I broke off that thought. It was too late to wish that things had been kept up along the way, because that wasn’t where I was currently. But as I had filled out the mountains of paperwork from the state of Michigan and from my insurance company after the kitchen fire, I had been feeling more and more flashes of resentment and anger at that lack of foresight. The situation wasn’t fair to Marley in any way.
He looked pretty serious. “If anyone looked at your house right now, I don’t think they’d let a child live there. I’m concerned about you living there,” he told me. “But we’ll deal with it in the morning.” He pointed to my reheated meal with his fork. “Don’t you like it? Eat, and you’ll feel better.”
I picked around the food. It was delicious, but I felt overwhelmed by everything. I rubbed at where the weight of my ponytail was pulling on my temples. Stormy weather was never good for my hair; I could feel it bobbing behind me like a second, enormous head. I knew that it looked terrible, as did my disgusting eye, and my glasses weren’t helping the case. “I’m not really hungry,” I told Gunnar.
He put down his fork. “I could read to you,” he said. He got up and walked to his bedroom, and when he came back, he had a stack of books. “I decided that one thing that would fill my time after January will be reading, now that I’m a bookstore owner.”
I looked at the titles on the spines. “These are really good ones!” I congratulated him. I picked up The Moonstone and immediately got lost in the words. Absently, I took off my glasses and put them down on the plywood.
“They’re so pretty.”
“What?” I looked up from the page.
“Your eyes are so pretty,” Gunnar said.
“You can only see the one right now, and it’s just brown,” I told him.
“No, your eyes are almost golden. I noticed them when you hit me in the face in the lake last summer.”
“That was when you noticed my eye color? After I had belted you one?”
He nodded. “They’re like…” He studied the eye that wasn’t swollen closed. “Like fall leaves. They’re beautiful.”
I felt myself blush. “Thank you. You say the nicest things to me.”
“I’m just telling you the truth.” Gunnar leaned over our plywood table and kissed me softly, and immediately, my heart soared up. “Let’s go read,” he said.
But when we got to the new couch, we were both more interested in continuing the previous kissing. I forgot all about my eye, and my hair, and my exploding light switches as his mouth moved, his tongue circled mine, and his strong arms held me to his body. “Hallie, maybe we should go into my bedroom,” Gunnar said softly. His tongue flicked along my ear and I gasped.
My mind raced through the possibilities of the bedroom. “No, let’s stay on the couch. But we could escalate things,” I suggested. “Like, I could touch you in a more personal way.”
“And I could do that for you.”
“We could take turns,” I concurred. “Oh…” He was kissing my neck, nuzzling against my skin there, and I tilted my head back to let him.
“I’ll go first,” he whispered.
I sat up. “Ok, let’s do this.” I reached for his zipper.
“No,” he said, stopping my hand. “I mean, I’ll go first on you.”
“No. No way,” I stated firmly. “I go first on you or I’m not going to do it. I’ll quit.”
He stared at me. “You must have been a real treat on the playground, Hallie My-Way-or-the-Highway. Fine, you can go first, but let me…warm up. More kissing, and I get to touch your breasts.”
I considered. “For how long? How much breast touching are we talking about?”
“It’s not going to take much. I’m pretty revved up just thinking about it,” he informed me, and reached for my shirt, pulling it over my head as I automatically clamped my arms to cover my bra. Then Gunnar pulled off his own shirt in a whoosh that revealed a swath of blonde hair leading down to the button of his jeans, and a whole lot of muscles. Lots.
My jaw drooped open. “Wha—”
But before I had time to gawk even more than a little, he leaned and captured my mouth, kissing me hard and deep, holding me to his bare chest so that his skin warmed mine. Then his hand went to my breast, squeezing gently, kneading. I moaned when his fingers rolled my nipple through my bra, swept away by how good it felt.
Gunnar’s tongue left my mouth. “Yep, I’m ready,” he said. He had his pants and underwear off before I could blink, and lay back on the couch.
