by Cara McKenna
We take turns in the bathroom. I change into the pajamas I keep in his underwear drawer. They’re crisp and sweet-smelling, freshly laundered by his own hands this very morning, I can only assume. Remarkable.
As we lay down facing one another on the covers, he gives me a deep, shameless, filthy smile. “I enjoy visiting these new places with you.”
Of course he does. A vacation that takes him no farther than the bounds of the mattress. Any excuse to go inside, rather than out. But I agree. “Me too.”
“It’s like doing these things for the first time again, experiencing them alongside you.”
My heart grows big, too big, pumping too hard, making me blush. My voice is a weak whisper. “I like that. A lot.”
He trails kisses along my jaw and between them he asks, “Why do you sound so shy?”
Because I want so badly to be special to you. Because I’m in love with you. “It’s just nice to hear. It’s nice to think I make you feel that way, that the stuff we do feels new to you, since you’ve made me feel nothing but new things since we met.”
A kiss below my ear, another, another. So many I know he’s caught on some thought, trying to decide whether or not to give it voice. My swollen heart clenches tight with irrational panic. What if he wants to break it off? What if he can sense how attached I’ve become? But it’s stupid. He just told me lovely things about us, and he’s the last man who’d clam up or run away, faced with sentimentality.
After a very long pause and countless idle kisses, he finally speaks. “Thank you for my gift.”
“Oh. You’re very welcome.”
He pulls back so I can see his smile. “You like the idea of me opening things, don’t you? Locks. Doors.”
“I hadn’t thought about it, really.” But yes, of course I want the world to open for him. He deserves the entire ocean, not just some lonely shell. “You like puzzles. Mechanical puzzles. And the tools are very you. That’s all.”
“You would have me become some master lock picker, so every door in this city would be mine to step through. Until I could go anywhere, Paris growing bigger and bigger and bigger, one door at a time.”
“You know I want that.”
“And you’d be at my back at every threshold, ready to push me through.”
I cool under his gaze. There’s something intense and unknown in that look. Is he angry? “I hope it never feels like I push you. I only ever want to encourage you…”
Another smile banishes my fears. “I need pushing, Caroly.”
“I’d never want to bully you, though.” He suffered enough of that as a kid.
The intensity returns to his eyes and he kneads my shoulder with fierce affection. “You’re the only person in my life who pushes. I have wonderful, kind clients and friends who run my errands, bring me groceries, do a hundred things for me so I can feel safe. But you’re the only one who cares enough to say, ‘Fuck your precious safety, Didier.’”
I blush. “I don’t think I’ve ever said that. Not even in my head.”
“No, of course not. Even when you push, you’re gentle. But you care enough that you’re not afraid to upset me. Everyone else, they love me as some pet. They want me fed and happy and warm, safe in a pretty cage, always waiting right where they expect me to be. But you would make me into one of those pigeons.” He nods to the window, where his little gray voyeurs doze beyond the drapes. “Maybe a little worse for wear, maybe a bit skittish and dirty, but you want me free to fly, I think.”
I nod. “I do. In your own time.”
His soft laugh warms the room. “My own time kept me inside for three years. I’m grateful for the pressure.” He pauses. “No, not pressure. For the baiting. For giving me the incentive to find my balls and go outside with you. Or meet you somewhere.”
“What incentive?”
He bites his lip, but I can see how broad his smile would be from how his eyes crinkle in the candlelight. “To impress you.”
My turn to laugh. “To impress me?”
“To make you proud. And to be honest…”
“Yes?”
“Because it’s a relief to let someone see me so helpless. To admit my problem to people is one thing, but to actually let someone see what it does to me… And you’ve seen that, and you’re still here.” His voice goes strange and thin, and he clears his throat. “Anyway. For a hundred reasons, you make me want to be a stronger man.”
“Oh. Wow.”
He presses his lips to my forehead, seeming ready to put the topic to bed.
When he rises to blow out the candles, I feel all funny and overheated. I spent forever worrying I might never even find a man I wanted who wanted me back. To imagine I’d find one I cared for as much as Didier, to believe he does want me back, that he wants to be stronger for me, better, as if he thinks I deserve more…
The thought should make me giddy but it scares me as well. It’s terrifying, feeling so much for one person, and after waiting so long for it. There’s so much to lose if they change their mind and leave you, if they’re taken from you…
I’m sure I’m not the only woman who’s in love with Didier. Half his clients might easily feel as deeply for him as I do, and I suddenly understand why they might want to keep him in this pretty cage, as he called it. To keep him polished and nestle him on a cushion in a beautiful box, and store him where they can always find him. If he hadn’t left this place to seek me out… If the moment we ceased being client and prostitute and became something more hadn’t happened how it had, I’d probably do like all the rest. Hoard him here for my own enjoyment.
