by Sunniva Dee
I love his mouth, a double hairpin curve at the top, shaping a heart that’s still intact. The mauve color of it and how his lips go darker when I suck on them.
Everyone sucks on them!
I slap him harder than my strength allows. The cacophony of it sounds so much smaller than it feels in the palm of my hand.
The slap doesn’t surprise him. Slowly, his cheek reddens, and I’ve done that, hurt him. I’ve hurt my love, and he deserves it and it doesn’t make me feel better. “I hate you.”
“You hate me.” I wait for him to touch his cheek. The red grows angrier. “Love turns to hate so fast, doesn’t it?” There’s no bitterness in his voice, only acceptance of a fact he knows well. His body moves closer to me, the body that just embraced and invaded god knows how many other women. Ha, I don’t even know how many! This is so crazy.
I flinch when his hands cautiously touch the roof of my car on each side of my shoulders. I can’t get enough air into my lungs. Would I feel better if I gauged his eyes out so he couldn’t tender-aqua-stare at me?
I feel lightheaded.
“Easy, baby girl.” He covers my mouth with a hand. I want to pull away, because what is he doing?
“You’re hyperventilating.” His fingers shape a cup as he covers my nose too. “Take it slow, okay? Easy. I don’t have a bag for you, but just breathe the same air from me.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Why does he have to be so sweet? It’s probably why he’s a star in that business too, the way he reads minds, nerve endings, skin— My breathing speeds up as my mind starts on its new favorite hobby, free association over Ciro in bed.
I crumble at the palm of his hand smelling like him.
15. PLEASE THINK
He drives me back to his house. His car is familiar. It’s just ours, no balloon-boobed womens’. The souvenir cup he bought for me at the pier in Santa Monica lies partly unwrapped at the bottom of my feet. This is where I forgot it. I was wondering about that. Ciro + Savannah = Forever. So naive.
We don’t talk on the way there. People say you need closure when something monumental happens, and he won’t let me leave without it.
The worst part is over, isn’t it? To see him do that with another girl was the worst. To see him first thing when the pain bled fresh was the worst. I exhausted energy and ashes down there at the Mintrer’s parking lot. I feel weak.
We round the last curve to the top of the hill, and I say, “There’s no use, you know. You could never have convinced me to be okay with your lifestyle. No level of brainwashing could make me pat you on the back, like, ‘Bye honey, have a nice day at work! Stay safe, okay, as in don’t get AIDS.’”
He shoots me a glance. It’s not surprised or wounded. All I see is sadness and acceptance. Fuck, I hate the way he looks like he’s the victim.
“Listen, I get that you’ve been through this before with your ‘fifty former girlfriends’”—I make quotation marks—“but no matter what you think, you’re the asshole here. Not me. You’re the one using women for your own winning, whether it’s money or entertainment. You did it with me.”
“You’re wrong, Savannah. You were never entertainment to me,” he growls, and anger finally clenches his jaw. “I don’t expect you to understand how I live, the good and the bad, but I wanted a chance to explain myself. Even if you saw a sliver of what I see, I’d feel better about watching you leave. I have no illusion that you’ll stay with me. I don’t know what I was thinking when I dove into this again.” He shakes his head. Parks the car.
Princess’ single muffled bark from the second floor welcomes us, and it jabs at my heart. He reaches for my hand, wants to lead me inside the way he always does, but I snatch my hand back. My chest tightens when he cups his hands in front of him, unconsciously squeezing the one I didn’t accept.
I drop to the floor upstairs needing Princess’ love more than I ever have. I let her kiss me, roll over me with her big, heavy torso, and I almost laugh at how loud her happy-snorts are against my ear. Yeah, I wasn’t here this morning. You missed me. You’ll miss me more soon.
I tear up. Again and again and again. Fuck this.
“Come with me to the sunroom?” Ciro’s crisscrossed on the floor next to us, eyes welling with sadness too. I’ve never seen them brighter. I clench mine shut while I pull myself together.
