He + She

by Michelle Warren

  I moan with pleasure, or maybe in release for finally being in this moment. This beautiful person tumbled into my life and I have no idea why, but there must be a reason. He’s been the clarity I’ve needed and I know that when I give myself to him, he will treat my gift with respect, with care, in the same way he’s treated me, even though he doesn’t even know my name.

  Hew drops to his knees and breathes hot air into my sex as he twists his fingers into my Fridays, dragging them over my thighs until they release their wet grip and drop to the floor.

  When the heat from his mouth swirls between my legs, my eyes roll back in my head and I grasp the thick hair of his head. As I massage the strands between my fingers, he brushes the soft stubble on his face on either thigh, and I feel myself opening for him on so many levels.

  He stands and meets my gaze, breathing that same sweet heat all over my face, my neck, and my entire body clenches as he kisses me everywhere. His hands drift to my ass, where he effortlessly lifts and settles me on top of the low dresser. I’m tilted back against the wall, completely focused on Hew’s sexiness as he seduces me with every move he makes. He slips a single fingertip under the strap of my wet bra, where he rubs the silk up and down, and then slowly drags it off my shoulder. He leans close, and the skin where the strap used to sit receives one soft, wet kiss. The other side receives the same attention, but that shoulder receives two kisses. When he skims his hands around my back and releases the clasp, he dives in for three sensual kisses at my collarbone. I arch my chest toward him, enjoying all the sensual attention.

  Hew is worshipping me, building me up slowly, taking his time. His lips meander down my body, lingering over sensitive parts. He cups one breast, and his teeth grazes over my hard nipple. His strong hands palm the outline of my hips, my thighs, my stomach, like he’s shaping each curve of my body out of soft clay.

  At each new spot, tingles race over my sensitive skin, awakening an animalistic craving that causes my hips to buck to be as close to him as possible. But there’s only one spot I need him to touch more than anything else, and as he works his way down, he finally does what I’m dying for him to. He touches the throbbing area with his thumb, drawing slow, languid circles, intensifying my lust. My legs spread, inviting him as my head falls to the side and I breathe heavily, threading my fingers through his hair, guiding him. As he dips down, his hot breath and tongue join the party, though he needs no direction. Each stroke is focused and rhythmic. My body churns beneath him, followed by a drawn-out chorus of primal moans, climaxing as he orally drives me into absolute delirium.

  He barely allows me to recover before rolling on a condom and taking me again, filling me completely and fusing us together. My body clenches, legs locked around his torso, begging him to pull closer and deeper. He hasn’t even begun to move inside me yet, and I think I may explode if he doesn’t move right now.

  “Please, Hew,” I purr, wanting him to begin the wild friction, but he already knows what I need. He picks me up again with ease and gently lays me on the edge of the bed. With me supported, he stands on the floor, deep within me, then pulls away slowly. The motion causes my breath to release but as he plunges in, I suck in a sigh of bliss as our bodies mold to each other in slow, steady, undulating movements.

  When he presses his thumb against that spot again, gently working me in two ways, I come undone, heart fluttering, heat activating every nerve. His touch builds the intense pressure inside, making me greedy for more. I lift up to tug on his hips, forcing him to move faster as I moan and pant to our beautiful rhythm. The more I constrict, the more tension compounds. My body tightens and muscles threaten to rip at the moment I climax again. Pleasure pulses from my orgasm, sending him over the edge, too. In a waterfall of shuddering movements, he fills me with warmth and love.

  I reach for his face as his glittering eyes watch me, and he kisses my palm. In this moment, I realize we’re finally sharing the most truthful thing that two people can share, and I think he feels it, too.

  Chapter 39

  He

  We’re lying in bed, tangled in the sheets, recovering. Shea is draped over my chest, drawing hearts on my skin with her fingertip.

  “There’s no place I’d rather be right now,” she whispers, and I understand exactly what she means.

  “In this moment I feel like a good person with the right person,” I tell her. All the bad in my life led me to her, which makes me think that I can live with the past if she is my future.

