If You Hear Me

by Jenn LeBlanc

  I flip over and grab my phone. He texted me a lot last night, means he’s probably sleeping now. I start reading through the texts, all of them much tamer than the ones I read before I went to sleep. My phone buzzes again.

  * * *

  D } I don’t know where you are but I’m close to the bar and I have cinnamon rolls

  D } Come to me or tell me where to go

  * * *

  I realize, after the phone buzzes again, that I’m hugging it and grinning, and have yet to answer him. I sit up and look at the screen again.

  * * *

  D } ?

  * * *

  I give him my address. When the door buzzes, I let him in and curl up on my sofa. I kept my long nightgown on because it’s like a giant sheet with sleeves. There’s nothing sexy about it certainly, and I can hide my entire body inside the fabric like a tent. Hopefully it’ll keep him away from me. Or me away from him.

  “Hi,” he says. Then he puts the box on the table and walks to the kitchen, coming back with utensils and plates. He serves me one of the biggest, gooiest cinnamon rolls I’ve ever seen. I scoot the plate toward myself with one finger, then lick the stickiness off the tip. It’s too sweet. He hands me a fork and I cut into the roll and ten minutes later I’m sprawled on the sofa and he’s rubbing my feet and flipping through the channels on my Apple TV.

  This isn’t exactly what I had in mind, but at least we aren’t in the bedroom. He turns on some British cooking show, and I roll toward the TV. Two hours later when Netflix decides to shame us for binge watching, I realize I really should be getting up and doing something, like practicing.

  “Did you want to go get some lunch? Maybe talk?” he asks and I’m impressed by the fact that we’re in my apartment but he isn’t trying to get in my bed. Or maybe I’m a little sad. Or maybe I’m glad with a hint of sad.

  “Listen, last night—”

  “Nah,” he says, “we aren’t going to do that. Last night was last night, and we’re just going to let it be and keep moving forward.” He looks a bit nervous, even though he sounds quite confident, and I watch for a minute until he raises one eyebrow and cocks his head.

  “Alright,” I say. “I’ll go get dressed. We’ll do lunch.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Just us?”

  “Yes, just us,” he says. I don’t know why I need this, but right now I do. His friends, well, Xan seems nice but I’m not here for the OMG what a cute couple tell us your how-we-met story! of it all.

  “Good.” I walk into the bedroom and put on a sundress, then think maybe I should wear something a little less like what I was wearing last night. So I pull on my jeans shorts and a cropped sweater. I slide into my gladiator sandals and push at my hair before I finger-comb some of the knots from my hair and twist it into more of a shape.

  When I walk out, he’s stretched on my sofa asleep, his head turned to the side, his hands tangled against his waist. I look down at my phone, knowing he was up all night texting me. I feel moderately guilty so I tiptoe over and slide up next to him. His arm comes around me, holding me to his side, and I drift off in a sleep more peaceful than I’ve known in a while.

  When I wake up he’s facing me, his hand running up and down my back, the TV on quietly behind me. I look up into his face, and it feels like the easiest thing in the world to do. I run my hand down the edge of his jaw until he’s looking down at me. The kiss he gives me is the slowest, warmest, most extravagant kiss I’ve ever had. He takes his time, tastes me—I can tell he’s relearning the shape of me, the particular flavor of me, and I’m doing the same with him. It’s a kiss that only comes with yearning and experience. Knowledge and want. And I do want. So much. I’m forgetting all the reasons I shouldn’t. All the reasons I’ve held back. I feel like he filled me with honey then warmed it up.

  I don’t know how long we lay there curled into each other kissing, but by the time he lifts his head to look at me, my breath is starting to come faster and so is his. I roll over and sit up, and he follows me.

  “I was thinking,” he says.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe you could speak with someone else if it’s too difficult to speak with me?”

  That’s not what I was expecting him to say. It’s like his body is all about the bedroom but his words are all about the conversations we need. I think about that for a moment. Talking to someone else isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that either. “It might be a good idea.”

  He nods and leans back against the sofa but his hand stays on my hip.

  “It doesn’t change the fact that I need to speak with you. I have things to tell you. I do,” I say.

  “I know and I’m here. I’m not going anywhere and I’ll be as patient as I’m able.”

  “I know you will. In the meantime…” I lean against him and run my hand up his thigh as I lick a strip on the shell of his ear, but his hand comes down over mine and instead of encouraging me, he stops me. “You don’t want to?”

  “You can’t possibly know how much I want to, but I don’t want to lose you again and it seems like every time we do this, or some semblance of this…you end up running.”

  “This is my house. I have nowhere else to go.”

  He watches me for a minute, and I know he’s wrestling with whether or not we should and at the same time…I start to lose my nerve, so I drop his hand and move into his space and begin all the unbuttoning and unzipping of everything that’s keeping his body from mine. Then all I feel is his breath against my neck as he tugs my sweater up, his hands moving down to the muscles of my thighs. But he stops again. “I can’t…”

  “You can, you have. It’s not difficult, it’s the easiest thing in the world.”

