Stitches

by Sam Mariano

  She stops fiddling with her earring and wraps her arms around my neck, drawing closer, slanting her mouth over mine and closing her eyes as she kisses me back. Blood rushes through my veins, heading straight for my cock. Fuck, I’m not supposed to be turned on already.

  After a minute, she breaks the kiss and smiles at me mischievously. “I guess I don’t have to ask if you like the dress.”

  “I’m a big fan of this dress, but an even bigger fan of the body it’s covering up.”

  She grins, playfully swatting my arm and turning away to head for the bathroom. “You better stop that or we’ll never get out of here.”

  That Chinese takeout is starting to sound damn good. The restaurant I made reservations at is great, but the chef is a real high-maintenance pain in the ass. Dinner and dessert will take every bit of two hours, maybe two and a half.

  I adjust my slacks, watching her ass as she walks away. I guess a few hours having to look at her in this dress isn’t so bad when I consider what I get to do to her as soon as we leave.

  Seb is the best fucking friend in the world. I know I give him hell sometimes, but damn.

  Moira comes back a few minutes later with a fitted black coat over her dress and a pearl-encrusted clip in her hair. She styled her hair up tonight with a few loose locks hanging down. She’s so pretty I could die just looking at her.

  Her blue eyes shine with affection as she takes my arm. “You look very handsome tonight.”

  I tear my gaze from her to look down at myself. I wore a blue suit with a white shirt and matching navy tie. I’m not really all about suits, but Seb has been since we could afford them. He wanted us to look the part when we first had the money but didn’t feel like we really fit the part yet. We could wrap ourselves up in as many $4,000 suits as we wanted, but I still felt like the kid who wore hoodies ‘cause no one bought him a winter coat and he was too surly to ask for one.

  I’m a long way from that now, though. Moira’s looking at me like she can’t see that kid, and if she could, she’d have bought him a fucking coat herself.

  I take her out to the car and open the door for her. She gives me a smile and a thank-you as she slides in the passenger seat. Honest to God, I can’t believe this is happening. Seb’s the kind of guy who gets the girl like Moira; I’m the guy who only dreams about her from afar. Only here she is in my car, all dolled up to go out with me.

  Once we get out of the driveway, I ask her, “So, how are you doing with all this?”

  “The sharing?” she questions. “Well, I certainly have no cause to complain so far.”

  That draws a smile out of me. “Glad to hear it.”

  “How about you? Are you feeling good about it today?”

  Is she kidding me? “I don’t see how I could feel any other way, to be honest.”

  “I know Sebastian has a sort of… transactional view of things sometimes. He sees something that needs to be done and then he does it. I didn’t think that would extend to this, but… well, here we are.”

  I nod my head in understanding. “I just wanted to make sure you feel good about it. I know Seb can steamroll over people sometimes when he gets an idea in his head, and I know you tend to be pretty submissive to him. I don’t want you to be here because you feel like you have to be.”

  She reaches her hand over and places it on my thigh, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “I want to be here, Griff.”

  “Was last night okay?” I ask, daring a glance in her direction.

  “If I said no after four orgasms, someone would need to show up and punch me in the face,” she informs me.

  That surprises a shot of laughter out of me. “Four? I counted three.”

  “You miscounted,” she says, slyly.

  “Damn, we do some good tag team work, don’t we?”

  Moira grins. “You sure do.”

  The restaurant I picked out for us has valet parking, so we stop out front and give the attendant my keys. I feel a little like a king, placing my hand at the small of Moira’s back and escorting her inside. A couple men turn their heads to watch as she walks by. If she notices, she doesn’t show it. Of course, she’s probably used to it. When she and Seb are out, they get looks from both sexes, ogling the pair of them as if resenting their monopoly on good looks. If people stick around long enough to notice how in love they are, they just have to hate them. No one should look the way they do and be so goddamn happy, to boot.

  Tonight it’s me, though.

  Tonight I get to be the luckiest bastard in the city.