  She readjusts on top of me so that her beautiful naked body is pressed against me and kisses her sweet lips to mine. When I grip the back of her neck, her wild hair falls forward around me, and I feel complete.

  But it doesn’t last long; she becomes distracted by the chatter in the hallway outside our room and pulls away. A door opens and closes. The TV pops on in the room next door. We can hear the light murmur. Our crappy neighbors have returned.

  “Are you ready to learn your second lesson in revenge?” she asks with a glint of mischief in her eyes. With our lovemaking, I’ve already forgotten about the plan to get back at them.

  “What’d you have in mind?” I ask as I look up at her.

  She lifts herself up and leans in, placing another kiss on my lips.

  “Round two?” I offer, and slide my arms around her impossibly tiny waist, gripping her curvy hips as she sweeps her tongue in my mouth.

  “Follow my lead,” she says, dragging her naked body seductively across my chest. She presses up on her hands and stands above me, looking down. I’m not sure what’s she’s doing, but it sends my mind racing. I flash her an amused expression.

  “What are you up to, Miss Whatever-your-name-is?” I grab each of her ankles and slide my palms around her silky legs.

  In response, she bangs the wall with the palm of her hand and at the same time yells, “Ahh!” She tilts her head back and moans loudly with pleasure, then looks down and smiles at me.

  “You wouldn’t.” I’m horrified and intrigued all at once.

  “Oh, yes!” She jumps on the bed and my hands release. She bangs and moans again, but this time with more fervor.

  I can’t believe what I’m about to do. I look up at Shea, at her mouth open and moaning with self-induced, fabricated sexual pleasure, and I laugh to myself. This girl is totally insane, and I can’t help loving everything about her.

  I sit up and stand next to her, balancing myself. Once there, we bounce on the mattress together, moan together, and bang on the walls together. But we do it right, starting slow to create realism, and then progress into a natural rhythm that after several minutes turns into a loud symphony of heavy breathing and lustful ecstasy.

  Shea channels her best Meg Ryan. “Yes, yes, yes!” She growls from the back of her throat. And I use the standard, “Oh God! Right there! Yeah, baby!” We build ourselves up into a heightened frenzy and finally when our moaning, banging, and screaming meld together in a flurry of sexual chaos, we fake climax together. It’s as exhilarating and exhausting and it has totally turned me on, more than ready for the real thing again.

  I have a sneaking suspicion that we won’t hear from our neighbors again anytime soon. I drop to my butt and bounce on the bed. Shea does the same, but when she does, she bounces off the side and rolls over the edge, hitting the floor and laughing. I roll over the side, following her, landing nearby. “One little monkey jumps in bed. She rolled out and broke her head.”

  “Ha!” She laughs, still out of breath, cheeks red from exertion, and she’s beautiful. “You have no idea.”

  “I think that was the best pseudo sex I ever had,” I joke. It’s true but I want more, and I don’t want to stop there; I want to make everyone in this hotel hear us. Make them all jealous.

  “We did it.” She raises her hand to me for a high five.

  “Seems weird to high-five after an orgasm of that magnitude.” I slap her hand with mine and grasp it, bringing it to my lips for a kiss, hoping to transition the moment into somethi
ng more.

  “What would you suggest?” Shea rolls on her side and rests her head on her hand, smirking with those bitable lips.

  “Real sex,” I say, and she complies.

  Chapter 40

  She

  As I brush out my wet hair after a shower with Hew, he steps up behind me, wrapping his long arms around my waist. “I think we’re running late for our date at the party.” He kisses my neck.

  “I don’t know if I want to go now. I don’t really have anything nice to wear, anyway,” I say, frowning at the thought of being at that nice party in cutoffs. They’d throw us out in seconds.

  “I can fix that.”

  “You can?” I turn to Hew with a puzzled look.

  “Wait here.”

  Hew quickly slides his pants on, shrugs into a T-shirt, grabs his wallet and key, and right before he runs out the door, he says, “Please don’t go anywhere.”