I could only stare at what he’d uncovered. “Gunnar…what?”
“I’m a big guy. Very big. It’s just commensurate in size with the rest of me,” he said, and gestured me closer. “Come kiss me again.”
“Are you serious with that?” I couldn’t wrench my eyes away from the juncture of his legs and what stood up there like a big old sugar maple tree. “It’s…colossal. Massive. Brobdingnagian! How have other women dealt with it?”
“They seemed to like it fine. Come here,” he told me urgently.
I moved toward him cautiously and leaned over him slightly, and he kissed me again, lifting his head and threading his fingers through my hair beneath my ponytail to hold me steady and flick and twirl and tickle with his tongue. And then his left hand was back to my breast, the other one, so it got a turn with his talented touch. I slid my own hands around his chest, feeling all the muscle, my fingers finding his nipples, too, but it was hard to focus with him stroking me like that. I squirmed a little, pressing myself closer.
“Ready?” he asked. He was already breathing hard. I’d made him pant?
“Ok. I’m going to try my best, but I’m not offering any guarantees on this service.” I touched him gently, stroking up and down his shaft, and his pants became moans.
“Yes, Hallie. Like that. Grip me now,” he said. His eyes watched my movements. “Can you touch me underneath…”
I took his balls in my other hand. “There?”
“Yes, oh, God, yes,” he answered, his face going slack, his eyes unfocused. “Squeeze, please.”
I did, alternating between monitoring his reactions and evaluating my own performance. I was really doing this, and from what I could tell by his very happy, excited exclamations, I was doing a good job.
“Can you use your mouth?”
“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully, looking at how my fingers barely fit around. “I’m not a snake. I can’t unhinge my jaw or anything.”
“Just a little,” Gunnar suggested. “Whatever you can do.”
I shrugged. Here went nothing. I bent and licked just the tip, flicking my tongue, and he started to shake. I was making him shake.
His hands twisted in my hair. “Hallie, Hallie,” he repeated, and then he just groaned when I sucked like I was eating the world’s largest popsicle. “Keep…yes…don’t…”
I pulled away to look up at his face. “You want me to stop?”
“Don’t stop!” he said, panicked.
I blew cool air across the head experimentally and he yelled my name. When I took him in my mouth again, he came. A lot. I’d never heard him so loud and the way he writhed and moaned made me get very quivery, very excited too. And proud, because I had brought him there.
I excused myself to the one working bathroom, noting when I glimpsed my reflection that he had created a large red tornado on my head from playing with my hair, but there was really nothing to be done about it. Actually, I didn’t even much care. Well done, Hallie, I told myself, looking at my face in the mirror. I was flushed and my good eye looked big and shining, and the other one didn’t even bother me. I looked pretty, even.
When I returned, he was still spread out on the couch, wearing nothing except a very satisfied smile. “Thank you,” he said. “Jesus H. Christ. Thank you for that.”
“It was ok?” I sat on the edge of the cushion and he pulled me to lay on top of his body, adjusting me around his delicate area, and putting his hands back into my hair, probably expand
ing it.
“It was amazing. My turn, right?”
I nodded reluctantly, the excitement in my stomach turning sour. “Or you can take your turn another time,” I suggested. “We don’t have to right now.”
“Why?” When I didn’t answer, he tried to tilt my chin to look at me. “Hallie, why? Why are you so nervous about this? Have you slept with someone before?”
“Yes. But it sucked, really sucked.” I stopped, not wanting to continue the degrading, painful story.
“You didn’t like it? The first time sometimes isn’t great,” Gunnar said. He kissed my forehead. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t like it,” I agreed. “Not at all. It hurt a lot, which I wasn’t ready for, and it was so humiliating.”
“What?” He stirred under me, sitting up part-way so that I toppled off him and rolled into the crack between the seat cushions.
“Hey!” I protested.
“Why did it hurt so much?” Gunnar looked down into my face. “What do you mean that you were humiliated?”
