But still the air between us burns.
We can laugh like the old times. Raquel can go back to her habit of stealing fries from my plate, and I can down my second beer and feel the tipsiness rush through me, a fluid bubbly happiness that makes my mouth hurt from smiling so much.
But it’s different, because every atom of my body aches for her.
Every time our eyes catch, we lean a little closer to each other, and every time Raquel draws herself back she manages to get a little further away.
I never want this meal to finish. Because I’m having the best night I’ve had in a long time. Because it’s so good to have Raquel laughing at my stories again, and to “passionately debate” with her about ballet really is terrible. (She says it’s not; I say you can tell how much I wanted to sleep with her by the fact I sat through three of them when we were dating.)
More than that, though, I don’t want to leave because that means we’ll have to work out what this is. What’s happening. And I don’t want to risk that.
I don’t think Raquel does, either. It’s only reluctantly that she finally stands. When I hold her jacket up for her, she looks at it for a moment before slipping into it, and as she turns her back to me and I slip it over her shoulders I can smell that perfume again, intoxicating.
When she looks back to me her eyes are dark and deep, her lips moist from the sweep of her tongue.
“We should get a taxi,” she says, in that husky voice which goes straight to my pants, and it’s all I can do to swallow and nod.
I hold open the door for her, trying not to lose my mind as she steps past me. So close I can see down the back of her jacket to the smooth line of her neck, the bump of bone at her neck. I want to kiss it, to lick it, to run my fingers down over her front, slipping beneath the top of that pretty dress to find the hot skin beneath…
Instead I shove my left hand into my pocket and step toward the street, getting ready to raise my right as soon as I see a taxi.
I don’t get there, because the moment I step, Raquel is on me.
She hits like an act of God. Harder than that avalanche could ever manage. One hundred pounds soaking wet, and I’m helpless as she rises to her tiptoes, her palms resting on my chest, and kisses me.
I’m changed. I’m lost. I never want to be found.
I wrap my arms around her and feel the soft sweet give of her body, and I know: this is the only place I want to be.
Raquel
Falling in love.
“Fall.” There’s a reason that we use that verb.
Because it is a falling.
I am out of control. I am at the mercy of what’s happening to me.
I am consumed with the breathless, hanging sensation of the earth dropping away from my feet, leaving me suspended in the dark night air, a thousand miles high.
I look at JJ, and I can see that he feels it too. His eyes are so very dark, his pupils so wide. When he looks at me, his lips twitch, as if he remembers our kiss. The thing that blossomed between us, suddenly so bright that we couldn’t deny it anymore.
Neither of us can talk about what happened. As if it’s too delicate. Or maybe simply too large—too momentous a thing.
Instead JJ holds open the door of the taxi for me, and as he makes small talk with the driver I look out into the darkness and up at the endless spread of the stars. Their pale pinpricks of light seem as tremulous and as hopeful as the feeling in my chest, a beautiful flower unfurling inside of me.
Once, JJ asked me to marry him under these stars.
A few weeks ago, I looked up at them and thought of things past and things new.
Now I think that they have been there before we began. That they’ll be there after we end.
All of my atoms and all of your atoms, JJ promised me once. That after we died our ashes would be spread as one, and we’d go into the universe together, forever, so much stardust on the wind.
When warm fingers find mine on the middle seat, I turn around with a start, but JJ doesn’t look to me. He keeps chatting to the driver as if this isn’t happening. As if his hand isn’t resting over mine, a touch as undeniable as it is soft.
I take a deep breath.
Is it falling, if you decide to jump?
My fingers thread through his, and JJ squeezes them tight.
It’s so quiet after the taxi pulls away. We stand in the darkness in front of the house and look at each other, each molecule of air between us vibrating with potential.
“Raquel,” he says, but I can’t hear how he’ll finish it. I can’t risk breaking this beautiful, fragile thing.
I go up onto my tiptoes, my hands steadying myself against his chest, and I kiss him the way I used to. His mouth opens for mine, and in the moment before his hands grip me I hear and feel the gusting groan from deep in his belly.
It’s like something breaks in him. Like something breaks in me, too, now we’re both falling together.
We fumble our way through the front door and up the stairs in the dark. JJ presses me to the wall in the hallway and I spread my legs for the questing reach of his fingers, shivering as they slide over the dampness on my panties. Against my hip I feel his hardness, solid with want.
JJ’s shoulders shudder as he tugs his mouth from me, kissing hungrily over my jaw and my neck, sucking at the delicate skin of my throat.
“Kel…”
I won’t have him talk. I won’t have him stop and make us think about this.
For once, just for once, I want to let my heart have what it’s wanted for so long.
I push him back, and when he looks at me, breathless and flushed, I take his hand and lead him to the bedroom we used to share together.
It feels like the first time, as we stand beside our bed and look at each other. How many times did we have sex in here? Hundreds of times, thousands.
And yet now I stand before the hunger of his eyes—a hunger for more than sex—and I shiver as I reach for the straps of my dress.
JJ’s hands stop me, our eyes still fixed only on each other’s faces. His fingers close around mine before moving them aside. When I’ve let my arms fall to my side, he smiles—one flicker of movement over his mouth.
