by Julia Kent
“How about I show you?”
My back is against the wall, my body craving all of this, every second of his attention, every commanding movement as he pulls me closer, pinning me between him and the moving elevator, and all I can think about is this.
Him.
Us.
What if I just stopped trying to fix problems in life and, instead, starting living?
One kiss, one lick, one groan, one cry at a time.
The elevator doors open and we lurch, Andrew’s steady hold keeping me upright. But his hands are under my shirt as he walks me backwards into his hallway. He punches the door code and it opens. I lose my footing and tumble backwards, a mass of heat and giggles as I look up at him, standing in the doorway, smiling down on me.
“That’s the view I love. Except you’re wearing too many clothes.”
He shuts the door.
“How many is too many?” I ask.
“Any.”
We’re playful and in pleasure mode now, the relief of just being together making us move fast suddenly, as if we have to capture the moment and pin it down, enjoy it first and savor it later.
There will be a next time, our bodies tell each other. There will. But let’s make sure there is a now.
Our clothes in a puddle of discarded propriety at the edge of his front door, we kiss our way to the bedroom. His bed is unmade, a surprising display of messiness that makes me smile. I’m currently kissing him as the grin trips over my lips, so he stops and bites my earlobe. The hard warmth of his ticklish skin, scattered with hair that makes my hands rake across his skin with delight as he rubs against me, makes me heady.
“What’s so funny?” he asks just as my hand reaches for his hardness, fingers wrapping around his thickness.
I can’t answer because I’m laughing. I halt in the doorway to his bedroom and, because he’s attached to the part of him I’m holding, he has to stop, too.
“I know you’re not laughing at that!” he adds, clearing his throat meaningfully.
I descend into giggles that take minutes to recover from, my whoops of uncontrolled devolution breaking down slowly, like a music box whose key is finally unwinding down to the last few notes.
“No,” I finally gasp. I’m still holding him. “I’m laughing because your bed is unmade.”
“So? We’re just going to mess it even more.” His abs slide against mine and a shiver runs through me.
“Also, you’re tickling me. On your skin. The hair on your legs.” I reach down to touch the tops of his thighs. “Your belly.” I reach up. “Your happy trail.”
I slide my palm down.
“My habitrail? I know I have some body hair, but did you just refer to that patch as a habitrail? Like a hamster?”
With great flourish, he takes a step back and points both sets of fingers, palms facing in, at his navel and below, and declares, “This does not involve furry monsters.”
Cue more giggling for the next seven minutes.
“I said Happy Trail. Two different words. No hamsters.” I can’t stop gasping.
A look of confusion, relief, and amusement fills his face. “Well, that’s an improvement, but what the hell is a ‘happy trail?’”
I point with my index finger at the thickening hair below his navel, tracing it down for him on his torso until he inhales sharply.
And then I drop to my knees.
“That, Mr. McCormick, is a happy trail. And while I see no furry monsters, I am discovering definite signs of a male animal here.”
His growl of satisfaction confirms it, in fact.
A few minutes later, he stops me.
“I don’t want to...this isn’t how I want....well., I just..” Andrew isn’t a stammerer, so this is charming. I do this to him. My mouth, my hands, my attentions take away his poise and leave him more real.
I stand on tiptoes and kiss him.
“You want me.”
“I want to be in you. I want you in my arms. Not on your knees.” He’s breathing hard, his eyes dark and intense. “I want to make love with you, Amanda. In my bed, under me, on top of me—but together.”
Rather than answer, I lead him to the bed and he takes control, crawling over my body as he warms my heart, my toes, my eyes and arms and legs and everything.
“I wanted to ask you a question in the car,” I whisper as he kisses my collarbone, his breath coming in sighs and sounds like restraint becoming frayed by too much use.
“Yes?”
“What do you feel? For me?” I murmur. His face hovers above my breast, brow relaxed and smooth. One second passes. Two. Three. I lose count because time becomes a blur of chaos as I wait to hear my anchor in the endless river of hope.
