by Sara Cate
He turns toward me slowly, his reaction sedated. “Rain cloud,” he slurs as he looks at me. His eyes won’t focus on my face, so I don’t look into his gaze.
“You need to get to bed,” I whisper as I walk him toward the door.
I notice the way he walks is unbalanced.
“Alex, stop. Your foot is bleeding.” He tries to lean against the wall but falls hard onto his ass.
Pulling his foot up to the light, I see the piece of glass sticking out the side of his foot and the deep cut there. Carefully, I slide the glass out and run toward the bathroom where I know there is a first-aid kit.
I grab a couple bandages and head out to find him snoring on the tile floor.
Once I have his foot cleaned and covered, I reach down to pull his face off the floor. The sight of his cheekbones pressed against the cold tile makes me stop. Resting my hand against his cheek, I rub my finger across his bottom lip.
A thought crosses my mind.
He’s so asleep he wouldn’t even notice. And I need to get this out of my system so I can stop fantasizing what it might be like. I just want to see, let myself feel it once so I have the feel of his lips stored away in my memory.
I lean forward, my knees folding around his body as I pull his face closer so I can press my mouth against his. His lips are soft, perfect with that deep contrasted line against the skin of his face. For a moment, I imagine he’s mine to kiss. And I let myself believe he’s kissing me back. And I slip my tongue out to run it along the crease. He takes like alcohol and perfume, a sour musk that assaults my taste buds, and I wish I could taste him instead. Tears prick my eyes when I realize he’s been kissing other women tonight. I can still taste her lip gloss.
Pulling away, I touch his face for another minute, letting this closeness seep into my pores. I want more, and I thought that kiss would get him out of my system.
“Come on, Alex. I need to get you to bed,” I whisper. He doesn’t move, and for a minute I consider leaving him on the floor. But I’m still afraid he’ll get up in the middle of the night and stumble to his certain death.
“Alex,” I moan, pulling him up by the shoulders.
He groans but doesn’t move. I could try and carry him, but I probably wouldn’t get far. I put one leg on each side of his body, straddling him on my knees as I shake his shoulders.
“Alex, come on!’
He groans again as something grinds against my ass. You’ve got to be kidding me. The man can walk through broken glass, crumble drunk to the floor and probably drown in his own pool but he wouldn’t miss the opportunity to get his dick hard no matter how drunk he is.
“Sunny,” he moans as he presses his hips up again.
Oh my god.
His eyes are still closed and for the most part, he’s dead to the world—well everything except his dick, which is still pressing upward to meet me, and I should definitely crawl off of him right now, but I can’t bring myself to do it.
He tries to peel his eyes open as his hands reach for my hips.
“Wake up, Alex,” I whisper as I climb off of his body. The instant loss of that friction makes my body ache, but I can’t be touching someone so intimately while they’re too drunk to even walk. But oh god, do I want to grind myself all over him until I come...but I won’t.
His hands fumble around my legs like he wants to fuck me, but his body is too damn drunk to manage it. He can’t even get a firm grasp in his hands. Instead, he jerks his hips upward and reaches for my hands.
“Come here, baby,” he stutters. Once he gets a hold of my hand, he pulls me down so that we’re chest to chest and he tries to kiss me, but I pull away.
Not like this, I tell myself. My kiss on his lips was different. That moment belongs to me. But this? Kissing him so he can kiss me back while he’s too drunk to remember it and still has some other bitch’s taste on his mouth? No fucking way.
Not like this.
“Get up, Alex,” I order him, my tone cold and level. The person who needs the most convincing at this moment is myself.
“Bedroom?” he asks with one eye open.
“Yeah, let’s go to the bedroom.” Which is exactly what we’re going to do but not to do what he wants.
Finally, he helps me get his drunk body off the floor. He winces when his foot hits the floor, but by some miracle, he stays on his feet. I’ve never actually been to Alexander’s bedroom, and I can feel my hands shake as we make our way down the hallway. This could be a very, very bad idea.
