Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  “Over alcohol?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I held her hair.”

  He laughed harder. “Really! I had no idea my cousin had that side to her.”

  My lips seemed a little loose at the moment. “I think everyone has that side, secretly,” I said. I thought about being a little girl, running down the sand dunes in northern Michigan with my arms stretched out, legs moving faster and faster. “Doesn’t everyone like to lose control sometimes?”

  He looked down at me, his face serious, his eyes sparkling. “I think definitely. We all need to. Losing control reminds us that we don’t ever really have it.”

  “I don’t like that idea,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “It’s all just an illusion,” he said, then laughed. He turned me quickly, whirling us around the dance floor. When I stumbled again, he held me up, and I was breathless when we stopped.

  “I think I need to sit down,” I said. A wave of dizziness washed over me. “Maybe lie down.”

  “I’ll get you some water.” He led me to a chair and I plopped down heavily, and fanned myself. The tight underwear was killing me.

  “Karis? Here you go. Drink it up. You’ll be happier tomorrow if you hydrate tonight.”

  I gratefully took the glass of water and drained it, and I did feel better. “I think I should go. Home.”

  Augusta’s cousin studied me. “How do you plan to get there?”

  “The valet took my car,” I said. “I’ll just walk some, walk it off.” I was going to have to walk a lot. “Then I’ll get the car.”

  He was still looking at me closely. “I’ll come with you. I could use the air.”

  What happened next was the best hour of my life, better than if I could have cherrypicked the best 60 minutes from everything that had happened to me in all the time before, and squished them all together. Somehow, maybe because of being in the dark in the city, or maybe (possibly) due to the wine and Tom Collins, I was more relaxed and forthcoming than I’d ever been. We walked and talked and laughed. He told me all about his travels, all over the world. It sounded like that was his job, but I couldn’t really tell. He had just come back from heliskiing in France and meditating in India. I had been to a lot of places too, but the way he described all his adventures made the whole world seem more alive to me. I was enthralled. He took off his white tuxedo jacket and draped it around my shoulders when I shivered. That made me feel so…feminine. I realized I was breathing faster, and it wasn’t due to lack of oxygen from the terrible underwear.

  Reid asked me a lot of questions, too. I had never said so much to anybody about myself. I talked about my mom, and I told him how I would be done with school soon, just one more semester, then I would move to Michigan permanently with her. I hated moving, so this would be it for the rest of my life. I was worried that I wouldn’t graduate summa cum laude after some mistakes I’d made on an exam. I was having dreams about retaking it but somehow I didn’t have my graphing calculator, or maybe it had turned into an abacus instead. I found myself talking, with a lot of animation, about stochastic processes, until suddenly I yawned so hugely I had to stop in the middle of the sidewalk.

  Reid McGrath laughed again. “I still don’t think you’re in any shape to drive home. I’m staying at the hotel right next door to the reception. Do you want to come up to my room?”

  My heart almost stopped. This handsome, fascinating man was interested in me. Me, Karis Brown. I nodded and squeaked out a yes before I could overthink it. We walked around the corner to his hotel and took the elevator up to his floor. I was dizzy again, but this time from excitement, and nerves, and generally just freaking out. Was I going to do this? I gathered myself up. Yes. Yes, I was going to do this. I was going to let loose, give up my illusion of control. My hands were shaking as I pulled the tuxedo jacket tightly around myself.

  Reid let me into the hotel room, a suite, really. “Make yourself at home.” He tilted his head and smiled at me. “Actually, why don’t you just head to bed?”

  “To bed?” My voice was all squeaky again.

  “Sure.” He walked to me and took his jacket off my shoulders. “You won’t be needing this. I have to go back down to say goodnight to Augusta and Shane.”

  I nodded, bobbing my head quickly. “Ok. Sure.” He smiled again, and the door clicked closed behind him.

  Oh, gracious. What was I supposed to do? I glanced around the room as if it would give me a clue. I didn’t know how much time I’d have until he came back, so I ran into the bathroom, found his toothpaste, and smeared some on my finger to give my teeth a once-over. Then I unpinned my dark hair, letting it fall in a thick curtain down my back. I checked my face. I looked worried and pale, hazel eyes large and frightened like a deer. I pinched my cheeks and flashed a large, fake smile at my reflection. Better.

  I removed the dress and my bra, then gratefully rolled myself out of the awful underwear. Ah, sweet relief! I hid the undergarments inside the dress and threw it all into the corner with my purse, then put on a hotel robe, which dipped and dragged across the floor as I hurried to the bed. Yikes, the bed. I sat down on it and watched the door. No, sitting cross-legged was not sexy. I lay across the mattress, but my arm started to fall asleep after I’d held up my head for a while. “Forget this,” I muttered. I dropped the robe on the floor and crawled into the bed, nude. Naked. I was going to do it. Tonight, with this captivating, charming man who somehow wanted me, too. Me, Karis Brown, just me.

  Shaking, excited, worried, thrilled, and ready for my life to change, I waited for Reid to come back.

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  His forked tongue licked down her body, stuttering over her rock-hard nipples.

  No, forked tongue was too snake-y. I deleted.

  His silver tongue licked down her body, stuttering over her rock-hard nipples. She moaned in ecstasy then hated herself. How could she be falling so hard for the beast who held her captive?

