by Cara Bastone
“I was so wrong,” she gasped, pushing him backward and planting her hands on his chest, riding him hard enough to slam the bed against the wall.
“What?” he asked, his eyes squinting through his own pleasure, trying to make sense of her words on the other side of it.
“I thought you were shallow and superficial, Ty.”
He banded an arm around her waist and tumbled her to her back, disconnecting long enough to have her huffing in frustration, only to sink back into her so fast she tightened and groaned and kept chasing that quickening.
“Dowehavetotalkabouthisrightnow?” he choked out, burying his face in her hair, inhaling sharply, trailing his teeth down the side of her neck, pinning her hands onto the mattress.
“Yes!” she moaned, both in answer to his question and because the hip-twist thing he was doing was just so good. “Because you’re not shallow. You’re so personal, Ty. Even the way you have sex. No one does it like this. Just you. Oh!”
“Say that last part again.” He stopped thrusting, his mouth open, her hands pinned, his body buried deeply inside of hers. He held, held, held, panting, his pupils expanding and contracting, trying to capture the light, the moment, the very image of her.
“Which part?”
He released her hands and went down to his elbows, his forehead against hers. He caged her in gorgeously, keeping the rest of the world out. There was nothing but them. “The part where you said it was only me. Is it only me for you, Fin? Just me?”
He was asking her for words, but she couldn’t oblige him just then. There were no words for this feeling. She locked her ankles around his back, her wrists over his shoulders. She was hugging him so tightly she was doubling back and hugging herself. And wasn’t that just the way it was supposed to be? Wasn’t loving someone like this supposed to involve loving yourself? Wasn’t that what Via had been trying to explain all those weeks ago? You couldn’t logjam one part of your heart and expect the other rivers to flow freely.
“All or nothing,” she eventually gasped, not even capable of caring if he understood what she meant. Just you. But it wasn’t just him. It was only him. “All. Everything.”
A deep, almost helpless sound was coming out of him as he worked himself against her, his forehead dropping to her collarbone as his back curved hard into a C over and over again. She felt the rough scrape of his leg hair, the desperate tug and slide of his hand up and down the curve of her body. She whipped her head to one side and watched him ball up her pretty purple sheets in one white-knuckled hand. His movements went tight and jerky and then he was saying her name again. Her full name. His arms were all the way around her, all his weight on her chest as he spent himself inside of her.
His weight seemed to increase as he fell into what she could sense was a rather meditative state. Fin was, herself, familiar with the postorgasm haze and didn’t begrudge him one second of it. She couldn’t, however, breathe.
She gave him a light back scratch, slow and sweet, meant simply to remind him that he was a part of the world. But it was almost as if she’d static-shocked him. His body went rigid, his weight was gone and then she was being dragged under the covers, the blankets sloppily blocking out the light as he sealed them both into her bed. She blinked into the sudden stuffy darkness and then gasped when her knees were pulled apart and a warm mouth licked between her legs.
“Tyler.”
“Shh,” he said, letting his voice rumble into her. “Just pretend I’m not even here.”
She laughed. How could she pretend he wasn’t there? He had his tongue between her—
“Oh, lord.” Fin arched up and a slice of light almost blinded her where the covers pulled free and the morning invaded. She clawed them back down.
This was too much. Too good. But also too much pressure. It was too transactional; there was too much pressure for her to come.
“Ouch!” she yelped when he bit her sharply on her thigh.
“Quit thinking up there! If you come, you come. If you don’t, the world is not going to end. Just lay back and let me start my morning off right, all right?”
Not exactly loving being told off, Fin crossed her arms over her chest. But any rigidity she’d been attempting to hold on to simply melted away as he started to pet her with his tongue. Each of his strokes somehow both deep and soft.
“Personal,” she whispered, mostly to herself. The air under the covers was stiflingly hot, and it felt good. They were sweaty and slipping against one another as she started to rock against him. He held her down with one forearm over her hips, but his other hand explored and slid and pressed deeply inside of her.
