotte was in my face, crying and apologizing over and over, mopping my head with a cold washcloth. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to cut you!”
“Yes, you did,” I mumbled.
“No, I didn’t!” she cried.
“You threw it. You meant it.”
“I threw it because you pissed me off, but I didn’t mean to nearly scalp you!”
Her hands were all over me, the blood covering the front of my shirt, dotting my jeans, flowing onto her floor. I reached up to touch the cut and caught a whiff of her scent, the fresh coconut and cinnamon aroma that was uniquely her. The taste of that one kiss was still in my mouth, and as she tenderly wiped the blood from my face, the pain started to hit. Stinging and throbbing, the top of my forehead began to burn.
I reached up and felt it—a one-inch gash.
“We need to get you to an ER.”
“It’s not that bad.” One hand was on my soaked t-shirt, leaning against my shoulder as she crouched over me, eyes worried and full of self-reproach.
“I should know better. I never do that! I have more self-control now.”
“You always did throw shit at me when you were mad.”
“Those were teddy bears and pillows from my bed! And only you. I never threw stuff at anyone else.”
“I’m honored.” Is that because there’s never been anyone else? I wanted to ask, but bit my tongue.
Her face was inches from mine, her lips slightly parted, the sweet pink of her tongue poking out between her teeth. Her eyes bored into mine, rimmed with tears, her fingers streaked with my dried, rusty blood.
“It’s slowing,” she said, tearing her eyes from mine, looking at the cut. She pressed the cloth into my skin harder. “Let me get some ice to put in here.”
As she stood and walked to her sink, I watched that fine ass sashay across the room, begging for my hands on it, for my bare skin to tickle hers, for our bodies to join.
Blank page.
Blank fucking page.
She had been celibate?
For five fucking years? No wonder she was a sex toy party hostess. I’d be humping sink drains and keychain holes if I went five years without sex.
I stood, careful to get my bearings. Blood was probably thin from the beers, and I was dehydrated, too. Like she read my mind, Charlotte came back with a glass of water and an ice cube tucked in a freshly wetted cloth. She stood on tiptoes and pressed the ice bundle on my face.
“Ow,” I said, tipping my chin up to drink the water.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Quit saying that.”
“I mean it.”
I put the glass on her kitchen table and reached up for the hand holding the cloth. Gently, I peeled it out of her clenched fingers.
“What are you—” And then I reached down for the hem of my t-shirt and stripped it over my head in one quick roll, a great stripper move.
Her audible gasp confirmed it.
Fabulous stripper move.
And then—
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, kissing her lips with a feather stroke. “I’m sorry, Charlotte,” I said again, my hands reaching for her hips, pulling her so close. The brush of her shirt against my bare skin made me take a ragged breath.
“Your head—”
“Is hard. Like other parts of me.” I tightened my grasp of her waist and she got my point.
“Liam, I—”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured against her ear, my hands holding her still. She slipped her arms up and around my neck, and as I pulled back our eyes met, hers troubled and dark. I didn’t know what mine looked like but they were probably pretty damn similar.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, fingers dancing around the gash. “I didn’t mean—” Emotion clogged her throat, and we both realized we weren’t apologizing for what had just happened.
Not one bit.
Through what seemed like a hundred “I’m sorries” we kissed our way to her bedroom in a matter of minutes, tumbling over our own feet, going so slow yet still tipping to and fro, struggling to find balance. Her mouth—ah, that lush, sweet mouth—was a garden, and I was on my back, face tipped in adoration to the sun for giving me such brilliance, delightful aromas, and the indescribable lightness of being with her.
