Clementine lowers herself onto her belly on one of the deck chairs lining the intricately tiled pool’s edge. “Oh god, girl. Just stay here, I know you want to.”
“Was I that obvious?”
Clementine looks over her shoulder, spine curving in, chest pushing out. “You were singing ‘A Moment Like This’ to one of the beds. So, yeah. That obvious.”
Gwen licks her dry lips, fights the heaviness of her eyelids. It’s an enticing offer. Dangerously enticing. “I should probably take a nap, get some food. Call Flora.” Sleep and food. Checking in with her wife. That’s probably important.
“Good. Then nap out here. I’ll order us some breakfast. You call Flora while we wait.” Clementine reaches out with one slender arm to pat the deck chair next to hers. Her tone doesn’t leave any room to argue.
“I’ll get my bathing suit.”
Gwen takes the golden staircase up to one of the rooms, tests out the king-sized bed and very nearly doesn’t get up again. She does sing to it once more. Then she fires off a quick text— made it here, miss you—and descends the staircase back to the pool.
Grady is there now, after getting settled in his own room and changed into a suit that barely covers the essentials. He’s all muscles and skin and wiry golden hair, his face freshly shaven, and he’s eating a breakfast burrito in the chair beside Clementine’s. He looks better, Gwen thinks, more relaxed; or at least he’s distracted enough to look better and more relaxed.
They eat cinnamon brioche French toast and bagels with lox and fresh berries. They drink cold cherry-ginger-infused tea and freshly squeezed orange-mango juice.
“Anything else, Ms. Campbell?” The Butler asks, after everything has been cleared away.
“Yes,” Clementine says, stretched out on her back. “If you could roll that awning out a little more.” The butler hits a button on his ever-present remote. It controls nearly everything in the suite. “And,” Clementine continues, flashing Gwen a grin, “we’ll take a deep-tissue massage each.”
In the shade, muscles relaxed and loose from her neck to her toes, the breeze from a fan caressing her back and thighs and the side of her face not buried in the pillow of her arms, Gwen mumbles, “Not becoming a country music star was the worst decision of my life.” She’s so relaxed and blissed-out from her massage that it’s a slurred mishmash of syllables.
Clementine and Grady talk in hushed, clipped tones. Grady wants to go off on his own, and Clementine won’t let him. Gwen thinks that’s what they’re saying, but her synapses are sluggish and she keeps slipping in and out of consciousness; she’s sleep deprived and was turned into putty by an Amazon with magical giant hands named Freya.
The next thing she knows, Gwen is in the pool, and she’s not alone. The heat and bright sun are making everything glimmer around her like a mirage, as if she’s encased in a floating bubble with the sound muted and her vision blurred; the scene is unreal and too real, all at once. Gwen moves her body, and the water glides and swirls, a caress over every inch of her skin.
She’s naked.
There’s no time to worry about that, though, because Clementine is here, on the steps in her little white bikini, and Gwen is overwhelmed by urgency; she has to go, she shouldn’t be here, something else is so much more important, but she can’t remember what; her head feels full of cotton batting and her body is like liquid. She churns in the water but can’t go anywhere.
“Are you ready?” is all Gwen can to think to say. She doesn’t know why.
Clementine winks, pinches the tie holding the bikini bottom together on her hip, and reaches back to the tie for the top. “I’m always ready for you, sugar.”
Clementine is graceful and slender everywhere; her breasts are round and firm and high, with small pink nipples; the rest of her body is tanned bronze. Her stomach is smooth and sloping; her legs are long, toned, and sleekly muscular. Every curve and mound and dip of her is enticingly exposed.
Gwen stares. Closes her eyes to stop staring. When she opens them again, Clementine is in front of her, pressing her fingers to the small of Gwen’s back and pushing her forward, pressing the length of her body against Gwen’s when she’s close enough. She says, “Don’t let ‘em see you sweat,” before kissing her.
It’s rough and strange, and Gwen can’t get ahead of anything that’s happening. Why can’t she think or speak, and why does it feel as if heat is lashing down her spine and searing her skin when she’s floating in the cool deep end of the pool?