What if we get to that bed, and I give in? Dear god, please don’t let me lose my virginity like this.
Once we reach the end of the hallway, I wait for him to pull me in the right direction, and he stumbles toward the right. Of course. His room faces mine.
When we enter the dark space, I breathe in the smell of his room. It smells like him. Musk, cologne, something sweet. There in the middle of the room, looming like a warning sign, is his bed. Sheets unmade, thrown about like he hasn’t touched them since he rolled out this morning.
He seems to have sobered up enough to sit on the bed without collapsing, but not enough to stop him from pulling me with him.
“No, Alex,” I say, keeping my voice calm. He yanks me onto his lap, but I pull away before I let my weight settle around his hips.
“Sunny,” he mumbles, pulling me closer, and I start to panic that he’s too strong for me to resist. “I wanna fuck you, Sunny.” His voice is a low growl, and it warms me from the inside like a fire ignited behind my belly button. If only he knew how much I want him to, but I don’t want my first time to be something he wouldn’t even remember and likely pass out midway through. I would remember it for the rest of my life.
Plus, he’s calling me Sunny, and that feels wrong now. If this ever happens between us, then I want him to call me what he always calls me. His little rain cloud.
I realize that pulling away doesn’t seem to be working, but he’s starting to drift off, too drunk and exhausted to keep his eyes open while in his bed. So, I let him hold me against his body, rubbing his groin against me a couple times. He only gets in two thrusts before he stills, and his eyes roll closed.
I don’t move though. Laying on him chest-to-chest feels intimate.
“I want to let you fuck me, Alexander,” I whisper against his chest.
He doesn’t react. He’s out, which I knew before I said it. I won’t admit the effect he has on me. Not to him.
Once I have his head on the pillow, I crawl over to his other pillow and lay down, looking at his sleeping face. I let myself imagine what it might be like to be the person on the other side of his bed every night.
It doesn’t take me long to finally drift off, coasting off to dreamland with the scent of Alex filling my senses.
Alexander
My eyes pop open, and my chest is heaving like my body panics before my mind can. I slept with my guilt. I dreamt it and felt it in my subconscious.
Sunny.
I have a hazy memory of her body on mine, the feel of her tiny hips in my hands, grinding against her, the sound of her telling me to stop, the feel of her pushing me away.
Fuck. Fuuuuck.
After I got drunk and pinned her against the kitchen counter, which I remembered better but didn’t feel any better about, I called a car and went to the first club my driver picked. Nobody I knew was out, but it wasn’t hard to find some assholes to drink with me. People get excited to see me in public, and they like it even more when I buy them drinks.
Speaking of...I hope I paid my tab.
Fuck, I hope I came home with my wallet and phone.
Rolling over toward the wall, I freeze when I see the body in the bed next to me. She’s facing the window, curled up on herself in nothing more than a tiny shirt and underwear.
Sunny.
My heart buzzes at the sight of her, something pinching behind my chest. I care about this girl, a whole hell of a lot. She deserves someone she can trust to not treat her like shit.
>
And I sure as fuck treated her like shit last night. Aside from touching her the way I did, crossing a line I should not have crossed, I know that in my drunken haze I tried to fuck her. Hopefully not too aggressively. At least my barely lucid mind knows I didn’t actually do it.
Turning toward her, I inch further toward my side of the bed, keeping my dick a safe distance. I’d jump out of this bed if it didn’t feel like my head was about to explode.
She wakes as she feels my movement on the bed. She’s probably afraid I’ll try what I tried last night.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble.
No answer.
But then again, I don’t expect her to. Sunny doesn’t talk unless she’s the one calling the shots.
“You didn’t hurt me,” she breathes, not even able to look at me. “Did you have fun?”
I groan, holding my pounding head as I turn toward the ceiling. The light from the window feels like knives in my eyeballs. “Not really, but I was going nuts in my house, Sunny. I needed to get out.”
