One Last Time: A Second Chance Romance

by Roxie Noir

  “I didn’t know you wanted a bed so I could be a projectile,” she says, and then I’m on my knees, between her legs. My cock springs free and I kick my jeans off.

  “Projectile?” I say, voice going low as I grab her again, shove her further onto the bed, the bottoms of her thighs resting on the tops of mine. “I just like tossing you around sometimes.”

  I kiss her deep, pinch a nipple.

  “You’re bouncy and you make good noises,” I tease as she wraps a hand around my cock again.

  Then, I groan. She squeezes, strokes me from root to tip. The head of my cock bumps against the soft, smooth skin of her inner thigh and I move my hands between her legs again. Toy with her clit even as I thrust into her hand, helpless.

  Finally slide my fingers inside her tight, slick entrance and circle her clit with my thumb and Delilah moans. She lifts her hips, one leg around my back now, strokes me and pushes my fingers deeper inside her all at once.

  I add another finger and move them against the front wall of her channel, in time my thumb on her clit. She moans again, her head to the side, fist still around my cock. I push deeper, burying my fingers in her up to my knuckle and I know I’ve got the right spot when her back arches so hard her whole body comes off the bed.

  I stop before she comes, take my fingers out of her. Move over her and give her a long, deep kiss as she strokes me one more time and then guides me to her entrance.

  “I love you,” I murmur.

  “I love you too,” she says, eyes wide, her other hand stroking my cheek.

  Then, suddenly, her eyes light up and she grins. Delilah twists under me and before I know it I’m on my back.

  I let out a surprised “Oh,” and then she’s holding me down, throwing her leg over me, straddling my hips, cock crushed between us.

  She’s laughing, pressing her body against mine. She grabs my wrists and holds them over my head as I push back against her in a token struggle.

  “Good noise,” she says. Kisses me, biting my lip. Rolls her hips against my cock until I groan into her mouth and she laces our fingers together, pushes me back harder.

  “Ride my cock and I’ll make more,” I tell her.

  “For such a nice mouth, it sure is dirty,” she teases, and she lets my hands go. Pushes herself upright, and I grab her thighs by the garters, push them apart, squeeze until my fingers sink in.

  “Dirty?” I ask, grinning. Squeezing, pushing as she reaches behind her and grabs me again. “Dirty is telling you that I want you to ride my big fat cock with your wet pussy until you come so hard your eyes rolls and your legs shake.”

  She lifts on her knees, one hand on my chest, her whole glorious body stretched above me. I grab the base of my cock, hold it steady, and she sinks onto it.

  This is when she yields to me. Her body yields, slowly, her tightness inviting, enveloping. She yields skin-to-skin with nothing between us, her eyes sliding shut, a sigh escaping her lips as she gives herself over to me.

  And this is how I know she’s enough because this is what I crave, what I dream about at night: Delilah soft and vulnerable like this, stripped down to her core. Delilah with her freckles and her inked skin and her untameable hair. Delilah who burns so bright it blinds me sometimes.

  I bottom out in her and she groans. Leans forward, both hands anchored on my chest, pushes her hips back. My fingers are digging into her thighs so hard she might have bruises later, but I don’t think either of us minds.

  “Tell me how much you like this,” I growl.

  She clenches around me, and I groan.

  “I love this,” Delilah says. Hands on my chest. Hips move again, roll, flex. Fuck.

  I pull her down again, hard, and she makes a noise.

  “I love your cock inside me,” she says, breathing hard. “I love your dirty mouth. I love how good you feel and I love how hard you are to resist, and —"

  She rocks back again, gasps.

  “And I love you,” she finishes.

  “I love you too,” I whisper, and she smiles at me.

  “Good,” she murmurs.

  She finds a rhythm, her hands on my chest. It’s slow and it’s deep and it makes her say my name as she rises, falls, grinds her hips into me and clenches her hands on my chest. I’ll have half-moon marks there tomorrow but right it feels too good to do anything about it, the pricks of pain blending with the whole-body pleasure of her, bringing everything into sharp relief.

