“God, Ave.” My fingers lace into the hair neatly gathered up, dislodging pins so it spills around her shoulders.
She shoves my pants down, following their path to my feet, settling onto her knees. Her velvety brown eyes peer up at me, hot and hungry, as she tugs my underwear over my legs, her hands tracing the muscles of my thighs and calves.
“Oh, my God.” She stares at my dick, elongated and thick, bobbing at the entrance of her lips. “I’m not sure I can take it all.”
“Won’t know till you try.” I line up with her mouth. “Open.”
Obediently, her full lips part, and I push in, groaning every inch of the way.
“Mmmmmm.” She clumps her eyebrows together, and for a moment I think it’s too much; that it’s discomfort tightening her expression. Then she lowers her jaw, taking me deeper into the tight channel of her throat.
“Mmmmmm,” she spreads her hands over my ass, gripping as much of me as she can. She presses in closer, rubbing her breasts over my legs in sync with her mouth, sharpening her nipples against me, using me. It’s turning me on even more.
“Shit, you give good head,” I mumble, barely able to form coherent words. I bite my bottom lip until it throbs, a counter to the bliss happening below my waist.
She adds her hand to the equation, cupping my balls, pulling her mouth from the root all the way to the tip and insinuating her tongue into the tiny opening.
“Sweet mother of . . .” I grip her jaw, holding her at just the perfect angle, and fuck her mouth relentlessly, my hips a merciless cadence while tears streak over her face. I don’t know if the tears are sadness, or if she’s choking on my dick, but she won’t let me go. Her fingers lock so tight on my ass, her nails dig into the muscles.
I will burst soon, and it will be inside of her. I carefully pull back and skim my palms over the fragile framework of her collarbone and shoulders, spreading my hands open, just whispering the palms over her nipples again and again. Her mouth drops open, lashes fall to kiss her cheeks and she leans back onto her heels, pressing her arms behind her, the muscles in her legs strained, palms to the floor so she’s offering herself to me. I keep working in tight circles over her breasts, and her hips jerk in time with my pace.
I lift her gently onto the bed behind us and spread her out, taking myself in my hand and pumping, making her wait. Making her watch. She moves her legs restlessly, looking for relief.
“Come on, Deck.” She licks her lips, eyes fixed on my dick.
I straddle her hips with my knees, letting my cock rub between her legs in tantalizing swipes.
“Give it to me.” She reaches for it, trying to line us up.
“You’ll get it when I’m ready, Ave.” My voice is hoarse and scratchy, and I want to be buried inside her, but draw it out for us both.
I take one nipple between my lips, varying the suction from gentle and barely there, to rough and aggressive. All the while pinching the other and rolling the nipple between my fingers. I transfer my mouth to the other breast and slide my hand, palm flat against her belly, between her legs.
She jerks when I peel back the lips and rub my fingertip over her clit in a swift rhythm. It plumps and tightens.
“Damn, you’re wet,” I groan, seduced by the sloppy sounds her pussy makes when I finger fuck her.
“I need it to be now, Deck,” she pants, stretching her legs wide and tugging at my hips. Positioning me.
“Okay. Just one more taste.” I want her juices on my tongue when I enter her for the first time.
“No,” she growls, her eyes narrow and her face tight with passion. “Now.”
I can’t help but chuckle because she looks so fierce; so much like the girl who put me in my place at my locker. So much like the driven, ambitious, commanding woman I’ve come to admire from a distance over the last few years, even more up close the last few weeks.
“Now, you said?” With no more warning, I thrust inside, and we share a gasp at the perfect fit. I know I’m big and she’s tight as hell, but it feels perfect to me.
“You all right?” I crush the urge to slam into her, waiting for her to indicate it’s okay to move. “Are you—”
“If you don’t come on and fuck me, Mack Decker,” she rasps, eyes half-mast and hands clenched around my ass.
My dick twitches inside of her at the coarse words, and she grins, locking her ankles behind my back. She better lock ’em. She has no idea how hard she’s about to get fucked. I hitch an arm under her knee and grind in so deep my balls get wet.
Her eyes go wide, and her body moves up the bed with the first few thrusts. I pump into her at full force, rocking the headboard into the wall, making the mattress moan.
“Oh my God.” One of her hands leaves my ass and grips the sheet at her side. “This is . . . oh my God.”
I push her knees to her shoulders, folding her back, appreciating how pliable her body is under my hands. I glance down to watch myself enter and withdraw, watch the evidence of how much she wants me on my dick.
On my dick. Fuck.
“Condom.” I pull out, and her face crumples.
“No, don’t stop.”
“Let me get this on.” I reach into the bedside table, wrap it up in record speed, and get back in there, pulling her legs over my shoulders.
“Oh, yes.” She links her fingers behind my neck and tosses her head on the pillow. She clenches around me, stiffens with wave after wave of her orgasm.
“I feel so much.” She stretches her neck back, lifting slightly off the pillow. Tears slide over her cheeks. “Oh, my God. It feels amazing.”