He lifts his head up and moves so our faces are inches apart. The moon pokes out from clouds here and there, making the light erratic, carrying a dewy glow like gossamer flattened with an iron and spread thin. I cannot see his eyes in full, but I feel the soft energy of his breath against my chest.
“I,” he says sweetly, “feel....” He sighs, then gives me a look of earnest connection that makes all my doubts disappear.
“Everything, Amanda. I feel everything.”
The kiss that seals my fate comes with a sense that time itself ripples right now, like a stone thrown into a pond. The water will go back to being placid and smooth, but the stone remains forever moved, the water displaced just so forever. And ever.
And everything.
Discreet and quiet, he reaches into his nightstand and finds what he needs for protection, the same way he has each time we’ve made love before. I’m grateful for the smooth integration, for his responsibility, for the thoughtful resoluteness in making sure that making love is safe.
His words make all the blood in my body rush to places where his touch thrills and sates, where we get as close as two individuals can possibly be. I want him in me, too, and as I stretch back and pull him to me, I wrap my legs around him, inviting him the only way I know how without words.
He finds me wet and wanting, his hips moving against me with a measured distraction that I find alluring. His fingers trace a circle around one nipple as he thrusts gently, all the way, making me tip my hips to take him in.
The fresh heat of him over me captivates every part of my being. Andrew is in me, over me, arms around me and I am enraptured. The strands of web that make up Amanda are woven by time, experience, emotion and senses, and right now he is threaded in me, weaving new patterns into the tapestry of my essence.
We move against each other with slow strokes that carry the groundswell of urge and need, of fire and ice, of everything.
Everything.
“I feel you, Amanda,” he murmurs, his voice harder to control. “And you’re all I want to feel. I want you.” My own control is fading, too, as impulse driven by logic dissolves under the moans that build in my throat. Too many years of no one, too many memories of loneliness, and far too many missed chances flood me as my blood skyrockets and crests, fevered and pulsing, searching for ways to find more of him.
From the way his hands grasp and explore, seeking to find new ways to touch and ignite, I think he feels it, too.
“You have me now,” I say, my words caught in my throat as my pulse quickens and the glow inside spreads, so powerful it pulls him in, too. As we come together we integrate, those threads of passion and respect, of shared time and futures to come, all mixing with flesh and bone. He’s carrying me away to some place we create between our hearts, where the only risk is in never taking a chance at all.
I tuck my head up against his shoulder and lick his neck, then give him a soulful kiss. He tastes like some exotic flavor, alluring and new. As we move against each other in the night, he fills me with a joyous bliss and hearing him call out my name in the throes of intimacy is, well....
Everything.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“He’s in Tokyo again.” Shannon whines. “Why do they both have to be there?” Declan went
with Andrew for this round of negotiations. We’re both feeling their absence. They come home tomorrow after nine days away. I’m squeezing in as many DoggieDates as I can while Andrew’s out of town and can’t magically appear at any of them.
I know. I’m lying to him. Great way to start a relationship, right? But it’s for a higher cause. The Paycheck Cause. Can’t pay my bills with kisses and breve lattes in bed. Oh, if only I could...
“They come home tomorrow,” Marie says with an eye roll. She and Carol are getting ready to go out for work, purses in hand, faces excited. But first, Marie fiddles with some folders on the dining table. Jason has let Marie turn their dining room into a wedding Command Central that puts the White House emergency bunker to shame. The Jacoby family dining room looks like the War Room at the White House. No—not quite.
It is more organized.
And speaking of the White House...
“We still haven’t received an RSVP from the president or vice president,” Marie says with a disappointed sigh as she goes through the mail and sorts response cards.
“You expected the President of the United States to attend Declan and Shannon’s wedding?” Carol snorts.
“I expected a gentle decline, if nothing else. Or he could send the First Lady. But would it kill the man to stop by for twenty minutes?”