She wanted so badly to let go...but just couldn’t. Everything he was doing felt so unbelievably good, but he’d already come and she was taking so long and he must be getting bored and—
“Fin,” he said, his lips against her thigh again. “Read my energy. Read me. Be honest with yourself. How am I feeling right now?”
As his tongue came back to draw circles around her clit, Fin let herself reach out and find his energy. It didn’t take much. The man was loud. Which made Fin realize just how hard she’d been working to block him out before.
How hard she’d blocked out everyone she’d ever slept with.
She sucked air in through her lungs, let her eyes close in the stuffy blackness of the blankets and let herself feel him. His energy hit her like a wall of light and sound. She was flung sidelong into his golden sphere of life and feeling and...contentment. There were other emotions there as well, of course. Every human was a complicated tapestry of thousands of feelings, each of them struggling to top-dog the next. But there, loudest of all, in Tyler, at that moment, with his head between her legs, was contentment. Followed closely by a lingering arousal that hadn’t leached from him after his orgasm.
He gave her a potent, twisting kiss, and Fin could not, for the life of her, scent even a trace of impatience in the man. He was fully in his body, in the experience of her. Her back arched when he kissed at her again.
“That’s it,” he muttered.
Light slanted in again from the side, momentarily blinding her as she arched for him, cried out, twisted at his hair. She let his golden glow take her away as her heels dug into his back, just trying to hold on to the bounds of the earth.
When the orgasm swept over her, she’d never known another one like it. This was jet stream and ozone on the air, clear blue sky, plummeting upward at the speed of light. She lost her grip on the sheets, arrows of cracked light burning her eyes as her body slashed its way through pleasure.
She fell back, her top half limp even as her legs still trembled. She’d probably have the imprints of his ears on her thighs, she’d been gripping him so hard. She must have been gasping for breath, there was blanket in her mouth, her own hand over her forehead, her hair everywhere. She felt Tyler fighting with the blankets and then light surrounded them on all sides, no longer orangey and glowing, but a glaring full-morning slice that told her just how much time had passed since they’d gone under the covers. She waited for the requisite guilt to swamp her that it had taken that long for her to come. But it didn’t come. Maybe it was the lovely buzz that still reverberated through her limbs, maybe it was Tyler, grinning at her from her shoulder, the blankets in a hood over his hair, his big feet waving happily from the foot of the bed.
Either way, the guilt didn’t come. But laughter did. Fin threw her head back and laughed her heart out.
She grabbed Tyler’s neck and hugged him, realizing that so many other times his energy had mixed with hers, she’d attempted to grab it by the scruff of the neck and leave it on the curb. But why? Why, when it felt this good to let it course through, in her blood like a stiff drink drunk too fast? She hummed with it, reveled in it and knew, in her heart, he was experiencing the exact same thing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
FIN WENT TO pick
up some groceries while Tyler went to pick up Kylie from her school. It was already almost 6:00 when the charter buses rolled down the street, finally back from their field trip. As he watched Kylie jump off the bus, chatting back over her shoulder to Anthony, he was glad that he got these few minutes alone with her. It had been strange to say goodbye to Fin, even just for an hour or two, after the intense togetherness they’d experienced for the last few days.
But now, watching Kylie’s red hair bob among her classmates as she searched the block for Tyler, he was grateful to be picking her up alone.
Because this wasn’t anything nearly as simple as a hierarchy. There was no comparing Kylie or Fin and their roles in his life. He hoped that Kylie would never ask him to. He knew that he would have to balance time between them. Time for Kylie. Time for Fin. Time for all three of them. Time for just the two of them.
He waved at Kylie—a small one so as not to embarrass her—and as he watched her make her way toward him, he realized that for the first time since he’d become her guardian, he wasn’t utterly terrified of messing up. He was certain that someday she’d be able to write an entire memoir on all the mistakes he’d made and was going to make, a whole library even. But he wasn’t scared of them. They were inevitable. Natural.
