by Noir, Roxie
“The backseat’s pretty big,” he goes on. “I’ve got a tarp I can use to protect your honor if anyone catches us.”
“The words every girl wants to hear,” I tease him, our lips still touching.
He just laughs. He kisses me, his other hand now in my hair, my heart racing.
“I’ll put it over us,” he goes on. “Anyone who looks in will just think I’ve got some dogs under there.”
I can’t help but laugh, even as he presses himself against me, so hard I can feel the ridge around the head of his cock through his pants.
“I don’t know how I can refuse an offer like that,” I say.
Eli swipes one finger under my panties and along my swollen lips, his tongue curling into my mouth.
“Doesn’t feel like you want to,” he teases.
My fingers find the zipper on his pants. His thumb flicks past my clit and I gasp, my whole body going rigid.
Just do it right here, I think. Bend over the passenger seat, hike up your skirt and maybe no one will notice.
Apparently, I’m so horny I’ve lost my mind.
“Eli,” I growl, taking my hand from his cock.
“Say it again.”
I clear my throat, pull back.
“Eli.”
I grab his wrist, pull his hand out from under my skirt.
“I like the way my name sounds in your mouth,” he teases.
Behind him, a door slams. I stand bolt upright, pushing at Eli’s chest. He glances over his shoulder casually.
The other couple from the restaurant are walking through the parking lot, toward another car, parked at the far end. I take the chance to recollect my senses and tug my skirt down. Eli pulls away. I hop into the passenger seat, and he stands next to me, one hand on the doorframe, every muscle in his arm called into high definition.
“You sure you’re passing up the tarp in the back seat?” he asks.
“Positive,” I say.
I lean back against the seat.
“You taking me home or what?” I ask, as sweetly as I can.
He leans in to kiss me one more time, but that’s all he does.
“Fast as I can,” he says, and shuts the door.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Eli
We don’t make it past her kitchen table. We don’t even get our clothes all the way off, because for the whole twenty-five minute drive I’m glancing over at her and she’s laughing, teasing me, the hem of her skirt a fraction of an inch higher every time I look.
The moment I pull into her driveway she leans over, kisses me, grabs my cock with one hand. I nearly explode right there in front of her house, in full view of the entire trailer park.
It’s hard and fast, her skirt pushed up over her hips, her shirt unbuttoned. I don’t even get my pants up before she’s bent over the table and I’m rolling on a condom.
But it’s good. It’s so fucking good that the rest of the world may as well cease to exist, because it feels like there’s nothing but me and Violet and this kitchen table, two bodies somehow made to fit together like like clockwork.
Violet’s a revelation. Every single time we kiss it feels brand new, like I’ve never been kissed before. Every time we touch, her skin is electric. I want her like I’ve never wanted anyone. I haven’t been a virgin for a long time, but she makes me feel like one.
It feels almost like a cosmic joke, that we’re so physically compatible.
If only we never had to talk, we’d be the perfect couple.
I come buried deep inside her. I pull her hair, her head drops back as she moans my name, back arched, my other hand pinching a nipple while her pussy is still fluttering and clenching around me. Violet rocks back against me like she still wants more.
“I like it when you come that hard,” I murmur in her ear.
I soften my grip on her hair, suddenly aware that I could hurt her. She turns her head, takes me by the back of my neck.
“I like it when you fuck that hard,” she says.
I lean over and kiss her. The angle’s awkward, but I couldn’t care less right now.
“Who are you?” I ask between kisses. “And where the fuck is Violet, who would never say that?”
She laughs, her her nose grazing my cheek.
“What, that I like fucking?”
“That you like anything I do.”
I pull out before I go soft inside her. Violet leans against the table for a moment, looks around, and then sits on her kitchen floor and leans back against a table leg.
“Just this one thing,” she teases. Her shoes are off, her skirt hiked up, her shirt unbuttoned, her bra unhooked and loosely shoved over her tits so her pink nipples are on display, her hair disheveled.
It’s the hottest, most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life. I just look at her, my mouth going dry.
I join her on the floor, leaning back on my hands, the scarred linoleum cool beneath my palms, my leg nuzzled against hers.
“I’ll take it,” I say. “And here I thought you were impossible to please.”
“I’m perfectly reasonable, Eli,” she says, her eyes laughing. “You’ve just got a difficult personality.”
“You know what’s not difficult?” I say.
There’s a strand of hair strung across her face, and without thinking, I tuck it behind her ear, her skin soft and flushed under my fingers.
“What?”
I just point to my dick, which is still out. Violet laughs, running a hand through her hair.
“For once, you’re right,” she says, then sits up straight. “I’m gonna go put on pajamas. You staying over?”
She says it so casually, like it’s a natural part of our four-day-old non-relationship. Sure, I slept here once, but it was an accident.
“I don’t have clothes here,” I say, watching her stand.
“You wear the same thing every day,” she says, shrugging out of her blouse. “No one will notice.”
“If I didn’t know any better I’d swear you were trying to talk me into it,” I say.