  I love this about her, too: her honesty when we fuck, the way she lets me give her what she needs. The way she’s never been coy about how good it feels or how much she likes it.

  The way she breathes, I’m gonna come when she gets close. She leans into me, slides down my cock, moans with her head thrown back. I pull her hips down as far as I can and she grinds herself against me and she moans make me come Seth, makes me come, make me —

  The words stop when she clenches around me, become nothing but sound. She rocks against me and I pull her down, onto me, going as deep as I can until she jerks with every stroke and she kisses me fiercely.

  “Fuck, that felt good,” she says, our lips still touching.

  “Sure looked like it,” I tease her, and she laughs softly, dipping her head next to mine.

  I hold onto her hips and slide into her again. She groans into my ear.

  “Still feels good,” she says. I do it again and she gasps. Bites my ear. I fuck her harder and this time she grunts and then she pushes back, sits up.

  Delilah anchors her hands on my thighs. She lifts up and arches back until the only part of me inside her is the very tip of my cock, and then I watch her take me in one hard stroke.

  It might be the best thing I’ve ever seen. It’s even better because she moans when she does it. It’s better because of the white-hot pleasure that shoots through me, because her tits bounce, because there’s some absolute, primal satisfaction in watching the woman you love ride your cock and like it so much she can’t stop.

  She does it again, harder, and this time when I meet her she gasps with pleasure. I move my thumb to her clit and stroke her in the same rhythm that we set, trying to memorize everything about this: the way she looks, breathes, sounds.

  The way she suddenly slows down when she’s about to come, taking me in hard and deep, muscles fluttering around me. I stroke her clit harder and faster and she whispers fuck yes, Seth, and she comes even harder than the first time.

  I follow her by seconds while she rides me, pussy clenching me like a vise as I come inside her. I feel like I’m capsizing into the sea, overturned and wrecked, like she’s destroyed me and now I need her to put the pieces back together.

  When we finally stop moving, I sit up, still inside her, put my arms around her waist as she wraps her legs around me.

  There’s a long, slow kiss. There are her hands in my hair, on my back, my shoulders, my arms. There’s Delilah everywhere, which is right where I want her to be.

  “Bird,” I murmur. “I love you.”

  She kisses me deeply. Slowly. Mouths open, tongues together.

  “I love you too,” she says. “You know.”

  “I do,” I tell her.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Delilah

  I tilt my head against Seth’s shoulder, warm and slightly damp against my cheek. We’ve moved, but not much: sitting up against the green velvet of my headboard, pillows and blankets scattered around us.

  “Shit, I didn’t even ask if you were okay to bareback,” I say, too lazy to be properly concerned. “Sorry.”

  His head is back against the headboard, and he smiles, laughs softly.

  “Bird, I promise I’d have said something,” he tells me.

  “I mean, I’d hope so,” I say.

  For the record, I didn’t really think that he went out, got some unprotected strange, and then built me a raccoon castle and said he’d always love me. It’s just a courtesy I should have remembered.

  “I’m mildly insulted that you asked,�
� he teases, eyes still closed. “I haven’t fucked anyone else since you moved back, you think I’m gonna start now?”

  I frown at him, mentally platy his sentence back. Then I do it again.

  “What?” I finally say.

  He opens his eyes, looks at me.

  “I”m kidding,” he says. “Asking is responsible, I’m not insulted.”

  “The other part.”

  “Well, it’s hard to get an STD from your hand.”

  “You haven’t slept with anyone else since I moved back?” I ask. “Since Fall Fest and the weekend in the motel?”

  “No,” he says, as if confirming the obvious.

  I just look at him. I look at him for a good, long time.

  “I told you that,” he says, his face suddenly uncertain.

  “You definitely didn’t.”

