by Piper Lennox
My thoughts dissolve into smoke when he pushes himself into me, filling me in a swift, effortless motion. I close my eyes and sigh at the fullness, this incredible feeling that never seems to dull.
“You’re about to have sex,” he says, rocking his hips forward and back, filling me and withdrawing, “with a cancer-free man.”
“And the last five years were...what, practice?” I joke, barely able to speak in between his thrusts, which are already picking up speed.
“Well, now it’s official,” he reminds me.
“Oh, of course.”
We laugh, our mouths just an inch apart. I lean up and kiss him, pulling him into me in every way possible.
“You know what we haven’t done in a while?” he asks, pausing his movement. “Sound byte rules.” He pushes my hair out of my eyes. “Think we could? I mean, Banner’s gone, he won’t hear us.”
“He won’t hear me, you mean?”
“Well.” He smiles and ducks his head, tracing my nipples with his tongue. His eyes meet mine when I start to squirm, and he waits. By now, he doesn’t need to give me my lines. I know exactly how they go.
“That’s it, baby,” I whisper, willing to play along if it means he’ll keep doing what he’s doing. “That’s it, Blake, lick my nipples...God, it gets me so wet when you do that….”
Encouraged, he lifts his head and picks up speed, the force increasing. I hear the headboard hit the wall in time.
“You like that?” he pants.
“Ah, ah,” I chide. “Sound byte rules.”
He laughs, slips out of me, and turns me over. I feel him at my entrance again as he breathes into my ear, “You like taking it from behind, baby?” While he speaks, he pushes back inside.
I moan instead of answering.
“What was that?”
“Yes,” I cry out, feeling tears behind my eyes. “Yes, I like—I like taking it from behind.” There’s a pillow underneath me in just the right place, and this new angle makes every drive of his hips even more intense. “Blake, it...it feels so good, I can’t even think.”
“You don’t have to think,” he chuckles, holding my hips with his hands.
I’m already teetering on the edge, but his talk gets me even closer. We haven’t done his little sound byte rule in years. I didn’t realize I liked it this much.
Soon I’m nothing but nerves, each teased and enticed to the breaking point. Any second now, I’ll lose it.
“I can tell you’re close,” he says, almost arrogant. Maybe it shouldn’t turn me on, but it does.
“I am,” I confess. “I’m so close....”
“Come for me, Mellie,” he orders, just like he used to.
That’s all it takes. My orgasm crashes down, tearing through my body like a wildfire. I hear him groan. He sinks all the way inside and releases.
We ride the peak out together, both of us shuddering as the sensations engulf us. I feel his weight drop against me, arms finally giving out.
I start to cry. It’s been a while since our sex included that element, too.
“Hey,” he says gently, pushing my hair off my forehead, “it’s okay. It felt good, didn’t it?”
“So good.” He laughs again. “I’m just…I’m so happy.”
“Me too, baby.” His lips press against my back, right between my shoulders, as he slips out of me. “Me too.”
We fall asleep, spent and smiling. I rest my head on his chest. Even when I wake at dawn with a crick in my neck, I keep it there, enjoying the steady rhythm of his heart.
“Hi.”
I start, looking up at him. “I thought you were asleep.” He slides out from underneath me and picks his clothes up from the floor, getting dressed. “You said you had the weekend off.”
“I do. I just felt like getting dressed. It’s kind of cold in here.”
“Oh.” My voice is sadder than I mean it to be. “I was hoping for another round.”
He smiles at me over his shoulder. “Yeah? You aren’t sore?”
“No,” I lie, which he sees right through.
Blake stands there a minute, in just his jeans and undershirt, which is smeared with charcoal. He’s given up the suits when he’s not at work, and even started sketching for fun again. More than once, I’ve woken to the scratch of pencil on paper, him drawing me while I sleep.
I notice his muscles are tense. Alarm bells sound in my head, and I sit up. “Are you okay?”
“Relax,” he smiles. “I’m fine. Just…nervous.” I’m about to ask him why, when he pulls a small box from his pocket.
This time, it’s my pulse that surges. “Blake,” I manage, my voice tight, “what is that?”
He laughs. “I think you know.”
Blake
I take a breath, exhaling with another laugh as I open the box and show her the ring, shimmering in the gray light.
“Oh, my God.” Mel covers her mouth. The tears start again.
I kneel beside the bed. “I promised myself,” I explain, keeping my voice as steady as I can, “that if I beat this, I was going to propose. And now that I’m in front of you, about to do it...I just keep thinking, God, why didn’t I do this sooner?”
Mel sniffs as I take her hand and hold it in mine. As always, it feels like it belongs there. That simple.
“Melanie Thatcher,” I ask, “will you ma—”
“Yes!” she shouts, and jumps on top of me, our laughter drowned in a clap of thunder, just outside the window.
Mel
We watch the rain all day. He sketches me while I wrap myself up in the sheets, until we have to stop and celebrate again. We reminisce about the past, daydream about the future.
