by JD Hawkins
My lack of answer is all the answer even a stranger would need, let alone Mia. Seconds after she sees that I can’t bring myself to reply, her face relaxes into a look of sympathy, as if I’ve just confessed that I have a deadly affliction. In a way, I have.
She looks away, as if wanting to give me some space for a moment to gather my thoughts, and I’m grateful for that semblance of intuitive compassion, to have a friend who knows me well enough to know when I need some time to collect myself.
She sips her chai, nibbles her panini, and an age seems to pass. I watch the people pass by outside, and listen to the couple in the corner occasionally break out into secretive laughter, as if their jokes wouldn’t make sense to anyone but them. Probably they wouldn’t.
“It was never a question of feelings,” I say, still looking out the window, the words coming out as soon as my thoughts can compile into some sort of sense. “It was a question of reality. I’ve never wanted a relationship—never wanted to feel ‘dependent.’ Perhaps I’m just too selfish, but I’m fine with that. And especially now that I’m supposed to be a ‘celebrity’ with a brand to uphold… A brand all about being an independent woman who plays the field… And then there was always the fact that he’s your brother—”
“Oh Maeve, you know I wouldn’t do or feel or get in the way of—”
“I know, I know,” I interrupt. “But even so, even with you being a sweetheart… It’s a complication. And there’s the fact that…” I trail off and sigh, suddenly exhausted with thinking about it. “It’s a different world, Mia. Entirely new. And I’m not used to ‘exploring.’ It’s so easy for me to do the things that are difficult for others—”
“Are you talking about being fabulous?” Mia says with a smile.
“Essentially,” I reply, with only a little humor. “But this… Relationships that aren’t purely transactional. Giving more than I take from men… It’s new to me.”
“You know, I always thought you and Toby were two of a kind, Maeve.”
“Perhaps that’s just as much reason not to do anything,” I reply. “Don’t they say opposites attract?”
“Well, they also say ‘takes one to know one’—so I’m not sure how much wisdom you can glean from simple clichés.”
I laugh gently, glad for the respite of treating it all lightly.
“Maeve…” she says softly. “I can’t tell you what to do. I can just tell you that whatever happens, it’s not going to change our friendship.”
“I know.”
“And also…” She takes a while before picking up where she left off, “Love is worth it. I mean, we’re different, obviously. You have your fashion and your parties… I had my ambitions and my neat little safe life… And I still do. But of course, you have to give up a little bit… Colin did too… But it’s worth it, Maeve. I’ve got a beautiful little girl now. A person, a partner, who I share everything with—including the weight of my own mind. All my own little issues. And he shares his. And it’s… It’s amazing.”
“I just don’t know if I’d feel the same…” I tell her, wrenching the thought from deep within me.
“Talking about clichés,” Mia says, smiling a little. “There’s that one about ‘not knowing what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ And it’s always used in a negative way…like ‘losing’ something. But for me…with Colin and Alison now… Honestly, it’s like I never realized how lonely I was until I found him. Weird as that sounds.”
“It doesn’t sound weird to me, sweetie.”
“Well, I’m not saying you’d feel the same or… I don’t know…” Mia says, taking a sip of her chai as she sorts her own thoughts out. “I suppose all I can really tell you with confidence is that sometimes feelings matter. Sometimes they’re the only thing that can guide you right. Sometimes everything else is just…a dead end.”
I sigh heavily and we sit in silence a while. I try to figure out a way that’s she’s wrong, while also struggling to believe that she’s right.
“Darling, I’ll tell you something.”
“Go on.”
“If I had never met you, I would be totally surrounded by superficial friends who would tell me what I want to hear, rather than what I needed to hear. I’d be sitting across from someone right now who’d be telling me that ‘of course I’m too fabulous to have a real boyfriend’ and that I should just use him to get my jewelry done before having a month of casual sex to forget him. It would be so much more easy and convenient.”
Mia laughs, then says, “If you’d never met me, you would never have met Toby, so perhaps.”