“I don’t think this is a good idea after all. I’ll Uber it home. You don’t have to drive me.”
“Savannah, please. Just give me an hour. I’ve thought about this since our first date, and I haven’t been able to get it right. I... want the chance to explain to you.”
“That you’re leaving the business?” I mock.
“Come here. Please?” He pulls me to my feet, and I let him lead me there. Thick red cushions against white walls. He lowers me to them, and I sit up straight so that I don’t invite his nearness. Princess comes too. I pat the space between Ciro and me, but she lies down by his feet instead.
I fold my arms. Force myself to stare into his eyes. “Speak.”
“I haven’t had this much time with one since Silk, not this long, not this much. We’ve had some good times together you and I.” He peers up from Princess to me. “I loved waking up to you. I loved getting up and making the coffee too weak to be considered coffee and mixing in that gross French vanilla for you.”
He thumps his back against the backrest, his touch leaving Princess. She moans sadly, and her pain is mine. “I loved walking in to Mintrer’s and getting the boyfriend-of-Savannah treatment from that little hostess girl. There was nothing like your smile when you noticed me in the doorway, and nothing like the way you shyly turned the side of your mouth to me so your supervisor couldn’t see you kiss me.”
He closes his eyes for a second, and when he opens them again, there’s a tear resting at the root of his eyelashes.
“I loved that you had no qualms with leaving your car at Mintrer’s when I picked you up in mine, how sometimes you were so tired after work that you rested your head on my shoulder like I was some hero. You made me better. You made me feel good about myself. You made me feel like I had a future.”
“Stop it. You’re just making things worse,” I choke out. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, but this is just bad.”
He lifts his head and peers at me. “Does it make things worse that you’re my home?”
Knife. In the heart.
“Is it bad that you’re my sanctuary? My love? That it’s fucking painful as shit to go out there and chase what you know you want and need, your happiness, and get shot down like you’re scum every time because you are? Fuck, Savannah, I know I am. It’s not new to me. I’ve been scum my whole life.”
He breathes hard, a ragged breath calming himself down. “But that’s irrelevant.”
My fingers stretch on the backrest. He’s near enough for me to touch his shoulder. A flicker in his gaze tells me he notices, but he doesn’t acknowledge my closeness.
“Are you... in this business against your will?” My voice has softened at the thought. America is rough. It’s hard to make a living and survive. Maybe he has medical bills for those old parents of his that he needs to pay. Maybe he’s a saint with a dirty halo.
He closes his eyes, shaking his head wearily, and I know it’s another question he has heard before. “No, Savannah, I’m not.” His voice cracks through his truth like he knows my fingers won’t be on his shoulder anymore after it.
“You know about my life when I was younger. I’ve always been an extremely sexual person. At seventeen, I branched out from just sleeping with bartenders and daughters at my parents’ country club. I started dancing for a strip club. I got all the girls I wanted after those shows, and it didn’t take long before I was discovered by the owner of Lucid.”
He finds my arm on the seat between us and caresses it. Tingles warm the skin where he touches me, and I’m outsid
e myself, listening to him recounting a story that doesn’t pertain to me. It’s an interesting, strange story of someone so different from anyone I know. What pertains to me, though, is the soothing circles his fingertips make on the inside of my arm.
“Lucid is a film studio? I met Ana, a girl you... saved. And slept with.”
“Worked with.”
“At seventeen! How old were you when you had sex with a seventeen-year-old?”
He frowns, mouth pursing into a small, regretful heart. “Twenty-one.”
“And you slept with a seventeen-year-old!”
“It was work, Savannah.” He withdraws from my arm and slaps his thighs. “God, Henry’s right. Why do I even try anymore? It’s bullshit. Why do I fall in love outside work?”
“Ha, you should stick to porn stars,” I say bitterly.
“They’re not attractive to me.”
“Why do you sleep with them then?”
