I push the strands of hair out of her face and put my arms around her. “Yes.”
“Really? You’d go?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I mean, it’s a resort. On a lake. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’re into.”
“I’m into you. If you’re there, that’s where I want to be.”
I wish I could take a picture of her face, the way she’s looking up at me right now. “Good. I booked a regular hotel room with a king-size bed, but there’s no view, I hope that’s okay.”
“Trust me, the only view I’ll be looking at is your beautiful naked body.”
She blushes. Thank God I can still make her blush. “Well, that will be one of the amenities you can enjoy, along with free Wi-Fi. It’s for next weekend, three nights, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.”
“Okay. God I can’t even remember the last time I took a vacation. I need to rearrange some things, but I can probably swing it.”
“Okay. I’ve already rented a car.”
“Well, darlin’ you can just go ahead and cancel that reservation. You know I’ve got a car. You’re in it right now.”
“But what if you can’t swing it?”
“Hey. I’ll swing it. I’ll pay you for the room. This’ll be good. This may be just what we need.” I didn’t mean to make that sound so ominous, but she seems to agree.
I couldn’t keep my hands off of Nina all through dinner. When we got back to her place we had the fastest sex we’ve ever had and it wasn’t even humiliating because she needed it that fast too. I think even the anticipation of vacation sex has reignited something. I wish I could have stayed with her, but I’ve gotta get to work if I’m going to take three days off. I came to Gabe’s to figure things out with him, but I keep spacing out.
“Hello?”
“What?”
“You want scotch or not?”
“Naw I’m good.”
“Are you? Because you seem like a moody little teen girl to me.”
“I should call Dr. Glass,” I mumble, dropping my head to my hands.
“You still see her?”
“Not for a while.”
“You don’t need some shrink to tell you how you feel. I’ll tell you how you feel. You like Nina. A lot. Maybe even love her.”
He watches me for a reaction but I don’t give him one, because the words hit me in the gut, hearing them out loud.
“You’re mad at Sadie for leaving and you’re mad at the guy she left you for and you’re mad at Clara for leaving and you’re mad at the guy she left dad and Charlie for but that’s their problem. You’re mad that mom died. We all are. She didn’t want to leave us. We didn’t want her to leave us. We all did what we could but we couldn’t beat the cancer. It’s sad. Mom wanted us to be happy. Go be happy. I didn’t think there could be anything more annoying than how grumpy you were those last few months you were with Sadie, but then you got so fucking cheerful when you met Nina. That I get. This? This moping around when you’re with the best girl you’ve ever known?...Jesus.” He polishes off his scotch. “Maybe you should be seeing Dr. Glass, because you’re a fucking nut job.”
Chapter Nineteen
Vince
I can’t even get her into the room fast enough.
The four-hour drive here was fun and mostly beautiful, and fucking hell for me because she’s wearing a pink midriff-baring T-shirt with jean shorts but she insisted we wait until we get to the hotel like respectable grown-ups before going to town on each other. I would have pulled her top off in the elevator but I don’t want to get us kicked out of an upscale old school lakeside resort as soon as we’ve checked in. This ain’t the W in Times Square. Also, there was an older couple in the elevator with us—I’m not a beast. Once we’re in the room, all bets are off.
It’s not that I’ve gotten tired of having sex with her—that seems impossible—it’s just that things were getting so real back home. Three nights away from my responsibilities, with nothing but this woman on my To Do list? Heaven. Let’s get started.
I’m holding both of our weekend bags in one hand, opening the door with the other. Neither of us is talking, because voices carry in the hallways of these big old buildings, but we both know exactly what’s going to happen next. When the handle clicks, I hear her breath catch. I kick the door open, toss the bags on the floor, pull her inside, and press her up against the wall before it’s shut again.
Her breathing is already so heavy. “God, I want you. Vince.” She drags her hands up my abs while pulling my shirt off. “I just want you.”
“You got me, baby.”
Her hands are all up in my hair while our tongues tangle, moaning and arching her back as I pull her hips closer to me and slide my fingers up under that damn pink half-shirt, but as soon as they find her nipples, she pushes me back. She undoes my belt and pants with a force and urgency that I haven’t seen from her before, shoves them down and has to give them a little help getting past the massive erection in my boxer briefs.
Her eyes are hooded and electric and I don’t even recognize her voice when she says: “Get on the bed.”
Oh. Dear. God. “On it.” I am on that king-size bed so fast, I don’t even feel my feet moving. But she takes her time approaching me, unbuttoning her jean shorts as she kicks off her sandals and puts one pretty foot in front of the other. I lean back on my elbows and watch her shimmy out of those shorts, revealing the tiny white lace panties that must have been made for her—sweet and so sexy and designed by some genius who knew what I liked even before I did.
She climbs up on top of me, straddling me and lowering herself down over my painfully-hard cock, shoving me back down when I reach for her shirt.
“Come on, take it off,” I plead with her.
