Tremble

by Alison Foster

  I’m defeated and I’m needy. I throw my arms around his neck and run my fingers through his thick, gorgeous hair. I kiss him back eagerly, my tongue colliding with his hungrily. Everything about him buzzes in my blood and bones. My lungs spasm with hot oxygen. Every part of my body wants to press against him the way our lips are now.

  As we find a sweet manic rhythm to our lustful kissing, I feel his hand brush along my ribcage on the way to my hips. I moan inside his mouth as his touch tickles my skin. He gently bites my upper lip just as his hand dives between my legs.

  Oh God. I’m about to melt. Actually, he discovers that I’ve been melting. The cleaning ladies will come in the morning and blush when they find the sheets still damp with my hot mess, much like an overheated popsicle.

  Heat. I feel it all over now as his hand glides on me in the most feathery and tantalizing ways. My clit hums in anticipation of him discovering it properly. I need him to press and massage it or I will have to beg him to do it. My nipples harden so much I can barely resist teasing them myself.

  My heart booms in my ears when his hand cups my entire pussy, making me feel faint. Somewhere deep inside panic erupts. I can’t do this. If I let him completely overwhelm my senses, I’ll have no sense left.

  I just can’t do this. Fuck.

  “That’s not for you,” I whisper through one last moan. “It’s not part of the contract.” I spring up from the bed, out of breath and red all over.

  He smiles, his eyes hooded and hot. “This isn’t business, Mac.” He shows me his glistening fingers like it’s evidence.

  “I know what that is,” I say, robotically at first and then find a little backbone. “Do you think you’re the first man who could do that?”

  Lukas’ expression hardens in a manner I’ve never seen before. “Listen, Nora, my judgment is impaired. The booze and the dress and the moonlight. I don’t know, the proposal maybe. I thought we connected. Let’s forget this little moment. We’re single and drunk and at a wedding.”

  “We’re hardly drunk,” I remind him.

  “I know, but I don’t drink much anymore and I’m guessing neither do you.”

  I don’t agree. I just wait.

  “Let’s do something else. It’s still early.”

  It’s hard to stay so strong when all I want is to go back to the dreamlike state of being undone by his kisses and hands. “Like what?”

  “You’re in charge,” he says. “Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

  I want to slap him and then spank him and then undress him. A hungry part of me wants him to grab me by the hair and spread me wide open and own me with his tongue—okay, that’s enough, Nora!

  “I’m tired, Lukas,” I tell him. “I’ll just watch a movie and order in food.”

  “Alone? Or can I join you?”

  The memory of his hands all over my body prickles my skin. I can’t have him next to me without lusting his touch again. It’s not that we couldn’t have sex, it’s that it would be too good and that would be a dangerous distraction.

  Our deception is serious business. We can’t start lying to ourselves.

  “Let’s not be naïve, Lukas,” I say. “You’re too charming and too used to getting your way. That’s not going to work.”

  “Huh,” he says. “I wish I could argue with that. I’ll go check my email or whatever in my room before we eat. I can’t exactly go out by myself. We wouldn’t want me to run into any of your family or friends alone.”

  “Thank you for being considerate,” I say as he walks away. How did we go so quickly from so hot to so formal? This is starting to feel manic or bipolar.

  My mind and body are at war. I have no fucking clue what I want.

  The air seems to thin out the moment he leaves. Now I feel warm and short of breath in a bad way. My index finger clicks the remote buttons endlessly, skipping through channels without focus or interest.

  I get up suddenly, needing to talk to him. I take two steps toward his room but stop short. I head back to my bed but that’s just stupid. I won’t be able to relax unless I make sure all’s well with Lukas.

  I take two deep breaths and lightly knock on his half-open door.

  “Hey,” Lukas says, unsure. He’s lying on the bed with his phone in his hands. The TV plays without sound on a sports channel.

  “You’re not totally wrong,” I say, staring at the soles of his feet. Even the skin he walks on is perfectly smooth and unblemished.