Clementine’s lips are demanding on hers, her tongue spears roughly inside, her teeth catch sharply on Gwen’s bottom lip, and it’s nothing like kissing Flora, nothing like the love and connection and care of Flora. Flora.
“Flora,” Gwen gasps into Clementine’s mouth. No, no, no. This is wrong. This is—
“Hey, G.” Behind her, Flora’s breasts press into Gwen’s back, Flora’s hand slips into the space between Gwen’s body and Clementine’s body to knead and stroke them both.
“Flora?”
Familiar lips trace the curve of Gwen’s neck, and Flora murmurs into the hot, sweat-slick skin there. “Are you happy?”
Gwen tries to twist around and kiss Flora, but she’s immobilized between their bodies, trapped in the surreal suspension of the water. Instead, Clementine cranes over Gwen’s shoulder and kisses Flora in the same roughly claiming way she’d kissed Gwen.
Gwen groans and her hips churn in the water, desperate for something to rub her aching pussy against, someone, limbs and naked slippery skin and mouths and hands everywhere.
“Are you happy?” Flora says again, in front of Gwen in a flash, hiking one of Gwen’s legs up over the bend of her hip. Clementine is behind Flora now, kissing and biting on Flora’s jaw and neck and ears, lifting the full mounds of Flora’s breasts in her hands. Gwen watches as Clementine pinches and pulls at Flora’s nipples, then slips a hand down between them, rubbing Flora, rubbing Gwen, making them both gasp and writhe in the water.
“I don’t, I don’t—” She can’t think and everything is strange and hazy, and why is Flora here in Vegas, why does she keep asking if Gwen is happy, and how is this happening? But god, she’s close, a tight build in her belly and groin reaching and reaching, the squelch and slap of their bodies, all three of them wet and flushed and moving together and the way Flora and Clementine looked when they kissed, Clementine demanding and rough, Flora giving herself to it so sweetly.
So, so close. If she could just—a little more. A little harder. A little faster. But it builds and builds and builds to nothing, and then Clementine is gone and Flora is gone, vanished like a hallucination. And Gwen is alone in the pool, panting and throbbing and bereft.
“Gwen?”
When she flutters her eyes open, it’s to the blurry sight of Clementine’s lean, sculpted stomach in front of her face. Gwen scrambles to sit up with a shocked inward breath.
“You okay? Looked like you were having a bad dream or something.”
Gwen smacks her dry mouth a few times and rubs at her eyes to clear the sleep and confusion away. She’s in the lounge chair. At the pool. Bone dry and dreaming about threesomes. She can feel how swollen and slick she is. She crosses her legs tightly.
“Yeah. Bad dream.” Gwen goes for a chuckle but it sounds like the croak of a bullfrog. Clementine tilts her head.
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind, now that you’re awake?” In Clementine’s outstretched hand is a bottle of tanning oil. “I want to get a little more sun before I head out.”
Alarm bells go off in Gwen’s head. Panicked, she searches for Grady; Clementine and Grady are close, he can slather her with oil; but he’s swimming laps in the pool. His muscled body glides through the water like a torpedo.
Clementine is still holding out the bottle of oil and staring at her. Gwen takes it with shaky hands and tries to talk herself down. Clementine stretches out
on her stomach in the sun, and Gwen kneels next to her.
Okay. They didn’t actually have a threesome, she reminds herself, squirting a dollop of the oil into her cupped palm, though why she was dreaming about it, in vivid detail, may still be a problem. Gwen rubs the slippery oil onto Clementine’s shoulders and neck, making her skin glisten. Fine. This is fine. She’s handling this just fine. Then Clementine reaches back and unties the string of her top, and the thin fabric settles open at her sides.
Gwen looks away, clenches her jaw, and squeezes another dollop of oil into her hand. Too much squirts out, and Clementine shifts at the harsh noise, her back bows and arches, her chest lifts off the chair, her bikini top falls loose—
No. Danger, danger.