She ignores me, kisses my chest, swirling her tongue, licking, making her way down to the waistband of my underwear, and before I know it, I’m naked and she has one hand around my shaft, her mouth around the head, sucking and licking and savoring. She slowly moves her hand up and down, twisting and squeezing, varying her pressure, then licks me like an ice cream cone when she cups my balls and I groan and say her name and reach for her hair.
“You like that?” she asks, with the voice of a fallen angel.
“Yeah I like that.” I can barely speak. “I love everything that you do to me.”
She nibbles gently around the inside of my thighs while grabbing onto my hips, teasing me with a little intermission, and then strokes the tortured length of me with her fingertips, gently tugging on my balls, before gripping the base of my dick and licking her lips while looking up at me and pressing her mouth over the head and slowly taking in as much of me as she can.
I take in a sharp breath and my whole body tenses up from my jaw down to my toes, clench my fists. When her mouth moves back up, her hand squeezes harder, and when her tongue flicks at the sweet spot under the head, I let out some high-pitched sigh and then growl as I wrap my own hand around my cock to keep it out of the way while pushing her onto her back.
I rip those fucking angel-white panties apart, our eyes locked, and then I push that stupid T-shirt out of my way so my mouth can finally consume her perfect swollen tits, my fingers rubbing her slick engorged clit. She gasps as she pulls her shirt off over her head and I stop to admire all of her exposed flesh, vision bleary but completely in awe of every inch of her writhing naked body.
She manages to flip me over onto my back while I’m staring, hovers over me and says in a voice so husky that I feel a tremor down to my bones, “I want you to come inside of me.” I watch her carefully lower herself onto me, her hands pressing down on my chest, mine squeezing her hips.
Last week we exchanged clean bills of health, and I tried not to think about when this would finally happen, because I had to get a lot of work done and I would have had a non-stop monster hard-on if I’d let myself imagine what it would feel like to have no barrier between me and her warm wet pussy. Anything I coul
d have imagined would have been a far cry from the sensations I’m feeling now, and I know she can feel it too as she lets out little murmurs and sighs.
I suck in air through my teeth. “Baby you feel so good.”
She raises herself up then lowers herself all the way down on my cock, leans back and tenses up her bent legs, slowly rocking back and forth, eyes closed. My eyes keep wanting to close, but I force myself to keep them open so I can watch this beautiful woman sway to the rhythm of me inside of her. It can’t be possible to adore a person any more than I adore Nina. I feel myself filling her up, the friction unbearably hot and comforting and stimulating at the same time.
I remember what she said once about counting in French to calm herself, and try to do it in my head so I can let her enjoy bearing down on me like this, but by the time I get to neuf, I’ve got her on her back, calves up alongside my neck and I’m driving into her so deep she covers her mouth to muffle her screams. Skin slapping against skin has never sounded so good to me. The bed is rocking back and forth and she reaches back to grab onto the headboard, her head tilts back releasing a low animal sound from the depths of her throat. We’re moving together with such furious grace, I don’t ever want to stop.
“Fuck me harder, Vince,” she hisses. “Break me in two.”
Oh Christ. I take a deep breath as she lowers her feet flat on the mattress to brace herself, and I ramp things up, giving her everything I’ve got. My hands clasp the headboard between hers, and I thrust until I hear her cry out my name, her body tensing up beneath me, and I finally get my release. She lets go of the headboard to hold me as close to her as possible while I shudder and clench my jaw so tight to keep from saying the thing that I so desperately want to say to her.
I feel frozen in time and completely at her mercy.
She kisses my temple, my cheekbone, the side of my jaw, the top of my shoulder, and wraps her legs around the backs of mine, keeping me inside of her.
I relax on top of her and drift off into some half-waking, half-sleep state that makes me wonder if this is all a dream.
“Is there room service?” The sun is going down and we’re still on the bed, wrapped around each other.
“I think we have to go down to the lobby bar for food at this point. We can go for a walk around the property too.”
“Okay.” Neither of us moves.
“Eventually.”
“Yeah.” I nestle my face into her belly and hug her waist while her fingers run through my hair. “Well I really like this place so far,” I say.
She laughs. “And to think I was worried it wouldn’t be your speed.”
I exhale.
“To think I was worried that I wouldn’t be your speed.”
I lift one hand up to hold hers.
“I don’t know how you did it,” she whispers, after a long pause.
“Did what?”
“Got me to bring you home with me after knowing you for an hour. I keep thinking about it. It’s like there was one moment in time that I was open to something like that and you found me there.”
“It’s funny you say that. Because I’ve been thinking that you’re the one who found me. Or you keep finding these parts of me that I didn’t know existed.”
She presses her lips against the top of my head, and then I feel her body tremble and know that she’s laughing. “I’m sorry! It’s so sweet that you said that, but —”
“Yeah yeah, I heard it as soon as I said it. You’re like an adolescent boy sometimes, oh my God.”
“I’m sorry, I love that you said that, I just…”
I affect a dorky voice. “’Hey what’s this thing hanging off my pelvis? I didn’t even know that was there before—thanks Nina!’”
