by Jolie Day
“I need to shower before work,” she said, breezing past the bed and blowing me a kiss. She disappeared into the master bath, and I heard the shower spring to life. An inviting haze of steam emerged from the bathroom door, followed by the scent of sandalwood body gel.
For a moment, I considered letting her get ready but decided against it. She wouldn’t go anywhere. Not until I was finished with her.
I stood from the bed, my sheets tossed on the floor. I picked my way through the maze of discarded clothes we’d left in our wake last night and into my bathroom. The city was already wide awake below me, with taxis honking at kids on bicycles, and the old woman from the flower shop on the corner setting up her displays of chrysanthemums and peonies. Any other day I would have already exercised, eaten, and showered, urged on by the sleepless energy thundering through New York City like an electric heartbeat. Any other day at about this time, I would be making business calls and checking the stock market, running calculations to anticipate fluctuations and acquisitions. I would have made tens of thousands of dollars by lunch—or lost it—and be hot on the trail of a new scheme to make it all back, plus interest.
But right now, all I wanted to do was fuck Maya. For a few minutes more, I needed to indulge in simple domestic pleasures with her. It didn’t usually go this way. On the few other occasions I’d invited a woman to spend the night in my bed, I was up before her to get ready for the day, and I usually had my breakfast delivered from a local café, and the number of my favorite cab company written down for her to use as needed by the time she’d dressed. I was always generous with my money and with my hospitality, but rarely with my time. I was too busy for most relationships, and always too busy for a little pillow talk and scrambled eggs after a one-night stand. Dating wasn’t my strong suit.
But Maya, for whatever reason, managed to capture my attention for more than an hour or two of vigorous sex. I would be lying if I said this magic power and loving gaze of hers didn’t concern me—it could become a dangerous distraction from my work if left unchecked—but I was still in that afterglow, that morning-after haze, and I wanted her body close to mine.
The shower was full of a thick cloud of steam when I stepped inside, and Maya was soaping up her stomach and tits. She gave me a naughty look when she saw my hard cock but continued with her routine like I wasn’t there, pressing up on her tiptoes to ensure that the water from the shower had soaked every inch of her hair. It looked even blacker when it was wet, her skin even more radiant.
“You’ve got a great view,” she said, probably not referring to the unbeatable skyline vista from my bathroom window. The walk-in glass shower, of course, strategically overlooked this vista. There was something empowering about starting your day lording over an entire city.
“I certainly do,” I said, never taking my eyes off the droplets of water running down her firm ass.
I sidled up behind her, taking her hips in my hands and lowering my mouth to kiss her shoulder. She dropped her head to one side to allow me better access and pressed up against me in a way that made me dig my fingers into her skin. I sensed her arousal and lust—she was ready to give herself to me again.
“You have to go to work,” I teased her.
Maya looked back to kiss me long and hard, her hands sliding up her abdomen to cup her breasts. My hand snaked down over her stomach to slip between her legs, coaxing a moan from her lips.
“We… have time… enough. If you can be… efficient,” she gasped while I teased her clit with soft little strokes.
I was determined to send her into her day with shaking legs, sore kitty, and a mind that was full of me and my cock.
Maya turned around so we were chest to chest, and she wrapped her fingers around my shaft while I worked her with my own. The water poured down our bodies until we were both slick and panting. I kissed her hard and passionate, my tongue darting around her own as she climbed closer and closer to orgasm. I rubbed her now-swollen clit with my fingers, this time rougher, and I pinched it. A loud moan escaped her, somewhere between pain and pleasure. When her moans got louder, and she sounded like she was moments from coming, I slipped two fingers into her warm slick pussy, so I could feel her jerk and clench around me as she came.
“Come for me, baby,” I told her, with my thumb stroking her clit. She came hard.
I followed moments later, pressing my face into her shoulder with a groan as I exploded in her hand.
We let the shower wash us clean—we kissed and rode out the last waves of pleasure. I chuckled as Maya caught her breath, holding me tight for support.
“Efficient enough?” I asked with a half-smile.
Maya let out a shaky laugh, a tremor running through her legs, and she wrapped her arms around me.
“Well, it certainly puts a new perspective on the word.”
Breakfast was quick, just some toast and eggs, but I did go through the trouble of scrambling them for her. It seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do after making someone run late by “interrupting” their shower.
Maya rushed through the living room, snatching up her heels and stuffing an umbrella into her bag as I buttered her slice of sourdough. I felt bad (not really) for making her run behind, but she was cute even as she huffed at her reflection and stabbed bobby pins into her messy bun.
“You’re the most punctual person I’ve ever met,” I said, pouring her a glass of orange juice. “I doubt they’ll fire you for being late one time.”
“You don’t know that. My supervisor can be such a hard ass. And I just hate letting people down.”
“I know, and that’s a good quality. But it’s also good to be able to recognize that you’re a human who’s going to make mistakes.”
“I thought I was supposed to be the one giving lectures about being easy on yourself,” she said in an amused tone, standing to eat her breakfast as quickly as she could. In less than two minutes, her plate was clean and put inside the dishwasher.
