by Ruthie Knox
When the time came for him to leave, he’d be fast about it.
She wanted him to stay. She had always wanted him to stay.
Carson set about it deliberately. He hung up all the garlands, put away the extension ladder, and tucked the boxes back into the closet. Showered. Dressed in clean jeans and flannel over a thermal shirt. Shaved for the second time today.
When he found her, she was in the front room—the first one guests would see when they arrived to check in. She stood on a low step stool, tacking mistletoe up along the crown molding. She’d draped garlands along the ceiling in loops, then filled them with Christmas stuff. Sugarplums, tiny reindeer, twinkling lights.
Carson walked right up to her. He was used to being taller than Julie, but the stool put her a couple inches above him. The house smelled like orange peels and cinnamon, and she smelled like the coconut shampoo he’d found in her shower.
“You’re making this real easy for me,” he said.
“The mistletoe?”
“The mistletoe.”
“It’s a handy excuse for a kiss.”
“I don’t need an excuse to kiss you. I need excuses not to kiss you. And I’ve run out.”
Her eyes had crackles of black in them. He’d forgotten. It had been a decade or more since he stood this close and looked.
Julie sighed, feigning exhaustion. “It’s kind of hopeless, isn’t it?”
“It’s like a sickness.”
“That’s romantic.”
Carson grinned. “You’re a disease.”
“You’re my cross to bear.”
“An epic mistake that I keep making, over and over again.”
“A colossally bad idea with really hot arms.”
“You like my arms?”
“Don’t even pretend you don’t know it. You have the body of a god.”
He wrapped his hand around her neck and rested his fingers on the knot that held the bandana on her hair. “I like your hair long.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you do me a favor and take this stupid thing off?”
“Take it off yourself.”
Her lips formed a ridiculous bow, like on a cartoon cupid. Soft and pink, the most feminine part of her entirely feminine body. He waited to kiss them, drawing out the anticipation just a moment longer now that he had something to anticipate. He kissed her throat instead, lingering over the spot where the blood thundered beneath her skin. Slid the tip of his nose along her neck. All the while, he worked the knot loose.
“Leo?” he asked as he pushed the bandana off.
“It’s been a long time.”
“You’re not seeing him.”
“I’m not seeing him.”
“I’m going to kiss you now.”
“Please.”
Their mouths met, a soft brush of lips that reminded him how good it would be in a few seconds, when they kissed like they actually meant it. Six years? Eight? It was an eternity since he’d touched her, far too many months since he’d fit his hands over her hips, slid them up to her waist, measured the distances and angles between every curve of her lithe little body. She felt different, but not in a bad way. She’d come into herself. Everything about her was Julie now. The right Julie. The woman he’d sensed behind the fancy fingernails and hundred-dollar salon haircut when he sat behind her in history class freshman year at Alfred.
He kissed her jaw and stroked his hands up her back.
“Kiss me for real,” she whispered.
“I’m getting to it.”
She took his head in both hands and pulled his mouth toward hers. “Hurry up.”
This time when their lips met, hers were wet, and her tongue darted out to slick over his bottom lip. His arousal dropped out of his head and into his dick, a sinking heat that became an ache when she pressed her breasts against his chest and dug her nails into his scalp.
“Carson,” she said. A complaint and a plea.
“All right, woman.”
He stroked his tongue into her mouth, and it was like flash paper igniting. Too-bright heat and light, then a burn that followed his hands over her ass, weighing her breasts, trailing along the back of one thigh toward the hot center of her. Her hips tilted into his, and the extra few inches of height meant that when she let him wrap her leg around his hip, the core of her settled against the crown of his cock, a hot, needy pressure that made him tug her close with both hands and grind against her as he showed her with his tongue what he wanted to do to her.
God, she killed him. Every time, like nobody else had ever kissed him before. Hamstrung with lust, he’d taken her once on her knees in the backseat of a car. He’d fumbled open his fly and fucked her in an alley outside a restaurant his parents had dragged them both to in Fenimore when they weren’t together, when they were barely talking, and it wasn’t because he didn’t respect her, it was this. This crazy connection that told him where she wanted him to touch her, how hard, how much pressure she wanted. This sense of being perfectly in the moment, centered over Julie, pushing with everything he had in exactly the right direction for once.
Like all the rest of the time, he was flung all over the place, and Julie gathered him up and handed him back to himself.
He didn’t know how to stop craving her.
“Tell me we’re not stopping.” He bit her earlobe because he knew she would shudder, and she did. His fingers found their way inside her sweater and unhooked the clasp on her bra, spilling her breasts into his hands. He tweaked a nipple, already bunched and sensitive. Carson wanted to see her. He wanted to feast on her for as long as she’d let him, until he didn’t need her so fucking much anymore.
It wouldn’t work, of course. He wasn’t stupid. He couldn’t use her up or shake her off or run away from her. He’d tried all that. He’d tried everything.
“I want you, Julia. Upstairs. All night.”
“It’s only two in the afternoon.”
“We have a lot of not doing this to make up for.”
