by Iris Morland
“Which would be?”
“Well, taking off my bra would be a start.”
Adam certainly wasn’t going to say no to that. Brushing his hands down her back, feeling the curve of her shoulder blades, he found the bra clasp and flicked it open. It sagged in front, and Joy took it off, folding it neatly in his office chair. Her breasts—pale white with pink nipples, already hardened into sweet little berries—were up-thrust, like they were waiting for his touch.
“I always thought of myself as an ass man,” he said, “but I’m thinking your breasts are changing my mind.”
She laughed. “You’re full of shit, but I’ll allow it.”
She didn’t believe him? Then he’d show her, just like he’d said he would. Kneeling on the floor, his head was level with her chest and it gave him perfect access to what he wanted. He cupped both breasts, teasing the nipples, loving how her head tipped back as he played with her. He could just make out light blue veins underneath her skin, pumping blood through her chest.
His touch turned to licking, and he kissed and licked each breast with a thoroughness that had Joy moaning and running her hands through his hair. He shushed her more than once, but when she swatted him on the head, he gave up. No one was close enough to hear them, and at that point, he didn’t even care if someone did hear.
He sucked one nipple into his mouth, rolling it around on his tongue. He sucked until Joy trembled and her fingers tightened even harder in his hair. He sucked one then the other until they were red and swollen.
He was so hard he didn’t know if he could keep this up much longer, but seeing the glazed look in Joy’s eyes? It made the pain of waiting worth it. He wondered if he could make her come just from sucking her nipples. She was so open, so responsive, her body arching and moving, her feet flexing, her eyes closed, that he didn’t think he’d ever seen a more beautiful sight.
It suddenly became too much. He stood up and, grabbing her, turned her around. He hooked his fingers into her underwear and tossed them where her dress had landed. Massaging her ass and dipping his fingers into her cleft, they both groaned at how wet she was.
Kissing her neck, he said, “I can’t wait any longer.”
She shuddered. “Then don’t.”
He hardly remembered putting on a condom, ripping it open with shaking hands. Joy had leaned down, her elbows on the desk, her ass in the air. She gazed at him under her eyelashes, a flush across her cheeks.
Adam kissed her back, down her spine, even kissing her tailbone, which made her laugh, and then he pushed her down slightly so she was level with his cock. He teased her opening. She was dripping, desperate, and she bucked against him. Her body was a swath of white and pink, soft and silky, her purple hair brushed to one side.
Placing a knee between her legs, he opened her for his onslaught, and he almost came undone from the sight: her glistening sex, waiting for him to fill her. If he weren’t hard as a rock already, he’d taste her and make her scream. Instead, he took his cock in hand and slowly fed it into her sheath. She squeaked. He smoothed a hand down her back, slowly, slowly, inching his way inside, and sweat broke out onto his forehead.
And then he was fully inside her, his balls touching her sex, and God almighty if he didn’t just about lose it right then and there. He gripped her hips, trying to keep her from moving, and he gritted his teeth. He needed to think of ice-cold showers, tax preparation, fertilizer research…
“Adam,” Joy said on a long moan. She looked back at him over her naked shoulder, need plain in her expression. She bumped her ass against his pelvis, and that tiny bit of friction sent him over the edge.
He thrust out, slamming back in again. Joy jolted against the desk. He did it again, and again. He had to grip her hips harder to keep her from bucking against him, and he knew he was probably bruising her but he didn’t care. She didn’t care, either. She moaned into the papers strewn across his desk; they would be crumpled and useless by the time they were finished.
But he was so close. He thrust harder and harder, the sound of their bodies slapping filling the small office. He hoped she locked the door. Did she lock the door? But then she began thrusting back in time with him, and he lost all thoughts of locked or unlocked doors. He didn’t care if everyone in the vineyard opened that door right now. He was too lost in Joy—in her body, her scent, her everything.
