If You Hear Me

by Jenn LeBlanc

  “When was this?”

  “About a year before Paris. Paris was his first major international campaign.”

  “Did he know about me?”

  “He knows everything about you, and he knows more about me than maybe even I do.”

  I nod. “I’m sorry I ran,” I say, because I am. Though I doubt if I had the day to repeat I would change anything. I needed space. He brings so much emotion out of me, like everything I feel is just there, sizzling beneath the surface of my skin. I have to prepare myself to see him. I have to lock those feelings down so I can manage the rest of it.

  “Yesterday or in Paris?” he says, and it takes me a second to catch up to the conversation because I’m so distracted thinking about him. But he’s right here next to me. I need to stop thinking about him and actually be here with him, right now.

  “Yesterday. Paris…was beyond my control.”

  “And the difference?”

  “My parents. I knew I’d be seeing you here but I wasn’t prepared for it to be so soon. I figured it wouldn’t be at least until the tryouts next week.”

  “Yeah, I was just as surprised. You were amazing, C-Meli,” he says with a grin that I feel all the way to my toes. I turn to my plate to keep myself from falling against him. Then we’re quiet for a while and it isn’t uncomfortable. It’s nice. It’s like getting back to the way we were so long ago. Where we’d spend days together without conversation, just the music. By the time I finish my tacos, I’m leaning heavily into his side and our breathing has synchronized.

  I clean my hands and wipe my face then drop my head to his shoulder. His arm flexes against me, and I close my eyes and simply breathe of him. Something I haven’t done for years. The light around us starts to change, I open my eyes, and the lights of WeHo wake up as the sun starts to set.

  “We should let someone else have the table,” he says, and I look to see a line of people waiting for somewhere to sit, so I stand, stretching my limbs like a cat as he tosses our stuff in the recycling and leaves the trays on the stand. His hand runs down my side, his nails against my ribs like a claw. I lean against him again.

  “Why is this all so easy?” I ask.

  “Because it was meant to be?” I laugh, and he smiles then he turns and leads me down Santa Monica, avoiding the other people who are starting to descend on the night. This neighborhood is wild. I can see why some people love it and others hate it. I love it. The street is so loud it bleeds into the residential areas, and there’s a constant hum that underlies everything.

  “Ice cream or fro-yo?” he asks as he stops me, and I think about it.

  “Fro-yo?”

  “You don’t sound so sure. There’s a new Ice Cream place back by Guisado’s. It’s pretty amazing, like, artisan ice creams.”

  “Artisan? That sounds a little too involved for me right now. I’m feeling simple,” I say and we start walking again. A couple of blocks later he pulls me into a fro-yo shop and hands me a cup. We sit on the patio to eat, and I’m finally starting to think of words.

  “What do you think is going to happen here?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…what do you want?”

  “To pick up where we left off?”

  “Not remotely possible. Those kids don’t exist anymore,” I say, and now I can’t look at him. “We were dreamers.” My heart gives a warning knock, reminding me just how wild and crazy and full of life we were when we were those dreamers. And how that led straight to disaster.

  “Not so much has changed,” he says. “I have the same dreams, and they all involve you.” He runs his cold spoon down the side of my hand, and a chill shivers through that vein straight to my heart, making me shudder.

  “A lot has changed that you don’t know about. It isn’t like I’ve just been on vacation.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I know you didn’t have a choice, but that’s about all…can you tell me what happened? Was it because of us? Did your parents find out?” he asks, and I freeze. I can’t. There’s no way I can tell him what he’s asking, and he obviously notices because he tries to calm me. “Okay. Can you tell me why you didn’t meet me in Paris?”

  That question is difficult but easier than the first. “You made me feel so much. Meeting you was a problem because for the first time in a long time you had my guard down and that was dangerous. You made me feel safe. Too safe. If my parents found out or if I let you…” I stop and close my eyes. “It just wouldn’t have ended well. It wasn’t our time.”

  “What about now? Is it our time now?” he asks, and his voice is so hopeful it falls against me like a soft blanket.

