by Lucy Lambert
“Are you for real?” I replied, “This is the exact wrong time in my life for me to meet someone like you! You’re funny and hot and I think successful but I’m not sure. And that kiss! That kiss! Why now?”
“Serendipity’s a funny thing,” Neil said, then, his smile spreading, “And you think I’m hot?”
“Don’t talk to me about serendipity,” I retorted. If I’d just chosen to go to Serendipity’s with the girls tonight, I wouldn’t be in this mess.
I needed him out of my system so badly.
Just then, my rebellious lock of hair decided now was the perfect time to fall down my forehead, the strands blurry and huge so close to my eyes.
Before I could take care of it myself, Neil swept it back into place with a deft move of one hand. That hand then cupped my cheek. I knew I needed to push it away, but I didn’t.
“We can’t do this,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” Neil replied. Our bodies shifted closer together. My lips started tingling in anticipation of meeting his again.
Scratch that, my whole body started tingling like I’d touched a live wire and couldn’t let go.
The idea came to me then. It was crazy, but I thought it could work.
“Neil?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have something to ask you.”
“Ask away,” he said. We stood so close together that I couldn’t really see anything but him. At some point that I couldn’t recall, his other hand went to the small of my back.
Perhaps around that same unknown point, both of my hands came to rest on his chest. I could feel the strong, steady thump of his heartbeat.
When did this happen?
“Come back with me,” I said, “Back to my place.” It was a crazy idea. But in my experience, the craziest ideas often ended up making the most sense.
He leaned in even closer. Our lips grazed the barest amount that could be considered actual physical contact.
My body again reacted like I grabbed a live wire.
“I’d like that,” he said. Whispered, more like. We stood so close to each other we could whisper, even with the taxis and delivery trucks and vans passing by not 10 feet away on the road.
He hailed one of those cabs for us and I gave the cabbie the address of my apartment building when he leaned over his shoulder and asked where to.
YOU’RE CRAZY.
I kept thinking those two words over and over. The whole cab ride.
I also couldn’t stop thinking about how our thighs touched. Because Neil let me into the cab first, then he came in. Then, for reasons unknown, I scooted over into the middle seat rather than staying on my side.
Then we got to my building, the cab’s brakes squealing when it stopped next to the curb.
“I’ve got it,” Neil said, reaching into his jacket, presumably for his wallet.
“No, you don’t,” I said. I didn’t want him paying for anything. I didn’t want to feel like I owed him anything.
Because after tonight ended, we were through. We had to be through. And you couldn’t be through if there were still loose threads to tug on.
So I paid the cabbie and we went up to my place.
My heart did its best to smash my ribs into little bits, and I thanked my landlord silently for having that elevator installed so we didn’t have to climb the stairs.
I lived up on the fifth floor. Room 505. Door on the left side of the hall, near the end. The hallway carpet was an old maroon fading to a sort of rusty brown. The wallpaper, plain textured cream-colored stuff, had been installed with the elevator.
I noticed all these details while I fumbled out my keys. I heard the tumblers in the lock click when I slid the key home.
You’re crazy.
Then: But I need this. I want this. I want him. It’s just one night.
Something tried to tell me it was never just one night. I ignored it while I cranked the key over and then put my shoulder to the door to open it.
Light from the hallway spilled into my apartment.
“So, this is it...” I said.
We stepped inside. I closed the door. His arms swept themselves around me, pulled me close to him so that I could see nothing but that handsome face of his.
Both my hands ended up on his chest. I could feel the thump-thump of his heart through his shirt.
He smelled good. Clean. A hint of cologne. Just enough to arouse the senses rather than overwhelm them like so many other men chose to do.
“Don’t... don’t you want the grand tour?” I said. Whispered, more like. We barely had to whisper to hear each other, we were that close.
“You’re trembling,” he said.
“Am I?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Not with him so close.
“Yes,” he said.
I started to say something else. I think I meant to ask again if he wanted that tour.
He stopped that line of questioning. He put his mouth to mine again.
The kiss started light at first. Almost chaste. Lips only. Then our lips parted and our tongues entered the affair.
I grabbed handfuls of his shirt. His hands slid down lower than my back and grabbed handfuls of me.
Then his mouth slid off mine. His lips trailed hot down my cheek, to my neck, back up to the lobe of my ear.
I didn’t know someone’s mouth could be so hot. So feverish.
I was wrong. There was no need for some grand tour of my apartment. There was really only one room I needed to show him.
I pushed away from him. He resisted at first, but his grip loosened and his arms fell away. I grabbed one of those hands and led him down the short entrance hall of my apartment.
We passed the dark doorway to my kitchen, the similarly shadowed entrance to my small excuse for a living room.
Electric tingles of desire shot up my spine, ran through my stomach, with each footstep.
Just before I reached out to grab the knob of my bedroom door I hesitated.
Did I remember to make the bed? Did I shove that laundry into the hamper or is it still thrown haphazardly into the corner?
