Sleepover

by Serena Bell

  So when Elle’s goofy chatter thing made me like her just a little bit that night at Maeve’s, I wanted to get back on solid ground. I was comfortable with sex. I’d had lots of it. At least once a week since a month or two after Lucy died—pickups, hookups, always an up-front “one-time-only” warning, as impersonal as jerking off.

  No smiling. No enjoying myself. No liking anyone or finding her cute. (Hot, yes. Sexy, yes. Filthy, naughty, delicious—all okay.) Cute, no way. Because among other things, I knew I had nothing to give in a relationship. And I didn’t want one.

  Then Elle said the dorky thing about it being her first hookup and she blushed.

  Cute.

  I finished my whiskey, and instead of getting up like I knew I should, I followed an impulse that felt more dangerous than pretty much any of the impersonal sex I’d had since Luce died.

  I touched her. Ran my thumb over her lower lip.

  It was like touching a live wire. Not just because I felt the touch flick back over my own nerves, but because she reacted, quicksilver and perfect. Her lips parted on a silent gasp, and her pupils flared.

  I wanted to make her do it again. I wanted to make her feel it again, whatever she’d just felt.

  I wanted to know exactly what it was, too. I wanted her to tell me. I guess that’s part of why I asked her that crazy question. You need to fuck? Prove you can still do it? That your ex didn’t take it away from you?

  I just knew, somehow. I knew that was how she felt. Like he’d taken away something that belonged to her. And I also knew I could give it back to her.

  When I said the word fuck, her pupils flared again. She liked it; she was dirty to the core. But also scared and vulnerable and—

  I’m hard.

  Now, I mean. Standing in my new kitchen, a coffee mug in one hand and a bunch of newspaper in the other hand, in an Elle trance. My dick is pumped full of blood, just like it was that night when I took her hand and led her outside and lifted her up so I could brace her against the wall. I have no idea how I had the wherewithal to slow things down enough to bring her off before I plowed into her, but somehow I managed it. Rucked her skirt up, ripped her panties trying to get them out of my way, slid one finger into her wet heat, slicked the swollen nub of her clit until she came clenching around my touch. So fucking hot I almost spilled in my briefs, which would have been an embarrassing (and unprecedented) end to a potential hookup.

  My hand is in my jeans. In my briefs. Straightening myself out.

  I slowly become aware that I am in a lit room with no curtains and it is growing dark outside. I have enough living brain cells not concentrated in my dick to get myself around the corner into the area behind the stairs so I’m not visible from the street or either of my neighbors’ houses. But that’s as far as I get before I unzip my jeans, free my erection from my briefs, and wrap my fist tight around myself.

  That night, I got the condom on so fast that she was still coming when I filled her. Clenching around me, fluttering, whimpering, clutching my arms, my hair, anything she could get her hands on. She gasped at every thrust, pressing herself down on me like she couldn’t get enough.

  It was the best kind of sex, the kind you want to go on for hours that has no prayer of lasting more than seconds.

  I came so fast, so hard, that I figured I owed her a big apology, except when I started to regain some semblance of conscious thought I realized she was coming again, clamping down around me, biting the crap out of my arm to keep from making noise.

  I yell something incoherent and christen my new house with an epic fountain of cum, coating my hands and dousing my shirt.

  Laundry. Damn. Gotta install the washer and dryer.

  Rookie.

  Chapter 7

  Elle

  I’m making pancakes for the boys when the doorbell rings.

  “Madden! Can you get that?”

  There’s no answer. Madden and Jonah are downstairs playing in a fort they built, and I’m guessing with the basement door closed and the blankets and pillows muffling their ears, they can’t hear me. Or their hearing has grown selective because they’re immersed in their own imaginative world…

  I head for the door myself.

  It’s Sawyer.