“You think I’m easy, don’t you?”
He pushed up her sweater and drew her nipple into his mouth, and she moaned. She was easy. For him, she’d always been that way. Every time he turned to her in the middle of the night. Every time he came back to town and told himself no, then put his hands on her anyway, she said yes. She moaned it in his ear. She came on his cock, hard and fast, and unraveled him.
“Let me tell you a secret.” He pulled her shirt down, because he was going to get his way, and they both knew it. “Men like easy women.”
She grinned. The glint in her eye told him she had something clever to say before she opened her mouth, so he was already smiling when she cupped his dick in her hand and squeezed. “That’s funny. Women like hard men.”
“I’ll show you hard,” he promised.
“You’d better.”
Chapter Seven
Julie pounded up the attic stairs, breathless and happy and urgently excited.
There was no way to remember this kind of joy, to hold on to the elation that lived in the body and rose like sap in the springtime when he touched her.
People liked to pretend that emotions had something to do with the brain, but they were physical sensations, and Carson’s hands, Carson’s mouth, conjured up this excess in her. Even when they screwed each other angry, when sex became a form of combat, there was a pure green streak to it, alive and good.
She shucked her sweater and let her bra drop off her arms before he even made it into the room. This morning, she’d left the bed unmade and a pile of dirty clothes next to the closet. Probably she should care, but she didn’t. Let him see her private mess. She would admit him to her room, her body, her life.
She couldn’t control what he would do after that. Probably he would leave. It was who he was. It was what he did.
That didn’t have anything to do with this. When he was here, he belonged to her. Everybody in town knew it. Julie was sick of pretending she didn’t know it herself.
She
leaned down to peel off her socks, nearly toppling forward in her haste. Carson’s hands slapped down on her hips to steady her.
“Whoa there.”
“Don’t rescue me. Get your clothes off.”
“Are we in a hurry?”
She straightened and went up on tiptoe to nip at his lower lip, threading her hands in the hair at the back of his head and giving it a sharp tug as she kissed him. “Yes. We are in a god-awful hurry. Pants. Off.”
Her other sock came away, and she peeled out of her jeans and panties in one fast push and crawled onto the bed on all fours, giving Carson a show that she knew from experience he’d appreciate.
“Mercy,” he mumbled from behind her. She heard the jingle of his belt buckle as he yanked it open.
“No mercy,” she promised.
Not for her, and not for him. She’d cringed away from colliding with her attraction to Carson—her feelings for Carson—for most of her adult life. Enough, already. Let him hit her. Let him slam into her and knock her over with a tidal wave of sex and passion and deep recognition that she’d felt since the day he first spoke to her in class.
Let it happen, and then she’d see what was left of her when the tide rolled out.
She flopped onto her back and finger-walked her hand down her stomach. “Hurry, or I’ll get the party started without you.”
His dark eyes blazed hot. “Show me what you did that night when you were moaning my name.”
“I’m sure you can imagine it.”
“Don’t make me imagine it. I’m sick of imagining things. I want to see.”
She dropped her hand and showed him. Her slippery fingers inside her body, circling her clit, dipping back and forth until her eyes closed and her other hand found her nipple. She didn’t have to imagine him inside her, because his weight hit the bed and she could feel him breathing, feel his heat. His cock bumped her hip. His mouth covered her exposed breast, and then he pushed her hand upward and said, “Let me help,” and he penetrated her with his fingers while she worked her clit.
Perfect. Perfect heat, perfect pressure, perfect suction on her nipple. It took all of twelve seconds before she said, “I’m going to come,” and he said “Good” and pressed up against her G-spot, hard, and the orgasm leaped the tracks and hurtled into another whole dimension of intensity.
She could hardly breathe. She kept gasping, and he was laughing, pushing her hand aside and moving over her so his chest vibrated against her limp, starfish body. He kissed her, still chuckling.
“Bad form, Vance,” she complained. “You can’t laugh at me for going off like a rocket.”
“I just forgot what you were like.”
“I’m not like anything. It’s you, with your giant man-fingers and all those muscles and everything. You’re like an enormous magic sex-toy Christmas present.”
He laughed again, ducking his head against her neck. “You needed to get off for Christmas?”
She shook her head. “All I’m saying is, I’m having a lot of trouble pretending you’re the Virgin Mary at this point.”
That broke him up, and she cradled his head and smiled at the ceiling while he laughed against her neck. The whole hard, naked length of him hovered over her, his thigh splayed between her legs, his arms braced on the mattress. She wanted to keep him there. Always.
She wanted him inside her even more.
“Get off me, and I’ll go get a condom from the bathroom.”
“I’ve got one in my jeans.”
“Of course you do. You always have a condom handy. It’s one of your enormous magic sex-toy features.”
“I always have a condom handy in Potter Falls.”
“What, it’s just me you have oops sex with at random, inopportune moments?”
“Yep.” He brushed her hair off her forehead. “You’re special, Jules.”
“Aww. Thanks, sweet pea. Now go get the condom.”