Clementine is attractive, obviously. Anyone with a primitive lizard brain can see that. But as far as being attracted to her—Gwen likes bodies, likes the variety of beauty in them, can look at Grady, even, or Nico, and enjoy their flat planes and sculpted muscles and strong jaws. She can appreciate Clementine, have a silly crush on her, can think about her body because she has to put clothes on her body. It stops there, though. It has to stop there.
It was just a dream. It doesn’t mean anything because it can’t.
“You doin’ all right over there, sugar?”
Gwen looks at her oil-covered hand, looks at Clementine’s naked torso, and then stands on wobbly legs and says, “I think I’m dehydrated. I’m gonna head inside.”
Once inside, Gwen washes her hand with cool water, splashes some on her face and takes a long drink of iced tea. She presses the cold glass to her forehead, and still doesn’t feel any less overheated.
19
“What are you wearing?”
“Wow, we’re just jumping right into it then. Okay.”
On the grainy rectangle of Gwen’s phone screen, Flora shakes her head and smiles in that lovingly bemused way she so often does. Across the room, Grady is folded into a chair, one leg bent up beneath him, the other with a guitar perched on it. He picks a frantic bluegrass tune. Clementine is out at a radio interview and a private industry party. Gwen helped her get ready with shaking hands, then took a very cold shower.
“No, really, what on earth are you wearing?”
Gwen smooths her hands down the robe she found in one of the spa-like bathrooms. “Oh, this old thing?” It’s gorgeous raw silk, likely cost upwards of eight hundred dollars and, on her tiny frame, looks like a beautiful, magnificent tent. Gwen waggles her eyebrows at Flora on her phone screen. “Are you into it?”
Flora purses her lips, and Gwen wants to kiss her. The dream flashes into her head again, how Clementine kissed Flora, how she kissed Gwen. After a cold shower and another nap, during which she dreamed about nothing at all, she still can’t shake it.
“It kind of looks like that muumuu my Nona wears. You know the one,” Flora finally says.
Gwen frowns as she picks at the robe. It does kind of look like that garishly bright muumuu Flora’s grandmother wears in the mornings. “So... it’s not doing anything for you?”
Flora laughs. She’s in the kitchen, backlit by her sunny garden, where the last blooms of summer still hang on in the rapidly cooling transition to fall. In this light her hair is highlighted deep golden red, and her eyes are warm amber.
“I miss you,” Gwen says. It’s true, regardless of what her subconscious may have to say about it.
“I was surprised you didn’t call right away.” Flora shifts her phone from one hand to the other; the lag makes her face blur and freeze for a second.
“I kinda crashed. Jet lag, didn’t sleep much on the plane.” That’s mostly true. “Oh, and Clementine’s room is insane. Like luxurious to a truly ridiculous and unnecessary degree.”
“So, like Vegas?”
Oh, her sweet Flora, who likes the simple, gentle pleasures of life: a long hike on a spring day, waterfalls, the perfect tomato growing in her garden, a cozy fire and a good book. She’s down-to-earth and mellow, yet married to Gwen for some crazy reason.
Speaking of a cozy fire. “Flora, look. The fire is remote controlled.” Gwen presses a button on the remote that’s resting on the side table, and the fire magically roars to life from the black stones. She clicks it back off. Flares it up once more. “Wacky, right?”
Grady’s plucky bluegrass song comes to an abrupt stop, and Gwen watches as he stands, finds the remote, and begins to flip through channels on the TV, which is as large as a mattress and nearly as thin as a sliver of onion skin.
“That’s great,” Flora says. “Hey listen, I need some input on the nursery. I know it’s early still, but—” Gwen drags her focus back to Flora as the image of her on the screen bumps and swoops; she’s walking somewhere, upstairs it looks like, still talking.
Clementine bursts into the suite, strides through the living room, and points at Gwen. “Let’s go shopping, yes? Okay. I’m gonna change.” And she walks right on through the dining room and kitchen, past the pool deck and into the master bedroom.
Grady is still flipping through the channels, and Gwen hears rapid, loud bursts of shows and commercials and commentary, flashes of programming so fast he can’t possibly be catching what they are. The fireplace roars in the air-conditioned room. Gwen is distracted. Does Clementine want to shop for fun or shop for an event? Gwen didn’t think she had anything lined up the rest of the day, but maybe she should call Nico. Oh shit, she forgot to call Nico.