  He nods but then locks his eyes on mine. “Wait, what?”

  He is going to make me work for this. “I mean, come on, I’m just a girl and what girl wouldn’t be at least a little attracted to you?”

  I expect a grin, but instead he tilts his head. “That’s nice of you to say, but it’s not necessary. I’m a big boy. I can take it.”

  “Lukas, come on. You know you’re an impressive man. I’m just not in the market for any drama right now. My life’s a mess. I need to put it in order before I even consider…” I stop. This is embarrassing. I was going to say relationship. I’m an idiot. I’m pretty sure that’s not what he was after.

  Lukas sits up, puts the phone down on the nightstand. “Got it,” he says. “Don’t give it a second thought. I should have been more professional.”

  I can’t help the thought. He is a professional. A professional lover. Only an incredible fool would forget that. I should have never opened up to him about my attraction, about anything. I’m a truckload of bad ideas.

  “Let’s order Chinese,” Lukas says. He stretches his arms above his head before he pops up and leaves the bedroom like nothing ever happened.

  Suddenly, it’s becoming clear which one of us is losing control.

  Chapter 9

  Nora

  Coming to the beach with Lukas in his board shorts is probably not the best way to forget the desire I felt for him last night. He dismissed the whole thing as a misunderstanding, but I think it was more than clear to both of us that we wanted to devour each other.

  His still-wet-from-the-shower hair glistens in the sunlight, accentuating his chiseled features. His whole body could have been carved from stone and then tanned deliciously.

  I don’t feel so splendid and I’m sure, next to him, I look sickly with heavy, tired eyes after a restless night. I could use a triple caffeine boost and a couple of tea bags on my eyes.

  The sun warms my closed eyelids. I try to imagine the seagulls I hear flying high above us. The rolling waves crash with a relaxed roar upon the sand. I can smell the sea and feel the cool breeze coming in off the water.

  The guy at the hotel reception gave Lukas directions to a quiet beach like he wanted. It’s just us and the elements out here.

  I adjust my wide-brimmed hat to give my eyes some shade. The beach was Lukas’ idea and, after some resistance, I agreed. Now I’m happy to be here. The sun on my skin is nurturing me back to a sense of control, the very thing the champagne and my loneliness tried to take away from me.

  When I open my eyes, I see Lukas running into the break waters. He starts to swim with sudden and natural skill. He’s far more than a recreational swimmer. But why am I surprised? I’m sure he can also fly a plane and wrestle a bear and grow potatoes on Mars.

  There’s a book in my lap, but it’s impossible to concentrate when I have this spectacle of muscle gliding through the water. His powerful shoulders move in perfect circular rhythm, lifting him above the water.

  Now he walks out of the sea, wiping water from his face. I close my eyes, trying to let the sea breeze and sunshine calm my thoughts away from his wet shorts clinging to his powerful thighs and enticing package. A long lost bliss rises and falls within my chest as my mind escapes to happy childhood memories of the ocean. Whether on the beaches near Malibu or along the Florida coast, many of my childhood hours were spent with sand between my toes and sea air filling my lungs.

  My eyes open to find Lukas standing over me like a bronze god, polished by the sea. I wait for him to speak but
he never does.

  “You’re done swimming?” I say, squinting under my sunglasses.

  Lukas runs his fingers through his hair. “No. I was hoping you would join me. Look at this weather. It’s a perfect day to swim.”

  He bends over to grab my book. I shiver as a few drops of cold water drip from his hair onto my legs. He sets the book aside and takes my hand.

  “Stop being a wimp,” he says. “The water’s amazing.”

  His persistence has long since worn me down. “I didn’t bring my bikini,” I inform him, knowing it will not weaken his resolve at all.

  Again he waits forever to respond. Our eyes just stay locked.

  “Not a problem,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s not happening.”

  “Would it help if I removed mine?” he says without a hint of a grin.

