by Hart, Alana
MADISON
It only hurts for a moment, and he is inside me. Luke is inside me, filling me, stretching me, and that feels like the best thing ever, lying on that picnic rug under the leaves and the clear blue sky with him sliding in and out of me. My hips rise to meet his as if they had a will of their own, wanting to feel all of him deep, deep inside, every thrust.
He speeds up then, answering my hips, and plunges into me harder and my body responds and meets him every time until he is going so hard and fast, everything is a blur. The clearing, the sky, the leaves. Everything. I am a mass of nothing but sensation and need and wanting. I can't control anything, my body, my breathing, and I come again just as he does and we groan out our pleasure.
Who knew it could ever be like that? I guess everyone else, just not me. This is something special we have. It's not just sex.
But what do I know? Maybe it is just sex to Luke. Maybe he's like that all the time with other women. Maybe he's been like that with that woman in the Shack—Sam—and that's why she put her hands around his neck. And stupid naïve Madison, what do I really know?
He withdraws from me and takes off the condom, tying up the end, and then lies back beside me on the rug, pulling me to his chest as he recovers. I feel his heart hammering and then calming as we lie there, our limbs entwined. He kisses my hair, my cheek. He seems lost in thought.
He looks down at me. There's a bit of blood on the inside of my thighs, drying now.
“Better clean you up a bit,” he says, smiling, and he takes his white t-shirt from where he pulled it off earlier and pours water over it from one of the bottles in the cool box. Then he uses it to gently clean the blood off my thighs, the cool water acting as a balm. He holds me again, and I feel as cared for as a newborn baby. In a family where they care about babies.
“You hungry?” he asks.
And then I realize for the first time since we got into that clearing that I am. I'm hungry for food. Not just for Luke.
“Yes.” I smile at him. “But I think I'll dress for dinner.”
He laughs. I put on my dress and panties, and he puts on his jeans.
“Oh! Your t-shirt,” I say.
“I'll wash it out in the stream later.”
“Give it here.” While he gets the food out I take it to the water and wash out the smudges of blood, wringing it out as best I can. I hang it over a branch.
Luke has brought simple food from the restaurant but it tastes like food fit for kings out in the fresh air under the trees—fresh bread, mozzarella, tomatoes sprinkled with pungent basil leaves, cold meats that we roll around crunchy sticks of bread and nibble, and fresh peaches. We drink the water, and he even has good coffee in a flask.
Mom and Dad take me to fancy restaurants sometimes but this is the best meal I’ve ever had. It's only a little to do with the food and everything to do with Luke and how I feel about him and what we just did.
“I can't remember the last time I went on a picnic,” I say.
“Me neither,” he says.
For some reason, that makes me happy. Maybe because it seems like I'm not just being treated to a standard Luke seduction technique.
CHAPTER 12
LUKE
I'm not sure why I've never wanted to bring anyone else here, but I'm glad I saved it for Madison. She likes the picnic Mom packed for me too.
I always thought rich girls were hard to please, like that bitch who decided it would be fun to slum it with a waiter last summer. I don't know why she bothered. We went for a drink at the Bay Water Hotel but she was never going to be happy with anything—the service wasn't quick enough, there wasn't enough ice in her martini, the décor wasn't to her liking. I took her home after I fucked her on the sand. I half expected her to complain about how she hadn't come fast enough or something. I didn't care. I never called her again. And I never wanted anything to do with rich girls again. Until Madison.
Our fingers are sticky with peach juice after the picnic. We wash them in the stream. The water is cool and clear and Madison wants to get right into the water. I roll up my jeans and sit on the bank watching her as she wades into the stream up to her knees, her dress tucked into her panties. She looks fucking sexy like that.
I hold out my hand and pull her to me and kiss her as she stands between my legs, my cock springing to attention in my jeans. She tastes like ripe peaches, the sun warming us while our feet are cooled by the stream.
“Take off your dress,” I say. “So you don't get it wet.”
And she looks me in the eye as if accepting a challenge and undoes the buttons and takes it off, putting it on the grass beside me, then she's standing between my legs again. I bury my face between her breasts. I could stay there forever, but her hands are working the button on my jeans again. My cock lurches beneath her fingers. I pull her out of the water. I want to take her there on the soft grass beside the stream, but she pulls open my jeans and suddenly her hot mouth is on me, her tongue swirling around, and I want to explode right there.
CHAPTER 13
MADISON
I know I am shameless. I wanted to get naked for Luke. I wanted to see his face when I took off my dress. I wanted to take him in my mouth and pleasure him. I wanted to make him moan, and now that I have, I like it. It feels so right.
He pulls me off him then. Wasn't I doing it right?
But he reassures me. “I'm going to come, and I want to be deep inside you when I do.”
He pulls another condom out of his pocket and tears the wrapper. He hands it to me as he pulls off his jeans.
“You do it,” he says.
I take it and do my best with it, rolling it onto the hard thick column of him, enjoying the power of him in my hands.
“That's it.” His face is a picture of concentration. “A day for firsts.”