  “I think maybe it could be. There’s still a lot… Wow, Daniel, this is so much more difficult than I thought it was going to be.”

  “It is?” he asks, and I look up at him because he seemed perfectly comfortable up till now. “I’m having a really hard time keeping my hands away from you. I’m having a hard time not touching you, not dragging you into the closest bathroom and tasting every inch of you like I want to. I want to reacquaint my tongue with your flesh, Cam. I want to fill up my senses with you. I want to live and breathe you and—”

  I drop my spoon and stand up and before I realize I’m doing it, I’m walking away. But I’m not running, and he catches me.

  “Cam, please? Don’t walk away again. I’m sorry.”

  “It literally isn’t you, Daniel. It’s me. I just… You make me feel, and it scares me so much I don’t know what to do. I need to keep myself inside my skin and you start in and I begin to feel and it’s like…I feel like I’m stripped to the bone and I’m just not ready for that. I’m not prepared for what comes next.”

  “What do you mean by ‘what comes next?’ You mean sex?” he says, and I laugh because that was so very Daniel from before and I’m just brought back by it. Grounded by it.

  “No…that’s easy for us. I think. Or maybe…maybe it isn’t easy. What if everything has changed between us and we just don’t know it yet?”

  “If it hadn’t changed by Paris, why would it have changed by now?”

  “Because in Paris I wasn’t thinking straight. In Paris I was so drunk on you that nothing else mattered. At all. In Paris…it was as though all my dreams had come true. But I woke the next morning to realize that the world was exactly the same and there was too much between us and it was going to be too difficult with my parents—”

  “Do you regret Paris?” he asks, cutting me off and stopping the spiraling of my thoughts. He’s aware of how controlling my parents are. Were. It’s not easy to get over, even if they’ve been gone awhile.

  “I’ll never regret Paris. Don’t ever think that I do or I will. That was one of the best days of my adult life…maybe the best day of my adult life.”

  “So far.”

  “So far,” I concede with a smile. He’s just… so beautiful, my Daniel. “I wish…” I let the words hang there because what I wish is that I didn’t have to tell him everything that happened, but not knowing the truth would be not knowing me and that just wouldn’t…it wouldn’t work. I can’t have all of this darkness pushing between us, and yet… “I wish I were ready for this.”

  “When do you think you’ll be ready?”

  “Never. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to tell you what I have to tell you. That’s the problem.” I can see her in his eyes, and my words cloud the hope he has floating in them and that’s exactly the look I’m afraid of—but he shakes it off.

  “Then for tonight, for now, can we agree there are things we need to discuss and that we will, we will discuss them. But not tonight. Tonight, let’s just ease back into being close to each other. Can we do that?”

  “I think I can.” And maybe that’s what I need, a night out, having fun and doing nothing else. No worries hanging over my head, threatening my sanity. No parents to come in and take me away, no secrets waiting to drown me. “Just us?”

  “Yeah, you wanna dance?” he asks,
and I pause, give it a moment to settle into my bones. A night on the town, dancing, maybe a little drinking—but not too much. Music. Just us and the music.

  “Yeah, okay,” I say, and he takes me by the hand and leads me back to the crowd.

  Four

  Daniel

  I don’t know what she’s hiding but it’s bad. Maybe I’m not even equipped to help her, or maybe I’m part of the problem so maybe I can’t help. Maybe she just needs a sounding board, someone to unravel all her past with. Someone who can give her the nonpartisan support she’s probably never had from anyone in her family, and while I’d like to be everything she needs, maybe I can’t be that for her. But I’ll happily help her find someone she can trust.

  I’ll bring the idea up later. Right now I intend to get her out of her head and into her body and back into my arms. Moving against me like…like she used to. I almost trip as my mind takes over and reminds me just how amazing she is. I squeeze her hand to remind myself she isn’t some sort of mirage, then pull her into Angst. The dance floor is big, the music is good, and my friends don’t usually come here. It’s perfect.

