by Serena Bell
He shakes his head, not matching my teasing, but watching Gabe through serious eyes. “I was scared of him,” he says.
I don’t get what he means at first.
“Of Gabe,” he clarifies. “Especially when he was little. It always felt like I’d break him. So it was easier to let my mom and my sister do all the work.”
I think my mouth falls open.
“And then, you know, they were good at it, they were the ones who knew how to do everything, so I kind of let it go on like that. But I’m glad. Glad I’ve gotten this chance. I don’t think—if what happened with you and Big Dick hadn’t happened, I don’t know what it woulda taken for me to spend more time with him.”
I close my mouth and catch my breath and finally figure out what I want to say.
“I’m glad, too.”
I wasn’t sure this morning. About this whole trip. About the idea of all of us doing something together that felt like what a family would do together. Mom and dad and kid.
Every time Jack and I have been together this week, I’ve felt myself slipping a little farther down a slope whose shape I know and whose pull I’ve never been able to resist. The only thing keeping it safe was that it was just sex.
But this isn’t sex. And it isn’t Jack’s easy friendship, tossed at me like a fleece wrap at a football game. This day, this trip, is a promise I’m pretty darn sure Jack can’t make.
Gabe comes running over and throws himself into my lap. “I’m hungry,” he says. “I want goldfish.”
It’s lunchtime, so we take a break and get hot dogs in the cafeteria, Gabe kneeling up on his chair, so bubbly and bouncy, full of the stories of what he’s seen, that I’m afraid he’s going to fall over from sheer uncoordinated excitement. Jack is on alert too, poised with a hand that hovers near Gabe’s squirmy little body, and I realize it’s one of the first times I’ve been able to sit back and just watch because someone else is worrying about whether Gabe will fall off the chair.
Instead, Gabe reaches out and brushes too close to his soda cup, and Jack lunges to catch it and knocks it over, a tsunami across the table and Gabe.
“Sh—”
Jack cuts the epithet off and rakes his gaze over the situation, taking stock. “You want the kid or the napkin run?” he asks, as Gabe, swamped in icy drink and startled by the toppling drink and Jack’s near-outburst, explodes into sobs.
I’ve never had a choice before. It’s always been the screaming kid and the napkin run, and if I’m lucky some well-meaning wait staff or elderly woman with a grandmotherly air will blot at the puddle for a few seconds before wafting back to their own concerns.
Gabe has one hand knotted in Jack’s shirt, so I run for napkins, and in a few seconds he has Gabe calmed down and I have the soda cleaned up.
I walk the wad of icy napkins to the trash can. As I turn back, I see that Jack is working Gabe out of his drenched shirt. He’s already dug in the backpack for a change of clothes, which are draped over the back of the chair.
It takes my breath away, actually, how perfectly right the scene looks. And how I don’t mind standing slightly outside it and watching Jack pull the new T-shirt over our son’s head.
I could get used to this, I think, and then, my heart squeezing painfully in my chest, Shit.
Chapter 25
Gabe doesn’t stir as I lift him from the car seat and hold him loosely slung against my shoulder to carry him up to the house. “He’s like a sack of rice,” I whisper, as Maddie unlocks the door and lets us in.
I ferry him down the hall and deposit him in bed. Maddie tucks him in. The two of us stand there, staring down at him. He’s so stinkin’ cute with his face all pink and his hair all mussed, and I give in to the impulse to stroke his cheek with one finger. It’s as soft as it looks.
I look up to find Maddie’s eyes locked on my face. They’re soft, too, and full of wonder, but as soon as she realizes I see her, her whole expression changes. It goes—stiff, I guess. Like she’s shut down whatever’s back there, behind her defenses.
I want her to let me in there. To look at me that way, with all that vulnerability and need showing.
“This was a good day,” I tell her.
“Yeah.” I see it, just a glimmer of it, that softness. I want to reach out and stroke it like I did Gabe’s cheek, but it’s not a thing you can touch. It’s like a wild animal that you have to lure out with quiet and gentleness. What happened between us, back then, it scared both of us bad enough that we’re both like that, holding something back from each other all the time.