  The waiter brings us cocktails while we look over the menu. I don’t even like half the shit on it, honestly, but I like the atmosphere of this place. It feels private and intimate, even though you’re in a room full of people. I only brought Ashley here twice. The first time was all right, but the second time she ran into someone whose name she could drop later, so she invited them to join us and I had to spend the whole dinner sitting there, listening to them talk about dumb shit I couldn’t give a fuck less about. Ashley regularly talked about shit I couldn’t give a fuck less about and I listened like any good husband, but when it’s three against one and they won’t shut up? I wanted to offer to pay for them to eat and slip out by myself.

  After that I was too worried we would run into someone again and I didn’t want to come back. Ashley came without me a few times, with friends—though now I wonder if they were friends at all. I never really worried about her spending time with other men, but I guess I should have.

  “Do you have a lot of male friends?”

  Moira glances up as she takes a sip of her drink, then shakes her head. “No, not really. I have a few male acquaintances, but no one I really consider a friend.” She gives me a funny little smile. “That’s an odd question to lead with.”

  I frown a little, nodding my agreement. “Yeah, it was. Sorry. I was thinking about—” I stop, my frown deepening. Talking about the wife I’m not quite divorced from yet and how she probably cheated on me with all her male friends probably isn’t the right foot to lead with.

  She seems to understand exactly what I’m thinking about, though. Her smile sobers and she glances at the table. “You know, before I met Seb I dated this real asshat. I don’t remember if I ever mentioned him—probably not. But we dated off and on for about a year. I was miserable after six months, I just couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. I thought maybe it was just a rough patch, but it was the strangest thing—I’m really not an insecure person, I don’t worry about other women, but I started to feel like I couldn’t trust him. His behavior got really sketchy. He’d keep his phone tilted and turned so I couldn’t see it, he’d cancel or change plans at the last minute, all that kind of stuff. My sister insisted he was cheating on me. I didn’t believe her, but I couldn’t bring myself to shake the insecurity anyway. So one night he pulled his ‘plans changed last minute’ shit when he was supposedly hanging out with a friend. My sister got fed up; she dragged me to her car and went to the place he said he would be hanging out with his friends. He wasn’t there. So my sister—who, I should warn you, is a raging lunatic—loads me back in the car and hauls me around to all his usual haunts, looking for his car. This could have been a profound waste of time, but we got ice cream sundaes while we did all this, and when are ice cream sundaes ever a waste of time?”

  I’m baffled that there exists a man idiotic enough to step out on her, but I offer a smile and shake my head. “Never.”

  She nods. “So, Gwen finally found his car. We went inside to see who he was with, and he was there with some brunette chick. We didn’t confront him, Gwen just hauled me back out to his car, handed me her sundae, and got out a tube of lipstick. She wrote ‘cheating whore’ on his windshield, ‘tiny dick’ on the driver’s side window, and ‘minute man’ on the passenger side window.”

  I want to be pissed off on her behalf over this cheating asshole, but Moira’s laughing at the memory, so it must not hurt too much.

  “Anyway,” she
says, shaking her head and smiling as she looks down at the menu. “I digressed a bit, but the moral of the story is, I have been cheated on and I know how shitty it feels. Obviously we weren’t married and it’s far worse that Ashley did this to you after making that kind of commitment, but I understand that it can mess with your ability to trust. That’s what I was getting at. And also, I would never do that to someone.”

  “Neither would I,” I assure her.

  “I know,” she says, smiling softly. “And if you do, my sister will vandalize your vehicle, so you’ve been warned.”

  “I like your sister,” I tell her. “I need to meet this woman. I wanna shake her hand.”

  “You met her. Remember at the wedding? Gwen was my maid of honor.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t know this story then, though. I wasn’t appropriately impressed.”

  Moira smiles. “Long story short, you don’t have to worry about me having male friends. If you did have to worry about that, I wouldn’t be worth holding onto.”

