It’s 7:55 pm. I’m damned nervous because I know that, practically, this is a terrible idea. This is one of those ideas that if you had a buddy, he’d say, “Dude. Hold up. Let’s walk that back…”
But I don’t have a buddy. I have her. I want her. I need her. She’s all I can think about, the air I’m breathing, the world I’m rushing through. She’s it. She’s there. And I’m going to take her out. On a genuine date.
Slowly, I nose the Jeep out onto Elm. Some students pass in the rain, and I’m careful not to nudge anybody by accident. Talk about a scandal, me knocking over some poor international student. God.
With the Jeep halfway into the street and blocking the sidewalk, I hurry to sling myself in the driver’s seat, using the roof rack for leverage.
And then a familiar voice is behind me. “Where are you headed?” says Osgood. “At eight on a Thursday?”
He’s lost the alpaca and is trying out a kind of tweed cap with a bill. He looks a whole hell of a lot like Elmer Fudd.
“IKEA,” I tell him. I’m standing on the running boards, so I’m about a foot taller than he is. I’m tempted to stay like this just to make a point, but I don’t. I step back down onto the wet pavement and face him. “I’ve got to buy a chair. And some meatballs.”
I can tell he finds this suspicious, not only because he’s narrowing his eyes to say that’s suspicious, but also because there are literally a million chairs in my house, and every meal I eat is served in the cafeteria. But what else was I going to say? Bookshelves? Dishes? Curtains?
“That wingback just isn’t cutting it. I need something that I can get comfortable in. You know? Put my feet up? Do some grading? Write some helpful emails?”
It occurs to me then that IKEA is probably not the right choice for comfortable chairs—idiot—but now I’m in the mud, I’ve got to sling it.
“How’s work been?” he asks. He’s wearing this beat-up old rain jacket with the hood cinched tight over his face. He’s almost sausage-like.
“Good. Class is good, I’m settling in.” Settling in? Fuck. I’m on Mercury.
“Staying out of trouble?”
I just smile and zip up my coat. The rain shifts to a dreadful, heavy, slapping, frozen drizzle. “No trouble. So I’ll see you around.”
And then he does the eyes-to-fingers thing again.
I’m tempted to do it right back at him, but I don’t. Instead I say, “Need anything? Ottoman? Drapes?”
He shakes his head and shuffles off into the rain.
Heading down High Street, I’m reassured. He hasn’t picked up on us or he would have said so. I can say that much for Dean Osgood. He may be pursuing scandal like his rare moth, but he can’t keep his feelings to himself for shit.
I park just on this side of Chapel. I’m a few minutes early, but so is she: From behind the squeaky wipers, I see her sitting in the window of Starbucks with her phone. Wearing those damn cute, sad galoshes again. I hammer out a text to her.
Walk down High, towards Crown, cross Crown, and then right. Don’t hurry. I’m in an old Jeep. CA plates. Can’t miss me.
Her face lights up into the most overwhelming smile. She replies with simply:
!!!
The light turns green, and I join traffic. I go down two blocks and take a right, parking in a loading zone in front of one of the infinite pizza places in New Haven. All the while, I’m watching for her in the rearview mirror. She comes into focus from behind, and I see she’s glancing at herself in shop windows. But not boldly. Subtly, gently. Like a girl who knows she’s beautiful, but is a little too damaged to flaunt it.
I don’t know what it is about her. I’ve been with a lot of women but never, not ever, have I chased one like this. I’m chasing her even though I have her. I’m chasing her even though she’s mine. It’s the endless pursuit of this perfect thing. She’s turned me into Plato himself.
Calmly and elegantly, she crosses the street and gets right in the passenger’s seat, without saying anything as she slams the door. She turns to face me sweetly as she buckles up.
“What are we doing?” she asks. Her voice is breathy and happy. “And please tell me that back seat folds down.”
