by Cee, DW
“Thank you, and I’m glad to see you here to support Bee.”
“Bee? I thought I was here to support you?” he kidded.
“You coming to dinner?” Donovan came out quicker than I thought and joined our conversation.
He gave a lazy shrug of the shoulders. “I’ll see what your aunt needs me to do around here. If we’re done at a decent hour, we’ll join you. But,” he added, “I wouldn’t expect us.”
“Any chance we’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Doubt it. I was told to get back first thing in the morning because you all are going somewhere?”
“Where?” I asked Donovan.
“Surprise.” He pulled me along after patting Nick on the back. “See you again soon.”
“Yeah. See ya.” He answered in his lazy way, again.
“We can’t leave without saying good-bye to Bee.” I complained.
“She’s busy. Let’s get this dinner over with so I can get the lingerie, tiara and high-heeled princess tonight.”
Just to get him riled up even more, I stopped and gave him a full, open-mouthed kiss before we got outside. “I can’t wait to show you the naughty princess.”
“Hell,” he said under his breath, “you are not helping my cause. You better walk in front of me at all times or everyone in that restaurant will know what I’m thinking right now.”
Purposefully swaying my hips like a cat-walker, I exaggerated my movements and got in the car. Donovan’s groan became more pronounced.
The eating was in full swing when we entered the restaurant. Our family clapped for us and had us sit to a toast.
“To my beautiful daughter and her equally handsome soon-to-be husband. We can’t wait to join our two families!”
“Cheers!” Everyone toasted.
“I guess it’s a foregone conclusion in everyone’s minds? I don’t have a say in this matter?”
“If I remember correctly, you picked me. I don’t have a say in this matter,” he whispered and placed his hand on my thigh.
“My father is sitting next to me and your father is next to you. Please don’t embarrass me,” I pleaded.
“All right, Princess.” He grinned and kissed me one last time to tide him over.
“Laney, you looked absolutely stunning tonight.”
“Thank you, Kelley. It wasn’t me so much as it was Bee’s creation. She’s so talented.”
“When we were in middle school,” Becky giggled, “she used to sew all of our Halloween costumes. We were too old for the store bought ones, but not creative enough to come up with our own costumes so we used to beg Bee to design something for us.”
“Remember that year when Donovan was the hotdog and bun and we were all the condiments?” Kelley laughed.
“What about the year when he was John Bosley and you were Charlie’s Angels?” Ma started cracking up. “Poor Rachel. She was too young to be an Angel so she was dressed as the speaker box that Charlie spoke into.”
Pa said, “My favorite year was when all the kids dressed up as the Village People.”
“Didn’t they all have their shirts off or unbuttoned?” I inquired.
Donovan chuckled. “All the girls wore a beige shirt underneath the outfit. It was quite decent.”
“Which one were you? I assume you went bare-chested?”
“That was the plan until Ma saw me and told me to put on the same shirt as all the girls. I was mortified wearing a girly shirt under my Village People costume.”
“I’m sure you were adorable, regardless.” I whispered.
“What’s on the agenda for tomorrow?” Noah asked everyone. “I have never been to Paris before so Kelley and I would like to do the usual tourist jaunts—Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Musee D’Orsay, you know...”
“I have to work tomorrow so maybe you can take Becky with you?” Al asked.
“Sorry, but we are out of here first thing tomorrow morning.” Donovan announced. “I know you wanted to spend time with your daughter, but...” He wouldn’t continue and we were all curious.
“I got the message yesterday.” My dad acquiesced. “We’ll see the both of you back in London.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“It’s a surprise, Princess. Just know, it’s something over-the-top spectacular.”
“Come on, Donovan. Let us know, too,” Becky begged.
“The Chief will tell you when we are out of here.” He pulled me up from the table. “And we are out of here right now. Are you four staying with us at Roland’s?”
