by Mia Malone
***
Nina
Matthias shared that he had ideas about our sex-life, which was something that sounded pretty damned exciting. I’d liked what we did, which wasn’t exactly middle-aged and not always horizontal, but it wasn’t not exactly wild and crazy either. I’d wondered about a few other things I hadn’t been sure if I should bring up and letting him take the lead seemed like something I would enjoy thoroughly.
Then he asked me to go and get my vibrator.
Because he wanted to watch me use it.
I could do that.
I smiled at him when I’d retrieved the thing from my bag, and wiggled the small, pink appliance. He’d rolled over to his back, and if someone had told me back in my twenties that I’d feel that rush of heat just from looking at a fifty-something man, I would have laughed.
His hair had grown, and Luke’s cousin Tony cut it in a way that made him look a little less distinguished and formal, but a lot hotter. His beard was somehow informal too, and I knew Matthias had caved in and let Tony trim it. There were a couple of steri-strips on his flat belly, and the hair on his lean chest was almost entirely gray.
The look in his eyes was scorching hot, and then he slowly slid the sheets off.
“Take off your panties,” he said, and I pushed them down.
If someone had told the twenty-something me that I could feel so sexy even though my body had changed, I would have laughed too, but from happiness. My boobs weren’t perky, and I was still slim, or slimish, at least, but it wasn’t the same as back then, and it didn’t matter.
“Come here,” Matthias ordered, and his voice had deepened in a way I knew meant he liked what he saw. He pushed my hand away when I reached for his briefs to help him out of them. “You first,” he said. “We’ll get to me later.”
“Okay,” I breathed out, hoping that getting to him would mean his cock in my mouth.
“Straddle me, baby,” he murmured, so I did. “Now, make yourself come.”
He used his hands on my hips to grind my pussy against him as I moved the gently vibrating stick between my folds, and over my clit. It built quickly, but I held back and moved it from side to side.
“I think we should get some other things,” Matthias said. The deep rumble of his voice rushed through me and made me shudder. “Want to watch you use a dildo,” he went on. “And maybe...”
His hands moved over my behind, and I felt the tip of a finger tease my back entrance.
“Ah,” I breathed out when he pushed harder, and a quiver went through my belly.
I had never tried something like that, but the way it burned felt good, and I moaned.
“Yeah,” he said. “Want to take you here, so we need to work up to that.”
“I –”
I cut myself off when an orgasm rushed through me, and I tilted my head back as I came in long waves of pleasure.
“You like that,” Matthias murmured when I’d moved the vibrator away, and was leaning my head on his shoulder. “When I play with your ass.”
“Maybe,” I murmured breathily.
“Yeah,” he said, but that was mostly because I’d started moving my hips against his cock.
“Can I make you come now?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he repeated.
I pulled his briefs off and moved down to between his legs, pushing them apart.
“Good?” I asked.
He nodded and was about to confirm that I wasn’t tearing any stitches when I leaned forward and took as much of him as I could into my mouth. His long, deep groan seemed to vibrate through me, and I started bobbing my head, using one hand to hold him and the other to caress his balls.
Then I pushed one of his legs up a little and moved a finger over him in the same way he had done to me.
“Baby,” he murmured. “Don’t –”
I'd pressed the tip of my finger inside, and he groaned hoarsely.
“Maybe we’ll play with you too.”
He shook his head, but I felt how his cock twitched and thought that, oh, yeah, we would totally play with his ass too.
When I pushed my finger a little further inside, his face hardened, and I took him deeper into my mouth, sucking harder.
“Wanna come inside you,” he ground out. “Fuck, I’m close.”
I let go of him and moved until I was straddling him again, and then I reached for the vibrator.
“I want to come again,” I murmured. “Can you hold back?”
“If you hurry,” he rasped out.
I only took the tip inside and started rocking my hips, sliding the vibrator in just the right place. He was breathing heavily, and when our eyes met, it rushed over me again, so I pressed down until he was buried to the hilt.
“That’s it,” he grunted. “Fuck, I’m –”
He pulled me down toward him, and his lips moved against my neck when he groaned loudly. I felt how his cock twitched as I let another orgasm rush over me, and it seemed to last forever. Through the pleasure, he held me pressed tightly to him, murmuring softly against my neck.
“I like your ideas,” I shared when my pulse was beating almost regularly again.
“Babe,” he said smugly. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
***
I heard Jacob's loud laughter when I opened the kitchen door, which wasn't a surprise. Everyone loved my parents.
Dad was interesting and entertaining but boisterous and sometimes a little too crude, which he attributed to being a starving artist. My mother was the sweetest person in the whole world, but incredibly calm, cool, and collected, which she said was because she'd handled a moody, starving artist for a long time. Neither of them talked much about the fact that they both came from very, very privileged backgrounds. The financial largesse in both their families had dwindled, so by the time they were through college, they were mildly comfortable but not in any way wealthy.
They had the right connections, though.
Dad had an undisputable and absolutely amazing talent, but the prestigious gallery where he had his first showings was owned by Mom’s cousin.