He turns, staring at me full-on again. “It doesn’t mean that I don’t like having sex with them. As I said, I’ve always been hyper-sexual. You could probably drop any old bag in my lap and I’d get hard and fuck her if she wanted it. I’ve done gay porn. I’ve done BDSM, female-friendly erotic movies. You name it, babe, and my cock enjoys it. There’s something delicious about all of it.”
His gaze has gone dark with heat and righteousness, how dare you cast me out, how dare you limit your beliefs to your own little straight square world.
My brain is so angry at him. My chest sputters fractures of my heart into a bloody storm in there. But my most private area warms at his insistence and at the force of his virility.
“You tear me apart!” I shout, and then he’s on me, pressing me into the pillows, sobbing against my lips. My brain shuts down. My skin decides, and then I am kissing him back.
“I wish I’d never met you,” he hisses as he sucks on my lips and presses his tongue inside my mouth, and I arch, arch the way I always do with this man, everyone’s baby—my baby—oh god!
“I’d have been fine if I hadn’t met you.” He finds my panties between us and pushes inside me. I moan, trying to say no, but I quake around his fingers—right away, I quake, and he whispers my name over and over, Savannah, Savannah, Savannah.
Just one more time, just us, only us, forget everyone else and everything he does. My pain dissipates with him watching me, touching me, with the love in his eyes and the despair on his lips. We rip my clothes off—his—
I don’t want to think.
I’m senseless wanting more of him than anyone else has ever had, feel him coat me and keep him for later when I am sad again.
I want him inside me, just this last time, but he breaks to pull out a condom.
“No condom,” I moan. I’m on the pill.
“No, baby. I won’t do that to you.”
“But why? Please,” I whimper.
“I’d never risk your health.”
He works me like a dancer, hips swaying and massaging, milking every sigh I own. I jut into him. He threads his fingers through mine, white-knuckling me into the mattress, and when he comes too, my heart is whole and full and it’s hard to believe it was ever shattered. “I love you.”
He doesn’t let me go once we’re sated. Moist with sweat, he twists us so he’s on his back with me draped over him. He removes the rubber, ties it, and deposits it in the windowsill. I wonder how many times he’s done that before.
How many times? How many women?
I let out my anguish, a small puff while my endorphin high sinks.
“Why didn’t you want to do it without a condom? Where you afraid I was going to trap you by getting pregnant?”
I don’t know why I say this. It’s messed up. All we did was indulge in a last fuck. I’m out of here as soon as he lets go of me.
Again that tenderness in his eyes when he looks at me. “There’s nothing I’d like more than you trapping me. I’d get you a ring so fast you wouldn’t even have time for a pregnancy test.”
When your chest constricts enough, it pushes tears up your throat in the form of a small ball. I have one teasing my esophagus now, and I swallow to keep it from taking over.
“Be serious. You guys always wear condoms at work, right? Don’t you people sleep with your wives and stuff without a latex barrier between you?”
He kisses my temple. I turn my head so that I look at Princess, not him, and he breathes against my hair. “I can’t speak for everyone else. The most expensive scenes are the ones shot without rubber so the audience can see it all. The actresses have to be certified clean for me to work with them, but I still worry about you. I’d never want to jeopardize you.”
We’re not together anymore, and I see the irony in my anger right now. It doesn’t stop me from bursting out, “You have bare sex with them and refuse to do it with me? Ha, that makes me wonder who you’re protecting, all of your sidekicks or your girlfriend.”
“Shit,” he mutters, and I get the feeling he hasn’t heard this one before. He’s been there, done that, but I’ve finally surprised him. I want to feel proud, but all I feel is a scratching in my lungs, like I’ve got some ragged tool grinding against delicate tissue in there.
“What do you want me to do, Savannah? Not give a damn about you?”
He wants to fight like we’re still together?
Oh I’ll do it!
