by Penny Reid
I was lost in these thoughts, my tears having ebbed, when I became aware that Martin was staring at me, watching me. I felt his gaze scan my form. He’d paused, as though considering me, then brushed his knuckles over the swell of my breast.
My breath hitched and my gaze jumped to his.
“There,” he said, his eyes searching mine as he touched me again, this time also tugging the strap of my top down and baring my breast. His other hand trailed along the column of my throat to my shoulder then collarbone, tickling me. I shivered and sighed. “There it is. You have it, and when I touch you like this, it’s there.”
I could only look at him in response. I didn’t want to move even though we were breaking the No-Touch Tuesday rule. I was caught in rule-versus-want purgatory. Ultimately, I decided not to move, and No-Touch Tuesday could go help itself to jumping off a cliff.
His hands slid down my sides, stomach, and hips. Under the water, he used the backs of his fingers on the inside of my thighs and I tensed, paying no heed to my sore muscles.
“I understand that you’re not ready for me to fuck your sweet pussy with my tongue. I do. I understand.” His whispered words sent a lightning strike of white-hot longing through me. I felt like I might break in half.
He continued, all the while his fingers stroked back and forth, each time coming closer to my center. “If you help me soften my calluses, I’ll help you soften yours.”
I swallowed, feeling dazed. “How?”
“Be passionate.”
I shook my head, a dizzy denial spilling from my lips. “I’m just not built that way.”
“From where I’m sitting, you are.” Martin growled this then leaned forward to steal a quick kiss, his mouth leaving a trail from my jaw to my neck, whispering after biting my ear, “You are. You’ve just…turned it off, buried it for some reason.”
“Why do you even care?”
“Because, Kaitlyn, and I don’t know how many times you’re going to make me say this, I care about you, I want you.”
“But why—”
“Why do people care about each other? What is attraction? I can’t give you a list of reasons why I react to you like I do. This isn’t an equation to balance. You’re the one I’m always thinking about. It’s you. It just is.”
“You need to rethink that list, because what if I’m just…asexual?” I felt unsteady and sensitized; the hot, balmy, bubbly water licking my bare breasts and back. As such my words were breathless, labored.
He leaned back, captured and held my gaze before speaking. “This isn’t about sex, Parker. But for the record, you’re sexy as fuck. I’m talking about passion. Wanting something. Loving it. I’m passionate about rowing, and I’m passionate about knowing how everything works and telling other people what to do.” He smirked at this last thought, then his eyes grew staid and thoughtful. Martin’s knuckles skimmed up my inner thigh and finally, finally touched my center. He rubbed the back of his middle finger up and down the apex between my spread legs, whispering, “And I’m passionate about you.”
My breath hitched, needy and painful spikes of pleasure originating from where he touched me, singing through my body. These sensations were unwieldy, unmanageable, and I realized it was because I believed him. I believed he was passionate about me.
“Touching you right now is meaningful for me. Tasting you, taking you now, here, would be meaningful for me.” He removed his fingers and my thighs tightened. Ignoring my reflexive protest, he lifted his hands out of the water, and then pulled my bikini straps back up my shoulders. He covered me as he said, “But it’s not going to be meaningful for you…unless you’re passionate about me.”
CHAPTER 4
The Discovery of Atomic Structure
It was past midnight and I was lying in the middle of my giant bed, staring out the skylight to the stars above.
Neither Martin nor I spoke much after we left the hot tub. I couldn’t. I guessed he sensed that I couldn’t, so he let me be.
Sam was not currently with me in my super-huge king-sized bed tonight. I saw her briefly at dinner, but then she and Eric and a few of the other guys decided to go for a moonlight swim. I’d been mostly quiet during the meal and didn’t want to go to the beach. I felt…morose.
Therefore I excused myself, ignoring Martin’s watchful glare as I left, and hid away in my gigantic suite.