Her eyes meet mine in the dim light, and she shows me everything. The things she hasn’t told me, the secrets that torture her. I may not have the words yet, but the feeling, the hurt shadows her pleasure and she tells me everything. The intimacy of it pushes me over, and I’m exploding, throwing my head back, gripping her hips, my body reduced to urges and instincts and thrusts and moans until I finish, sinking my teeth into the tender curve of her neck.
I roll onto my back, keeping her connected to me, staying inside of her, our bellies kissing. Her legs fall limply on either side of my hips. She pushes up onto her elbows to study me, tears spilling unapologetically down her face. Her mouth trembles, works around sounds for a few seconds before she speaks.
“You made me feel,” she whispers. “Damn you.”
And then she collapses onto my chest and weeps.
11
Avery
“He left a note.”
The confession slips seamlessly into the intimacy our bodies, maybe even our hearts, made in this bed. In the darkness of this room only brightened by the skyline twinkling beyond the window.
“What?” Deck adjusts me in the crook of his shoulder, kissing my temple and pushing my hair aside to nuzzle into my neck, too. “What’d you say, Ave?”
He sounds sleepy. We just finished round two, and I must say I’ve never been fucked like that in my life. It was . . . possession and dominance and tenderness and ferocity taking turns, all sides of him sharing me. I love the way he arranges me exactly how he wants, pushes my legs back just so. Tips my ass up to the desired angle. Spreads me to his specifications. And then fucks me like a train.
The man fucks like a train.
And I’ve been railroaded; possibly ruined for everyone else. If I had known there were men out there, fucking like that, I’d have a lot more notches on my bedpost in my quest to find them.
“Ave?” he asks again, reminding me of what I want to tell him, as much as I would love to stay distracted thinking of what we just did . . . twice. For the first time, I want to tell someone other than my therapist the secret I’ve been wearing like an albatross around my neck for the last year.
“He, um . . . Will, my fiancé. He left a note.”
Deck shifts, carefully pulling his shoulder from under my head so he can lie on his side. So he can see my face while he waits for me to go on. I punish my lip trapped between my tee
th.
“It was in the bathroom with my ring.”
In the sliver of silence following my last words, I know he’s mentally assembling the pieces of this puzzle before he asks his next question.
“You weren’t wearing your ring?”
The question comes low and soft, a sympathetic query. Not a threat or an accusation or any of the things I’ve told myself I deserve.
“No, I had taken it off a few days before.” I try to swallow, but can’t past the scalding, swollen walls of my throat. “I . . . I . . . God, I . . .”
My breaths come in choppy heaves. I clutch the sheet to my naked breasts to keep my hands from shaking.
“Hey, hey.” Decker cups my jaw in one big hand, brushing his thumb over the tears trickling down my cheek. “Baby, it’s okay. Take your time.”
It’s been so long since a man called me “baby.” Since I shared any intimacy with another person. Long before Will and I ended, our sex life dried up. The casual affection of intimate touches, naked skin, bared souls and endearments had long departed.
“I broke our engagement off a few days before he killed himself.” The admission storms past my lips as if the words know this is their last chance; know that if they don’t escape now I won’t ever let them out.
Decker scoots down until his forehead lines up with mine, the height difference so great my feet stop at his knees under the cover.
“I’m so sorry.” He dusts kisses over my wet cheeks, spearing his long fingers into my hair. “I can’t even imagine. Tell me.”
I stare through the dim light, searching his face for judgment, but it’s not there; just a patient, waiting compassion. It gives me courage to go on.
“We had been over for a long time, I think.” I squeeze my eyes tightly closed. “He suffered from depression. His medication made it so much better, but he didn’t like to take it. Sometimes he wouldn’t take it, and he wouldn’t take care of himself. He’d lose friends. His work would go bad.”
I lick at the bitter smile festering on my lips.
“We would go bad.”
I shrug and shiver, pulling the sheet tighter around me. “I would say he wasn’t trying hard enough. He would say I didn’t understand. We’d . . . fight. We stopped . . .”
My voice dies in the dark. I dip my head to hide my face, ashamed to hear my part in this tragedy spoken aloud.
“You stopped what, Ave?” Deck probes gently, kissing my forehead and encouraging me to go on. “You can tell me.”
“We stopped . . .” I glance up at him through a dampened veil of eyelashes. “We stopped making love. We were like roommates, miserable more often than not, but determined to keep trying. I loved him. I did, but I’m not sure for the last year or so that I was in love with him.”
My harsh laugh puffs across our lips, just inches apart.
“Hell, he probably wasn’t in love with me either there at the end,” I say. “He went on a business trip and he cheated.”
Deck’s hard body goes still, and his thumb caresses under my chin, urging my eyes up to meet his.
“He was a fool,” Deck says. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but anyone who isn’t satisfied with you is a fool.”
“No, I was a shrew.” I wince, replaying some of our arguments. “We both wanted it to work so badly. We loved who we were in the beginning, but we weren’t those people anymore. At least not to each other.”
