Skylar lifted my legs up with ease and pinned them at his sides, so even though my torso undulated with pleasure, I wasn’t in danger of losing Skylar’s dick. He wasn’t going to pull out and take my mouth or my ass, but just my pussy, angling himself so that his shaft rubbed against my clit and it made me squirm more. Skylar knew what he was doing to me and smirked. His tattoos were a collage, a mosaic of color and ink, that I couldn’t read from this position, at least not well, but there was so much to take in. On the nautical arm, a series of tentacles entwined one of his biceps like barbed wire on the other parts of his body.
He was a man who was so tortured, so pained, who used his body as a canvas to express so many things that I couldn’t even fathom yet. Skylar didn’t just have more knowledge about sex than me: he had more experiences, knew more about the world, and it wasn’t just the fact he was a few years older: the fact was, he’d lived. I had lived a sheltered life, both in boring Iowa and here in Cali, but with sheltering came reliance, with reliance? The risk of abandonment and betrayal, like at Club Grit, like almost being raped. On the more artistic arm, there were petals that looked like they were fresh and had fallen on his arms after drifting through the window on the afternoon wind.
Skylar gripped my ass in his hands, lifting me further off the bed, and he angled himself so that he was still over me but neither of our hips were touching the bed, instead, locked in midair as if they were two objects of pleasure denying all physical lies and operating of their own accord. The way that his huge cock fit into me without hurting me at all, the way it only have me pleasure, had to be something, had to be an omen, a sign, that I was meant to be with Skylar, made for him, meant for him.
I was so much smaller than him and from this position, he looked even larger than usual, his tattoos rippling across his chest. I wished I was on acid or at least high on weed so that I could watch his tattoos move like a sexy hallucination, a burlesque made of chemicals and ink.
Of course, that’d never happen, because that’s why I’d gotten his dick in the first place.
I’d only received this gift from him for agreeing to stay clean.
What I hadn’t planned on? Was having a release.
I’d wanted him inside me, that much as true, but a release of my own? I’d never expected that. Although of course, I’d had orgasms before, I usually had to do most of the work. I didn’t have a man like Skylar in my life that would make me orgasm, that took pleasuring me as a challenge, that could dominate me with desire. I’d mostly just lain back and taken a dicking.
But this was different.
This was Skylar.
And my body knew that and reacted appropriately, sending out waves of pleasure only minutes after he’d entered me. It wasn’t fair: I’d wanted to have to make him fuck me for hours until a release. I’d wanted to control this, but he was just too good, too skilled, and my body was too desperate and wanting.
My back arched up and I grasped around Skylar, who kept pumping away at me. I felt my inner walls clench on his cock but he kept pulling out of me and pushing back in steadily, keeping the rhythm strong and powerful, not letting my body stop feeling what it was feeling, although it would keep needing what it was needing.
I called out his name as I gripped the sheets: “Skylar, Skylar, Skylar.” It was a moan that I tried to restrain, knowing that he had neighbors, knowing the window was open and the sound would carry, but I couldn’t help myself. He, on the other hand, just bit his lip, not saying anything, least of all my name, and continuing to pump into me, making sure that I really had climaxed, that I’d reached that point of pleasure that seemed unreachable at every moment except as it was being passed.
It wasn’t like what I’d expected.
It was better.
I didn’t explode into a thousand pieces, but into a million.
I didn’t find myself floating, but flying
I didn’t find myself relieved, but released..
Finally, my orgasm stopped. I never wanted to come down from the orgasmic heaven that my seraphim lover had brought me to, the heaven that only he could bring me to, wrapped in his arms and legs as if he was an angel coiled around me, shielding me from the soft but icy clouds in the sky as we plunged up into the heavens, as if
But so did he, even though he hadn’t cum, at all, and wasn’t getting any softer. He got up from the bed and took the condom off, throwing it away, into the trash, empty.
“We’re done,” he said coolly. It wasn’t angry. It was casual, the way that someone would tell a waiter that no, they didn’t need to see the dessert menu and yes, the check would be great.
“Wait, what? Like, I have to leave?”
“No, like, I have to go take a cold shower. Now.” Skylar wasn’t even really taking to me but to himself, or more specifically, to his dick. It wasn’t like he was going to the shower to masturbate, but to wash the scent of me off of his skin, to purge the way my folds had caressed his cock and made it into something that needed a release. He wanted to relieve himself not of fluids, but of desire, desire that I’d practically cursed him with.
“Skylar, are you...are you going to cum?” I asked as he pulled away, from my grasp. I’d never had men take me and then deny me more, deny me further release, but then again, I’d never had a man focus solely on my pleasure while stopping himself from cumming. Most just expected me to lie there and if I got an orgasm, that was great for them, because of what my body would do to their cock and the fact they’d get to brag about how loud I’d scream for them, but to the other guys, the point of sex was to get their rocks off, to use me as a cum dumpster, as a jizz rag, a cum box, to use me as a receptacle and not as a lover.
