by Katie Porter
Exactly what I’ll know, I’m not certain. But I watch the mobile play of his mouth, the way his tongue slides over his teeth and his bottom lip as he watches my tits.
“Do you want to taste me?” I cup my breast.
He covers my hand with his, so long-fingered and elegant and a lascivious smile playing over his mouth. His thumb rubs my nipple. “Lean down.”
“Say please,” I say, but we both know it’s only a laugh.
He proves it by pulling me down by the back of my neck. I shiver hard enough that I feel it with a clench of my body on his. He hitches up on one elbow and curves me toward his wicked half smile. He sucks my breast—the inside first, where my hand still lingers. He doesn’t care. He kisses my thumb and then my breast and then thumb again. As if all of me, every bit matters. As if I’m made of more than only the sum of my erotic parts.
I jolt, pulling my hand away. His gaze jumps to mine. If he was quick enough and perceptive enough, he had the chance to see the crack in my soul. The empty place. I smile. He doesn’t smile back. He keeps watching me as he takes my nipple between his lips. Wet, heat, searing. I can’t parse. It all comes flooding in at once. There’s nothing in between, just this bottomless feeling. I don’t know the specific things he’s doing to me. All I know is the way they make my pussy squeeze down on his dick.
I’m not supposed to come this time. I’m not supposed to come this way, when I’m on top and in charge.
But he’s driving up into me. He’s taking over the pace and he’s doing these things to my body that are too good to protest. I’m not thrusting down on him and I’m not touching myself and none of that matters. He’s running us both right up to the edge of the afterlife and it’s terrifying. I can see a version of life that I want desperately.
I’m caught. I could push away. He’d let me run, even now. I’m too close to ruined to let go of his cock and the strokes he’s fucking me with.
I clamp down on his shoulders. His muscles flex as he takes me. Even his neck isn’t a safe place to touch because he’s breathing hard and his throat works. He glistens with hard-earned sweat. A shine that matches my own. We’re beasts of the field, straining together.
So far gone. I’m so far gone.
I put my hand over his eyes. His too-bright, too-dark eyes. He doesn’t let me. He takes my hand in his, twines our fingers together. I lean in, let my body weight drive down into that single touch point. He still holds. He still stays strong.
And I loathe him. Even as I come.
And I love him. Even as he comes.
It’s the squeeze of my body on his. I tip over with breaths I can’t control, then the thrill that starts deep within me. The kind of electricity that’s wrought by magic, zooming down my limbs and tickling the arches of my feet, and all through it I keep fucking him. He keeps fucking me, my pussy even tighter than before. He groans and cusses. Fingertips dig into my hip. Bruise me, mark me, own me.
Save me.
Chapter Thirteen
Alec
I KNOW BEFORE I OPEN my eyes that she’s not in the bed with me. It’s in the way the blankets and sheets slide around me. There’s no weight pressing against the mattress. She was nearby when I fell asleep, but not now.
I’m not surprised.
I roll over and stretch instead of opening my eyes. The linens smell like her and me and sex. I take a deep breath and fill my lungs. The sheet that slips over my back is a much less satisfying caress than one would hope for.
But I can’t keep my eyes closed when seeing her is an option. I would have last night—at some point—had I been able. I would’ve broken whatever connection had crashed her into me and me into her.
She’s curled in a chaise, a dusky grey blanket wrapped around her like a shroud. Her shoulders are covered and her lap too. Only her legs are bare. A line of muscle turns her calves into beautiful curves. She keeps her head tucked over the large sketchpad that’s balanced on her knees.
I hold out a hand across the wide ocean of bed and floor and room between us. “Come back?”
“It’s late morning,” she says. She erases a line, then flicks away the leavings with a delicate gesture. A frown turns her mouth sullen. She has the softest bottom lip, a stretch of velvet that I want to plunder and wreck. “I don’t sleep much.”
“Funny.” I let my hand close in on itself. I fold it away. “I don’t either.”