  He races out of the room and I have no idea where. I have no intention of leaving him. How can I when I feel this way? When he makes me believe that I can fight my demons and live in our perfect world together?

  When he returns thirty minutes later, I’m lying on the bed with blown-dry hair, still naked but wrapped in a towel. He shuts the room door and places a large white bag on the bed.

  “I need you to stand,” he says.

  I slide over the duvet and stand.

  “Do you trust me?” he asks.

  “Yes.” How can I answer anything else when he has trusted me from the beginning, even when I asked him to lunch without telling him my real name. When he showed me his favorite places, told me his secret dreams, and we created an entire world of make-believe together. He never questioned me and I never questioned him. Trust is the one thing we’ve had since the beginning.

  “Drop your towel.”

  I do it without hesitation. It falls to the floor around my feet, revealing all of me to him.

  With a dropped jaw, Hew looks me over. Even after today, after he’s seen all of me, I blush as he takes his time. “Shea, you’re absolutely stunning.” It takes some time, but he finally breaks his gaze and digs into his bag. First he removes a pair of new baby-blue lace panties. He rips the tags off with his teeth and I laugh.

  “You animal.”

  He roars playfully and drops to his knees. He places the panties on the floor and I step into them. Slowly he drags them up my legs, leaving a trail of goose bumps behind them. When he pushes the panties in place, snug on my hips, he lodges each hand on my back, pulling himself to my waist. There, starting from one hip bone, he drags his wet lips all the way to the other, kissing and caressing. I thread my fingers through his hair, massaging his head as I tilt my head back and moan with pleasure, slipping into ecstasy at being near him this way. He grips me tighter, forcing me to feel every movement of his face on my body.

  When he releases me and turns back to the bag, I can’t wait for him to return. This time he does with a matching bra. I have no idea how he knows my bra size, but when he stands and slowly drags the straps over my arms, little hairs stand at attention, and heat races up my limbs. Hew touching me is sexy. But somehow, Hew dressing me is even sexier.

  He moves behind me, sprinkling my neck and shoulders with warm kisses as he feels his way around my bra. He massages my breasts before moving the bra into place, and latches the clasp.

  He returns to the bag twice more. The third time he removes a pair of glittery silver sandals, then goes back to his knees and slides my feet in securely while rubbing my ankles. The fourth time he returns with a pair of shimmery silver earrings. He slides them into my pierced ears. They make a low, tinkling noise when I move, like miniature wind chimes.

  “Almost done.” He finally takes out the tablecloth. The one that I lied and told him I wanted to borrow from the B&B.

  “You took it!”

  “I purchased it,” he says, correcting me.

  “Liar.” He winks, so I’m unsure. “What’s that for?”

  “Why, my dear Scarlett, I thought I’d make you a dress out of a tablecloth,” he says in a Southern accent.

  “I suppose that’s better than curtains.”

  “It will be. I promise.”

  Hew allows the fabric to fall long and straight, then drapes me in the folds. I have no idea what he’s doing but he seems to, so I just trust him like I have from the beginning. He twists, turns, and ties me into that cabbage-rose-covered linen and when he’s done, he pushes me in front of a mirror.

  Chapter 41

  He

  “Where in the world did you learn how to do this? It’s so beautiful!” Shea exclaims.

  “I have three older sisters. Spent the better part of my childhood engaged in any girly activity you could think of.”

  “Aw, you poor thing.”

  “My sister Beth, who is closest in age to me, wanted to be a fashion designer when she was little. She would wrap herself in covers, in linens, or any other piece of fabric she could find, playing a model on a runway. I learned a few tricks from her. Anyway, after she dressed herself and my two other sisters, I pretended to take photos of them walking the catwalk with an empty macaroni-and-cheese box that I cut a viewfinder into.” I play with a coil of Shea’s hair, rubbing the strands between my fingers, and smile at the memory.

  “Really?”