“I don’t know if I want a big wedding,” I muse. It actually makes me grimace: a traditional and giant wedding in my family’s church, every pew stuffed with ancient people I don’t know, the whole place smelling like cough drops and incense.
“We could do a destination wedding,” he offers. “Just us, your family, and Banner. Who else do we need?”
“True.” I look at the ring again, touching each stone. “One for each year we’ve been an official couple,” he’d explained, as he slipped it onto my finger. Only now, I’m seeing something else.
“Eighteen,” I say, pointing to the first stone. “Twenty-one...twenty-two...twenty-five.” I look at him. “One for every time I looked at you in a new way.”
“Not always the best way,” he adds, which I have to agree with. “Besides, what about this one?”
I stare at the last stone, exactly the same as all the others—but seeming, somehow, a little bit brighter.
“This one,” I say, “can be thirty.”
Blake laughs. “Right now? How are you looking at me in a new way?”
“Well....” I look from the ring to him. Into those icy blue eyes I’ve known almost all my life, this face I know even better than my own.
“I guess now I’m looking at you in a…rest-of-my-life kind of way.”
He hooks my chin with his finger and lifts my face to his. “I always looked at you that way. Ever since that day at track practice.”
“Not always,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“Yep. Always.” He pauses, our foreheads touching. “I didn’t always think I’d actually get you forever…but I always hoped I would, somehow.”
He kisses me so deeply I forget, for just a moment, that we’re thirty. We’re eighteen again, or every age in between then and now, making up for all those years we were apart. Or starting to, at least.
And I realize, as I have before, that I don’t like the Old Blake or New Blake: I don’t want to choose between the sweet, sensitive guy I called my best friend, or the sexy, dominating man who could make my head swim and my toes curl. I want both. I’ve had both the last five years—and now, officially, I can have both forever.
“My Mellie girl,” he whispers, starting to drift as the sun sinks into the horizon.
I press my ear to his chest and listen to
his heartbeat, clear and steady. Strong. “Call me that again.”
Also by Piper Lennox
Teach Me
The Road to You
It’s Complicated: A Novella
(Subscriber Exclusive)
Turn the page for a preview of Piper’s upcoming novel,
Pull Me Under
(Love In Kona Series, Book One)
Sneak Peek
Pull Me Under
Kai
When I surface, Dad is pacing the shoreline. Looking for me.
I take my time paddling in. Today’s the first official day of tourist season—not that it ever really ends—and I’m on duty.
“You’ve got a line at the cantina already,” he hisses, motioning up the beach. “What, you didn’t surf enough during the meeting you skipped?”
“I got Luka to cover the cantina, Dad. It’s fine.” I wipe the salt from my face and pretend I couldn’t care less that he’s still glaring at me while I grab my bag.
He shakes his head and blinks a bunch of times, his signature “I’m so done with you” move. “I just don’t know what to do with you, Kai,” he mutters. “You used to be so helpful and now...it’s like you don’t care.”
I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t care.
I used to, though. Back when our family’s empire was small and manageable and actually fun, just a regular bed-and-breakfast kind of place, working for the family business was my dream job. I loved every second of it.
Now, though, I squint down the beach and see our new hotel, giant and looming. Hideous. I can’t believe Dad caved to the businessmen who approached him almost two years ago, talking about franchising and expansion, all the words I’d heard my father spew with contempt as, every year, the island turned more and more commercial.
He’s changed, too. I can tell he doesn’t love the business anymore: it’s turning his hair gray, keeping him up late. I can’t remember the last time he took Mom out on a date, or hit the waves with me and Luka.
Great. Now I feel guilty.
“I’ll go to the cantina now. Sorry.”
He nods and starts back towards the resort, the opposite direction from me, but I notice the way his eyes catch on the horizon. He’s watching the waves.
“Caught some good ones today,” I tell him. Startled, he snaps out of it and looks at me—at the board I’m now offering him. Really, I’m offering him a break. “If you want to paddle out for a few.”
For a second, I swear, he actually considers it: glances between the board and the ocean, one hand almost reaching.
Then, he stops.
“Just go to the cantina, son, all right?” He gives me another done-with-you move and turns on his heel, marching back to the crown jewel of his empire.
Now it’s my turn to sigh. I do it as a curse, one long and breathy, “Fuck.” The sun is so high as I trod to the little hut down the beach, I can’t even see my own shadow.
Luka’s playing video games when I get to the bar. “Hey,” he says, without looking up.
I knock the handheld out of his grip with one hand, catch it with the other. “You should be prepping.”
“You should be prepping. Last I checked, this isn’t my shift.”
I ignore this while I wash my hands and slice a couple limes. “You missed some good ones,” I tell him.
“Yeah?”
“Well, decent, at least. Would’ve been better down near Drew’s place.” I pile the lime slices into the container, then start on the pineapples. Already, my hands are sticky; the entire bar smells like fruit salad, sickly sweet. “Dad saw me.”
Luka nods at some passing tourists. “I figured. You wouldn’t be back here already if he hadn’t.”
“He told me there was a line.”
