by Noir, Roxie
Charlie doesn’t talk any more. She rides me faster, harder, her small breasts bouncing with every stroke, her glorious body on full display. I’ve got a perfect view of my cock disappearing into her over and over again, our bodies meeting roughly, savagely.
I find her clit again with my thumb, circle it slowly, in time with her movement and I’m rewarded by a long, low moan, her walls clamping tighter around me. I clench my teeth and gasp, self-control hanging by a thread.
“Daniel, I’m gonna come again,” she says, her voice a whisper, a moan. “Make me— oh fuck—"
I pull her down hard, slam myself into her as hard as I can. I see stars. The air feels like thorns against my skin.
“—oh fuck oh please Jesus Daniel—”
I do it again and again. I think the ceiling is cracking.
“—so fucking good Charlie—”
“—oh God oh God please, please, please—"
Charlie comes like an earthquake, shaking and trembling and rattling, her head thrown back and her fingers digging into my legs. My vision goes white as she clenches around me but doesn’t stop riding, my thumb still on her clit, taking me in long, hard strokes.
I’m two seconds behind her. I’m a fucking feral animal, grabbing at her, hauling her in with all my might, coming and coming and burying myself in her and wanting to never surface.
I come so hard I forget where I am. I come so hard I forget who I am and only come to with my face in her neck, my arms around her. We’re both panting for breath, both sweaty, hard to tell where I end and she begins.
I lift my face and kiss her. She’s trembling. She pulls back, laughing softly, shakes her arms out, wraps them around me again. After another minute we manage to unwind from each other and Charlie collapses to the couch, limbs akimbo, a droplet of sweat slowly making its way down the hollow between her breasts.
I reach out and trace it with my thumb.
“Next time I’ll turn the AC up,” she says, flinging one leg over mine.
“I think I busted a nut,” I say. “Now I feel like I truly understand that saying.”
“That’s your pillow talk?” she teases, grinning. “We have the best sex of your life and afterward you want to talk about busting nuts?”
I slump further down on the couch, stroking her thigh. It feels like it’s a million degrees in here all of a sudden, and I’m pretty sure I’m also very sweaty.
I also think I might just melt into this couch out of sheer satisfaction, even though I know I’ve got about five minutes before I need to leave so I can be at Rusty’s ballet class at a respectable time.
“Presumptuous,” I say.
“Is it?” she muses.
“I didn’t say it was wrong,” I admit. “Just presumptuous.”
Charlie laughs, puts her arm through mine, leans against my shoulder.
“This is good,” she says. “Whatever it is.”
“I think we’re dating,” I say. “Is this dating?”
“Well, usually there are more dates,” Charlie says.
I look down at her, a smile tugging at her lips.
“This wasn’t a date?”
“This was more of a… sex appointment?” she says, thoughtfully.
“I’m not seeing the difference.”
“If it were a date, you’d have had to find a sitter, and we’d have spent a frustrated hour in a restaurant or something first,” she says.
“So we’re not dating, we’re sex appointing,” I say.
“While pretending that we’re engaged,” Charlie points out.
I glance down. The ring’s there, on her finger, glimmering away. I think she’s gotten used to it, because she isn’t constantly messing with it any more like she used to.
“Well, that was an incredible sex appointment,” I say, and kiss the top of her head. Charlie snorts.
“Do you have any openings on your calendar later this week?” she asks. The twist of her mouth says she’s making fun of me, not that I care.
“Well, Rusty’s got a piano lesson Thursday at five-fifteen,” I say. “Though that’s only forty-five minutes long.”
“We can make it work,” Charlie says instantly.
“And she’s with her mom this weekend,” I say. “Friday night until Sunday night, if you’re available.”
“I could make some time for you,” she teases.
I glance at the clock again. Now I’ve got two minutes before I need to be gone.
“C’mere,” I say, leaning down. I run my hand up the inside of her thigh, her skin soft and warm beneath my fingers. She tilts her head up and my lips find hers, her body splayed on the couch, naked and glorious.
It takes all my self-control to pull away from her, Charlie’s hand still on my face.
“Thanks for lying to a judge,” she murmurs. “It turned out pretty well.”
I kiss her again, quickly, then stand before I can be tempted further.
“You’re welcome,” I say, then sigh. I’m already running a minute late.
I hate running late.
“Be right back,” I say, and head for her bathroom.
“Daniel!” she calls.
“Yeah?”
“Make sure you wash your face so you don’t smell like vagina in front of the dance moms,” Charlie says. “Don’t go giving them ideas.”
I laugh, hand on the doorknob.
“I would never,” I say.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Daniel
Tuesday night, Charlie comes over for dinner, and afterward I clean up while she and Rusty play Go Fish with the deep-sea deck. When I’m done, I lean against the doorway into the living room and just watch them for a while: Rusty constantly trying to get one over on Charlie, Charlie having none of it.
They finish that game. Rusty wins. They play another one, I tell Rusty it’s bedtime, and she negotiates for one more game before she has to go to sleep.