Still I’m falling, my heart racing in my chest, my blood seeming to sing in my veins.
His hands are gentle as he slides the straps of my dress and bra down from my shoulders. He bends deep before me so that he can kiss over the revealed skin, and for one moment I close my eyes, overwhelmed by the sound that comes up from my core. A low, quivering moan.
JJ undresses me slowly, carefully. Somehow I’m more nervous than the night we first slept together, even though then it was all new.
Now we’re not only nervous before the unknowable future. We’re walking delicately through the echoes of the past, too.
I reach my fingers to curl in his hair as he sinks down to kneel before me. Once my dress is at my ankles he reaches for the strap of my bra, undoing it with one deft hand so that he can kiss down the line of my breastbone, over each curve of flesh, so that he can suck each nipple into his mouth for a swirl of his wet tongue and the graze of his gentle teeth.
I want to look at him. I want to see the peek of his dark eyes as he looks up to find my gaze. I want to watch as he kisses lower down the line of my stomach, his hands finding my lace panties and slowly easing them down over my hips.
But when he kisses the neat curls between my legs I can’t keep my eyes open, just like I can’t stop the hot panting of my breath. Between my twisting fingers his hair grows taut, as his breath ghosts over the place that I need him the most.
As his tongue slips along the line of my sex, I pull him back. He comes away with a grunt, the softest frustration—but he looks up to me from his knees, willing, listening.
“Stand up,” I whisper, language feeling alien on my tongue.
He moves so much better than he used to. In the fluidity of his push upward I see the promise of his healing.
I’m so much
smaller than him that JJ has to dip for me to undress him. He bends so that I can pull his Henley shirt over his head, the faint light through the open blinds illuminating the planes of his skin. He closes his eyes, just for a moment, as I reach for his belt.
I kneel just as he did, stripping the final clothes from his body, and as I stand again I take him in my hand. I’ve held him so many times that it’s instinctive, the shape my fingers make around his erection, the turn of my wrist that makes his eyes close and his lips part.
But not yet. I can’t yet. I let go of him and push my hand to his bicep to direct him to the bed.
As he steps past me, I catch sight of the scar on his back. That livid line, edged on either side by marks as perfectly circular as pennies.
When I catch him from behind, JJ’s breath stops for a moment. He hangs unsure in the darkness, his face half turned.
“Raquel?”
But I have nothing to say. I only press a kiss between his shoulder blades. Over his ribs. And finally, crouched low, I kiss the scar that he hates. Beneath my lips he tenses, and I kiss it again. Almost as if I’m thanking it. Maybe he knows: with a sigh he relaxes, his hands finding mine at his waist.
He’s still standing there, his eyes closed, when I move before him and lie down on our bed.
When JJ opens his eyes, it’s to reveal pupils black with unspeakable things. He looks down at me, and his chest heaves over his heavy breaths. The flush I remember spreads pink over his neck and lower, down to his pectorals.
I’m almost worried, for a moment, at what he’s waiting for. What he might be thinking in all of this silence.
Then JJ crawls over me, and I have no more worries at all. He dips to kiss me and eats all of my fears out of my mouth, sucking my lower lip between his and catching it with his teeth.
“Raquel,” he says, once more, but he’s learned the rules of this ritual. He says nothing else as he pushes me back toward the headboard with one hand and parts my thighs with the other, settling between them.
And then he takes care of me, just like he promised he would, right at the start.
No man has ever been as patient as JJ. Ever made me feel so relaxed. Even now, in this tremulous, delicate moment, he can make me feel that we have all the time in the world. His tongue slides over me, into me, and all of my breath is trapped inside of my lungs. My thighs quiver. I slide one hand down into his hair, cupping the back of his skull, and with the other I reach behind me for the headboard as if I need to be braced for this, this thigh-trembling breath-catching pleasure that leaves me shaken and panting.
I can’t think of stars anymore. Nothing so distant and cold. Instead the world is reduced to the feel of JJ’s hot mouth between my legs, his tongue sliding over me and into me. The painstakingly delicate way he sucks on my clit before backing away again to tease me with the tip of his tongue.
“JJ,” I tell him, and he knows what it means. His left arm curls under my thigh so that his fingers can find my nipple, pinching it to hardness, coaxing my back to arch. I don’t have my eyes open anymore to see the movement of his free hand. I only feel the carefully controlled slide of his fingers inside of me, first one and then another, dipping and curling as he opens me for him.
When he curls them like that I can only cry out, reminded for the first time in so long that JJ is the only man who has ever been able to make me feel like this. There have been others, and they have been good, but JJ…
He knows me better than I know myself; he loves my body the way he loves the rest of me. With a touch as soft as it is relentless he works me to the edge and over, bringing me once and again to the point where I shiver and crack, my head thrown back on a cry. The first time, when the feeling is delicate and low. The second orgasm rattles me, stealing my breath and raising my voice.
JJ kisses me hungrily, nuzzling his face against my wetness.
“Again?”
He would. I know he would. But I tug at his hair until he looks at me, his eyes dark with lust and things unsaid.
