by Marr, Maggie
She tightly clamps around my finger.
“I want your cock,” she breaths out. Her voice rasps with a need for satisfaction.
I spread her legs with my knee and grasp a hip in each hand. With one strong thrust, I am deep inside her.
“God, yesssss,” she moans.
“Yes.”
I thrust in and out of her. Her palms press to the window and her ass presses back toward me. Heat starts in the soles of my feet and then rolls up and through my legs. Fuck yes. I am going to come. Her sex tightens and tightens again. Her breathing is shallow and heavy.
“Yes, oh God, yes, please, Jake, please!” She looks over her shoulder at me again and her eyes . . . I could fall into those eyes for the rest of my life. Live in her arms. Be satisfied with Tara for the rest of my life.
But could she?
I thrust deep and hard, and come jets from me.
“Yes!” Tara yells.
We fall into the pleasure together.
* * *
The sweet smell of garlic in butter and cream fills the kitchen. The prawns are nearly done, and angel hair pasta is already divided into two bowls. Tara spreads chopped tomato on the salad she made. The timer beeps.
“Garlic bread,” she says to me.
I lean forward and pull the baguette wrapped in aluminum foil from the oven. We are ready. She fills two wineglasses from the bottle that is open and breathing. She hands me one and smiles.
“To us.” She clinks her wineglass against mine and takes a sip of her cabernet.
I sip mine as well.
“That smells amazing.” Tara stands beside me at the stove.
I grind a tiny bit more pepper into the sauce. “Now it’s amazing,” I say.
I pour the sauce onto the pasta. Oh yeah. The scents of butter and garlic and prawns. I glance at Tara. She smiles. She’s living in the moment like I am. We’re doing this. We’re being together this weekend for our final time and ignoring the consequences of our feelings. And then . . .
And then we will say good-bye. This will end. Our Wonderfucking will be over. She’ll go back to her life and I’ll go back to my life . . . and . . .
My throat tightens. I put the saucepan into the sink and Tara sits. I serve her and myself and sit.
“This is amazing.”
“Yeah?” I twirl my fork tines in my pasta. I take a bite. I look at the beautiful woman sitting beside me. “I haven’t seen you for a while. Are you busy with work?”
Tara looks at me. Her jaw drops. At first, for a split second, it doesn’t register what I’ve just done. I’ve just . . . I’ve bled this reality, my Wonderfuck reality, into my Jake reality, and I’ve done it without even noticing. As though I’m allowing us to cross over into that other part of my life, the one that I pretend doesn’t exist. She raises an eyebrow, but she acts like she doesn’t notice.
“I’ve got an article I’m working on. One that I really like.”
I nod. I sip my wine. I’m uncertain I want to talk. I . . . I’m uncertain I want to do anything but have sex, because the sex takes away my confusion. We finish our meal in silence and clean up our dishes. The sun begins to set into the sea.
“Walk?” she asks. As much as I’d prefer to take her upstairs and fuck her instead, I take her hand in mine. Jango hears the magic “W” word and skips around at our ankles like a five-year-old going to Disneyland. Tara grabs a tennis ball from a basket filled with them by the back door, and Jango bolts out the sliders and across the sand toward the water. I smile, and Tara throws the ball into the surf.
Jango bounds into the water as though this moment is the best of her life. I smile, I can’t help but smile, at her irrepressible joy. She swims, grabs the ball, and hurdles toward us as we slowly walk up the beach. She does us the courtesy of shaking off the water before she reaches us, and drops the ball at my feet.
“She’ll do this all day,” Tara says.
“Can you blame her?” I reach down, pick up the slobbery wet ball, and throw it toward the ocean. Not too far, but just far enough. Jango is off like a shot. Ball. Water. Her favorite people. She’s is in dog nirvana.
Why can’t life be this simple for humans?
A warm breeze lifts Tara’s hair from her shoulders. A smile hovers on her face as we head north along the beach, enjoying the brilliant light show of the sun sinking into the sea.
“Nice place, where’d you find it?”
“It’s my parents’ place. They don’t use it much since they retired, so it’s open most of the time.”