“What's wrong?” I know there's something.
He laughs. “Just thinking of something to take my mind off the...er...situation here.”
“What?”
“Drinks orders. I’m trying to remember what a table of ten ordered last night.”
“Did you remember it right?”
“No idea,” he says, laughing. “But it did the trick.”
Then he looks at me with that intense way of his. “Ride me. I want you to ride me.”
And I kneel over him as he sits on the bank of the stream, his legs stretched out on the grass, and position him where I think he needs to go, and he pushes into me. I gasp. This feels different. Doing the work with my body, raising myself up and down shamelessly on his cock, my breasts on display for him, bouncing a little.
He's helping, thrusting his hips in time with mine, but he's letting me set the pace. At least, he does for a while and then we roll over and I feel the cool soft grass against my back and my bottom as he powers into me hard, and he takes control again as if he can't help himself wanting to have the upper hand.
“Come for me,” he says as I get near. “Come for me Madison.” And I do, exploding around him at his words as he releases into me, groaning.
CHAPTER 14
LUKE
This girl is so...unexpected. I didn't think she would be so uninhibited so soon. Not in a million years. It's as if she has been in some kind of cocoon just waiting to break out. And I like it. I like that a lot. I like that I'm showing her who she can be.
I know I can have fun with Madison, but should I? Is it fair on her?
Why the fuck am I asking if it's fair? Why do I care?
But I can't help it. It matters. It's starting to matter a lot.
Fuck that! I can't have some girl pinning me down, stopping me going places.
Then again, I can't help thinking that I want this summer with Madison first. One fucking glorious summer or one summer of glorious fucking. Amounts to the same thing.
***
I take her home that day and kiss her gently, like she's precious or something, before she gets out of the car, and I arrange to see her again the next day.
I can't help it. I know I have a stupid grin on my face all the way back to Silver Point. I'm like the cat that got the whole fucking dairy.
CHAPTER 15
MADISON
I wave Luke off at the door and I almost skip inside. I'm a little bit sore from what we just did, but it's a happy soreness, a reminder of how good we were together. I just want to go to my room and relive the whole day from beginning to end.
But talk about throwing cold water on everything! My mother has it down to a fine art when something's not to her liking. It doesn't matter who upset her—me, my dad or a woman at the grocery store. When she isn't happy for any reason, we all know about it, and she isn't happy now.
But it's worse than that. I look at her, ready to escape after I put up with some kind of tirade. Shit! She's drunk.
There's something really wrong. I've never seen my mother drunk. Maybe tipsy a couple of times when she's had an extra glass of wine at Christmas but never slurring her words or anything. She's got a bottle of gin or something in one hand, and she’s grasping the edge of the kitchen counter with the other. It seems like it's the only thing holding her up.
“Mom,” I say, reaching out to her. She's really scaring me. She has a wild look on her face.
But she just kind of collapses down slowly onto the kitchen floor in a flood of tears, and I take the bottle from her hand. She lets it go.
“What happened?” I ask.
This has to be something more than me not tidying my room or the woman at the store being too slow bagging the groceries. Maybe someone at the tennis club snubbed her or something. I'm hoping it's something like that. We've had those kinds of dramas before. I can handle that. But she never got drunk then either.
“Your father,” she says. “That's what happened. Your father has been fucking his secretary. He's been fucking her for months. And I never knew.”
“What?” My blood runs cold. “Dad?”
Even though I'm questioning it, I believe it. He spends so little time at home. He runs off to the office all the time. He works late. And the arguments. It's not as if he's happy at home.
“Yes, your father spends so long at work not because he likes his job, not because he wants to make life better for us all. It's so he can spend time with her, so he can fuck her, his fucking secretary.” And she starts weeping again.
I lift her up. I can hardly take in the news, but I have to deal with my mother. I always have to deal with my mother first, no matter how I feel about anything.
“You should lie down,” I say. “You'll feel better once you've had a chance to rest.”
“What do you know?” she says. “You're as useless as him.”
But she lets me lead her up the stairs. She's unsteady on her feet. I fear she'll fall and pull me down the stairs with her. I hang onto her with one hand and the handrail with the other, and get her to bed eventually. I'm sweating with the effort. I feel sick trying to take everything in. I put a blanket over her and draw the curtains against the early evening sunlight.
“He repulses me,” she says from the bed. “For years, he's made my skin crawl wanting to paw me all the time with his “needs”, but to see him with her, at our house, in our bed.”
“What do you mean? Did you go back home?”
“I followed him,” she says, through her tears. “I've had my suspicions since that charity ball in May. His secretary couldn't keep her eyes off him. Silly bitch. She can have him. Men are such losers, Madison. I went to his office. The one where he had an urgent problem to sort out. So he said. He wasn't there. They said his secretary had the day off when I asked to speak to her. He didn't even bother with a hotel. Why bother when he knew we were here the whole summer? He couldn't even last a couple of weeks without having his beastly little way with her. The rest of the summer wasn't enough. He had to go back there and have her when he was supposed to be here.”