He is the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. Not just his looks—more than that. The way that through his slight smile I’ve always been able to see the pilgrim soul inside of him. The person that I fell for.
The man I never stopped loving.
“Now,” I disagree. My fingers are stiff. They’ve forgotten how to move. They ache as I unclasp them from their grip at the headboard, reaching instead for his bicep, tugging him up.
A grin spreads over JJ’s face like sunshine coming over the horizon, and the wipe of the back of his hand over his slick mouth can’t interrupt his pleasure.
JJ moves smoothly, the seamless slide of his weight onto his palms and knees folding the time between now and then so that the accident never happened. So that JJ has always been the embodiment of athletic grace, moving on sure and steady strength over me as he settles between my thighs.
He dips to kiss me, and I press my hands to him. To the back of his neck. To the line of his ribs. My fingertips brush the raised marks of his scars, and they don’t change anything at all.
Why won’t he move?
I don’t understand it until his lips find my ear.
“Do we need…?”
Of course he’d ask. Considerate, kind JJ.
But in this moment, I want him so badly that I whimper with frustration. “No. JJ. Please.”
He laughs, the sound soft in the darkness. Despite everything, he doesn’t question his trust in me. Whatever has happened, we’ve always had that. He only smiles, a look I can half-see and half-feel as he presses his mouth to mine, sliding his tongue slowly in claim of my own. Below I feel his hand reaching between our bodies, the back of his knuckles spreading my leg wider so that his fingers can guide him to me.
“JJ,” I begin, but I don’t finish it. The feeling of him sliding inside of me is too much, too all-encompassing. The controlled, careful working of his hips opens me for him until he’s buried inside, that aching empty wanting filled with his heat and his hardness.
Against my neck he grunts, the air forced from his lungs. “Fuck.”
The word isn’t profane, somehow. Everything is numinous in this moment. Glowing and sparking with light, tingles that spread all over me.
His hand finds my hair, and I tilt my head for the hunger of his kiss.
“Raquel,” he says, and through the flutter of my lashes I can see the way he looks at me as he begins to thrust. As his newly broken and newly healed body begins to move, tight hips rocking back and forth in the way that he knows I like, his spine curved so that he can hit just there.
Pleasure begins to pool inside of me, a weighty, tangible thing. My fingers are rushing over him, scraping at his skin, trying to pull him close to me. Each push of his hips rubs him over my clit, sparking a brighter sensation in my core.
When he arches his back to send his free hand down between us, we look at each other. Absolutely naked. Not physically—more than that. As he moves inside me and I pant with want for him, all of my skin on fire. His gaze slides from my own down the line of my body to where he slides in and out of me, before he forces himself to look back up, his lips parted and his eyes dark.
“With me,” he manages around the heaving of his breath.
It’s all I can do to nod, my thighs trembling between the work of his own.
“Together,” JJ murmurs as his clever fingers find my clit and begin to rub, his eyes watching my face intently to read my pleasure.
Together, I agree, but I can’t say it, not when he’s working long, slow strokes in and out of me, when his thumb is swirling over that sensitive nub of nerves, when all of me is building and cresting and tightening—
I cry out first, but all JJ needs is evidence of my pleasure for him to lose his own tightly held control. He grunts as he lets himself fall again, catching his weight on his forearm so that he’s low over me, and together, pressed face to face, we share this drenching wave of pleasure.
It’s too much. We can’t kiss.
We can’t look at each other. But I can feel him here, as we come together.
JJ
I can’t sleep.
I don’t need to. This is already better than any dream.
I lie in the bed that Raquel and I bought together, in the house where we planned to raise our children, and I look at the woman I love beside me.
It’s been over a year since she lay here. Fifteen, sixteen months that I’ve slept in this bed alone, her empty space beside me so tangible it seemed like a thing I could touch.
Raquel sleeps soundly, curled to face me with her body cupped in the spoon of mine. The light from the crack in the blinds illuminates the delicate lines of her face. The arch of her cheekbones. The bow of her lips. The shadowing of her lashes.
I feel like I’m holding a miracle. I can hardly breathe.
She is so precious to me. Something sacred. Something true.
In the dark, of course I hope it: that maybe, somehow she’s coming back to me. That this was more than sex. More than a mistake. That it felt for her the way it felt for me—like coming home.
Like a second chance.
I move my hand as carefully as if I’m touching bone china. When I tuck her hair back, the shell of her ear is delicate beneath my fingers.
She moves, and I’m frozen.
Don’t wake up, I beg her silently. Don’t wake up.
I’m not ready to learn yet if she feels the way that I feel.
Maybe it makes me a coward. Maybe I should hunt down the truth.
But at this moment, I’m just so grateful for this stolen taste of heaven. No matter what else happens—no matter what tomorrow brings—I have her here, now. The woman I love is lying in my arms, and happiness tastes sweet in my mouth.
Raquel’s eyelashes don’t flutter. Instead she nuzzles forward to me. Her breath ghosts over my jaw. Her breasts press against my chest. Lower I feel her legs move against mine, a twisting, a re-knotting, bringing us closer together than before.
Under her my arm is going dead, and I don’t give one single shit.
Crash: The Wild Sequence, Book Two Page 18