I put the Jeep in drive, and get a little farther away from campus. The world feels unclear, like I’m in a tunnel. We pass under traffic lights, every one of them green. Finally, when we’ve gotten on CT-15, I put my hand on her thigh. My thumb is on the seam of her leggings. I feel her muscles right under my palm. Those muscles I’ve grabbed, those muscles I want to mark. “So, I thought it might be nice to do a few errands…”
She turns to me. “Finish that sentence.”
“…and do something romantic…” “Keep going.”
“…before I show you how much I missed you.”
Her head lands softly on the headrest, and then she knits her hand over mine.
As I drive away from New Haven, her fingers inch up my leg and every mile feels like a hundred. Romance is going to have to wait.
The first chance I get, I pull off the highway and find an empty warehouse parking lot. I put the Jeep in park and grab her.
I’m growling into her mouth. Get me inside that body right fucking now. She reaches down and takes my cock in her hand, rubbing it on the underside, from base to tip through my pants, like we’re teenagers out for the night. We’re not teenagers, but we are this close to having sex at a stoplight in Madison Goddamned Connecticut. Sex with her, it’s like that. Like a rebellion, or like getting ripped off a surfboard by a wave from behind.
A car honks behind us. She is ceaseless, and she draws it right out of me into her, through her mouth and lips, saying Everything, give me everything.
“Fuck!” she says, in a whisper. “Why are you so good? Why, why, why?”
Popping open the door, I see her face under the dome light, reddened from my scruff, the edge of her lips a little less clear. She looks vulnerable, and I love it. “Hold that thought.”
In the pouring rain, I open the back door and fold down the seat. With a giggle, she sneaks through between the front row and lies down.
Slamming the door and climbing on top of her happen in one movement almost. For a moment, we are a swishing mess of jackets and squeaking boots. She unzips mine, I unzip hers. Our boots come off in a pile between the seats. Now she’s all softness under me. Her sweater has trapped her perfume, and I press my nose down past the turtleneck, against her throat, kissing her hard, and halfway hoping I’ll leave a mark so she has to wear this sweater for the rest of the week.
This time, with the hard seatbacks below us, there is no mattress to sink into. I can explore her just exactly as she is. The smooth angle of the small of her back, the gap between her neck and the seatback are all new spaces that I need to touch. Soft and delicate. I pull her sweater slowly off her body, peeling it away so I can see what’s underneath. What’s underneath, of course, is another shirt because it’s freezing, so I peel that off too. As I suck on those nipples, teasing them and biting them, she fumbles for my belt with one hand, the other around the back of my head. I slide one hand down past her leggings.
“No underwear,” I say, letting her nipple go. It keeps the shape of my bite, slightly upturned and compressed.
“I ran out. You soak them through.”
“What, all your underwear?” My stubble just grazes her hipbone.
“I mean, all the sexy ones. I only want to wear sexy when I think of you.”
Her leggings have absorbed that smell so much more strongly than just her panties
had. With one hand parting her pussy lips, I massage that clit on the outside of the leggings with the other. I know I’m making her insane. I know I’m pissing her off. I know what she wants me to do, but I’m not going to do it, not yet.
“Take off that bra,” I say.
She sits up, shifting the back of her bra to the front. She slings it from her finger towards the front seat, and it catches on the headrest. “Take off that shirt,” s
he says back.
I’m powerless with her. Every other woman I’ve ever been with, I set the terms. I take off the bras. I kiss first. I say what’s what, and they listen. Until I collided with Naomi Costa, at least I knew who I was in the bedroom. But not anymore. She’s brought out the switch I didn’t know I had. I want to pull and push and fight for control forever. I pull down her leggings, and she falls back onto the carpeted surface with a moan. I want to own her, I want to rule her.
But I also want her to do the very same fucking things to me.
I dip my tongue down into that outrageous wetness. I stay there for three long plunges.
With two fingers, nearly three, I reach inside her. Her body comes right up off the carpet. “Oh, God. Whoa.”
“Too much?” I want to hurt her, but just enough.
“No,” she says through a gasp. “Not… Shit.” That last word, it’s long and tremulous, guttural. Coarse. Shiiiiiiiit.