I swear, she’s gonna work for the UN when she grows up.
Finally, she comes down in her pajamas — narwhals leaping through rainbows, a gift from Violet — to say goodnight.
“You brushed your teeth?” I ask, and she nods. “Washed your face?”
She nods again.
“Tell Charlie goodnight, then,” I say, standing.
“I want Charlie to read to me,” she says.
I raise both my eyebrows and look over at Charlie. Rusty’s never requested a bedtime book from anyone but me, but Charlie looks at me and shrugs.
“You have to ask Charlie,” I say.
“Charlie, will you read to me?”
“Sure,” she says. “You’ll have to fill in the backstory, though.”
“That’s okay,” Rusty says, bouncing on her toes. “Good night, Dad.”
“Good night, sweetheart,” I say, giving her a quick kiss before she’s gone like a flash, Charlie alighting the stairs behind her.
“Okay,” I hear Rusty say, slightly breathless. “So Sophia is a princess but she thinks that being a princess is stupid, her parents just want her to marry a prince so instead she goes and finds a dragon and asks if she can work for her…”
And then they’re gone. I sit back on the couch, suddenly unsure what to do for the next fifteen minutes.
* * *
Thursday we have another sex appointment. This one’s even shorter than the last, and we don’t even make it to the couch. Charlie answers the door in a towel, somehow wearing even less than the last time I came over, and within minutes we’re kneeling on the floor and I’ve bent her over the couch while I fuck her hard and fast and deep and she begs me to do it harder, faster, shouting into the couch cushions when she comes.
I can’t get enough of her. I feel like an addict, unable to think about anything but my next fix. Even as I’m going soft inside her, my cock slipping out, I kiss the back of her neck, her shoulder, one hand cupping her breast. I pinch a nipple and she makes a soft noise, her back arching, the perfect globes of her ass against my hips.
I love how responsive she is, how she tells me what she wants, how her body moves under mine, and even though I should be going already I slide my hand between her legs again, her clit between my fingers. I stroke her until she comes again, moaning, bucking backward into me and then when she finishes, I kiss her hard and deep.
“You’re gonna spoil me,” she says, her voice dreamy.
“I’m okay with it,” I tell her.
* * *
Friday morning, Crystal calls. I’m already at work, and I seriously consider not picking it up. I’m going to see her in a few hours when she picks Rusty up for the weekend, I can talk to her then.
But one of us has to be the reasonable, level-headed adult, so I answer.
“Listen, Daniel,” she says. “Can you do me a favor and bring Rusty over at three?”
“No,” I say, managing to keep my voice reasonable.
“Bruce has dinner with the board tonight, and I need to have Rusty over here on the early side so I can get her cleaned up and dressed and everything,” she says with the air of someone explaining some very basic to someone very stupid. “So I really need you to just bring her to—”
“For starters, she’s got school,” I say, already on my feet, pacing back and forth. “And for—”
“It’s May,” Crystal says.
“School goes through mid-June,” I remind Crystal. I’m honestly not sure she knows when Rusty has school.
“Then they’re not doing anything,” she says, like it’s obvious. “Everyone just screws around for the last month anyway.”
I take a deep breath, step out of my office and into the main brewery. We just started our Mountain Hollow Brown yesterday, so it smells like fresh, strange bread right now, and I breathe that scent deep.
“I’m not pulling her out of school early, and I’m not bringing her to your house,” I say, struggling to maintain calm.
Crystal snorts derisively.
“It’s just second grade,” she says. “It’s not important.”
“How would you know?” I ask, patience fraying quickly.
“Because it’s second grade.”
“When was the last time you helped her with her homework?” I ask. “How the hell would you know anything about whether second grade is important?”
“I mean, maybe high school is important,” she says. “Jesus, Daniel, can you do me a favor once?”
I don’t believe in violence, but if Crystal were here, I might strangle her right now.
“No,” I say curtly. “Pick her up at six at my house. See you in a few hours.”
She says something else, but I hang up. If I talk to her anymore I might say something I regret, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she were secretly recording our phone calls.
I’m not pulling Rusty out of school — which she loves — for Crystal’s bullshit. I have no idea what Crystal says about me when Rusty’s with her, but her whole life, I’ve been careful not to say anything bad about Crystal, because no matter what, Crystal’s her mom and Rusty loves her to death.
I worry that someday she won’t. Rusty’s a perceptive, precocious kid, and I worry that it’ll be sooner and not later that she starts asking questions about why she only sees Mom once a month, or why I don’t have any baby pictures of her. Sometimes I lie awake at night, practicing my answers to those questions. I never get them right.
I stuff my phone in my pocket, and head out back of the brewery. It’s a little outside town, on a rural road, so it’s surrounded in the front by farmland and the back by forest.
For a moment I just stand in the gravel parking lot, fuming at Crystal.
Then I throw rocks at the trees until I feel better.
* * *
Crystal finally shows up at 6:30, half an hour after we agreed. When she knocks on my door, looking impatient, I don’t ask why the hell she’s late if she was in such a damn hurry to begin with.