Not normally. I fall asleep late and wake at all hours. Work is my comfort in the dark of night, when this huge house is empty. I feel like I’m trying to carve my future out of marble. It’s a process too exhausting to be alleviated by sleep.
Last night, with the taste of Harlow in my mouth and her voice in my thoughts, I slept all night.
She doesn’t look up from her notebook. Her toes wiggle into a seam between the cushions of her chaise. This isn’t Harlow. Harlow fights. She doesn’t hide.
“What are you drawing?”
She turns the oversized spiral-bound pad toward me. She’s spent her morning hours sketching a gargoyle perched on a tall building. An indistinct cityscape looms behind him.
“That’s striking.”
Almost as quickly, the work is hidden from me again. She worries over a tiny corner with minuscule etchings. “Striking is the kind of word one uses when they don’t actually have a compliment to give.”
I breathe a little deeper. There’s the Harlow I’m beginning to think of as mine. The one who fights with tooth and claw. “It’s his eyes. They’re sad, though the rest of him is battle ready.”
“Sad.” Her mouth tilts into the wry smile that says she’s about to tease me. “I bet you’d thesaurus that one away in a song. Have you ever used such a banal word as sad?”
“On my first solo album.” I shake my head, pushing up higher on the bed. “Do me a favor and swear you’ll never listen to it.”
She lowers her knees, the drawing set aside. Her eyes light up. She pulls a slim phone from under one thigh. Dramatically, she hovers a finger in the air. “Oh no. Dude, you and I are a thousand percent promise free.”
I groan and cover my eyes with a hand. “Don’t do it.”
“Nope. Click, click, download. There! Done.”
Like a specter of poor past choices, my mawkish first solo single warbles from her phone. It helps not at all that the speakers are tinny and distorting the sound.
“Bloody hell, make it stop,” I say on a laugh.
She puts her drawing pad on the ground and holds her phone in both hands. Her head cocks as she listens. A single lock of hair tangles over her cheek. She’s not looking at me. “Did you just say something about finding Jesus in yourself?”
“I blame excessive use of hallucinogens. I had to remember how to write again.” I’m groaning, but for some bizarre reason I love this as well. My chest is loose and air is easy to come by. No one’s taken the piss out of me quite so directly in a very long time, nor have I done it myself. “At least fast forward to ‘Passengers.’ That one’s not half bad.”
She swipes a button and there’s my voice again, this time with only a piano. I think the song takes her by surprise. It’s a long way from what I did with The Skies, and far from where my solo career has taken me since. I wonder sometimes if I would’ve carried on without that hit of satisfaction—the relief that came with writing that song. For the first time in years, I didn’t feel like I was in competition with my old self. I was just myself.
Her love is treason / makes whips out of ribbons / ribbons out of veins
Harlow looks at me. No smile, no frown. She’s exploring my mind while looking at my face. I hold still under the invasion despite the way my skin pulls tight over my bones. It’s been a very long time since I’ve let anyone in like this.
“Who was it?” she asks.
“Why do you ask?” Maybe it’s a counter, maybe it’s a hedge. I’m not sure. I stretch my legs. The sheet shifts lower across my waist. I should hold onto it but I don’t.
She holds
up a hand, shakes her head. Her hair flies into her eyes. “No, you know what? Don’t tell me. I’m not ready for jealousy.”
I’m hit by a surprising rush of triumph. Despite her worrisome distance, despite the cold air between us, she’s still tempted. I don’t invite her back to bed. That would be a mistake. That would be asking her to cross the wood floors on bare feet, and watching her change her mind halfway to my side.
Instead I go to her. I scoop her up and pull her against my body. We’re an inverse image of last night. I’m unclothed and she’s so wrapped in cashmere and wool that I can barely find her curves. Her phone clatters to the ground, still playing my music.
I kiss her and she kisses me back.
There’s a knock at her door.
She yanks back faster than if I’d been feeding her arsenic from my lips. She flattens her hands on my chest and shoves. I give her the distance she needs.