I pull against the weight of her pelvis, drawing her up a few inches more. Her legs help me out. Slipping that third finger all the way in, I leverage her body against her G-spot.
The sound that comes from her mouth, it’s an inhalation under her tongue flicking against her own teeth. “Oh my God, what is…”
Still I hang on to her, putting my tongue to her clit now. I feel her start to seize my fingers from inside. Her thighs begin to come together and give her away, she’s that close. I don’t give her any mercy. I keep her that way, hooked on my hand, and bring that orgasm right out of her. As she comes, she grips my bicep with her tiny hand, her fingers spread out and pale against my shoulder. Her strength is tremendous, the rolling waves tearing through her. When she finally releases her hand, I know I’m going to have a bruise of her fingers on my arm.
When her body begins to go slack, I let her go. She’s got her hands to her face now, saying, “Shit…shit!” on a loop.
Wherever she is, that’s exactly where I want her. Yanking her leggings down even more, I pull my dick out of my pants, and she takes it quickly in her hands. She reaches inside her own pussy to moisten her palms, and rubs herself all over me.
With her other hand, she massages my balls, just gently, cupping them in her palm. “Please, Ben. Please get inside me. Please.”
As if I had any other thought in my head.
I push into her, and with my other hand support her back. Her body rises up as she gets used to how I feel inside again, her hips rise slightly, and I feel a second wave of wetness draw me further into her.
In the confined box of the back of the Jeep, I have leverage that I’d never had with her before. I can feel her pussy in a way I never did in bed. I can feel her pelvis, her cervix like an impassable dam that I’d like to blow up with a hundred raging orgasms. She’s got my head spinning so that some deep, reptile part of my brain starts talking. Put that seed in her, Beck. Get it inside her. That’s where it belongs.
“You feel so fucking incredible,” I tell her, pulling her to me with my fingers gripping both sides of her waist. She grabs one of my arms, hanging on tight.
“I’m close.”
On top of everything else, she’s fucking insatiable. Two orgasms, back to back. That’s what I’m talking about.
Pinning her other arm with my hand above her head, I drive in harder and whisper, “Do it. Let me feel you again.”
Out here, in the middle of nowhere, she screams out like she hasn’t been able to before. Her cries tear through the air, half sadness and half bliss, tumbling from yes to no, and then my name, “No, no, no, Ben, Ben, Ben,” and then she screams out, “I love you, I love you, I love you, fuuuuuuck,” and she pulls me in so deep, I don’t have a chance of hanging on.
Does she realize what she just said? I don’t know. But what I do know is we are ten thousand couples, fucking in back seats on dark rainy nights. But nobody is falling as hard as I am right now.
Her eyes wide and honest, she looks right at me. “Tell me this is real.”
“Real as fuck.”
“How real?”
I come hard and strong inside her in three massive bursts, her name getting diced up into three furious syllables, “Na-oh-mi, fuck.”
Again, I collapse on top of her. Whimper on the in, moan on the out. Over and over. I could listen to that until the day I die.
A tap at the side window startles us both, along with a light shining in. I throw my jacket over her and then lean over to wipe the fog from the window with my forearm. Outside stands a cop. I roll down the window an inch.
“Evening, Officer,” I say. I feel her toes curl against my thighs.
Even through the high beam in my eyes, I can see he’s got a smile on his face. “Time to keep moving, folks.”
“This isn’t romantic,” she says, as I pull up in front of shoe store in Madison. It’s the heart of suburbia out here. All strip malls and family minivans, not a Yale professor in sight.
She’s peering through the now rain-blurred windshield.
“Come on,” I say. “I need boots. I can’t shop online for boots.”
“Is this what you call romantic? Shoe shopping? Ben!’
It’s all I can do not to burst out laughing. “Miss Costa. Don’t be a brat.”
She purses her lips. There’s that smile. “I’m hungry.”
“My feet are wet. I don’t want wet feet. So,” I shrug. Keeping it nonchalant.
She has exactly zero idea why I’m doing this. Good. If she did, she’d never agree. Ever.
