But he couldn’t believe that she truly accepted that. The good-byes. The small squares of sky above her head like the underside of a cage, ready to trap her.
He had been trapped, he knew. He knew what it was to look at a landlocked lake and wish it were the sea. To climb forty stories and hardly get a view for his efforts. He had sat inside his box and looked at his past hanging on small nails all around the room like it was an archival display.
Some twisted-up part of him, living deep on the inside, wanted to force her to admit what she didn’t have here. To name every last twig of her grief as if she had been cruelly tasked to put the tree back together. Minimal employment. Death. Crushing family obligation with little reward. A little rented house crowded around with little rented houses.
Except he somehow knew that once he had visited this torment, where he reduced her entire life to a handful of broken twigs, she would weave them into a circle with the ambition to make something of it.
He had nothing to give her. Less than nothing. A plane ride. The foldout sofa in his parents’ living room. Long hours in a tiny sublet in a country where she knew no one while he worked even longer hours, nothing for her to do but sightsee and wait.
His life would become a slowly emerging target of her resentment, until she didn’t recognize herself.
So he would tell her yes. He would tell her yes for whatever she asked for as long as there were flowers and birds and farmhouses to carve into oak and fit into marble cladding.
Then he would get on a plane and fly home and find a doctor to replace his heart with a plastic pump, like the one he heard some American politician had, that moved his blood around but didn’t beat, so the man was alive but didn’t have a pulse.
That. He would do that.
“You don’t know what you’re saying ‘yes’ to.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he told her.
“What if I was going to ask you to eat worms?”
“Yes. I might ask for a tea alongside, though.”
“What if I was going to ask you to go to Mass with me, and that you had to wear a tie? Bear in mind that the parish priest has been running over a good half hour ever since he was brought back to life on the table after his heart attack.”
“Yes. I would also tell you that I tie the most beautiful half-Windsor you’ve ever seen and that you should be prepared to wait a good time after. My unconfessed sins have quite piled up.”
She brought her head back and showed him her hand, which was streaked with mud. Her forehead crinkled and she reached up and drew a line of mud from his forehead to the tip of his nose. Then folded her hands into her lap. “What if I was going to ask you to mud wrestle?”
“That’s simple. Yes. In fact, a thousand times yes. You know men have been known to pay good money for that sort of thing.”
“You’re very easy this morning.”
His heart skipped a beat, threatening to stop and rescue him from this entire situation. He held his breath to encourage it, but it started up again with a sick and lurching plod through his chest. “None of this is easy.”
She looked down at her dirty hands. “No. It’s not.” She looked back up at him.
“But it doesn’t have to be the end of the entire fucking world, either.”
He looked back up at her small little square of sky. “Yes, then. I’ll take you inside and make love to you. I’ll willingly make everything much more difficult, as it seems we have no choice.”
“That’s what you think I was going to ask?”
“You said you weren’t going to be afraid, and having you is the most terrifying thing I can think of.”
“Except for the whole part before the scary part where it’s really, really awesome.”
He laughed. She made it seem easy to, even during the scary parts.
She stood up and held out her hand and he took it and she pulled him along until they creaked into her back door.
Her kitchen seemed dark and quiet after the birds and sunshine of the garden.
She kept hold of his hand, and pulled him through the old-fashioned galley kitchen and dark living room.
Kept pulling until she pushed through a doorway in the hall, then let go. Faced him.
Her bedroom was small and close with knotty wood paneling that he was certain had not actually been milled from a knotty pine tree. Her nightstand was a chair, and it was stacked with books. Her bedclothes were still rumpled, a bright quilt and pink sheets, what she’d been wrapped in this morning.
“Where are you?”
He looked away from her bed. “In your bedroom.” It wasn’t an answer.
“No you’re not. You’re not here with me. You’re in that place where you squint at me like you can somehow get me into better focus. I’m right here. I’m not there.”
“Where’s there?”
“Standing on the ground, watching your plane fly away. I’m not there. We’re not there yet. You’re not there yet. Stop making us be there. You know what was dumb?”
“I can’t possibly name one particular thing.” But he left the bite out of his voice.
“It was dumb to waste time on all that talk about good-bye. About all the languages we’d need. All that stuff, a waste of time. Every time you let me walk past you in the library was a waste of time. Every time I didn’t make up an excuse to talk to you or join one of the project tours and make cow eyes at you was a waste of time.”
“Cow eyes?” He didn’t resist putting a finger on her forehead, bunched in irritated wrinkles.
“Moon eyes. Come-fuck-me eyes. Whatever. Waste of time. Why did you decide to stop wasting time?”
“You were crying.”
“What did you imagine you were going to do about it?”
He thought about that moment when he stood behind her in the library, the feeling he’d had that everything he did from that moment was an impulse he would pay for, as if approaching a pretty woman was charging against the entire credit of his life. “I didn’t know.” He hadn’t known.
“What if I had told you to go away?”