I laugh with her.
“Oh, that ship has sailed, crashed, and sunk long ago.”
Mia’s phone pings on the table and she checks it quickly, wincing as she does so.
“Crap. I have to go. Colin’s got to head off to meet a client and I was supposed to take Alison anyway. But if you need me to stay a little longer, I guess I could—”
“Go, go,” I say before she can feel guilty. “I already dragged you away on a whim, and I should probably check in at work myself. Thank you, sweetie.”
Mia’s already stood up and is throwing her purse over her shoulder.
“Oh, Maeve…” she says with a warm smile. “It would… I always… Ugh… Never mind. Whatever happens, you’ll always be my friend.”
“Likewise,” I say, as she leans down to hug me. “Just do me one favor.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell Toby that I told you all of this… I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to tell you anyway but… Oh, anyway, you’re a terrible liar, you’ll probably let it slip—but if you can—”
“I promise,” Mia says. “Well…I promise I’ll try. You know that I’m terrible at—”
“Yes, yes, honey. We all know you’re terrible at keeping secrets.”
She smiles sweetly one more time, pats me on the shoulder, and then darts for the exit of the café quickly, bringing her phone to her ear as she does so. I watch her go, then glance at my coffee and wonder why the hell I even ordered it.
25
Toby
Let’s meet.
Only two words to the text message, but they change everything.
Only two words, but it’s the name above them that makes them important.
Maeve.
I text back quickly. Can you come by my shop today?
Her reply is almost as quick. Neutral territory. No houses. No drinks. No people.
I stare at the message in confusion for what feels like a minute but is probably just seconds. I’m in the backroom at work, having ditched a customer and rushed back there the second I saw that I had a message from her.
I rack my brain trying to think of a place, as if I’m solving a riddle. Too desperate to grasp this small window of opportunity she’s giving me to let my mind wander into the bigger questions just yet.
What does she want? Why a neutral place? What is she going to say?
I dismiss the first few places that come to mind. An abandoned warehouse on the outskirts that there are sometimes large raves in. The top level of a sky-high parking lot that gives incredible views of the city and always struck me as a good location for a movie confrontation.
Eventually I settle on a spot up in the hills that an old friend used to visit to stargaze. A dirt path through the trees just about big enough to fit a car through, ending in a small cliff that looks over the dark edge of the city. I send Maeve the location and stare at my phone, immediately regretting it, wondering what she’ll make of it.
She replies with one word—nine—and the smile on my face might as well be plastered on for as much as I can remove it.
For the rest of the day, I barely exist, all of my thoughts entirely on the future, tonight, and what will happen. Emotions stuck in the past, replaying everything that’s happened recently, the events of the party.
By five I’m still smiling—it has to be good, right? She has to have come to her senses. Why would sh
e ask to see me if she still wanted nothing to do with me?
By seven the doubts creep in. Why neutral territory? Does she think I’m going to make a scene? Maybe she thinks that because she’s about to put the final nail in. And no drinks… As if she doesn’t want to lose herself again…
By eight-thirty I’m just confused, uncertain, and anxious, watching the seconds tick, feeling like everything, good or bad, is on the table.
I get to the spot early, parking beneath an indigo blue sky and stepping out onto the dirt. I lean back on the car and gaze out at the view, arched by the trees overhead. The eucalyptus- and jasmine-scented air feels light but full of secrets. Perhaps that’s just the adrenaline in my body.
After glancing back at the path for every sound that might be her, one of them turns out to be right. Headlights blinding me as her SUV brushes the leaves of the tight road before parking, facing the view ten feet away from me.
She opens the door and gets out. High heels, a shiny pencil skirt in jade green, and a loose white blouse. Despite everything, the complexity of our relationship, my intense curiosity about what she wants, the regretful turn we’ve taken—I feel such a pure lust for her. A lust that goes beyond simple attraction, and borders on ambition. I’m starting to doubt it’ll ever die.