“How about—oh I don’t know—wearing protection with the women who supposedly mean nothing to you, and sleep bare with your girlfriend? You know, just one of those crazy suggestions.” I set the heels of my hands against the cushion and try to press up and away from him. He doesn’t let me. Instead, he pulls me down and kisses my ear, travels down my neck to the base where my collarbone dips in the middle.
“Okay.”
“Whatever. And that stuff doesn’t even matter anymore, Ciro. We’re not together. I’m not— Ah I can’t do this with you.”
“Savannah, I’ll tell Sharon I’m not doing a single scene without a condom anymore. I’ll tell them I have a girlfriend and that I intend to marry her and have babies with her as soon as she’s ready. Now, tomorrow, in fifteen fucking years, I don’t care. I’m telling Sharon now so she knows how to book my next gigs from here on until forever.”
“Please don’t.”
“Please think! Give me a chance, Savannah. Have you ever been loved the way I love you?”
Never!
I wring out of his arms. I can’t lie here and allow him to contort my sense of right into something it can’t be. “The human race is monogamous. We’re supposed to be a twosome. Both parts are supposed to agree to this.”
“And I do.”
“Oh yeah, by wearing a condom?”
“And never being unfaithful to your mind and your heart.”
“Ha!” I stalk to the window and stare out at the balcony beyond. I slide my hands upward, letting the glass cool my cheek. “I get it now. I asked you once if your marriage broke apart because you were unfaithful to Silk. You said you weren’t.”
I don’t hear him move, so I jump when his arms fold around my middle and his stomach presses against my back. “Yeah. She was the only person in my heart and in my head. I never even looked at another woman in the years Silk and I were together.”
“But you were ‘working.’” I chuckle, shaking my head.
“Of course. We were both working for a living.”
I side-eye him. “And you weren’t jealous of her having sex with other guys?”
His chin lowers to my shoulder. “No. I knew she loved me. We’re performers. Just like the actors you know from mainstream movies, we summon feelings and pour them into our moves. I don’t do guys often anymore, but the last time I had to for a contract, I thought of you and your response to me in bed.”
“You’ve even been with guys since we got togeth
er?”
“For work, yes.”
“Do you let them... on you?”
“I did when I was younger, but I’m in a position to not have to do the few things that turn me off anymore.” He laughs softly. “The director doesn’t like me turned off either, so win-win.”
“Do you feel sad when you have to do ‘a job’ and think of a girlfriend to make you perform?”
He tips my head back so I have to meet his eyes. “Do you ever fantasize while having sex?”
My face ignites the way it did during our first weeks together. It triggers a small smile from him. “I take that as a yes. Do you ever fantasize while you’re with me?”
My face is on fire, and I feel like I cheated on him in my thoughts. Why did I do that anyway? Sometimes, I cheated with memories of one of our earlier trysts.
I guess that’s not cheating.
He interrupts my chain of thoughts. “It’s natural, you know. We feel so good, and we want it even better. So we think of other wonderful things. I guess my answer is, ‘no.’ I’ve never felt sad over adding my imagination into the mix to finish a scene to the satisfaction of the director.”
I break out of his hold and cup my neck with my elbows around my ears. I don’t want to see him. I need a shield against how he makes me feel, how he’s making me understand more and more about what he does.
I leave the couch and plod toward the kitchen. Pick up a throw blanket from a chair and drape it around me so I’m covered when I reach the fridge. I open it, needing something to drink. I’m too scattered to select something.
“Let me.” His voice is gentle. A carafe of chilled water is removed from the second shelf and a dewy bottle of rosé from the door. His arm circles me again when I trip on the too-long throw blanket. I wasn’t about to fall. He guides me to the nearest barstools and accommodates me on it like I’m a child.
“Wine?”
I nod.
He pulls down two long-stemmed crystal glasses. The wine clucks as is tints the bottom of my glass pink. I keep my eyes on it, taking a break from his presence. He scoots the drink over and sits down next to me. I’m too aware of his bare torso, black boxer briefs the only fabric covering him.