  I shake my head, glancing up at her. “You’re far more sensible than I was at your age.”

  She shrugs her shoulders, perusing the menu. “I’m glad he cheated now. Imagine how much longer I might’ve stayed with him. I would’ve never met Sebastian. If he had asked me out that day, I wouldn’t have been able to go. It all worked out. Change isn’t always such a bad thing.”

  “My relationship with change has been a little rockier. When I was younger, I hated it. I hated the instability of everything. I just wanted something solid and reliable.”

  “Then you met Sebastian?” she inquires.

  I nod my head. “Mr. Solid and Reliable.”

  Her smile warms with love. “He is. Sebastian is wonderful.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I wish I had known you back then,” she tells me. “You guys needed a friend.”

  I can’t help smirking. “We had Stella.”

  “Ugh,” she mutters, rolling her eyes. “I said friend, not tricky little ho.”

  “We had each other. That was all we needed. Besides, you would’ve been a kid back then. When I was 18, you were only, what, 11?”

  Moira rolls her eyes at me. “That’s not such an enormous age difference.”

  “Not now that it makes you 24, but back then it would’ve been a little unsettling.”

  I see the server headed our way, so I ask her, “Do you know what you want to order?”

  “I’m so much more interested in the dessert. There’s chocolate soufflé and crème brûlée. How’s a girl to choose?”

  “Well, we have three courses to get through before we come to that life-altering decision.”

  “Why don’t you pick for me?” she suggests. “No oysters or escargot. Otherwise whatever you want.”

  Whatever I want? I’m not the one eating it. I have no idea what her tastes are. She’s already decided the matter though, putting the menu down and turning her attention to her drink.

  The nice things about restaurants like these are the chefs don’t like giving you too many options. Each course only has four choices and she told me what she didn’t want, so I make sure to order us both different things; if she doesn’t like what I ordered for her, we can swap plates and she can have mine.

  I bet Seb orders for her all the time. He’s a bossy motherfucker. Always had to be, so he learned to love the role.

  “Do you and Seb come here?”

  Moira shakes her head, gently placing her cocktail back down. “We came once to see what all the fuss was about but we didn’t like it so much that we went out of our way to come again. It was a different menu then, though,” she adds, probably realizing she’s telling me she’s not too fond of the place I picked. “I’m excited to try what you ordered tonight. And I do remember the crème brûlée was delicious.”

  “We’ll get one of each and we can share, if you’d like,” I offer.

  “I would like that very much, thank you.”

  “You don’t have to keep thanking me for things,” I tell her.

  Lightly rolling her eyes, she says, “I don’t remember how to do first dates. It’s been a long time. I never thought I’d go on one again, so I threw out the manual.”

  My eye gets drawn to the sight of her left hand, decked out with a sizeable engagement ring and a platinum wedding band. I look at my own hand, suddenly missing the wedding band I’ve worn for years. I actually didn’t take it off until this morning. Didn’t feel right to wear it after last night. You can still see a faint indent on my finger where it used to be.

  “Do you miss her?” Moira asks, gingerly.

  “No,” I answer, quickly.

  “It’s okay if you do,” she assures me, empathetically. “She was part of your life for years. That would be completely natural.”

  “It’s not that I miss her,” I say, shaking my head. “Honestly, I wish now I’d never married her. She’s being a pain in the ass about the divorce.”

  “Do you think she’s still in love with you?”

  My eyebrows rise and I look up at her. “No, I think by the time she took the third or fourth dick that wasn’t mine, she was pretty firmly not in love with me.”

  Moira darts a look to our left, then our right, subtly making sure no one overheard.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, grabbing my drink and taking a long sip.

  “No worries. I just don’t want gossips to hear your business. Sometimes the people who come here are real busybodies, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know that.” I lower my glass to table with a thud and look across the table at her. “I don’t want to talk about Ashley.”

  “We don’t have to,” she assures me. “Just know that we can, if you ever feel like it. Just because we’re lovers now doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.”