She pulls her bra off, unzips her skirt, lets it puddle on the kitchen floor and she’s suddenly, gloriously naked in her kitchen.
“I like it when you make me breakfast,” she says, winks at me, and disappears into her bedroom.
* * *
That night stretches into two, then three. A few days becomes a week, ten days, a fortnight, and before I know it, Violet and I have been friends with benefits for a month.
Well, “friends.” It’ll have to do as a moniker, because I don’t know another word for “person who irritates the living daylights out of me until she takes her clothes off, at which point she becomes my own personal sex goddess, custom-built to satiate my physical desires.”
“Friends” is at least shorter.
I spend about five nights a week at her house. She gets me a toothbrush. I start leaving clothes over there. It’s all purely for convenience, because it would be stupid to carry shirts and a toothbrush with me every day.
We fuck in nearly every room in her house, on nearly every surface. I learn her inside and out: that she likes watching me fuck her from behind in the mirror. That there’s a spot deep inside her pussy that makes her legs shake. That we both like fucking in the shower, her detachable shower head aimed at her clit.
It’s an informative month, is what I’m saying.
I don’t tell anyone besides Daniel, even though I’m clearly no longer spending much time at my mom’s house, other than our weekly Sunday dinners. My mom has to know that something is up, but she hasn’t said anything to me. Maybe Daniel’s covering for me.
At any rate, she seems to stop worrying.
* * *
“Tell me one more time what sliding rocks are,” Violet says. She’s sitting in the passenger seat of my Bronco, her feet on the dashboard, her legs stretched all the way out. I’m studiously ignoring them, as well as the fact that all she’s wearing is cutoff shorts and a bikini top.
&nb
sp; If, at any point in the last ten years, you’d told me that one, Violet Tulane would go anywhere in just shorts and a bikini top, and two, that I’d be impossibly distracted by it, I’d have laughed. Except here we are: she’s doing it, and it’s driving me a little crazy.
“They’re rocks,” I explain, very slowly. “And you slide down them.”
Violet doesn’t even look at me as she flips me off, and I laugh.
“There’s moss so you don’t get too scraped up,” I say. “It’s fun. My father used to take us here sometimes when we started driving Mom a little too crazy.”
Then I stop. There’s a silence like I’ve dropped something over top of us, and I keep my eyes on the road.
It’s the first time I’ve mentioned my father to Violet. She knows the story, of course. Everyone here knows the story, but it’s something that’s always existed between us unspoken.
We’re just fuckbuddies, two people scratching each other’s itches, and that’s all. We don’t get too personal, and discussing our respective dead parents seems pretty personal.
“He take all five of you?” she asks, like it’s nothing at all.
“A couple times?”
“And none of you ever died or drowned?”
“Levi did hit his head on a tree branch once,” I admit.
“That explains a lot,” she says.
“And Caleb broke his arm.”
“Next you’re gonna tell me that actually, there were six of you and the sliding rocks is the reason there’s five now,” she teases.
“I think five was plenty for my parents,” I say. “I think they kept going because Mom wanted a girl, but after a while she decided a sixth wasn’t worth risking another one of us.”
“She’s a wise woman.”
“I’m sitting right here, Violet. I can hear you.”
“I should hope so,” she teases, and we lapse into silence for a moment, the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees, speckling the car as I drive. I turn off of the main road onto an unlined pavement, then off the pavement and onto a dirt road. After a while it ends in a big dirt patch, and I park.
“All right,” I say. “You brave enough for this?”
Violet’s not looking at me. She’s looking through the windshield, at the bright green foliage in the hard sunlight, the forest so dense it looks like a wall. We had the windows open, so the dust from the road filters into the car, making the air around her shimmer.
Suddenly she turns and those eyes settle on me.
“I’m sorry I called you a moron the day after he died,” she says.
I’m literally speechless. Even though I’d carried that with me for ten years, even though when I saw her washing dishes it was one of the first things that popped into my mind, I’d forgotten about it in the past month.
Or, at least, I’d forgiven it. Ten years is a long time and despite her numerous faults, Violet’s not that girl any more.
“Thanks,” I say.
“I didn’t know he’d died,” she says, still wide-eyed in the passenger seat. “I like to think I would have been nicer if I’d known.”
I don’t point out that calling someone a moron isn’t nice ever.
“I only went to the geography bee because I didn’t want you to win by default,” I admit.
“There were other people competing.”
I half-smile at her, and she half-smiles back.
“What, like Dwayne Carson and Mabel Lean? Those morons didn’t stand a chance,” I say. “Someone had to stop you and it sure wasn’t going to be them. Until I got Trinidad and Togo backward, at least.”
“And then, none of it mattered,” Violet says, looking through the windshield again, grabbing her left arm with her right hand like she’s cold. “You flunked out of college. I got into Yale but had to go to the state school instead, and now we’re both here.”
“I’m sorry about your mom,” I tell her. It feels like the right thing to say in this sun-dappled, quiet, raw moment.