I’m not sure which is more remarkable: that these sorts of conversations don’t shock me, or that Marie actually holds out hope that the president might just pop in for the wedding.
“Where are you going?” Jason asks pleasantly, stepping into the house via the sliding patio door. His hair is half on end and half flat. There’s a giant smear of grease on his right cheek, and he looks like he hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. His face is sprinkled with streaks of cotton.
Oh. Wait. That’s not cotton. I guess his beard is mostly white, which is weird, because his hair is such a rich shade of auburn.
Marie turns an uncharacteristic shade of pink. She’s embarrassed. I didn’t think Marie was capable of embarrassment, much like the Queen isn’t capable of smiling without looking like she’s constipated.
“Um, we’re going to a mystery shop,” she says in a breathy voice.
Carol gives her the side-eye. “This mystery shop is one of Mom’s favorites.”
“A sex toy shop?” Jason asks, as if he were asking about a garden supply store or an insurance agent evaluation. The level of casual discourse we have these days about anal beads and dildos is disturbing, especially since I can’t talk about tampons with my own mother without needing smelling salts.
“No. Even better,” Carol says in a voice filled with amusement. “A department store shop.”
Jason frowns. He’s picking up on the subtext. “What’s so special about that?” he asks Marie, who is avoiding eye contact.
“Nothing! It’s just a shop,” she murmurs, pretending to paw through her purse.
Carol seems to enjoy tormenting her mom. “This is a men’s clothing experience.” She looks at me. “From top to bottom.”
My quizzical look must match Jason’s, because Carol bursts into laughter.
“It’s porn for women,” she says, as if that explains everything.
It doesn’t.
“Shopping for men’s clothing is porn for women?” Jason asks in an incredulous tone.
“Have you seen the men’s underwear display lately?” Marie bursts out. “All these models. David Gandy. David Beckham. All wearing underwear and nothing more and their pictures are on the posters and on every single package. It’s like they went and got Minions except instead of a crowd of little yellow beings staring at you, it’s thirty or forty pictures of hot men in underwear all asking you to touch them.”
“Pick up their package,” Carol murmurs. Marie elbows her in the ribs as Carol giggles silently.
Jason just blinks, over and over.
“Hey, don’t judge. You have your Victoria’s Secret catalog obsession,” Marie says in a threatening tone.
He throws his hands in the air, one of which is clutching a wrench. “I don’t judge, honey!”
“Then why the stare?”
“I was just thinking that you should stop teaching yoga classes and do this mystery shopping thing full time. It suits you better.” And with that, he walks over, drops the wrench, and bends her backwards, giving her the kind of kiss you see in old movie posters, the kind that curls a woman’s toes and makes her body melt.
I turn away.
Now I’m embarrassed.
“Get a room,” Carol mutters, clearly used to this. But I’m not. I’ve never seen my father kiss my mother. I don’t even have a memory of it. Not one, single mental image of my mom and dad touching. Ever.
Now that I know the full story about what happened with my dad, I find myself even more interested in watching men who are about his age. I’ve always struggled with the concept of a father. So many of the men in my life who represent dads are wildly different. James McCormick terrifies me. Jason is a cuddly teddy bear, but I keep my distance with him because, well, I’m not one of his daughters. He reserves a kind of overflowing love for all of them that stands out in stark contrast to what I don’t have.
I keep him at arm’s length because it’s too painful to think about sometimes.
I’ve told everyone the story my mom poured out after the baseball game, and Marie’s been more pleasant to her. Not just because Mom pulled strings to get the bagpipers from Carnegie Mellon, but because, as Marie put it, “Oh, lord, those hours of pure despair. That would shred anyone to the bone. I understand why she’s a hovermother now.”
Yeah. I guess I do, too.
“We’re going to stare at pictures of mostly naked men on underwear packages,” Carol says pleasantly, all dimples and blue eyes and blonde hair. “What’s your work day look like?”
