Hopeless Romantic

by Francis Gideon

  “Uh-huh.” Nick acquiesced as he pressed his mouth against hers again. He combed his hand over her shoulders and into her hair at the back of her neck. He knew he was tracking frosting everywhere—and he could still feel the sticky bit against his cheek—but he figured that was what showers, or pools like Katie had said, were for. When she moved from the counter, bringing their bodies closer, Nick knew she felt the same way. He worked his fingers over the small button and zipper on her top and watched as it fell to the floor.

  “You don’t mind?” Nick’s hands moved to her jeans.

  “What? Fucking you or getting undressed? Because I’m pretty sure I’m into all of these ideas.”

  Before Nick could answer, she tugged on his shirt, pulling it over his head. They shed more clothing as they walked up the stairs to the bedroom, Nick in his boxers and Katie in her bra and panties by the time they got to the doorway.

  “Let me.” Nick traced his fingers along her bra clasp. He was getting better at this task, and he liked every bit of practice he could get. She made a small noise in her throat as her bra fell to the ground and his palms pressed over her nipples. He rocked their hips together, burying his cock along her ass cheeks, until she finally turned around.

  “I’m supposed to be doing that.” Katie placed him so he faced the wall and tugged down his boxers. Her panties hit the ground, and in a few seconds, her cock was nestled between his ass cheeks. He let out a low moan as he felt how wet she’d become. She slid between him easily, teasing him without ever going inside.

  “How do you want me?” she whispered.

  Nick leaned down on the bed, propping his arms and elbows by his side. “Like this?”

  “From behind? Just like you are now?”

  Nick nodded. Her hand came between his legs, stroking his balls and dick. He rocked their bodies back and forth until he was panting. Only then did she gather lube, condoms, and a purple strap-on from her bag.

  “Of course it’s purple,” he murmured.

  “What else would it be? It’s my favourite colour for a reason.” Katie slipped the strap-on over her body and was about to reach for a condom when she caught Nick’s gaze. “You want to suck me?”

  Nick swallowed hard and nodded. Katie gestured for him to get on his knees in front of her, which he did in one fluid motion. He grasped the base of the strap-on and slowly circled his tongue around the tip. The scent of cleaner hit his nose first, then became masked by Katie’s scent. Nick wrapped his free hand around her cock, toying with her slit and pre-come, and then her balls as he continued to suck the plastic shaft as well. He met Katie’s eyes between each head bob. Her breasts were shaking as her arousal grew, and soon she was too needy to continue.

  “I need to fuck you. Now.” She was already unwrapping the condom. Nick dragged his tongue across the purple strap-on and then resumed his former position. It was so much hotter like this, bent over and waiting for her. When she slid in a finger, Nick let out a low moan.

  “What?” She took her finger away and placed a firm hand on his waist. “What do you say?”

  “Katie.” Nick moaned. He could still smell the vanilla from the cake. “Fucking hell, Katie. Keep going.”

  She placed a kiss on his shoulder blade that he felt turn into a smile. “Yeah? Like this?”

  She slipped another finger inside of him, stretching him easily. He groaned her name as he pushed his hips back so her fingers could go deeper.

  “Fuck.”

  She added another finger and stroked that sensitive spot inside of him, making his knees weak.

  “Katie, keep going.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You’re so fucking beautiful. My God.”

  She rocked her fingers inside him more and pressed her chest against him. He groaned, grabbing his cock and stroking himself only two times before he barked out a moan between saying her name again.

  “Katie, please. Fuck me. I’m not going to last long.”

  “Okay, okay,” she whispered, breathing heavily. “I’m so fucking hard and wet for you right now it’s ridiculous.”

  Nick clutched the bedsheets as she removed her fingers. His hole felt tender and teased from so much foreplay; the sound of the lube bottle lid made him clench. She lined up the cock and entered him after a moment of resistance.

  “Jesus,” Nick said.

  “Okay?”