“You nearly did.”
“What if you had listened? Walked away? Walked right back to your wood carving?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know. Your walking away is about everything, everything that wouldn’t have happened, so far. Like holding me in the park on the first warm day of the year, or getting naked in the back of a limousine. Why is experiencing what you would have otherwise missed out on so terrifying, Hefin? Why is living so scary?”
His head was actually spinning, he was looking down from a hundred stories and waiting for his brain to make sense of safety. “I’m here.”
He would be here. He would try to be here.
If only because every other place didn’t hold her.
She was only here.
He didn’t understand how she accomplished that.
When he told her he was returning to Wales, she made him ask her on a date. As if they were young and were nothing more than a girl and a boy who had been making cow eyes at each other across the room.
She had lifted her shirt and risked his instant death by flying baseball.
And yes. The bit in the limousine. That, as well.
“You’re brooding,” she said, and pulled that big, loose shirt right up over her head. The hair that was dry floated after it in electrified orange webs. Underneath was some kind of vest, with tiny straps. Pink.
“I don’t think that means I’m not here. I think it’s simply proof of life.”
“You know what would have been great?” She wiggled her jeans right off her hips without unfastening them. Her panties weren’t panties at all, actually, but plaid men’s shorts with Christmas trees and snowmen printed over. His lust was confused, but game.
“What’s that, then?”
“If we could have done it inside my dome.”
He laughed. “Inside your twig circle, you mean.”
“Yeah.” Sh
e stood in front of him, toe to toe. “When it’s a dome, we’ll have to do it, right inside. I’ll work in a little doorway, so it’s like a hut.”
He closed his eyes because he knew that she would take advantage and kiss him. Reliably, he felt her mouth move over the corner of his, rubbing her nose in his whiskers. She kissed his top lip, and he had never been more glad of its strangeness. He let her kiss him.
Her hand was at his jaw, her thumb pressed down on his chin, and he opened his mouth, just a little for her, and their tongues met, just the very tips, before she slid right into a kiss, warm and wet, and so slow there was a moment it seemed they only breathed together, lips fit under and over the other’s.
He slid his mouth over to her jaw, found a clump of freckles so closely gathered at the hinge, they looked like a spill of stain on raw wood.
“Take your clothes off,” she said. And while he pulled off his shirt, she grabbed the waistband of his briefs and jeans in one go, so quick he made a little noise when the waistband tweaked a muscle in the base of his cock. He had to help her untangle his trainers from the cuffs of his jeans while his hard-on bobbed around madly.
Then she had her arms around his hips, her fingertips tracing around his flanks. She buried her face into his hip. He hovered his hands over her head, a little uncertain. “Destiny?”
“Yeah?” Her mouth moving at just that place made him close his eyes against the sluice of warmth drawn into his dick.
He didn’t know how to answer. She seemed very happy, snuggled into such a place, nothing but a serviceable muscle over a hard bone and the hair, of course. He was quite hairy. “Would you like to get more comfortable?”
“I am comfortable. You smell good, and these are so pretty.” She reached around to grab at the muscles around his hips, and when she did he coughed, the breath caught so hard in his throat. Like they were power cables running directly to his genitals, which he supposed they were.
“Jesus, Destiny.” He reached down and extricated her from her position, hauling her up and holding her close.
“I was going to make my way to the other thing.” He might have thought she was pouting, except for her grin.
He gave up and started kissing her again, backing her up to her bed. They slithered their way to the middle and she pulled down her boxers in between their kisses. When he hitched over her, slid his forearms under her shoulders, he felt her soft inner thighs squeeze around his waist, smelled her as she opened underneath him, just before he felt her, a wet brush against him.
He reached down between them, looking into her eyes. Her hair, there, was so soft, as fine and straight as the hair on her head. Yesterday, in the limousine, he had wanted to suck the salt from it like he had licked the sweat away from the hair at her temples.
He had never seen anything better than that sopping, light blue twist of silk splitting her and opening her, so tight against her he could feel her pulse within the tension of the fabric.
Now, he slid his middle finger where those panties had been and it was so soft and wet what he felt was nearly without definition under his fingers. She pushed up though, and sighed, and the firmness of her clitoris was a surprise, unexpected, among the impossible tenderness around it.
His fingers frustrated him, they were so callused that he couldn’t feel what he wanted, explore her. Her wriggling as they kissed kept nudging his hand away.
He kissed down her throat, then shoved up her vest, over her breasts. Her nipples were so tight they seemed to gather the whole of her breasts with them, everything swollen and pinkened. She went to take the vest off the rest of the way, but he stopped her.
“Keep it like that.” He remembered her bra twisted under her shirt, the eroticism of her mangled clothing. He liked how the vest rolled on itself and framed her breasts, made her look ravaged already, hastily fucked.
He wished she was wet, or that the morning hadn’t been so cool and that she was sweating and shining, that the clinging bit of pink fabric was darkening with wetness as it got in the way of his hands. So he leaned over and took her nipple in his mouth, the texture startling, her instant response turning his blood so hot he felt nothing but a throb, a clench.
