by Nella Tyler
He came back to lean over me again and kissed me. He set one hand on my waist and the other in my hair, knotting his fingers there.
His hips pushed forward, and he slid into me with little resistance.
“Fuck,” he gasped, the expletive lost in the space of our open kiss. I tilted my head back and moaned as he pressed further, and then backed away. He pushed back in, and like this, slowly, he worked his way fully inside me.
Our breathing was coarse, and his pupils were dilated, mouth partly open in complete and total want. I held on to his shoulders, and he began to move, finding a rhythm easily. He moved one of his hands between us to add to my pleasure, and I found myself moving my hips to meet his, our moans accentuating the motions we made, lost to the throes of what this felt like.
“Soon,” he warned me, though there was no need to do so with a condom.
It was too late. I could already feel my pleasure peaking, and when I clenched around him, it triggered his own climax. He shouted into the crook of my neck, nearly pulling my hair too hard as he spent himself.
For a moment, we lay motionless, trying only to breathe. He moved out of me and pulled me to sit up. I sat in his lap, leaned against him, face planted in his chest.
I didn’t know what to say. He didn’t, either, judging by his silence, though he might have also been trying to piece together a coherent thought. I couldn’t remember the last time that someone touched me like that. I couldn’t remember the last time someone held me like this, even though I knew we both needed to clean up.
It was that need that eventually drove him to get up. “I’ll be back,” he murmured, and he kissed my cheek. I knew where the bathrooms were, so I wandered off to go find one, too.
When I looked at myself in the mirror, I shook my head. My hair, for one, was a complete mess. I could already feel a soreness coming on; we hadn’t had the ability to wait, but we ought to have used lube, but honestly, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. The skin on the base of my neck was spotted with hickeys, as were my breasts, and I had marks on my hips where he’d grabbed me.
I felt thoroughly and completely had, and I loved it. I shook my head at myself and my condition. I wanted that again.
My stomach twisted. I turned the sink on and splashed my face with cold water. I wanted that again, and it couldn’t happen. I’d known that going into it, hadn’t it? Everything that we did here was temporary. A fun vacation fling that wasn’t meant to carry on for more than a week or so.
All I could think about was the want in his eyes when he took me. The powerful way he held himself over me.
This was a mistake. I took a deep breath and forced my tears down. This entire thing was a mistake. I shouldn’t have ever gone on a second date with him. It wasn’t wrong for me to want a bit of fun over a vacation, but that’s not what I wanted with Dexter. I didn’t want to leave him behind and never speak to him again. But that’s what I had to do. Anything that I did that prolonged that was cruel to both of us.
I used a washcloth to scrub myself where I needed to be clean. I went back into the room and put my dress on, tucking my underwear into my bra; it wasn’t completely ruined, and leaving it in his trash can would be gross.
I could still get back to my room and save myself from this.
Dexter walked back into the room wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. His hair was a mess, too, and his face was more relaxed than it had been. “Hey. You’re leaving?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “Yeah. Um, I had a good time. Thank you for, you know, everything.” I had a good time? Thank you for everything? This guy just fucked you out of your senses and you’re acting like he took you to go see a bad movie!
He balked a little, but quickly forced his face into something more understanding. He was trying to accommodate me even now. “You don’t have to leave. If you don’t want to, I mean. I have some shorts and shirts that might work for one night. You’re welcome to stay.”
It would have been easier somehow to hear him tell me that he didn’t want me there. “Yeah, I just, I should be getting back.”
Dexter’s brow furrowed. His face read confusion and hurt, but he said, “Okay. I understand.”
Without another word, I scuttled out of the house as though I had been caught trespassing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: DEXTER
I woke up the next morning to someone knocking at my door. I hoped, naively, that it might be Briella. She hadn’t left anything over the night before to reclaim, and she’d made it quite clear that she didn’t want to stay, but I still hoped that it was her. My mind was still reeling from that entire exchange. I’d gone from certain that she wanted to stay with me to uncertain that she even liked me, and we’d slept together.
Even knowing that it probably couldn’t be Briella, I got the door. Tyler was there, wearing work clothes, which was odd for him to do on a Friday. He almost always skipped Fridays to go do something with his band or see other bands—I didn’t know the particulars, just that Fridays were usually busy for me because he skipped them.
“Dude, this is ridiculous,” he said.
“Good morning.” I returned. He walked in, and I went to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. I didn’t even really need the caffeine; I felt rested enough. Still, I wanted some kind of routine to start feeling normal.
“Good morning, my ass,” Tyler snapped. “I had to go up to work every day this week.”
“Not every day. Was it Monday you skipped?”
“Almost every day. I’ve been up there busting my ass. Dad’s breathing down my neck about every fucking thing I do.”
I shrugged, unable to be too sympathetic. It was what I usually dealt with, after all. “Sorry, man. Did he set you up with any bullshit accounts?”
“No, I’ve just been getting more work than I usually do and he’s been holding me to a higher standard than usual.” Tyler shook his head. “Yesterday he bitched at me for like an hour about some technical issue I made in an email I sent to a client. I got bitched at for comma usage.”
