Love in the Time of Serial Killers(74)

Finally, his hand skated back up over me, leaving a streak of wetness on my nipple from where he’d been inside me. I watched Sam’s profile from under my lashes. The way his mouth parted as he rubbed that wet nipple with his thumb, the way he bit down on his lower lip.

I leaned all the way back until I was lying on the bed, pulling Sam down over me for a long, deep kiss. I was trying to tell him something with that kiss, and I didn’t even know what it was. It vibrated through me, in my tongue in his mouth and my fingers pulling at the button of his jeans, desperate to get them off. It was a low hum in the back of my throat as I laughed a little when I couldn’t, and he reached down to undo the button with one hand and slide them down his hips. There was an awkward moment where he was working on that while I was trying to kick my underwear off, all while directing him to the box of condoms I’d recently bought and stashed under the bed. It could’ve spoiled the mood, but somehow it didn’t. Sam pressed one more hungry kiss against my mouth, and then he entered me in one fluid motion, and stole my breath.

When I looked up, his eyes were open, his gaze on my face. One corner of his mouth hitched in a smile, but it didn’t seem like an expression as simple as pleasure, or even a leftover from the silliness of the logistics from a few moments before. It was more like . . . awe. Like I could feel some glow come from the center of his chest where I’d unconsciously flattened my palm.

I was scared of what he might say, with an expression like that. I was scared of what I might say. So I ran my hands up his arms, my nails up his back, my fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck as I pulled him toward me. At the same time, I lifted my hips, inviting him to move with me. The rhythm was exquisitely slow at first, then built until the wrought iron headboard of my bed was banging against the wall.

“Right there,” I gasped, reaching up to grasp two bars of the headboard as Sam thrust into me. “Right there, Sam, oh god.”

This time when I came, it was gentler than before, rolling through my body like a wave. I could tell Sam was close, and I clenched around him, urging him to keep going, to fuck me until we were both strung out from it. I watched his face as he came, the way his jaw clenched and then went slack, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed as he gulped air, as though he’d forgotten how to breathe for a second. I’d never done that before—watched a partner climax during sex. It had never even occurred to me to open my eyes. But with Sam, I wanted to pay attention.

He took care of the condom and then climbed back into bed, our bodies nestled close on the narrow twin mattress.

“I think we may have broken it,” I said, reaching up to rattle the headboard.

“It seems pretty solid.”

“Well, we definitely embarrassed it at least. This was my childhood bed.”

“I don’t think furniture stands in any kind of judgment. It’s inert.”

I smiled at that. Sam’s head was on my chest, and I ran my fingers through his soft hair. “I spent a lot of time in this bed daydreaming about what my life was going to be like.”

He was quiet for a moment, his breath so even on my skin that I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. But then he said, “What did you imagine it would be?”

“I thought maybe I’d be a writer,” I said. “Or an editor. Something with books. I wanted to live in a big city, in a cool apartment like they always have on TV. One with a view of the skyline and a quirky doorman. Oh, and a cat. I always thought I’d have a cat, actually, although in my daydream my cat was more of a purring lap animal than a feral street beast.”

“Glad to see you’ve recovered from almost losing Lenore,” Sam said dryly. “What else?”

“It all sounds so generic now. It was probably the same thing every kid dreams of because we all watched the same movies. I thought I’d lose all my baby fat and turn from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. I thought that would make my mom like me more, and we’d grow up to be that mother-daughter pair who drink mimosas together at Sunday brunch.”

I swallowed. “I always imagined that I’d get at least one moment when my dad would be really proud of me, and I’d be able to tell. He never would’ve said it—that wasn’t his style—but just some moment where I knew.”

And now I would never have that. I hadn’t realized what a different kind of grief that was—the loss of all the potential moments that would never be, not just the past moments that already were. I’d focused so hard on that past, where my relationship with my dad had been so complicated, but forgotten that I used to dream of a day when it wouldn’t be that way.

“Did he ever mention me?”

I hadn’t known I was going to ask the question until it was out of my mouth. It was so raw, there was no hiding it, and I immediately wanted to snatch it back. Of course my father wouldn’t have mentioned me, a daughter he barely spoke to, a daughter he’d probably written off.

“Your dad wasn’t a big talker,” Sam said, his voice a rumble against my chest. “As you know. But I feel like I could tell, from the way he checked his mail, that he was super proud.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “Could not.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “You should’ve seen it. He’d do this shuffle down the driveway—it screamed that his daughter was about to become a doctor, he was obnoxious about it, to tell you the truth—and then he’d open the mailbox and peer inside. Then he’d pull out the envelopes and start sorting them like he was reading through the paper you presented at the pop culture conference last year, the one about masculinity and monstrosity in The Shining—”