“I’d be here all the time.” The sound of the waves coming to shore takes the edge off the thoughts in my mind. The metronomic continuity of the sound numbs all the chirping in my brain.
“I come out here to write. Especially if I’m working on something that’s tough for me to figure out.”
“Is this where you’ve been?”
“I needed to get away.” She pulls a strand of hair behind her ear and glances down the beach. “To work on this story.”
“Tough one?”
“Kind of personal.”
She doesn’t offer any more words, and though I have all kinds of questions, I don’t ask them. Unfair, isn’t it, for me to pepper her for answers to my questions when I don’t really want to answer many questions from her.
I wonder if the story is about her engagement, or maybe some other part of her life, a part that I know nothing about. Unfortunate really, how badly I want to know what she’s working on, to hear what has her bothered or worried. How I want to fix whatever problems she has. I want to take care of her. Fix her coffee and breakfast in the morning, make her lunch and dinner, sit with her and talk and take walks where Jango splashes into the waves over and over again.
I want to be here for her.
But I can’t.
I tried that once. Tried to fix Susie’s problems. Tried to love her through the challenge. Tried to help her, and I failed. I failed so badly that she died.
“Do you miss her?”
I stop walking. I turn to Tara. This is a complete violation of our agreement, of what I allow myself to talk about with women when I’m Wonderfuck. I bend down and pick up the tennis ball for an excited Jango, who waits ever-so-impatiently for me to throw it. This gives me a couple moments to consider if I’ll answer Tara, and also to decide what I’ll say.
“I used to think about her every day.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s not every day.” I can’t quantify it. I don’t want to, but I realize that my thoughts of Susie aren’t as insistent as they once were, nor are they as morbid. I’ve even started to think of funny things that she did, and when I think of the funny things, those thoughts aren’t always tinged with grief. Sometimes I even smile. My thoughts of Tara are more numerous than my thoughts of Susie. It’s a wholly new experience that I can barely admit to myself, so I’m definitely not telling Tara.
“Do you miss Garrison?”
She laughs. “I know you know his name.” She turns away from me and we continue our walk up the beach. “But it’s sweet that you still pretend you don’t.”
“Want to know what I really call him? In my brain?”
She shakes her head and wraps her arm through mine. She leans in. “But I appreciate the thought.”
Jango drops the ball, and this time Tara throws the yellow-green orb into the waves. She looks at me. “The sad part is, I don’t think about him much. I think more about what an idiot I was.”
“You weren’t an idiot.”
“Yeah, I kind of was. I’m an investigative journalist and he was boning a co-worker. You’d think I would’ve sorted that out.”
“Maybe it was the first time.”
“Really?”
“Okay, definitely unlikely, but I wanted to give you an out.”
She smiles at me, and a little laugh escapes from her mouth. “I know now, after a couple months, that what your sister said is right. Better to figure out now that he’s a chea
ter than later. After a wedding and a couple kids. Then you’re really stuck.”
Did that cross Susie’s mind? Is that what she was thinking?
“So yeah, I think my mother may have even forgiven me.”
“Forgiven you?”
“It embarrassed her. The idea that her daughter called off a wedding. She’s a very Bel Air Country Club sort of woman, you know. Substance isn’t really something that matters so much. You hide things you dislike with a perfect smile, loads of money, closed doors, and scotch. Vats and vats of scotch.” Tara stops and looks toward the ocean. “I think if she was me, she would’ve gone ahead and married him.”
I stoop down and grab Jango’s ball.
“I think a long time ago, maybe she did.” Tara’s eyes meet mine.
I lob the ball into the ocean. I don’t have any judgment. It’s a choice that a lot of women make. Some are content, some leave, some need a Wonderfuck and then stay in their faithless but cushy marriages. A number of couples create an entirely separate life, where the wife uses the husband’s money and name without bothering about him.
“It’s amazing what you sort out about your parents as you age,” she says.
“No kidding.”
Jango is back, but she’s moving a little slower. She drops the ball at my feet and drops to the ground.