That earned a cringe from me. I plopped a sugar cube in my coffee and sat up on the barstool. “Sorry.”
“Yeah, you’re sorry. It’s because you’re gone. You need to come back so I can get a little of this taken off my shoulders.” Tyler shook his head again and sat down on a barstool next to me. “Honestly, it’s driving me crazy. I just want to go back to not giving a fuck. What the hell have you been up to, anyway?”
I wondered how much I should tell him. There was a chance Briella didn’t want to see me again, and Tyler didn’t know her or her family, so there was really little risk in telling him about the night before. “That girl I told you about, Briella?”
“Yeah, yeah, the one you’re being insufferable about.”
“Yeah. Fuck off,” I added, as a defense to his insult. “But yeah. She came over last night and we, um, we sort of slept together.”
“Look at you go!” Tyler clapped me on the back. “I’m proud of you, dude. Getting a little from a tourist. That’s risky; I like it. You need to be doing shit like that more often.”
I raised my eyebrow at the predatory tone he took. I didn’t like to think of women as means to act up or as conquests to have, and I even further hated the insinuation that Briella was a conquest or means to act up. Still, I was glad to have Tyler’s approval on the matter, gross as his approval might be.
Something else that he said stuck out, though. ‘Tourist.’ Briella was a tourist. She was on vacation. She was going to go back to Houston, and there wasn’t anything I could do to get her to stay. We were hardly in love, and it wasn’t like I was about to force her to stay with me, but she was going to leave. I didn’t know that I could bear the pain that it would bring when she did. I didn’t want to think about how awful it would be to see her walk out of my life, especially because it would probably be followed be a forced marriage to someone I didn’t like very much.
I wanted to change the subject. “Hey, um, something weir
d also happened at work recently.”
“What? You had sex with a stranger last night, and you want to talk about work?”
I raised my eyebrows at him.
“Christ. Maybe you and Tiffany would be better off than you think,” Tyler grumbled. “Sure, what’s your story?” he asked with all the enthusiasm of someone watching a documentary on drying paint.
It was actually something I’d been meaning to talk to him about. “There was this account, I don’t remember the name, but this guy came in asking for an investment on something. Dad turned him down, and I couldn’t figure out why.”
“Probably something to do with his credit.”
“It wasn’t, though,” I said. “I checked everything. We’ve approved dozens of accounts and investments just like it, except….” Suddenly it sounded ridiculous, but I was determined to figure out whether or not I was right about this. “Except this guy was black.”
“Okay?”
I sighed. “So, do you think Dad turned the account down because the guy is black?”
“Duh.”
The frankness of the answer caught me by surprise. Tyler didn’t look phased. He looked like he’d just confirmed that the sky was blue. I set my coffee mug down and shook my head. “Wait, wait. Dad’s always been racist?”
“Yeah. He’s been pretty open about it,” Tyler said. “You’ll notice we have maybe two people of color in the office, and they work shipping. He’s always griping because he thinks that black people are freeloaders. He’s basically a shitty person in every respect.”
I couldn’t believe this. I’d had my suspicions, sure, but I had hoped that Tyler would disprove them and cast away any chance that my father could be even slightly racist. I hoped that I had just been thinking things up. Now I felt sick to my stomach. This, coupled with what he’d said about my mother… “How has no one sued him for that? You’re not allowed to not hire someone for a certain job because of their race.”
“You can in Florida,” Tyler said. “Well, sort of. You can hire or fire someone without telling them why.”
I rubbed my forehead. Tyler didn’t know that Briella was black and I decided it would be best now not to let him know. I didn’t trust him to keep a serious secret, and I further didn’t want to find out whether or not he was racist, too. “I don’t get it. How could he be openly racist for years and I didn’t notice? That’s something obvious.”
Tyler snorted. “Um, yeah, except you never noticed when Dad did something obvious. You put him on a pedestal, remember? Always thought that he wanted what was best for us, always thought we had to do shit for the company, and you never questioned him very much. You’ll notice Dad and I don’t talk anymore. I figured out a while ago that the guy isn’t a saint.”
It was my own fault. Tyler was right; I’d put my father on a pedestal that he didn’t deserve to go on and refused to see any fault in him. If I saw fault in him, it would mean everything about my life was wrong. My job, my house, what I was doing, it was all corrupt and wrong. It was founded on a shitty person, and I couldn’t ethically take it.
That was the situation, though. “Shit.”
Tyler stayed over for a few more minutes, talking more specifically about why he was mad at the office lately. Mostly it had to do with bullshit assignments that I could tell that Dad had assigned to keep him busy. Now, though, I had a much harder time sympathizing with Dad, thinking about what Tyler had just told me. Now it seemed I could remember incidents where Dad had said something derogatory or made a comment that rubbed me the wrong way. He wasn’t flagrant in his racism. He didn’t spout racial slurs or enact hate crimes or anything. But that didn’t make his racism any more tolerable.
When Tyler left, I stood around my kitchen, wondering what the hell I was going to do now. I wanted to see Briella again. That was still on my mind, of course; how could it not be? I’d never spent a night with someone like that before. I’d had sex, sure, but my sexual experiences had been largely obligatory, with maybe one or two drunken fun exceptions.