Martin was right. I was analytical—overly so—and I’d been using it as a way to suppress passion. Everything could be reasoned away or made to look silly with enough rational scrutiny. Faith, love, hope, lust, anger, sadness, compassion—everything.
And that’s what I’d been doing with every feeling and emotion that was confusing or difficult to control. Except, when Martin touched me I felt a little out of control…or rather, a lot out of control. I felt unsteady, I felt uncertain, I felt…
I felt.
I rolled to my left side; instead of staring out the skylight, I stared at the wall of windows overlooking the beach.
Passion and being passionate were not bad things. Just like arsenic isn’t bad, even though it can be used to murder a person. If passion wasn’t bad, then why was the very idea of being passionate so terrifying?
I sighed, rearranged myself in the bed—again—and punched my pillow. My pillow was seriously getting on my nerves. It wasn’t reading my mind and supporting my neck like I needed. I considered breaking up with my pillow, but then decided to give it one more chance. Settling back on the mattress, this time on my right side, I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to go to sleep.
I couldn’t.
My body was sore, yes. But it wasn’t why I couldn’t sleep. I felt restless, I felt irritated, I felt dissatisfied, I felt…
I felt.
Abruptly I sat up in bed and threw the pillow across the room. I felt like it was giving me inadequate neck support and I hated it. I hated that pillow with passion.
We were never ever, ever, ever getting back together.
I tossed the covers to one side and bolted out of the gargantuan suite. Its largeness was overwhelming and I needed small. I needed safe. I wandered around the house for a bit, intent at first on a visit to the kitchen because...cookies. But at the last minute I took a right instead of a left, went up the stairs instead of down, and found myself in the room with the piano and the guitars.
I hovered at the door and stared at the piano. It was a Steinway grand and it was gorgeous - black and sleek and curvy. Moonlight spilling in through the windows gave it a shadowy, secretive appearance. I wanted to touch it. For some reason, in that moment, it felt forbidden.
It made no sense.
You’re being silly, as it’s just a piano, I thought. But then I pushed that thought away because it felt too rational. Instead I embraced the sensation of feeling. This act, coming here in the middle of the night to touch and play the piano, excited me because it felt forbidden. So I let it be something dangerous, even if in reality it wasn’t, because it made my heart beat faster and my breath quicken.
I closed the door behind me and tiptoed to the instrument. I sat on the bench, wincing when it creaked just slightly under my weight. I set my fingers on the ivory keys and closed my eyes. Inexplicably—irrationally—they felt warm to the touch, soft and smooth.
Then I played the piano.
At first I played a few songs from memory—Chopin, Beethoven, Strauss—then I bluffed my way through a jazzy version of Piano Man, by Billy Joel. Then I bluffed my way through something new, slow and morose, a composition of my own making that had no beginning and no end. It was nonsense because it was the middle, and everyone knows songs have to have a beginning and end.
My lack of adhering to common sense and established norms also felt forbidden and dangerous. It was dangerous because it was altering. Altering me. I felt myself change, shift in some fundamental way as I played entirely in the bass clef.
It was my song.
So what if it never started or ended?
So
what if it was nonsense?
So what?
It was mine and its lack of rationality was seductive. I loved it. It was beautiful to me.
“Prudence,” I said to the empty room, my left hand moving unhurriedly over the keys. “Practicality, good judgment, reasonableness, rationality, realism…” Each word was punctuated with a chord in the key of B minor.
Schubert was said to regard B minor as a key expressing a quiet acceptance of fate, but I was using it now as a battle cry. My right hand joined my left to marry treble and bass, the sweet descant like cries and sighs of melancholy.
But then I realized the cries weren’t coming from the piano. They were coming from me. I was crying. I for real cried, loud and messy and angry. I gave myself over to it, and the piece became incalzando—louder, faster—and it felt good to lose control. Like a release. Like unearthing something essential, but up to this point buried.
I didn’t angry-cry for very long; my tears reached their crescendo and so did the song…and then I just couldn’t play anymore. I stopped mid stanza, folded my arms on the music rest, then buried my head and cried.
