by Roxie Noir
“Where’d I put the tea?” he asks.
“Are you okay?”
“What? I’m fine,” he says, reaching out to open another cabinet that also doesn’t contain tea.
“Stop opening cabinets.”
“I thought you wanted tea,” he teases, but there’s the slightest edge there, a wildness behind his eyes that’s really weirding me out.
I close the cabinet, stand on my tiptoes, and put my hands around his face. He’s still cold.
“I’m fine,” he says, and he almost sounds convincing.
“Go sit down, I’ll make tea,” I tell him.
“Bird, it’s —"
“Please don’t make me throw you over my shoulder.”
Finally, that gets a real smile, one with light behind his blue eyes.
“I’d kind of like to see that,” he says, his hands on my wrists.
“I’d probably throw my back out, which is why you should go sit on your couch of your own volition,” I say.
He leans forward, gives me a quick kiss on the lips.
“Fine,” he says, and pads out of the kitchen.
I open the cabinet that does have tea and pull down a box of chamomile. It’s pretty easy to find because Seth has one of the most ruthlessly organized kitchens I’ve ever seen, and I spent years living with Vera.
I’ve just put the kettle on the stove when I hear the soft creak of his stairs, and I stick my head out of the kitchen.
“That’s not sitting,” I tell him. He pauses, halfway up the stairs, and leans on the railing.
“I’m slipping into something more comfortable,” he says. “Does that meet with your approval?”
Please be sweatpants. Please be sweatpants.
I think I blush, and I hope he doesn’t know why.
“Fine,” I tease. “But that ass better be on that sofa by the time this is done.”
“Or what?” he calls, resuming his climb.
“Or you know what!” I shout.
Back in the kitchen, I look at the box of tea on the counter. I look at the kettle on the stove. I make a face.
Then I check Seth’s fridge and pantry for ingredients, find what I’m looking for, and scrap the game plan. I’ve just put the new concoction on to heat up when he comes back down the stairs, and I poke my head out.
“Have I dressed quickly enough for your satisfaction?” he asks when he reaches the bottom. “I bet I’ve still got time for another costume change.”
Seth’s wearing a v-neck white undershirt and red-and-black plaid pajama pants, and I don’t know whether I’m relieved or disappointed. They’re still a thin, pliable fabric, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see his dick, but the pattern and the non-stretchy fabric hide it about thirty percent better than sweatpants.
“I approve,” I say, making an effort to look him in the face.
“Thank God,” he deadpans, and holds out a small stack of clothes. “Here, I grabbed these for you. I think that’s the smallest stuff I’ve got.”
Right. I can’t sleep in the dress and tights I wore to my parents’ house, and they’re not the comfiest for hanging out in, either.
“Thanks,” I tell him, and he sits on his sofa, then gives me the thumbs up.
I check on our still-warming drinks, then change in the bathroom. There’s a moment of horror where I wonder if some other woman or women left these here and now I have to wear them, but as soon as I get them on I’m pretty sure they’re his.
It’s a black t-shirt with the old Loveless Brewing logo on the back and a pair of gray sweatpants that I have to roll the waistband on about ten times. As I do, I wonder if he’s mocking me. He can’t read my mind, right? My perverted thoughts are solely my own, right?
Just before I leave the bathroom, I hesitate for a moment and consider my outfit.
Then I take off my bra, because if I have to behave myself around Seth’s dickprint, he can deal with my nipples.
When I head into the living room with the mugs, Seth is sitting on the sofa, one arm splayed across the back, mindlessly scrolling on his phone. His hair’s messy and when he looks up at me there’s something in the way he looks, something in the way he tosses his phone onto his coffee table, that makes him look so… young.
Something vulnerable, sweet, innocent. Right now he looks exactly like the boy I fell for all those years ago.
“Thanks,” he says, as I put the hot mugs down on the coffee table, then sit next to him.
Then, when he reaches out to grab a mug, he pauses, his hand around the handle. Stares into it like he can read a fortune in the fancy dash of cinnamon I sprinkled across the top, and then looks over at me with the strangest look on his face.