  “I must have.”

  I just tilt my head at him, and he clears his throat.

  “Hey, Bird, guess what?” he says. “I haven’t been with anyone else in the two and a half years since you moved back to Sprucevale, isn’t that cool?”

  “You’re impossible,” I say, but I’m smiling.

  “I’m sorry, I thought I’d told you,” he says, then leads back again, laughs. “Fuck, I felt like it was written on my skin.”

  “It’s kind of a lot of text, but I could definitely do that for you,” I say.

  His hand drifts to mine, takes it, turns it over. It’s my left, a band-aid still over the new tattoo.

  “What happened?”

  As an answer, I take the band-aid off. Underneath, the star is black and shiny, still slightly pink around the edges since it’s still healing.

  “Got another one,” I say. “Well, technically, I gave it to myself. Luckily I’ve gotten better at them.”

  Seth cups my hand from below and looks at the tiny tattoo for a long time, thinking.

  “That one’s gonna be hard to hide,” he finally says.

  “I know,” I tell him. “Fuck it.”

  He leans in and kisses me on the temple.

  “Vera and my dad are gonna hate it,” I say, still looking at the star. “Winona’s going to quietly disapprove but not say anything, Olivia’s going to make a face, and her husband is going to express some sort of terrible concern about me ever having a job interview, as if I don’t have a job.”

  “I like it,” Seth says.

  “Thanks,” I tell him. “I like it too. And I’m done letting their opinions override my own.”

  He gives me another kiss on the temple, and this time his lips linger a moment longer, his hand still under mine.

  “Stay there a second,” he says when he releases me, and gets out of the bed.

  He looks around. Stretches. Runs a hand through his hair, which fixes nothing, and finally grabs his pants and reaches into the pocket.

  When he gets back on my bed, there’s something in his fist. Seth wraps an arm around my shoulders and I lean into him, his other hand still hiding something.

  My stomach tightens, and I swallow. I try to push away the sudden dread creeping through me.

  “This is just a gift,” he finally says. “I swear that’s all. It’s not a question or a contract or some kind of obligation. It’s just something I wanted you to have, and that’s all it is.”

  I look over at him, because I have no idea what to make of that speech. His blue eyes meet mine.

  “Okay,” I say.

  He holds his fist in front of me, exhales, and opens it.

  “Here,” he says.

  It’s the engagement ring.

  Sitting in his palm, it’s smaller and simpler than I remember. Everything that happened after imbued it with so much meaning and significance that it looms large in my memory, but it’s just a gold ring with a diamond.

  I hold out my hand, and he pours it in.

  It’s the first time I’ve ever touched it. The day he proposed I only even saw it for a few seconds, still in the box, and that’s all. Amazing how something that takes up so little space seemed to fill the room.

  “You kept it?” I finally ask.

  “Well, sort of,” he says.

  I take it in my fingers, look closer at it. One of the prongs is missing, and there’s grime in the setting.

  “Did you feed it to a tiger?” I ask.

  “Technically, I threw it into the woods behind my mom’s house after you broke up with me,” he admits.

  I don’t ask why. I know why. Seth takes a deep breath.

  “And then yesterday, I called in the cavalry with metal detectors and we ran a search-and-rescue operation for it,” he goes on. “It’s probably some sort of miracle that it didn’t get taken off by some critter.”

  I sit up straighter, the ring still in my hand, Seth’s arm still slung over my shoulders.

  “Why?” I finally ask. “Why not leave it?”

  “Because I threw it in there to hurt you,” he says, slowly, looking down at it. “I know that doesn’t make any sense at all, but it’s what I wanted to happen. For a long time I thought that if I hurt you back like you hurt me, I’d finally get over it, but I never did. I tried every single time we fought, but seeing you cry never made me feel one lick better.”

  He shifts against me, strokes my arm with his thumb.

  “So it’s time to let go,” he says.