But Skylar? Skylar was different. He’d used his own body as the object, using it to pleasure me, pleasure me better than any sex toy could, than any man could, because he was more than a man. He was a sailor in the docks who was rough and needed to use a woman like the ocean used a boat in its waves. He was the bad boy biker in a bar that took home a bar fly and used her in ways that she didn’t know she could be used. He was the man focused on one thing, on being a fantasy dreamboat through a tunnel of love, my tunnel of love, steering me towards an oasis of pleasure in the desert of sheets caused by our body’s heat.
He was Skylar and I wanted more. I wanted him inside of me, his semen filling me with warmth to bring me to another orgasm, to act as the glue connecting our bodies, but Skylar wasn’t about to let me have that.
“No, no, I’m not Emma.”
“But why?” I had to know. I’d never had sex with a man who hadn’t cum before. I’d never even met a guy who was too drunk to get it up for me. But Skylar? Skylar was different. He was hard, and I’d felt him inside of me, needing for release, felt the way that he held himself back and the way he practiced restraint. What guy wouldn’t want to fuck me? What guy would willingly deny himself that pleasure?
Skylar.
Skylar, whose only answer, as he walked out of the room to go take that cold shower he’d promised himself, was, “I promised to fuck you. I never said I’d cum.”
Chapter Twelve, #Wasted:
SKYLAR FOUND THE DRUGS. He found the pills, the powders, the syringes, the tubes, the capsules, the rolling papers, the tablets, the pap tabs in neon colors, the paraphernalia, the bomgs, the oils, the everything that made me into the nothing.
And he wasn’t snooping.
He caught me red handed.
Or rather, with a handful of pills and my flask in the other hand, about to head out to a different club across town, not Club Grit where I knew he’d see me, but somewhere where nobody knew me where nobody knew about Skylar or Omega Mu or about any of that, somewhere I could go to forget.
Somewhere I could go to not be myself.
Somewhere I could go to go, away.
He’d come back from his shift just minutes after he left because he’d forgotten to take a shirt with him for the bouncer that had covered his ass (or rather, his back) the night
before and lent him a spare that Skylar had made sure to have washed before this shift. I was in our bedroom with the pills on the sheets.
“So is this what you do, when I’m gone?” he asked.
“No, it’s not like that, you don’t understand,” I lied, because I knew that he did understand, that he understood it better than I understood it, that he was the only one in the room that really knew what was going on because in my state I couldn’t say what I needed to say, I couldn’t do what I needed to do to convince him I didn’t have a problem. Because I did.
“I can’t, Emma, not when you lie to me, all the fucking time.” He picked up an empty box meant for his vinyl records and started to put all the stuff away into the box, before taking a plastic plate we’d used a few nights before for sushi or something, and dumping all the drugs out into it, a plate he filled within minutes, working as fast as a factory worker at a pharmacy, opening up every syringe and dumping out the contents, until he had a plate worth thousands of dollars, a whole Dior handbag, and I watched as he walked away with it.
To do them, all at once?
No, to flush it, a sound I cringed upon hearing. Didn’t he know how much those went for, what I’d had to pay for them?
Skylar came back in and sat on the bed, head in his hands.
“Do you want me to be rough with you, to treat you like a child, to treat you like my dad treated me? Is that what you want, Emma? Because that’s not what you’re going to get, not ever. I’m not going to tie you to a bed or a chair and make you sober up that way, I’m not going to fuck this addiction out of you or make you into my personal sex slave or something, do you know how fucked up it is that you want me to sleep with you while you’re in this condition? What happened to staying clean, staying sober? Was that an act to get me to sleep with you?”
“S-Skylar,” I stuttered, but I didn’t know where to start, which of his questions to answer first.
So again.
I blacked out.
Chapter Thirteen, #YouDontKnowMe:
THE NEXT WEEK, SKYLAR AND I DIDN’T HAVE SEX. We didn’t make out. We didn’t hold hands or cuddle. He was still mad about what I’d done and he mostly holed himself up in his room and although we still slept in the same bed, it was with his back turned to me. I knew I’d fucked up but had no idea how to make it up to him. Actually having to work for someone’s respect and forgiveness was hard, and I couldn’t solve this with flowers and a gift card. Skylar wasn’t that kind of person.
But that’s when I saw the flyer.
Printed on rough paper with black glossy ink as if made from a screen printing place instead of a laser jet printer, was information about a show that night. Friday Night Only: The Eldritch Poets Society was circled in red. That was Skylar’s band. They had a show and he didn’t tell me? Didn’t matter, I was going to go. I checked my phone: I had ten minutes to get across LA. Fuck.
I got to the venue late, missing the first band, but it ended up being okay: Skylar’s band had been pushed back another set, so I caught them as they were still setting up. The crowd was too thick for me to get to the stage, so I sat on an empty bar stool.
“Ahem,” coughed the bartender.
“Hi,” I said, and turned back away, but he rapped at the table with a knuckled fist.
“If you’re going to sit at the bar, you have to buy a drink,” he explained.
So of course, I bought one.
And when that one ran out, another, and another.