I step toward her and we approach each other, stopping when we’re close enough to see the light in each other’s eyes even in the dusk. She looks serious, but no longer cruel. I wait for her to make the first move.
“How would this even work?” she says eventually, her voice as natural as our surroundings.
“Us?” I ask.
She nods.
“I guess it’s a ‘figure-it-out-as-you-go’ deal,” I say.
After a few more seconds, Maeve breaks her gaze from me and turns to the cliff’s edge, walking toward it and stopping a few steps from it. A few more seconds go by and I follow her until I’m standing a little behind her.
“You’re afraid?” I say.
“You’re not?” she says over her shoulder.
“I guess that’s one of the benefits of being a reckless idiot.”
I can’t see her face, but I know she’s smiling at that.
“I guess…” I continue, “we make it work. We start trusting each other. Start giving a little. Start fighting for each other as much as we fight against each other.”
I put my hands on her shoulders and feel them relax under my fingers, her tension softening a little, Maeve’s heart of glass cracking.
“Give a little…” she repeats softly, as my hands move down to her upper arms, down to her stomach so that I can embrace her, pull her back into me—like I did once before, except this time the fire is more than sexual, the feeling more than sensual. A connection deeper than skin-on-skin. “It feels like giving too much.”
I press my chin against her hair, closing my eyes as I relish for the first time just being this close to her—not as part of some game, not as some ritual toward an end, but simply for the sake of it.
“But think about what you’d get,” I whisper quietly, my mouth close to her ear so she can hear me loud enough. Her hands move over mine as they rest on her front, the two of us sinking together, falling closer, merging and fitting together so well as if it proves my point. “What we’d both get. We could be amazing, Maeve.”
She spins in my arms, liquid and smooth and perfect, like the move to a dance. I don’t take my arms from around her, while hers search out my waist. I put a hand to her hair and stroke it gently, and she closes her eyes as if trying to resist how good it feels to be this way, but failing.
“I don’t think we’d ever stop fighting,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll ever become that person.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be,” I tell her honestly. “I’ll fight you for the rest of my life if that’s what it takes to keep you.”
She smiles and opens her eyes finally, and there’s a look in them that’s entirely new. A softness, a vulnerability, and truth from deep within her. A look I don’t even think she’d show the mirror.
And it’s beautiful in a whole new way. An entirely new universe of her beauty. Something so real that it drives home the stakes, and shakes something in my own core. A face she’ll only ever show me, a place she’ll only ever take me. Beyond that cage she’s kept around her heart her whole life.
Her lips part and it’s an invitation only I can read, as big as a billboard. I move my lips to hers and when they touch—even this lightly—I feel the pain and frustration and agonized yearning for her that I’ve been walking around with for weeks rush out of me. Her kiss is like a cure for something in my soul, healing wounds I never even knew existed until now. Her kiss is like a confirmation of a future I’d worried would never come. I tighten my embrace, as if afraid she might slip away like smoke once again. I keep my kiss light as if to ensure I make the most of it in case she does.
Eventually she pulls away, slowly. Her hands on my chest where she was gently grabbing my shirt. We look at each other, close up, eyes reading something beyond words in one another’s gaze.
A million wordless promises being made, every aspect of our souls on show.
“So…” I mutter softly, “where do we begin?”
She smiles, sultry and knowing, eyes flashing a little of their pride, a little of her typical character returning to her face. She pushes me gently away.
“Follow my car,” she orders, as she turns and walks toward it. I watch her go, feeling like I’m full of fuel and she just lit a match. Knowing that she knows I’m looking at her, that I love looking at her when she turns her back on me. I let the sight of her stir me, turn me on, get me hot, and then when she’s in her car I get into mine.
I follow her all the way back to her place, where it all began. Returning to the scene of a crime we only half finished, only now ready to steal everything we can from this place, this moment, each other.