And when I wanted to transfer from Brown to Yale, Mom called someone she greeted as Buffy-my-darling, and it was a done deal.
It wasn’t something they flaunted, and I suspected that they rarely thought about it. A long time ago, I told Layla that it was strange how they simply took their privilege for granted, but she’d laughed at me and told me that so did I.
Perhaps I did. It was hard not to when it had always been there, although the way Lay said it was more indulgent than unfriendly, so her words didn’t hurt. I’d anyway thought a lot about that over the years, and had tried to be mindful of how carefree and easy my childhood had been in so many ways.
I grew up traveling the world, following my father’s whims, as he created the pieces of art now on display in museums all over the world. My first memories were from Italy, and how I’d run with the other children while the adults drank Bellinis and laughed. We moved to the Faroe Islands when I was ten, and I spent a couple of my early teenage years in Norway. Then we moved on to Zimbabwe, swiftly followed by Nepal and London.
My parents had loved their gypsy lifestyle, and I wouldn’t have changed it for anything but felt mostly relief when I started college and got to stay in the same place for several years. Then I met Dave and stayed for twenty years in the same house.
I suddenly missed how the morning sun painted the church towers and houses a pale, peachy pink.
“Nina!” Mom called out as I walked into the kitchen. “Why the frown?”
“I was thinking about Riccione,” I said. “I miss it.”
“So, go back.”
It was as simple as that to them, and perhaps it should be for me too?
“Okay,” I said and looked at the kitchen counter where Dad and Jacob were busy making sushi. “Will there be enough of that for us?”
“We’re going to the hotel,” Matthias cut in from the door. “Danny called. He’ll
take most of tonight off and asked if we’d have dinner with him. Len showed up earlier too, and he brought Luke and Jeff.”
I’d met Danny and liked him. Since he too had moved around quite a bit in his life, we had plenty to talk about, and he was hilarious. There was something in his eyes, though, and I asked if something happened to him, but Matthias just shrugged and said evasively that Danny had gone through some shit. I interpreted that to mean it was shit which wasn’t any of my business, and let the topic drop.
“Dinner at the hotel with our friends,” I said and raised a hand, palm up. “Sushi made by two adorable, fumbling senior citizens...” I raised the other hand and pretended to weigh my options.
A small piece of salmon hit me straight between my eyes, and I stared at my father.
“Dad,” I snapped.
“Not me.”
“Me,” Jacob said with a wide smile and pointed at himself with both hands. “A fumbling senior citizen with a great aim.”
I opened my mouth and watched in stupefied silence how Jacob and my father high-fived each other.
“Jesus,” Matthias muttered.
I walked over to throw the fish away and got a piece of paper towel from Mom.
“Wipe your face, sweetie,” she said with a smirk.
Jacob laughed even louder suddenly and nudged Mom with his shoulder.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a sister, would you?” he asked with a wink.
My eyes almost popped out of my head because he sounded just a little bit flirty, although mostly since my mother indeed had a sister.
A crazy one.
“O-ho,” Dad boomed. “She does, Jacob.”
“Dad,” I said feebly, hoping to step what I knew would be a loving but not entirely favorable description of my aunt.
“You’ll like her,” Dad went on. “She’s kind of slutty.”
Matthias pushed out a small cough, and I closed my eyes.
“She isn’t,” Mom protested, but since she did this with a giggle, it didn’t sound credible at all.
“Nothing wrong with a little slutty,” Jacob said, which made Matthias groan quietly.
“Josie, my darling,” Dad said indulgently. “Rose would be the first to agree, and she’s calmed down.”
“Marginally,” Mom said with a chuckle.
“Is she pretty?” Jacob asked.
“The prettiest woman in the whole world,” Dad said immediately.
“Huh?”
“We’re identical twins,” Mom clarified and gave Dad a pat on his cheek. “Thank you, Cornelius.”
“So, you're saying that there's a slutty woman looking like you out there?” Jacob asked with a short laugh and added, “I'm game.”
They laughed, and I wondered if one ever got old enough to listen to one's parents engage in banter of the kind that was full of sexual innuendo.
“When are you leaving?” I said, trying to sound annoyed, even though they were kind of cute.
“We bought a house here,” Mom said and started moving sushi-rolls to a plate.
A what?
“Where?” I croaked.
“Jacob’s neighbor passed away a while back, and his sons wanted to sell, so we bought it.”
They had been on the island for three days, and I had no clue what to say, so I stared at Matthias as if he could tell me what’s going on, which he obviously couldn’t. Then I turned to my parents.
“How could you –”
Afford it, I meant to say, but it would have been rude.
“I sold New Dawn,” Dad said anyway.
New Dawn was a big painting he’d made the night I was born and had held on to since then. It was enormous and quite famous, but I’d just seen it a few times, and mostly in photos like everyone else since it was stored away somewhere safe.
This was a surprise because Dad hated selling any of his pieces and had always claimed that the big, abstract landscape was special to him. He’d turned down plenty of highly lucrative offers for it over the years.