“Fuck, Adam, I’m coming.” Joy buried her face in her arms, stifling the noises she was making, a combination of a moan and a scream. Adam could feel her body starting to tense. Reaching down between them, he flicked her clit with light strokes as he watched himself fuck her. It was too erotic; it was too much. He couldn't last a second longer.
Then Joy’s body bowed and bucked and he could feel the contractions of her sheath clenching his cock. He dug his fingers into her hips. Sweat dripped down his face and was surely soaking his shirt. The room smelled of heat and sex. As the last of her orgasm faded, he thrust one more time and let himself come: he came and came, his balls contracting, filling her until he surely blacked out a little. An exquisite, yet brutal, kind of ecstasy rushed through his blood. His fingers tingled. His head felt light. He heard a buzzing in his ears.
He gently rocked against Joy, lengthening the sensations. He stroked a hand down her spine and then kissed her right on her lower vertebrae. She was still trembling, and she was damp with sweat.
Realizing she was probably uncomfortable, Adam let her go, and she rolled over. A few papers stuck to her breasts and belly; she laughed when she saw them.
Plucking the documents off of her skin, she said, “I hope these weren’t important.”
He took them and tossed them into the nearby trash. “Not even remotely important,” he replied.
“Good.” She smiled up at him, and he couldn’t help but lean down and kiss her. It was a kiss of tenderness, of gratitude, of hope. He brushed his hands down her arms and she lightly touched his cheek. It was the kind of kiss that was created to devastate your heart.
Adam returned home hours later, still in a daze. He couldn’t get the smell of Joy off of him—and he didn’t want that scent to ever disappear—but entering his house, full of photos of him and Carolyn, he experienced a feeling of displacement. Like he didn’t really live in this place, with its neat furniture and organized kitchen and shelving put together after a memorable outing to Ikea. He didn’t even know what he should feel, gazing at a photo of him and Carolyn as his body still shimmered with the memory of Joy underneath him.
He couldn’t, he realized, reconcile the two of them right now.
Picking up the photo, he touched Carolyn’s face. “What am I doing?” he whispered. The photo, of course, didn’t reply, but he felt a little calmer talking to her visage. It wasn’t guilt so much as…confusion. He’d been so devastated by his wife’s death and the subsequent media circus surrounding it that he’d never expected to find another woman to…what? Sleep with? Date?
He remembered, suddenly, the morning of Carolyn’s funeral. It had been a muggy day, and he barely could recall what he’d worn or done before he’d arrived at the church. But as the car parked behind the Methodist church, he’d seen the crowd of strangers. Strangers who turned out to be journalists, jostling the Danvers family for information about Carolyn’s untimely death. Had drugs been involved? Was she an alcoholic? Had someone run her off the road and tried to kill her? Adam could remember the sweat glistening on the journalists’ foreheads from the unexpectedly warm autumn day, how their hands gripped phones and notebooks and recorders and cameras. How he’d stood mutely, unable to respond. How his dad had growled and pushed them aside and told them if they didn’t leave they’d call the cops.
How those same journalists had haunted his and his family’s every move for months. Showing up at River’s Bend, and Trudy’s, at Mike’s, even some going so far as to lurk around their property before taking off before the police arrived. He’d been hunted, and all because Carolyn had been a celebrity and people wan
ted their dirt, no matter who it had hurt.
Adam set the photo down. He remembered Joy’s smile as she’d talked to Sadie, telling the girl to have her wedding at the vineyard so Joy could make it into a story. He thought of seeing Carolyn’s lifeless body in that casket and the cameras snapping photos of him as he left the funeral.
He brushed moisture from his cheeks, knowing what he had to do.
13
J oy remained on a high that lasted for the rest of the week. She and Adam texted back and forth and saw each other as much as possible, although he was slammed with events planning at River’s Bend. Joy found herself writing even more than usual, her muse coming back in full force. If only she’d known that getting good sex would result in her most productive writing spree ever, she would’ve gone down to the vineyard and seduced Adam ages ago.