I squirmed so I wouldn’t have to look back at him, putting my face into his neck to avoid his blue eyes. “It hurt because it was my first time and he wasn’t caring about being gentle or about me being ready. And it was humiliating because when it was over, he pulled on his clothes and walked out of the room. He pretended that nothing had happened afterwards.” I had skulked out of the bedroom and then out of the party. Then I had spent the rest of sophomore and all of junior years also skulking around the hallways of our high school and finding ways to avoid him until he graduated a year ahead of me. “I guess it was so terrible, he wanted to forget about me, too.”
“Aw, munch. That sucks,” Gunnar said. “He shouldn’t have done that. Maybe he was embarrassed by how bad he was at it, that he didn’t make it good for you, too.”
“No. No, I know it wasn’t that, because of what he said.” I pushed my face deeper into Gunnar, taking a fortifying breath of his delicious, spicy smell. “I never told anybody what he said.”
“What?” he asked quietly.
“Just before he left, he told me, ‘I don’t want anyone to know that I fucked Hallie Holliday, so keep this to yourself. Next time you get a guy to go to bed with you, try not to make him wish his dick would fall off before he finished.’ And I was really crying then, because it was so awful, and he shook his head and said, ‘God, you’re an ugly, miserable little bitch.’” I swallowed. “I kind of memorized it. I think he was angry because I was also crying while we did it, but I couldn’t help it because I was scared and it hurt.”
“Hallie.”
“It was awful,” I repeated, and realized I was crying again right now. “I wish I hadn’t gone with him.”
“What happened? Why did you?”
“I wanted to have sex with him,” I admitted aloud. “I went to that party because he had told me to, and I went into the bedroom willingly with him. I didn’t know how terrible it would be. I wouldn’t have gone if I had known.” I sniffed. “I was so stupid. I thought we’d go do it and he would realize that he was in love with me and we’d come back out into the party as a couple. But then he said that thing about his penis falling off, and how ugly I was, and he went right back to ignoring me. Or he’d ask me to see my homework at school like nothing had ever happened between us. He still acts that way when I see him now—”
“What do you mean? You still see him here?” Gunnar sat up all the way and leaned over me. “Where?”
“He was at Gaby’s party,” I said. “The one who said he knew you, that his dad is a part-owner of the Woodsmen.”
“That little shit? He made you cry? He hurt you?”
This was Gunnar angry. This was the man on the football field who would knock other men down like he wanted to kill them and then line up to dish out more. “It was ten years ago,” I said. “I shouldn’t cry about it now.”
“But he still bothers you?”
“No, not really. I hate him, and he pretends like nothing ever happened, or like it’s funny that I’m so mad, still. And I should let it go, but I still have these fantasies about using my grandpa’s big loppers…”
“Don’t do anything with garden tools. What was that guy’s name? It was a girl’s name, right?”
“Carey,” I answered. I watched his face. “Gunnar, what are you thinking?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “Nothing. You’re right, you should forget about that guy.” He held me for a while, rubbing my back, and I felt much, much better. I snuggled deeper and kissed his chest.
“Can I help?”
“How? What do you mean?”
“You seem to like it a lot when we kiss. And when I touch you.” Gunnar’s hand moved to my breast. “Here, you really like it.”
I closed my eyes briefly as his fingers massaged and my mind went blank. “I do. I do like that a lot,” I managed to say.
“Let me try a few things. If you want me to stop, I will. Right away,” he said into my neck, which he was kissing and stroking lightly with his lips.
“Well, I guess we could do that.” I was having trouble catching my breath. “Ok, sure. Let’s try it.”
“Great,” he murmured, and unclasped my bra. He leaned on his arms so that he didn’t crush me, and then he kissed from my neck down to my breasts. “I’ll try this first,” he said against my nipple, his lips lightly brushing the sensitive skin, and I arched up so that he took it into his mouth.
“That’s a good one,” I told him brokenly, and moaned when he put his hand on the other one to feel it, too. “Oh, yes, that’s a good one.”
