I pull back enough that I can see her eyes. I don’t have words for what stirs in me. No grand speech or gesture. All I can do is stare at her with a sense of wonder for what she’s doing to me. I see her in an entirely different way, wondering how I ever thought she was less than perfect. How I ever managed to let her walk out of my cabin, even that first night boggles my mind. I wonder how I was so fucking stupid not to see.
“You’re perfect to me,” I breathe, eyebrows drawing together as I hear the words like they’re from a stranger’s mouth. I don’t say things like that to women and mean them, because I never think of them. But now? “So fucking perfect,” I growl, kissing her neck hungrily, but slowly. I savor every taste, exploring her body with my mouth and my hands like we have all the time in the world. Because we do. I’m kidding myself if I think I’m sending her away in the morning. She’s mine, and I’m not going to let what’s mine get away. Not now or ever.
Goosebumps ripple across her skin everywhere I touch, and her small hands squeeze at me, rubbing and pulling and digging in search for some release, some way to channel the unbelievable pressure she must feel to find her own release. She must feel it because I do too, my cock is so hard, every heartbeat sends a dull ache of pain through me. I need to cum so bad it hurts, but I don’t dare rush this. I feel something stirring inside me, changing me, but there’s still a chance this could be the only time I have her, and I’d spend the rest of my life regretting it if I rushed it by even a second.
“If you think I’m perfect, you’re going to be disappointed,” she says, stiffening slightly.
I can sense her insecurity hanging between us, but I instinctively feel where to massage it away, just like a knot in a stiff back that needs kneading. I bring my mouth to her nipple, kissing the hard bud and pulling it into my mouth before letting it go with a satisfying pop. “I don’t have much real-estate left to inspect, but so far you’re ten out of ten,” I say, making her giggle when I try to kiss up her side and to her armpits.
She bites her lip as her amusement quickly turns back to arousal. “Why do you make me feel so good?”
“Because you deserve it,” I say between kisses. Every bit of her I touch with my lips adds fuel to the fire growing quickly out of control inside me. I felt lust when I climbed on top of her in this bed. I felt the normal animal desire to feel myself inside her. Now though? Now I feel something I’ve never felt before. I don’t just want to fuck her. I don’t only want to give her the orgasm of her life. I want to cherish her.
She threads her fingers through my hair, gripping me tight and pulling me back to her mouth, where I suck her lip into mine and breathe in the scent of her--something flowery and soft. She smells like innocence.
Our tongues roll together, and I guide my cock back inside her. “God,” I groan against her mouth. “You feel so good.”
“Not so bad yourself,” she breathes.
This time, I don’t pound into her. I don’t squeeze her until my hands leave red marks. My teeth aren’t gritted against the out of control intensity. Instead, I ease into her, rocking my length into her depths with a careful, deliberate pace that carries a weight to it. There’s no need to move quickly because this moment is something to be savored, not rushed.
She digs her fingers into my back, pressing my chest into hers, her breath hot on my neck as we move together, bodies slick with sweat.
I press my forehead to hers where our eyes can meet. I put my hand to the side of her cheek, watching the beautiful shift of her features as she nears her climax--the way her eyebrows twitch down, forehead creasing, and lips quivering. It’s more perfect than any painting. It’s not only lust and basic instinct that brings me closer to my own climax. It’s a soul-shattering sense of completeness, as if this is the moment and the thing I’ve been searching for. The only thing in the world that’s the right shape to fit the hole that has been inside me for as long as I can remember.
We cum together--her with a gasp and a shuddering breath that tightens her grip on my back and makes her legs wrap up around me, heels digging into me and urging me deeper. I fight to keep my eyes from squeezing shut with the intensity of my orgasm, not wanting to miss her face as she rides her own. I groan, letting my cum fill her without a second thought, thinking how right it feels, how right all of it feels.
She squirms when she feels the heat of my release, mouth opening in surprise before she chews on her red and swollen lip, closing her eyes and sinking back into her pillow like she’s about to take the most satisfying nap of her life.
I kiss her then, surprised to still feel a spark of heat. It’s like I’m kissing my first crush when I was just a kid. I love you. The words bubble up and nearly reach my lips before I bite them back because surely it must be the sex talking. I’m not about to go saying something stupid, no matter how real it feels in this moment.
“Wow,” she says as I roll off her and turn my head to watch her.
“Yeah,” I agree.
“You look surprised,” she says, looking so goddamn beautiful it hurts. Flushed cheeks, lips red and raw from kissing me. Perfect and innocent. Sweet. And right now, she’s mine.
“Did I pass your little test?” she asks. She smiles mischievously, but the way her eyes flick to mine, then away tells me all I need to know. She’s nervous. Nervous this was all just part of my usual treatment and she was going to get her “I rode Chris Savage and survived, sort of” t-shirt along with her ticket home.
“Passed?” I ask. “You destroyed the fucking test,” I say, running my finger along her soft jawline. “You might as well have ripped it up and lit it on fire, because—” I clear my throat, feeling uncharacteristically awkward. What was I going to say? Because no one else will ever need to take it? Was I really just going to imply that I’d never fuck another woman? I might as well have been about to propose to her.
