by Sandy Lowe
Emma’s safe word was for her protection, and Lauren didn’t make her feel guilty for using it. She was relieved about that, but she needed more than her body to be safe. How did she explain she needed her heart and their future to be just as safe?
Emma took a big breath and let it out slowly, giving herself time to decide. The last time they’d come up against an obstacle, she’d asked Lauren to leave. This time skipping out wasn’t an option. She loved her. That was the thing about love, the sticking when things got tough part. The not running and not hiding, but facing what stood in the way. All the hitches and the monkey wrenches, and those times when life took a chunk out of your ass. Love was having someone who stuck.
Emma wasn’t topping from the bottom, not really, but she needed to call this one shot. Just one. For Lauren, it would be the most important one.
She flipped over in Lauren’s arms until she could look into Lauren’s eyes. “I don’t want to be in the club with a stranger.”
Lauren raised her eyebrows and brushed her wet fingers against Emma’s cheek, making her blush. Lauren was using her arousal to disagree with her. That was more than a little annoying.
“Yes, okay, it turns me on,” Emma snapped. “This make-believe story you’re concocting is hot, Lauren. Well done.”
Lauren’s face shut down just as Emma knew it would. Just as she’d witnessed every time Lauren came up against something that hurt. Emma couldn’t have asked for a more compassionate and insightful lover. She’d never expected anyone to truly see her, and then to want the person they saw. Lauren had, and she did. The last thing Emma wanted was to be a source of pain for her, but if Lauren retreated every time things got hard, sticking would break them.
Emma had to say what needed to be said, and see if Lauren would come back.
“Well done? That’s a bit condescending,” Lauren said.
“Then maybe you should stop hiding if you don’t want me to call you out on it.” Emma dug her knees into the couch when Lauren tried to sit up and push her off. Emma knew exactly how she felt. She knew not wanting to face something. To have someone you cared about, someone you loved, tell you it was time to get over your self-judgment. Time to show up because they needed you to.
“Either explain yourself or let me up, Emma.”
Lauren’s voice was so quiet, so precisely controlled, that goose bumps spread down Emma’s arms. Frost had crystalized over Lauren’s detachment now, shrouding her in ice. This was a risk. Lauren’s tone was a tiptoe away from legit pissed off. But loving someone meant you saw them for who they really were. You knew them for the good and the bad and all the ways they held themselves back from what they really wanted. That’s what Lauren had done for her, and now she saw what Lauren was hiding.
“I’m getting a little bored being a pawn in your fantasies. Having you whisper in my ear is real hot and everything, but if you don’t start acting on all this talk soon, I’ll be disappointed.”
She was such a liar her pants should be on fire. She would happily lie back and listen to Lauren weave a sexy world around her all damn day if she thought that’s what Lauren really wanted. If she didn’t finally see that fantasy and sex clubs and a change of scenery were Lauren’s defense against truly owning up to her passions.
Emma didn’t want fantasy. She’d lived in a fantasy world with Lauren as the star since high school, and as lovely as it was, it wasn’t real. She wanted Lauren.
“A pawn? Disappointed?” Lauren hauled herself up with Emma still on top of her so they were tangled around each other in a sitting position. “Is that so?”
“Yeah,” Emma shot back with all the bravado she could muster, “that’s so.”
They stared at each other, the fierceness in Lauren’s eyes belying the remoteness of her expression.
Emma broke first. Of course, she did. She didn’t even have half of Lauren’s control, but it didn’t matter. She had the truth instead. She knew it in her bones. Just because Lauren had more experience, didn’t mean she didn’t have demons. Lauren’s wealth of experience was precisely why she got away with hiding behind fantasy. Fantasies were safe.
Emma knew all too well the cost of such safety.