  I immediately bite my lip. “Stop it, Lukas,” I say with an embarrassing tone of vulnerability. My heart starts to pound hungrily.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean that as a come on.”

  I can’t stop staring into his intense eyes. I feel like he can read my mind. He knows I am begging him to release me from his spell, to move on from me, to wear clothes around me, to stop making me hot all over.

  “Shoo,” I say quietly. “I’m happy here. Stop being a pest.”

  He turns to look at the ocean. His ass flexes in his wet shorts.

  “We need to swim,” he says and then spins back and suddenly envelopes me with his strong arms. The dampness of his skin soaks through my clothes.

  His lips move close to my ear. “From a distance underwear looks like a bikini,” he whispers. “No one will know.”

  Seriously? Now this is happening? Oh, what the hell. It’s not like I can get him to just forget it. “Fine. Just set me down and turn around,” I order him.

  He obeys. That’s a first. My hands are shaking as I start to undress, first the hat, then the t-shirt and then the shorts until I’m standing in nothing but my beige bra and, oh shit, white panties.

  I really need to coordinate better in the future, especially if Lukas will be roaming my apartment as my husband for the next year.

  He tries to peek.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I snap. “Just…just close your eyes and keep them that way until I tell you otherwise.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says, covering his eyes with his hands like a good boy.

  All right, you got this, I tell myself as I tiptoe across the hot soft sand on my way to the promised iridescent waters.

  A step away from the incoming tide, Lukas grips me from behind. I scream as he spins around to toss me out into the deeper waters.

  My ass hits the water first and then, falling backward, I go completely under the surface. The silence of being submerged quickly fades into the splashing chaos of my flailing of arms and legs as I climb back to my feet.

  “You’re an asshole!” I say in waist deep water. “What if I didn’t know how to swim?”

  “You’re fucking like ten feet from the shore,” he says, laughing. “The water’s like four feet deep, Mac.”

  I adjust my bra which thankfully did not come undone. By the time my brain starts to relax, he’s already right next to me.

  “Let me show you a nifty trick,” he says.

  “Nifty?” I say. “Now you’re mocking me?”

  “Not at all,” he says.

  “Does this trick involve throwing me again?”

  “No,” he says. “That was a one-time thing to get you to relax.”

  “Huh, do I look relaxed?’

  “Actually? Yeah. You’re standing in the ocean in your bra,” he says, staring shamelessly right at my chest. “This is a big step for you.”

  I quickly cover my wet bra by crossing my arms. “Don’t stare.”

  His eyes lift back to my eyes. “The trick,” he says and then plops down onto the seabed in a sitting position. He pulls me by the hand and onto his lap, my back against his chest. Only my head is above water.

  “Lukas,” I protest.

  “Patience,” he says as he takes both my hands into his, closes them tight against each other underwater until they cup each other.

  “Good,” he says, lifting my hands out of the water. “Keep your hands sealed. Hold the water in.”

  I nod, unsure of the whole process.

  He squeezes my hands pushing my palms flush together. Water squirts out of the front of my hands like a little fountain.

  “That’s the trick?” I say, dumbfounded.

  “Told you it was nifty.”

  “You’re too easily amused,” I scold him.

  He turns me in his lap so we are looking right at each other. “Guilty,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be a niftier world, Mac? If we all were?”

  “It would be a world full of fools and stop saying that word.”

  “Which word? The usual Mac or the more recent addition nifty?”

  “Both.”

  “So it’s words that get your panties in a bunch?”

  “No, but never mind my panties. Don’t say that either.”

  “The list keeps growing,” he says with an evil chuckle.

  Something else is growing beneath my butt. I slowly and carefully get off him trying not to let him know I felt his length thickening.

  He opens his mouth, but I march out of the water and straight to my beach towel, afraid of what he might say next. I’m sure he’s getting an eye full of my wet white panties, but I do not turn back to confirm that or to see if it’s having an effect on his already wakening manhood.