She mimics the dorky voice. “’Hey what’s this thing behind my forehead?’ ‘Oh honey, that’s your frontal lobe.’”
I tackle her. “You’ve found a side of me I didn’t know I had. How’s that?”
“Your good side, finally?”
“My best side. Miss Parks, you are a grade A smartass.” I smack her butt.
She sticks the tip of her index finger in her mouth and bites it, rolling her eyeballs up like the secretly naughty good girl that she is.
“Hey…” I am about to tell her I am so fucking head over heels in love with her, but suddenly the walls shake and we hear a door slam. A man and a woman’s voice heard through the wall behind our bed, somewhat hushed but definitely an argument.
We both tilt our heads towards the wall to listen, because it sounds—not heated so much as mean. A lot of seething anger. Bad vibes.
“Should we go down and get something to eat now?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“What were you going to say?”
“I’ll tell ya later.”
Probably best not to say it on the first night that we’re here anyway, in case shit gets awkward. Things do get awkward for everyone eventually, as our charming neighbors have reminded me.
Chapter Twenty
Nina
He left the Rumi book on the bedside table. For a self-proclaimed non-reader, I am impressed that he has respected the spine of the book by leaving it open face-down. He is in the bathroom, done showering, but I can’t help but pick up the book to check to see if it looks read. He hasn’t said anything since I gave it to him—which is fine—it’s hard to talk about poetry. You get it or you don’t. I can tell immediately that every page has been looked at. Flipping through it, I see that he has underlined many sentences from the introduction by the translator, and earmarked one page.
I hear him talking in the bathroom, probably on the phone. I have to see what page he earmarked. I flip to it and see that it’s my favorite poem, a tiny one. “The minute I heard my first love story…” and he wrote on the page: THIS
I put the book back the way it was on the bedside table, smiling and feeling warm all over.
Yes.
This.
The bathroom door opens, Vince walks out wearing nothing but his swim trunks, looking all shiny and new, and I feel warm all over in a completely different way. But when I hear Charlie’s voice through his phone, I sit up straight and get into Miss Parks-mode. I’m wearing a flimsy sundress over my bikini and need to make sure I don’t accidentally expose too much.
“Show me the room!” Charlie says. Vince turns his phone around to give him a 360 of the room. I wave at Charlie’s little face on the screen. “Oh hey!”
“Morning!”
Vince brings the phone over to me on the bed. His dad’s face pops into view.
“Hey Nina, we could use your help with something.”
“Hi Neil.”
Vince gives me his phone to hold, and immediately slides his hand up my dress, between my legs. I push his hand away.
“Charlie here is going to his friend’s birthday party this afternoon and we haven’t got her a present yet. He wants to get her a book. Thoughts? She’s eight.”
“Oh Charlie, is this the girl who gave you Matilda?”
“Yes.”
“Did you finish reading it?”
“Yeah, I liked it.”
“Well, maybe you should give her one of your favorite books.”
“She’s already read Harry Potter.”
“Okay, what else do you like? What other books do you re-read when you get the chance?”
“Holes, Phantom Tollbooth, I guess.”
“Great books! I love Holes but since I don’t know the girl it might be a little dark for her. You should get her Phantom Tollbooth and then you can talk about it.”
Vince is snickering and Neil rolls his eyes.
“I think you should talk to your girlfriend about holes.”
“Oh my God,” I punch his bicep. “You dork.”
“She’s not my girlfriend!”
“Where’s Gabe when you need him.”
“Okay, we gotta go to the bookstore. Thanks Nina. Have fun you guys. Stay outta trouble.”
“Not
a chance.”
“Have fun at the party, Charlie!”
Vince ends the call and tosses the phone away before I can stop him from pulling off my dress, my lukewarm complaints about how we have to get out to enjoy the sun and let housekeeping clean the room go ignored.
It took another hour to get out of the hotel room, because we both had to ensure that the other was thoroughly covered in sunscreen. My body has never felt so adored and attended to, and seeing the man that Eve referred to as “Mr. Seriously Sexy” behave like an insatiable teenager at times, is flattering to say the least.
The resort is fully-booked, so it is not surprising to find that all of the recliners around the pools are taken by the time we circle the area. I notice about fifty different women of all ages—moms and grandmas, women on their honeymoons—checking out the delicious man I’m holding hands with. I do not blame them. He looks super fine in his swim trunks, tank top and aviators.
“Let’s go down to the waterfront. There’s a beach, right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Hang on, I wanna get a picture of us with this view. Look at that. It’s gorgeous here.”
It really is. It’s a beautiful day, and the location of this resort, in the Adirondacks, on the lake, is perfect. It’s hard to believe I made these reservations for me and Russell. He probably would have insisted on spending the days seeking out antiques and dining. And I would have made myself believe that I like it.
I feel self-conscious when Vince holds up his camera to take a picture of us. This is the first time we’ve taken an “usie” together. He leans in, cheek pressed up against mine, and takes three shots. He looks at the pictures. “Damn. We look good together.”
Rebound With Me Page 13