“Great.” He nuzzled my belly button and licked along my hipbone. “We’ll just take these off.” There went the rest of my clothing, and Gunnar hooked my leg over his shoulder. “The couch is a little small but I think this will work if I…” He nipped the inside of my thigh and I jerked it away, opening my legs and everything else to him. “Perfect, thanks,” he told me, and then he licked me, twirling his tongue over my clitoris.
“Oh…yes, that’s good, too,” I said, and gasped when his fingers went inside me. “Oh, and that. More of that.” My hips started to move, rocking up and down. “Is this how it feels for you? Like you might pass out?” I moaned, my body trembling. I held the edge of the cushion to keep myself on the couch.
“Mmhmm,” he rumbled, and the vibration of it made me gasp again. His other hand grasped my butt and pulled me even closer to his mouth, which licked and sucked—
Colors brighter than Gaby’s apartment broke over me and I screamed a little, my hips now jerking, my whole body jerking as I came. And then I lay there smiling, just like Gunnar had, and he laughed and pulled me into his arms.
“Well?”
“Well, l did like that,” I said, snuggling into him.
He laughed again. “I like you, munch,” he told me, and I hugged him closer. I liked him, too. I loved him, really.
Chapter 14
Meredith frowned and tilted her head. “The first time Jory let me do his hair, it really didn’t turn out very well.” Her frown turned into a smile. “I’m glad to say that my skills must have improved since then, because this looks great.” She met my eyes in the mirror. “Do you like it?”
“It’s…” Think before you speak, Hallie! “Well, it’s not straight anymore,” I answered.
“No, it’s definitely curly,” she agreed. “But do you like it?”
I turned my head back and forth, examining the bright corkscrews tumbling around my shoulders. “I think I do,” I said slowly. “It’s just so different.”
She started to go on about the products she used and saying how much better it was to leave it in its natural state rather than fight with the flat iron then confine it into a ponytail. A dog bounced against her hip as she spoke and nearly knocked her sideways. “Down, Surfie!” she said ineffectually. “I wish Jory hadn’t gotten three dogs at once,” she mentioned. “I should have known better than to let him go to the shelter alone. The
y were brothers, and he didn’t want to separate them,” she explained. “He’s been apart from his own brother. And speaking of families, how is it going with your friend Marley?”
“Good,” I said. The application process to become a foster parent was moving along well and Marley and I were already spending a lot of time together. In fact, she was here at Meredith and Jory’s farmhouse, because Marley, Meredith, Meredith’s brother, and I were all going to the Woodsmen game together. And we were meeting Gunnar’s parents there, too. It was a Thanksgiving tradition that the Woodsmen played at home and he had managed to get a box for us to sit in, one of the big, fancy ones overlooking the whole stadium, so his mom and dad would be comfortable.
Their RV had pulled down the road last night in the midst of swirling snow, with Marley and me watching avidly from my cottage’s living room window, but Gunnar had wanted his parents to get a chance to settle in before I met them. He’d thought his dad would be tired after the trip and he had texted me the night before that he was, but also that both his parents were very excited to meet me soon. Which was why, when Meredith had cautiously suggested helping me with my hair, I had immediately answered yes. I wanted to make a good impression and I felt that smaller hair would help.
After the game, we would all come back here to the farmhouse, if Gunnar’s dad wasn’t too tired, for a late Thanksgiving dinner. I had contributed a Jell-O mold that my family had always loved, but when I’d arrived to drop it off and seen Meredith’s beautiful table and all the organic, gourmet food that she already had prepared, I had known that the oblong peach Jell-O with the floating pineapple chunks was going to be quite out of place.
“Your hair looks good, Hallie. But are you guys done? Are we leaving?” Marley asked, putting her head into the bedroom. I’d left her, with a whispered hiss to be nice, with Meredith’s brother Brendan and he’d been showing her his instruments. “Because if I hear another guitar song, I’m going to—”
The Last Whistle Page 23