She’s out of my reach, crawling out my bed, and I want her back. I want to bury her between my arms and keep her there, where she belongs.
No matter how much I want that, I can’t.
“Whatever I did last night, I’m sorry.”
“You fucked some chick at the club, then came home and tried to fuck me.”
I wince. Damn, she’s blunt when she wants to be. “Sunny, I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”
“Did you?” she says, swallowing. When I open my eyes, she’s there in front of my large window in her underwear, and I want to cover her with something.
I fucked up last night. She was right. I went to the club, found some girl who remembered me from a couple years ago. Cute girl with brown hair and a big round ass, and she followed me to the spare apartment downtown I kept for extra space in the city, and I fucked her on the couch without fully taking my clothes off. Then she left. I vaguely remember her riding my cock and thinking about Sunny while she did it.
I remember the hunger for it, the desperate need for it...and the feeling it left when I got what I wanted. The decay it created.
I crossed a line last night. I touched Sunny in a way that was against the rules. Then I thought about her in a way that was definitely against the rules. I’m here in this house to settle down, stop throwing my life down the drain one pussy after another, and climbing between the sheets with a teenager is not how I’m going to do that.
“Did I what?” I ask with a frown.
“Did you screw someone at the club?”
My eyes find hers, and I see her hesitation. She’s pissed, but she’s also worried. I fucked up so royally last night, but now she’s showing her cards. Sunny is jealous.
I can’t look at her with the shame coursing through my body.
“Thank you for coming over to help me,” I mumble without answering her. “Better get home before your mom worries.” Her gaze doesn’t move from my face. I can see the irritation in her eyes.
My sweet, beautiful rain cloud.
I am torn in two over all of the things I want when she is around. Half of me wants to protect her, feed her, keep her safe and comfortable. The other half wants to peel back that tiny shirt to see what she’s hiding beneath. I want to know the face she makes when she comes. I want to watch her do it, her fingers buried knuckles deep...
Stop.
These are the things that make me the monster I am.
It doesn’t take a genius to see what a guy in his thirties who’s fucked a different girl every week since he was sixteen would do with an eighteen-year-old virgin, and if I were any other guy, I would beat the ever loving shit out of me for even thinking it.
“You cut your foot. Tracked blood into the pool house,” she mumbles as she walks out of the room. I don’t respond. I pull the black-out curtains closed, and I crawl back into bed, which is feeling a little colder now, and I sleep as long as my body will let me.
Sunny
Cadence comes with me the next time I go to work in the pool house. After our little talk yesterday, she seems a little more uptight about the idea of me spending so much time over here. Deep down, a part of me is nervous for her to see me and Alex together. Sure, we’re not screwing each other or anything near it, but we have a familiarity now. And I’m afraid if she sees that, she’ll get defensive again.
He comes out sometime in the late afternoon. It looks like he slept most of the day, which wouldn’t be surprising. I can hardly look at him after the whole thing between us last night.
Every time I close my eyes, I feel him grinding himself all over me, begging me to fuck him, telling me he wanted to fuck me. I will never forget as long as I live the way it sounded to hear him say that to me. And how badly I wanted to let him.
“Hey,” he says as he walks through the pool house to grab a water from the fridge. He’s in a tight white T-shirt and gray sweatpants that are snug against his backside. I catch Cadence looking as he leans into the fridge. When he notices my sister sitting on the couch, he hesitates. I didn’t tell him she was coming, and I hope he doesn’t start thinking that I’m afraid to be alone with him now. When his eyes find me, searching for something, I see that question there.
Instead of trying to answer it now, I just get back to work.
“Rough night?” Cadence asks, her voice two octaves higher than normal.
“Yeah,” he answers with an uncomfortable laugh. Inwardly, I stifle a groan. She thinks it’s funny, and for her, it is, but for Alexander, it’s a reminder that he failed. “About to take a swim to cool off. Care to join me?”
