by Noir, Roxie
He pulls them out, grabs my hip, pushes me harder against the bars and I hang onto his shoulders, lift my hips. I kiss him again, nearly out of my mind with need as the tip of his cock finds my clit, parts my lips.
“Charlie,” he whispers. “No takebacks?”
I can’t help but smile.
“No takebacks,” I whisper, and he eases into me.
My body feels like someone flips a circuit breaker, all the lights suddenly ablaze.
“Oh fuck,” I whisper, one hand in his hair, clutching his face close to mine.
He stops.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I whisper, and he moves again, sinking into me, pulling back, pushing me against the bars, going deep and hard and slow and leaving me breathless. “Oh fuck, Daniel, I’m fine, I’m fine.”
He grabs me, pulls me down, kisses me hard.
“Fine?” he asks mid-kiss, his voice a growl.
“It’s good,” I manage to get out, my voice barely working as he hilts himself again, so deep it makes my toes curl.
“It is,” he says, and then we stop talking. We move together like two parts of the same machine, like we were designed with each other in mind. It’s better than fine, better than good, better than great.
I can’t keep my mouth off his. I can’t stop whispering his name, usually with some version of oh fuck thrown in there. I keep telling him not to stop, chanting it over and over even though I know he won’t.
He’s whispering my name back, his face buried in my neck, his lips on mine as we hold onto each other, entangled, still trying to get more and more and more. The wave inside me crests, higher and higher, the feeling that I’m floating, flying.
I grab the top rail on his headboard, the cool metal anchoring me to reality as he hits that spot over and over again, my whole body attuned to his like a radio antenna.
“Daniel,” I whimper. “Fuck, Daniel—”
He claps his hand over my mouth just in time, because a second later I explode, a chain reaction that rattles through my body, all the way to my fingers and toes, a cataclysm from somewhere deep within. I clench my teeth against the noise, but it escapes me anyway, bubbling up unbidden.
“Holy shit, Charlie,” Daniel gasps, his hand still over my mouth, as he thrusts so hard I see stars. “Holy fucking shit—”
I grab his shoulder, tighten my legs around him, draw him in as if to say come inside me please god come inside me but he’s already there, holding me so tight I can barely breathe, rocking like the aftershock of an earthquake, every muscle in his body tense and rigid.
It’s beautiful. It’s mesmerizing. I want to make him come a thousand times. I want to feel every single one just like this, the two of us together, so close that I can feel every single jolt as it travels through his body.
He finishes but he doesn’t stop. He kisses my neck, bites my earlobe, takes his hand off my mouth, replaces it with his own. I can’t stop touching him. I can’t stop needing him, wanting his body to still be on mine, craving this closeness, this oneness.
He bites my lower lip. He pinches a nipple, rolls it between his fingers, my body jolting at the sensation and I laugh, softly.
“You’re addictive,” he murmurs, then pinches it again and I gasp lightly. “See?”
“Is that bad?” I whisper.
He slides his hand down my torso, and I realize I’m damp with sweat and so is he as he pulls out of me carefully.
“Fuck no,” he says, and before I know it his thumb is on my clit, rubbing me slowly, firmly.
I lean my head back against the brass bars. My breathing gets shallow, my legs still splayed around his waist, my hand still on the top bar.
It doesn’t take long. Neither of us says a word as he watches me as I come apart for the second time in three minutes, exploding again, this time with my own fist jammed against my mouth. I’m gasping when I finish, eyes closed, one hand in Daniel’s hair because I can’t stop touching him.
He kisses my neck. I’m still breathing hard, fingers and toes clenched, and as he kisses me again, I unfurl, breathe deep, his hands on my legs, waist, his arms around me, his mouth on mine.
We untangle, kiss again, untangle some more. Finally, we’re sitting up in his bed, backs against the brass bars of the headboard, his arm around me and his other hand in mine, my head against his shoulder.
“Are we different now?” I murmur.
I feel him press his lips against my hair, keep them there for a long moment.
“Not in the ways that matter,” he finally says.
Chapter Nineteen
Daniel
“So it doesn’t matter that now I’ve seen you naked?” Charlie says, keeping her voice low, turning her head toward me, teasing.
“You didn’t just see me naked,” I say, still talking half into her hair. “You’ve experienced me naked.”
“The Naked Daniel Experience sounds like a band,” she says. “They’d play psychedelic rock and they wouldn’t be very good.”
“Unlike the actual experience,” I say, and she laughs, tilts her head back over my shoulder so she’s facing me.
“Right,” she says, and her eyes search my face.
And then, simply: “That was good.”
Good isn’t a big word or a fancy word, but right now, Charlie’s eyes looking into mine in the dark afterglow, it feels like it encompasses the universe. I know exactly what she means, and I know what she’s trying to say, and yes, yes, yes to all of it.
“It was really good,” I agree.
Charlie curls into me even more, her face against my shoulder, her hair tickling my neck. She rubs back and forth once, twice, adjusts, rubs her face on me again.
“What are you doing?” I finally ask, and she stops.
Then she looks at me.
“My forehead itched,” she says.
She’s trying not to laugh.
