Sweet

by Tammara Webber

  My fingers forked through his hair. Soft and thick, it prickled against my palms. He stood then, lifting me, guiding my legs up and around his waist while his lips shifted to my neck, kissing and sucking gently. I grew dizzier with each lave of his warm tongue. One knee on the bed, he laid me back in the center and stood. I whimpered and he chuckled.

  “I’m comin’ back, sweetheart. No worries.” He unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans. Shoved them down his thighs and off. “You first, or me?” he asked, hands at the strings of the board shorts he’d worn underneath the jeans. Through which a humongous erection was so, so visible.

  “You,” I whispered.

  He untied the shorts, loosened them, and they dropped to the floor. And oh, I was right. Given the size of the rest of him, I shouldn’t have been surprised. How would that fit? But his hands went to my hips, fingers hooking into the slivers of fabric on the sides of the pink bottoms, pulling them away, and there was no time to weigh the consequences of the disparity between us.

  “You’re a dream come true,” he breathed, echoing my earlier thought about him, his fingertips stroking over my bare skin.

  My eyes brimmed with tears at the wonder on his face—hadn’t this boy seen a hundred naked girls by now? I was horrified he might notice, but he was riveted in his examination. His gaze followed that tantalizing, dragging caress, every inch of my skin flaring up in response. As pleasure engulfed me, the breath in my lungs caught and released, and I closed my eyes, fists white-knuckle tight on my bedding. My hips twisted and my shoulders rolled against the mattress. I couldn’t lie still.

  He moaned in response, his voice a growl of frustration. “My God, Pearl. You’re going to kill me.”

  “How?” I asked, confused. If anyone would be rent in two at the end of this, it would be me. He moved between my legs and I stiffened, thinking, Condom?

  He rose above me, turning my face with his fingertips. “You’re too smart a girl to have unprotected sex—and I know that. I’ll take care of you.”

  There were multiple promises in those words. I was naked on my bed with Boyce Wynn—but he was going slow and promising to be responsible and hadn’t even kissed me yet. All my fantasies were being flipped on their heads.

  “Kiss me?” I whispered.

  He angled closer until his chest rested lightly on mine and then dragged himself higher, brushing my breasts with an incendiary friction that zipped straight to my core and forced a gasp from me. His mouth hovered inches over mine, his breaths deep while mine were shallow, erratic. I vaguely registered the feel of him as other—his body hard and heavy though he balanced his weight away from me.

  Elbows on either side of my face, he stared into my eyes for a long moment before lowering his mouth to mine. Careful and measured, his kiss was everything I remembered. And then the first stroke of his tongue blazed through me, exploring the seam of my lips. I gasped again, drawing him in, my tongue swirling around his. Withdrawing, he teased my lips until they craved the spear of his tongue sliding between them.

  I arched against him, wanting more, and he pushed back, his eager kisses plundering my willing mouth until I could scarcely breathe.

  “God, Pearl,” he panted, “you’re gonna make me blow without being inside you—and that would be a goddamned shame.”

  “Night table drawer.”

  He didn’t have to be told twice. He was back in less than a minute, sheathed and ready, kissing me until I sank my nails into his back, and then he positioned himself and drove into me.

  I screamed. Tears streamed from the sides of my eyes and into my hair, but I bit my lip and tucked my head to his shoulder, mortified. I’d asked for this. Wanted it. I’d known it would hurt—Melody and I had discussed sex a million times—but holy hell. What she described as discomfort felt more like being stabbed with a flamethrower.

  Boyce held himself utterly still. “Shit.” He started to withdraw and I clutched his arms, nails digging into his biceps, because movement equaled a burn like a lit match. “Pearl…” His voice was pained. “Are you—?”

  Crap. So much for a stealthy loss of my V-card. “I was,” I mumbled, feeling every bit as dumb and inexperienced as I was.