  Carefully, I turn my left hand and slide it onto my ring finger.

  It fits perfectly. I flatten my hand and look at it, the small diamond winking in the low light.

  “I’m not proposing,” he says, a smile in his voice.

  “Good, I’m not accepting,” I tease back. “Just curious.”

  “It’s not bad,” he says.

  I think it’s a quarter the size of the ring Nolan gave me, maybe less. That was a huge, honking thing that he liked to see on me but loved to see other men look at. I fell for it, though, the idea that the size of a diamond had anything to do with my value as a person or someone’s love for me.

  “I got married because I thought doing that would fix me,” I finally say, still looking down at the ring.

  “You don’t have to explain yourself, Bird,” he says.

  “I want to.”

  “Then I’m listening.”

  I take a deep breath, close my fist, try to quickly arrange everything that I’ve worked through in therapy or talked about with Lainey or even meditated on in yoga class.

  “I felt awful when I broke up with you,” I say. “I’d just failed out of school again, my mom was dead, I didn’t know where my life was going, all my old friends were about to graduate college and my new friends were getting high and then going to their jobs at Subway, but somehow it felt like breaking up with you was the thing that made me feel so truly awful. So when I met someone else, I thought… maybe that was the answer. Maybe I just needed to be with someone and I’d feel better.”

  I take the ring off my finger, fiddle with it.

  “And it felt like everyone I knew was pushing me in that you need a man direction, and I knew so many people who got married right after graduation, so when I met Nolan and he proposed a couple of months later, I said yes even though deep down I think I always knew it was a bad idea to get married.”

  Finally, I look over at Seth. After a moment he leans in, plants a kiss on my bare shoulder.

  “If you and I had gotten married, we would’ve gotten divorced,” I tell him, quietly. “Someone else wasn’t going to fix what was wrong with me. I had to do that. I destroyed everything I touched back then.”

  “Bird, you still destroy me,” he murmurs. “But the pieces are yours.”

  I close the ring in my fist, lean in, and kiss him softly.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Seth

  Fifteen Years Ago

  It’s the first day of sophomore year, and there’s a new girl at Sprucevale High. We don’t get a lot of new students, especially not in high school, and no one will talk about anything else.

  There
are whispers that her dad is really rich. There are whispers that she moved here because something really bad happened, though no one is quite sure what.

  I don’t see her until second period, when she’s in my English class.

  The whispers didn’t tell me she was pretty. They didn’t say anything about her being so pretty that it makes breathing feel weird, like there’s something hitching in my chest.

  Pretty in a way that’s startling: wild red hair and freckles, wide cheekbones, full lips. Brown eyes.

  Delilah.

  Sometimes, I glance at her and she glances at me, across English class, and it feels like a hole’s been opened in my chest and I’m falling through. It’s brand new, a little terrifying. Nothing like any crush I’ve had before. Nothing like the thrill of looking at naked women on the internet. It’s a pull like I’ve been run through and hooked.

  By third period, I’ve got a crush.

  By fourth, I’m full-on infatuated, even though we’ve still never spoken.

  Then, at lunchtime, it happens. I see her sitting by herself, at a table in a corner, and I have an idea that terrifies me. I stop in my tracks, backpack hanging from my shoulders. My friends wave at me, and I wave back.

  I almost go sit with them, but there she is. By herself. Drawing something I can’t see, sitting by herself, this girl who makes me feel like my insides are sliding out.

  The whole walk over I don’t think I breathe. I nearly chicken out at least five times, but then, I’m standing next to her table. The drawing in her notebook looks like a raven, its head turned over its shoulder.

  She looks up at me, and I smile.

  “Hi,” she says, and smiles back. It feels like being wrapped in warm golden thread.

  “Hi, I’m Seth,” I manage to say. “Can I sit here?”

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Delilah

  Present Day

  Thalia half-turns in her chair, facing me, tapping the program against one leg.