  I wink to this and she leaves it alone, even though it’s true. Beth never lived out her dream, just another thing my family blames me for.

  “I have to admit that I was a little worried when you referenced Gone with The Wind.”

  “Blame that on my sisters, too. Let’s just say they kept me in touch with my feminine side. Shall I sing the words to the songs of Grease?”

  “You are the one that I want.” She wags her eyebrows and grabs my hand. “This could be the best first date ever.” Shea pulls me into a hug. “Thank you for this.” Then she steps back and looks down at herself, and just by the expression on her face, I can tell she finally sees herself the way I see her—beautiful.

  “So tell me,” I ask. “What party are we crashing?”

  “You know me so well!”

  Shea has done a complete turnaround. Yesterday she was locked in the bathroom, having an anxiety attack. I’m not complaining about the change, of course, but it does make me worry about that ass-hat she’s running from, if there’s more to the story that I should know. And I’m concerned about the fiancé she left behind and how that affects us. For now, at least, I just need to be happy she’s opening up.

  “So do I get to dress you now?” She bites her tongue. She’s back to her playful ways, and she does help me dress, though it’s more of a sprint than a stroll because we’re running late. I wear my gray interview suit, sans jacket, but with a plaid bow tie and suspenders. The blue and gray in my tie matches the colors in Shea’s dress. When we walk out the front door of the B&B, Shea picks a white rose from the garden and pushes it through the buttonhole on my shirt.

  I leave my camera behind. I want to live in the moment of every second of the night, to commit our first official date to memory, taking photos in my mind instead of with my camera.

  I drive and Shea navigates. She directs me to park behind the Coppalina estate, and hide the car in a grouping of dense trees.

  “Are you sure about this?” I eye her.

  “We’re just crashing a party, not robbing someone.”

  “We can try to be better people tomorrow, I suppose.”

  “Just relax and have fun.”

  We exit the car and she grabs my hand, guiding me through the trees and a corner of a vineyard, and to the back of a large restored chateau. From a line of high box hedges, we emerge to the party.

  The outdoor affair is elegant and beautiful. Large round lightbulbs are strung everywhere, twinkling in the dying light. Partygoers dance on the stone patio to a five-piece jazz band. White lace covers dining tables adorned with flower arrangements. And then there is a buffet crowded with ice sculptures, food, and
chocolate fountains, and strategically placed bars serving lots of alcohol. Even the people are beautiful, and I can’t believe that we sneaked in this easily.

  “You’re a genius.” I lean over and kiss her temple.

  “I know,” she says cheekily as she throws her shoulders back.

  We mingle. Shea grabs a glass of wine. I stick with a soda, and tell her it’s mixed with rum. I want to tell her the truth, but today is not the day to ruin all that we’ve built up. We snack on hors d’oeuvres while we meet people, important people from all over the world. We should stick out like sore thumbs in our cheap clothing, but Shea conforms like a chameleon, and when I’m with her, she transforms me, too.

  Someone even asks her who designed her dress, like we’re attending some awards show. Shea replies that it was an up-and-coming designer named Hew Hew. French, she tells the woman. Talented and dreadfully overpriced, but worth every pressed penny. Then she winks at me. The woman believes Shea, just like I believe her. There is something about her that everyone trusts and falls in love with. It is her sincerity, her charm, and I suspect her special gift.

  Looking around, I realize we’re among the youngest partygoers here. Most people in our age group are broke from college loans, or probably still in college, doing keg stands to cheering crowds on a Friday night, not crashing luxurious wine dinners with billionaires. It’s possible that Shea is still in college, I think, and realize that it’s strange that it never occurred to me before. She’s young enough, and I wonder if she’s even old enough to drink. She acts so young and naive in some ways, but so mature in others.

  Now that she’s opening up to me, the questions that matter in typical and normal relationships pour in. I was content to know little in the beginning, but now I’m frantic for more. Everything. I go to her and pull her away from her new acquaintances because I don’t want to share. It’s our first date, and I want Shea for myself.