  “But— That assmunch you dated junior year—” He stopped, because I’d just proved that rumor untrue. “That sexy come-to-my-bedroom look— The striptease without so much as a kiss— You have condoms in your nightstand for fuck’s sake! I thought— Jesus Christ. How was I supposed to know—” Again he began to withdraw and I cried out, equal parts pain and embarrassment. He froze. “What the hell, Pearl?”

  How could I ever explain this? Oh, you know, I’ve been in love with you since I was five and I wanted you to be my first. That’s all.

  No, no, no.

  The inferno below appeared to be subsiding, kind of. I took a deep breath and pulled my face from his shoulder, determined to be bold and fearless. The last thing this fiasco needed was for my declaration to be delivered in a squeak. “I’m going to college in three months. And I wanted this to be with you.” Matter-of-fact. Logical. Very Pearl Frank. “Is that not okay?”

  His freaked-out expression melted a bit, but his grimace lingered. “Why me?”

  I licked my lips. “Because you want me. Not just this. Not just something to fill the time. You want me. You have for a while.”

  His brow relaxed and his mouth pulled up on one side. “I’m not exactly a subtle guy.”

  In spite of everything, I laughed. “No, you aren’t.” Swallowing lightly, I whispered, “I thought maybe you wouldn’t have done it at all if you knew…”

  Leaning to brush his lips against mine, his indignation melted away. “Hate to spoil your puzzling opinion of my principles, but you thought wrong. I wish you’d have told me. I could’ve made it so much better if I’d known.” His warm breath fanned against my throat.

  “So make it better now. It doesn’t… doesn’t really hurt at all anymore.” A little white lie. Even if the pain had subsided, it was anything but pleasant. I was at a loss as to how the first man ever talked the first woman into trying this a second time. Then I looked into his dark eyes, which were crowded with an uncharacteristic mix of banked passion and self-reproach. Ah, that’s how.

  “I’m so sorry, Pearl.”

  “I’m not.” The words tumbled out, startling him, but they were right. I wasn’t sorry.

  He lowered his mouth to mine again, kissing me softly, deeply, as he withdrew below. Before I could protest, he returned—more tenderly than before. His biceps trembled beneath my hands, and I knew he was using every ounce of control to keep from hurting me.

  I trailed my fingertips over his solid shoulders and down his back as he pressed deeper still, his kisses drugging me. The discomfort began to melt away, to be replaced with a fierce, building ache. Progressing slowly to longer, deeper strokes, he countered those movements with his mouth rather than mirroring them—his tongue driving deepest when he pulled back, teasing the surface of my lips when he thrust inside.

  “Boyce?” I breathed, beginning to move along with him, though the motion was foreign and some small part of me felt ridiculous. I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right.

  He slowed and I arched against him, wanting the opposite of slow.

  “Ah, dammit.” He closed his eyes. “You. Feel. So. Fucking. Good.” His eyes flashed open and he steeled his jaw, filling me completely and going stock-still, watching me.

  My breaths came so raggedly that they’d turned into inarticulate whimpers, and I knew the orgasms I gave myself weren’t going to compare to this. Nothing in my experience assured me of this—but I knew it was true. I writhed under him, so close, wanting him to move. “Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”

  “No intention of that,” he murmured, pressing his forehead to my shoulder and pulling out, slamming back into me a second later. “Jesus Christ, girl. Goddamn.” He raised his head and swirled his tongue over the margin of my ear and I moaned, teetering on the verge and terrified to
let go. “Fuck me, Pearl,” he said. “I’ve got you. Fuck. Me.”

  Everything under my skin from my jaw to my toes clenched tight at once—muscles and veins and nerves and blood—and then released, pulsing, gushing like a dam breaking open, and I cried out for the second time, but for the most opposite reason possible.

  That time he did too.

  chapter

  Eleven

  Boyce

  I pulled my bellyaching TA onto the road, the loaded boat trailer filling the rearview mirror. Using a classic sports car to tow a fishing boat—even a small one—wasn’t ideal, and I tapped the steering wheel in unspoken apology. The municipal harbor was only a quarter mile or so through town, and lately I hadn’t gotten much chance to take her out on the water anyhow, but the recent increase in business meant that renting a slip at the marina might be less of a fantasy than it was a few months ago.