  “Uh-huh. Just big. And good. God.” Nick closed his eyes and saw stars. Katie slipped inside him an inch more, then pulled out. Each time she leaned over him, her hard nipples and breasts dragged across his back, sending shivers down his spine. He felt the thickness of her thighs as she moved between his. Katie glided into him easily now, filling him up more than he’d anticipated. Nick continued to clutch the sheets in desperation as she thrust deeper into him, then nearly pulled all the way out. She bucked her hips, her motions matching Nick’s panted breathing.

  “Good?” she asked between bucks. “Like this?”

  “Fuck.” Nick lost all control. He splayed his arms and legs out against the mattress, completely giving his body over to Katie. Words became a garbled mess inside his mouth. She continued to fuck him, harder and faster than before. He tried, in spite of all the pleasure and intensity rolling inside of him, to say her name again and again.

  “Fuck,” Katie panted. “Touch yourself, Nick. I want to see you come before I do.”

  Nick did as he was told without a second thought. His hand around his dick was almost too much. He stroked himself slowly, pressing his thumb to the base as he felt Katie shift inside of him.

  “Katie, Katie,” he murmured on each exhalation. Each time he said her name, he swore she went faster. And faster, and deeper again. He breathed in through clenched teeth, his wrist trying to keep up with her rhythm. When her tits brushed his shoulders again, he let out a low breath.

  “Fuck. Katie.” He groaned out as he came, his body shuddering from the orgasm. He knew Katie could see him writhing like this, because her hands slipped away from his body and moved to touch herself below the strap on. Her thrusts became erratic along with her breathing.

  “Fuck, fuck,” she cried as she came with another buck of her hips. Nick clenched the bedsheets again with a moan. His body didn’t feel as if it belonged to him anymore, but all to her. She pumped a few more times inside of him, before she came back down to the real world and pulled out. She peppered his back and shoulders with kisses as she took off the strap-on.

  “Nick,” she whispered, crawling next to him on the bed. “Nick, I want to see your face.”

  Nick turned to see her on the bed. She wrapped her arms around him and tucked herself into his body, as if she were the one who’d completely surrendered and not him. They were still covered in come, but in the afterglow, Nick—and Katie—didn’t seem to mind. He touched her chin, pushing their lips together in between laboured breaths.

  “Fuck,” he said. “That was good. You were amazing.”

  Katie’s bangs were damp with sweat and stuck to her forehead. She smiled wryly. “You were pretty amazing too.”

  When Nick’s breath finally came back to him, and his orgasm had mostly left him feeling blissfully spaced out, Nick wrapped a tighter arm around her. “Katie,” he whispered. “I . . . I think I love you.”

  Katie laughed.

  “What?” Nick’s heart fell. He hadn’t anticipated or planned on saying that to her in this moment. It had been coming to his head at random intervals, but like with most important thoughts, he was good at pushing it away. “I mean it, Katie. I think I love you.”

  “Oh, Nick. Don’t be sad.” She touched his face and pecked him on the lips. “I just . . . I know never to believe ‘I love you’ during sex.”

  “But it’s after sex.”

  “I know that.” Katie’s fingers danced along his arm before she tilted her eyes to look up at him. “But it still has the same effect. Orgasms change people.”

  “But I said it after,” Nick repeated, trying
to keep his tone light. “And I think a postcoitus ‘I love you’ is perfectly acceptable. Because I’m not waiting for the orgasm. So there’s no ulterior motive. I’m just . . . vulnerable. So it counts.”

  “Maybe it does,” Katie agreed after a moment. “Maybe.”

  The silence that hung over them was a lot less awkward than Nick figured it would be. Katie still snuggled next to him, clearly enthralled to be naked and in his arms. And so what? He had said I love you, more or less. He was pretty exposed, but love was always a good thing. Even if Katie remained quiet like she was right now. She hadn’t said no, and really, that was all Nick wanted to have for sure. She might not be in love with him—but there was always a future.