“I can play that game, too,” I said, and swatted at her with the twisted end of a dishtowel. It snapped against her ass, just hard enough to make a crack, and only hard enough to sting.
She jumped all the same, and I chuckled. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.”
“That seems to be a recurring theme.”
“Is that a complaint?”
She smiled. “Not at all. All right, I guess it’s time for me to go!”
Maya finished her last swallow of orange juice and snatched up her bag, moving for the door. She stopped in front of me and leaned in like she was going to steal a goodbye kiss, and then stopped short, stuttering.
“Uh, sorry, are we—”
“We can.” I fumbled the reply, and it came out in a half-choked and half-eager mix. I gave her a peck, and she smiled, almost apologetically. Maya could strip down naked in front of me and tell me exactly how she wanted it, and I didn’t miss a beat, but ask me if we had the sort of thing going on where we exchange hello and goodbye kisses, and I was suddenly as standoffish as a kid on prom night. The sex had felt good, and so did cooking her breakfast and kissing her on her way out the door in the morning. But thinking about how exactly things had changed between us, and what that might mean, was another matter altogether.
“Will I see you tonight?” she asked rather unnecessarily, considering that we lived together.
“I’ll be around. I’ll be tied up with clients until eight or so, but then…”
“Maybe we could meet up in the living room for a late dinner and see where it goes from there?”
Her doe eyes were vulnerable but unwavering. Whatever had happened between us since last night in the endorphin-rush of arriving home after a thirteen-hour flight, she wanted to do it again. And if Maya was down to see where all that went, I wouldn’t say no.
“Sounds perfect. I could order something for delivery. Do you like Chinese?”
“Of course. Lo mein is my favorite.”
“Lo mein it is.”
Maya stole
another feather-light kiss and then disappeared out our front door without saying another word. After she left, I sipped my coffee in a sort of stupefied state. In a way, nothing between us had really changed, but in another, everything had. My mind was already jumping ahead to eight o’clock, looking forward to hearing her talk about her day and sharing details of my own, while she was letting me peel off her jeans to see what color her panties were underneath.
I shook my head, like I was warding off a dream. My high school fantasy come true had already taken up too many hours of my undivided attention, which was the most precious, expensive, and finite resource I had at my disposal.
I glanced at the clock above the stove and felt my jaw drop. Past noon already? The day was practically over! I was sure to have at least fifty urgent emails burning a hole in my inbox and no small number of pissy voicemails waiting on my work cell. I chugged the last few mouthfuls of my coffee and took the stairs up to my bedroom two at a time, already planning out what I was going to wear, and how I planned to attack my mammoth to-do list.
Oh, Maya, I thought as I spied her forgotten bra strewn across my usually pristine bedroom floor. You’re going to make life very difficult for me. I can tell.
The next few weeks passed in a haze of work meetings, work calls, and Maya. She always seemed to be there in the gaps between my client dinners or Skype conference calls, ready and willing to supply me with teasing kisses and words of encouragement. The sex was sporadic but mind-blowing.
We would go a whole day without touching each other, too wrapped up in our own responsibilities and maxed-out schedules, then she would say hello to me as we passed in the hallway, and the next thing I knew, I was driving in to her while she sat on top of our washing machine, spin cycle set to high. We had sex in the bedroom, in my whirlpool tub, on the living room couch overlooking the whole city at dawn. I finally fucked her on top of the kitchen counter like I’d wanted to the first night we’d kissed, half of a chicken Parmesan recipe discarded and shoved to one side. We never seemed to get tired of each other, and she never pulled away from me like she had the first night. Well, at least not sexually.
Maya was still sensitive about her decision not to go to the Gala with me, and I stopped bringing it up around her after a while. I knew she wasn’t satisfied with my refusal to discuss the past, either, but that felt like a non-negotiable boundary to me, and so I always steered the conversation away from the topic when it came up.
We slipped into our own kind of routine, catching dinner together when we could at pizzerias or Thai restaurants a few blocks from the apartment, and always ending up in either my or her bed together after returning home. These little excursions felt more functional than romantic: we were both busy people, and we both had to eat, after all. But I would be lying if I said that they never felt like a genuine date. Sometimes, when I held the door open for her, or Maya laughed at something I said while the waiter refilled her glass of Pinot Grigio, we felt dangerously like any other young couple in love.
But these flickering moments of tenderness didn’t last long. One of us would always notice that things were getting a bit too intimate and either backtrack into friendliness or push the boundaries into friends-with-benefits territory. We always seemed to end up back where we’d started, sweat-slicked and wrapped around each other under the sheets, with no intention of “defining the relationship” once we’d finished and showered.
It suited us both, well, for a time. But then, slowly but surely, we started losing patience with the other’s little idiosyncrasies. Admittedly, more me than her. It started small, with an irritated sigh on my part when she turned down yet another invitation to a restaurant that she deemed to be “too high end” for someone of her standing, following a roll of her eyes when I wiggled out of a question about if I ever got that Christmas card her mother had sent to my old address the year I skipped town. You could only use sex as a band-aid for relationship problems for so long until your friend (friend with benefits?) becomes irritated that you were holding out on them. Often, as would prove the case with Maya and I, this irritation sometimes advanced into a full-on fight.
