by Piper Lennox
A Scout’s honor sign appeared in the cracks between her seat and Rylan’s…then slowly transformed into a stiff middle finger. This time, Clara and I kicked her seat at the same time.
“Damn,” I muttered, halfway through the flight. I made a big show of searching my wallet.
Clara stretched underneath her blanket and looked at me. “What?”
“My membership’s expired.”
“Membership?”
“Yeah.” I showed her my open wallet with one hand...while sliding the other under her blanket and immediately finding her panties. “To the Mile-High Club.”
“Wes,” she hissed, but too late: we both knew I’d already felt the dampness between her legs. She was about ten weeks along in the pregnancy, which meant morning sickness still called most shots.
But, whenever nausea took its lunch break, uncontrollable horniness came out to play.
“If it helps,” I whispered into her neck, “I was just kidding. I’ve never joined.”
“Me neither.”
“What?” I drawled sarcastically. “No way.” Before me, the most adventurous sex Clara had was—wait for it—doggy-style on some loser’s couch. In his basement bedroom. In his parent’s house. Yawn.
“Behave yourself.”
“I behaved like a freaking monk during both Tokyo flights.” My roaming fingers teased a gasp out of her. “I think I deserve a reward.”
She went to the bathrooms first. As soon as I stood up to follow, I heard an exaggerated gag.
“What?” I asked Georgia innocently. “I’m taking a piss.”
“Yeah, sure. That how you got my sister pregnant?” she shot back, and laughed when Rylan clamped his hand over her mouth; other passengers were sleeping.
Clara unlocked her door when I knocked. Three times, so soft my knuckles barely felt it.
The tiny space smelled like her sex, sweet and primal. I told her I wanted a candle of that scent, and she chopped her hand right into my ribs and called me disgusting.
“I’m not the one,” I countered, hiking her dress up to her stomach, “who’s so horny she couldn’t even wait five minutes for her partner to show up.” The second I dipped my fingers inside her, she blushed. “You already came.”
“I’m sorry!” She laughed, but it soon switched to a sound way too close to tears. The flipside of hormones, I guessed. “I was just getting myself ready, but then—”
“Clara, look at me.” I hooked her chin in my free hand—then decided a better idea was to use the fingers currently inside her. The second she felt her own wetness on her neck, she shuddered. “I’m joking. It’s not upsetting in the least. It’s fucking hot.”
The water in her eyes shimmered in the fluorescent light as she smiled. “Really?”
“Oh, God, yes.” I swirled my fingers inside her again to elicit another moan, then undid my pants.
“The thought of you,” I whispered, licking her neck from one side to the other, “waiting for me in here...so turned-on you just couldn’t help but orgasm?”
My dick flinched against her. She readjusted herself on the sink and tightened her grip on my shoulders while I rubbed the head of my cock against her clit. It was still red from her masturbating, and the mental image almost made me explode all over her right then and there.
“It’s beyond sexy. It’s so damn dirty and adorable, I might just keep you pregnant so it can keep happening.”
This made her laugh, which she had to stifle against my chest. “Just the one is fine.” We were both thrilled about the pregnancy, but it definitely wasn’t planned. Two hectic schedules and one expired birth control implant later, here we were.
She sank her teeth into her lip and begged me to enter her.
“This what you need, princess?” I slammed my cock into her in a single stroke, simultaneously sticking the side of my hand into her mouth so she could bite down. “Don’t scream. That’s frowned upon on airplanes.”
Tears bloomed from the corners of her eyes as they fluttered shut. When I asked if I’d hurt her, knowing I hadn’t but compelled to double-check, she shook her head and thrust against me.
She said something, muffled by my hand, before spitting it out with a breathless laugh and repeating, “Fuck me.”
“God. Gladly.”
For the first time during the pregnancy, I orgasmed before she did.
“Don’t look so arrogant,” I told her, while we cleaned ourselves up. “It was only a two-second difference.”
“Maybe you should challenge me to a rematch, then.” Her eyes flashed. “Tonight?”
