Game Changer

by Melissa Cutler

  “The third from the right. The princess cut with the sapphires.”

  It was a great ring, but not one he would’ve picked for Harper because she was such a traditionalist. He would’ve gone with something simple and classic, a gold band and a huge solitary diamond with an oval or marquise cut. She’d picked a platinum band with a princess cut that was flanked with brilliant blue sapphires. “Really? Even though it’s more than a simple gold band and a solitary?”

  “Yeah. The blue stones remind me of my special cocktail napkins, so I’m biased. Blue’s my new favorite color. I know that doesn’t help you pick a ring for your brides, though.”

  She punctuated the word brides with air quotes, as usual. Whatever. After his chat with Dresdic, he agreed with her sarcasm, even though Danielle and Jennifer and Winnie were good people whom he really liked.

  He plucked Harper’s ring from the lineup and handed it back to the jeweler and made a cutting gesture across his throat. He could never give that ring to a woman now. Every time he’d look at it, he’d think of Harper. Maybe this was the wrong move, asking her for help. Because how could he propose with any ring that she liked, even a little? They’d all be associated with her. There was only one way to salvage the disastrous plan. “Okay, new question. Which is your least favorite?”

  “The one on the left, with the oval diamond and the gold band.”

  Huh. Perhaps he didn’t know her as well as he thought he did. “Are you sure? Because if you were a prospective bride on the show, that’s exactly the ring I would’ve gotten for you.” He’d chosen his words carefully, letting the show be a hypothetical buffer of impartiality because he was fairly certain that platonic friends didn’t have opinions on the ring they’d choose if they proposed marriage to the other.

  “And old Harper would’ve loved it. But I’m done with romance, for real. However, if I were going to drop money on a ring for myself, I’d get something flashy and personalized. Something fun.”

  What kind of defeatist attitude was that? He held the phone up and looked her in the eye. “You’re not done with romance for real.”

  “Yes, I am, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Presley. She’s been pressuring me to start dating and she’s serious about it. She’s even got a guy picked out that she wants to set me up on a blind date with. But I think she’s projecting because she’s the one who’s scared to start dating again.”

  What a concept—Harper the flippant one about relationships and him the overly-sensitive romantic. “She only broke off the engagement, what, two months ago? Of course she’s not ready yet. But she has a point about you. I think she’s right. I think you should go on this date.”

  Harper wrinkled her nose. “I couldn’t be less interested. Like I’ve been trying to get through to Presley, I’m just going to focus on being a person for a while. Not a woman, not a sexual being. Just a human being. I’m barely a woman anyway now that all my lady parts are gone, and I’ve got too much living to do to get dragged down by a relationship. Kind of like you. One might say you inspired me.”

  That was the most ridiculous logic he’d ever heard. “Okay, one—not all your lady parts are gone, so stop with the toxic bullshit. And two—if you’re really serious about this whole selfish, carpe diem lifestyle like I have, then you should be going on lots of dates and embracing the idea of casual sex. Like I do.” Or, used to, anyway, before the show killed his sex drive.

  She threw her head back and let out a belly laugh for the ages. Mac shifted uncomfortably and adjusted the camera on his shoulder. Lucinda tapped the glass in an attempt to refocus his attention on the rings. Listening to her laugh like that, like he hadn’t heard since they’d stood in the hallway by the men’s locker room at the Iceplex after she’d faked an orgasm with him, a fire lit inside him to push the conversation with Harper as far as it would go.

  It pissed him off that she was dismissing sex as superfluous instead of vital. It pissed him off that she’d dismissed sex with him so easily that night. And it pissed him off that she was dismissing herself as a woman.

  Then again, it wasn’t as though he had healthy sexual habits, seeing as how he’d signed a contract with a television studio relegating him to six months of either celibacy or sex with his prospective brides.