Flora is still talking, and Gwen has barely caught a word. When she focuses back on the screen, Flora is in the extra bedroom closest to theirs—a guest room, but not for much longer—holding up a long sheet of paint colors. “Or this one?”
“Um,” Gwen says, to stall for time. “Show me again?”
Flora sighs a little, but holds up a series of paint options for the wall. “Deep Taupe. Maple Sugar. Mystic Beige—”
Gwen mmhmms after the first two and scowls after the third. Mystic Beige?
“—Burlap. Peanut Shell. Oklahoma Wheat—”
Gwen starts to answer, but Grady’s constant channel flipping and the heat of the fire are making her twitchy.
“Must you?” she says to Grady. He shrugs, turns off the TV, and then goes back to plucking at his guitar. “Honey, I don’t—they’re all beige. Don’t babies need stimulating, contrasting colors for brain development or something?”
“Well, the research now suggests that babies need low-stress, soothing environments,” Flora explains. “Earth colors.” She flips through the paint samples. “Why, do you think it’s too soothing?”
What she thinks is that they have plenty of time to decide between light beige or medium beige or slightly darker medium beige, and Mystic Beige which is not actually mystic, not even close, and all of them are tied for dead last on the list of what Gwen would ever paint a room. She doesn’t want to hurt Flora’s feelings, so she just says, “Whatever you want, okay? I’m fine with whatever.”
Flora’s face goes stony for just a flash. Then she looks away, just off the side of the phone screen and says, “Of course you are.”
“Flora...” Gwen’s not even sure what she did, but she certainly did something.
“You’re busy. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Flora.” But the phone beeps, and Flora’s face disappears. Gwen sends Nico a text: where are you? Then she shuts off her phone, tosses it to the side, and finally snaps the fireplace back off. She drops her head back against the couch and puts her feet up on the coffee table, and Grady starts an up-tempo song. Maybe Flora could feel her guilt over that stupid dream through the video call. Flora’s always been so good at reading her, better than she can read herself.
“You ever have a weird sex dream?”
Grady pauses his song and looks up, his curls spiraling down his forehead. “Sure.” He starts to play again, fingers tripping expertly over the strings,
and then the song slows and goes quiet. “Once I dreamed I went to a brothel, but they wouldn’t let me pick just one person, I had to take all of them. Then just as we were all getting into it, they all turned into cat-people. Just stood there in a circle and stared at me while I was naked and ready to go. It was scary as hell. And I still woke up. You know. Happy.”
Gwen flops her head to the side to look at him. “That is definitely weird. And a little concerning.”
Grady rolls his eyes in a manner so disdainful he could only have learned it from Nico. “It’s just a dream. Just your brain spitting out nonsense.” He strums the guitar fast, almost frantically, but seems totally comfortable talking about sex and weird sex dreams.
Gwen smashes her cheek into the armrest and watches him. Nico has to be totally shit-faced before he’ll talk to her about this stuff. “Can I ask you something?”
With his lips curled, Grady nods his head to the music, slow and bluesy now.
She loves his music, always has. There’s this raw, soulful quality to his songs. He doesn’t hold back; he really, really means every word and note. He’s like that with Nico, the way he loves him, the way he looks at him and touches him.
Grady doesn’t look up or stop playing, but he inclines his head. “I’m a little afraid to say yes.” His smile turns teasing.
“Nothing too raunchy,” Gwen says. “Now that you’re just tapping the one ass on the regular—or is it the other way around? I never got clarification on that—what was I... Oh, right, do you ever miss women? Like, their soft skin. Or the way they smell.” Gwen hums and closes her eyes. “Boobs.”
Grady sets his guitar down between his knees and rests his hands on the headstock. “They do smell good.” He smiles; it’s kind of sad. Wistful. “Nico smells good. Tastes good, too.”
“I’ll take your word for it. But. Okay. If you’re with Nico, and you’re never with another woman. Never. You’re fine with that?”
Burning Tracks (Book Two: Spotlight Series) Page 11