  “I guess I’ve never been in your car before,” Pearl said, clicking the seat belt over her lap. Her gaze roamed over the dash, the floorboards, and my hand on the knobbed gearshift between us. “It’s really… clean. Your place too. Very tidy.”

  I chuckled. In terms of everyday living, we knew so little about each other. She wasn’t familiar with all my habits and quirks any more than I was familiar with hers. “Expected me to be a slob, huh? Surprised?”

  She chewed the edge of her lip, trying to hide the familiar cheeky twist of her mouth. “A little.”

  I’d run around picking up before she showed up, but it could have been worse. Was worse; she hadn’t seen Dad’s room. If not for Mr. Amos having me search his shit for legal paperwork, his decades’ worth of hoarded crap would have been at the curb a week ago. “How do you know I didn’t just clean up before you came over?”

  “Why would you?”

  “To impress you, of course.” I flashed a wink at her. “Did it work?”

  “It’s just me, Boyce.” She dropped her gaze and smoothed her hand along her thigh. “You don’t have to do anything to impress me.”

  My fingers tightened on the gearshift. “Because you already think I’m awesome, or because you never will?”

  Her eyes flashed back to mine, startled. “You saved my life.” Her voice was soft but steady. She returned her gaze to her lap and then forward, and the setting sun made her dark eyes glow. “I’ve been impressed with you since I was five years old.”

  I glanced at her profile and then stared out the windshield—as if I couldn’t drive this road blindfolded. I wrestled to swallow the lump that rose in my throat, ashamed of the way I hankered after those words. The way I needed them and hadn’t even known it until she’d said them.

  When we got to the marina, she jumped out and helped remove the tie-downs and push the boat into the water, and I tried to return to the easy teasing she was used to. “At home with launching a boat, Pearl?”

  She climbed into the boat, turned it on and reversed it off the trailer.

  “Lord, girl—do you fish too? I might have to fall in love with you.” Well, hell—where the fuck had that come from? I should just bite my damned tongue off.

  She hitched the boat to the dock cleat before she looked at me. “Be careful how you throw that proposition around, Boyce Wynn. A girl might take you seriously.”

  I parked the car and trailer in the near-empty lot, grabbed the dad-in-a-box and cooler from the trunk, and jogged back over to the boat, waiting for her response to cut off my air, to give rise to the Mayday warnings my head sounded whenever I felt cornered or suffocated or obliged. But there were no orders to retreat, and the only distress signal in my head told me to make that girl fall so hard for me that she’d never wanna get back up.

  When I hopped aboard, she was sitting in the passenger seat of my Gambler, texting. I didn’t ask who and she didn’t volunteer it. When she looked up, tucking the phone into the front pocket of her shorts, she stared and I threw her a questioning look.

  “Your hair, with the sun behind it like that,” she said. “It looks like it’s on fire. Like those medieval paintings of saints and angels, with the rings of light around their heads?”

  Damn if I wasn’t on fire right now, conjuring up the last time we were on that sandbar. The first time I claimed those plump lips. “I’m neither of those things, Pearl.”

  “So you say.”

  “So everybody says.”

  She crossed her arms. “Well, everybody is wrong.”

  I couldn’t help laughing at that. Angels and saints don’t fantasize about doing a girl like Pearl over a kitchen table, or most of the other ways I’d imagined taking her. “There’s my stubborn girl—so dead set on being right. So which am I? Angel or saint?”

  She blinked and blushed dark pink, rising like dawn from chest to throat to cheeks. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Pearl blush. I hadn’t even said anything that suggestive in view of the teasing, flirting nonsense she’d tolerated for years.

  “I suppose you’d be my guardian angel, wouldn’t you?”

  Her answer slammed into me. I hadn’t expected her to choose either.

