Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7)

by Julia Kent

  A long time ago I asked one of my therapists how I would know when I was ready to have sex with someone again, and she said, “When you want to.”

  And I said, “That doesn’t mean I’m ready.”

  And she asked, “What other criteria do you think you need to have?”

  As I touched Tyler, as I kissed him freely and my hands finally roamed out of the safe zones, I realized that what I was really asking back then was how can I trust myself? How can I trust myself to know what’s right when I’m broken? My fingers curved over the slope of his muscled ass, my palms following, trailing behind and documenting for my mind, my heart, my body what I needed to learn. All my self-consciousness, all my fears, all my worries that I somehow was too shattered ever to really find a path to this moment—it was all gone.

  Chased away.

  All faded out over seven years of careful, conscious, painstaking deliberation that led to the kind of freedom that let me touch him like this.

  He hissed, inhaling sharply through clenched teeth as I pulled my hand forward and slid it between us. The firm flesh of his cock felt dangerous in my hand, my fingers instinctively wrapping around it, sliding up, using the water. I reached for a wrapped bar of soap sitting on the edge of the tub and discarded the paper, taking the soap and handing it to him, holding him firmly by his handle.

  “We really should get clean,” I said.

  “I think I like dirty.”

  I bent down just slightly and looked up, the water pelting me and making me close my eyes. He groaned, my hand moving millimeters, my shattered soul moving worlds.

  I stood at full height and he bent down, taking one of my nipples in his mouth, the sensation stirring an electric bolt that ran from my clit all the way up to the top of my head. I tipped my chin up and pushed myself toward him.

  And froze.

  The first image of that night seven years ago filled my mind. It was as if someone had poured a bottle of paint perfectly calibrated to fill in a colorized version of my memories. It was a still in my mind’s eye, a moment caught forever. One of my assailants’ hands buried in my long hair, yanking my neck back as he ripped my pants off.

  Tyler stood immediately and let go of me, his hands moving to the sanctuary of my shoulders. “What’s wrong?” he asked, serious and concerned.

  Shame pooled in a place below my navel, but above the part of my body that had been so violated. It crouched there, curled in the fetal position, waiting for orders. But it had been summoned, and it couldn’t go back to the quiet, dark place where I had made it live. It had taken seven years to get it to that point, to crawl into a box, one padlocked with a key that I had tried to throw away, but that kept coming back over and over again, living somewhere else inside me.

  Now Tyler’s beautiful, erotic attentions had unlocked the box.

  I couldn’t answer him. All I could do was stare and feel the shame pour in rivulets down from my mind’s eye to the tip of my toes. I wanted to will it away, to make it flee, to banish it forever. And yet, I also knew I needed to learn to live with it. That it was as much a part of me as the Maggie who needed to just keep going, to keep turning toward healing, to say yes to this man with dark, worried eyes, whose hands and lips and heart were so focused on giving.

  “Hey. Hey,” he said, his voice cutting through some kind of fog that surrounded me. It felt like a suit of terror and want, of reproach and resolve.

  “Hey,” Tyler said, gently tipping my face up to meet his eyes. “This can be enough. Maggie, this can be enough. I don’t need more. I—I—uh.”

  Words failed him, and somehow that’s what cut through for me. That was what reached me. His words had failed him.

  “We’re not doing anything you don’t want to do,” he said, “and if this is where this stops, that’s okay. Because this isn’t where we stop.” His eyes bounced from one of mine to the other, then down to my nose, my lips, my cheek, then back. It was like he catalogued me, like he was checking in.

  “I want more,” I said, the words coming out long before I could even think about whether to say them or not. My truth stepped up and took its shot.

  “Then how about this,” he said in a gruff voice. He cleared his throat, emotion clogging it. “You lead,” he said, “I follow. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “You keep saying that. You keep saying that. It’s okay, I know.”

  “No, Maggie, I don’t think you really do know. I don’t think you really do, that’s why I keep saying it. And I’ll say it every day for the rest of my life if that’s what I have to do to make you feel safe.”

  Tears filled my eyes, piercing the bridge of my nose with the kind of pain that felt so acute I wanted to stop the world and make the universe acknowledge its existence. Our kiss would have to be enough.

  His beard was scratchy against my face as I kissed him, once on each cheek, once on the nose and then softly on the lips. I reached for the bar of soap, taking it out of his hand and lathered up, touching his shoulder in a way that made him turn around. I smoothed the lather on his back, admiring the space where the tattoos began on his upper shoulders.

  They spread down, going almost to his wrists. The colors peeped out in the shadows, under the white soap. And as the water ran long lines down the planes of his taut muscles, his curved bone, his skewed stance as he shifted his weight from one hip to the other, I felt myself centering again. The violent images washed away, rinsed off me like that soap, circling the drain and being taken out to sea.

  He turned around and I repeated the steps, only this time washing his ass, his cock, finding his sac and admiring the soft weight of it all. How strange a man’s body was in my hands, how different, what a playground, what fun it could be. My stomach seized in a giant, twisting motion as if two fists had come from my imagination and grasped either side of it, and drained it of all its life force.