Except—except when we have sex. I don’t think either of us is holding anything back then.
She turns away from me, toward the door of Gabe’s room. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“You want company?”
Almost to the door, she turns back and regards me. Her lips twitch with amusement. Showering together is one thing we haven’t done yet, mostly because at night we’re busy crawling all over each other in bed, and during the day the one of us who isn’t showering needs to be watching Gabe. “So, like, more of a ‘getting dirty’ shower than a ‘getting clean’ shower.”
The way she says it brings my dick to immediate attention.
“Getting dirty on the way to getting clean.”
I hear her breath catch.
“You don’t mind that, do you, dirty girl?”
She whimpers her approval, biting her lip. Oh, that fucking lip. I cross the room, swoop her up, and carry her down the hall. She clutches fistfuls of my shirt and calls me a Neanderthal. The way she says it, I’m 100 percent sure it’s a compliment.
In the bathroom I strip her out of her clothes, my hands roaming everywhere. “The first couple of weeks you were here you drove me crazy every time you showered,” I tell her, kissing the corner of her mouth, her earlobe, her jawline, her throat, her tits. “I’d listen to the water run and all I could think about was you, naked and wet…” I groan. “I wanted to lick all that water off you…” I give her a demo, flicking my tongue over the whorls of her ear, along the line of her collarbone, down the slope of one breast until I can take the nipple in my mouth and treat it right.
Her knees buckle and I catch her, my arm looped tight around her, holding her up as I lavish all my attention on first one tight bud, then the other.
“You’re still wearing all your clothes,” she murmurs when I let her go, just long enough to turn on the shower.
I grab my T-shirt and tug it over my head, loving the hot way her eyes track my movements and her gaze slides down my torso to the button of my jeans. I put on a show with that button, slowly unfastening it and drawing down the zipper over my erection, which strains painfully against its constraints. I push my jeans and briefs down and stand naked before her, and she reaches out her hands, palms open, and begins to paint my body with big, lush strokes. Everywhere her hands touch there’s a rush of heat and sensation, and it all gathers into my cock like sand draining to the apex of an hourglass. I’m wound tight already and we haven’t even gotten under the water.
She steps into the shower and I follow her, loving her curves with my eyes—the flare of her hips, the heart-shaped curve of her ass, those generous tits, now drenched and dripping, the water streaming down the way I pictured, catching on the tips of her nipples and beading in her pubic hair and in her eyelashes. My mouth finds hers, my tongue licking against the wet silk of her lips and cheek and tongue like I’m still catching water droplets on her skin. She moans and leans into me, and the heat of her body with the heat of the water, touching me everywhere, is almost too much to take. She reaches past me for the soap, slicks her hands with it, and winds her fingers against mine until we’re both soapy. We touch each other like that, soapy and eager, almost desperate. She’s so slippery under my hands, everything is slippery, and it’s all I can do not to just plunge myself into her right now.
“No condom,” I groan.
“Jack,” she whispers. “If I said I have an IUD�
��”
“I’d say why the fuck didn’t you tell me that before, woman!?”
She frowns. “You have to swear to me that you’re clean…”
If her implied lack of trust burns at all, it gets swallowed in all the other heat around us, by how much in this moment I just want her no matter what. “I swear. I’m clean.” I’ve got something to tell her that feels like a big deal, even though it shouldn’t; it’s just a statement of fact, it doesn’t have to be all laden with meaning. But I have to catch my breath to get the words out, and they come out a little rushed, and cracked: “You’re the last woman I fucked without a condom.”
She takes a step back and holds me at arm’s length for a moment, and I see that wide-open look in her eyes again, and I have that same insane feeling of wanting to reach out and touch it, touch her in some place that’s beyond where my hands and fingers and tongue and lips can reach.
She takes a deep breath. “Okay. Okay.” She closes her eyes, then opens them again and turns toward the wall.