She grinned at her laptop. She was practically beaming, and multiple people had commented on it. Grace, for one, who gave her sly glances and teased her as much as possible. Even Mike in the general store had asked what put the spring in her step. Unable to say that she was getting the best boning of her life, she’d replied that it was just Mike’s amazing array of produce that sent her into such a euphoric state.
Typing away at her computer, Joy frowned when her phone sounded. And it rang…and rang. She let it go to voicemail, waiting for the sound that someone had left her a message. No one called her these days, except her mom periodically. But then her phone started ringing again, and she huffed out a breath. She grabbed it from where she’d set it on her kitchen counter, and then she groaned out loud. Jeremy Evans, her phone read.
“The fuck is he calling me for?” she growled at the air. She set her phone back down, refusing to answer it. He was not going to ruin her good mood. She wouldn’t let him.
Too bad that if anyone knew how to be obnoxiously persistent, it was Jeremy. Her phone rang, and rang, and rang, and she was so irritated that she answered the call with a loud, “What do you want!”, not caring if everyone and Mike heard her downstairs.
Jeremy didn’t say anything, but then she heard him take a breath. “You picked up!” he said, way too cheerily in her opinion.
She sat back down at her computer, tapping a pen against the desk. “Yeah, after you wouldn’t stop calling me. Are you dying? Are you bleeding? If so, call 911. I’m not a nurse, Jeremy.”
“No, I’m not dying, but thanks for your concern. I did want to talk to you about something, though.”
“Well, considering you refused to leave a voicemail, I assumed you wanted to talk to me.” Joy was not in the mood to coddle her cheating ex, and she already regretted picking up the phone. She should’ve turned her phone on silent and let Jeremy rot, but he also knew how to push her to get what he wanted. She sighed internally.
“I know you aren’t happy with me right now,” he said slowly, as if measuring out his words. “I get it. But I wanted you to know that I broke up with Regina. We’re over.”
Joy blinked. Then she tapped her pen faster against her desk. “Congratulations. Did you cheat on her too?”
“No, but I decided we weren’t for each other. We weren’t right.” Silence. And then, “We were right for each other, though, weren’t we?”
Joy set the pen down. She looked out her window onto Main Street, at the few people walking up and down the lane, probably heading to Trudy’s for lunch. She thought about Adam and how he’d touched her and kissed her.
“No, Jeremy, we weren’t right for each other. No man who cheats on me with my best friend is ‘right’ for me. Now, are we done here? I have work to do.”
“Wait, Jo-Jo! Wait. Just hear me out.”
She’d been about to hang up on him, and she cursed that he knew her well enough to know when she’d been about to hang up. She slowly raised the phone back to her ear. Maybe if she let him talk, he’d get out whatever he thought he needed to get out and he’d leave her the hell alone.
“Hear me out for a second. I was in a bad place when…that happened. It’s not an excuse, but maybe an explanation. I fucked up. I did. And I’m sorry for it. When I realized that Regina was nothing more than a distraction, I knew I had one more shot.”
“One more shot at what?” Joy’s voice was filled with dread, because she already knew what he was going to say.
“One more shot at us. I want you back. I want us back together. I love you, Joy. Can you ever forgive me and take me back?”
Peering out the window, she saw the broad shoulders of a man, and she thought it was Adam. But it wasn’t. Her heart slowed, and then she raised her fingers to her forehead, realizing she was sweating. She felt clammy and sick to her stomach, and she half-wondered if she was going to puke.
After he’d first cheated on her, Joy had dreamt about Jeremy apologizing and begging for her to come back. She’d loved him—still loved him, in a way—and they had been engaged. He was supposed to have been the man she’d spend the rest of her life with. But all of that had changed when he’d decided to fuck her best friend and then blame her for his straying.
I needed more from you, Joy. And when I didn’t get it, I guess I just went somewhere else.
Joy’s hand hurt, and she saw that she was clenching the pen so tightly that the plastic had cracked. She set it in the pen stand by her computer.
“Joy, are you there? Joy?”
“I’m here,” she said quietly. “I don’t know why, but I’m here.”