  “Let me go!” she demanded angrily, tossing her fiery red hair. His 14 talons—no, fingers—his 14 fingers descended to her pouty breasts…

  I couldn’t say that, even if it sounded good. I never understood it, like, how were boobs pouty? Did that mean sulky? Poorly behaved?

  …to her luscious breasts, and he cruelly grasped them. “You’re mine, Princess…”

  I didn’t have a good name for the heroine yet. I looked at the pile of candy wrappers next to my couch where I was typing.

  “Princess Peanut Butter Cup.” He laughed harshly and despite her fear she felt her arousal rise even higher. She wanted him, all 20 inches of his alien…

  I heard a noise outside and quickly shut my laptop, banishing the blue light of the screen. I had the porch light on, as always, with the extra-bright bulb I had screwed in myself. I peered around the edge of the blackout curtain.

  There were two people in the parking lot and from my position on the second floor I could watch them. They were saying goodnight, laughing in the warm summer night’s air. The man leaned forward and quickly kissed the woman, then she reached and pulled him to her, and they kissed again, deeply, her hands sliding down his back and his arms locking around her. I watched them kiss and kiss, then speak softly, heads close together. She got into her car and waved out the window. As she drove away, he watched after her for a long time. I could see him smile as he turned and walked off to his building in our apartment complex (Unit B, third floor). It looked like he was almost dancing.

  I sighed. That little interaction was way better than what I had just written about stupid Princess What’s-her-name and her alien captor. I thought that maybe I would change him to a dragon. People seemed to go for my dragons lately. I was going to have to switch back to the forked tongue, then.

  His rough scales dragged against her skin, chafing…no. I was tired of dragons.

  His velvet-smooth skin rubbed along hers, exciting her, but even so she fought agains
t the bonds that encircled her wrists and ankles, spreading her, opening her to him. His merciless laughter chilled her even more than the icy, purified air of his star cruiser. “Fight all you want, Princess Gummy Bear, but you’re mine. I will breed you…”

  I coughed and bits of the candy I had been chewing spewed out of my mouth and onto to the keyboard, gross. I wasn’t getting anywhere with the writing anyway, but it was late at night, my witching hour. If I wasn’t asleep by now, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get there. So I kept pounding away at my now-sticky keyboard until I had another thousand or so words in the latest alien/captive saga. I needed to email this in to my publisher tomorrow to use as a social media tease (after I thought of a good name for the captured princess) and then I had the chapters due for the Duchess and the Dairymaid Regency books I was working on.

  That whole series was just the age-old trope of the two women switching places, and followed all the confusion, hilarity, and (of course) hot and dirty action that ensued. In every book, both of them were nearly trapped and outed as imposters by different guys. The duchess and the dairymaid would then convince the men not to tattle by revealing some heaving bosom or glimpses of creamy white thigh, which led to, well, sex. The dairymaid did it with noblemen from one end of London to the other, while the duchess was hot and heavy with the stablemaster, the butler, and a variety of footmen.

  Each story was pretty much the same as the last one. I was running out of ways for men to stumble onto the truth and then for them to all tumble into the sack (or the hay, as the case might have been). Why were those women always so stupid? Why didn’t they just say, “Well, you got me! I’m not really a dairymaid, as you might have been able to tell since I don’t know one end of a cow from another, so I’ll head back to the castle now,” or, “Duchess I ain’t, because, of course, I just said ‘ain’t.’ See ya, suckers.” Instead, both of them just kept throwing up their skirts. It was getting boring.

  But they paid. I had hit the jackpot when the duchess went into the stable and met all the sweaty men and their riding crops and when the dairymaid started getting tied up in drawing rooms with silken cravats. That had led to the contracts for the five Aliens in Heat books, the Knights of the Hardbody trilogy, the DragonMasters: Seeking Human Mates series, and the mail order tie-me-up brides who liked to get spanked all across the American frontier (those went from A to Z and but I was stuck at Q because I couldn’t think of a catchy title—Quiet Queneta Quests? It just didn’t have the same zing as Filthy Franny F-cks, for example). I was at the top of the charts in several genres. Several erotic genres.

  I heard some more noises in the parking lot and watched raccoons play in the trashcans, making a mess. That meant that I would watch the janitor pick it all up in the morning, after the newspaper man threw six papers at the three buildings in our complex, and before the first bus came by on the main road outside our driveway. I had the whole morning routine down pat. My entire day was divided up neatly into routines, my own, but mostly the ones I observed.

  I padded back across the floor to my bedroom and Mr. Joyce downstairs thumped on his ceiling with his cane. Honestly, I could have been wearing pillows on my feet and he would have thumped, the asshole. I had the urge to start jumping up and down and screaming, but it was close to four in the morning, and Mrs. Cruz upstairs from me needed her sleep. I’d watched her get in from work at midnight, closing her car door and trudging, exhausted, to our building. She would need to get up soon with her kids, and I didn’t want to disturb her as much as I wanted to bring down some plaster on the head of the jackass downstairs.

  My bedroom had a window because we were the corner units. I opened the curtains and watched the sky get lighter and lighter. If I pressed my forehead against the glass, I could almost peer around the edge of the building to see the sunrise. It meant the beginning of a new day, another day in my tiny, bare apartment, in a small town I didn’t know very well, away from all the people I had counted as friends.

  It meant another day in heaven.

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