“Hell yes, we are!” Dad exclaimed. “I noticed one of the rooms is completely empty and one room had both your bags. What is that all about?”
“Dad...” I groaned.
“We are out of here,” Donovan repeated and pulled me from the restaurant. “I need you alone in that apartment before the senior citizens put the kibosh on our evening plans.”
“And what’s on the agenda for tonight?”
“Words can’t do justice to what I want to do to you. I’ll show you.”
“That sounds scary.”
“Nothing scary, my princess. Just think love and pleasure.”
“Donovan.” I pulled back from his amorous quest. “You know I’m not experienced at all. I have no idea what to do...” At this very moment, I had never felt so jejune, so unsophisticated, so primeval in matters of life and love. Why, I was almost embarrassed for myself.
“Princess, you don’t need to do anything tonight, but feel and enjoy. I want to love you tonight.”
Nervous, freaking-out, considering moving into my parents’ room—these were some of the thoughts going through my head during our ride to my grandfather’s apartment. Donovan went on about something I didn’t care to listen to and I was in such a daze, the car had stopped and I still sat, looking out the window.
“Princess. We’re here.”
“Oh!”
We walked hand-in-hand and he led me straight to “our” bedroom. He began kissing me while we were still standing and I must not have participated because Donovan stopped mid-kiss and chuckled.
“I know I said I’d do all the work, tonight, but I can’t kiss myself.”
“What?”
“Come here,” he looked amused and had us lay in bed. “Talk to me. What makes you so nervous?”
“I told you. I’ve never done any of this before. How do I know if I’m doing this correctly and if I’m pleasing you at all?” GAAWWDD! I just wanted to go lock myself in a room and sit in the dark for the next few millennia. How stupid did I sound just now?
Donovan tried hard not to laugh. “All right. Let’s start with what you like and don’t like.”
“I don’t know what the hell I like and don’t like. And I have such jumbled up information on sex and whether or not I’ll like it, or whether or not I’ll have an orgasm—and if it even feels good.” OH MY GOD! I couldn’t believe I’d just spilled all that info to Donovan. I groaned, put my head on my perched-up knee, and put my hand on my head. Had we not been sitting on the comforter, I would have pulled the comforter over my entire body to hide my shame. “I can’t believe I just told you all that. I feel like a teenager having the sex talk again with my parents for the twelfth time.”
Now, Donovan tried his damnedest not to laugh at me. “I promise you, sex is good, you’ll like it, and yes, you will have an orgasm.” He kind of snorted while talking, trying to hold back his laughter. “And as for an orgasm feeling good...it feels...how can I explain the...wait a minute! What do you mean what does an orgasm feel like? You’ve never felt one?”
Now I just got pissed. “How many times do I have to tell you, I’ve never been with any other man?”
“But, but...” he sputtered. “You’ve never had one, solo?” I shook my head no. “How can that be? Is that normal for girls to not...” he left it at that.
This was a secret I thought I’d take to my grave, but in light of this sit
uation, I had to spill the beans—apologies to my brother in advance! “When Doug was in his early teens, I heard my parents tell him that if he kept touching himself, he’d go blind. And I didn’t want to go blind, so I never started.”
That’s when Donovan lost it. He howled so loudly and so violently, I thought he might choke on his own saliva. It took him a good long while to calm himself down, and once the tears were finally gone, he took out his phone and called someone. Perhaps he was calling Jake to verify this blindness theory?
“Hello, future brother-in-law!” Donovan smirked.
“Noooooo!” I yelled and tried to grab the phone.
“I heard your vision isn’t too good.”
“Stop it!” I slapped his arm and tried to grab the phone, again.
“I got an interesting tidbit about you possibly going blind when you were a teenager, but your parents saving you just in the nick of time.”
I could hear my brother yelling, “LANEY!” on the other end.
“...no, you may not speak with my bride-to-be, and you definitely may not yell at her...”