She’s already reached her house by the time I park behind her car. I get out just in time to catch a glimpse of her stepping inside. She leaves the door open, and something about pursuing her like this is already driving me wild. Only Maeve could understand the need for a man to hunt, and make a game of playing the hunted.
I get inside the house just in time to see her slip off to the side, where the stairs are. After shutting the door behind me I move through the house after her. At the bottom of the stairs I see her at the top, looking back at me as she pulls her heels off and tosses them aside. I glare up at her, take my own shoes off as if participating in some ritual, and start taking the steps as she moves away again.
She hasn’t turned a light on, so her home is only lit by the moon and the streetlights outside, angular shadows cutting shapes across the landing. I pause there, looking about me to guess which room she went in, then see the light emerging from the open bedroom door. As if wanting to tease me further, or simply because she’s impatient, her pencil skirt is tossed out of the door, to lay in the hallway like a sign, an invitation. I stop to step out of my own pants and approach the door, pulling off my shirt as I round the corner.
She’s lying on the bed, in nothing but her panties and bra, arms above her head as if stretching out in the sun, though it’s dark. The moonlight through the shutters casting strips of light that catch every sensual curve and erotic line of her body.
I hold back a moment to appreciate the view as she raises one knee elegantly, ankle over her calf, twisting a little as she languishes in the bed—only Maeve could move the way a dancer can even when she’s lying down.
And beneath my hunter’s lust, my carnal hunger, my infinitely hard desire, there’s another thought, another feeling. Something that makes this more than just sex, more than just attraction, more than the basic physical pleasures of two human beings. It was there before with her, but it was half formed then, a crude version that pained as much as it pleasured. Now, seeing her writhe for me, stepping toward her in the dark, it comes to me in more than words, in a physical
sensation like a slow-working drug.
She’s mine…not just tonight…and not just her body…
Mia was wrong. Finally. I have her, and I want her—only her—more than ever.
I step around to the side of the bed and she rolls over, all perfect ass and a flash of her teeth as she bites her lip in the dark. I move back around to the other side as if I’m staking territory, and she rolls over again, her back arching off the bed as her whole body throbs and stretches and twists, utterly hypnotic in the dark. I’m not sure which of us is teasing who anymore, and I’m not sure I even care.
The twining of her legs is so spellbinding I don’t even notice her reach out and grasp my boxers, pulling them down as she takes me in her hand. She looks up at me, sharp eyes catching moonlight as she watches my expression intently, studying how I clench my teeth, narrow my eyes, tighten my neck muscles, entirely under her control.
She caresses my cock like a weapon, perfect long fingers threatening to be too rough as they clutch and stroke, but never too much, never enough. It’s the sight of her as much as the sensation, seeing her perfect face outlined in the slivers of light as she brushes it against her cheek, nuzzles it appreciatively. Then she extends her tongue and draws it firm and slow up the length, as if urging forth the volcanic heat inside of me. And as I’m still reeling, head spinning and breath heavy, she does it again, except this time her lips linger at the tip, slow and soft and warm and wet, and it feels too good for me to even look, my head thrown back by what she’s doing.
But I don’t want her like this. It’s not enough. As good as it is, I need more. I need to feel her. To taste her. To press my whole body against hers. I grab her arms and lift her before throwing her back onto the bed. She lets out a quick shriek, a laugh like a broken champagne glass, but I’m serious about how much I want her.
I move over her, between her thighs, walking on my fists like an ape as I glare down at her twisting body. She arches her back and undoes her bra, and when I peel it from her like an unveiling, the sudden glimpse of her breasts in a glimmer of light is too much to resist. I dive into her and bite. She lets out a hiss, a moan, the music I like. Somehow she wriggles out of her panties as I taste her skin, and then she kicks them away so that we’re both naked now—more naked than we’ve ever been. Nothing but flesh and sweat, nothing but my hardness and her wetness. No more games, no more teasing, no more emotions and thoughts between us, just two people wanting to mix themselves until they’re one.