“What?” I ask, leaning over and staring into his mug of hot cocoa. “Are you allergic to something? You don’t hate chocolate, do you?”
“No, no,” he says, and finally picks it up. He doesn’t stop giving me the weird look. “I just -- did I ever… tell you this?”
I look from Seth’s face to the mug and back again. Neither gives me any hint about what this is.
“Tell me what?” I ask.
“That my dad used to make us cocoa when the power would go out,” he says. “I really never told you? Not even before?”
It might be the first time he’s brought up the before intentionally since we agreed it doesn’t exist.
I wrack my brain, slowly shake my head.
“He’s get out the camp stove and the canned milk and we’d all go on the front porch and drink cocoa and watch the storm,” he says, and finally takes a sip. “In the summer, anyway. If the power went out in the winter we’d all pile onto the couches and have a fire, and if it stayed out overnight Caleb and I would push the beds together in Levi’s room and sleep with him.”
Seth laughs then, leans back into the sofa.
“He always seemed like the one who’d manage the best in primitive circumstances,” he says.
Levi, the eldest Loveless brother, is now the Chief Arborist for the Cumberland National Forest and lives with his fiancee in a cabin that he built himself. I’d say he can manage.
I sit up straighter on the sofa, legs crossed, and pull Seth’s head into my shoulder until he’s leaning on me.
“What else?” I ask.
“When it would storm in the summer, Daniel and Caleb and I would go out on the front porch to watch it, and every time there was a lightning strike we’d all look over at the porch light to see if it was still on,” he says. “I think Daniel would’ve run out and tried to catch the lightning if we’d let him. Caleb was always a little spooked by it, but liked being brave with us.”
“And you?”
“I was always counting the seconds between the strikes and the thunder so I could know how far away the storm was and which way it was moving,” he says, lifting his mug to his lips. “Someone’s gotta compile the data.”
“Want to turn out the lights and pretend the power’s out now?” I ask. I run my fingers through his hair, tousling it, and I can feel him relaxing into me.
I don’t touch Seth as much I’d like. I find myself shying away from these sweet, simple things because I know exactly where it can lead, and we made an agreement.
“Nah, it’s bound to happen soon enough on its own,” he says.
There’s a long, silent moment where nothing moves, and there’s no sound but the occasional creak of the building, settling into the cold, or his neighbors making the smallest of muffled thumps against their shared wall.
“Sorry about the drive,” I finally say.
“Don’t apologize. It wasn’t your fault,” he says, voice slow and lazy, his twang coming through.
“I can still be sorry.”
He drinks the last of his cocoa, puts the mug on the table, then turns and arranges himself so his head’s on my lap, his feet over the armrest of his couch.
“You sure you’re okay?” I ask, settling one hand on his chest. He puts one of his own over it.
“I am now,” he says.
I don’t ask anything else because I know the story of how his father died: dark night, icy mountain road, single-car collision. Seth was eleven, almost twelve. It’s no wonder that we bonded three and a half years later when I suddenly moved to Sprucevale.
I finish my cocoa and we talk, my hand on his chest. If I pay close attention I can feel his heartbeat even through his ribcage, steady and true, and for once I don’t wonder. I don’t wonder who else has sat like this, talking about his family. Who else has made him drinks and worn his pajamas, who else has driven him home in a storm and stayed the night.
We talk about raccoons and squirrels and chipmunks and all the havoc they’ve wreaked. We talk about which grocery store in town — there are two — has better tomatoes, which has a better beer selection. I ask about the bookshelves lining the wall opposite us, his television in the middle, and he laughs and tells me how Caleb came and built them in a fit of heartbreak over his twenty-two-year-old student.
“Can you sow some more discord between them and get some side tables?” I ask, slumped on the couch, feet on his coffee table, his head still in my lap.
“This is why he thinks you’re a witch,” Seth points out.
“I thought it was because I have magical dick-raising powers.”
“Decline to comment.”