“I don’t want this fantasy,” Emma said with all the certainty she could muster. “Not right now. I want you to tie my wrists to the metal rungs of my headboard. Then I want you to fuck me. I want you to take me. I want you. The real you. The one that’s right here looking really damn put out by all of this. I don’t want another fantasy. I don’t want you to spin a make-believe story to get us off. I want real. I want honest. I want raw. You get annoyed when I close my eyes? When I struggle to be present? Well, I get annoyed when you distance yourself from what’s genuine by layering a fantasy on top of it. By not really doing what you’re describing. I want you to mean it, and actually do it, and to fucking revel in it.”
I want heartfelt and wholehearted and heart-to-heart with nothing between us.
Lauren’s gaze never wavered. Her stare peeled Emma inside out until every part of her was on display—her desire, her need, her heart—all there for Lauren to see. What Lauren stirred in her in that moment, her stare somewhere between a glare and a claiming, was too complicated to be love. Too big to be bound by emotion. She was laid bare and the feeling swamped her, wrapping around her, seeping into her pores, and becoming part of who she was. It was a feeling meant only for Lauren. This one woman who owned her heart.
Emma breathed.
“Is it so bad to want you?” She used a thumb to catch the tears that ran down Lauren’s cheeks. “Wasn’t it you who told me wanting something from someone is the damn point?”
Lauren’s silence grew, like a slap stinging Emma’s skin. She untangled herself from Lauren, pulled her knees to her chest, and wrapped her arms around herself. Swallowing hard, she tried to force away the burning in her throat that always signaled tears. They would never work if Lauren didn’t stand up for herself and what she wanted.
Seconds and minutes and years bled together as Emma looked into Lauren’s gray eyes, soft as cashmere and wild as storm clouds. Those eyes that had seen inside her from the very first moment. Those eyes had never looked away, never considered her too much to handle, and had always been patient, kind, sexy-as-all-get-out eyes.
Emma spoke to the woman behind those eyes. “Sex isn’t as good if it’s easy and simple and uncomplicated. I want vulnerability. I love you.”
Lauren grimaced like the words made her bleed. “Emma.”
“I love you.”
“That’s a really terrible idea on your part. I’m hell to love. I never remember anniversaries, and I leave my wet towel on the bathroom floor.”
“Don’t joke. Be vulnerable. Be real. Be you. Just you and me and nothing and no one else. I love you.”
Lauren pulled her shirt over her head and pressed Emma’s palm to her heart, where, in deceptively simple script, were the words What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Her fingers wrapped around Emma’s and held there, their joined hands against the phrase they’d have to break through for access to her heart.
Emma relaxed. Pushing Lauren to face her issues, ripping at her deepest secrets, wasn’t what she wanted to do. Lauren had to want to expose herself. Lauren had to let her in. Asking, demanding, putting conditions on their connection, wouldn’t get her what she wanted. Wouldn’t do a damn thing to get Lauren to open up. Emma waited, and, for the first time, the waiting was comfortable, like they could sit there with her jeans undone and Lauren’s shirt off all their lives. As if nothing and no one outside this moment mattered, and time was suspended and irrelevant.
“Mom was never a prostitute,” Lauren said flatly. She squeezed Emma’s hand. “She checked coats at a gentlemen’s club in Albany, and she helped out the dancers sometimes, giving them a safe place to stay if they needed it. But she never had sex for money.”
“Okay,” Emma said.
“But bringing a procession of erotic dancers to your house, and tre
ating them as if they actually mattered, as if they were as worthy as her church-going neighbors, well, that wasn’t living up to small town values, at least not in Sunrise Falls.”
Emma nodded and tucked a strand of hair behind Lauren’s ear.
“I was eight when the rumors started. I’ve never been quite sure where they originated, but it got around fast that Mom wasn’t just a coat checker, that she was taking cash for blow jobs, and God only knows what else. The kids at school, eight-year-olds, started calling her a whore. You know that’s not a word they’d have figured out for themselves. They must’ve heard it from their parents.”
“That must’ve been so hard.” Emma’s heart broke for Lauren. To be eight and struggling with such adult discrimination must have been agonizing.
“She lost her job at the bank. Back then, there wasn’t any protection against workplace discrimination. What was she supposed to do? Sue them with no money and no job?”
