by Ruthie Knox
“Did you happen to bring a condom?”
“In my jeans.”
She dove her torso off the bed, fished around in his pants, returned with the condom packet in her hand. “Put it on me.”
“Get on your back.”
He flipped over, put his hands behind his head, and watched her rip it open, kneeling up naked, pretty and soft and muscled and bruised.
The first time he saw her naked, her hair dripping, pupils blown, he hadn’t let himself look. Kal looked now. He looked at her breasts, the hard shapes of her nipples, her pubic hair a shade darker than the hair on her head. He looked at her hands rolling the condom onto him, her intent expression, the way she rocked a little back and forth on her heels, too horny to keep still.
He kept his hands to himself and looked at Rosemary until she looked back at him. Then he said, “Come here.”
She crawled up the bed to lay beside him, her head on the pillow by his head, her eyes dark blue because they hadn’t turned the bedroom light on. The light that came in through the doorway from the kitchen was enough to see by.
Enough to see the vulnerability in her face that she wasn’t bothering to hide. Enough to see that she didn’t just want to fuck him, any more than he just wanted to fuck her. “Rosemary.”
She put her hand over his mouth. “Shh.”
That seemed like the best way to handle it.
Kal licked between her fingers and sucked one into his mouth. She lifted one knee over his hip, and he dropped his hand between her legs, found her slick and wet, spread two fingers and worked her up and down until he figured out how much pressure she wanted and where. Their mouths met, hungry and messy and hot, breathing into each other as much as they were kissing, Kal distracted by the feel of her wet heat against his fingers and the sliding pressure of her hip grinding back and forth over his cock.
She made a noise. Closed her eyes. Arched her back, gasping.
“You like that, princess?”
Rosemary rolled onto her back and pulled him on top of her. She moved beneath him, spread her legs, found him with her fist and positioned him right where she wanted him. “I thought I told you to be quiet.”
He was smiling when he moved inside her. She was so perfectly Rosemary, the smug tilt of her smile in place until he was all the way inside, and when she lifted her hips and found an angle to take him deeper still, he had to squeeze his eyes closed and grab a fistful of pillow and count backward from ten.
She put her arms around him and stroked his back, up and down. She ran her fingers along the ridge of his spine. When he opened his eyes, there she was. Hiding nothing.
“Are we going to do this or what?” she asked.
“Jesus.”
She wrapped her legs around his waist and rocked a little. “Yes. That’s very nice.”
“You’re really something.”
“Thank you.”
Just like the first time she thanked him when he handed her a cup of tea at Base Camp, Rosemary looked right into his eyes, gave him all of her attention, gracious as a princess.
She rocked again, this time more determined, with a bump and grind when she had him in to the hilt that made her mouth go slack. “Mmm.”
“Do that again.”
“It’s your turn.”
“Lazy.”
“I put the condom on.”
“I carried you into the bedroom. I rubbed your feet, too.”
Rosemary sighed. “It’s impossible to get serviced properly these days.”
“You should try Craigslist.”
“I should try a riding crop, is what I should try.” She smacked him hard on the ass. “Go.”
“Are you pretending I’m a horse?”
“Your proportions are generous, but they’re not that generous.” She smacked him again. “Yah!”
Kal let out a yelp, and then he was laughing and it was all over—Rosemary brought a hand up to her mouth, giggling, her legs gripping him even tighter, and he started to move inside her, steady and slow, that same rush he’d felt in the cab there when he looked into her eyes, like they’d been doing this forever, and he never wanted it to end.
He straightened his arms so he could look at her and watch their bodies come together, focusing in on the sounds she made and the color in her cheeks. He knew when he found the right angle, the right speed, and he dropped back to his elbow so he could put his hand on her and rub beside her clit, tight circles in the spot he’d found earlier.
She made a sound that didn’t have a name. A highly satisfying sound. Her cheeks had gone crimson. Kal put his lips on her hot skin, kissed beside her ear, pressed relentlessly into the spot she liked, and she tightened mercilessly on his dick. “Kal.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh my God. Don’t—”
He did, though. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she clutched at him hard, pulling his head down to her chest, digging her fingers into his hair, moaning his name in a voice so raw and needy that it sliced right through what remained of his self-control and he went over with her, fast and hard, his hands finding the middle of her back and holding on tight.
They collapsed in a damp, sticky heap. She disentangled her hands from his hair and patted the top of his head.
“Good horsie,” she said in a raspy voice.
All Kal could think was that the way he felt about Rosemary wasn’t complicated.
It wasn’t stupid.
It was just a whole lot more than he’d bargained for.
—
Rosemary lay beside Kal, her body cooling, her heart full, and she didn’t pull his head to her chest to run her fingers through his hair, separating the short strands, learning the shapes of his skull with her hands, but she wanted to.
She wanted to stroke his hair.
She knew what it meant. She was no fool.