“You’ve got hands,” I point out, also trying not to laugh.
“They’re far away.”
“They’re literally attached to you.”
Now she’s laughing, biting her lips, still trying to quell it.
“I didn’t think you’d notice.”
“You thought I wouldn’t notice you rubbing on me like a cat?”
“Sometimes you don’t notice things,” she laughs.
“Is this how it’s gonna be now?” I tease. “We have sex and suddenly you get super weird?”
“You think that’s super weird?” Charlie says. “I’ll show you super weird.”
“You don’t have — are you biting me?”
She’s got her teeth on my shoulder, not hard enough to hurt.
“Grrr?”
“Oh, my God,” I mutter, laughing. “I’ve unleashed a psychopath with the power of my dick.”
That gets a snort-laugh out of her, her shoulder shaking under my arm.
“Sorry,” she finally murmurs, and kisses the spot she just bit, still laughing.
“If I go get rid of this condom can you be normal for three minutes?” I tease.
“One way to find out.”
I kiss the top of her head again and then pull myself away from her and throw on pajama pants.
* * *
“Shit.”
I come awake all at once, already up on one elbow, always primed for middle-of-the-night problems.
“What?”
“I fell asleep,” Charlie says, pushing herself to sitting, facing away from me on the edge of the bed. She’s naked, her wild hair a halo around her head, both hands already in it. “Fuck. Shit.”
I roll over enough to see my alarm clock glowing green on my bedside table: 5:45 a.m.
“I gotta go,” Charlie’s already saying, whispering at me in the quarter-light of early morning. “Shit, I didn’t mean to fall asleep, I just meant to stay a little while…”
She bends down, comes up with her bra, wraps it around herself. Somehow, she does the clasps behind her own back, without looki
ng. I’m impressed.
I toss off the sheets, get up myself, get dressed as Charlie tosses the purple dress back over her head.
“Where’s my underwear?” she whispers.
“Floor?”
I pull on boxers, pants.
“I can’t find it.”
“It didn’t disappear into a wormhole.”
I open a drawer, grab the first t-shirt inside.
“Fuck it, I’ll grab it later,” she hisses. “I gotta go.”
I pull the shirt on, my body still half a step ahead of my brain.
“You good?” she whispers, hand on my doorknob.
“No,” I say. She frowns at me, but I cross the room, bend down, kiss her. We’re both still foggy with sleep, both rushed, slightly rattled but we kiss slowly, deeply, softly.
“We still haven’t talked,” she murmurs when it ends.
“We talked for like two hours last night,” I point out.
“I mean about us,” she says. “Not about how big a rubber duck would need to be before it doesn’t float anymore.”
“I still think any size would float.”
“But you couldn’t make it out of rubber, at some point it would collapse in on itself, and — no. We’re not having this conversation again,” she says.
I lean forward and steal another kiss. She’s soft and warm in the morning, yielding. I never knew that before. I like it.
“All right, get outta here,” I whisper. “Before Rusty wakes up.”
Charlie opens the door silently, peeks out into the hallway. All clear. We both tread downstairs lightly, she grabs her phone and purse from where she left them last night, and we step onto the front porch, the cool morning air raising goosebumps on my arms.
Then we both stop short at the same time.
“Fuck,” hisses Charlie, right as the same realization hits me.
I gave her a ride here yesterday. Her car’s still at her apartment.
“Crap,” she says.
“It’s okay,” I say, pushing a hand through my hair, trying to think. Rusty’s still asleep upstairs, so we’ve got time, but probably not all that much. “I’ll just…”
I glance back at the house, and for precisely one second I consider just giving Charlie a ride home right now, before Rusty wakes up. Chances are, she’ll never know she was home alone.
But then I imagine what would happen if she woke up and I wasn’t there, and I wipe that possibility from my mind.
“Look, we’re engaged, remember?” I say. “We’ll just wait for her to wake up and then we’ll take you home.”
She’s already shaking her head.
“Rusty thinks it’s fake,” she says.
“We’re going to tell her, aren’t we?”
“Not like this,” Charlie says, urgently. “She can’t just wake up with me here wearing the same outfit as yesterday with no underwear on—”
“You didn’t find it?”
“It’s there somewhere, I was in a hurry, but Daniel, we can’t just spring this on her.”
“She doesn’t have to know about the underwear.”
Charlie just gives me a look.
“Sorry,” I say.
“We need to at least plan how to tell Rusty,” she says. “We can’t just be like, hey, Charlie’s banging your dad now, by the way has anyone told you what sex is yet? Well, they did it while you were asleep.”
“I don’t think I’d go about it that way, but I see your point,” I say.
“I’m calling Elizabeth,” she says, already scrolling through her phone. “She’s a teacher, she’s probably awake right now. And if she’s not she has to forgive me.”
Charlie holds her phone to her ear and waits. And waits.
“I got her voicemail,” she says, and dials again.
Same result. Charlie makes a face, goes to dial her phone again, but I shake my head.
“Levi’s awake,” I say, pulling mine out.
Charlie looks doubtful for a moment, but then she nods.
