Madly

by Ruthie Knox

  “You should, though,” she added.

  Winston released his grip and let his hand drop to the bed.

  He thought of all that the day had brought to them, the weight of her burdens. What she was asking of herself, the kind of vulnerability she thought she should be able to access, on top of all the ways she’d already had to be vulnerable today. “Come here.”

  She found him in the dark, pressing her thigh into his, her arm over his chest. “Sorry,” she said. “It was weirder than I expected.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”

  “Did you…?”

  “I’ll be fine in a moment.”

  Her hand skimmed over his hard cock. “Oh,” she said. And then, again, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. We tried something. There’s nothing wrong with trying things that don’t work, on occasion. How are we to figure out what we do want, and what does work, if we don’t try?”

  “I guess.”

  She sounded glum, and a little annoyed.

  Winston lay for a moment, thinking about how to be what she needed right now.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He went to the kitchen, where he made two bags of microwave popcorn and two tall glasses of water with ice. When he returned to his place in the bed, he stowed the popcorn with linen napkins on the bedside table, handed her the water, undressed so he could slip comfortably between the sheets, and turned the television on.

  After a moment he found an independent comedy in his queue that promised entertainment without much engagement.

  Allie snuggled against him, flushed with heat, wiggling every so often, restless.

  He rubbed his hand up and down her back, kissed the top of her head, and gave her space to find her way back to herself.

  —

  An hour, two glasses of water, and a bag and a half of popcorn later, Allie reclined against the pillows.

  “I like this movie.”

  “I thought it was meant to be funny.”

  “You don’t think it’s funny?”

  He gave her the arched-eyebrow look and returned his attention to the screen.

  They watched a dinner party scene where the heroine and her best friend got after a male friend for a sexist comment, and then the best friend told a story about her abortion.

  Maybe it wasn’t funny. But it was interesting, full of New York people who knew what they wanted and how to get it, even as they were human and scared and confused.

  “I like this movie a lot,” Allie said again.

  “I like you,” Winston replied.

  “I like you, too.”

  She scooted over next to him. He’d taken off his pants when he got back from the kitchen and removed his shirt, which meant she’d spent an hour in bed with sexy, nearly naked Winston eating popcorn and getting increasingly, inconveniently horny.

  Inconvenient because horny-time had already come and gone for the evening.

  Someone needed to tell this to her entire pudendal area.

  It was just that she liked him. She really, really liked him—the way he smelled like expensive Englishman toiletries, how he looked at her, the stuff he told her, the sex things they’d done together, and how incredibly nice it was of him to bring her water and popcorn and not bother her when she’d worked herself into a stupid snit over fail-masturbation.

  Also, he kept petting her. And she’d never put her shirt back on. His big man hand stroking up and down her back had felt soothing, and then just kind of pleasant, but after about forty-five minutes of on-and-off stroking his hand had started to stoke the fires, a little, and then a little more as she started thinking about Winston between her legs last night, and especially about Winston kneeling up over her, jerking himself, coming on her body.

  Also, the boy and the girl in this movie were really cute together, and liked each other very much, and their tender romance should not have made her horny but kind of did.

  She didn’t want to be wearing yoga pants under the sheets anymore. The pants material stuck to the sheets and ruched them up under her ass and in her crotch, which drove her crazy and made her want to wiggle against them, amplifying the whole horniness problem.

  “I’m going to take off my pants,” some hind part of her brain announced through her mouth without consulting her front brain.

  “You do that.”

  So she had to.

  Which left her in panties, sandwiched between four-thousand-thread-count sheets and Winston’s hard, hairy thigh, making it impossible to give the movie even the smallest portion of her attention. Because she just wanted to rub herself all over his thigh.

  The hand farthest from Winston twitched on her thigh. She smoothed it up and down her flank as though maybe she could gentle herself like a nervous horse, but it felt too good, every little thigh hair standing to attention and sending a message to her brain suggesting, Hey, how about that mutual masturbation thing? That was kind of interesting, right?

  Kind of interesting. Lying next to Winston, knowing his fingers were wrapped tight around himself, jerking himself like he’d jerked for her, listening to him breathe hard as she slid her fingers through her own slickness.

  She just hadn’t been able to figure out how to stow her day, calm her mind down—it kept interrupting her, before, with thoughts of May and Ben and Mom and Dad and Matt and Elvira on a loop.

  Which didn’t seem to be a problem anymore. All of those thoughts, those people, felt like they would keep until tomorrow.

  Beneath the sheet, Allie’s hand snuck across her thigh and came to rest where she was pulsing and hot.

  And then kept sneaking.

  She pressed her cheek into Winston’s chest, bit her lip against the bolt of pleasure. She was more than ready, swollen and wet, sensitive. She moved her fingers over herself, fascinated, and Winston grunted.

  “Are you—”

  “Shh.”

  She was. Oh, Jesus, she was, and he knew she was, and that made it better and worse, made it possible for her to sort of…wallow her face on his naked chest and slide her fingers into herself to the second knuckle.

  “May I—”

  “Yes.”