  I paused, gasping for air as Tyler watched me, his hands by his side, never reaching out. “It’s all about you, Maggie,” he said. “This is all about you.”

  I looked at him, taking agonal breaths, trying to stop what had embedded itself in my body all those years ago and now was coming out. “You keep saying that, but it’s about us.”

  “Making love is about us,” he said. “But right now, this is about you.” His eyes narrowed and his cheekbones seemed to widen. His lips parted slightly as if he were about to start another word, and then they pressed together, firm. His eyes went sad. “I hate seeing you in pain.”

  His words surprised me. Pain? How could he know? My stomach felt raw, like someone had taken small knives to it and just slashed over and over again. The sense subsided slowly as he took the soap so gently from my hands and urged me to turn around.

  “Let me do you?” His voice turned up in a question. He didn’t touch me. He waited.

  The good little organizer inside my mind whispered, He’s asking for your consent.

  And I whispered back, I know. I’m waiting for mine.

  Just as I turned around and silently answered his question, the water began to fade from a lovely steaming hot to a lukewarm deluge that made the hair stand on my legs. He acted fast; this was no sensual scrub down. By the time we were both rinsed and clean, the water had turned as cold as the shower had been when we were outside stuck by the side of the road.

  Chilled to the bone yet again, but this time in a very different place, we crawled into bed. Tyler unzipped the two sleeping bags that we had been given and made a makeshift double bed from them. Without pillows, without anchors, without anything from our regular lives, the tiny cabin felt disjointed, as if we had ascended to some place where you just showed up naked and the rest unfolded before you.

  Without a plan.

  I guess that’s life, right?

  “Tyler, what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You keep saying that I have all the control, and that this is all about me. That this is my choice. But you have y
our own demons to reckon with. You’ve got your own past and your own sexual—”

  He rested one palm against the side of my face, his thumb stroking the skin beneath my lower lip. His eyes filled with a kind of sweetness that I’d never seen. His words came out thick at first, and then he had to clear his throat to start again.

  “I didn’t go through what you went through—”

  “But you said—”

  He squeezed gently at my jaw, the pressure just enough to make me halt. “I didn’t go through what you went through, but yeah, I’ve got my own demons. But I got over this hurdle,” he looked down at our naked bodies, “a lot longer ago, and what you’re going through right now is special.”

  Tears filled my eyes, along with a kind of self-consciousness that came less from shame and more from a flush that occupied my breastbone, spreading down across my chest and into my arms. I knew it was creeping up my neck and would soon fill my face. It was the warm sense of recognition, of surprise, of being seen. This sensation didn’t have to carry a negative connotation with it, and right now it didn’t.

  “So this is about you. You have given me everything. Let me give you something back.”

  My heart sank. “If you’re doing this because you feel like you owe me something—”

  He put his hand over the glowing pink spot above my heart, and I paused.

  “Not like that, Maggie. Never like that.”

  “But I don’t want to just take—”

  “You’re not.”

  “But I—”

  “You’re not,” he said, his voice stressed with a kind of urgency that didn’t quite fit the moment. “There are no selfish people in this bed,” he finally said. It wasn’t an observation as much as a declaration, the slide of his hairy legs against mine so alien, the feel of his veined arms colored and telling stories against my pale, freckled skin.

  The interplay of who each of us were and how our bodies appeared was like a scrapbook before it’s assembled, the many pieces all remnants of a story that you’re composing, made up of different bytes and bits of a whole that only gets put together when you decide, and of what you decide.

  In spite of what others may think of the event that you’re commemorating, you hold the ultimate truth in your own hands. That’s how our bodies and minds felt right now. The only part of us that had to catch up was our memories. Mine was definitely more in need of work than his.

  “May I kiss you?” he asked.

  I giggled, feeling stupidly awkward. “Of course!”

  He shook his head slightly, his eyes serious though his nostrils twitched. “There are no of courses, either.”

  “Are you going to ask me every single time you want to touch me?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  And then he kissed me, a second, a third, a fourth time, his hands sinking deep into my wet hair, both of them pressing into my scalp, sliding down the side of my neck, one finger stroking an earlobe. His tongue was lush and warm against mine, my own diving into his mouth, our lips slanted against each other, our breath hard and hot.

  My hands didn’t know what to do. I wanted to touch him, and yet I kept forgetting, as if my sense of how this worked had slipped out of gear, and all my attention had to be focused on making sure I was in the right gear, rather than on paying attention to the drive itself.

  His palm made contact with my rib, slipping back under me, fingertips tickling my spine. “May I touch you here?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  His mouth bent down to my nipple, his eyes tipping up to catch mine, and I swallowed hard, my throat fluttering at the sheer openness of it.

  “And here?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  This time, as his mouth licked with such respect, pebbling the nipple instantly, there was no image. There was no horror. There was only this.

  He suckled, his tongue twirling in circles, and then he pulled back.

  “And this?” he said as he bent down to pay the same attentions to the other breast.