This makes him laugh. “Two people. And they didn’t even order, they just wanted to know where they could rent some bikes.”
Instead of laughing along, I shake my head and curse again.
“You know, you could at least pretend you care,” he adds, serious now. “For Dad’s sake.”
I stop carving the pineapple and look at him. He took the game back from the countertop when I wasn’t looking. “First of all,” I spit, “you’re sitting there playing a video game, trying to lecture me about caring? And second, I used to care. Back when we were actually running shit the right way instead of...this.” I spread my arms to the beach, encompassing the two miles that make up the resort property—four times as big and a hundred times more ridiculous than what we had before.
“I cared,” I add, stabbing the knife back into the pineapple, “when Dad decided to sign everything over, just like that, without even asking us. And it seemed like I was the only one who cared that everything changed.”
Luka looks up from his game. “I cared, dude.”
“Yeah? Then why didn’t you say anything?”
He shrugs. Not like he doesn’t know, but like he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. I pile the pineapple pieces into the container and slam the lid so hard, half wind up on the floor.
Mollie
“There he is. Go for it.”
I nearly jump out of my skin when Tanya pushes against the small of my back, nudging me forward. She was gentle about it, but I’m too tense to handle even the softest touch. God help me if Damian tries to hold my hand or kiss me tonight.
Actually, God help me if he doesn’t.
I weave through the crowd like I work here, the way my friends have shown me a hundred times: chin up, shoulders back, every step like you’re wearing heels.
Damian’s at the bar beside the infinity pool, where the luau begins and stretches down the steps, onto another deck, and out to the beach. There are torches and leis, servers with bright pink drinks, and hula dancers on a small wooden stage, sporting coconut bras. I’d be really into all this touristy stuff, if I weren’t a woman on a mission.
“Hey,” I say, trying to sound breezy as I take the seat beside him. “What are you drinking?”
He turns his glass in the fading sunlight. “I can’t remember the name,” he says, “but it has passionfruit juice in it. Want a sip?”
For the first time in my life, I don’t hesitate to take someone up on the offer. “Huh,” I say, silently freaking out that my lips have touched the same spot as his, “not as sweet as I expected. In a good way.”
“Right? I was worried it’d be too sweet, too.”
This is going well, I tell myself, relaxing a little. I order a vodka and cranberry from our bartender, a local whose name tag reads Luka, and settle in.
Of course, it helps that I’m good and tipsy already, en route to drunk. Up in our hotel room after lunch, the girls convinced me to play drinking games we hadn’t thought about since sophomore year: Kings, Quarters, and what could only be described as “Malibu Pong,” all of which helped me feel a little less stupid and a lot more courageous as the luau, when we’d planned to meet back up with the boys, drew closer.
Now, I find a miracle unfolding before me. I’m witty. I’m funny. Damian and I begin to pass conversation back and forth like a game of tennis, just that easy.
“I’m so glad school’s over,” he says, ordering a round of shots for the two of us. He picks my favorite vodka. My stomach does cartwheels at the implication. “Senior year was so long. Like, I’ve felt ready since September. I gotta get out there. Know what I mean?”
I don’t. I still don’t feel ready to “get out there,” wherever that is. If I could afford to stay in school another year, just to avoid the decisions and pressure waiting for me, I would.
Still: we’re talking, and that’s something. We haven’t had a conversation this long since we met, before my crush could take on a life of its own. He’s slurring a little—which I’m sure I’m doing, too—and it’s so cute, I feel like I could kiss him right here, right now.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding emphatically. “Totally.”
Across the crowd, I see Carrie chatting up Ted. They have a fr
iends-with-benefits arrangement, and I’m sure she won’t be coming back to our room tonight. I remember her teasing from earlier, about Damian and me getting some alone time down by the waves. Suddenly, it sounds perfect.
“You want to walk on the beach for a while?” I ask, already getting up.
“Okay.” He drains the last of his drink and follows me, even taking my hand so he won’t lose me in the crowed. I’m thankful he can’t see the stupid grin on my face as his fingers wrap around mine.
The sand is cool and fine under our feet. We carry our shoes and shove each other towards the waves, our laughter ringing out into the sky. It’s been a few hours since the sun went down, but the sky still has a tinge of purple to it. Everything around us looks ethereally lilac because of it: a giant blacklight.
“I’m going to miss you,” he says. “It’ll be weird, not seeing you every day.”
“Really?”
“Of course. We had class together...what, three times a week, for the last four years? I only passed Hines’s class because of you, you know.”
I laugh. “Nah, you would’ve done fine. You’re going to be a great architect one day.”
“You, too.”
This, I’m not so sure of. But it’s nice to hear him say it.
My head swims with vodka. How much have I had? I try to count, but the pre-gaming alone is a blur. All I know right now is how badly I want him to kiss me.
Maybe that’s why, when he turns his head, I think that’s exactly what he’s doing. Why I close my eyes and lean in, lifting my face to meet his.
Why I stumble forward into his chest, instead, when he pulls his head away.