  She rocked herself against him, finding the movement and pressure she liked best, finding herself kissing his chest, his nipple, his neck. It was much more exciting than she’d ever imagined, because it was just Winston, secret sexy Winston, the muscles in his neck and chest tightening, his body rocking, too, and all she had to do was look at his right arm jacking up and down to feel a deep, hot pulse rush through her whole body.

  Their bodies got damp sliding against each other. Her wrist ached, and the back of her throat, from the way she was breathing and the wrenching little moans that kept escaping from somewhere inside her.

  She rutted on him, shameless, fucking herself, watching him fuck himself, watching his arm and then throwing back the sheet to see his hand clenched, pressure-white from his grip, every muscle in his forearm taut.

  “Shit,” she said. “Shit.”

  They were all over each other, his free arm holding her tight against his body, her hips crashing into his, her hand wet and her clit hurting, just hurting, from the glorious and perfect sound of Winston abusing himself.

  “Fuck.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Allie.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Allie.”

  And she heard it and felt it when he started to come, felt it everywhere, moving through her, tightening her aching pussy and swelling in her clit, his broken breathing, his straining body, and she came so hard with her eyes closed that her vision went red-black at the edges, on and on until she couldn’t hear him anymore, or move, ever again.

  She was dead.

  Winston started to laugh.

  “Don’t. I’m dead. Don’t make me—”

  But it was impossible not to, the way he shook with it, his hoarse laugh and his big beaming smile, his face that
had so much Winston in it, thoughtful and interesting and dear.

  She flopped over him, her sticky hand clenched in the sheets, his wet palm on her ass, and they laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Chapter 16

  Ben wasn’t cooking.

  Allie didn’t know Ben particularly well. She’d met him when May showed up with him, a surly and dark-haired stranger without provenance whom May seemed to know incredibly well, and to trust, despite having only known him a few days.

  It was the weekend of Allie’s wedding, and she’d been preoccupied with the impending catastrophe of her own decision to walk away from Matt. She hadn’t found much time to interact with Ben, and then he and May were gone again, back to New York, where May had settled in.

  They’d visited Wisconsin a few times since, and Allie had chatted with Ben enough to be sure that he loved her sister, and to figure out that when he was nervous, or happy, or at loose ends—pretty much all the time—he cooked.

  This morning he was sitting across from her on a pink sofa, hands clasped between his knees, training all of his intensity and focus right at her, and Allie would have far, far preferred him to be cooking.

  She cleared her throat. “So I’m just supposed to go in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And…like, she wants to talk to me?”

  Ben raked both hands through his hair, every tendon in his hands straining. “I already said.”

  “I know, I’m just making sure, I’m just…” She fluttered her hands through the air, a gesture that meant nothing, that meant Ben made her twitchy, and she was already twitchy enough, running on caffeine and four hours’ sleep and fumes, and she just wished he’d tell her what to say.

  “Fix it.”

  “Yeah, but if I don’t, you know, it’s kind of—”

  “You’re not leaving this apartment until you fix it. Come on. Stand up.”

  Allie stood. There was no way not to, with Ben looking at her like that.

  “Put your purse down, for fuck’s sake. Take off your shoes. Stop looking like I’m going to eat you.”

  Allie slipped her purse off her shoulder and set it on the floor.

  “Jesus, you can put it on the coffee table.” But he was already moving, crouching and sliding toward her so fast that she flinched, and then claiming her purse from the floor and dumping it on the table. “Talk to your sister. If I have to live with her one more fucking day with this hanging over me, I’m going to stroke out.”

  “She’s so mad at me.” Allie looked at him as she said it, hoping for some softening, empathy.

  “I’m mad at you, and I’m a lot fucking scarier than May. Get in there.”

  “Can I use your bathroom first?”

  He just stared at her, his eyes as flat and mean as a snake’s, and Allie slipped out of her shoes and padded down the bare wood floor of the hallway to the bedroom where her sister was waiting.

  May sat in a chair by the window—a good window, floor-to-ceiling set into brick, probably the only truly nice thing about the apartment aside from the kitchen. An end table beside her was stacked with notepads, a laptop computer, a jar filled with artist pencils, a gummy eraser stuck to the lip of the wooden top.

  May’s hair was piled on top of her head in a sadness bun, her eyes red-rimmed, her face pale and slack.

  “Hey,” Allie said.

  “Hey.”

  Allie’s heart hurt so much, it was difficult to breathe.

  She sat cross-legged on the floor at her sister’s feet. There was only the unmade bed, and Ben and May’s unmade bed wasn’t somewhere she could insert herself into right now, or possibly ever.

  Besides, it felt about right, sitting at May’s feet. She wanted to wrap her arms around the wide legs of her sister’s soft sadness pants and rest her cheek on May’s shin.

  “I’m sorry.”

  May looked out the window. “I know.”

  “I fucked up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I know. I know you can’t, but you have to try not to, because I need you.”

  May’s mouth hardened. “Now you need me.”