  When Katie shifted beside him, she murmured that she needed to clean up. Nick moved so she could get up, but he also clasped her hands in his. He kissed her again.

  “You’re great, okay? You are,” he said in the same tone in which he’d professed his love.

  “And I really, really like you, Nick. I care for you deeply.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I care about you deeply too.”

  “I know. You didn’t let me finish.” Katie bit her lip, trying to steady herself. “I can’t say that right now. Doesn’t mean I won’t be able to in the future.”

  “I know, I just—”

  “Let me finish.” Katie patted his cheek and then narrowed her eyes. “I care about you deeply. And that grand romantic gesture you described? Going to a wedding and a trip? I want that. I want all of that, with you.”

  “So you’ll go to the wedding with me?”

  “I’ll go to as many as you may need to attend. Which given our age and friends, may end up being quite a lot.”

  Nick’s heart skipped. A wedding in the future, beyond Alex’s, they could definitely bank on. And for now, as he kissed Katie again, it was enough.

  The next few days passed easily between them, with lots of cake (when Nick finally got around to making his own), lots of swimming, and lots of movies from the eighties. When they exhausted what Nick’s parents had on DVD, Nick went digging around in the basement. He surprised himself when he managed to find his parents’ old VHS collection and a functional VCR. In between Adventures in Babysitting and Youngblood, the two of them completely forgot about the outside world—except for Felix. But after a week together, even the dog had succumbed to their distinct sleeping and eating schedules—they’d often stay in bed until noon, stay up until 2 a.m., and hang around the pool all afternoon, while watching movies over popcorn at night. When the movies weren’t enough to fuel their nostalgia, Nick found a couple of family albums he thought could be funny to share. He hadn’t known he could possibly get this happy reliving all these memories with Katie, but he did. He started to piece together some of that life story he’d told Tucker, reliving his first boy crushes, but he also stumbled on one or two girl crushes too.

  “That’s Avery,” Nick said, lingering on a photograph of his old babysitter. “She stayed with me for a couple years when my oldest sister was at university and couldn’t look after us when my parents were out. I wasn’t old enough to fill the babysitting role for Shannon, but I was also too old to be watched, so I often tried to be her best friend.”

  “And it became something more?” Katie asked. She seemed to sense that Nick’s hovering over this picture in particular wasn’t just because he wanted to laugh at the style choices. There was a deep emotion that he couldn’t articulate even at that age, and had tried to forget about it since.

  “You know, I’m not sure what Avery was. We obviously were never a couple, and I don’t even think I would have said she was a crush.”

  “So what would you have said?”

  “She was . . . she was the one who first traded music with me who wasn’t in my family. She gave me a mixed CD that had pop punk on it.” The memory came back to Nick so suddenly it was like he was watching it play out in front of him. Avery’s red hair framed her face, and the red permanent marker she’d used to write on the CD seemed almost iridescent in his memory. “She used to have this binder that she wrote song lyrics in and carried around with her everywhere, but there was a poem from Keats that she put on the front page. Yes.” Nick nodded, then recited the verses from Keats’ “Bright Star.” “That poem was in the front of it. I used to steal her binder and read it all the time.”

  “That’s so sweet,” Katie said. “And you’re studying that now, right? Keats and the Romantics?”

  “Yeah. She was my first vision of what it meant to be a hopeless romantic.”

  “And the first girl you liked?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Though I didn’t quite have the words.” When Nick turned the page, Avery’s image still lingered in his mind. He wasn’t entirely comfortable saying he had a crush on her, though he knew logically that was probably what it had been. He’d wanted to be with Avery at that age as much as he wanted to be just like her when he grew up. She’d become the focal point in his life when his worldview as a romantic was formed.

  And yet, he’d forgotten about her. The thought that he could literally shape and form his life—to the point where he was getting a PhD in the Romantics—and somehow not know it was all down to her was startling, yet freeing. It made him look at Katie, and the subsequent other women in the photo album (like Becky from seventh grade, or Molly his French tutor in high school) that stirred a similar feeling of kinship in a new way.