She gives me a strange look at how I cut myself off, but still looks relieved. “When I went to school, if we just ripped up our tests and lit them on fire, that didn’t mean we passed. Your school must’ve been great.”
I laugh, running a thumb over her lip and fighting the urge to go another round with her. “You passed,” I say. “Flying colors. But I think your professor might want to retest you a few times just to be sure you didn’t cheat.”
“Oh?” she asks. “I suppose I could talk to him about it.”
“Good. I hope it goes without saying that I’m canceling your flight in the morning. And if you think you’re still leaving when we head for Italy…”
“My sisters do need me,” she says. “But I can talk to them about it, maybe we can figure out a compromise.”
“Whatever it takes,” I say. I mean it, too. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her at my side. Maybe that’s just chemicals in my brain or a lack of sleep talking, but I have a feeling it’s more than that.
One way or another, my life isn’t going to be the same anymore.
17
Lindsey
Once I’ve showered and gotten myself ready the next morning, I walk down to the buffet in the lobby with an extra bounce in my step. I could get hung up on all the maybe and shouldn’t have’s of what happened between Chris and I, but I don’t need to. I won’t. Last night was like a whirlwind that sucked me in and never let go. I know I’m not imagining what I felt in his hotel room.
The sex started as lust. It was just an outlet for emotions neither of us could understand, just bodies moving together. Had it ended that way, I’d be nursing a guilt hangover this morning, but that wasn’t how it ended. I saw the look in his eyes change, like he had some kind of epiphany. He was cradling and touching me like I was the most precious thing in the world while he made love to me. It wasn’t fucking. Fucking is dirty and raw and obviously has its place, but this wasn’t fucking, not at the end.
Every movement of his body was like a caress, as if he was worshipping me.
A wave of chills runs across my skin at the memory. I felt it too. Being t
he object of his undivided attention like that was a drug, and it was one I can’t imagine ever getting enough of. As soon as I saw him looking at me like he actually cared, I no longer felt stupid for all the things I’ve felt for him and been too ashamed to fully admit. Yes, I care about him. Yes, he makes me feel good despite all the reasons that shouldn’t be true. Yes, I want to be with him, whatever that means.
I bite my lip as I round the corner to the buffet, hoping I might run into Chris, but if I don’t I can always go give him a wake-up call after breakfast. He wanted me to spend the night in his room, but I had to call my sisters and give them a check-in to let them know I wouldn’t be coming back after all, despite the dramatic text I had sent on the ride home from the castle. Besides, I had a feeling neither of us would get any sleep if I tried to stay in his room.
I nearly run face-first into Alec, who is waiting with a smug look on his face. “Oh, good. It’s you.”
I glare, because screw him.
“This is for you,” he says, handing me a plane ticket.
I glance down at it, noticing it’s dated for today and scheduled to leave in only a few hours. “Oh,” I say. “You must not have talked to Chris. The plan changed. I’m actually going to be staying.”
“I talked to him this morning,” says Alec. There’s a smugness to him I don’t like. At all. “He wanted you to have this.”
I try to hand the ticket back. “You must be confused.”
“No confusion. When I showed him the contract you signed to do whatever it took to get the manuscript written, sleeping with him included, in exchange for payment, he was a little upset.”
“What contract?” I ask. My heartbeat pounds in my ears, face red and hot.
“The one you should’ve signed yourself. It’s amazing what a couple hundred dollars and an artist can do. Good thing, too. I thought Chris would just glance at it, but he actually didn’t believe me until I showed him the pictures I took of your passport and travel documents.”
I slap Alec as hard as I can. “Do you have any idea what you’re ruining?” I ask through a thick throat as I fight back tears. “You fucking asshole. Do you have any idea?”
A few people in the lobby look toward the commotion, but everyone makes an extra effort to look busy, ignoring us while they listen as hard as they can.
“I gave you a chance to work with me,” he says. “If you’re not going to be committed to helping him finish, then I’ll find someone who will. It’s that simple. So yes. I know exactly what I’m ruining. Your chances of ever being with Chris.”
It’s a good thing I don’t carry any kind of pepper spray or a concealed weapon, because I think I’d do just about anything to wipe the smug look off Alec’s face. Instead, I turn and head toward Chris’ room at a jog.
“You’re wasting your time!” calls Alec with an infuriating note of humor in his voice. “And your plane leaves soon. We won’t pay for your a new ticket if you miss the flight!”
I take the stairs up to his floor, not wanting to wait for an elevator. I find him stepping out of his room with his suitcase flung over his shoulder when I leave the staircase and enter our hall.
“Chris,” I say, stopping short. “Alec forged the signature. He just told me everything. He was bragging about—”
“Just stop,” Chris says. The way his eyes look dead and haunted breaks my heart. “I saw the signature on your passport. It’s an exact fucking match. You told me you refused him.” He shakes his head, laughing through his nose cruelly. “Maybe you could write about this on your blog to cash in since you won’t be getting that check from Alec. You can write about how you made an idiot out of me and tricked me into fucking you.”