I couldn’t have been more mortified than I was right now. I tried to get up and move to the other bedroom, but Donovan quickly said his good-byes to my brother and stopped me.
“That was not cool. It was not information for you to use against me, and it was not meant to be a tool to embarrass me and my brother.”
“Princess, I wasn’t trying to embarrass you, and I wasn’t using this information against you. Your brother and I were having a good laugh over his teenage years.”
“I think you were the only one laughing.”
“Come here!” His command was quite...demanding and startling enough for me to submissively obey.
No sooner had he barked out that order, than we were in bed fully engaged. To my chagrin, Donovan undid my garter belts instantly and both hands began to roam. It wasn’t because he was going so fast. I was saddened that he could so quickly and expertly undo the snaps on the garter belt that usually took me a while to accomplish with both hands, and with my eyes open. When would this shadow disappear from our relationship? As much as I didn’t want to, I couldn’t stop picturing him and Kate together.
“What’s the matter?” He stopped and stared at me.
“Nothing,” I whispered.
He thought only briefly about it, then placed both hands on my breasts and practically revered them. “God, I’ve been dying to touch these since I saw you at Jake and Emily’s wedding in that low-cut dress.” It seemed like all he was doing was massaging and squeezing my breasts, but it felt so damn good. I didn’t realize I could get so much pleasure from two parts of my body I always found annoying when I played sports. “Then when I saw you in that Chanel outfit with the thigh high boots, I thought I might explode from desire.” He said this while distending my nipple with his thumb and forefinger. Truly, I thought I might explode right here and now from desire. “But tonight, I’m going to give you your first orgasm.”
As soon as he said this, I knew I was finally going to have sex. This would be it! I would get to experience what I’d only heard about from all my girlfriends. I didn’t understand why Donovan was going down the bed, but I was mentally preparing myself for the discomfort I’d heard about from some girls, the outright pain other girls spoke of, or the intense pleasure most girls liked to brag about. What I didn’t expect was for Donovan to put his tongue on me. That feeling of his warm tongue on my most intimate part almost made me go half-blind.
It was as all that the romance authors explained. “The leg stiffening,” “teeth clenching,” “heart beat racing,” “skin heating,” “toe-curling,” sense of ecstasy building up to what I presumed would be the eventual climax. But, as I looked down and saw the top of Donovan’s wavy head, to me it was so much more. A cynic could say it was oral sex. Men and women perform it, it’s a part of sexual congress, it’s mutually satisfying. And though with every “tip of his tongue swirling about the sensitive bud,” or “lapping delicately into the heated channel,” I thought I might die from either the absolute pleasure, or the utter embarrassment of being spread wide for the first time by the man I’d dreamed of for so long; the sheer intimacy of our closeness made me fall in love with him all over again. I could only have this done to me by, and reciprocate to, a man I loved, respected, and saw my happily ever after with. Without a doubt, I would give everything of myself to this man—that’s how much I loved him.
“Princess,” I heard soft breathing in my ear. “Princess,” he said one more time but this time with a chuckle.
Huh? I got up from bed completely in a daze. “What time is it?”
“7:00a.m.”
“Why am I sleeping?”
Donovan began to laugh. “Should I be insulted that you fell asleep before we were completely finished, or cocky that it was so good I knocked you into oblivion for the next ten hours?”
I thought about what he’d said. We went to the fashion show. Donovan showed up unexpectedly as my prince. We had dinner with our families. We came back to an empty apartment. “Shit!” I popped out of bed and Donovan laughed even harder. “What the hell happened to me?”
“You had the full French experience in Paris.” I gave him a what-the-hell look. “La petite mort or the little death.”
“Yes, I speak enough French to know what that means. But what the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s a French idiom or euphemism for orgasm.” He then searched something up on his phone. “Wikipedia says, ‘it can refer to the spiritual release that comes with orgasm or to a short period of transcendence as a result of the life force which is caused by the release of oxytocin in the brain after the occurrence of orgasm.’ Or in laymen’s terms, you had your first orgasm and you passed out—immediately!” The smart ass recited to me.
