Both Sides Now

by Barbara Ferrer

  “Nick.” Her mouth was so close to mine her lips felt like the lightest caress as she said my name, raising goose bumps over my skin.

  “Say it again.”

  “Nick,” she breathed into my mouth. Again and again she repeated my name, as I lifted my hips, meeting each of her thrusts, the extent of what she’d allow me to do since she maintained her hold on my hands, held all of me, inside and out.

  The raw sounds of our bodies moving together, the feel of her fingernails digging into the backs of my hands, set something off in me, made me want to give her exactly what she wanted. Made me want exactly what she wanted. That’s when I flipped us back over and began moving, slow and deliberate, stretching both hands above her head and holding them there.

  “This, Libby?” I whispered against her ear, my tongue teasing the soft hollow behind the lobe, groaning at the shiver that passed through her entire body and vibrated against mine.

  “Yes…” Freeing her hands, she drew them down my arms, a slow, sensuous stroke before curling them around my shoulders as she arched up hard, holding me close. “Please, Nick, yes.”

  And God help me, as I wrapped my arms around her and came into her, the last thing I wanted was for her to let me go.

  It wasn’t until she squeaked, pushing at me that I realized that I’d collapsed on top of her, exhausted and panting.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry.” I rolled off, but kept her with me, the two of us winding up on our sides, facing each other.

  “Oye, would you stop saying that?”

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “Would you stop saying that, too?” Shoving her hair from her face, she blew out a long, slow breath, the warm air tickling my throat and chest and, for Christ's sake, making my dick twitch, like it thought it could go again. Right now. Goddamn crazy appendage.

  “I’m serious, Libby. That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.” Not that it was rough, not like against the wall—but it hadn’t exactly been gentle and easy either. I stroked her thighs, moving them apart so I could see the insides, breathing a sigh of relief. No more signs of blood. Made me feel only marginally better.

  “As I recall, you said you wanted it to be good.” Her mouth against mine, she took my lower lip between her teeth and nibbled before adding, “It was good.” Releasing my lip, she lowered her head to catch a drop of sweat that was trickling down my throat, the warm soft drag of her tongue making my body entertain those crazy thoughts again no matter how many signals and warnings I sent it to slow down.

  “God, woman, what you do to me.”

  “I do?” Her hands were playing on my chest, walking up my ribs, nails scratching lightly.

  “Libby.” My turn to cut through her bullshit and she knew it, judging by the small smile that crossed her face as she continued stroking my chest. “You do. And as you can tell, I’d be happy to show you again, but how about after a shower?”

  Her smile got a little bigger. “How about in the shower?”

  And after we’d slept a few hours, in the bed again, this time finally the gentle coming together I wanted to give her, holding both her hands as we kissed and our bodies, now familiar with each other, did this slow, languid dance without any conscious effort on our part. And with each thrust, I lost myself further in her, lost the sense of myself and of her as separate entities until there was only us.

  It should’ve felt perfect. I think it did feel perfect. Maybe that’s why, holding her close and watching dawn bring a cool gray light into the room, I felt like such utter shit.

  Libby

  January 8

  Something that seems like a good idea in the dark? That not only is it a good idea but the right thing to do? The only thing you could possibly do?

  The light of day has a way of peeling back that handy layer of security and exposing the truth.

  And the harsh, light-of-day truth was I was married, I loved my husband, and I’d just spent the night having sex with a married man who loved his wife.

  Libby, Libby, Libby. If you’re gonna do it, do it right.

  Okay, fine. The real truth was that I’d spent the night having good sex. Maybe that’s what was hardest to deal with. Because I couldn’t deny it had been good. Unbelievably good. And so very wrong.

  At least I knew that Nick was feeling the same way. He was holding me close, same as all those nights where all we’d done was sleep, but unlike those nights, an unfamiliar tension held his body hostage. A tension that prevented him from curving his body around mine in the way I cherished and needed—so badly—at the end of these increasingly hellish days. So now we’d lost that too.

  However, there was no point in torturing either of us, so I let him continue to feign sleep while I crept off to the bathroom. Would’ve left altogether except, well…my room. Maybe he’d take the chance and leave while I was in the shower. I’d take a really long shower. Let him have plenty of opportunity to take off and not be forced to tell me what a mistake it had been.

  Because I got it. I really did.

  But of course, having him leave—that would’ve been way too easy. Cowardly even, and neither of us were necessarily cowards. Wrapped in my robe, I finally left the bathroom and wasn’t all that surprised to find him still in the room. At least he’d had the decency to get out of bed and get dressed. He sat slumped in one of the chairs by the windows, the curtains drawn back to reveal the morning, eliminating the last vestiges of that handy, concealing dark. Now, if this was a movie or a book, that window should’ve revealed a gloomy, rainy day. Something to reflect our moods and the gravity of the situation.

  So of course, it was a picture postcard perfect day—the kind of day that had made Miami a winter playground since Henry Flagler had first brought his godforsaken railroad down here. Obscenely bright—the skyline diamond-etched and shining across the calm, deep blue expanse of Biscayne Bay. The gods were having a great time mocking me, weren’t they? Because they had to know that from this day on, every time I saw an image of the Miami skyline silhouetted against such an achingly blue sky, I’d remember this day, and, consequently, the night that preceded it.