“Oh, good. So, what do you say? Will you at least think about it?”
Her head hurt. Her heart hurt. A tear slipped down her cheek, and she felt guilty about it, swiping at it with quick movements.
“There’s nothing to think about. We’re over, and I’ve moved on. Have a good life, Jeremy. But don’t contact me again.”
She pressed the red button and hung up, instantly turning off her phone to fend off any more calls. Rubbing her eyes, she fought back tears. Why was she crying at all? She didn’t want Jeremy back. But he’d reopened wounds that she’d worked so hard to sew up, and now she was bleeding all over the place. Memories she’d shoved away burst through the cracks, and she could only remember the day she’d found out Jeremy had been sleeping with Regina.
She’d been so angry, so angry that it had scared her. She had wanted to scream until her throat was raw, she’d wanted to hurt Jeremy and Regina like they’d hurt her. It had been an explosive anger that she’d never experienced before. They betrayed me, she’d kept thinking, over and over again. She’d do the dishes and think, They betrayed me. She’d wake up in the morning and think, They betrayed me. It was like a poison, filling her veins and slowly killing her. It was only time and distance that had allowed her to recover, but the scars remained.
Joy shut her laptop. She couldn’t write anymore today. Jeremy had ruined things—again.
As the afternoon waned on and she drank more wine than was probably wise, she heard a knock on her door and frowned. She wondered if Jeremy had come to haunt her. But when she opened the door, she saw Adam standing there, a look of annoyance on his face.
“What the hell have you been doing all day? I text you and call you for hours, but no response. Is your phone dead?”
She remembered that she’d turned her phone off and never turned it back on. But her mind was mush at the moment, and she just stared at Adam with a blank, tired expression.
He peered at her. “You look like hell. What happened?”
“You’re always so charming. Come in.” She waved a hand to nowhere in particular, grabbing her oversized glass of wine to continue drinking. She knew she was probably flushed and sweaty from the alcohol, but she was buzzed enough not to care.
“It’s only five o’clock and you’re drinking. Something’s happened. Care to tell me?” He gave her a concerned look.
She shook her head. “I have no interest in talking about anything. Only drinking. You can join, or you can go away.” She wandered to her living room, where some Food Network show was playing. One con
testant was making a bread pudding, and Joy scoffed. They always made fucking bread pudding because they were hacks. Hacks! She slugged back some more wine.
Adam slowly sat down next to her. He didn’t say anything, but Joy had to admit, she felt better with his presence. He was so strong, so put together, despite everything he’d been through. Here she was, crying over her shitty ex, when he’d lost his wife in a tragic accident. He wasn’t sitting around drinking and crying.
She wiped away a stray tear and decided she’d feel sorry for herself until the clock struck midnight. Then she’d return to being an adult and throw out her single glass slipper.
Now the tears were coming faster, and she felt so stupid that it made her cry harder.
“Hey, hey, what is this?” Adam put an arm around her shoulders. “What happened? You can’t just sit there and cry and expect me to ask nothing about it.”
Joy shook her head, crying into his shoulder. She shouldn’t indulge herself like this, and yet… It felt good. It felt good to have someone to lean on. She’d been alone for so long lately.
He jostled her. “Hey, come on.” He rubbed her arm.
“It’s so stupid,” she muttered.
“Did Mike run out of Cheetos again? Like that kind of stupid?”
She laughed a watery laugh. “No, but that would make anyone cry. No, it’s my ex. He called me and…” She realized she was talking about her ex with her current—boyfriend? lover? her head hurt thinking about it—but at Adam’s curious look, she continued. “Jeremy. Did you know I was engaged before I came to Heron’s Landing? We were. Jeremy and I. We were together for five years and then he fucks my best friend. So I ended everything and now he has the gall to ask to get back together. What an asshole, right?”
Adam seemed at a loss for words. Then he pulled her closer and brushed a kiss on her forehead. “Definitely an asshole,” he murmured.
“I hate him. I hope he chokes on a sandwich and dies.”