  I’m startled, anew, by just how big he is, and how attractive. He’s wearing a pair of camel-colored Carhartts and a black T-shirt that says Emily’s, with a cartoon picture of a fifties club-car diner. The T-shirt fits gorgeously over his broad shoulders and chest and I remember, with a rush of desire, how those muscles flexed under my hands. His hair is damp, as though he’s fresh from the shower, and I can’t help myself: I breathe deeply—but surreptitiously—and catch a whiff of Lever. Damn. I’m a sucker for that soap.

  “Sorry.” As usual, his delivery is gruff. It roughs up my nerve endings in a way I’d like to hate but can’t. “I texted but you didn’t answer, so I came over. I was hoping to take Jonah for a hike. I wanted to grab him in an hour or so.”

  “Sure, no problem. The boys are up. I was about to feed them some pancakes. I’m making them now.”

  “I figured.” He gestures with a tilt of his head at my hand, which—I now realize—is clutching a spatula. “At least, that was my best guess.” He raises an eyebrow.

  Damn him. That eyebrow quirk ripples through all the earthquake-prone bits of me.

  He, on the other hand, is unfazed. He shifts away from the door, indicating the conversation is over. “If you could just let Jonah know. Madden’s welcome, too.”

  “Welcome where?” Madden demands, materializing with Jonah in tow.

  “On a hike with Mr. Paulson and Jonah.”

  “A long hike?”

  I look to Sawyer.

  “Couple miles. Not super long. Really great view at the end.”

  “Can I, Mom?”

  Obviously, according to the workings of Murphy’s Law, these two boys are going to be inseparable. But I’ll just have to live with that, and find ways not to have to be face-to-face with Sawyer. I can be a big girl about it. “Um, Dad is taking you to his place for dinner tonight, so—would he be back by dinnertime? Before five?” I address these questions to Sawyer. Five is when Trevor is scheduled to pick Madden up.

  “We should be back before that.”

  “Sure, you can go,” I tell Madden, who bounces on his toes in jubilation.

  “You should hike with us, too,” Jonah says to me.

  “Um, thanks.” I don’t meet Sawyer’s eyes. He makes no move to reinforce Jonah’s invitation, so I figure he’s as horrified by the thought as I am. “That’s, um, super nice. But I’ve got a lot of things to do. Writing. I have a bunch of articles due. I have a freelance writing business—” I stop just in time, before I can fully gear up into babble territory.

  “Mr. Paulson, you should come in and have some pancakes,” Madden says. “My mom makes the best pancakes.”

  They really are such delightful, polite, kind boys, and yet I want to shake them right now. I mutter, “Yes, you should have some pancakes with us.” It’s the most ungracious invitation ever issued, and I imagine my mother, who is a stickler for manners, shaking her finger at me.

  “Already ate,” Sawyer says. “Thanks. So yeah. Send the boys my way.”

  And on that note, without an actual goodbye, he turns and heads back to his house.

  I sigh and close the door, leaning against it like that might shut out some portion of either my unruly attraction or my embarrassment. Or just keep him from ever showing up on my doorstep again.

  Except I liked having him on my doorstep. The problem is maybe that I liked it a little too much.

  This is a one-time thing. I don’t do repeats, no matter what.

  Which is totally fine, right? I wouldn’t want a repeat.

  Right?

  “Mom, what’s that sme
ll?” Madden asks, snapping me back to the present, which features the distinctive odor of burning pancake.

  “Shit!” I cry, running back into the kitchen in time to prevent a fire, but not to save the charred pancakes on the griddle.

  As I’m scraping those pancakes into the trash and starting a new set, I realize that not only was I clutching a spatula throughout the entire conversation with Sawyer, I was also wearing my rubber-duck shorty pajamas and a gag apron that Trevor gave me for Christmas two years ago that says, Ask me about my explosive diarrhea.

  I guess humiliation is going to be the name of this particular game.

  Chapter 8

  Sawyer

  “How was the sleepover?” I ask the boys over my shoulder as we drive out to my favorite kid-friendly trail, the overlook from Mount Mocadney.