But, I would have bought a thousand drinks if it meant getting to watch Skylar’s band play.
They set up and I swore I saw him look at me but then away, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t here to watch me: I was here to watch him. I was here to see him on stage, playing the electric guitar I’d never heard him play around me, the one that changed positions in the room when I was in classes, either because our schedules were incompatible or because Skylar was keeping something secret from me.
“Again, ladies and gentlemen, we’re The Eldritch Poets Society. We’ve got a few more songs for you all tonight, and our lead guitarist, Skylar “The Kraken” Brown, is going to be singing this next one, an original work by him. You’re in for a real treat, everybody,” said the short, pudgy lead with glasses and abeard, and the voice of an angel, as Skylar went up to the mike.
“Thank you for that, Jared. This song is dedicated to a special lady that I wish was here for this tonight. Thank you.”
Skylar had...a girlfriend? My heart sank. Probably not, but he had someone special to him, and he’d written her a song. This was for her, and although I half felt like leaving, I stayed. I needed to hear the song she’d inspired him to write, to sing.
What I didn’t expect was to be drawn in like a moth to a flame, and what was I but a vulnerable moth, easily burned by this brightest of flames?
“I see you dancing on tables like an RPG,
Last thing I’d believe is that you’d lock eyes with me,
But sometimes my heart won’t let me breathe,
But nightclub girl, you can’t come with me”
I understood why he couldn’t be the lead singer now. His voice was filled with passion as he started out but by the end, with tears streaming down his face and his voice growing hoarser, I could tell he couldn’t last long up there, but luckily, he finished the song before he went back to just playing guitar. The lead didn’t have to do that, have to manage two instruments at once, and in that way, had nothing on Skylar, the same way he had nothing on Skylar’s passion.
But, as the set continued, Skylar saw me.
Our eyes locked from across the room, there was no mistaking it for anything else.
And he looked away.
The audience had been silent as he played but at the end, clapped louder than they had for anything that night and the stage was crowded with people asking about the band’s next album and future shows.
“Hey, Skylar,” I said as he started to walk off the stage. He saw me and rolled his eyes.
I chased. “Don’t ignore me!”
And he sighed. Wasn’t that always how it was, with cat and mouse, the chase, the sigh? “I saw you at the bar, Emma. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing. Maybe you want me to give in but I’m not going to. If you need that stuff to talk to me, I don’t want to get that involved with you. I’m already letting you stay with me. Don’t embarrass me here.” He sounded exhausted, not like how he did on stage.
That’s when I showed him the back of my hands, holding them up like hipsters posing with their cat headbands made of wire, pretending to ironically reenact a music video about being young. That’s when he saw that they matched his in one way, but he still put his hands next to mine to compare.
“You actually did it? You went straight for the night?”
“Yeah. Maybe, you don’t know me as well as you think, Skylar,” I said. “I just drank waters and sodas the whole night. Ugh, my teeth feel so weird now, there’s a lot of sugar in that organic cane sugar cola stuff.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I know. I guess you really had it. Come on. Let’s go back stage, there’s some people I want you to meet.” He took my hand again, like he had that time at the club, except this time, it wasn’t an act. This time, I was really that girl he was with at the club, and this time, there was nobody watching, nobody we had to impress, and he was the one proud of me.
In the back was the rest of the band as well as two other women, one short and plump, in pin-up style retro clothing and jet black hair in victory rolls, a few tattoos of nautical symbols like an anchor that read “NEVER SINK” on her arms. On another girl, dressed in all black with a heavily pierced face, with parts I didn’t know could be pierced like her eyebrows and the middle of her cheeks, was heavy neon makeup. Her hair was half shaved off like a dub step artist, the remaining half dyed a mix of purples, pinks, and blues. She had a more industrial or punk or Goth look, I really had no idea how to label her. Maybe that was the point.
Ever
ybody chatted for a few minutes about things I didn’t really understand. Paleo organic co-ops focused on sustainability? Proto seapunk resurgence in underground raves? Witch hop becoming passé? I wasn’t really part of Skylar’s world, and this was another reminder of that. Standing there and looked cute just made me look stupid. How did these other girls know about this stuff? I guess inside, I knew. It was because they weren’t girls, they were women, or, that word Skylar just loved to use to refer to people instead of “bro” and “bitch”: they were people.
“Do you want a brownie? They’re gluten free, vegan, and organic, obviously,” offered the girl I’d been a bit intimidated by at first. Skylar’s friends weren’t the kind that first impressions did justice. I felt guilty for judging her for her appearance choices. It hadn’t been my place at all, and even though she had no idea I had those kinds of negative thoughts about her as she talked with Skylar more naturally than I ever could have, I had no right to be a bitch. Skylar deserved better than that. Deserved better than me.
“I’m new here too. I’m Lianna, Jared’s sister, visiting from Portland. You’re with Skylar, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that. Well, I kind of came here, uninvited, to give him back his keys, but I stayed to listen to the band.” It was kind of true. I just happened to find the excuse to come here after I’d already arrived.
Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy) Page 11