“Ooh.” I inhaled through my teeth and fixed her hair while she fixed mine. “Tonight’s no good. I’m supposed to meet up with my wife.”
“Wife, huh? Hope you take care of her.”
“With everything I’ve got.”
The smile that played at her lips made me want to kiss her until she was worked up again, but I knew we’d get a stewardess rapping at this door if we didn’t exit soon.
“Wife,” she repeated thoughtfully, then covered her mouth when a happy laugh burst out. “Oh, my God, Wes. I’m going to be your wife.”
“Just now realizing that, huh?”
She rose on her tiptoes to kiss me. “And you,” she whispered, “are going to be my husband.”
I swallowed, but I couldn’t hide my grin. I loved the sound of that more than she’d ever know.
We were married at sunset, jetlagged and sunburned, on the pink sand beach outside our resort. In the light, all that shining sand looked like rose-colored glitter. Clara asked if I hated it. I told her she squealed with so much happiness when she saw it, I couldn’t hate it if I tried.
“Our moms were not happy we chose elopement.” Her face twisted with worry after our reception, a picnic of cake and champagne on the beach, slow-dancing to nothing but the sound of the tide lapping at the shore. Georgia had music playing during our first dance; we just couldn’t hear it. I thought the sound of the ocean suited us pretty well, though.
“They’ll get over it.” I tossed Rylan his and Georgia’s room key. We wished them goodnight and boarded the elevator, while they veered into the hotel bar for drinks. “Especially when we visit next week and tell them about the baby. Grandchild news will more than make up for this.”
Her head tilted in silent agreement.
“If your mom still takes it too hard, just tell her eloping was my idea.”
“No, no, I’ll own up to it,” she said. “Mom knows I always wanted something low-key, anyway.”
“Surprised you didn’t want a bubble machine, though. Or a candy buffet arranged in a bizarrely perfect rainbow gradient. Or,” I emphasized, “gift baskets for every single guest with Ray-bans inside.”
“Don’t even pretend you didn’t love Walt and Mark’s wedding.” Clara swatted me as the doors opened to our floor. “It was a little…excessive,” she laughed, “but it was stunning.”
“It was. Which is why, should you ever want to redo this wedding in the future, I’ll understand.”
Clara laughed when I tried to carry her across the threshold to our room; the door kept locking me out before I could pick her up. “Here,” she said, and had me hold her while she swiped the card and opened it.
“Beauty and brains. I hit the jackpot.” Tempted as I was to toss her onto the bed, I resisted. Not only was there the baby to consider, but also the fact she looked exhausted.
I undressed her before shedding my suit and slipping into the sheets behind her. The sunburned skin on her neck warmed my lips as I kissed it.
“Why would I want to redo our wedding?”
As she turned in my arms to face me, I shrugged. “Maybe you’ll want something bigger later on, I don’t know. Maybe part of why you wanted this wedding was that a big one would take too long to plan.” My hands slid to her stomach. “And we’re kind of on a clock.”
“I didn’t care about the timeline.”
“So what was the rush?”
Tired as she looked, that wasn’t about to stop her—or her hormones. The second she nudged me onto my back and climbed on top, my head started swimming.
“I waited years for you to ask me to marry you, Wes Durham,” she whispered, both of us sighing in relief and pleasure as she sank onto me. “I wasn’t about to wait any longer.”
Cut to the Chases still has the honor of being Wes’s least favorite subject. I think it always will, mostly because he’s yet to encounter a single interviewer who brings it up without mentioning Burke. He’s learned to control his temper, though, and finish those conversations instead of storming off.
His coming forward about the abuse encouraged his former costar Tallulah to finally do the same, along with two other young actors from a sitcom Burke did before his role as Bernard Chase. Wes was heartbroken to discover there were more victims—but I think it helped, in its own way, to know all their secrets could finally see daylight.
It also helped when his agent was arrested, two months after fleeing the country. They charged him with everything from tax evasion to sex trafficking a minor, hoping at least one would stick. Not all of them did, but enough to put him away.