  “Fun!” Jonah says.

  I catch a glimpse of my son’s face in the rearview mirror. In place of his usual expression of pre-teenage boredom, he’s grinning. I can’t help smiling in response, although I know he can’t see me.

  “What’d you guys do?”

  “Played Battlefront. Played Jukem. Watched Cars 3. Had a pillow fight.”

  “Ms. Dunning must have loved that.”

  In the rearview mirror, the boys exchange quick, knowing glances.

  “My mom was a little mad. But not really mad,” Madden informs me. “She laughed after.”

  I try to picture what Elle must look like in a parental lather, but my imagination fails me. My brain serves up another image instead. The night I met her, the way she looked right after I kissed her. Her mouth was kiss-slick, her lips parted, her eyes hazy with desire.

  Okay, then.

  I wrench my mind back to the present. Pillow fight. “Nothing got broken, did it?”

  “Nah,” Jonah says.

  “So, Madden, your mom’s a writer?” I tell myself I’m just making conversation with Jonah’s new friend, that I’m not indulging my curiosity about the woman next door.

  “Yup. She writes for magazines and stuff.”

  “Pretty cool. She written any books?”

  “Not yet, but she says she wants to someday.”

  “Do you like to write?”

  “Not really.” I glimpse the tail end of Madden’s shrug.

  “So what do you and your mom do for fun?”

  Madden appears to consider that at length. “We used to have more fun before my dad left,” he says.

  Ouch. Of all people, I should have known better than to poke that wound. I’m sure similar words could have come out of Jonah’s mouth.

  “I bet you still do fun stuff sometimes,” I prompt, trying to undo the damage I’ve done by opening this topic.

  Madden thinks, then brightens. “We go to movies and play games. And Mom says we’re going to kayak this summer and hike and stuff. She says this summer will be funner than last summer because things were kind of messed up last summer. ’Cause you know my dad went to go be with Helen, who was his high school girlfriend, and it really, really, really hurt my mom’s feelings.”

  I feel a sharp pinch of sympathy for Elle. It’s mingled with respect, too, because it sounds like she was pretty truthful with Madden, without flat-out making Trevor into the bad guy. That’s not so easy to do.

  “My feelings were hurt, too,” Madden says, matter-of-factly.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Really, really hurt feelings would definitely make sense in that situation. But I bet you and your mom take good care of each other.”

  “We do!”

  “And she seems like a pretty fun mom.”

  I flash on another image of Elle, at odds with the earlier one: her wearing rubber-duck pajamas and a diarrhea-joke apron, her hair up in a messy bun, clutching a spatula. I have to fight back a smile.

  “She is,” Madden says emphatically.

  Shortly after that, the boys conk out in the backseat. They probably didn’t sleep much, what with video games, movies, board games, and pillow fights.

  The car takes on that soothing feeling I used to love when Lucy and Jonah both fell asleep on a drive, and I realize, with a start, that this will be the first time Jonah and I have hiked Mount Mocadney without Lucy. Lucy and I used to do this hike all the time with Jonah when he was little, making a day of it and packing lunches, snacks, and water bottles.

  I can’t believe it’s been two years since I’ve been up here. I guess I took a break from being fun after Lucy’s death, too.

  When we used to do this trip as a family, Lucy and I fought, not angrily but in the way people do who love each other but are together all the time. I never understood why the whole trip had to be such a production, why she got so fussy about whether we were dressed right for the weather and had enough food to survive an apocalypse. If I suggested that it was more important to catch the best part of the day than to be equipped for disaster, she got mad at me for being so cavalier. But not really mad. Just, you know, pissy. The sandpapery rub of two people’s neuroses against each other.

  I miss it. The day-to-day reality, even the fighting.

  I wonder if Jonah will remember that we used to do this with his mom. I wonder if he’ll feel like it was more fun before.