“No way! Jango? Did we wear you out?”
Her tongue lolls to the side and she pants, but she still seems to smile an entirely contented smile, as though this walk may have been the best walk of her doggy existence. Until the walk tomorrow, of course. She’s a dog, they’ve got that live-in-the-moment thing down. Wish I did. Tara wraps her arms around herself. The wind has picked up and the sun set into the ocean long ago.
“Cold?”
She nods. I pull her into my arms. This is where she fits and where I want her to remain. We stare out toward the infinite sea. I lean back and look down at her. I press my lips to hers. A long warm luscious kiss. A kiss that says more than “I want to fuck.” This kiss is meant to tell her that I care, and that if the facts of my life were different, if I wasn’t so damaged and selfish and if all the pain that has brought me to this moment could dissolve, I would pick her. I try to put that all in one kiss.
I’m not sure if I succeed, but when we break apart, there’s a look in her eyes that tells me she shares my feelings. If our lives were different, we might be able to spend a lifetime together making each other happy, walking on the beach, making prawns in garlic cream sauce and throwing a tennis ball into the Pacific Ocean as the sun fades.
I don’t say all the things that cross through my mind, like “I don’t want this to end,” or “I wish things were different,” or “I care for you, I really care for you” . . . I don’t say any of it. Instead, I say, “We should get back.”
“Yeah, we should.”
I don’t know for certain that the same thoughts go through her mind in this moment, but her eyes seem to reflect my thoughts back to me.
We turn back toward the house and Jango trots beside us, no longer dancing at our feet and begging for one of us to throw her ball into the waves. No, we’ve worn her out. Now she’s content to walk beside us and slowly plod her way home.
Chapter 28
The air grows cool as the evening deepens. I start a fire in the fireplace in the bedroom. A wall of windows provides an ocean view from the bed, which is loaded with plush pillows and a fluffy duvet. I walk into the bathroom of white tile, silver faucets, and grey marble. Tara stands in front of the mirror, wearing only my shirt, unbuttoned.
“A shower,” I say. My hands part the fabric of the shirt and I pull it down over her shoulders. My lips stroke down her neck. She reaches out and grasps my cock.
My God, yes.
I can fuck her over and over again. We just finished and napped, and now, I’m hard. I can’t imagine my body growing tired of hers. Still kissing her, I reach into the shower and turn on the four shower heads. Steam rises around us. I pull my lips from her neck and look at her naked body. A flush hovers on her cheeks. Her nipples are erect.
Grasping her hand, I step into the shower and lead her in. The warm water flows down her body like art, accenting curves that already steal the breath from my lungs. I reach for the soap and I turn her back toward me. Gently, carefully, I begin at the nape of her neck and run the soap down the curve of her neck. My hands caress her shoulders.
Her breathing shifts, because we are close, we are naked, and we want nothing but each other. My smooth touch over her slick flesh that I know so well, after so many times together. I press my fingers into the dimples of her back, right above her ass and her hips. Like I’ve hit a button that commands arousal, she shifts forward, her ass arches back, and her head tilts ever so slightly toward me.
She is as responsive as she is beautiful. Water washes the bits of soap from her flesh and my lips press to the spot where her shoulder meets her neck.
“Oh, yes, yes,” she whispers.
I take her hand, cup it with mine, and slowly move her fingertips to her sex. She gasps. I press her finger, beneath mine, to her clit.
“I want to watch you make yourself feel good.”
She moans. She pulses her finger over her sex while my hand guides her.
My cock throbs. I look over her shoulder, her taut, tight nipples, and the soft curve of her belly to where our hands are connected as I guide her fingertips over her sex.
Her moans grow more insistent. I move my cock up between her legs, and while she touches herself, her ass presses back, seeking my cock.
Fuck yes. A deep need tears through my body. Her ass shifts back toward me. “Please,” she whispers, “please fuck me.”
I can’t stand it. I can’t stop myself—I don’t want to stop myself. I thrust my cock up and into her sex. Her fingertips pull away from her clit, but I press them back into place.