My hand is still on his chest, my thumb slowly stroking back and forth. Despite my comment, I don’t look down at the dick in question. No good can come of that.
Well, no agreed-upon good.
“I still can’t believe he banged his student,” I say, looking at the bookshelves. They’re very nice bookshelves.
“Is banging,” Seth points out. “Present tense. It seems like a terrible idea, but they’re happy.”
“There’s no accounting for taste.”
“Says the woman with the octopus tattoo.”
I glance down at where Seth is tracing along the bottom of my ocean tattoo: a sailing ship, pulled under the waves by tentacles. Above it’s there’s another, birds in its rigging, flying it away.
“It’s a Kraken and it’s very scary,” I say.
“I like it.”
“I broke up with someone over it once.”
Seth’s eyes meet mine, and for a moment I regret saying anything. I know the past officially doesn’t exist but that’s our past, not my past and his past.
“Sounds like his loss,” he says. “He call it an octopus too many times?”
Just like that, I smile and relax and Seth closes his hand around my arm, covering a sailing ship.
“It was years ago, I didn’t even have it yet,” I say. “But when I was planning it and doing all the sketches and stuff, I was dating this guy who never said that he hated the tattoos I already had but who obviously did.”
Seth doesn’t ask why I was dating him, which is good, because I don’t have an answer. I spent most of my twenties ensconced in serial monogamy, trading one mediocre boyfriend for another without ever asking whether I wanted a boyfriend at all.
“Long story short, he really hated that I was going to get this one, and after I made my first appointment for it, he told me that if I got this tattoo I wouldn’t be attractive to him anymore, so I needed to call and cancel.”
In my lap, Seth laughs. He laughs and I can’t believe he’s laughing over someone else I dated. I half-wonder if there were drugs in the cocoa powder.
“Anyway, now I’ve got even more tattoos and a different boyfriend,” I say, dryly.
“Your different boyfriend likes them,” he says, simply. “Always has.”
The thought flickers across my mind: Property of Seth Loveless, but I push it away.
“Thanks. I like my different boyfriend,” I tell him.
He’s still tracing my seafaring sleeve: fingers on a red-orange tentacle, thumb brushing over the waving stained-glass waves. With his other hand he pushes the wide sleeve of my borrowed t-shirt over my shoulder to where the waves fade but the Kraken goes on, no longer sea-bound, reaching out over the left half of my body.
Seth’s finger disappears under the sleeve of the shirt, onto my shoulder, and even though he can’t see them he’s still tracing the tentacles to where they curve, just shy of my collarbone, where they bend onto my shoulder blades. If he’s surprised not to find my bra strap, he doesn’t show it, but then again I’m sure he knows.
Then his hand leaves my shoulder, the shirt falls back, and his other hand is sliding up my neck, into my hair, and he pulls me down for a kiss. He tastes like cocoa and a little like cinnamon as he opens his mouth and slides his tongue into mine, fingers tightening in my hair, my hand pressing against his chest.
I try to focus on the minutiae of this moment: his soft lips and the slight scratch of his day-old stubble, the strange angle of our mouths’ meeting, his heartbeat under my palm counting away the moments. Anything to ignore the persistent ache, the gathering heat, the automatic flash-forward in my brain to a future where I’m riding him on this couch like I said I wouldn’t.
Seth moves without breaking the kiss, pushing up on his other elbow. He lets my hair go and pushes me back and I laugh softly as our lips tangle and our noses bump, and he laughs too and bites my lower lip. Sits upright, sideways on the couch. Grabs my thigh and pulls me until my leg is draped over his and I’m leaning forward, mouths together, one arm around his shoulders and the other hand steadying myself on his hard thigh, the muscles tensing under my fingers.
We pull back a moment, as if we’re considering, taking stock of this moment and how to proceed. I know he’s already hard as fuck, his erection inches from my fingers, but I don’t move away. I know the hows and whys of this agreement, the theory that if we restrain desire for long enough we can temper it so that when it comes screaming back, maybe it won’t break us apart.