  “We didn’t use anything.”

  I stared at him. He stared out the window. And I laughed. That, at least, made him look away from the window. Made him look pissed, too.

  “You know, you’d think that’s something we would’ve thought of after the first time—maybe the second.” I dropped onto the edge of the mattress, twisting the sash of my robe around my fingers. “Or the third. Definitely by the fourth time.”

  “But we didn’t.” His eyes narrowed, his gaze fixing itself on my face. “What if—”

  “I’m on the pill.” My voice caught, strangled almost as hard as I was strangling my hand with the damn sash.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been on the pill since I was fifteen.” I looked up and found him staring at me, his brows drawn together. Right. He knew Ethan had been my first and I’d been twenty-one. So what was a fifteen-year-old virgin doing on the pill? Aside from the fact that I had Nora as a mother. “Irregular periods, and when I get them, they’re vicious. The pills keep both under control. One less thing to have to deal with. Do you want to see them?” I sounded brittle and harsh, as if every word might shatter and break into tiny, sharp fragments over our stupid heads.

  “God, no.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to worry after all.”

  “Libby…” Now it was his voice sounding strangled. “Talk to me.”

  Took a second to realize that the laugh bouncing off the walls had come from me again. “That’s what you said last night—and look where that got us.” He sat there looking wounded and furious and every bit as helpless as I felt.

  “At the risk of sounding all telenovela and clichéd, what is there to talk about? We—” I caught my breath, nearly choking on my tongue in the process. I had very nearly said “made love.” My fingers had gone numb, so I released the sash and rubbed my hands together. “We had sex, Nick.” He fl
inched at the words, but what the hell else was I supposed to call it? “It’s been a hellaciously bad few days. I was scared and upset and pissed, and I took advantage of your concern. I just…I needed to be close to…someone.”

  That was close. I’d almost said, “You, Nick. I had to be close to you.” And that kind of guilt he didn’t need on top of everything else. Neither did I. Maybe too, I was trying to convince myself that any warm body would’ve done.

  “Wait just a goddamn minute.” His fists were clenched on his thighs, the skin around his eyes drawn and tight. “If we’re going to be honest and call it what it is, then we’re going to be honest enough to both take responsibility. Maybe—” He stopped short and I watched the muscles in his neck tighten and shift as he swallowed. “Maybe you initiated it, but I won’t lie and say that I didn’t want it. Want…you. Because we both know that would be a lie.”

  “Does it really matter? What we did, Nick…We swore nothing like this would ever happen—”

  “No, Libby—I swore,” he broke in. “I promised you, and I promised myself and—”

  “And I’m the one who pushed.” I was shaking my head back and forth, twisting my hands in the sheets. “And…and maybe if it had been just the one time, I could’ve found some way to excuse it or at the very least, forgive myself—but after that first time, it was a conscious choice. We spent the whole night making love.”

  Oh God.

  “So…not just sex?” His voice was very quiet as our gazes met. I wanted nothing more than to take it back, to look away, to crawl under a rock, but Nick and I—we weren’t like that with each other.

  “I don’t know. Does it really matter?” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “What we call it?”

  “I think it does.” His gaze was steady on mine, holding on, refusing to allow me to back away or hide. “You can’t deny there were feelings involved, Libby. Stuff that takes it beyond just fucking.”

  A long slow breath hovered between us, pregnant with so many more things that could have been said. That maybe needed to be said. But in the end, I was only able to say one thing.

  “No, I can’t.”

  I could admit that. Especially if he could. Took guts to even be having this conversation, considering I’d given him the perfect opportunity to bail and never have to deal with it.

  Turning to look back through the windows, he quietly added, “And if I’m brutally honest with myself, I’d also have to admit that while I hate that I hurt you and thought I could stop after the one time, the God’s honest truth is, I didn’t want to. I wanted you, Libby. Last night, I wanted everything we did.”

  I sat frozen, staring at his bent head, wanting so badly to go to him and hold him and tell him it would be okay—knowing I couldn’t. How the hell was any of this ever going to be okay? What had I done?

  “You’re my friend, Nick,” I said slowly. “Probably the best one I’ve had outside of Ethan in a long while. But this…” I went back to wrapping the sash just as tight as I could around my hand, a convenient excuse for the pain and the tears clogging my throat. “It can’t ever happen again.”

  His head snapped up. “Of course not, Libby. That’s not at all what I was trying to suggest. Of course it can’t ever happen again.” He stood and walked to the door, each motion stiff and careful. “In one night, I betrayed my wife and a friend’s trust. And there’s not a fucking thing I can do to make it right. For either of you. And to complete the hat trick…” His shoulders dropped as he sighed, his eyes dark and for the first time since I’d met him, unreadable. But he also didn’t look away—didn’t back down. “Do you remember what you said last night? After the first time?”