  “I never stopped needing you. It’s—That’s the thing you don’t get, that I didn’t tell you because I need you, because I love you and I wanted to protect…us. Like, I found out this thing, this terrible thing, about Mom and Dad, and it changed absolutely everything. Like some bulldozer had come and knocked the house down, and Mom and Dad were already used to living in the rubble, and I had to get used to it, obviously, but you…you could be the one person who still had everything, right? You could be the one who got to have the gift of not knowing.”

  “Jesus, thanks. Thank you for the gift of not knowing. Best gift ever.”

  “I don’t mean it like—”

  “Thanks for letting me live in ignorance for years while everybody else kept me safe and innocent, because that always worked so fucking well for me, having somebody keep me innocent and safe. That’s just exactly, exactly, what I wanted from my little sister.”

  May’s arms were crossed, her knuckles white where she gripped her bare arms. She hadn’t looked at Allie even one time since she came in the room.

  “I wanted to keep the worst thing that had happened to me, ever, from also happening to you.”

  “You wanted to protect your idea of what I needed, which means who you wanted to protect was yourself. You didn’t trust me.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I can see that. But…” Allie stopped, because what May had said was true. She hadn’t trusted her sister. “But you didn’t trust me, either. You’re mad at me because I couldn’t tell you these things, these big and terrible things, but you did it, too.”

  May shook her head. “I don’t think I’m ready to do this. I don’t think—Ben said to, but he doesn’t have a sister, and I can’t. Today. I can’t today.”

  Allie looked down at her hands and made herself keep talking. “It’s not like anyone could ignore how Mom would treat you, sometimes. What she would say about…your body. How she would act like we all needed to eat healthier and start making chicken breasts, or talk about how much weight someone at church had lost on Weight Watchers. Not just that. All the comments about how art classes didn’t lead to a stable career path, especially for women. Badgering you to go out with that asshole, Zach, from youth group who kissed up to her but talked shit about you behind your back. Dan.”

  May’s jaw was set. She didn’t turn, didn’t soften.

  “You never, never talked to me about it, May. Never. I’d follow you to your room when you shut yourself in after one of those fucked up things with Mom, and I’d knock and you wouldn’t answer. When you would come out, you were always all sunshine and daisies, and I’d ask you if you were okay, and you always said yes, but I knew you weren’t. You didn’t trust me. You didn’t need me. You didn’t tell me. So…I didn’t tell you.” Allie’s eyes filled with tears. “This can’t be where we end up.”

  She didn’t have to look at May to know that she was crying. Her toes were curled tight into the rug and her body had gone stiff. This is what May did. She compressed everything that hurt her into some horrible pebble so she could drop it down some well inside of her.

  “Please, let’s get somewhere else.” Allie wiped her face clean with her palm. “Let’s talk about it. It feels better to talk. We’re getting somewhere.”

  May stared out the window. Allie stared at May, willing her to say something, until she began to feel light-headed and not quite in her body.

  She wasn’t the one who told her body to stand up. It just did. It walked to the door, stared at the doorknob, turned it and drifted her down the hall, into the bathroom, where she peed and splashed water on her face.

  When she came out, Ben was in the hall.

  “No,” he said.

  “She won’t.”

  “Then you didn’t do it right. Turn around, march back in there, an
d get it done.”

  Her back hit the wall, sinking down as the strength went out of her legs. She closed her eyes and thought of Winston’s comfy bed, and his body, and the way he looked at her. She wanted to be back there. She didn’t want to cry anymore.

  Ben sighed like she was the least competent of his line cooks. Barely tolerable.

  The floor squeaked as his weight shifted.

  She peeked. He was sitting right across from her, staring. “You need juice or something?”

  “No.”

  “You eat anything today?”

  “No.”

  Then he got up, and she heard him banging around in the kitchen. He came back and set a plate on the floor next to her. Green apple slices spread with peanut butter and drizzled with honey. “Eat it.”

  She picked up a slice of apple, mostly to keep him from hating her more than he already did. She didn’t want to put it in her mouth.

  “You’re eating that,” he said. “If I have to cut it into tiny pieces and feed them to you like an infant.”

  “I don’t know what May sees in you.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not the first person to say that.”

  He had a crevice the depth of a canyon between his eyebrows. Allie looked at that crevice as she ate the apple, wondering how many years you had to spend frowning in order to lose that much face real estate to your own craggy meanness.

  The apple was delicious. She took another slice.

  Some of the tension went out of Ben’s shoulders. He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a delivery coming. I have to be at work in thirty minutes at the absolute latest. So that’s what you’re working with.”

  Allie bit into a third slice of apple. She thought maybe he’d put cashew butter on it, or possibly pistachio butter, if that was even a thing.

  She wondered if the other half apple was in the kitchen. New York apples were apparently a whole different thing from Wisconsin apples, which didn’t make sense considering Wisconsin was the land of the honeycrisp.

  “Listen, what do you want?” Ben asked. “I mean, what do you really want?”

  More apple.

  To run away.

  My sister back.

  “A bunch of my Fredericks aunts and uncles hate each other. They hold two different family reunions every year, and you have to pick which one you’re going to attend because if you go to both, everybody hates you. It’s awful.” Tears were dripping onto her shirt, which was stupid. Crying was stupid.