Emma made a harsh sound, a laugh that caught in her throat and transformed into a sob when it reached her lips. Not even remotely funny how close Lauren’s mom’s history mirrored her current predicament. This town hadn’t changed even a little.
“She had to take more hours at the club to make enough to survive, and even then, we struggled. There were days she didn’t eat at all. Days she watched me cry and call her names because she had to deny me the apple sitting on the kitchen counter. I couldn’t have the apple today. If I did, there wouldn’t be any lunch for the next day. That’s how I grew up after no one in Sunrise Falls would hire the whore who spent her nights sucking cock at the gentlemen’s club and came home with a procession of pretty girls who just needed a safe place to sleep. Women who, it’s hard to believe, were even worse off than we were.”
Emma swiped at the tears on her cheeks and swallowed painfully. God. It was so much worse than she’d imagined. “Your mom sounds amazing.”
Lauren’s chin lifted and the smallest of smiles appeared. “She’s the best, but poverty is debilitating. Life isn’t about meaning or enjoyment. Nothing is as simple as going to school and playing with your friends, or worrying about your homework. Poverty is life. Every decision is about poverty. Do you put gas in the car to get to work or pay the oil bill to keep the pipes from freezing? Mom faced those choices every day, a weight on her mind every minute. That’s the burden of poverty, not to mention the stigma of sex work. She did her best. She kept a roof over my head, kept me fed, kept me in school, but poverty came first.
“There was no one to watch me while she was at work, so I spent every night alone fending for myself. She had to sleep during the day so missed every school function. She was so sad, so fucking weary of the battle to just stay alive, she didn’t have a lot left over for me. She loved me. She had the bone-deep decency to put her own worries aside and give shelter to girls who needed it despite the damage to her reputation. She did everything she could for me, and for them. It just didn’t always feel like enough. Poverty always got the lion’s share.”
“I won’t say I understand.” Emma wished she could wrap Lauren in her arms and somehow heal all her hurt. “I’m sure I don’t understand even half of what you went though, but I’m so sorry. It kills me that you suffered. That you’re still suffering.”
Lauren’s shoulders lifted in a gesture too slow and exhausted to really be called a shrug. “Everyone suffers somehow. This was just my how. I got out, moved to the West Coast, and started over. But the past never really goes away no matter how much you stamp it down. What’s that saying? No matter where you go, there you are.”
“Is it connected for you?” Emma asked. “Your childhood experiences and your sexual expression as an adult?”
Lauren didn’t answer for a long moment. “Yes and no. I don’t think I’m kinky because of what happened when I was a kid. That’s just who I am and what I like, and would be the same no matter what upbringing I had. But when I’m in control, it’s easier to separate who I want to be from who I used to be. I like going to Kink’s because the atmosphere, the role-plays, give me space to distance myself through fantasy.”
“Why?” Emma felt the weight of those three letters like they were a sledgehammer about to come down on her heart. “Why do you do it?”
“Because I’m trash.” Lauren put a hand up to stop Emma from voicing the protest that was instantly on the tip of her tongue. “I know I’m not really trash any more than my mother is. I know that her taking the only job available to her, and helping women even less fortunate, doesn’t make either of us trash. I know trying to help Caroline doesn’t make me trash, either. I know.
“But when I was eight, no one would play with me at school because my mom was the town slut. When I was fifteen, boys invited me to parties to get me drunk, thinking I’d be an easy lay. When I was a senior, the school counselor told me that I’d have to focus on my grades, so I wouldn’t repeat my mother’s mistakes. It never ends. Now I’ve come back amid a scandal of my own making, and proved every single one of the naysayers right. That’s who I am, Emma. And even though logic and reason tell me all those things don’t make me trash, it’s hard to really believe it.
“It’s hard to be me with someone like you. Someone so good. Someone who excelled in all the ways I didn’t. It’s hard not to pretend to be a better version of myself. At the end of the day, at the crux of everything, it’s just hard to believe that anyone would want me. Sexy, dominant, role-playing, fantasy-weaving Lauren who can make a woman come? That’s given me confidence. That’s helped me to find value in who I am. I’m good at that. But under it, I’m eight and afraid that this girl I’m falling for will discover I’m not really worth it unless I keep some distance between her and the person I am on the inside.”