  Oh yeah I remembered. The same way I remembered the rough feel of the carpet beneath my skin and the throbbing ache between my legs and the slow trickle of wetness down my thighs. I remembered feeling how, for the first time in two years, even if it was only for those few minutes, I hadn’t been consumed with misery and worry and sorrow over Ethan.

  I remembered the sense of sheer relief. Of…freedom.

  I’m not sorry.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m…I’m not sure I am either.” His voice dropped further as he turned the knob. “I just don’t fucking know.”

  I sat there for the longest time after the door clicked shut behind him. Another honorable man. I knew people who thought they were myths.

  I knew different.

  • • •

  I eased in through the partially open door, not wanting to disturb Ethan if he was asleep. Instead, I found him sitting up and watching the door, his expression anxious.

  “You’re here. Thank God.”

  My backpack landed at my feet with a dull thud. “What?”

  “You’ve never been this late before. I don’t know, I thought maybe I pushed you over the edge yesterday…especially after the past few days.”

  “Shh…” I eased down on the edge of the bed and put the fingers of one hand against his lips, the other stroking his cheek. “I’m sorry I’m late. And that I didn’t call.”

  He untwisted his hands from the sheets and grabbed my wrists. “Libby, I had to do it—”

  “I know, Ethan.” I drew his head to my shoulder, stroked the satin smoothness of his skull, the curve of his back through his T-shirt, my heart twisting at the almost painful protrusions of each vertebra. Felt it twist again as another back flashed into my mind. Broad, the spine bracketed by smooth muscle, slippery with sweat, the skin giving beneath my fingernails. The memory of which had me holding Ethan that much closer, stroking his head and back as I repeated, “I know, querido, I know… It’s okay. I love you. I’ll always love you.”

  “Thank God,” he sighed, his breath warm against my neck. And I was grateful to the point of tears that I could still hold him and tell him I loved him—that he could hold me back with whatever he had left.

  We remained like that for however long it was until his nurse came in to administer his second day’s cocktail. While she got him set up, I ran down to Starbucks, picking up Frappuccinos and “something decadent for us to share, gorgeous.” I fed him bites of Neapolitan, holding globs of rich pastry cream on my finger for him to suck off, then afterward I carefully settled beside him on the bed so we could browse the net on the laptop. We laughed at all the funny political cartoons and rolled our eyes at the truly wretched headlines and even worse writing on the various news sites until I felt movement beneath the covers. His foot—just the merest twitch, but it was enough.

  “Do you need me to go?”

  His expression was at first shocked—I had never once ever volunteered before—before he sighed, resting his hand against my cheek. “I wish you didn’t have to.”

  Maybe I was volunteering, but I wouldn’t lie to him. We’d been together too long and besides, he’d figure it out for the bull it was inside of two seconds. “Let’s be honest, Ethan. I don’t have to—and I certainly don’t want to. But it’s what you need.”

  “Yeah.” His expression morphed further into something so ineffably sad and heartbreaking that all I wanted was to take him in my arms again. But how could I when even resting my hand on his had his skin rippling and twitching beneath mine? He was almost there…to that full-bore agitation where physical proximity—of any sort—was just too much for him to handle. I wondered how long he’d been trying to hold it off.

  He surprised me though. When I leaned in to give him a careful kiss goodbye, he pulled me close against him, holding my head to his shoulder as I’d done for him earlier. He didn’t say anything, just pressed a gentle kiss to the top of my head as he stroked the length of my back for several long seconds. And as always, I reached out and held tight to this rare, all-too-brief moment where he was just Ethan and I was just Libby and none of this had happened to us yet.

  As I drew back, his hand trailed along my cheek. “Such a gorgeous image I’ll go to sleep with tonight.”

  I risked trapping his hand, turning my head to press a quic
k kiss to his palm. “I’ll be here first thing in the morning so we can go home. But call me if you want me to come back before then?” Even though we both knew he wouldn’t, he still nodded, allowing me that little bit of fantasy.

  For once, I was able to close the door behind myself without that horrible, gut-wrenching sensation that I was abandoning him. Was able to give him space that he needed, and was able do it without giving in to all that helpless rage and despair that left me exhausted. More miraculous was that I was able to do it without feeling the overwhelming guilt I had in the past for needing space as much as he did.

  Oddly, I felt no need to sift through the feelings and examine any of them too closely. No desire to try to dissect them and figure out why it was finally possible for me to do this.

  Honestly? I was too scared to go probing beneath the surface.

  Nick

  January 28

  I tried like hell to make sense of everything. Then I’d decide there was no way to make sense of it—best to try to set it aside and move on. Then I’d start over. Because something in me was demanding I make sense of what had happened.

  The first time? Easy. Emotional overload. The two of us had been walking the edge, Libby so much longer than me. Clearly something had happened that I still had no clue about, other than it had been a really shitty few days by her own admission—and me, being my usual bullheaded can’t-take-no-for-an-answer asshole self, had pushed until she snapped. Except instead of turning away from me, she’d turned to me. Combine that with the sort of physical deprivation we’d both been living with and the sexual attraction we’d both acknowledged…

  It was like a spark going off too close to an open gas line or some other crappy metaphor.