He thought of his journey with Fin, filled with mistakes on either side. But that was how they’d gotten here, to today, where she was headed to pick up groceries for the three of them. Where he was allowed to whisper in her ear before they fell asleep. Where they felt a true connection together. The mistakes were part of that connection.
“What’s that look on your face?” Kylie asked as she approached him. He reached for the extra overnight bag she had over her shoulder and she handed it off without a second thought.
“What look?”
“I dunno. You tell me,” she said as she eyed him skeptically. “You look kind of...dopey.”
Well, he’d been thinking of Fin so it wouldn’t surprise him in the least if he looked like the biggest dope in New York City. Part of his heart hadn’t stopped whirring like helicopter blades in seventy-two hours. If he didn’t concentrate on Kylie, he might lift off from the ground by his spinning tail, hearts in his pupils like a Looney Tunes character.
“Don’t I always look dopey?” he quipped. “How was the trip?”
Her curiosity over the look on his face immediately tempered as she shrugged. “I dunno. Good.”
They walked twenty more feet before Tyler realized that was really all she planned on saying about it. “Come on, you’ve gotta be kidding me. I’ve been waiting for two days to hear about this thing.” He bumped her with his shoulder. “Gimme the deets.”
She smiled, frowned and then glanced around them quickly. “There are no deets. And don’t say deets!”
He laughed. “At least tell me if you took Fin’s advice.” He also took a glance around to make sure that none of her classmates were in hearing distance as they jogged down the stairs toward the train. “Did you make at least one friend?”
She glared at him like she was attempting to turn him into a sewer rat with simply the power of her ire, her teeth gritting together. “Yes.”
“Great!” He modulated his glee immediately, knowing it wasn’t welcome ’round these parts. At least not when it came to rooting for her to make friends. Nothing was more annoying than that, he was certain, but still, he had a tough time wiping the silly smile off his face. He searched for a topic change. “Fin’s gonna come over for dinner. She’s picking up groceries right now.” He glanced at his phone. “She should be getting there about the same time as we are.”
“Mmm,” Kylie said listlessly, looking at her own phone. She obviously wasn’t listening to a thing he’d just said.
“Hello?” he said loudly, turning a few heads on the train and intending to embarrass her a little bit. “Anyone out there? Dear diary? Can you hear me?”
“Shh!” She shushed him with an elbow to his ribs. “I was listening before. Fin’s coming over for dinner. Let me just answer this text and then I’ll put my phone away.”
Oh. She was answering a text. He surreptitiously attempted to glance at her phone. Not spying exactly. He just wanted to know if she was texting with this Anthony kid. And if she was, he wanted to know if any pictures of any kind were being sent. He’d read the headlines. He knew what kinds of things kids were using the internet for. And the last thing he wanted was a googlable picture of Kylie—
Thank the good Lord. He sagged backward. She was in a group text with two people. One of whom was named Luna and the other was Aceda. Those were girl’s names. And she was in a group chat. Most likely nothing seedy would happen in a group chat. Right?
She slipped her phone in her pocket and narrowed her eyes at him. “Seriously, what’s wrong with you?”
“Other than the fact that I definitely didn’t put enough deodorant on this morning, I’m fine.” He was a sweaty wreck, but he’d make it to the other side of this subway ride.
They were quiet until they were walking the few blocks back to the house, aboveground, the streetlights already buzzed on, most of the town houses and storefronts they passed looking buttoned up for the night even though it was only 6:30. This was how it was in February. Come May, there’d be people on every other street corner chatting and playing music until ten p.m. at least. Every winter Brooklyn was a well-mannered seventy-five-year-old. Every summer, she was a teenager again, bucking curfew and wagging her tongue at the adults.
Speaking of teenagers, Tyler glanced down at the one who was walking next to him. “You’re not...like...sexting, are you?”