I threw a pillow at him. “Are you making fun of me?” Turning fire engine red; I was mortified!
“If the orgasm fits,” he laughed and walked in the shower.
GAAWWDD‼ How could I be so unsophisticated as to have a man goes down on me and not fully remember what happened? Obviously it was good, or else I wouldn’t have passed out, but how could I have gone from being on the brink of dying from pleasure, to comatose? I would not, could not, ever live this down. I didn’t know whether to cry from the embarrassment, or laugh from the ridiculousness of it all.
I couldn’t face Donovan right now. I hurriedly washed my makeup-ridden face, got dressed, figuring I could shower after Donovan left for work, and started walking out to...SHIT! What if my parents and his parents knew what happened? Did I make a lot of noise last night? I didn’t think I did, but...SHIT, SHIT, SHIT! What the hell was wrong with me? I was standing in the hallway wondering which was the lesser of two evils. Should I go back in the room with Donovan and live the ridicule, or sit in the breakfast room with two sets of parents and live the shame? Damn!
With Donovan, I knew there was a one hundred percent chance he would tease me. But with the parents, there was a fifty-fifty chance they had no idea what occurred last night. Going into the breakfast room was the better option.
“Good morning!” I cheerfully exclaimed.
“Good morning, Laney, Baby, Sweetheart,” were all the greetings I got in return. Covertly looking at each parent, each acted absolutely normal. No one seemed the wiser. I broke into a relieved smile and started talking to them about their day.
“What will you do today?”
Mom said, “We are going antique shopping. Emily mentioned a wonderful antique area she and Jake visited when they were here a few years ago.”
“That sounds like fun,” I agreed. “What about you, Ma?”
“We are going with the girls and Noah to tour Paris. I wish you and Donny could join us but your dad told us what you are doing today and it sounds heavenly. I wish we could join you, instead.”
“What are we doing, Ma?”
“I can’t tell,”
she sounded absolutely and artificially flabbergasted.
OK...if she wasn’t going to tell me, I’d ask the weaker link in this chain. “Pa?” I placed my head on his shoulder, and he returned my affection. “What does Donovan have planned for me?”
Pa hesitated only briefly, then said, “You, Donny, your cousins, and...”
“PA!” Donovan the party-pooper came in the breakfast room looking delicious, but intent on keeping this a secret from me. “What are you doing? This is supposed to be a surprise!”
“I can’t help it. She’s so adorable.” Pa kissed me on the head and said, “You almost got me into a shitload of trouble with my son, young lady.”
“Sorry, Pa.” I gave him a peck on the cheek as an apology.
We were having a sweet breakfast, the six of us, when the buzzer signaled that someone was at the apartment at this early hour. Dad got up and buzzed the person into the building without asking who it was, and we went back to our conversation until Dad got up again and opened the door for this very early visitor.
“Donovan,” Dad called. “You have a visitor.”
In to the breakfast room walked a stunning Kate Beauvais, all confident in her stride and attitude. To say I was shocked to see her, and to see her at my grandfather’s apartment, would be the understatement of the year.
“Kate,” was Donovan’s response.
“What the hell,” was Ma’s response.
“Jamie,” was Pa’s response.
“What is she doing here?” was Mom’s question.
Except for Donovan, everyone spoke under their breaths, but it was still loud enough for all to hear.
“Hello,” Kate still oozed confidence even though the five of us gave her a what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here, look. “Donovan,” she flat out ignored our stares and turned to him. “I’m sorry to intrude, but your phone was off. I’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”
“I guess I forgot to turn it back on after the fashion show. What’s up?”
“Monsieur Montaigne is not happy about what we wrote up in the proposal.”
“I thought he agreed to everything.”
“He did, but now he wants everything changed. You need to come into the office right now and help me resolve this issue.”