And it wasn’t likely that Briella wanted to see me. I couldn’t shake the way she’d taken off immediately after the fact. I wasn’t sure if I should have stayed with her longer before getting up to clean up, or whether I should have talked to her more. I should have said something, but I hadn’t been able to think of anything to say.
What she’d said reverberated in my brain. ‘Thanks for everything.’ Not only was it an incredibly lame thing to say to someone immediately after sex, but it wasn’t like her at all. Briella was confident, if nothing else.
Still, knowing that there was a chance she didn’t want anything to do with me, I wanted to see her again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: BRIELLA
When I woke up, I could hear Nina snoring, and I decided not to disturb her. She’d been asleep when I came home last night, and I didn’t want to talk to her yet about what I’d done.
I’d been so excited to do sleep with him. I’d been so excited to finally sleep with Dexter, and to spend time with him, and to have a no-consequences fling over vacation. It seemed now that that had been a foolish goal from the start, and I nearly felt sick waking up to know that I’d left him so abruptly. I didn’t even come up with a good excuse.
But God, it had been a good night. The food alone had been fantastic, and I would have probably been genuinely happy we’d left off after dinner. But my mind kept replaying the way he held me, the way he took me without making me feel secondary in the process.
“I’m fucking hungover,” Nina groaned next to me. I rolled my eyes and wondered if she had any crazy stories about sleeping with someone, too. I doubted it. I’d witnessed her the morning after a particularly rough night, and she looked more composed now than she had then.
“Let’s get breakfast, then.”
“Fuck. I don’t want to move.”
“Then don’t move.” I got out of bed and pulled on some clean clothes. “But I’m going to get breakfast.
“Wait, wait, I want to come.” Nina got out of bed. After a few minutes of stumbling around and trying to get ourselves looking more or less in order, we started heading down to the hotel lobby for breakfast and coffee.
“Tell me about last night,” Nina asked. She hadn’t spoken until she’d had a full cup of coffee, and I’d already finished most of my breakfast.
“Well, I went over to his house. He made some food, he gave me a tour of the house—”
“His house is big enough for a tour?”
“Yeah.” I shook my head at how ridiculous that was. “Yeah, it is, and it’s fucking beautiful. Anyway, we walked around and had some wine and I, um, I sort of slept with him.” I said the last three words as I tilted my mug up to my face to quiet the confession.
“Excuse me?” Nina slammed her mug down on the table. “You did what?”
“Shut up, people are gonna hear.”
“Bri, I’m so proud of you!” Nina looked like she was about to jump over the table and start hugging me. I’d expected a reaction like this from her, but it didn’t make my stomach turn any less. Something still felt wrong. She paused and frowned. “Wait. If you slept with him last night, what the hell are you doing back at the hotel?”
“I came back home.”
“Briella!” Nina rarely used my full name, and she threw her head back in her exasperation with me. “The hell you mean, you came home? Was he really bad?”
“No, he was really good,” I said. I buried my face in my hands. “He was really, really good, and I panicked. Like, I can’t just walk away from him. He got me all excited about seeing him again, and I didn’t wanna just leave.”
“You’re not just leaving. You have a few more days.”
“But then I’ll have to leave.”
“So, worry about it then!” Nina reached across the table to grab my head in her hands. “Bri, you have been putting up with some second-rate shitbag for three goddamn years. Finally you got a boy who’s treating you like you’re worth someth
ing. Maybe it’s not true love or happily ever after but you deserve to enjoy yourself!”
I stared at her and wanted to plop my face back into my food. “Isn’t that unfair?”
“Does he know that you’re just visiting?”
I nodded.
“Then you both know what’s at stake. You need to have as much fun as you can while you’re here. When you leave, you can worry about all that sentimental shit, like whether he’s the one for you or whatever. But that doesn’t matter right now. Now you’re having a good time.”
I took a deep breath. She was right. We were both consenting adults fully aware of the situation. He knew that I was a tourist; it wasn’t like I was stringing him along under the guise of being interested in a long-term relationship. We were both just having our fun, and that meant that this could still be non-consequential.
Besides, there was still time left before I went home. While I got dressed for the day, I thought about the full days between now and when I went back to Houston. I’d get sucked back up into my mundane life and trying to get on my feet. With my ex-boyfriend out of the picture, it was going to be a slow, painful struggle to rebuild my life.
I would regret it if I didn’t live it up in Florida as best as I could.
Somehow, I wasn’t sure how, my wandering around in the city had landed me in Dexter’s neighborhood. It was near the beach, and I’d been walking near the beach, and I remembered where his house had been. I walked up to the sprawling estate and considered the worst case scenario.
We fall in love, maybe, or he hates me. Equally terrible things. Both of them could be solved with time, which would be forcibly put between us anyway.
I deserved to be irresponsible for once.
I knocked on the front door, and when Dexter opened it, I was almost hurt by how surprised he looked to see me there. I wanted to apologize for barging out on him like I had.