“Oh, my God,” she moans. If she keeps touching herself she won’t last, can’t last. I can’t last either. All I want is to fuck this woman, fuck her for the rest of my life.
“Please, oh my God, Jake, I’m going to come, oh my God, I’m going to come!”
Heat flashes hard and tight through my body. My balls tighten. I pull back and thrust deep into her body.
“Yes,” she shrieks. Her sex tightens around me. Fuck. this hasn’t felt so good, I haven’t . . .
“Fuck, Tara, fuck yes.” I yell, and my throbbing cock spurts into her.
I fall forward, my hand against the wall of the shower, my legs barely able to support my weight.
The water rinses over us. I wrap Tara in my arms. I press my lips to hers. Through the water, I taste the salt of tears, and I’m unsure if they’re hers or mine.
* * *
The phone rings at 5:58 a.m. Not my Wonderfuck phone, but my real phone. My stomach pitches forward. The people in my life that I love are few, and I desperately need every each of them.
Rachel.
There are a handful of reasons why Rachel would call me at six a.m. on a Saturday when she knows I’m out of town, and none of those reasons are good. I glance toward Tara, who appears to be sleeping. I slip from the bed and walk into the bathroom.
“What’s up?” I say.
“It’s Mom.”
“Okay, what happened?”
“She’s gone.”
My heart plunges in my chest and I sag against the wall. “Wait, how? When? I don—”
“No . . . no . . . I don’t mean gone as in ‘dead’ gone. I’m sorry . . .” Rachel sighs, and then I hear in her voice the tiniest hint that she’s crying. “I mean gone as in ‘we can’t find her’ gone.”
“Wait? What? Since when?”
“Since I’m not sure. Sylvia isn’t sure either. She . . . she turned off the alarm and she’s gone. Her purse is here, and the car is here, but her shoes and a jacket are gone and—”
“And nobody knows what time?’
“Could’ve been as early as just after midnight or a
s late as five a.m. Sylvia put her in bed at nine. Checked on her at midnight and then went to bed.”
“No ID?”
“No ID.”
“Fuck.” I circle the bathroom. “I’m on my way . . . I—”
“You don’t have to come. The police are on their way, and I can—”
“Are you kidding? No way you go through this alone. I’ll be there.” I’m in Malibu. Mom’s house is on the Westside. It’s Saturday at six am. “I can be there in about forty-five minutes. Maybe less.”
“Okay.” Relief weaves through Rachel’s voice. She was there for me with Susie, and I was there for her with Dickface, and we’ll be there for each other with Mom. It’s simply how this works. She and I and the family tragedies we endure.
I press off on my phone and scrub my hand through my hair. My face, rough with stubble, is reflected in the mirror. Through the open door, I can see Tara in the bedroom, illuminated with the light of dawn. She’s nestled beneath blankets. Her skin soft and warm, her scent enough to harden my cock. I want to walk through the door, lift the covers, and slide into the sheets beside her. Awaken her with a kiss. Slide my cock deep into her body and let physical pleasure drive out the thoughts in my head and the reality waiting for me.
But I can’t.
I turn on the shower. I close the bathroom door. I don’t even trust myself to tell her that I have to leave until I’m ready to go, because her pull over me is that strong. If I walk into the bedroom and feel the warmth of her close to me, in minutes, I’ll be back in bed fucking her.
* * *
“Oh my God.” Tara covers her mouth with her fingertips. Her eyes widen and she looks . . . well, she looks how I feel. She looks scared.
“Go,” she says. “Go, and please let me know if there’s anything that I can do or if I can help.”
I pause. I want to say, yes, come with me. Be there. Help me look for my mom. If you’re with me it’ll make this easier. But I don’t say any of it. Instead, I lean forward and I press my lips to her forehead. The wisest choice I’ve made in a long while is showering and dressing before telling Tara, because otherwise, I’m selfish enough that I’d be back in bed with her. I’m fighting the urge even now. I pull back and look into her eyes. Those bright blue eyes with flecks of gray. Those all-seeing eyes that gaze much deeper into me than I want anyone to see.