“Five years?” Georgia fumed, when the sentence was announced. “He helps to ruin a kid’s life, and that’s all he gets?”
“Hollywood,” Wes sighed, but I saw relief in his eyes. Five years was satisfactory to him, because he’d prepared himself for nothing.
A year later, Louis wrote him an apology letter. Wes read it twice, then used it to kill a spider in our coffee mug cabinet.
The show’s lost a lot of its appeal, in light of the scandal. It still runs on one channel late at night, but was wiped from everything else in a matter of months.
Whenever Wes is out of town on his mini-tours playing dive bars and small venues, I turn on the show and sleep to the familiar one-liners and laugh track I still love. My DVD collection has been watched so many times, I know exactly which episodes feature Charlie Chase, but not his fictional father. Thankfully, my favorite episode is one of them.
It’s where Charlie saves his best friend from alcohol poisoning.
All right: that’s almost everyone’s favorite episode. It sticks in an entire generation’s collective memory just as much as the crooning duet theme song, but with good reason. It’s got heart.
The scene: Charlie Chase says yes to a beer at his first real party.
Dramatic music stabs down the viewers’ spines, and tricks them into thinking this is the conflict. Will Charlie get sick? Get arrested?
When Anna, Charlie’s crush since kindergarten and the Chases’ neighbor, begs him not to drink, the audience silently pleads right alongside her.
When Charlie jerks away from her, we get our hearts broken, too.
Then, before Charlie can even finish that beer, he finds Oliver unresponsive in a bathroom of the party.
Charlie: Wake up. Wake up, Ollie, you stupid jerk...I’m not doing this. Out of all the times you’ve gotten in trouble and made me stand on your porch, look your mom in the eye, and tell her what you did? This would be the worst. And I’m not gonna do it.
It’s a rare moment of uninterrupted pain for the show. Usually there’s some comic relief, in times like these. If nothing else, the acting is always a little stilted, because let’s face it—this isn’t a drama, and the cast isn’t used to showing emotions like those.
But in that scene, Wes Durham gives it his all. When he sobs, you sob with him. You believe the panicked flicker of his eyes when he searches Oliver’s. You clutch your heart when Charlie screams for help, because you want so badly to clutch Charlie’s hand instead, and know you can’t.
The end of the episode is a cliffhanger, leaving the audience to wonder whether Oliver will live or die as paramedics shut him into an ambulance and speed away.
And the last thing we see is Charlie knocking on Oliver’s kitchen door, tears streaming down his face but his expression numb, as the porch light comes on. Oliver’s mother peers at him through the screen. Without a single word, Charlie tells her.
It fades to black, no music.
Before Wes knew how much I loved that episode, he told me about the night he finished filming it—that he’d needed his stomach pumped from drinking vodka, at just thirteen, with the actor who played Oliver.
“Don’t cry about it,” he’d laughed, but in a gentle way as he pulled me into him. “I’m obviously okay now.”
“I’m actually crying for a different reason,” I sniffed, and had to laugh at myself, it seemed so ridiculous. “You just ruined my favorite episode.”
Wes had cursed and thrown himself down into the beanbag chair in his music room.
It took time, but eventually I could watch that episode again and found I still loved it. Maybe even more than I had before.
It explained why Wes had acted so well—admittedly, better and more convincingly than he had in any other episode. He wasn’t acting.
He wasn’t Charlie yelling at Oliver, or Charlie sharing a gut-wrenching look with Oliver’s mom.
He was Wes Durham, yelling at himself.
Wes Durham, standing on a fake porch on a soundstage, delivering news he knew, one of these days, someone might have to give his own mother.
“Reading too much into it,” Wes snorted, when I told him my take on things. “I was acting. Lying for money, sweetheart.”
I knew better, though. It was captured on film. I could pause that episode and see, plain as day, that no matter how scripted his words were...those emotions were real.