So then I go around to the other side of the Jeep and open the door for her, keeping her dry with my umbrella, and shaking it off outside the door before we go inside.
The shoe store feels like a blown-out photograph, so bright and shiny with those fluorescent bulbs against the darkness outside. As we enter, we separate. She heads down one aisle of men’s shoes. I head parallel down another. All the time I’m watching her. Her fingers trail over the shelves, but she’s locked on me.
With her help, we settle fast on a pair of good, solid rain boots. They’re made by Bogs, and they have a sweet handle built right in. I ask the lady for a 13, and she gives me an efficient nod before heading into the stock room.
“You’ve got big feet,” Naomi says.
“Is it true what they say?”
“Yep. Totally true. In your case.”
A half-laugh jumps out of my mouth. “Now, about those,” I say, nodding down at Naomi’s yellow galoshes.
She wiggles her feet, and the toes come up off the floor. “These? They’re great.”
Actually, the rubber is cracked, and I’m almost positive I can see her socks. “Sit down,” I tell her. “Right there.” I point to one of those weird benches with the diagonal mirrors at the end of a row of dress shoes. Of course, she doesn’t sit down. I didn’t expect her to. She’s a lot feistier than that.
All the girls on campus wear Hunter boots. I’ve seen them in every shade. Leopard, rainbows, shiny silver. I don’t care at all about what they look like. What I want is for them to be watertight, to keep those pretty feet warm and dry.
“What size?” I ask, pressing gently on her shoulder, the tips of my fingers on the fine edge of her collarbone.
“I don’t need new boots,” she says. She’s playing with the sleeves of her jacket.
Again, I’m on my knees in front of her. I like it down here. A lot. A lot more than I’d ever admit out loud. I slip off her boot but don’t see a size inside. What I do see is what I suspected: a wet blotch on her sock.
“Size,” I say again.
“My booths are are totally fine. I mean, you should see my dad’s …”
I scratch my face with the tip of my thumb and wait for her.
“Tell me.”
Embarrassed, she stares off at some half-priced sandals. “Nope.”
Time to up the ante. “Tell me, or I take you home right now.”
Now she looks like she’s all fire and hot spun sugar inside. Sweet but a little too hot. Boiling o
ver. “Oh, yeah? Dad?”
“I’m serious. I’ll take you right back home. No dinner. No nothing.”
Her face reddens. Now I’m biting my fucking cheek to keep from laughing, but I’m not kidding either. I don’t know how a person can bring out the fight and laughter in me, but she does it. Without fail.
“Miss Costa. Shoe size. Right now.” I stand up, towering over her.
The laughter spills right out of her, somewhere between happy and slightly ashamed. She shoves me a little but leaves her hand on my stomach as she looks up at me. “Eight, okay? Eight.”
So when the shop lady comes out with my boots, I say, “And a pair of Hunter boots for her. Size eight, and I have no idea what that is in European.”
The lady looks tickled and crosses her arms over her chest. “What color, honey?” she asks.
Naomi is staring straight at me, defiant, furious, but also with that undercurrent of tickled joy that I find so fucking addictive.
But then she softens in a way I really haven’t seen her. Not like this. Gratitude, a glimmer of being overwhelmed. That sheen comes back up into her eyes.
“Pick your color, beautiful,” I say. The shoe lady, behind Naomi, with her arms crossed and her apron too tight, smiles at the two of us. Her eyes shift back and forth, back and forth.
“Red,” Naomi says finally. “I’d like them in red.”
Instead of the fancy dinner I’d planned to take her to, we stop for burgers, fries, and shakes. Between the parking lot and the shoe store, we’ve missed our reservation.
She sticks a fry in her mouth. “I like this better.”
God. See. Exactly what I was thinking. “I never know what fork to use.”
She sucks on her shake, and I see the lovely hollows of her cheeks. It’s a long minute that passes with her sucking vanilla through the straw and watching me. Finally, she says, “I didn’t either. I can help you out with that.”
As I unwrap my burger, she hands me a napkin before I even know I need it.
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