  I’m suddenly so glad I brought Madden along for distraction. It’ll be different-fun with him.

  I find a parking space, despite all the people who’ve had the same idea we did. The boys wake as the car stops and bound out, going from fast asleep to wide awake so fast it makes me crave coffee. They skip toward the wooden stand that holds the area map and study it, but I can tell as I get close that they don’t really understand it. So I boost them up one at a time and let them get a closer look, show them the “You Are Here” sticker and where we’re headed. Then I point them at the trailhead and let them run.

  They dash ahead of me on the trail, Jonah with his jet-black mop and Madden, who’s a dandelion, with fluffy butter-blond hair and skinny limbs. The fact that they’re moving so fast is great, because it means that I have to walk at a pretty good clip to keep up with them. But it also means that they’re lost in their own world, some mix of woods exploration and video game culture. I hurry after them, admiring the late spring woods, the ferns unfurling, the ground russet with needles. My mind drifts, from the sights around me to my plans for the house (first, get rid of the heinous carpet in the living room), and I let it wander wherever it wants to go.

  Oddly enough, as I catch up to the boys near the overlook, I realize that I haven’t mostly been thinking about Lucy.

  Which is weird, because I must have walked this trail twenty or more times with her, wearing the backpack she’d crammed with supplies. While we walked, we chatted. Sometimes it was good, her sharing a funny story or something about her shop, or me talking about a piece of furniture I was working on. Sometimes it was bad, the two of us spatting over whether we had enough money to fix a broken oven or who was going to call around to find out who could do the repairs.

  Today, though, those memories aren’t the thoughts that mostly fill my head.

  Instead, it’s the sight of Elle dressed as she was earlier today, in those ridiculous shorty pajamas and that awful apron, spatula in hand.

  I chuckle, thinking of it.

  But barely suppressed laughter wasn’t my only reaction.

  Standing there on her front stoop, part of me wanted to complete my mission as soon as possible and escape to the safety of my house.

  Another part of me wanted something else. The part of me that remembered.

  How her hair felt like handfuls of silk.

  How her nipples rose under my touch, hard and needy.

  How soft the skin of her inner thighs felt, rich and delicate, begging to be licked.

  I wanted it again.

  I wanted to unfasten the messy bun and let all that blond goodne
ss tumble down around her shoulders so I could run my fingers through it.

  I wanted to untie her apron and let it drop to the floor, then brush her nipples to peaks through the thin cloth of her shorty pajamas, because I’d bet the farm she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  I wanted to take my time running my hands—and my tongue—up the satin expanse of leg revealed beneath the shorty bottoms.

  But it wasn’t the remembering or the physical craving that had me tied in knots.

  No. It was how badly I’d wanted to knock on her door and tell her I’d changed my mind, that I’d happily accept her invitation to join her and the boys for pancakes.

  How close I’d come to doing it.

  Chapter 9

  Elle

  At 5:01, the doorbell rings.

  Damn.

  I was really, really, really hoping that Madden got home before Trevor showed up. Because the less conversation I have to make with Trevor, the better.

  But about an hour ago, I got a message from Sawyer that said:

  Running late. GPS says ETA 5:05.

  No worries, I texted back. Trevor’s usually a few minutes late anyway.

  No such luck.

  Trevor stands on the front steps. He’s tall, almost six feet, built like a runner, with reddish-blond hair that tends toward wild and is too long right now. I used to love his hair too long. I would run my fingers through it, feeling the strands sift like sand.

  Now I want to tell him to get it cut.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi. Come in.”

  If Madden were here, I would have pushed him out the door the instant Trevor’s car pulled up at the curb, hoping to forestall this awkwardness. And I probably would have succeeded, because Trevor’s no more eager to talk to me than I am to talk to him.

  I can’t live a lie anymore.

  That’s what he said to me. That he’d feel—every day for the rest of his life—that he was living a lie if he stayed with me instead of divorcing me and marrying Helen Bradley.