A smattering of muffled applause drags me to the present, and I watch Wes and some security exit the event room while the fans wave goodbye.
He flashes them one last smile. They try to hide the blushing and giggles; we’re all in our twenties and thirties, after all, and should be past those little crushes. But I know that’s a losing battle.
“You’re sure you want to leave right away?” I ask, as he takes my hand and leads me through some side exit to the chauffeured Town Car that Pasqual, his agent, arranged to pick us up. Georgia and Rylan took the limo back to their hotel, but we’re going straight to the airport.
“Positive. I can’t visit Delaney until her immunosuppression is done, Mom’s in Canada with Adler again—no point sticking around longer than I have to.” He waves away the driver who’s holding our door so he can hold it for me, instead. Once he’s inside, he tips his head back against the seat and sighs heavily. “Besides, I’m just sick of California. Sorry.”
I nod. I still love it here, but this trip has put him at his absolute limit.
We spent a few days before the premiere visiting my friends: first, Walt and Mark at their new home in Long Beach, then a day at Disneyland with Colby and Orion. Their daughters adored Wes beyond all reason, with London chatting his ear off about princesses and her Pirates of the Caribbean record (eleven rides in a row), and little Sydney toddling at his heels to share spit-drenched binkies with him, whether he wanted them or not (he did not).
“Seems like he’s having fun,” Colby said to me, while we watched the men take the girls to meet Cinderella. “Think he’s coming around on moving back?”
“Not even a little,” I laughed. I didn’t have to ask him to know. Now that he had some closure on his past, California was tolerable—but it still hurt him to be here, deep down, no matter what city we were in or how much fun he was having.
So now, as the lights of the airport spark into view, I tell him, “It’s okay. I miss Brooklyn, too.”
Maybe someday we’ll be back on this coast for good. Maybe not. Between Wes’s feelings and all the plans Georgia and I still have for work, it’s really not feasible, and might never be. But I’m okay with either outcome.
California feels like my home, but New York feels like ours.
“Thank you,” he whispers. When he swallows, I take his hand in both of mine and kiss his knuckles, one by one.
“Guess the piss stick’s out of the trash
.”
I make a face as Georgia shoves the box across the Lucite table. “You know, there’s nothing wrong with the classic ‘cat’s out of the bag.’”
While she adjusts the lights and checks the cameras, I dig through the baby supplies and pregnancy products. It’s been a week since the movie premiere—and six days since photos of my suspected baby bump hit digital newsstands and media feeds.
So far, I’ve received unsolicited boxes of onesies, belly tape, cocoa butter cream for stretch marks, wool diaper covers, and at least fifty other products I can’t even use yet. Never mind the fact neither Wes nor myself have officially confirmed the pregnancy.
“What in the Christ,” Georgia says flatly, grabbing an oddly specifically shaped ice pack from the box, “is an ‘Epesio-Freeze?’”
I shudder and grab it from her, tossing everything back in so we can return it. “Didn’t we agree to stop opening stuff from random companies?”
“We also agreed to stop working on Sundays. Yet here we are.” Georgia sets the makeup tray in front of me and starts recording. We’re currently doing a series of fantasy eye makeup looks inspired by Disney landscapes, which prompted Wes to ask if we’d “officially run out of ideas,” and Rylan to slowly back out of the studio when we walked in last week and found me meticulously painting the restaurant from Ratatouille on my sister’s eyelid.
Today is the grotto from The Little Mermaid, the most requested location in the comments on our last upload.
We practiced last night at my place, so the video doesn’t take long. Georgia takes some photos for Instagram when I’m finished, then drowns a cotton round in makeup remover to clean it off.
“God, my crow’s feet are ridiculous,” she groans, wiping away the last of the blue paint while I text Wes that we’re done.
“They’re only visible when you shove your face into that magnifying mirror,” I point out, and hitch my messenger bag onto my shoulder.
“No,” she sighs, “we’re just getting old.” She flicks her trash into the wastebasket. “No wonder retirement sounded so good.”