“Chris,” I say, pleading. “Just please let me prove it to you somehow.”
“I’m done with the second chances. I should’ve known as soon as you told me about Alec’s offer that you were just as fake as all the rest of them.”
“Don’t do this,” I say, falling to my knees and crying, not even caring if anyone comes out of their room and sees me making a fool out of myself. “He’s lying. I swear it!”
He drags his eyes away from me and walks past, not even turning as he yanks open the door to the staircase. “You’d better hurry if you’re going to catch that plane. Have a good life, Lindsey. You were a good fuck, at least.”
I curl into myself, clutching my chest like my heart is about to break into pieces. I don’t know how long I sit in the hallway ugly crying, the kind of crying that will leave my face swollen and give me a headache for the rest of the day. When I’m done, all I feel is numb.
I numbly get my things from my room, numbly get myself a cab, and I numbly take the plane home. How did I ever think that I was only risking a small part of myself by coming here with Chris? I risked everything. I gave him everything. And he threw it away.
18
Chris
One Month Later
I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the cabin. Lindsey would be there, she’d be so fucking close I would be able to practically taste her on the air. No, my parents were going to have to wait a while before I came to visit again. So I took my mom’s journals back home after I called the promotional tour short two weeks ago and flew home. I rented a place in Maine where I could work by myself, where I could work on myself, but more importantly, where I could write.
I read my mom’s journals finally, too. It took me a few tries. The sad part is, I was only able to do it when I remembered hearing the first passage being read in Lindsey’s sweet voice. I imagined all of them in her voice, and somehow it helped me get through them. I got through my mom’s apology, which took the first few journals. Imagine that, she was apologizing to me, when I was the ungrateful shit who made a career out of pissing off her and the rest of my family.
Her big confession was that her and my dad had faked my rejection from Parsons. They thought they could force me into making the “right” decision since I would never have listened to them. It was a shitty thing to do, but it hurt to read how much my mom blamed herself for everything that happened after because of their one real sin against me. I wished I could go back and tell her it didn’t matter, that I would’ve found some way to imagine the world was against me, no matter what had happened or how few mistakes they had made.
What surprised me was the rest of the journals were her love story. She wrote how she met my father, how they fell in love, how they fought at times, and how they decided to have us. She talked about what it was like when we were just babies and we changed her life and all the hopes she had for us.
I read one passage in particular that stuck into me like a seed, burying itself deep where I know it’ll grow and grow no matter what I want. “I remember how I’d lay you on my lap and stroke your little head. You loved that. You’d fight so hard to keep your eyes open, but every time my fingertips ran across your forehead they’d slip closer and closer to closed. I loved those nights, just sitting with you in the rocking chair while you slept and dreamed in my lap. I still remember how comforting the weight of your little body was on me.
“I’d think about how I made you, how I had such an awesome responsibility to honor that. I had brought you into the world and it was my job to make sure I prepared you for it. It was so strange to think that you were growing into a little person, someone who’d have hopes and dreams one day, who’d make mistakes and suffer tragedies and live through amazing things.
“You were my little baby boy. My first baby. And I was still naive enough to think I could help you once you grew up and became your own person.
“This part is hard to write, Chris, but it hurts when I think about how I failed you. I think about your sweet little face and all the things that we could’ve done and shared together, but somewhere along the way I messed that up. I won’t lie and say I know what it was that drove us so far apart, but I’m not going to make excuses and blame you, either. I take the blame for how things turned out between us. I failed you. I fa
iled my baby, and I’ve never forgiven myself for that.”
Reading that passage broke something in me, but it was something that needed to be broken. It was a wall I had built up over the years made out of anger and a bull-headed refusal to let anyone in or feel anything good. I let it break apart when I saw what my own stubbornness had done to my mom, how it had weighed on her, and how I had missed my chance to apologize and make things right before she died.
I said a prayer that night for the first time in my life. It was probably a prayer that would’ve made a priest cringe, but it was the best I could do. I told God he had better exist, and if he did he had better not dare do anything but let my parents move on to a place where they could know what happened to me wasn’t their fault.
And then I started to write.
The words poured out of me like I was writing a book I’d already read a thousand times from memory. It was a tragedy and a love story and a message all in one. It was nothing like my publisher was expecting, but I promised them a book, and they will get a book. I’ve only been here a few weeks in the cabin I’m renting out in the middle of nowhere, but I’m already almost done with my first draft.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still think about Lindsey. When I close my eyes too long or let my thoughts wander, she’s always there. I’ve made her out to be more perfect in my memory than she possibly could’ve been, which makes it all the more torturous. But I have to cling to the truth: she betrayed me. I’ve found a new part of myself out here, a better part, and there’s no room in the new life I want to build for the kind of women I used to get tangled up with. Despite my heart telling me Lindsey was different, I just keep remembering holding contract up to her passport and seeing the damning evidence of her signature.
Sometimes I worry about how I came in her without protection. It was so fucking reckless and stupid. I could’ve gotten her pregnant. What then? I wouldn’t be able to keep shutting her out of my life, for starters. Either way, it wouldn’t change things between us. Not really, at least.
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