  “That’s the problem, Cam. I don’t want you just for right now. I want you forever.”

  What do I want? I can’t see past my hormones at the moment to know whether or not I can do forever. The fact is without the truth between us, there’s no way for me to promise forever. Because he doesn’t know, and I can’t assume he’ll be okay with what I have to tell him. “Why not both?” I ask but I know it isn’t convincing.

  “Listen, I’m just frightened. Every time we do this—”

  “Every time?”

  “I mean…there was Paris, and then the club.”

  “The club was last night, and you’re here today.”

  “I know, and I want to be here tomorrow. We need to slow down. We just need to talk some more before.”

  “I can’t talk yet. I just can’t.”

  “I understand, but please…I can’t do this again with the fear that I’ll lose you all over again. I just…”

  I’m suddenly cold and I stand from the sofa to turn. “Okay.”

  He grabs my hand. “Can we go for a walk? Let’s go to Griffith or some other touristy place and walk a bit. Then maybe we’ll talk, maybe we won’t. But don’t push me away.”

  I close my eyes and try to let the warmth of his hand seep back into my blood. “Okay.”

  Five

  Daniel

  We brunch on Melrose at my favorite cafe where she sees Prince Caspian and barely holds her shit together while I drink the best dirty chai I’ve ever had in my life. Then we wander the shops. We walk and talk about simple things. We talk about what we’ve done, where we’ve been, the things we’ve accomplished and seen. She prefers orange to pink now, but she wouldn’t give away a pair of pink Manolo Blahnik’s if they were a gift. Standards, she says. We don’t get into any of the truths I know she needs to share, but small snippets work their way around all of it. Like a mouse with cheese.

  By the time we get a car back to her house, I feel closer to her than I have in very a long time. This is what’s been missing…the simple ability to be us. We aren’t just hearts and sweat and bodies. We are so much more, and it’s that more that makes what our hearts and bodies do so powerful.

  I feel her hand in the car on my knee, one finger circling th
e small divot next to my kneecap and her shoulder leans heavily into mine. I play with her fingers as they trace longer and longer strips up my inner thigh until her nails scratch at the thick seam in the crotch of my jeans. I’m so turned on by everything that she is that I’m not sure I can walk away from what she’s offering again. We stop in front of her building, and she pushes me out before I can argue.

  By the time she pulls me down the hallway to her loft, I’m mostly hard and half undressed and I’m not really sure how I got this way. There was a moment when she’d shoved me in the elevator and pulled my shirt up—one of my arms tugged free before the doors opened and she turned away and I followed behind her like a starved puppy behind a woman with treats. And don’t I just want all those treats right now? Everything I needed, the discussion, the learning, the catching up…it all pales in comparison to the basic want that I knew was underlying all of it from the beginning.

  I look around her place this time. Her apartment stretches wide in just the right way, letting in enough of the downtown skyline that it isn’t pretentious, but again, enough of the downtown skyline that you know for a fact you’re standing inside three million dollars at the edge of Hollywood.

  It’s Daddy-style money for sure and reminds me of just how much she’s lost in her life.

  She shoves my shoulders, and my hands hit the windows as she comes up behind me. “Were you waiting for more of an invitation?”

  “No, I…no I wasn’t. I was just—” I turn around, and she’s standing there with nothing on but these pink lace panties. I swipe one thumb over a barely covered nipple and it rises to meet me, and my dick returns the favor. Her gaze drops to my pants, her hands following and… “Admiring…” I continue but my brain, I think, just slid out of my ear.

  “You can admire my view or you can come worship me. It’s your choice. One lasts five minutes. The other will take all night.”

  Shit. She turns, and I follow, watching the perfectly round globes of her ass bounce as she walks away from me. Hopefully toward a bed. Or… whatever, I don’t care. I just want my hands on her and right here is fine. Anywhere is fine. I catch up to her then realize I’m crowding her toward the door at the end of a short hallway, my hands holding her hips, my thumbs on those sweet dimples her spine makes.

  She walks up to the bed which is draped with pink, fluffy, cotton candy-like streams of fabric that pool on the floor around the posts and I realize she’s been in L.A. at least long enough to have decorated this room.

  She turns at the foot of the bed and scoots back until she’s spread out on the giant pile of pillows at her headboard like a sacrifice to some god and she fully expects to be worshipped.

  I’m feeling a bit…overwhelmed. I take a deep breath and all I smell is her, coffee and vanilla and sex, and I know this is exactly where I was meant to be. I’ve been looking for this woman for ten years and here she is, exactly where I’ve been dreaming of her, laid out in front of me and…my breath catches and I trip like an idiot on the fabric spooled at the bottom of the posts. I try to reach out to catch myself, but my arm is tangled in the shirt that’s half on and half off, and I land in a pile on the floor. Laughing. Because of course.