It’s a harmless invitation. He would have said it to anyone. That’s who Alexander is. The social being, party animal, never leaving anyone out, but he doesn’t see how his actions are translated by others. My sister lights up like the Fourth of July.
“Sure,” she squeals as she pulls off her see-through cover.
The hand holding the paintbrush freezes over the palette as I watch them talk on the pool deck. I have to make myself dip the brush into the paint, mix it until I find the right shade, focus on what I’m doing and not on what they're talking about or how she’s touching his arm.
I never outwardly admitted to my sister that I was growing feelings for Alexander, but I wonder if she would still flirt with him if she knew. She thinks it’s a harmless crush, and maybe it is, but it still hurts to see her brush me aside, so she can get closer to him.
I stay in the pool house painting, letting the muscle memory in my fingers do all the work while I listen to them flirt in the pool, her laughing at every single thing he says. When they come inside and he starts mixing drinks, I notice the way he doesn’t hold her eye contact for long. Not like he holds mine. Not long enough to let her lose herself in those blue oceans.
“Sunny, take a break and come swim with us,” she whines after her second margarita. Her hips are taking a softer shape as summer progresses, but the bikini bottoms still hang off her barely-there hip bones.
“I’m busy,” I mutter, looking down at the chartreuse swirling with the magenta, and I wish I could escape into the color.
My sister jumps into the water without another word, and it’s a moment longer before a soft hand glides across the bare skin of my lower back, sending butterflies sailing through my stomach. I freeze under the contact.
“Take a break, rain cloud,” he whispers, his mouth so close to my neck.
Every breath is heavy, like my lungs are filled with rocks. They come out slow and silent, but his hand doesn’t leave my back. He’s had two drinks already. He’s slipping into the other version of Alex, the one who lets himself touch me.
Where I know my sister can see.
“Okay,” I whisper back, and I turn toward him, our eyes meeting only inches apart.
And I let myself believe Alex is mine. He’s mine and I’m his, and it’s the safest and most fulfilling thing I could feel.
I hop off the scaffolding
, and suddenly, his arms are around my waist and he’s carrying me. I let out a shriek as he hoists me all the way to the water, my head hanging back on his shoulder as his laugh fills my ears. Then, I’m airborne. Flying through the air until I land, submerged by water, chilling me to the bone. My scream is cut off, and when I open my eyes underwater, I see him submerge just next to me, pushing off the bottom of the pool. He wraps his hands around my waist again and we glide to the surface as one.
When our heads come up, we’re laughing. His smile reaches across his face, and his eyes look even brighter with the moisture pooling on his lashes.
Glancing over at my sister, I find her watching us with a hesitant expression.
After about an hour of swimming, Alex goes into the house for more drinks, and I head into the pool house to finish what I was working on before the paint dries. Which it already has. I get a little lost in the process, painting and mixing colors, the scrape of my trowel against the tray.
The sky is growing a little darker, and I realize that we haven’t eaten. Those two have been drinking all day, and I bet they’re both feeling it with how Alex mixes his drinks. It occurs to me that we should order pizza since I don’t think he’s able to cook at the moment.
Glancing back toward the pool, I look for my sister to make sure she didn’t go and drown out there alone, but the water is still. Standing up from the scaffolding, I walk over to the door and see an empty pool.
She must have gone home. Or she followed Alex into the house.
As I turn around and face the kitchen, it becomes one of those moments that happens in slow motion because my brain already knows what it’s going to see before I see it.
Without the sun hitting the patio window, I can see through the glass clearly, and it’s the movement that catches my eye. She’s standing with her back to me, her butt up against the kitchen counter, and he’s standing close to her, most of his body hidden except for his hands which are firmly on the counter framing her in.
The blood drains from my face, and I imagine it pooling around my feet like I’ve been sliced open. I can feel it gushing from this wound, the pressure more intense than ever, slowly subsiding until I’m empty.