  Lukas snatches the towel out of my hands as soon as he reaches me. I’m about to grab the towel back, but something in his eyes gives me pause. It’s that darkness I glimpsed back at my apartment before we set off for Santa Barbara. Hungry, fathomless, demanding darkness.

  He keeps gazing into my eyes, saying nothing. The tension between us makes me uneasy. I put my palms on his chest to get him to move. Instead, he grips me by the wrist, pulling me closer.

  We’re standing silent, facing each other. Our lungs are the only things still moving. The darkness in his eyes turns into something different, a little savage and desperate. He leans in slowly. I hold my breath. My pulse races as I’ve made up my mind not to fight the kiss this time. Not to fight him.

  He pulls back, letting go of my wrist. “We’ll be late,” he says, placing the towel in my motionless hands. He walks back to his shirt on the sand.

  I feel erased. A hundred abandoned impulses numb my muscles. I have to fight to slowly begin rubbing the towel against my skin.

  To travel from this moment to a chatty brunch with Aunt Sonya will be a journey of a thousand sighs.

  Chapter 10

  Nora

  Dragging myself to work is a cruel torment this morning. Mixing red wine and online chatting with Lori and Olivia until the wee hours was a bad cocktail. My reward was a manic monkey brain that wouldn’t relax for a second. So here I am, after two straight nights of little sleep, extremely late and with a tension headache building that threatens to explode my skull.

  Walking through a sea of cubicles does nothing to boost my confidence. Everyone looks serious and focused at eight thirty in the morning, talking into phones, typing feverishly and absorbed by their computer screens—you know, like work matters to them.

  Lukas Dupree needs to get the hell out of my head. He’s all I can think about and it makes me feel helpless. How am I supposed to survive months living under the same roof when I can barely survive a weekend with him?

  Being assigned to the design team for the initial phase of a social media campaign doesn’t improve matters. The idea of communicating in a limited number of characters has never appealed to me but today it suffocates the life right out of me. I want to scream, I belong in the art department!

  But at the risk of sounding a tad bit psycho, I keep the thought to myself, paint a smile on my face and carry on.

  Alexis, the s
enior project coordinator, hands me a sheet with the focal points as well as a flash drive containing confidential material. She wears a navy blue business skirt that outlines her perfectly toned legs and her long blonde hair is coiffured in an elegant bun. The woman looks like a walking ad in a health magazine. Bleh.

  “We will need to Instagram hard this time around,” she says. “Paul added the relevant PPC information as well as the graphics conversion from last time. We will proceed as usual with Facebook and Twitter. Might involve Pinterest. Main focus as always is on brevity and clear call-to-action.”

  “Got it,” I say, but I haven’t. I haven’t gotten it at all. My brain is a total, senseless mush. I wanted to prove something to myself by being here. I’ve only proved that I’m not up to the task.

  I count the minutes until I can get out of the office and do something physical. My body aches all over but it’s mostly my head that needs relief.

  After an hour, I stop pretending I’ll get any work done. I need a break badly. I need to talk. Let it all out. Maybe then I’ll be able to focus.

  Jules has always been my safe zone in this world. I hold the phone to my ear while I walk to my car.

  “What happened?” she says with a knowing tone.

  “Want to meet for lunch?”

  “I can maybe do a 12:30,” she says slowly. I know she is racing through her appointment schedule trying to make it work.

  “How about now?”

  “I knew it,” Jules almost shouts. “It’s not even ten, Nora. Something happened. Something unintended and juicy.”

  “Can you move your appointments?” I say, changing the subject.

  “I can do anything, little dove,” she says. “I’m a badass. Meet me at L.A. Live. I know this place that will still make me a crabmeat omelet.”

  “How do you not weigh two hundred pounds?” I say as I start my car. “All you think about is food.”

  “Food’s my boyfriend,” she says. Hard not to love her.

  I hit no traffic and am on the sidewalk walking into L.A. Live within fifteen minutes. I’ve been rehearsing how I’m going to tell Jules that I’m becoming obsessed with thoughts of Lukas.