  I pull her through the smoke-filled room with the lights pulsing so hard they tell your blood how to flow. It’s like the music is attempting to create a single organism on the floor, one that shares a heartbeat and moves in unison. And we do, we move together to the deep flow of the bass, the lights dancing around us.

  My fingers coast down her ribs to her hips, and I slide the soft, slippery fabric of her dress between my fingers, pulling her toward me gently, feeling the sweetness of her hips shift beneath the dress and into my hands. Then we’re nothing but the beat with the rest of them. My hands search her body, calming and keeping her close to me as I let the sound wash over us.

  The music shifts from song to song just as easily as she does without skipping a beat and before I know it, her slippery dress is sticking to her body, a sheen of sweat trickling between her breasts and holding the fabric to her skin. Her eyes are closed, her arms above her head as she twists and turns in my arms, and I realize this isn’t like anything we’ve ever done. I’ve never once moved against her with so much between us. We were always naked as kids, physically, metaphorically—we knew everything about each other. We never had secrets.

  That she now has secrets sends a beat through my system that I feel in my chest, and my hands clench on her hips, drawing her against my body as the dancing turns to more swaying and pulsing instead of jumping and twisting. She turns in my arms, her body curving into mine as though we weren’t in a busy club on Santa Monica, as though we weren’t ten years away from those kids who first met and fell in love. As if there were nothing between us but the salt of her sweat and the tears of my sorrow at losing so much time with her. I feel lightheaded when my blood pressure drops, then it thrums, and my blood starts to move again.

  “Did you dance like this with Xan?” she asks.

  “Not exactly like this, but we danced. We spent a lot of nights dancing.”

  “But not like this. How was it different?”

  “I don’t know, it just was. Dancing with him was…letting off steam, having fun. It was never—” I can’t say it. What if she isn’t thinking the same thing as I am right now? Her hip grazes my dick, and she smiles.

  “It was never what?” she says.

  “Erotic.” My voice tears through my dry throat and I swallow, trying to soothe it. But she smiles, and I succumb to the electricity of it all and pull her back against myself. We tangle ourselves into each other, my arm around her waist like I’ll never let go again. Her arm wraps around the back of my head, holding me to the crook of her neck, the other on my wrist like a vise. It’s the first time I realize the weight of it all. I can’t lose her again. I don’t care what it takes—this is what I want forever.

  The DJ starts mixing old music and new, stringing it all together in a mashup; the chorus of “We Are Young” anchors it, and on the second pass she falters. We used to scream this song from the roof of the conservatory. She turns to me, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright, her hair wild like her gaze searching for that same recognition. Her hands come to my cheeks and she pulls me toward her. The kiss is more than I remember. No hesitation, no sweet innocence.

  The fact that she knows what she wants comes through in this kiss like nothing I’ve ever felt. Her arms snake around my neck, and I pull her against my chest, my hands sliding down her spine to the wide flare of her hips, letting her know just how much I want her. Because I do—I want her so badly it hurts.

  I push my cock against her soft belly, hands searching all her soft curves. Her tongue pushes into my mouth, her hand sneaking down my back to the round of my ass, her sharp nails digging into my skin through the fabric, and I wish—more than I’ve wished for almost anything—that there was no fabric between us. While my brain is distracted by those five points playing a tune against my skin, she slides her other hand against my dick, pulling me close and lifting my shirt so I feel the satin of her dress, the shift of the muscles of her belly as she moves.

  “Jesus, fuck, Cam…”

  “Shhhh,” she says, and it’s like a calming breeze against the edge of my ear.

  “We’re going to get kicked out of here,” I say but I close my eyes, wrap my arms around her waist to hide what she’s doing, and tuck my face into her neck and allow her whatever she wishes. I lick the skin that covers her pulse, then pull it into my mouth like a heathen marking my territory. I don’t give a shit. She’s mine. I hear her groan, but my concentration wanes and my attention focuses on the core of my blood supply, which has most decidedly moved south. Her body keeps us moving in time to the music, her hands working me like I haven’t been worked in years until I can’t hold back. “I can’t, Cam, I’m going to—”

  “Come for me,” she whispers, and I’m ruined. Burned to ash from those sharp words. My blood pauses in my veins like it’s unsure then it rushes, sliding through my limbs and down my spine, settling in my balls, until I can’t take the pressure and I come so hard that if she wasn’t holding me I would have fallen helplessly to the floor.