  Meli

  All I can hear is giggling. He pulled the top sheets with him, dragging me along, and I think I’m giggling too because that was patently ridiculous, but perfectly us. I roll over and look down at him on the floor and wonder what I’m doing, while at the same time, I just can’t stop laughing. Everything up until this point was textbook Hollywood big-screen sexy. How’s he gonna trip and fall and ruin it? I can’t help but to giggle as I run my finger down his jaw from his ear to his chin, and he opens his eyes and looks up at me, his gaze wild. “Are you…okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah…I think so?” he says, and my face hurts from grinning.

  “Because you just took a digger on the floor, at the foot of my bed. The bed—in case you’re curious—is a much softer landing.”

  “Did you…did you design this room to be a hazard? Because it’s super cute…but it’s a hazard. And you…I mean did you purposefully leave me half dressed so I couldn’t balance myself?” He looks up at me, his top half tangled in his clothes and his bottom half tangled in my bed.

  I can’t do anything but laugh. I shrug, playing with his neck, his collar bone, his nose. “Does this happens to you often, being ridiculous?”

  He smiles then closes his eyes, and I watch as he seems to get himself back under control before he rolls up to sitting, untangling then crossing his legs at the foot of my bed, his face close to mine. “Are you sure we should do this?” he asks, and I narrow my gaze at him for continuing to question my decision-making skills. “I’m not sure we should do this,” he whispers, and I know for a fact we need to do this. I need to feel him. I need to know that reality either is or isn’t what I’ve been dreaming about for the last decade since I returned to France.

  “You don’t want to fuck me?” I ask, and his eyes open, his gaze searching mine.

  “Wow…you used to be—”

  “A child?” I ask, because he doesn’t know me anymore. And I don’t know him. After everything that’s happened, the knowing each other like we did has slipped away from us.

  “That’s not what I meant—but yeah, I guess that is what I meant… This is so strange, it suddenly feels like the last time I saw you was yesterday and then you were gone, but now you’re back and those ten years…” His voice fades away probably because of the look of disbelief I didn’t manage to quash. He’s…pretty in a very manly way. I can see where Daniel was, the Daniel I’ve known forever. But this Daniel has so many more features that I’m interested in learning. His hair isn’t as blond as it used to be, but still streaks in the sun. The scruff on his face that’s more uniform than it used to be but obviously still doesn’t grow well enough for a full beard. His nose even looks more adult to me. He cocks that one eyebrow as I inspect him.

  “First of all, you did see me yesterday, and if you’ve already forgotten that, I really do need to work on leaving more of an impression. Second of all, you don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. We were children back then, the first time, before. We were just children,” I say, allowing it to sink in as I look at his body on the floor below me. I prop my head on my hand and drift the other down and across his collarbone then down the center of his chest as his breath catches.

  “I don’t care if we were children,” he says. “I meant every word I said to you then and I still do today. I know everything I felt for you was true. You can’t just wave a hand and make that disappear. We may have changed—grown up—but I knew you then, and I want to know you now.” He waves a hand in the air then pushes against mine on his abdomen, keeping it from moving farther toward his waistband, which is still in place. Sadly.

  “Do you?” I ask. “Because I remember every word you said to me with perfect clarity. I’ve played those words in my head over and over, trying to reconcile my feelings with what I knew my future was going to be.”

  “If you tried so hard to remember, why didn’t you try to contact me?” he asks. But that’s not something I want to discuss right now. I don’t want to think about the reasons I left, the reason I was pulled away from my entire world and taken back to France to live in seclusion. In shame.

  His thumb skims my forehead and he pushes my curls back from my cheek, wrapping his fingers around the back of my neck as he pulls my face toward his, and I slide off the end of the bed, catching myself over him with my arms, my hips still on the bed. Then his mouth is on mine and his lips are so soft and so sweet and I think I might just cry at that touch. I knew I missed this. I always knew exactly what I was missing when I wasn’t with him. I never exaggerated it and I never tried to minimize it. I quantified it perfectly in my memories, and this moment, this kiss, is everything I ever imagined it might be.

  My mouth is colder than his but he warms me slowly, lends me his heat when he shifts and comes up to his knees
without breaking the kiss, then he rolls me to my back as he crawls over me and settles on top of me at the foot of this massive bed that has one divot on one edge because I always sleep in the same spot.

  His hands skim up my sides as his weight grounds me. He’s so heavy, so solid and comfortable, like I’ve been too loose all this time, like I’ve felt so very out of control and now here I am and I’m beneath him again and I’m vulnerable but also anchored and safe. Safe. I feel safe. I feel tears streak my cheeks and I open my eyes to find his clenched, and his mouth wavers against mine as his tears fall, and I push and we roll again and then I’m over him and now I’m the comforting weight and his hands find more places to remember, to relearn, to discover, because this woman’s body isn’t the sweet virginal body he once had his tentative hands all over.

  He knew every single inch of me back then, but I have many more inches now than I did and I want to share every single one of them with him. I want him to learn my new dimensions, my upgraded topography.

  He grabs my ass and pulls me tight against himself, and I collapse, my head on his shoulder as he turns his face to me and still we kiss, and still we share breath and still his hands are learning and finding me everywhere until he stops, he pulls back, he looks at me, and he says the exact same thing he said to me the first time we ever made love. “Can I?”