  “Oh yes,” I hissed, arching my back up to meet him. “Please.”

  I had thought about this moment for the better part of seven years. What the man I would make love with would be like. Who he would be. Whether he would understand, or whether it would matter at all.

  It would matter, of course, and it did in this moment, as my mind tried to reconcile what had happened to me in the past with my known self in this very moment.

  I transformed under his touch as his fingers strummed my skin like the delicate strings of an instrument.

  His lips brushed against my skin with a kind of restrained elegance that I would never expect from such a quiet man. Tyler seemed coiled, like a deep pressure cooker of anger lived at his core, his body a casing for holding back everything that brewed inside. That same intensity was in his touch as his skin slid against mine, bare and warm, and his lips found mine again. His hands ran up from hips to ribs to breast along the contours of my neglected skin, until they rested, cradling my jaw, his body pressed hard against mine, sloped slightly to the left so I could breathe.

  Was I breathing? I couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t until his hand sunk into my hair and my heart touched his, getting as close as possible between our naked bodies, that I knew I was. We were out of sync, my heart a half beat off from his, and it was in the space between those beats that I found the pleasure he so freely gave.

  My hands. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. The worry became a talisman, something I stroked inside myself to take me out of where I needed to be. It was a place of safety inside, as if ruminating on the question of what to do with my hands somehow protected me from the intensity of what I sought.

  Make no mistake: I sought this. I wanted this. I wanted him.

  My mouth went dry as he pulled back and in the bright light of day he looked at me, one finger stroking the planes of my cheekbones, crossing over the bridge of my nose like a painter with a fine brush, memorizing lines. His eyes warmed and I let myself study him, knowing that the only way to overwrite the memory of seven years ago was to live this moment in as much awareness as possible.

  He bit his lower lip and pulled it in, his teeth pressing against the soft flesh, his face changing as we studied each other. Our breath filled the space where our skin and our hearts couldn’t, and something in me released.

  My hands suddenly knew what to do.

  I reached down, feeling the contours of muscle and sinew, the curves and valleys of a man whose body was hardened through use and youth. He was six years younger, and yet we were ageless. As my hands found and cradled his ass, I could feel layers of muscle built and forged through time and struggle. I could appreciate the thin layer of fine, dark hair that covered him, so different from my own body.

  He let me. He let me, and he seemed to know that in the letting, he was giving me exactly what I needed to take.

  I warmed as I touched him, my body melting, my heart speeding up, the blood pumping to places I hadn’t let it think about for so long.

  You spend seven years telling yourself that you’re damaged. Seven years trying to get to a place where you decide that in spite of being broken, you’re going to move on. And in the moment when you take action, you hope that the person you choose to forge ahead with will understand. That they’ll be there through the realness of it. But what you really hope is that you choose well.

  The trust that I put in him was second to the trust that I put in myself. And so far as he kissed me deeply, then pulled away and trailed kisses down to my breast, hands roaming over all the skin he could possibly take with his palms, his lips now brushing my navel, I realized that not only was this moment a victory, a triumph over the violation of seven years ago, it was an even bigger victory for my sense of self.

  I had trusted the part of me deep down inside that knew I could trust myself, that knew I could trust him, and I had been right.

  He planted kisses on the bare skin of my belly, his body curl
ed, muscles strong as I watched him dip down, leaving kisses along my thighs, his fingers gently parting my legs. He did it so slowly, each movement a question, and I let him. I let him because I wanted this.

  He looked up, and that was the moment when self-consciousness kicked in.

  If you didn’t count the three from seven years ago, Tyler was my third. But for this, he was about to be my first.

  “I’ve—uhm—” I said, my throat throbbing and my tongue feeling like a thousand balloons. “Are you—uhm—is that...”

  I could feel his smile against my inner thigh. “You don’t want this?” he asked, his finger stroking along the soft flesh, making me shiver.

  “No, no, I do,” I said, the words true and yet haunting.

  “It would be my pleasure,” he said, and started kissing his way down closer and closer.

  And then warmth, the soft grace of a gift. The gift of his attentions. He teased with the lightest of butterfly movements, with the determination of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and exactly why.

  And exactly how.

  My back arched and my legs began to quiver as I sank into a level of sensation that I didn’t know my body could experience. The two minds that lived inside my head stopped existing on parallel tracks and integrated as I lost the ability to think. This was...divine, the feeling of his body against mine, of his mouth on me, of knowing that he wanted to touch and stroke and lick and lave, and use each other’s skin and tongue and lips and fingers to speak a language that could not be spoken in any other way.

  That he could use his body like this, twinned with mine, to elicit such sensual ecstasy was something I understood intuitively. I understood it intellectually. I even grasped it psychologically and emotionally, but in the abstract. He had to make love to my actual body, to minister to my flesh, to make this offering and to give me this gift, for me to understand it fully.

  In another world where the other Maggie lived, the one beaten and bloodied and broken on that college campus seven years ago, those men had used the same hands. The same lips and mouths and fingers (and other body parts) to cause pain. To wreak havoc. To use violence as a tool for domination and destruction.