We climb under the covers together in the dark.
I kiss his temple. “Turn over.”
He rolls onto his side and lets me hug my body to his. I breathe in the scent of his neck and hair, feel his ribs rise and fall under my arm. I find his hand and twine our fingers and squeeze. He squeezes back.
I love you.
I think the words I’m afraid to say. If I say them it’ll make all this real, and real things rarely last. They get lost and broken and worn, and you look back and try to remember the time when this faded object meant so much to you. If I say them he’ll know beyond a doubt I’m his, and we never yearn for things as deeply once we know they’re ours to keep.
But then I picture Didier’s cabinet full of curiosities and I realize newness isn’t his currency. He’s attached to the old, the discarded, the broken and fixable. He wouldn’t leave a woman simply because her novelty faded. I hug him a little tighter, thinking of how very many objects live in that hutch. I’m special, maybe even the most special, but what does that warrant? A central space on the top shelf perhaps, but I’m still just one among dozens. Maybe I’m greedy, wanting more than that.
You knew what he was before you met him. You knew he wasn’t yours alone.
But I hadn’t suspected then that he’d become this much to me. He was only ever supposed to be the handsome, expensive solution to the issue of my loitering virginity. I gave him that, and so much more. He holds a great hunk of my heart in his hands, so big it feels like I’d die if he took it away.
But it beats now, steady thumps against his back. And here he is, solid and warm. He’s already real, and I’m already in love with him. I slip my fingers free to rub his chest and feel his heart thump too.
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” he murmurs.
“Yes. I’m excited to sleep in.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Let’s not worry about that now.” He’ll never fall asleep if he starts stressing about leaving the flat. Anticipating the route doesn’t calm or prepare him—it only makes his thoughts race faster. “We’ll figure it out in the morning.”
“It’s supposed to be warm.”
“I heard.”
“Let’s go to the river. Let’s find a café with a terrace, overlooking the water.”
“Outside? Really?”
“Yes,” he says, and he yawns. He’s speaking about going out
side and staying outside and he actually yawned.
“Okay, sure. Whatever you want.”
“What I want is to sit with you and listen to the water, and feel the sunshine warm my hair.”
In all likelihood he’ll be too anxious to register anything so subtle as the shush of the river or the heat of the sun, but far be it from me to remind him of this. “That sounds nice.”
He turns over, knees finding mine under the covers, our legs locking. “You know what else is so good about Saturdays?”
“What?”
“Did you notice that I never take clients on Fridays or Saturdays anymore?”
I’d noticed, though I hadn’t let myself hope it was anything more than a pleasant string of coincidences. “No?”
“No. So unless you have plans, maybe I could see you tomorrow night as well?”
“Sure. I’ll need to go home for a change of clothes at some point, but yes, of course.”
“And maybe I could take you out for a glass of wine, and stop at a market and find things to make dinner.”
Again, out. Markets are full of people, I want to say. And bars are full of people, as are all the streets of the Latin Quarter on a Saturday evening. “I’d like all those things. If that’s what you want.”
“Those are things I want to want. That’s the sort of man I’d like to be, so I’ll go through his motions, again and again and again, until they feel like my own.”
I kiss him between his brows. “That sounds like a very good strategy.”
“Now you turn over.”
I do, savoring the shifting of his body as I’m enclosed by strong, warm maleness. So many years I missed out on this embrace, letting fear guide my decisions. I hope Didier finds his payoff too, all that warm sunshine on his hair. If it feels even half as wonderful as his chest at my back or his breath on my neck, it’ll be worth the work, a hundred times over.
“Good night, Caroly.”
“Good night.” I love you so.
About Cara McKenna
Cara McKenna writes smart erotica: a little dark, a little funny, definitely sexy and always emotional. She lives north of Boston with her extremely good-natured and permissive husband. When she’s not trapped inside her own head, Cara can usually be found in the kitchen, the coffee shop or the nearest duck-filled pond.
Cara welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email address on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.
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Also by Cara McKenna
Backwoods
Brazen
Convenient Strangers
Curio
Dirty Thirty
Don’t Call Her Angel
Getaway
Ruin Me
Shivaree
Skin Game
Willing Victim
Print books by Cara McKenna
Lessons in Letting Go anthology
Off Limits anthology
Stray Hearts anthology
Ellora’s Cave Publishing
www.ellorascave.com
Craving
ISBN 9781419942006
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Craving Copyright © 2012 Cara McKenna
Edited by Kelli Collins
Cover design by Caitlin Fry
Photos: Yuri Acurs
Electronic book publication September 2012
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