It had been a while since I did anything like this.
Neil decided for me. He reached out and grasped the knob as well, his fingers overlapping mine. We turned it together.
I didn’t get the chance to see if the bed was made or not.
He picked me up. Literally swept me off my feet. I gasped, flung both my arms around his shoulders.
He carried me over to the bed and set me down on it.
“Sorry,” I said, “I don’t really have guys over that often...”
“Me neither,” he said. Even in the dark I saw him grin. We both laughed.
He cut off the laugh with another kiss. His lips trailed down my throat again. This late in the day, he had some stubble. It prickled against the sensitive skin of my neck in the most delightful way.
His thigh moved between my legs. The pressure was nice. Almost of its own accord, my body shifted, wanted to increase that nice pressure. My skirt rode up my hips.
He pulled the tails of my blouse up out of my skirt. Then his fingers found that slash of bared flesh between skirt and blouse.
I started breathing heavily. This was sensory overload, too much to handle.
Then he started unbuttoning my blouse, moving from top to bottom. Each time he popped a button through, my breath caught in my throat.
When he finished, he kissed the soft and sensitive patch of skin between my breasts. Even in the darkness, I could see his eyes on me.
The skin of my stomach bunched and pebbled into tight goosebumps when he trailed his lips down it.
I laughed, “That’s no fair!”
“When did I say I was going to be fair?”
My skirt zipped along the side. With it all bunched up the way it was, Neil had to straighten it out before he could guide the zipper along its path.
He grabbed handfuls of the skirt and pulled it off sl
owly so that his fingernails scratched lightly along my outer thighs.
More goosebumps formed in his wake. At this rate I’d be nothing but goosebumps in no time at all.
“What are you going to do to me?” I said between heavy breaths.
I decided to let everything go. To really enjoy myself that night. After all, it was going to be the last time I saw Neil T from my speed dating adventure.
Might as well make it a good last time.
“Well,” he said, “I thought I’d start at the bottom and work my way up.”
“What?” I said.
Rather than answer, he grinned at me. Then he stripped off his jacket and dropped it on the floor. He did the same with his shirt, pulling it out of his slacks.
Even in the darkness of my bedroom I could see his well-muscled torso, from his broad shoulders to the V-shape of his abdominals.
He shifted down. Then he kissed my calf, right above my ankle, on one leg, then the other.
His lips traced a fiery path up my left leg, coming to rest where my inner thigh met the rest of my body.
My breathing became ragged. My fingers bunched up handfuls of the comforter.
He lingered in that spot, in that crease of flesh. His breath tickled at my skin. Then his mouth shifted over to the same spot on the other side. That fold of skin between my thigh and the rest of me.
“That’s nice,” I said. I wasn’t certain I could handle anymore. Handle what I thought he intended to do.
No guy had done anything like that since, well, since I broke up with my last boyfriend.
Then his lips shifted again. They glided over the thin bit of cotton still covering me. When I felt that pressure I shivered in response.
His mouth kept moving up, past the elastic waistband. Up over my stomach, back between my breasts. He kissed the base of my throat again, then my chin.
Our mouths touched for the barest moment. My eyes hooded. I got the sense of him holding himself over me.
Then he went down again. The skin between my breasts, then over my stomach knitted into goosebumps when his lips grazed over them.
This time, he grabbed the waistband of my panties and pulled them down, flicking them away from my ankles.
This time his mouth found nothing but my bared flesh, not even the thin layer of cotton to protect me.
Not that I wanted any protection. Not after he got started.
I felt the pressure of his tongue and the texture of it against me. His arms swept under my thighs, his hands ending on my stomach. I grabbed his hands and squeezed them.
He was relentless. Part of me, a dwindling part, wondered how he managed to never have to come up for air.
The rest of me disappeared inside the widening and increasing pressure of the pleasure building inside of my body.
My hips lifted up off the bed, my body seeking more of that intense pressure.
And then it snapped inside of me. My head pushed back into the mattress. My mouth opened, but no sound came out right away.
My hands gripped his harder. My hips pushed higher.
Neil didn’t stop. Not until my hips settled back on the warm softness of the comforter and I lay there panting before him.
I felt like a wet spaghetti noodle. I could feel the beating pulse of my heart in my fingertips and toes. At some point in the last few minutes a fine dew of sweat had started, spritzed over most of my body.
“That was... that was...” I said, meaning to add an incredible to the end of that sentiment, but my breath always ran out first.
“It’s not over, yet,” Neil said.
I sat up, my legs dangling off the foot of my bed. Neil stood between my knees. I undid his belt and whipped it out of its loops. I popped out the button, pulled down the zipper, then I freed him.
Before I could do anything more he pushed me back down by my shoulders, pinning me beneath him.
We kissed, hard. I could feel the heat of him on me. I wanted that heat inside of me, wanted him to fill me. I wanted it more than I wanted anything else. Wanted it more than I’d ever wanted it before.