Her eyes are wide, her color high. She puts a finger over her lips as if we’re primary school students. I’d be more upset if her finger weren’t shaking so hard.
She uses the walk across the room to fight out from under her blanket. It drops to the floor. Underneath, she’s wearing a modest pair of shorts and sleeveless sleep shirt. With her hand on the doorknob, she looks back at me, then the door. Yes, I’ll be seen if she opens it wide, but I don’t move.
She frowns and turns away. In the end she opens it less than an inch, then angles her body to block any possible view.
“Hi, Tootsie,” says the tired, hollowed-out version of Silas Tate.
“Hi, Dad.” She sounds admirably normal.
“Today we’ll go to Cheltenham. I haven’t been back since... I’d say since I was your age. We’ll spend the afternoon.” He makes it a mandate instead of a request, as if he owns her time by default.
“Okay, Daddy.”
Of course she agrees. It’s right that she does, that she cares for her dying father. I beat back the unpalatable responses thrown up by my animal side. I slide away from that animal and scoop up last night’s trousers.
“Do you need me to check which of the nursing staff is available?” she asks.
I can’t hear Silas’s answer, but I don’t think she likes it. Her shoulders form a U-shape, pulling up toward her ears. She says something equally quiet in response.
Silas suddenly explodes. “Can’t I go without a nurse for one fucking hour?”
“It’ll take more than two hours just to get out to Cheltenham,” Harlow replies calmly.
I zip my trousers and move to the far side of the room. I’m out of sight of the door now. She doesn’t look at me, but the torsion in her shoulders and spine eases. I duck into her loo to take care of normal morning ablutions now that my dick isn’t standing to attention.
I take longer than I like to admit. I plant my hands on the pale counter and bow my head. None of this is remotely right. Do I even have a plan? Did I ever? Not one that ended up here. The florescent lights glare down at me.
By the time I open the door again, Harlow is by herself and stands by the window. Late morning sunlight slithers through half-drawn curtains. She’s put her fingers on the glass. Her spine is straight, but it's her feet that give her away. Her left toes are tucked under the arch of the right insole.
She draws shapes on the glass. “What do you want?”
Everything. Everything.
The word pounds in my skull, slams around my brain. The mantra is a dancer who forgot some long-ago choreography and has since lost its way. I fold my lips, my teeth, my tongue around the word. I want everything. I always have. It’s a prayer that I shouldn’t set free.
I’ve always been a greedy man. It’s my worst failing and my strongest virtue. My rapacious nature clawed me out of a scrotty council flat in East Sussex. It also subjugated me to afternoons with the shades closed, lost to an inflated sense of the connection between hallucinogens and creativity. More cocaine up my nose than sugar in my tea. Eventually, that same greed helped me claw out of the pit. I wanted more time. More life. I was desperate for a life that was mine to dictate once again, and I got it.
I don’t want to conquer my nature. I have learned to channel it, direct it. I’ve learned to ask myself: Is this desire worth seeking above all others?
When it comes to Harlow, I don’t know the answer.
Chapter Fourteen
Harlow
WE’RE FINALLY GETTING out of the house, but if given a choice, I wouldn’t head to Cheltenham. It’s pleasant enough, though I can’t say that the two-hour ride in a hired car is worth arriving in a town that looks very much like the rest of the London suburbs. The suburbs don’t stop or start. They blend one into the next. Roads are tight, and the roundabouts meant we never really seemed to stop. Just going and not knowing why.
Homes whip by the window. I can’t tell if they’re fifty years old or three hundred years old. Everything is casually made of brick, as if there was an immense pile lying around; they needed to be used up, like leftovers that need eaten before they go off.
The address Dad gives to the driver lands us on the corner of two nondescript residential roads. It doesn’t look like much. The houses are plaster instead of abundant brick. Maybe that means something about the economic level he’s driven me to, but I don’t know which would be which.
“Would you like to get out, sir? Ma’am?” The way the driver says ma’am makes it sound rather like he’s saying mom instead. Considering he looks about my age, it makes me uncomfortable.