  As Nick told her story after story, Katie opened up too.

  On the last day together, Katie pulled Nick close as they watched the final Indiana Jones movie. When the credits rolled, Katie whispered into his ear. “I want to show you something.”

  “Oh?” Nick glanced from her to the TV again. “Does it involve me getting up? Because I think we’ve perfected the pillow fort.”

  Katie chuckled. “No, we can stay right here. I think Felix would resent us if we moved and didn’t get him a T-R-E-A-T.”

  Felix stirred from his sleep, popping his head up and tilting it to the side. He didn’t bark, and when Nick and Katie made no move to get him a treat, he folded his head over his paws again. After some lazy kissing, Katie finally peeled herself from the couch so she could grab her purse from the chair opposite them in the living room. She plopped back down with her iPhone and started to skim through her photo galleries. Nick was about to ask what she was doing—and if she was taking a picture, he really, really wanted to shave—but soon saw her open a folder that he’d never seen before. It was full of old photos; many of which had to have been scanned and then downloaded onto her phone. There were black-and-white ones, Polaroids, and even something that appeared like it belonged in a magazine or newspaper, but had been cut out.

  “What’s all this?” Nick asked.

  “Come here. Sit closer to me and you’ll see,” Katie said, her voice quiet. Nick did as he was told, facing Katie’s phone so he could see the pictures she moved through.

  “You’ve been sweet enough to show me all these things about your life here. Including your mullet and the bowl cut you never told me about.”

  “The 1980s were difficult, even if I was only a couple years old.”

  “We all know the real eighties fashion didn’t end until, like, 1994. Same with the nineties ending in 2004. But you know what I mean, right? You showed me all these things, and I’ve been quiet.”

  “You were a good listener.”

  “Well, here. I’m not just listening anymore. Just don’t flip through the photos until I tell you so, okay?”

  Katie handed Nick her phone, an image of two boys holding a basketball between them coming up as he took it. The photo was taken at dusk; maybe sometime in July judging by how everyone was dressed. The taller boy was smiling proudly, his T-shirt revealing the number twenty-three (Michael Jordan’s), and the younger boy, with dark hair obscuring most of his face, was wearing a jersey with the number ninety-one on it.

  “Whose number is that?” Nick asked, pointing to the ninety-one.


  “Oh, Rodman,” Katie said. “I always hated basketball, but I thought Dennis Rodman was cute. I think because I saw him wear a wedding dress when I was quite young. So obviously, he became this odd queer icon, though I had no idea what the hell that meant.”

  “Oh.” Nick glanced down at the photo again. This wasn’t a picture of two random boys. This was Katie and her brother Randall, the golden child. Nick had only heard things in passing about them, small stories here and there, but nothing that ever made it as real as this. “Oh.”

  Nick remained at a loss for words for quite some time. He saw Katie in the image of the young boy now: her small, narrow nose and blue-green eyes. Even the hair, though it was short, was dark and straight like hers was now and framed a heart-shape face. Nick was overwhelmed by the sudden familiarity that he had grown used to, but displaced in a reality he didn’t always think of. Katie had not grown up with purple as her favourite colour and with a pink dress in her closet. She had grown up trying to decipher why she didn’t like basketball and why Dennis Rodman was attractive.

  “You’re . . .”

  “You can say I’m cute. If you want, I mean,” Katie cut in. “I don’t want to assume that’s what’s going through your head. You can call me a scrawny little weird boy, if you want, because that’s kind of what I was.”

  “No. You’re cute. I think you’re cute when you’re a kid and when you’re . . . you, now.”

  Katie smiled weakly, then nudged the phone. “Go to the next picture. You can see my sister.”

  Nick did as he was a told. A tall girl with a huge smile on her face and curly hair pinned on the top of her head like a fountain came into view. She stood in foreground of the picture and held up a random trophy. Nick couldn’t make out what spot it was, but the figure on top of the trophy was twisted into a knot.