Emma swallowed past the tightness in her throat, hardly daring to breathe. This moment, this revelation, felt like the most important of her life, and the desire not to fuck it up was almost overpowering. She leaned forward, pressed her mouth to Lauren’s, and whispered against her lips, “That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”
Lauren’s laugh was genuine, if not exactly carefree. “I’ll have to keep in mind you have an excellent memory and a propensity to throw my words back in my face.”
“Can I help it if it’s effective?” Emma got up and offered Lauren her hand. “I don’t have the words for everything I need to say…for all the ways your history is heartbreaking, and for all the reasons you’re wrong about not being enough.”
Words would never heal the hurt shrouding Lauren’s heart. Maybe nothing would. But Emma knew Lauren now, saw her now, and there was one way they could communicate without need for words at all.
“Come to bed.”
Chapter Eighteen
Emma made a sound that was two-thirds oh-my-God-hurry-up, and one-third don’t-you-dare-stop-kissing-me, as they fumbled their way to the bedroom. Her need had reached the level of craving, the desire welling inside almost painful, as sheer want enveloped her so completely she couldn’t separate her need for Lauren from her love for Lauren.
Love and lust were inextricably linked.
She landed unceremoniously on her back with Lauren on top of her. When Lauren grabbed her wrists and pinned them over her head, she didn’t hold back the frustrated sound on the tip of her tongue. How was she supposed to convince Lauren that she loved her? That Lauren was worthy of all the love she had to give, if she couldn’t touch her? She needed contact, skin, closeness. Emotional, sexual, spiritual…all of it.
Whose dumb idea had it been to suggest bondage, anyway?
“Stop trying to get away. You wanted this, now you’re going to take it how I want to give it. I’m not inclined to hurry.” Lauren’s gaze glinted, half teasing, half hunger, as she rested her weight fully upon Emma.
Lauren caught her gasp in a searing kiss, and heat curled from her lips, burned down her belly, and blazed between her thighs. Emma marveled at how intense kissing was. No matter how many times Lauren took her mouth,
her fingers tangling in Emma’s hair, her lips and tongue urgently coaxing needy sounds from deep inside, nothing felt familiar. Kissing Lauren, or rather, Lauren kissing her, had adrenaline coursing through her veins, revving her up, making her breath catch and her skin ignite. Narrowing her awareness to this one point of contact, impossible to control.
Guhhh. Why did her mind have to screech to a halt right now? She had things to do, points to prove, feelings to express. Touch was Lauren’s language, and she wanted to communicate just how loved and appreciated and goddammed worthy Lauren really was. She wanted to sooth a lifetime of pain with tender caresses and gentle explorations.
The trouble was, kissing Lauren made her want to fuck.
Emma wrapped herself around Lauren, rubbing her pussy against the bare skin of Lauren’s stomach. “Please.”
Lauren tortured her, cupping the back of her neck to hold her right where she wanted her, and grinding against her center. Emma whimpered. More, damn it. She wanted to be naked. She wanted Lauren to tip her head back and kiss down her neck, stroke her breasts, explore all her curves, use her fingers and her mouth to make her come. She wanted so much more. “Please. Please. Please.”
“Such pretty begging,” Lauren murmured against her mouth, crushing her hips into Emma’s.
Need burned through Emma’s senses, igniting her with reckless abandon. Warning! Extreme fire alert: uncontained blaze ahead, backup impossible. “I need you inside me. Please.”
Lauren propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at her, a smile in her eyes. “A woman with a strap-on request at the top of her sex list must have one lying around here somewhere.”
Emma considered denying it—for half a second. Lauren slowly moving against her was sending her whole world into overdrive. Embarrassment about sex toys would have to wait until after her hormones had been subjected to an ice bath. “Maybe.”