“Thanks,” she says. “You know how sometimes you hear about parents whose kids died, and they keep their rooms exactly the same for years and years, like they’re gonna come back?”
I don’t answer her, I just wait.
“I did that with her room,” Violet says. She sounds far away, strange. “I took all the medical equipment out because I had to give it back, but everything else I just… kept. It’s that door by the kitchen. I never go in there.”
“I know the door,” I tell her.
“It’s not that I think she’s coming back,” Violet says. “I know she’s not. I’ve got her ashes. It’s that…”
“You don’t have to explain it,” I say. “I know.”
She’s frozen, staring forward. Without thinking I unbuckle, slide across the center console, and then she’s in my arms. I press my lips to the top of her head and she leans into my chest, her seatbelt still on.
This is dangerous. It’s dangerous the way drugs are dangerous, because it feels too good. It feels warm and right, soothing, like there’s a deeply tangled piece of me coming untwisted in this moment. It feels like the world outside my Bronco has stopped so that we can be here, together, warm and safe.
But getting drunk feels good. Cocaine feels good. Heroin feels good, and everyone knows those are dangerous.
I ignore the danger and don’t move. We stay that way for a while, until finally Violet takes a deep breath, pulls away, gives me a quick kiss on the lips and the moment is over.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go slide down some rocks or whatever.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Violet
“Where are you?” the bride demands, stomping away from us, one finger held out in our direction.
Lydia puts her clipboard down, holding it in front of her with both hands folded over each other, her lips thin. I glare daggers at this woman’s back as she walks away, having just answered her phone in the middle of Lydia’s sentence.
“She didn’t even say excuse me, I need to take this,” Lydia mutters to me. “She just stuck her finger in my damn face.”
It’s been a long afternoon. A really long afternoon.
“It’ll be over soon,” I promise.
“Cool, then we can deal with some other bitchy princess who thinks all other humans are her servants,” Lydia huffs.
“Oh, it’s not always like that,” I remind her. “Sometimes it’s the groom who’s the nightmare.”
She snorts, but I think it does the trick.
In reality, most of our brides are lovely, delightful people who are perfectly easy to work with.
They’re just not the ones that make an impression.
“Send me video!” the bride shouts. She’s now holding her phone away from her face, and even though we’re outdoors in the rose garden, I’m pretty sure they can hear her in West Virginia.
“Someone’s in trouble,” Lydia mutters.
“Video, Edgerton!” she screams. “I want to know where you are and who you’re with!”
“Uh oh,” I mutter to Lydia.
“Edgerton, I swear to God — who is that?”
“She got video?” Lydia whispers.
We exchange a glance, then both turn partially away from our screaming, shouting bride, like we’re giving her privacy.
We’re not. We could probably hear her clear across the garden, and besides, she’s the one who started this phone call in front of us, not the other way around — not to mention that she’s been a demanding asshole all afternoon.
I am not looking forward to this wedding.
I am looking forward to getting drunk after it’s over.
“Reginald’s yacht?” she screams. “Get off that boat right this instant! You know how I feel about Reggie, and if his whore of a — was she wearing a bikini?”
Lydia and I cringe in unison. Payton — the angry bride — already spent several minutes this afternoon detailing how she likes to punish her fiance, Edgerton, by withholding se
x for a week whenever he does something she doesn’t like.
Apparently, when she discovered a Victoria’s Secret catalog at his house, she wouldn’t sleep with him for a month.
I have no idea why they’re getting married. They don’t even seem to like each other.
“ — Betrayed and humiliated right now,” she’s saying. “First we had to get married at this shithole while I wanted that private island in the Maldives, then you send me out here to the asshole of nowhere, surrounded by inbred hicks —"
“We’re standing right here,” Lydia hisses to me.
“ —While you party in the Greek Isles with Reginald and a bunch of sluts?”
“At least we’re not sluts,” I murmur to Lydia.
“Speak for yourself,” she whispers, and I have to bite my lip so I don’t laugh.
“Baby —” the man on the phone says. She’s got the volume cranked up loud enough that I can hear.
“Don’t you baby me,” Payton shouts. “I want you off that boat right this instant —”
“ — But, baby —"
“ — Or I swear you won’t be getting any of this pussy until Christmas —”
Lydia and I make what the fuck goggle eyes at each other.
“ — Come on, baby —”
“— And you can forget about my lips coming near your dick until this time next year —”
I’m holding my breath and Lydia’s doing the same, both of us turned away from Payton like we’re giving her privacy. We’re not. There’s no such thing as privacy when you’re screaming about your pussy in public.
“Should we leave?” I whisper.
“What if that only makes her angrier?”
“ — I swear, it’s like you don’t even want to get married, Edgerton.”
There’s a long, long, silence.
It gets longer. I desperately want to leave, only based on today’s events, I think that might just make her start screaming at me instead of him. You know that scene in Jurassic Park where the kids are in the Jeep, and the T-Rex is coming, and if they move they’ll get eaten?