  Lovers. That’s sure an odd thing to hear coming from her mouth.

  By the time the first course arrives, Moira is tipsy. Cocktails seemed like a good idea to calm our nerves, but they made them strong and I didn’t consider what a lightweight Moira is.

  When Moira gets tipsy, her sexuality comes out to play. Ordinarily she’s a lady in public—even if she enjoys being fucked from both ends by two men, apparently—but the alcohol melts away her inhibitions in grand fashion.

  Smiling at me across the table as the server clears away her barely touched second course, she asks, “What’s the first sexual thought you ever had about me?”

  The server pauses and stares down at her, and I can guess he’s having his first sexual thought about her right now. I stare at him until he catches my eye, then he flushes and hastens away from the table.

  I look at Moira, the little minx, still sultry and playful. “I honestly can’t remember. There have been too many over the years.”

  “Have you ever had a sex dream about me?”

  “Oh, yeah. Many times.”

  She grins, pleased by this information as she sips what’s left of her drink, just barely enough to cover the ice cubes. “I had some pretty dirty thoughts about you the night you spent in the guest room. When you asked me to help undress you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Mm hmm,” she verifies, nodding her head. “I shouldn’t have at that point. That was naughty of me.”

  The playful way she says it gives me cause to shift in my seat. Now I’m thinking about the blue satin negligee she wore that night, how she didn’t have on any panties underneath. “You wouldn’t happen to be wearing anything like you wore that night underneath that dress, now, would you?”

  Moira doesn’t blink. “I’m wearing a black lacy thong under this dress. Nothing else. Figured I’d save you a little time when you take it off me tonight.”

  My cock jumps to life, hearing her say that—knowing it’s real. I really get to do that as soon as we get out of here.

  Fuck, where is that waiter with the third course? She’s talking like this and I already promised her dessert.

  Seb was right; we should’ve kep
t it simple tonight. I should’ve just taken her for a simple dinner and drinks—I do like the tempting shit that comes out of her mouth when she drinks.

  “You know what? I think I just remembered the first time I had a dirty thought about you,” I tell her.

  Her eyes dance with merriment and she clasps her hands together with exaggerated glee. “Tell me.”

  “We were all hanging out and you had too much to drink. You were sitting on Seb’s lap and getting way too handsy. I was starting to get antsy so I went to the bathroom, mostly just to get away from you. When I came out, you were waiting in the hall to go in. You beamed a smile up at me and went to squeeze past me, but you tripped over my boot and fell right up against me. I swear to God, I felt my heart fall right out of my body. You just smiled up at me, went ‘whoops’ and sauntered right into the bathroom. You didn’t even shut the door—I had to do it real quick before you dropped those snug jeans you were wearing and really ruined my life.”

  Moira laughs a little, shaking her head. “I’m such a slutty drunk.”

  “You’re not slutty, you’re just relaxed… and okay, sure, a little more sexual, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I was worried that night, though. I was one part turned on, but also worried you might end up in a bad situation, doing shit like that.”

  “I could’ve,” she says, but not with nearly enough soberness. Instead, her big blue eyes widen theatrically and she leans across the table. “You know what could’ve happened?”

  Oh no, I can feel one of her dirty stories coming on.

  I search the vicinity for the waiter. Come on, asshole, bring out the duck so we can get the fuck out of here.

  “You could have been a real asshole. Maybe you liked the feeling of my body pushed up against yours. Maybe you liked it so much that instead of shutting the door and leaving me to my privacy, you followed me inside. Locked the door, so no one could walk in on us.”

  I’m already visualizing her story, even if I would’ve never done that. The guy in her story is a creep, and I may not be perfect, but I wouldn’t corner my friend’s drunk girlfriend in a bathroom and come onto her. Still, I’m probably gonna like her depraved story. I always liked these fucking things, even if I couldn’t understand how they came out of a sweet girl like Moira.