Instead he strokes my side, over my shirt, his thumb whispering past the curve of my breast, the material moving ever so slightly across my nipple and I close my eyes and lean in again, always hungry for more.
We’re not touching, not really, I tell myself. I’m still doing it right.
His hand brushes down my ribcage one more time. Tongues on tongues, lips on teeth, and now his plaid pants are twisted between my fingers and there’s a tug on my shirt, steady and insistent.
The material slides right over my nipple and this time, I make a noise.
“Fuck,” Seth hisses.
Half a second later I’m in his lap. Straddling him, his big hands locked around my upper thighs, pulling me in hard.
I’ve got both hands in his hair and I’m kissing him desperately, hungrily, like he’s air and I’ve been underground for months. My hips roll against his, nothing but flannel between us as I swear I can feel every ridge and bump of his cock against my clit, his thick head pressing against my entrance.
It’s torture. Pure, beautiful torture, and I hear Seth groan even as I think technically we’re not touching, there’s clothing, technically this is okay —
“I’m sorry,” I gasp, even as I roll my hips again and press my clit against him, the ache in my core fuzzing out into pleasure.
“Me too,” he growls into my mouth, kissing me again. He grabs my hips, lifts his against mine, grinding me down his entire length. Eyes closed, a noise coming from somewhere deep in his chest. “God I’m sorry.”
We don’t stop. I don’t know how to stop. Somewhere, buried deep in my brain is a sequence of events that goes stand up, walk away, take the world’s coldest shower but those thoughts flit by like clouds on a sunny day: interesting but unreachable.
Instead we make out hard enough to bruise lips. Instead we dry-hump like teenagers seeking any kind of release at all even as I force my hands to stay outside his shirt, letting myself touch him but not all the way. Not quite.
He grabs my shirt again, the same way, pulls it so it whispers over my nipples. They’re hard as diamonds, so sensitive it hurts, and he does it again until at last his ha
nds are on my ribcage and Seth pushes me up, back, until I’m sitting upright and we’re staring at each other, panting for breath.
I clear my throat, nod. His hands slide until his they’re on my back, his thumbs on my sides, the black t-shirt stretched tight right across my tits, my nipples out and proud as a rainbow flag.
“Okay,” I whisper, my voice still husky. “Okay. Well.”
Seth’s just staring at me, chest rising and falling, every curve and dip and ripple of every muscle on nearly-full display under his sorry excuse for a shirt. His eyes fall from my face to my tits, my belly, my hips, my thighs spread over his.
No one’s ever looked at me the way Seth does. Not once. I was married, for fuck’s sake, and my ex didn’t look at me this way.
“Give me your hand,” Seth says, and I hold one out.
He takes it in his, curls my fingers around his. Kisses me slowly on the knuckles, and when he does, his eyes meet mine.
In them is the most devilish look I’ve ever seen, almost like he’s daring me to stop him.
Without saying a word, he presses my hand to my still-clothed breast, my nipple hard against my palm.
I laugh. I can’t help it. I laugh and Seth grins at me, his hands back on my thighs as I slide both hands over my nipples, palms down, letting the Loveless Brewing shirt ride up.
“Like this?” I ask, as innocently as I possibly can. It’s not very innocent.
“Exactly like that,” he says, his eyes never meeting mine.
I do it again, slowly. I pinch my nipples and grab my own tits and Seth watches me, that look on his face like this is the only thing he’s ever seen worth watching. I drag the shirt up, over them. I gasp with the friction and flash Seth some underboob, and then he growls when I drop the shirt again, my hands under it this time, twisting my own nipples until I moan.
It feels good. It feels better with him watching me.
“Take it off,” he says.
“This?” I ask, and flash him.
“You’re a goddamn tease,” he says, and pulls me in for a quick, rough kiss. “Yes, take your shirt off and quit robbing me of watching you play with your tits.”
I pinch them again and this time I moan into his mouth without even meaning to. Sparks of pleasure shoot down my back, and I pull away from him.