I sit there beside the bed. I don't know what else to do, so I pass her a paper tissue. I don't know what to say. I know she only has herself to blame with her temper and her moods but I feel sorry for her right then. I feel pretty sorry for myself. I thought they might end up divorced. It's a pretty sure thing now. That's not going to be pretty. I can imagine how vengeful and vindictive my mother is going to be. A nightmare. And she'll hate how this will make her lose face with her friends.
Eventually, she stops crying.
“Do you need anything?” I ask.
“No, nothing from you. Maybe if you'd been the kind of daughter he wanted, he'd never have run off.”
“What do you mean?” She's always criticizing me, but Dad never has. He's not exactly there for me, but he's never gone on at me like she does.
“You know, someone prettier or talented. If you had anything to recommend you at all, things might have been different. You're such a disappointment to him. No wonder he never wants to come home.”
I run from her room and into mine in tears. Dad doesn't think that, does he? She's only lashing out as hard as she can because she's upset. She always takes everything that goes wrong out on me. But even as I doubt her words, I start thinking what she says is true. What's special about me? I'm sure Dad didn't run off because I'm not the kind of daughter he wants, but he never has time for me. Is that why? Because he doesn't think much of me?
And worse, it makes me see everything that I did with Luke in a new light. What does he really think about me?
Maybe he was happy to spend the day with me because he knew I would give him what he wanted. I looked like an easy target because of the way I acted like a slut at the beach. He made me feel like I was special, but that's what guys like him do, don't they? They know exactly how to seduce girls like me and I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.
I feel ashamed of all the things I did now. What was I thinking? Stupid, naïve Madison. I feel sore and dirty like I've been used and thrown away. I take a shower but the hot water is not enough to soothe away my distress. Only two thing are crystal clear. My parents are splitting up, and I'm not going anywhere near Luke Baroncini again.
CHAPTER 16
LUKE
Madison hasn't answered any of my texts. I know there's something wrong. Something has changed since I left her smiling at the front door of the beach house two days ago. Was it something I said? I don't think that's it.
I have no free time to see her. It's the weekend and we're so busy in the restaurant there's no time to get across the bay, but every break I get, I'm thinking about her or trying to call her.
There's no reply. She never picks up her phone. She never texts me back.
Monday, I beg some free time during the day from Mom, and indulgent as ever, she relents. “I suppose we can manage again with Dominic. I'll rope in one of the girls if we have to, but it's mad out there. I'll be pleased when summer is over, except you'll be gone then.”
She gives me a hug.
I won't stay away any longer than I have to, but I'm pleased the new waiter is working out because sorting out whatever is going on with Madison can't wait. As I drive over there to her house, I wonder if she's having second thoughts about me.
I didn't think she was one of those rich girls who only care about money and status, but maybe I was wrong, and she thinks I'm not good enough for her after all. I didn't get any of those vibes from her, but I need to know for sure.
I ring the doorbell. Her mother answers. She's an older, much harder version of Madison, probably pretty once, though she has steely gray eyes nothing like Madison’s blue-green, and she’s in full make-up, her hair like a helmet, like she lacquered it so much it would never dare get out of place.
“Yes?” she says.
“I was looking for Madison.”
“Really? You?”
She looks up and down at my clothes and then over at my car. “Did you arrive in that deathtrap?”
“Yes, that 'deathtrap' is mine.” I'm trying to stay cool but I'm not doing a good job of it. “Is Madison home?” I ask before I lose my
temper.
“Madison,” she shouts. “There's a 'friend' here for you.” I can hear the sarcasm in her voice at the word “friend.” Somehow she gives the word a whole new meaning.
Madison comes out. She looks guilty. For avoiding my calls? For something else? I need to know what's going on.
Her mother looks at us, no doubt curious.
And then she turns to Madison. “It figures. You never fail to disappoint me. I might have guessed the kind of friend you'd make here.”
Then Madison's face changes as if she's made a decision and she says, “Mom, this is Luke. I'm just going out. Will you be okay for a while?”
“Of course I'll be okay. Not that you'd care. You're just like your father. I've had enough of you mooning around.”
CHAPTER 17
MADISON
My mother is usually polite to visitors but apparently she decided Luke was beneath her and not worth the effort. She had a kind of sneer on her face and in her voice, a sneer not just at Luke, as she obviously didn't think much of him, but at me, too. And she said that thing about disappointing her. Whatever I do is never good enough.
I know I'll feel the force of her disapproval and contempt when I get home. I can't do a thing right since Dad went to the city. But then I never can at the best of times. Dad hasn't come back. He hasn't called. I thought he might have phoned me to explain, but he hasn't bothered.
And now I have Luke to deal with. I don't know what to say to him but I couldn't let him just stand there with my mother looking at him like that. I couldn't let him think I was anything like her. And he hasn't given up on me, despite me not answering his calls, so maybe I got him wrong. I don't know.
Then again, maybe he just wants more of the same from me and he thinks he can get it. Well he can forget that. He can look elsewhere. It surprises me how painful the idea of him going elsewhere is.