She puts her hands against the tile, steps with one foot onto the ledge of the tub, and I don’t wait for a written invitation. I cover her body with mine, our skin sliding soapy and slick and delicious against each other, and I thrust into her with one long stroke, she is so fucking wet and needy, and without the condom she is hotter inside than outside, hotter than the water raining down on us. We’re wet from the shower and her generous slickness and the beads of pre-cum easing my way into her, from the way she’s turned her head to catch my lips and lick hungrily into my mouth, from soap, water, sweat. My fingers weave through hers on the tile wall, the ceramic squares smooth and cold under our hands, her ass canted up to give me an angle that won’t let me last more than a few seconds, her body like fire around mine and, now, gripping my dick tight as she comes, and nothing, no amount of willpower or desire to make this moment last forever could possibly stop me from shooting my own wet heat into her like it’s just one more way the universe fits together.
Chapter 26
Monday night, it takes me forever to pick my clothes for Tuesday. I fuss and fuss, trying things on and discarding the losers on the floor of the guest room.
“Wow,” Jack says from the doorway. His gaze flicks from the pile on the floor to my nearly naked body—lace bra and panties—and back to the clothes before he settles on me and gives me a thorough visual going-over.
But I’m too sweaty and frustrated to melt under the heat in his eyes. “I don’t have anything fun to wear out tomorrow night.”
“Why does it matter? It’s just Sienna and her girlfriends. Besides, you look sexy in everything. You’re sexy in sweatpants.”
“That’s exactly why it matters. I can wear anything and you’ll think it’s sexy. But they’re women. They actually have opinions about fashion.”
And it’s been a really long time since I had a group of girlfriends. People to hang out with, go out with.
“Just go like that.”
“I’m serious. I want them to like me.”
Jack sits on the edge of the bed. “They’re going to like you, Maddie. Sienna already likes you. Always has. You don’t have to dress to impress. But, okay. Show me what you’ve got.”
I start re-trying on the least egregious of the rejects. No matter what I put on, he takes it off with his eyes and tell me it’s sexy. Not helpful. And yet—
Really, really good for the ego.
“That,” he says definitively.
I’m wearing a pair of bright-red satin leggings and an oversized white button-down.
“You need black boots.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“What? Just because I’m a straight guy doesn’t mean I’m not right about this.”
I dig in the closet for my boots and pull them on.
“Fuck yeah,” he says. “Now. Take it off.”
The hard command in his voice goes straight to my core as a rush of heat. I kick the boots off and peel myself out of the satin pants, which I’ve miraculously spared, although my panties go into the corner in a damp wad.
“Boots back on.”
I give him a WTF look and he looks right back at me, eyes flinty. I feel more moisture slick my sex. I reach for the boots and tug them back on. There something about it, the boots stiff and confining on my feet, the melting at my center, that amps me up even more, my nipples tightening, my breathing coming faster.
“Mmm,” he says, eating me up visually. “Yeah. Just like that.”
He leans back on the bed and just stares. Like I’m his own private porn movie. So, what the hell. I start unbuttoning the buttons of the white shirt, one by one. And then—because what’s a strip tease without a dance?—I roll my hips a little. My core clenches around emptiness and I whimper.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
His voice is rough, husky.
I run my fingertips across my collarbone, down over the slope of one breast, stroking lightly over the tip of one nipple through the lace of my bra. A little sigh escapes my lips, and Jack’s hips buck.
“Touch that nipple again,” he says. “But just like that. So lightly you can barely feel it.”
I do.
“The other one.”
There’s moisture on my thighs now. I want him to come close and slip his fingers into it, spread it all around, find my hard clit at the center of the mess I’ve made of myself. But he doesn’t. He just watches.
So I do it. I let the white shirt slip off my shoulders. My fingertips follow the upper outline of my bra, dip over the lace to flick a nipple, and then brush down the center of my chest, past the flirty little satin bow of my lingerie. Usually when I touch myself it doesn’t feel as good as when Jack does it, but this time, with his eyes fierce and fixed on me, it’s like it’s his fingers. His hand behind my back, unhooking my bra, letting it drop, releasing my breasts with a last caress. The rough flat of his palm over my belly, his fingers dipping into my curls, smoothing my wetness everywhere.