Kylie stopped altogether, turned on her heel and started speed walking in the other direction.
“Hey!” Tyler jogged after her. “Where are you going?”
“I’m taking a different route home. We are not having this conversation.”
He took her by the shoulder and turned her back around. “Come on. You know I have to ask, right?”
“I already know about the birds and the bees.”
“Yeah, but these days the birds have high-speed internet access, and the bees like to convince you they’ll only think you’re cool if you send naked pics.”
“Oh, Jesus. Kill me, Lord. Just end this mortal misery.” She raised her face and palms to the sky, looking so sincere Tyler had to laugh.
“Stop that.” He slapped her palms back down to her sides. “Bad karma.”
“Karma? Jeez. Fin is really getting to you.”
Tyler’s mouth clapped shut. She had no idea.
“You’re blushing,” Kylie was kind enough to point out with her pointer finger an inch from his cheek. “Tyler, this leads me to one question and one question only. Have you been sexting?”
“No,” he snapped. “I have not.” Which was an oversight that he was quickly going to be rectifying. “And don’t change the subject.”
She sighed. “What do you want me to tell you? I watch Netflix, go on BuzzFeed, read manga and now I have like three friends who text me. I don’t even have a Snapchat, Ty. You lucked into the one teenager on earth who uses her phone like a grandma.”
“Grandma Nora used a rotary phone until the day she died, so she actually had you beat there.”
“Oh. Right.” Kylie looked momentarily perplexed. “I forgot how old you are. You actually knew her.”
Tyler cleared his throat as they waved at the doorman and got on the elevator, thankfully without an audience. “Well. Yeah. I’m glad to hear that you’re not using the internet for...sex stuff.”
Part of him wished the elevator cords would snap and just end this horror.
They stepped off onto his floor. “Ky...”
She stopped, her eyes on his feet, not on his face.
He cleared his throat again. “I hope you’ll talk to me if you ever have questions about this stuff. I mean, I’ll
wear a ski mask, you’ll wear a ski mask, we’ll never have to look at each other’s faces, I swear.”
Thankfully, she laughed. “Tyler, I promise I’ll talk to someone, okay? Just...maybe not my older brother.”
The elevator dinged behind them as Tyler unlocked the door.
“Whoa,” Fin said, her arms full of groceries. “Hell of a vibe in this hallway.”
“It’s his fault,” Kylie said, pointing her thumb at Tyler. “Hi, Fin.”
Kylie ducked into the apartment and Tyler raced back toward Fin, taking the groceries and making sure the coast was clear before he kissed her cheek.
For some reason he didn’t understand, that made her blush. “What?”
“Nothing,” she whispered. “I just think it’s sweet that you go for the cheek kiss even after we...” She glanced toward the open living room door. “Never mind.”
He laughed and hauled everything inside. As he made dinner, he kept an ear perked toward Kylie’s room, where she and Fin were chatting easily about her trip. Kylie regaled Fin with the horrors of the sexting conversation she’d just had with Tyler. But Tyler didn’t mind. Mistakes are part of it, he reminded himself, holding Fin in his heart like a talisman.
Forty-five minutes later, the three of them sat down to broccoli chicken casserole, beers for Fin and Tyler, bread on the table. He let them continue their conversation without adding much. It was nice to hear Kylie chatter away, something she did more freely with Fin than she did with Ty. The disparity didn’t bother him. He hoped that this wasn’t any more a hierarchy for her than it was for him. It wasn’t about comparisons. It was about having a balanced diet of people in her life. And he and Fin balanced one another.
The conversation lulled, dinner was pretty much over and Fin’s socked foot nudged at Tyler under the table.
“Uh, Ky.” Tyler pushed his plate aside. He’d always hated the stomach-dropping introductions to hard topics. The I have something to tell yous. There’s something we should talk abouts. The we have to talks. So, he simply didn’t use one. He jumped right in. “Fin and I are together now. Romantically.”