  He tried to picture Danielle naked, which wasn’t difficult because very little had been left to the imagination with the skin-tight, barely there dresses she wore during episode tapings. Sex with her would probably rock, but it didn’t get his blood pumping like it should have—like it would have a year ago. What the hell had gotten into him? There he was advising Harper to indulge in casual sex, but the idea had never sounded less appealing to him.

  He looked over his shoulder at Mac. “I need a minute of privacy to finish this call. Please.”

  The red recording button turned off. “Sure. I could use a smoke, anyway.”

  He and Lucinda filed out. The jeweler retired to his office behind a glass wall at the far end of the room, one eye on the line of rings on the table in front of Brandon.

  Brandon tucked into a corner of the room, facing the wall, and lowered his voice. “Why is that funny, what I said about sex?”

  She opened her mouth, her eyebrows pinched together as though she was at a loss for words. Shaking her head, she shrugged. “Hey, I didn’t mean to offend you. It makes me happy when you get your player swagger on because it’s so you. Maybe when I come to Miami to go skydiving you can give me a swagger lesson and teach me the best way to pick up strangers for sex.”

  His mouth went dry. This conversation had gone off the rails in a bad way. Note to self: bringing up sex was definitely not part of the friend zone rules. There was no way in hell he’d help her pick up a strange man to have sex with. She might fancy herself his wingman but he was definitely not hers.

  “In fact, I think I’m going to write that on one of my cocktail napkins,” she said. “Casual sex with a stranger.”

  She looked down, a pen in her hand, moving it as though she was actually writing it down right then and there.

  Brandon could feel the ire building inside him, tightening his ribs and threatening to erupt.

  Harper tapped the pen against her lip. “It’d have to be one of those ultra quickies so my flat chest and scars wouldn’t have the chance to send the guy away screaming.”

  “Toxic bullshit. Stop it,” he bit out from behind clenched teeth.

  She pressed on as though he hadn’t spoken. “It’d have to be a screw in a public place, clothes on.”

  Pain and fury punched through him—a fist twisting inside his guts. “You mean, like we did?”

  He regretted the words immediately. Why had he brought that up? Stupid idiot. He wanted this call over with. He refused to look at his phone to see her reaction, so he walked back to the line of rings, his eyes straight ahead.

  “That wasn’t casual,” she said. “That was angry, desperate sex. We were trying to punish each other. We were pushing.” Her tone was wooden. Totally devoid of emotion of any kind. He’d never thought about it like that, but she was right. That’s exactly what they’d been doing. Pushing. Punishing.

  This was probably a conversation that was a long time coming, but he didn’t have to like it. He convinced his legs to start moving again. At the counter, he grabbed the first five rings he saw, all gold bands dripping with diamonds. He waved to the jeweler and mouthed, “Done.”

  Harper sighed. “I’m going to get off the phone. I don’t know what’s gotten into you this week, but I hope you know you can talk to me about anything.”

  Not about this.

  “Let’s forget this conversation and start fresh the next time we talk, okay?” she said.

  He shook his head, so irritated at himself for pushing her and picking at her until the conversation had gone over a cliff that they might not be able to
recover from. What had gotten into him? Grimacing, he pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting to get a grip on the lightning storm of emotions raging out of control inside him.

  The show was getting to him. That had to be it. The show was turning him cynical and he was taking it out on the most important person in his life. It was time to knock that shit off immediately.

  He caught sight of Lucinda standing in the doorway, her ear cocked as though she’d been hanging on every word. “Yeah, let’s do that. I’ll call you later. There’s no privacy here anyway.”

  ***

  Harper pressed the sleep button on her tablet and stared at the blank screen.

  What the hell just happened?

  It didn’t make sense how angry he was about her taking his suggestion and running with it. They were friends. They’d tried sex and it’d sucked. Big deal. She hadn’t even been serious about the casual sex thing, anyway. The idea of sex had no appeal, and it wasn’t merely a hormonal thing. Would she ever feel like a sexual being again? Maybe, but she just couldn’t fathom making herself vulnerable to a man’s judgment about her body.