They weren’t my normal sedate tears, however. They were still messy and raw. Uncontrolled and unsteady. Restless and irritated. Dissatisfied. They were tears of passion.
Someplace, closer to the surface than I would like, a version of Kaitlyn Parker was rolling her eyes at my dramatics, wanting to point out all the ways I was being epicurean and childish.
I was able to keep her at bay because I wasn’t being childish. In fact, I was finally not being childish. I was waking up from a deep slumber, where the only two things that mattered were being smart and being safe. I was taking the first step toward leaving that behind for something infinitely frightening, for a kaleidoscope of feelings.
The hand on my shoulder made me jump and scared the bejebus out of me. I sucked in a shocked breath, but then immediately released it in a whoosh of relief when I found Martin was the owner of the hand. He was idling behind me.
I huffed another breath, my heart still beating staccato as I calmed myself. I glanced up at him and pointed out the obvious, “You scared me.”
He didn’t respond. I couldn’t see his face very well, but from what I could discern he appeared to be staring at me with something like violent absorption. It was…unnerving. I wiped tears from my cheeks and laughed a little, giving an inch into the instinct to feel silly.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” I said, shaking my head.
“Parker, you said you could play the piano.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I mean, yes. I dabble mostly.”
“Dabble?”
I pressed my lips together, liquid feelings still leaking out of my eyes. “Yes. Dabble.”
“That’s not dabbling. That’s mastery.”
I flinched at his compliment, then immediately shrugged it off. I began to rise, turn away from him. He caught me by the shoulders and turned me to face him, my bottom hitting the piano keys and making a clumsy chord.
“You are an artist.” He shook me a little as he said this, his eyes darting between mine like this—what he was saying—was of vital importance. “Why aren’t you a music major?”
I automatically scoffed and he pushed the bench to the side with a swift nudge from his knee, then stepped into my space, annihilating the distance between us. The hollow, awkward notes from where my backside still pressed against the keys created an eerie, off-tune soundtrack to what was quickly feeling like another confrontation.
“I’m pretty good, but I’m not amazing.”
His gaze searched mine again and his features twisted until they communicated that he thought I was crazy.
“Why are you lying to yourself? What kind of bullshit is this? What I just heard, that wasn’t pretty good. That was…that was spectacular. That was once in a lifetime.”
My chin wobbled, and Martin was growing blurry as new tears filled my eyes. I shook my head in denial but I couldn’t speak. I felt too raw. I felt too vulnerable.
I felt.
Martin’s eyes were devouring my face, like he was seeing me for the first time, or he was seeing a new me, and he was afraid that this vision was fleeting.
“You,” he breathed on a harsh sigh, like the word was torn from deep inside him. I watched him swallow and he appeared to be struggling, fighting against some invisible monster or tide, rising above him and preparing to wash his world away.
He said nothing else, though he looked like he wanted to. Instead he caught my cheek in his palm, and pressed an ardent kiss to my lips. His other hand settled firmly on the base of my spine and brought me against him.
My movement was restricted because he held me so completely; therefore I slid my hands under the hem of his shirt and gripped his rigid sides, loving his smooth, taut skin. I rubbed myself against him, sought to deepen the kiss, a little wild with the irrationality of just feeling.
But then he pulled away, turned away, and crossed to the far side of the room. I slouched, trying to catch my breath, and I heard him curse viciously. Yet almost immediately he turned back and charged at me, muttering another curse before he pressed me more completely against the piano, insinuating himself between my legs.
Again, the discordant music caused by my bottom and thighs was nonsensical and jarring. Nonetheless, my heart swelled at the harsh melody, because it felt real and honest. Martin rocked into me and I sucked in a surprised breath. His erection was unyielding—granite, hard and covetous—and he rubbed himself against my center with an impatience that felt forbidden, dangerous, and seductive.