The light spilling through the doorway striped his skin dark and light, golden and brown. The fine hairs along his forearms glowed.
She didn’t reach out to touch them because he’d gone still, and she understood that this was another one of those tricky moments with Kal, a minefield she hadn’t a strategy for and could only creep carefully through.
She turned onto her side, though, to study him unobtrusively.
He had calluses across his palms from climbing, square fingernails, round muscular forearms. He had fine collarbones and smile lines at the corners of his eyes, and dark stubble now where he’d been clean-shaven this morning. She found no gray hair at his temples. She could see no tension in his body, though he felt tense beside her.
They’d been through a great deal in a short period of time.
Rosemary knew there were people who, if she asked them, would tell her the things she and Kal had been through had generated what she was feeling for him. Tragedy, danger, intense sexual attraction—all of them influenced brain chemistry.
Adrenaline and pheromones and serotonin had created a miasma of manufactured emotion.
These people would tell her that the intensity of her feelings would fade given time, leaving behind only the obvious obstacles to any kind of partnership.
He lived in New York. She had a cottage north of London, a daughter in Wisconsin. She had seven mountains to climb and a book to write, and she didn’t know what Kal wanted or what he intended to do in the years ahead.
So, yes. Perhaps those people would turn out to be correct.
That was fine.
For now, it was lovely to feel this way about someone again. She had never discounted the possibility, but she hadn’t gone in search of it, and she certainly hadn’t expected her journey to Nepal to carry her here, to the blooming beginning of love.
Kal turned onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow. “So.”
She repeated the word back. “So.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes?”
“I could be here when you wake up.”
“You could.”
“Or I could not be here.
”
“That’s the other possibility.”
“What do you want?” He smiled, but it wasn’t the smile she liked best from him. It was a question rather than an answer.
“I’m a big girl, Kal.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I want you to do whatever it is you want to do.”
He slid his elbow along the counterpane until his head hit the pillow. Then he turned over onto his back again and commenced a careful survey of the ceiling. “I snore,” he said after a very long silence.
“It’s been rumored that I do, too.”
“You didn’t in Lukla.”
“I can’t imagine you would have heard me if I had.”
“Over the sound of my snoring?”
“Through the haze of your exhaustion.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“I’m right about a great many things.” Rosemary began to feel she’d like to be dressed. A hot shower, a soft towel, a white cotton nightgown, and the window open to let the spring breeze in.
“Do you think there’s a baby?” he asked. “From Lukla?”
He said this to the ceiling rather than to her face. Annoyance made her response curt. “No.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“I haven’t taken a test, if that’s what you mean.”
“Could you? Or wouldn’t it be accurate yet?”
“I’ve no idea. I haven’t had a cycle in ages, and I don’t think I’m fertile at the moment. But I’ll look into a test.”
“Good.” He was quiet a moment. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Right. Tomorrow.”
Her affection for him remained undiminished, but he was officially trying her patience. “Have we settled that you’ll stay the night?”
“Probably.”
“We’re to meet your mother at the break of dawn. It’s already late. Just stay.”
“Okay.”
She waited for him to soften, or reach for her, but he didn’t, and she wondered if there would ever come a time he could learn not to retreat into silence and blithe, noncommittal conversation when there were important things to talk about.
Given what she’d seen of his family around the dinner table, perhaps not.
Rosemary pushed Kal’s elbow out of the way and snuggled herself against his chest. “Why do you think your mother wants to go to Wisconsin?” she asked.
“She moves in mysterious ways.”
“She didn’t seem to want to be interviewed on the phone or by video.”
“Most nights she has her phone glued to her ear, talking to somebody or another. She probably has some reason she wants to do it this way. She usually does. But we’re not going to find out what it is until she’s good and ready to tell us.”
That was more or less what Rosemary had already surmised.
“Why did you say yes?” Kal asked.
“I want to interview her.”
“Sure, but you could’ve come up with some other way.”
“The way she put it, it didn’t sound like a request, it sounded like an order. And since it’s what your mother wants, and what I want is access to your mother, I didn’t think I was in any position to say no. Besides, it means I’ll get to see more of you.”
“Sorry.”
“What on earth for?”
“Old Sherpa ladies are kind of bossy. And persnickety.”
Rosemary wanted to poke him for letting her comment about wanting to see him go unanswered. Instead, she turned her head and bit his collarbone hard enough to make him wince. “Many old women are bossy and persnickety because it’s the only power they have available. Are you going to be like this the entire trip, or will you take the stick out of your bunghole at some point and be your charming self?”
“There’s a stick up my bunghole?”
“There’s a meter-long rod up your bunghole, and there has been since the moment you achieved orgasm. I can only assume it’s because as soon as you completed the sex act, you remembered to be preoccupied with fidgeting over the news that your mother is insisting we all road trip to Wisconsin together, but if it’s something else, now would be the time to let me know.”
“No, that was the whole thing.”