  Once we picked a spot to beach the boat, she grabbed the cooler while I pulled the box and a small shovel from the hatch. I went back for the blanket and stack of firewood I’d stored there last night. The sun was almost gone—just a sliver of it loitering on the horizon like it meant to cause trouble, lighting the sky a violent red-orange. It lit the very edges of Pearl’s dark hair as well—bits torn free of her ponytail during the trip over. On her, it was less halo and more like she’d dipped the ends of her hair in red dye.

  We both stared at the box. I’d never known a moment of softness from my father. He hadn’t earned the right to my grief, not even a slice of what I’d felt when I lost Brent. Why, then, did the knowledge that he was right there, in that box, dead but not buried, make something in my chest ache like it might crack?

  “Boyce.” Pearl’s voice was soft. Her touch was soft as she pressed the shovel into my hand. “Let’s choose a spot and get this over with. And then we’ll make a fire and have a beer. C’mon.” She picked up the box and waited until I stamped toward the marsh grass and started digging.

  • • • • • • • • • •

  “You sure that wasn’t illegal?” I asked, tossing the last log on the fire.

  “Maybe. Probably we should’ve procured some sort of permit. Good thing my silence can be bought with a couple bottles of Shiner and a perfectly dug fire pit, huh?” She grinned and I laughed, which felt really good.

  June wasn’t a month that required a fire for warmth—not by a long shot. The heat of the day and the never-ending humidity felt like sitting under a lukewarm wet towel, even if the south wind off the gulf was cool. But Pearl had always liked campfires on the beach. Sometimes, back in high school, I’d catch her staring into the flames like she’d been hypnotized. So I used the shovel to dig a pit, and now we were parked on a blanket between the open cooler and the blaze.

  She lay back and looked straight up. “God, I’ve missed this sky, all crammed full of stars. I could be here all night, tracing constellations.” Stretching a finger to connect the pinpricked dots overhead, she said, “There’s Ursa Minor—the Little Dipper.”

  I had a splintered memory of my mom, holding me on her lap, using my finger to outline skeleton patterns in the sky—Ursa Major and the sea serpent and Leo, my birth constellation.

  “Most stars fade out in big cities because of light pollution—all the headlights and streetlights and landscaping lights. So much artificial prettiness at the expense of real beauty,” she said. “Nothing makes me feel how small and insignificant I am, how fleeting life is, like the sky and the ocean. And here they are, in one place.”

  “You want to feel insignificant?”

  “I want to feel what’s true. And the truth is our lives are short and so often they seem to mean nothing. Even lives that seem important, like scientists who discover cures to horrible diseases or humanitarians… If we step back and view hum
an beings—all of us—as part of the history of the universe, do we matter?” She paused, sighing. “Do you think when we’re dead, we’re dead, or that we become something else? It seems so pointless otherwise.”

  Leaning back on my hands, I stared into the dark where the water lapped at the sand. “What does?”

  “Life.”

  I pushed my alarm aside. Pearl wasn’t suicidal, just muddled over weightier matters than most people contemplated or worried on, because they couldn’t really be solved. That, I got. It was the place we’d always met. “Those are some big questions. Pretty sure lots smarter people than me have argued over those things for a long damned time.” I smiled down at her. “No one seems to have reached an agreement, near as I can tell.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She turned on her side to face me, folding her arm under her head. “But what do you think?”

  I chuckled and glanced at the empty bottle just behind her on the sand. She was a little two-beer lightweight who got all metaphysically curious when loaded instead of drunk-dialing an ex like everyone else. No surprise there. “What difference does it make what I think? My opinion doesn’t matter in anyone’s grand scheme of things.”

  “It matters to me,” she said, dark eyes probing mine as if I had the answer to her philosophical uncertainties and she meant to dig it loose.

  I pondered her question, unsure it had an answer and even less sure I was capable of finding it. “Okay. Well. I think life is like a test on a subject we came in not knowing much about. We do the best we can, and we find out after it’s over how we did. Or maybe we don’t ever find out. But when you say my opinion matters, doesn’t that eliminate the option of life being pointless?”

  “My life, because your opinion matters to me, or your life, because yours is the opinion that matters?”