  For the rest of the afternoon, she fought to stay focused on her work at the bar, but her thoughts wouldn’t stop drifting to the argument with Brandon. It was the first time they’d argued since becoming friends, short of the brief snipping they’d done over text messages when he got the invitation to her birthday, and it left her feeling anchorless and out-of-sorts. Even Bailey mentioned it, as well as a couple regular customers who’d noticed her staring off into space.

  Being a Wednesday, the cancer support group was meeting in the upstairs banquet room. Harper drifted up there, listened in for a while, but she couldn’t stop her mind from wandering. Not only to Brandon, but to herself and what she wanted. Was she an asexual being now, as she’d espoused? Or was that the easy answer—the fearful answer.

  There was only one viable way to find out.

  She slipped away from the meeting and into her apartment, to her room. The low, afternoon sun cast her bedroom in a buttery fog of light and shadow. She set her phone on the vanity, then braced her hands against the wood and looked at herself in the mirror, at her eyes, the creased lines of skin at the corners of her eyes and mouth, the sunspots on her cheeks.

  Her hair tumbled over her shoulders in a cascade of bottled blonde highlights. She looked good and she felt good—better than good. She felt real, secure in her bones in a way that she never had in youth, when she’d had those ticking time bomb breasts and reproductive tissue. She felt like a woman; she really did. So she didn’t have breasts anymore. Who the fuck cared?

  “You still care,” she said into the mirror.

  She hated that she couldn’t give up caring yet. She would. She’d be fierce in her fight to crush her vanity. She’d figure out how to crush her fear of sex, too. That was the opposite of how she wanted to live her life. Contrary to what she’d told Brandon, she wasn’t yet ready for sex with a man, even casual sex while clothed, but what she was ready to start doing was loving her body again in a real way.

  With her eyes still on her reflection, she stepped back until her legs hit the bed. Then she fell back onto the duvet. She pushed with her feet until she’d scooted her body fully on the bed, then she took a deep breath and smoothed her hand over her belly and into her pants.

  She curved her palm over her mound, letting her fingers tangle in her hair.

  She pushed a finger between her folds and ran it along the side of her clit. Electricity jolted through her body. She groaned out loud, her toes curling. Guess she had some feeling left down there after all. So much for being a non-sexual being.

  She swirled her finger over her clit, building the pressure inside her, losing herself to the pleasure of it until she needed even more.

  Breathless and flushed, she rolled to her side and leapt from the bed. From the box below her bed, she pulled out a dildo, a realistic, rubber one with a suction at the base. Working on autopilot so she wouldn’t have the mental space to talk herself out it, she did what she’d always done with the toy. She slammed the suction end down on her vanity bench, creating an obscene sight. A giant silicon cock rising from the wood.

  She liberally lubed it up, then tore off her pants and lubed herself up, taking the time to rub her clit and revive the sparks she’d felt while lying on the bed.

  When she set the lube on the vanity, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror. She was a different woman from only moments earlier. She was visibly aroused, her cheeks pink, her eyes dilated. Straddling the bench, she positioned the tip of the toy at her pussy entrance and locked eyes with herself in the mirror.

  This was what it looked like to be fierce about her own happiness. This was what it meant to take control of her pleasure. She sunk onto the shaft, her lips parting as it stretched and filled her. She couldn’t keep eye contact with herself; the sensations were all too much. She threw her head back as her thighs touched the bench and she seated herself to the hilt.

  Groaning, tears flooded her eyes. It was so good, yet so hollow a feeling. Full, yet so empty. Not even close to what her body really craved.

  She lifted slowly, then sank down again, harder. And then again and again, simulating a fast, hard fuck. Simulating what she really needed. Another body in the room with her, another person desiring her, two souls connecting. She needed to be taken by a man. She needed to be made love to.

  At least she’d answered one question today. Brandon had been right—she was still very much a woman in all the ways that mattered.