  “Cam…Cam…fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  She pulls me close, her hand flat against my cock as it pulses between us. Then I want to do nothing but curl up around her and sleep in perfect contentment.

  “You’re a little heavy,” she whispers, and I try to get my legs to work, to bear more of my weight instead of turning to jelly like they want to. Because we’re standing in the middle of a dance floor, her hands all over me, and I just had one of the most powerful orgasms of my adult life. She moves slowly, her hips leading, mine following until I think I might be able to bear my full weight. She releases me slowly and it’s like nothing has happened except I can feel the proof of what we did soaking the waistband of my jeans.

  “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not done yet,” she says and holds me tighter as she moves with the music, but she isn’t so frantic now.

  Meli

  I manage to come three times in the shower before I collapse on my bed, still wet. “What the fuck was that?” I pull a pillow over my head and close my eyes as if that’s going to erase the reality of what happened in the club tonight. “Who am I?”

  God, but the way he came, the pulse of his cock so strong I could feel it through his jeans. Before I know it, I’m circling my clit again and feeling it rise against my fingers. I’ve never done anything like that in public, not ever. But when he kissed me at the bank, it started something. I bolted because it frightened me. He frightened me. And not just because I have secrets but because he makes me want things I’ve never wanted, not ever.

  “Mon Dieu, oh mon DieuohDieuohDieu.” I scream and come against my hand, then curl into a ball against my sheets. I’m not sure I can ever look at him again. I’m surprised he allowed it. I’m surprised…by a lot of things.

  I hear my phone buzz against my night stand and pull it toward me, the light bright against my eyes in the dark
.

  * * *

  D } I don’t know if you’re awake

  D } I couldn’t wait until morning to tell you how amazing you are to me

  D } I don’t really know what happened but I’ve never

  * * *

  I stare at the phone waiting for more, watching those three little dots dance on the screen, but nothing happens. I should get up and wash my hands, rinse the sweat off my face, put pajamas on. Something. I put my phone down on the nightstand and walk to the bathroom to clean up. I start brushing my teeth, and my phone buzzes again. I run to pick it up.

  * * *

  D } I’ve never been one for public…stuff, but I’ve never come so hard in my life. I’m sure that’s because it was you but

  D } …

  I stare at it again. Why is he sending these unfinished thoughts? He’s driving me insane. I toss the phone to my bed and finish brushing my teeth in the bathroom then slip a long cotton nightgown on and wrap my hair up before I slide back into bed. I feel the mattress vibrate and dig around in the sheets for my phone.

  * * *

  D } I kinda want to again

  * * *

  Oh, shit. I don’t know about that. I don’t even know how I managed this tonight. I just wanted to touch him so badly and then when I was touching him I wanted to feel him come like we used to, I wanted to feel that power again…and then I did and I just…

  I toss my phone to the nightstand and roll over, pulling the pillow across my head so I can’t hear it again. At least he got me out of my head for a minute. At least I was able to forget about everything and have some fun. I hope we can do it again, but then, I hope for a lot of things. We could have gotten in so much trouble doing that. So much trouble.

  When I wake up, there isn’t anything I want more than to roll over and wrap my arms around Daniel. But I know that isn’t going to happen. I sent him home last night after I molested him on the dance floor. That was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done—not the molesting part, the sending-home part. I wanted him to come home and fuck me sideways but I stopped quite a bit short of that. By the time we got to the sidewalk in front of the bar, I was completely spooked and I told him I needed to leave. I know he didn’t want me to. I know he wanted to get me home, but I also knew I couldn’t trust myself with him. That kind of dirty dancing only leads to one place, and I need time before I have Daniel in my bed again.