“Not my trip,” I say, looking at my father. “Dad?”
He doesn’t answer. His hands are in his lap, open and palms up. His skin is mottled, which speaks to his poor circulation. He watches a teenager wrapped in a puffy coat walk past a greenery-covered iron fence.
The hired driver is looking at me, but I’m looking at Dad, so I just wave him off. He shrugs and sits back in his seat.
“Dad?” My heartbeat is skittering. “Where are we?”
His mouth lifts in a way that ought to be a smile, but it’s more about judging me. Good enough or not enough? I can never tell.
“Cheltenham,” he says.
I try to ignore the way my teeth hurt when I clench my jaw. “You grew up here, I know. But here. This intersection. What is it? Or was it?”
He waves a hand toward the top of the window. “The tower block I lived in. Eight stories tall. They named mine India House.”
I cringe at the shadow of imperialism. But I shove it away because this is what I’ve been hoping for. “Did you like it?”
“Christ, no,” he says on a squawking laugh. “It was hell.” He leans forward and taps the driver on the shoulder. “Go on, now.”
“Where to, sir?”
“Anywhere you like. Simply stay in town. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
I’m proud of myself for not howling. He brought us so close and then yanked us away so fast. What would it cost him? One story? One little bit of truth about his family and the way he grew up. It wasn’t enough that he dragged me an ocean away and kept me there. His parents—I never met them—died together in a house fire when I was ten.
Dad came back to the UK for the funeral. I stayed at home with a fucking nanny while both my grandparents were buried. I understand it. I do. It took a long time, but I eventually figured out how hard it must have been for Dad to suffer both of their deaths, and with him so far away. Taking a small child to a funeral in another country would have been asking a lot.
I’m not a small child anymore. Stupid me, to think things might be different now. That I might not be left in the dark forever.
I stare out the window and watch the buildings creep by—the slow motion of an anonymous town like this one. The cabbie takes a turn and now we’re driving along a cute street of small shops with a café down the way. I wish Dad would decide to stop. He doesn’t say anything, just groans and moans at traffic as actively as if he were the one driving.
“You fucking ass,” Dad mutters whe
n we’re cut off by a Porsche.
“In a pretty car.” I try to add pleasant words whenever I can. It’s grueling.
The air in the car is oppressive and I can’t figure out why. We’re doing exactly what Dad wants, aimlessly wandering around the city.
“Does it look different?” I finally ask.
“Different than what?”
“When you lived here.” I see a sweet little wine shop and its cutely old-fashioned sign. Maybe I’m drawn to the idea of its bottles and bottles of wine. I could use one or two, plus I'd like Dalia here to drink them with me. I miss having my own life, with my own friends.
“Looks the same,” Dad says. He’s staring out his window too. “Not that it matters much. My family was too poor to do... anything.” He flaps a thin hand. His breathing rasps in and out. His oxygen tank can only help so much.
“I thought your mom had a nice job.” He’s always talked about his mother with a certain worshipful tone. She was perfection as far as I’ve always known.
“Did. She was a planning and campaign executive for The Royal British Legion. Made enough readies. My father gambled it all.” He leans forward and points. The tips of his shoulder blades poke at his shirt like sticks. “That pub there. We’ll stop for a meal.”
“I’m not really hungry,” I say.
He doesn’t answer but cuts me a severe look. It doesn’t matter if I want to eat or not. We’ll stop, of course.
The Hound and Eagle is old. It seems that way to me, at least. Inside there are darkly paneled walls and the tall-walled booths you see in any Hollywood version of an English pub. The clientele is more varied though. Instead of old men with hands wrapped around pints of bitter, there is a healthy mix of families and couples.
We can’t take a booth, because Dad’s wheelchair won’t fit at one. A little black boy sits at the table next to ours and stares at Dad’s oxygen tank. The boy clutches a stuffed octopus, with one tentacle shoved up his nose. I think it’s cute but the woman at his side swats the octopus away from his face.