As well his hands were everywhere, searching, grabbing, wanting, and grasping as though he would remain forever disgruntled with settling for just one place, one touch. They slid under my shirt, pushing it up, insisting I discard the offensive garment. I lifted my arms to assist and he whipped it off, his mouth tasting and biting my collarbone.
His hands cupping my bottom, Martin lifted me off my feet and turned, supporting my weight entirely. He brought me to the side of the instrument. Abruptly he lifted me higher, then relinquished my weight to the piano. He buried his face in my breasts while he showered them with all good things—some painful, some tender, all wonderful—then pushed me gently backward until my back met with the cool lacquer of the instrument. My legs dangled off the side.
“Martin, what—”
“Let me,” he said, his thumbs rubbing a controlled circle around the tight peaks at the center of my breasts, then sliding his hands down my stomach, to the waist of my plain, grey sleep shorts. He curled his fingers around the band, then moved to my bottom, lifting my hips. He tugged the band lower, pulling my shorts and underwear over my hips, bottom, and thighs.
I stared at him as he did this and his gaze didn’t deviate from mine. When my pajamas hit the floor his hands slid up my calves, the backs of my knees, the underside of my thighs, lifting my legs as he went until he’d positioned my heels on the edge of the piano, my legs immodestly spread.
Then his gaze flickered away and he looked at me. I held my breath. Waiting. Watching.
Martin licked his lips, his thumbs at my center opening me. Then he bent and placed a cherishing, closed-mouth kiss directly on my clitoris, his soft, full lips lingering at my apex.
“Oh God.”
I panted. I tensed. My hands gripping the smooth surface of the piano and finding no purchase. Every part of me sore and throbbing from my earlier exercise, yet singularly focused on where his lips loved my body. He leaned away slightly and kissed the inside of my thigh, nipped at the skin, then soothed it with his tongue, trailing a wet path directly to my slick center. He licked me, softly, reverently. Then he licked me again, and again.
He tasted me over and over; wet, lapping noises that struck me as tremendously carnal married with my harsh breaths and moans. The combination was discordant, awkward, and clumsy; yet like the accidental and inharmonious tones of the piano as he’d pressed me against the keys,
the sounds were real and they were honest.
They were the sounds of sex, of desire.
If I hadn’t been lost to my passion, if I’d heard the sounds separate from this act, they might have struck me as lascivious and animalistic, repugnant. But passion changed them. Passion changed us. Passion changed me.
His fingers whispered over the backs of my thighs, making my legs shake. I threaded my fingers through his hair, pressing him to me, needing to hold onto him. Then he did something shocking and wonderful. Keeping his lips on my center, his tongue lapping me loudly, hungrily, he moved his index and middle finger into my body and stroked.
My breath hitched, my hips lifted off the piano, and I felt my insides shatter into a million shards of pleasure. It felt so good it hurt—the sharp edges of my release cutting through me, leaving a trail of ruin and stunning anguish. My lungs seized as I tried to hold on to the sensation, willing it to last and last.
But it didn’t. It couldn’t. And when the shards dissolved and disappeared, leaving me cut and wounded and satiated and defenseless, I realized I was crying again.
Not big messy sobs.
Just quiet, joyful tears.
I didn’t think about them, whether they made sense or what Martin might think. I didn’t try to reason them away or analyze the pros and cons of tears after cunnilingus.
I felt cherished.
I felt.
And it felt like perfection.
***
I slept naked in Martin’s bed. Yep. True Story.
Well, Martin slept. I didn’t sleep much. I couldn’t.
After our early morning inauguration to Wet-and-Wild Wednesday, Martin wrapped me in a blanket and carried me to his room, leaving my clothes strewn all around the piano. I was deposited on his twin bed. He then pulled off his shirt—but left on his pajama pants—and climbed under the covers next to me. He wrapped an arm around my torso and pulled my bare back to his bare front, slipped his leg between mine, and cupped my breast with his palm.