“You didn’t have to,” I said. “You have money.”
“As if I’d take your money,” Dad said.
“It’s your money.”
“No.”
“It is.”
“N –”
“Nina,” Mom cut in, knowing that we could go on like this for a long time if she didn’t put a stop to it.
“What?” Dad and I snapped at the same time.
“He kept that painting for when we wanted to settle,” Mom said, ignoring us completely. “That time has been coming for a while, and the island is perfect. The house is perfect. The amount we got was ridiculous, so we’re good.”
I heard a familiar sound of steel in her voice and knew that arguing would be futile, so I settled for a meek, “Okay.”
“I don’t get it,” Jacob said and nudged Dad. “You must have made millions over the years.”
“Every time he sold a painting, he put most of the money away,” Mom said with a casual shrug.
“For Nina?”
“Yeah,” Dad said. “Don’t like having a lot of money. It just makes you lazy.”’
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes because I’d heard this plenty of times over the years, and there was no way my energizer-bunnyesque father would be described as lazy.
Prolific was a word widely used in art circles.
“I beg to differ,” a calm voice said into my eye-roll.
Aha.
Matthias had apparently found the flaw in Dad’s strategy.
“I’m not saying you’re lazy,” Dad said quickly.
“I know,” Matthias retorted. “You’re saying your daughter is lazy.”
Exactly. I had all that money in some account I rarely looked at but hadn’t been idle a day in my life.
“Of course n –” Dad cut himself off and raised his brows. “Wiseass,” he muttered.
Matthias turned to me with a grin.
“I believe it’s our time to high-five,” he said haughtily.
“Bet your cute tush it is,” I said with a smirk and raised my hand.
Chapter Thirteen
Working from home
Matthias
He still felt a little bit stiff when he moved, but apart from that, the whole appendectomy experience had been surprisingly easy to move on from.
Len laughed like a fool every time they met, though. Luke was less obvious about it but clearly had a hard time holding his humor in check.
“Fuck it,” Matthias grunted and swept the brush across the canvas.
“It looks good,” Nina murmured and groaned a little when she straightened from the drawing in front of her.
“What? Oh, the painting,” he said, and looked at the seascape in front of him.
Nina’s goddamned father had told him that the abstract flowers he was working on looked like a cheap replica of something the distinguished painter Cornelius Amadeus Miller had already done. The old coot had shared this with a straight face and fuck it if the man hadn’t been right.
This time it might be a Winslow Homer copy, but at least it was a good one.
There was a massive problem with it, though.
“What did you mean?”
“Leonard fucking Jackson,” he muttered. “Laughing idiot.”
“Ah,” she said. “It is kind of funny, though.”
He blinked and stared at her, wondering if she’d lost her goddamned mind.
“I puked all over you.”
“Yes,” she said, and her lips twitched. “It went into my cleavage and down –”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he snapped. “There is no need to go into details.”
“We laughed as we cleaned me up,” she shared.
Matthias froze and stared at her.
“Len wiped my vomit off your tits?” he asked silkily, not finding this funny at all.
“Well...”
“Len wiped –”
“Oh, get over it,” she snapped. “He handed me paper towels,
and yes, he helped to wipe the top part of my chest.” She raised a hand to silence the string of curse words he was about to unleash on her. “While I had my bra on, and it was not one of the lacy ones.”
He closed his mouth and tried to come up with something to say that would make the whole thing less horrific, but settled for a hoarse, “Jesus.”
“Matty, it wasn’t so bad. You were sick.” Her lips twitched again, and he saw how her tee moved a little around her waist as she pressed back laughter. “At least you had soup for lunch and not the pasta.”
He groaned and threw his brush on the table.
“The painting looks good,” she said, clearly trying to placate him.
He did not feel like being placated, but a change of topic was eminently desirable, so he turned to look at the canvas.
“Huh.”
It did look good, actually. But still...
“You don’t think so?”
Should he tell her?
Fuck it. He’d just spit it out.
“I liked painting when I was younger. Liked the art classes, and back then, I dreamed of doing it for a living...”
“But?”
He sucked in air and turned to look at her.
“I hate it,” he said with a sigh. “Or, not hate it, perhaps, but I don't like it the way I did back then.” He winced and wondered if she'd think he was a boring old moron but went on anyway. “I miss the office. I've felt locked in and overworked for years, but while I've been on this paternally ordered sick-leave, I’ve realized that I actually like my job.”
“Yes!” she half-shouted and threw her pen on the table. “Thank God!”
“What?”
“I hate this, too,” she said. “I like doodling, but it’s mostly something I do while I think about, you know... rolling forecasts and how to best break down development expenses.” She made a face and pushed out a weak laugh. “And a new model for business cases. Christ, I’m such a boring, middle-aged moron.”
He started laughing, and her brows went up in surprise.
“We should like creating art because I used to, and you’re Cornelius Amadeus Miller’s daughter. And we’re both not bad at all at it.”
“I know,” she said.