“I am dating a man named Eagle,” I declare.
“Eagle?” Jason has pried his lips off Marie and is now looking through receipts on the table with the air of a man who needs a barf bag. “You’re dating a man named—sweet Jesus, Marie, you bought $3,100 worth of tartan ribbons?”
Marie bustles over to the table and physically blocks Jason’s access to the folders by shoving her ample boobage right in his line of vision.
“Don’t worry, Jason. It’s all covered.”
“We have a seventeen-thousand dollar budget and you’ve spent a fifth of it on ribbons?”
Shannon closes her eyes in resignation. The moment of truth has arrived. Turns out I’m not the only one hiding the truth from someone.
“Uh, Dad? Our budget is bigger than that.”
Jason frowns. “What do you mean? I took Carol’s wedding fund and split it between you and Amy and—”
“Anterdec is footing the bill, Dad.”
“Anterdec is what?”
Shannon and Marie share a look. “Right after Declan proposed, we had a meeting with James, who asked that this be a thousand-guest wedding.”
“A thousand?” Jason’s been involved in some of the details, but for the most part has been happy to let all the women in his life do their thing.
“Yes. And most of those are business associates. He said this will be great, free publicity for Anterdec and if we invite enough business colleagues it becomes a corporate write off.”
“The bastard coopted my own daughter’s wedding,” Jason fumes.
This, I know, is exactly why Marie and Shannon have kept things quiet, though at some point didn’t Jason question some of the arrangements, like the forty-one piece bagpipe band and the ice sculptor from Finland?
“We didn’t want to hurt your feelings, Daddy,” Shannon says, reaching for his hand. I turn away. It’s moments like that that make it hard to be around Jason. What’s it like to reach out and just touch your dad like that, with a father-daughter bond that has been forged by decades of love?
“Why would you hurt my feelings? It’s obvious James McCormick has a bigger...wallet...than I do.” He
sighs and swallows, hard.
“That’s not what this is about,” Shannon pleads.
“I know it’s not, sweetie. I do. I just worry that the love between you and Declan is getting lost in all the tartans and cake frosting flavors and elephant discussions.”
Shannon turns sharply to Marie. “Elephants?”
Marie shrugs one shoulder. “We thought about it. Bring you and Declan to the ceremony on an elephant, but mahouts are notoriously difficult and the dung is big and messy, and it turns out elephants don’t like to wear diapers.”
“No elephants!” Shannon shrieks.
“Plus, they don’t make tartan-pattern elephant diapers, so—”
“What’s a mahout?” Jason asks.
Bzzzz.
Marie and Carol look at their phones. “Gotta go! Our mystery shop reports are due by six p.m. and our boss is a real bitch.”
“Hey!” I protest. “I’m in charge of that account!”
Carol just laughs as they sprint out the door, leaving a puzzled, slightly hurt Jason.
“Cowards,” Shannon mutters. She looks around Command Central and shuffles through some papers. Frowns.
“What?” I ask, afraid to do so, but...
“Mom has a deposit for that place. The one you went to,” Shannon tells me.
“O? The stripper spa?” I’m surprised. Not shocked, though.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, boy.”
“No. Just O.”
Shannon makes a sound like Declan makes when he’s displeased with Marie.
“She’s sniping the bachelorette party.” I am stunned. I can’t say I’m truly surprised, because this is Marie, after all. The woman who is turning a cat into a flower girl and making the cat wear a kilt.
“Oh, no, she isn’t.” Shannon’s expression is smugger than smug. “We’re outwitting her.”
“We are?”
“Let’s find a way around her. Swear Amy and Carol and everyone to secrecy.”
“Yeah,” I say. “About that. The, um, party list.”
“What about it?”
“Josh asked if he could go.”
“Why would we include Josh?”
“Because he likes male strippers, too? Plus he’s technically part of the wedding.”