I always knew Will had . . . spells. Seasons when he would withdraw because life felt too hard, and nothing, not even our closeness, could pull him out. I didn’t realize how bad it was until last year, and even then, I never imagined he’d harm himself. He stopped going to work. Stopped eating and showering regularly. Stopped making love to me. Stopped everything that made him happy. Stopped everything that made him . . . Will. He stopped everything that made us . . . us, and it broke my heart. Long before anonymous out-of-town hook up ho, my heart had been broken in minutes and hours and over days. We drifted out of love, into heartbreak, and settled into a terrible indifference. We were unrecognizable, and I didn’t know if it would have happened eventually anyway, or if his depression, the wall it erected between us, forced us to it.
“So, what happened?” Decker prompts.
“When he told me he’d cheated, I. . .” I want to cover my ears against the memory of our raised voices; of our hurtful words. “I gave him his ring back. I told him it was over and went to a hotel.”
Guilt assails me, fresh and wrenching. My heartbeat accelerates and my pulse pounds in my ears.
“That was the last time I saw him alive.” I struggle to get the words out. “How could I do that, Deck? I knew he was depressed, was struggling, but I never thought he’d do something like that.”
“Not your fault, Ave.” He squeezes my chin between his fingers firmly. “Don’t do that to yourself.”
Doing that to myself has become a habit I’m not sure I can break. Blaming myself for what happened.
“When I broke it off, he thought I would reconsider, and asked that we not tell our friends and family yet so no one knew that just days before, I’d . . .”
Abandoned him. Left him on his own. Left him to die.
The details of that night overtake what I see, what I hear, hurling me back into that cold bathroom. All the sounds and images and horrors flood my memory. I’d gone to the apartment to tell him I was sure; that we should go ahead and tell everyone it was over. Not just because of him cheating, but because we weren’t working anymore and hadn’t for a long time. As soon as I let myself into the apartment, I’d heard the music drifting from the back to the entrance.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on your troubles will be out of sight
The closer I’d gotten to the bathroom, the louder the music became and the more I was sure something was wrong. The air trembled with it. Each lyric ached with the pain I’d seen in Will for years, ebbing, flowing, sometimes less, sometimes more—always there, but finally too much.
“He was in the tub,” I whisper, my eyes unfocused on the room I’m in now, but seeing that other room; seeing Will in water turned scarlet with his blood. Seeing the deep lines sliced in his wrists, perpendicular to his pain; intersecting with the misery I’d seen in his eyes for months, but been helpless to soothe. I hadn’t known his despair went that deep.
I still see that note, my name scrawled in Will’s loopy penmanship. I still see the ring I had returned to him there on the counter.
“Avery, I tried,” I say, my mouth trembling, an unsteady messenger for Will’s last words. “That’s all the note said. That he tried.”
Was it an apology? For cheating? For giving up? Was it a condemnation of me, for underestimating his despair? For pushing too hard? For wanting too much? Always more from him, or for him? The questions make well-worn laps in my mind, round and round, dizzying me with the finality of Will’s one-sided farewell.
The song. The tub. The blood. The ring. The note.
Second after painful second, I manage to drag myself out, like I’ve had to do so many times since that night. I focus on Decker, pleading for him to understand, or maybe to help me understand.
“Sometimes I’d say he wasn’t trying because that’s all I know how to do,” I say. “I’ve spent my whole life trying. Achieving. Making things happen for myself, and on some level, I didn’t understand that it wasn’t that easy for him. That it wasn’t about trying. It was deeper than that. For him it was harder than that. Maybe he was trying until he just couldn’t try anymore. And I saw that too late, Deck, and now he’s gone.”
My shoulders shake with the emotion I’ve been hiding from for a year.
“When I saw the note, it had my name on it. No one else’s.” I shrug helplessly. “There was no message for anyone else, so I kept it to myself.”
My laugh comes out hollow, barely a laugh at all.
“And if I’m honest, I didn’t want anyone to know
. To blame me like I blamed myself.” I swipe trembling fingers over my wet cheeks. “God, I didn’t want his mother to blame me like I blame myself. For her to think he did that because of me.”
The words slip-slide on my tears, barely discernible, but Deck understands. He pulls me close, one hand stroking at the small of my back and one hand cupping my face as he kisses the wetness on my cheeks.
“Listen to me.” His voice falls soft and firm over my hiccupping. “I don’t know what you could have done differently in your relationship. When a relationship fails, we look backward with much more perspective than when we’re in it. Believe me. I learned that after my divorce.”
I sniff and nod against his chest for him to go on.
“And replaying our arguments and rehearsing our mistakes won’t change how we handled things,” he says. “But in a situation like that, you aren’t responsible for someone making that decision. Our lives are just that.”
He dips his head to catch and hold my eyes with his.
“Ours.” He frowns, pressing his lips together over a sigh. “You remember that Sports Illustrated party a couple years ago?”
“Yeah.”
We hadn’t spoken, but I remember that lightning strike of seeing Deck again after so long. How my palms went sweaty and my heart went haywire and my stomach went all fluttery. I had seen him from time to time over the years from a distance, but that night, he’d been so close. Closer than he had been for a long time, and as much as I made sure nobody knew, it affected me. He affected me.
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