He answers on the second ring. I keep it short and simply ask him if he can swing by the house and give Charlie a ride home.
“A ride home from Mom’s house?” he asks, his gruff voice full of unasked questions.
“Right,” I say.
There’s a moment of quiet, and I can practically hear him stroking his beard.
“Be there in twenty,” he says, and hangs up.
“Twenty minutes,” I tell Charlie, and she exhales. “You want coffee?”
Chapter Twenty
Charlie
When Levi pulls up in the driveway, Daniel and I are sitting outside on the porch steps, coffee in hand, talking about nothing, watching the sunlight slowly soak through the forest that surrounds the house.
I’m on my feet before Levi’s truck comes to a stop. Daniel takes my coffee mug. Levi’s truck stops. He gets out.
Daniel leans down and kisses me. I put one hand on his shoulder without thinking, a brief, chaste kiss, and then it’s over.
“Ballet Monday?” he says.
“Sounds good,” I say, and I walk toward Levi’s truck, manage to climb into the passenger side without flashing him.
“Thanks for the ride,” I say as soon as we’re both inside, seatbelts buckled. “I know it’s early, I just totally forgot that I didn’t have my car here, and we didn’t want to wake Rusty up, you know?”
Levi puts the truck into gear, and I swear there’s a quick, sneaky smile hiding under his beard.
“Naturally,” he says. “I imagine she’d have a lot of questions.”
I steal a quick glance over at Daniel’s oldest brother. Just because he tends to be the quietest, the last one to typically get involved in family arguments, and the least likely to interfere, doesn’t mean he’s the least nosy.
There’s a part of me convinced that Levi somehow knows everyone’s secrets, all the time, he just doesn’t say anything.
“Are you trying to tell me you’ve got questions?” I say, leaning back in the seat, my arm resting on the window ledge.
He’s giving me a ride home at sunrise. I probably owe him some answers. I think I can handle that. This isn’t really a secret, right? We’re supposed to be engaged, after all, though I think Levi is one of the ones who knows it’s a ruse.
Shit, I’m gonna need a flow chart to keep track of who knows what.
“I’m probably the only person right now who hasn’t got any questions at all,” he says, downshifting to go around a sharp turn. “Unlike Rusty, I know what it means when a woman is still at a man’s house at six o’clock in the morning.”
“Right,” I say. “So… how are the trees?”
The answer to that question is surprisingly complex and interesting. Most of the trees are well. Some of the trees are in trouble. He’s trying to convince the Forest Service to do slightly more prescribed burns this year than normal, to clear out the brush, and just as I ask how many acres they usually burn, my phone rings. It’s my sister.
“Sorry, one sec,” I tell Levi. “Hey, Betsy.”
“What happened?” she asks.
“I’m fine, it’s nothing,” I tell her.
“You called me at five-fifty in the morning,” she says. “That’s not a nothing time, Chuck.”
“Is that Elizabeth?” Levi asks.
“Is that Daniel?” Elizabeth asks.
I nod at Levi.
“It’s Levi,” I tell Elizabeth.
The line goes dead silent for at least five full seconds.
“It’s Levi?” she asks.
I’ve never heard my sister sound more astonished. I just start laughing.
“Surprise!” I say.
“What?” she hisses into the phone. Another silence.
Then: “Charlotte Alexandra, are you fucking with me?”
“Of course not,” I say. “It’s Levi. It’s six in the morning and I am currently with one Levi Loveless. Hand to God, Betsy.”
Levi glances over at me, one eyeb
row raised, an entertained half-smile on his face.
“Tell her I say hi,” he says.
“Levi says hi,” I tell Elizabeth.
“You’re definitely fucking with me,” she says.
“Elizabeth, she’s fucking with you,” Levi says, raising his voice slightly. “I am merely your sister’s conveyance. Our relationship is platonic.”
“He’s giving me a ride home from Daniel’s,” I say, still laughing. “That’s why I called you, but your phone went to voicemail.”
Next to me, Levi is just shaking his head.
“I see,” Elizabeth says. “Just so I’ve got everything straight, you were at Daniel’s at five-forty-five this morning?”
“Technically, it’s his mom’s—”
“Charles.”
“Yes.”
“I see. You want to get breakfast in an hour? Mountain Grind?”
“Sure,” I say. After a few more exchanges, we hang up, and I look over at Levi.
“Sorry for involving you in that,” I say. “Sometimes I can’t help but mess with her, she can be such a know-it-all.”
There’s that slight smile again as the truck comes to a stop and Levi looks left, then right.
“Oh, I understand completely,” he says. “You know my family. Some of them rather well.”
I blush, laugh, and change the subject.
* * *
When we get to my house, Levi insists on walking me to my door. I accept, because I’ve learned it’s pointless to argue with a Loveless man on matters of chivalry.
I make some more coffee, shower as fast as I can, put on new clothes, and head back out to the Mountain Grind. It’s only about six blocks away, so I walk, but I’m somehow still ten minutes late.
Elizabeth’s sitting by the window, messing with her phone, two cups of coffee in front of her, a plastic number eleven in a stand. She doesn’t say anything as I sit, just pushes one of the cups forward.