Maybe because I knew I’d never get it, get him, again.
“In the nightstand,” I whispered to him. He didn’t ask me what I meant.
We parted long enough for him to find what was in there. I watched with greedy eyes while he rolled it on.
Then he was on me again.
Then he was inside of me, that heat pushing deep. So deep.
My body responded. My legs wrapped around him. Little trembles took me. Again my hands quested out, grabbing up fistfuls of soft comforter.
Neil saw. He reached out and took my hands, threaded his fingers into mine. He pinned them against the mattress just like he had the rest of me pinned down.
I liked that sense of being totally at his will. That he could do anything he wanted to me.
And he did.
Again, Neil was relentless. His pace never slacked.
When I screamed through gritted teeth at him to go harder, faster, he went harder and faster.
When my climax gripped me in its throes, every muscle in my body going rigid and slack, he rode it like he stole it.
At the end we came together. He wrapped his arms around me and held me as tightly as I held him, both of us gripped in that most basic response.
I held him like that for a long time, wanting that moment to linger. Wanting to feel the sense of his weight on me, wanting to remember the way he smelled, the way the dew of his sweat glistened on him.
Finally I did let him roll off me, laying on his back beside me on the bed.
Chapter 6
NEIL
Drained.
That was the best, the only word to describe how Rachel left me feeling.
Satisfied was a close second.
I reached out, found her hand with mine. She had small, delicate hands and I liked the way they felt.
When was the last time it felt that good to be with a woman?
I didn’t know. I wasn’t certain it ever had. Because Rachel was so different from the women I was normally with.
I took in as deep a breath as my lungs would allow, held it, then let it out slowly. Rachel’s sheets and comforter were in a chaotic tangle at the foot of the bed, partially wrapped around our legs.
As the haze of pleasure over my senses retreated, I could hear the distant noises of the city intruding again. Car horns, the roar of engines. Shouted conversations.
I wanted this moment to linger longer. And I looked forward to holding Rachel all night long.
My eyelids, so heavy, drifted shut. I felt my breathing slow.
Then I felt Rachel shift her weight on the bed, moving onto her side. One of those small and lovely hands touched my chest. My eyes opened. I smiled when I saw the way her hair hung around her face while she looked down at me.
“Hey,” I said.
Rachel met my eyes, then glanced away. She took her hand away as well.
“You can’t stay,” she said.
I sat up. Her headboard was cool against my bare back. “Oh?”
“Yeah...” Rachel said. She shifted so that her legs hung off the side of her bed and her back was to me. She looked over her shoulder at me. “This has to be a onetime thing. I’m just... I’m at this point in my life, in my career, really, where I really, really don’t need any sort of personal distraction.”
“Personal distraction? That’s what you think this is?” I said.
“That’s all that it can be,” she replied. She reached under a lampshade and turned a low wattage bulb on, casting a pool of light out around it that softened the shadows of the bedroom.
So this is what that feels like, I thought. I leaned my head back against the plaster wall behind the headboard and rubbed at my eyes, unable to stop from smiling a little.
It wasn’t a happy smile. Rather, a sardonic, mirthless one.
“Something funny?” Rachel asked.
“Usually I’m the one who says something like
that after something like this,” I answered.
“So you understand, then?” she said.
“Understand? Yeah.” Accept? Hell no.
“Because if you stay I know it will turn into something else. Something I can’t handle. Please don’t stay.”
I thought I caught a hint of, But you can. You can stay. I won’t stop you.
I should have stayed.
I knew that as soon as I, once again fully dressed, set foot outside the door of her apartment. She closed it behind me before I could say anything else. The deadbolt shot into place, the sound the period at the end of the sentence describing our relationship.
I thought about banging on the door, demanding she let me back in. But I knew that wouldn’t work. Would just strengthen her resolve.
I left.
I should have stayed.
IT WAS IN A SORT OF daze that I made my way down to the sidewalk. Almost to the sidewalk, anyway.
“You look a little lost.”
I turned towards the voice. She stood by the checkerboard wall of mail boxes, a canvas grocery bag hanging off one shoulder. The thin neck of a bottle of wine, the screw-off kind, poked out from the top of that bag. She was a shorter woman with curly black hair that fell to her shoulders.
“Not physically,” I said, “Only in all the other ways that matter.”
I wondered then if there wasn’t something I could say to Rachel through her door that might get me back inside.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d invested in her in the short time we knew each other. I’d let my guard down around her. And she let hers down around me.
That’s the problem, I knew. She’d said as much. But there had to be some way to make her see that sometimes it was okay to let your guard down. That not all deviations from the path that she’d laid out for herself were bad.
“Maybe,” the dark-haired woman said, “I can help you find yourself in all those other ways again.”
I recognized that tone in her voice. When I looked at her, I also recognized that look on her face. The way she looked me up and down.
She wanted me.
It wasn’t a question. Merely an observation. One I’d been able to make about women for a long time.