“Why won’t you come with me to La Scala?” I asked, my cell phone cradled between my shoulder and ear as a very patient hostess waited for the number in my party on the other end.
“You know I don’t like places like that,” she huffed, buffing bronzer onto her cheeks in her bathroom mirror. I was standing in her doorway like a pest, refusing to leave her be to fix her face until she told me where she wanted to get dinner. I was in the mood for something new, but she had shot down every establishment I’d suggested on similar pretenses. “I’ve got nothing to wear, and it just seems really high-end and stressful.”
“It’s just tapas, small plates, and cocktails. It’s hardly fine dining.”
Maya glared at me from the mirror, one eye expertly lined with a flick of black paint.
“I’ve seen the kind of girls who come out of that place, and I don’t want to go. People would see us together and think—”
“Think what, Maya? That we’re two young people out for a nice dinner at a nice restaurant?”
“No! That I’m your sugar baby, or some kind of gold digger or something. Look at us! We obviously don’t ‘match,’ Ethan. And I don’t like you having to pay for me at places like that.”
“I pay for dinner every time we go out.”
“This is different, this would look like—”
“I’m sorry, June, it looks like I won’t be placing a reservation tonight,” I said into the phone, summoning the most soothing tone I could manage under the circumstances. “Thanks for everything. Have a nice night.”
I shoved the phone back into my pocket and launched straight into a diatribe aimed at the woman who’d invaded my bed, my schedule, and now the top of my pet peeves list.
“Like what, charity? Listen, Maya, you’ve really got to get over yourself about this eventually. I’m never going to force you to do something you don’t want to, but constantly refusing to step foot in an establishment outside your tax bracket has got to stop. You want to work in the art world, don’t you? How do you expect to get anywhere if you keep telling yourself you have no right to be in a museum, or at cocktails before a gallery opening, or at a benefit Gala?”
“Please, stop bringing up the Gala,” Maya snapped. She dropped her eyeliner into her makeup bag and stormed out of the bathroom, refusing to look at me. I simmered while she tossed her lipstick and a scarf into her battered big-box store handbag, which she had refused to let me replace with a bag from even the most subdued department store sale rack. It was becoming clear to me that a person who enjoyed showing affection with financial generosity and a person who felt dirty accepting gifts were bound to clash, and that maybe I should have thought this whole thing out a little better before I started it.
Maya tossed her bag onto her shoulder and slipped into her heels. “I don’t like you lording it over me.”
“Lording it over you? You can’t be serious.”
“Just drop it, Ethan.” She sighed, breezing past me into the hallway.
I followed her at an irritated clip, loathed to let this go now that she’d gotten under my skin. I had always been hyper-focused on something once it caught my attention, and unfortunately for those who worked or lived with me, this talent extended to interpersonal criticisms.
“I can’t believe you. Is that what you think this whole thing is, that I’m trying to buy you?”
“I never said that,” she snapped again, rushing down the staircase. I followed close behind, although at this point, I had no idea where we were going for dinner, or if we would even be going out together. But things had been worsening and left unspoken between us for too long, and now the floodgates of complaints were opening, whether we wanted them to or not.
“You’re implying it. Look, Maya, I would never encourage you to do something or go somewhere that you hated, and I’m certainly not trying to bribe you int
o spending time with me or sleeping with me, or whatever other impressions you might have gotten. But I’ve seen you light up when you get to experience things that you may not otherwise, and I think you deserve to have those experiences now, when you’re young and can enjoy them and use them to build your career—not in ten years after you’ve saved up enough money to afford them outright. But apparently that makes me the bad guy.”
She turned and glared at me. “Don’t be a martyr. Maybe I would be able to trust you and your gifts more if you were willing to actually give me the one thing that I want.”
“Name it,” I snapped, leaning against the counter. “I’ll have it shipped overnight delivery to the front door tied with a bow.”
There was the eye roll again, so dismissive and disgruntled that it made my blood boil. She was digging through her purse for her metro pass now, which told me that she no longer intended to walk with me to dinner, and that she was probably going to go hop on the subway and visit her friends in Greenwich to talk shit about me as soon as this conversation was over.
“How about the truth?”
This caught me off guard, and I blinked at her like she’d just spoken in a foreign language. “When have I ever lied to you?”
“Never to my knowledge. But it would be hard to tell if you were because you keep so many damn things from me. Your life is like a confidential government file, and I’m only allowed to read the parts that haven’t been marked out with a black sharpie.”
“You need to read the whole goddamn file?” I groaned.
Maya threw her hands up in the air and exclaimed something in Spanish to Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the angels and saints. “This is exactly what I’m talking about! You’re the most evasive man I have ever met, and it drives me up the wall.”
“It’s called privacy.”
“Not where my family is concerned,” she shouted, eyes flashing, and I knew then that I’d crossed a line. She seethed for a moment, looking down at the floor, as though looking into my eyes made her too furious to function. Then she took a deep breath and said with a bit of a waver in her voice, “Why did you leave us? Ricky and me? He was your best friend… he told you everything. And me. You just… used me and threw me away like it didn’t matter at all.”