He got it. While he was opening the package, she slid down his body and warmed him up with her mouth, just to make sure he was ready. He was so ready.
By the time he’d rolled the condom on, Julie was ready again, too, but she felt like teasing him, so she threw a leg over his hips.
“Cowgirl?” she asked.
He had her on her back so fast, the walls blurred. “Not a fucking chance.”
“I thought you liked cowgirl.”
“Honest to God.” He pushed up her knee and thrust inside her, not bothering with slow or careful because he knew she was ready, and he knew how they fit. Perfect. “It’s like you don’t remember me at all.”
Carson liked to be on top.
He grabbed her wrists and locked her arms over her head.
She lifted her hips and wrapped her legs around him, arched her back, tossed her head.
In the middle of her, that deep, satisfying ache. That wet heat of intrusion. She loved it so much. She’d missed it in a way she never admitted to herself.
She was a goner, lost in a terrifying impulse. Too late to turn back. Impossible not to admit that this was what she’d wanted, what she always wanted from him.
Impossible to pretend she hadn’t loved him all this time.
But she didn’t have to say it. She could be who he needed her to be, even now.
“Jeezy Pete,” she said, putting as much round-eyed ohmygoodness into her voice as she could manage. “You are hard.”
And that was the last coherent remark she formed before she lost her mind, and all she could do was meet him stroke for stroke, take him in, kiss him, and jabber senseless words in his ear, dirty words that made him go faster and harder and deeper and man, oh man, there was nothing like this.
There was no one like Carson.
He made her come, and he kept going, let her catch up, and made her come again.
They kept doing it, pausing to rest and make each other laugh and run down to the kitchen for snacks. They didn’t stop until she ran out of condoms, and by then, it was almost dawn.
Chapter Eight
It was the kind of high that lasted. Carson figured the staying power of this particular Julie high probably had something to do with the fact that they were always postcoital, midcoital, or precoital. Basically, his entire life now boiled down to sex, foreplay, and sleeping. Not necessarily in that order.
He walked around town with a smug expression on his face—he’d caught it in a shop window, the answer to the hitherto perplexing riddle of why everyone seemed to be smiling at him. Strangers on the street. Uncle Bruce at the hardware store. Even his father, once, briefly, and possibly by accident.
They were smiling at him because he looked happy.
He thought nobody had the power to bring him down from it. Then he ran into Leo at the diner.
Carson was minding his own business, drinking coffee and looking at a pamphlet about gold-leaf restoration he’d tracked down on eBay. The Potter Falls bank, a squat marble structure with a gilded dome, needed a facelift, and he had some notion of figuring out what needed to be done with the dome and … well, he didn’t know what. It wasn’t a job that could be dealt with in the winter. He could leave the pamphlet with Julie, though, if it came to that, and ask her to pass the info along to the historical society ladies.
Leo plucked the pamphlet out of Carson’s hand and studied the title page as he took a seat across the booth. “Little light reading?”
“What do you want?”
“My key back, for starters.”
Carson fished his key ring out of his pocket and started unthreading the loaned key to the shoe-factory building.
“Here you go.”
Leo took the key. The waiter set Carson’s plate on the tabletop. Grilled cheese and fries that no longer looked all that appetizing.
“You’ve been over there a few times.”
He’d been in there twice more. There was something sacred about what came over him in that place. A weight that he ached for—a trust or an anchor, or possibly both.
“I ju
st poked around.”
“Have you talked to Julie about it?”
Carson looked down at his hand wrapped around the mug. He hadn’t. If he told her, she’d hear something different from what he was saying. She would get her hopes up.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the same girl he’d left here all those years ago. She had her own life, and she knew the score as well as he did.
“I think you should,” Leo said.
“Yeah, well, no offense, but who asked you?”
Leo sort of smiled and shook his head. He leaned back against the booth, his legs widespread, his open face disarmed in a way that made Carson uncomfortable. “Do you even remember why you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I’m curious. Do you remember?”
“ ’Course I remember.”
He hated Leo because they’d been best friends. From somewhere in the mists of time around second grade all the way through to their sophomore year in high school, Leo was always over at the house, eating Mom’s cookies, playing Legos, watching TV, and doing homework with him. Until they’d fought.
“Then say it.”
“We argued.”
“About?”
“About me leaving.” Story of his life.
Carson took a bite of the grilled cheese. It was dry and cold, and he had to work hard to chew it.
“You said Potter Falls was a shitty little backwater, and you couldn’t get out of here fast enough.”
“And you said you were going to own the place one day, and I was going to die alone out in the world somewhere, and nobody would notice or care.”
Leo nodded. “So why was that it for us?”
“What do you mean?”
Leo leaned forward. “It wasn’t much of an argument, Carse. You insulted Potter Falls, which you knew damn well means a lot to me, and I was pissed off because I cared more what you thought than anybody else. And jealous because you were going to leave me here for something better, and I knew even then I’d never leave. I said something in the heat of the moment that I later regretted. We were fifteen. Why didn’t you ever get over it?”