He refused to acknowledge what had passed between them even as they sat bare-arsed atop the mattress it happened on.
Men were idiots. She officially had no use for them.
“ ‘Bunghole’ is a really disgusting word,” Kal said.
“It’s no worse than ‘arsehole.’ ”
“We don’t say ‘arsehole,’ we say ‘asshole,’ and it’s much worse than both.”
“You’re a tedious human being.”
His mouth twitched. “You’re not the first woman to think so.”
“No, I imagine there’s a long string of women behind me, all of whom found you tedious in the extreme. And small-penised, besides.”
It was the lowest form of insult—entirely untrue, also—but it did the trick. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes reanimated, and he leaned closer. “Did you just call me ‘small-penised,’ princess?”
She leaned, too, until their noses nearly touched. “I did.”
“Small-penised.” He shook his head. “You’re the meanest woman I’ve ever met. I just made you come like an actual freight train, huffing and puffing, and you should see how red you turned, like a fire engine—”
“Now you’re mixing metaphors.”
“And you have the audacity to insult my manhood. I tell you—”
“Stop telling me things now.” She kissed him. “You’re bad at it.”
“It’s just that you’re so scary.” He kissed her back, then dropped his head to nip at her neck. “Smelly, too.”
“We’re taking a shower now.”
“Is it a big shower?”
“It’s the ordinary size, but it’s marble. If you’re good, I’ll let you wash my hair.”
“That’s a shame,” he said, and he finally wrapped his arms all the way around her, which made her heart speed up at the same time it calmed her down.
She’d got him back from wherever he’d gone.
“I’m never very good,” he said.
“I know, Kalden.”
She let herself pet his head, but only one time. Then she kissed his cheek. “You’ll learn.”
Chapter 17
“I love this song!” Rosemary leaned close behind his headrest and breathed vodka fumes into his ear. “Turn it up.”
“No.”
“Pleeease?”
“Mom’s asleep.”
“She’s snoring. She’ll never know. Turn it up.”
He thumbed the button on the steering wheel twice. Rosemary started singing along to a hair band anthem of the 1990s as the car shot down the back roads of southern Wisconsin in the dark.
Kal wondered if days like this were why his uncle Dorjee had started muttering to himself.
It hadn’t sounded this terrible in theory. Last night, he’d even started to think it could be kind of fun, in a way. For one thing, he’d get to spend time with Rosemary—a prospect that took on additional shine when she’d dropped to her knees in the shower, and he’d returned serve back in bed and kept her at the edge of coming until she finally relented and admitted his penis was perfectly adequate, perhaps more than adequate, although she slightly preferred his tongue.
She made him laugh.
When she wasn’t driving him nuts singing at the top of her lungs with the windows rolled down.
“Put that up,” he said. “It’s too cold.”
“It’s not cold. Everest is cold. This is summer.”
“It won’t be summer for a couple months.”
“In England, this passes for summer. We all strip off our jumpers and lay about in the grass to soak up the sun.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m perfectly aware of that, thank you. Ooh, this is a good song, too.
Turn it up.”
“I already turned it up.”
“Turn it up again.”
Kal gave her one measly click of the volume button and then tuned out her protests. The navigation system said their hotel was two miles away. He’d been awake since his mom started texting at five a.m., and now it was midnight and his lower back hurt and he wanted out of the car and away from people talking.
They’d talked all day, Rosemary and his mom in the backseat, Kal up front like a chauffeur. He’d worried about it at first, thinking he might need to direct the conversation, walk them through the tricky parts, but despite Rosemary’s interviewing his mom being the entire point of this journey, they mostly talked about nothing—the itinerary, the weather, the scenery, whether they ought to stop at various attractions along the way.
No. That was Kal’s opinion every time, but they overruled him repeatedly, forcing him to pull into rest areas to stretch their legs, at gas stations for snacks, at a scenic overlook in Pennsylvania where they snapped cellphone pictures of the landscape so they could paste them in an album someday, souvenirs from Yangchen and Rosemary’s Awesome Vacation.
They’d turned a fourteen-hour drive into sixteen, then capped it off with an endless late dinner at Applebee’s, where both women got lit on signature cocktails.
At least he had a chance to drive the Outback. His mother—who didn’t drive—had bought this Subaru brand-new off a lot, decked out with the most expensive trim package, then parked it in her cousin’s garage in Jersey, only letting it out for a constitutional three or four times a year.
The road widened to four lanes. The speed limit changed, and Kal rolled through a strip of fast-food restaurants, check-to-cash scams, past a Walmart. There was the hotel, finally.
It looked like the kind of place his mom always found. Clean but cheap. The rooms would smell like carpet shampoo and ancient nicotine. He pulled into the carport area in front of the entrance.
“Wait here, I’ll check us in.”
“Leave the music on?”
“Yeah.”
It was a relief to stand up, and even more of a relief to walk away from his mom’s Outback and pretend for a minute that he was unencumbered.