Jack groans from the bed. His cock has raised a bulge in his jeans and my eyes want to linger there. But his hand cups it, covers it, so instead I watch the impatient, rough way he handles himself while I touch myself, gentle as a butterfly.
I raise my eyes from the spectacle at his fly and our gazes meet, spark. His eyes are so dark and hungry, almost angry in their intensity. And I want to push him harder, dare him more, make him crack. I raise my fingers to my lips, slide them in my mouth, and suck, hard, my eyes never leaving his—which means I can watch the heat flare there.
A moment later he’s off the bed, kneeling at my feet, his mouth covering me as he coaxes wave after wave of orgasm out of me.
Chapter 27
Caverna is a new bar on Fifth near the theater, aptly dark and cozy, its walls lined with expensive bottles I’ve never heard of. I weave my way between closely packed tall tables and bar-height chairs to find Sienna and her friends with drinks in their hands. My Lyft got stuck in rush-hour traffic. I’d Lyfted to work so I could ride back to Revere Lake with Sienna and her friends after the show—not economical, but I didn’t want to miss the post-show girl talk.
“Ladies,” Sienna announces as I approach the table. “This is my friend Maddie. My nephew Gabe’s mom.”
I give her a hug. “Thanks so much for inviting me.”
She hugs back, bony and fierce. “My pleasure. Maddie, this is Cora.” She indicates a petite woman wearing a glittery tank and black leggings with a profusion of tight golden curls and a round face. She beams and waves. “Hey, Maddie.”
“And this is Lani.” Sienna opens her hand toward a tall woman with shiny black hair and a swervy figure—the kind that turns heads in bars even when it’s not clothed, as now, in skinny jeans, a cream-colored halter top with a deep cleavage dive, and stilettos.
She’s familiar. “Did you go to Revere Lake High?” I ask her.
Lani’s gorgeous, smokily outlined green eyes research me carefully. It’s unnerving. “I was a couple of years ahead
of you. But yeah.”
“I’m sorry, did we—I can’t remember if we’ve actually met or if you’re just familiar from the pass-in-the-hallway routine.” Although I’m pretty good with names and faces; I think I’d know if we had met.
She shakes her head. Her gaze doesn’t get any warmer. I feel like I’ve done something to piss her off without meaning to, but of course that’s ridiculous. I’ve just met her. “I’m a friend of Jack’s,” she says.
She says it in a way that’s carefully neutral, but something—call it female intuition—tells me that there’s more to the story than “a friend of Jack’s.”
Then she seems to soften, and she sticks her hand out to shake mine. “Nice to meet you. And I love those leggings.” She inclines her head down at my red satin.
“Cool boots, too,” Cora adds, pointing at the boots Jack spec’d last night.
I blush. I will probably blush whenever anyone mentions these boots, possibly till I’m old, or dead.
The waitress comes by and asks what I want.
“You want one of these,” Sienna says, pointing to her drink. “Bee’s Knees.”
The waitress confirms this. “It’s the best drink. Sweet, but not too sweet.”
“Sounds good. Thanks.”
When she’s gone, I incline my head toward Sienna and ask Lani, “So if you were two years ahead of me in school, and Sienna’s three behind, how do you guys know each other?”
“Cora and I work for Lani,” says Sienna, grinning.
“I own Cuppa, the coffee shop in town.”
“Wow, cool,” I say. “I haven’t been in there yet, but I’ve heard it’s got the best coffee in Revere Lake. How’d you get that gig?”
She tells me about buying it from the previous owner, who had driven it almost into the ground, and bringing it back from near-dead. Cora and Sienna were among her first employees, and she credits them with helping her figure out a vibe and a schedule that would work for tourists and locals. Lani smiles as she tells the story, her narrative picking up steam and energy until she’s glowing with pleasure in her work. What came across as coldness or even anger earlier, I realize now, is just a little bit of shyness.