He let his mouth go sloppy, watched her watching him, and he made one breast gleam and redden with the scrapes of his whiskers, then the other. Then she brought her own hands to them, brushing her fingertips around them, breathing through her teeth as she tested how sensitive he’d made them.
“You’re gorgeous,” he said, and she smiled at him, tipped her face up to ask for a kiss.
She tasted familiar, nearly, and sweet. Her hands moved from her breasts to his shoulders, mapping his back, making him aware of how he was curved over her, that the hair at his nape needed trimming but felt fantastic as she rubbed it back and forth.
She tipped a thigh open and he abandoned her mouth to look at it, freckled and corded. He hunched down to kiss it, then he was the one to bring his arms around her hips, hold her flanks in his hands, bury his face in her hip just to feel so much of her skin against his face.
“Hefin?”
“I’m making my way to the other thing, not to worry.”
She smiled, wide and pretty. Pink and flushed, even over her mons, roses blooming on her belly in splotches, she sat up on her elbows, then reached down and circled herself with her ring finger.
“That’s so lovely,” he said.
“Yeah?”
He watched her circle and tap, her hips hitched in his arms, then he got close and licked through her, feeling all her muscles under his hands tighten, even while her folds opened and yielded. His tongue encountered her finger, still moving, and he joined it, then let her go to take her hand in his and suck her finger into his mouth, massaging over it with his tongue.
“Come up here,” she said.
She curved her body, and he fit into it. She put her hand down around his erection, and when her thumb nudged back his foreskin to skim over the sensitized head he almost shouted but ringed her neck with kisses instead, tasting soap, smelling grass.
Her hand was so gentle and loose around him, just cupping and testing, and it let him stay just ahead of the rich impulse to come, to fill her palm with his slickness while deep into a kiss.
He kept to her neck, and let his fingertips swirl her wetness from her entrance to her firm clit without rhythm, holding them both just short of coming.
“I want to,” she whispered.
“Okay.” He stilled. Closed his eyes tight. Thought here. Even as something tight in his chest flew away to there.
“Do you want to? I have condoms. Regular color.”
He wanted to. He wanted to nudge inside of her, feel her slide up around him, that indescribable give. Then feel it again, and again.
But he also wasn’t a casual man. Jessica left their flat, and another woman hadn’t entered it. He had come with her to the States because their affair had convinced him of the rest of their lives together.
In fact, this, the cocoon of breaths and touches shared like this, he’d only done with women he had been convinced of.
Here, he reminded himself.
“Hefin?” She moved to bring them both to their sides, so that they could easily face the other. She hooked her leg around his hips and it was such an unexpected pleasure, to be brought close to her body in just that way, that he closed his eyes and felt a gorgeous sort of comfort, even as his cock beat its impatient pulse along her belly.
“Yes. I want to,” he whispered.
“It’s okay if we just enjoy this. I love this.”
As an answer he took her head in his hands and kissed her like they were starting from the beginning. Let himself get convinced. Realized he had never really needed convincing, not of Destiny.
“The thing is, maybe I’m a bit nervous.”
She traced her finger softly down his arm. “Why is that?”
“I think I’d like to be your personal sex god.” He had meant to lighten things after his wit
hdrawal, his uncertainty, but he realized that yes, he would. For as long as he was given the right to, he would like to be a sex god, just for her.
It seemed like the right sort of goal to have to get through this.
Her laughter was perfect because she hung on to him with her arms and legs in that way that made him feel present. Like he was right here, where he was supposed to be.
When she scooted backward, he went with her, and then he realized she was reaching under the bed. She brought up a box of condoms, very plain and ordinary ones to his relief, and took out one. “Even if I put this on you, it’s just to be careful. We can do anything you’d …”
But he stopped her, interrupted her with his kiss, asserted his kiss as the beginning of his desire to really be her god, over this, over their limbs tangling and their tongues touching, their hands reaching for slick places that ached and ached.
He opened her hand and took the condom, tipped his hips away to open and fit it over himself, loved that she watched him, put her palm to his hip while she did, and when he was finished, she reached down and dragged the tips of her fingers softly over him, and it was a near thing, that gentle touch, it made his control a near thing.
She moved to her back again, but he stayed where he was. “No, like we were.” He wanted her leg over his hips again, to be in a position where they would need to rock together.
He didn’t wait, he took ahold of himself and nudged where she was so wet, had been wet for so long as they played. She bent the leg at his hip even more, then he was inside her without even a thrust, just with the sudden work of their bodies so close together, clasped, then fit together.
Here, he thought, and then he was. Warmed through, his body working against hers, their breaths exchanging, woven so tight every release of her muscles along her bones contracted his.
Here. In her arms. Destiny in his.
Right there.
Right here.
Chapter Fourteen
“No.”
Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series Page 13