  The next time she sunk down, she stayed there. Her hand darted between her spread legs. Her fingers found her clit. She rubbed a tiny circle over her pleasure center and closed her eyes, digging for relief. She rolled her hips, rubbing against the cock as her fingertips worked at a feverish pace.

  Her body wasn’t making this easy. She concentrated hard, her eyes squeezed shut, her body tense, her breathing shallow. She needed to make this happen for herself. A first step toward sexual rebirth. She visualized men she’d known, great lays of her past. She imagined porn scenes that had gotten her blood pumping once upon a time. She pictured Brandon’s cock. She pictured him kissing her on the ice during their one-on-one game. Him, kissing her in front of Locks after beating up those bikers. Him, kissing her while she lay in bed the night before he’d left town after her surgery when he thought she was sleeping.

  Then she vanquished every one of those thoughts, because they didn’t matter. They were toxic bullshit, part of the noise keeping her from moving on. So she pictured nothing, and though her wrist was tiring and the lube was drying, she kept at it, for no reason other than that she deserved this.

  She felt the first stirrings of her release and grasped it tight in her mind’s eye. She rocked her hips again with small thrusting moves as her fingers rubbed. Clenching her teeth, not breathing, she commanded her muscles to let her do this for herself. Then she shattered, crying out with a feral growl. She threw her head back and let it all go. Her body pulsed, sending her on a high that was cruelly fleeting.

  When she landed and started breathing normally again, she realized she was crying. The hollowness returned, overwhelming in its loneliness. That orgasm had been too hard to achieve and it had been over too fast—and it was nothing like what she actually needed. She felt gross and sad and unlovable, just a woman sitting on a fake cock in her room while the world passed by outside her brick fortress.

  Sniffing, she wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands.

  Toxic bullshit.

  She rose off the toy and stood, then pulled it off the bench. She looked at herself in the mirror again, this time with her battle weapon in her hand in the fight to rediscover who she was and what she needed out of life.

  She had two weeks until her fortieth birthday, and so much to look forward to. The fishing trip with her friends, the birthday party s
he was throwing herself at Locks. Her passport was set to arrive any day in the mail, so it was time to book a flight abroad. She could start with Paris. And the whole time, she’d masturbate relentlessly until the orgasms came easily and lasted longer. A burst of laughter bubbled out of her at the ridiculous thought, even as her eyes welled with moisture. What kind of bliss list goal was masturbating?

  She cried a little more at that thought, feeling at once both lost and liberated. She might not know who she was yet or where she was headed, but at least she was searching for the answer.

  She was in the bathroom, washing the toy, when her tablet chimed with an incoming video chat request. Her stomach dropped. Brandon was the only person who ever requested video chats. She wasn’t in any kind of mental place to argue with him again, but she was afraid if she put any more distance between them, she’d only be causing more damage to their already faltering friendship.

  She scrambled to get her pants on, then pressed her palm to her chest, took a deep breath, and accepted the call. “Hi.” The smile she’d forced almost turned real at the sight of him smiling right back at her. Almost.

  “Hello again,” he said. From the looks of it, he was in his living room, at the sofa, with his laptop most likely on a coffee table. He was dressed in a loose-fitting red tank top and nylon pants, and his hair was damp, as though he was fresh from a shower.

  She smoothed her hands over her pants, at a loss of what to say. Luckily, he saved her from it.

  “I know I agreed that we should forget the conversation earlier, but I had to call you to say that I’m sorry I upset you. That wasn’t my intention. I guess picking out those rings made the whole engagement thing a little too real. You know, for a commitment-phobe like me.”

  He accessorized the self-deprecating remark with a disarming, lopsided grin. The kind he used to charm the ladies. Been a while since she’d seen that one. Weird that it left her feeling nostalgic about the way their relationship used to be, about being pined for. What a frivolous thought, one she was totally blaming on her unsatisfying attempt at self-pleasure.