Rusty practically bounces into her mom’s arms. She pats Crystal’s belly and whispers hello to her little sister while Crystal gives me a triumphant look that I can’t interpret.
I try to tell Crystal everything that Rusty’s been doing lately: that she wears long-sleeved pajamas because she kicks all her blankets off; that she doesn’t like to sleep without Astrid, her stuffed wombat; that we’re reading Apprenticed to Dragons and she’s been helping me cook and can tell different pine trees apart thanks to her uncle Levi and sometimes pretends to be Jump Girl and leaps off the back of the couch, onto the cushions she’s piled up.
“Great!” is all Crystal says. “Rusty, want to go to the waterpark this weekend?”
“YEAH!” shrieks Rusty, jumping up and down. I’m pretty sure that Crystal didn’t listen to a word I said.
I get the booster seat out of my car and put it into Crystal’s, since she doesn’t have one of her own and I definitely don’t trust her to install it. While I do that, I can hear her telling Rusty about all the fun they’re going to have this weekend, all the presents that Rusty has at her house, how they’ve got a gallon of ice cream in the freezer.
When it’s time for them to leave, my mom and I give Rusty hugs and kisses, promise to call, and then we stand in the driveway and watch Crystal drive away. Rusty waves all the way down the driveway, until she’s out of sight. My mom puts her arm around me and hugs me to her side.
On one hand, I hate watching Rusty drive away. I’ll miss her every minute she’s gone. The house will feel weird and empty without her.
On the other hand, it’s really nice to get a break once in a while. Particularly this weekend.
“Daniel, I have a confession to make,” my mom says, still side-hugging me, both of us still facing the driveway where Crystal’s car disappeared.
“Is it that you hate Crystal and wish I’d impregnated someone better?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says.
I just put my arm around her and pat her shoulder. She says more or less the same thing to me every time Crystal takes Rusty for a visitation weekend, and I can’t say I disagree.
We stand there for a bit, just my mom and me, still facing the driveway.
“And you’re staying at Charlie’s this weekend?” she asks.
“Right,” I say, suddenly standing up straighter. It doesn’t matter that I’m a grown man with a child. Admitting — however tacitly — to my mom that I have sex is… weird.
“Tell her I said hello,” she says, disengaging with a final back pat. “And don’t come back without calling first.”
“Sure,” I say, turning and following her toward the house so I can get my stuff and leave.
Then I stop in the driveway, my mom still making her way to the house.
“Wait,” I call. “Why?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Charlie
Daniel: Heading over now.
Me: Everything good?
Daniel: Don’t make me talk about Crystal.
Daniel: Can we just talk about what you’re wearing?
Me: What makes you think I’m wearing anything?
I watch my phone screen, waiting for a response. I see him typing, then nothing. Typing, then nothing.
I start laughing to myself. I’m lounging on my couch, half-assedly watching TV but actually thinking about tonight. My room is lit by battery-powered tea light candles that I impulse-bought off the internet last week, because real candles make me nervous that I’ll forget to put them out and burn my apartment down.
Daniel: I’ll be there in ten.
Me: Door’s unlocked, just come inside.
Daniel: My pleasure.
Me: That’s the idea.
Daniel: Don’t distract me, I’m driving eighty miles an hour.
Me: I’m not sorry.
He doesn’t respond, which is good, because that means he’s busy driving.
I get off my couch, get undressed, and hop onto my bed.
* * *
I come twice before either of us says a word. Daniel comes in, lock
s the door behind himself, finds me on my bed, and not ten minutes later I’m on my hands and knees and he’s buried balls-deep, hitting the exact right spot over and over and over again until I fall apart. Twice.
Once we’re finished, we collapse onto my bed, both facedown, on top of my sheets and duvet. Idly, I wonder whether I should have taken the duvet off, since it’s a pain in the ass to wash and it’s too hot to use it anyway.
“Hi,” Daniel finally says, turning his head toward me, his face smashed into a pillow. “How was your day?”
I can’t help but laugh at the polite, mindless small talk in light of what we were doing two minutes ago.
“It was fine,” I say. “Sanded some stuff. Sawed some stuff. You?”
“As good as any day where Crystal’s concerned,” he says. “She wanted me to pull Rusty out of school so I could bring her to the new house because her husband is having some shindig or something.”
I just snort. I don’t think there’s been a single visitation where Crystal hasn’t tried to get Daniel to do something extra for her. He used to say yes more often, until he realized that if he gave her an inch, she’d take two miles.
“You didn’t, did you?” I ask, even though I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
“Of course not,” he scoffs. “There’s probably an ancient secret society devoted to hunting down and killing her kind, I’m not going to help her.”
“When’s the hearing?”
“Two and a half weeks,” he says, and buries his face in the pillow, stretching. The muscles down the back of his entire body bunch and knot so I give him a good, long ogle.
“I should write it down,” I muse, not moving a single muscle.
Daniel just gives me a look.
“Give me your phone,” he says.
“Why?” I say, still not moving.