The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(97)

“Diane, I can’t breathe.”

“You can. The air is going in. You’re breathing. I promise.”

“All right.”

“Back up. Where are you?”

He visualized the action running in reverse. “It was a rehearsal. A tech run-through. And it was Daisy’s turn. They would have called her and she would have come…from the audience. No. Wait.”

Like a small bright flower, the memory rebloomed: Daisy, walking down the aisle. Tying her skirt and walking toward the stage. He had watched her. She had walked down the aisle. Away from him. Down the aisle. Which meant she had been…

“Where are you, Erik?”

Another flower unfolded its petals. In the booth. Of course. She had been in the booth with him. “It was,” he began, but his throat was bone-dry. He cleared it. “It was…”

“Stay here. I know it’s hard.”

“I feel like I’m dying.”

“Tell me.”

“The lighting booth.”

“When?”

“Before she went onstage to rehearse, Daisy was with me in the lighting booth.”

“Tell me.”

It was so strange, picking these flowers. He looked at them, sure they belonged to someone else. Then he held them closer to his face, caught their scent and he knew they were real. They were real and they were his. He remembered.

“She was sitting on my lap and…” It was flooding him now, fast and furious. Not flowers but a white-water river of memory churning up in his brain, each recollection clamoring for attention and refusing to be corralled into order. His hands came up to the sides of his head, trying to hold it all in place.

“Were you having sex in the booth?”

“Yes. I mean no, not then. It was the night before. God, I’m all over the place.”

“It’s all right. Keep backing up. Tell me about the night before.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her helplessly. “My head is spinning, I can’t even…”

“Erik look at the wall. Right there, the place where it’s blank. Take everything in your head and fling it on the wall. Like a movie. Put it there.”

He tried, stared hard at the white expanse of space and attempted to project his thoughts onto it. He even imagined a whirring clicking noise, like a projector. It worked. The tornado in his head died down to a gentle gale. “We were in her room, and we were just… God, I remember now.”

“Describe it to me, what are you feeling?”

He knew Diane wanted him to speak in present tense but it was too terrifying. Until he could figure out what was scaring him so much, he had to keep it in the past.

“We were making love but it was…” He trailed off as the images on the wall grew brighter, more vivid, dripping sweat and giving off a faint scent of sex and perfume. Desire, thick like syrup, caramel sweet and rich. The bumps of Daisy’s spine and the muscles along them rippling as he thrust into her from behind, slow and sure and strong. Something almost narcissistic about it—admiring himself in his prime. All cut arms and abs, bursting with health and stamina. He was young, rock hard and raring, carefree and reckless. He could f*ck her all night, she only had to ask. And she did. She begged for it.

“I had her down on the bed. I was behind her and I was just holding her down and f*cking her. Sorry,” he said.

“There’s no shame there. When you’ve established that kind of trust and intimacy, sex wears all kinds of faces.”

The movie on the wall, which had been silent, now offered up a soundtrack of memory as well. “She was saying…things. Like you f*ck me so good and… I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

“It’s not about me,” she murmured. “Go on.”

“It made me feel incredible, like I really dialed into what it felt like to be a man. I was down at some elemental level of being…”

“Male.”

He nodded, lost and transfixed in the remembering. “I was making her come. Getting her off, one after the other. She kept begging and I kept going and we just fed on each other. And at one point she put her hands behind her back and I held onto them. She just gave herself over to me.”

“It sounds intense.”

“I can’t believe I forgot this.”

“You didn’t forget.”

“God, I had her in my hands. Had her right where I wanted her and I wanted to make her scream the house down.”

“You were very much in love with her.”

“Yes.”

“You trusted each other. You were utterly free to say whatever you wanted and be whatever you wanted. You could be loving and sweet, or you could be primal and savage. You could make love or you could f*ck, it was all the same thing.”

A stream of tears on his cheek then. He hadn’t even realized his eyes had welled up. “I never knew anything like it in my life.”

“And there seemed to be no end to it.”

“Nothing to stop it.”

“And when you were in the lighting booth the next day,” Diane said.

He turned his head from the wall. “She was in there with me,” he said. “She was sitting in my lap and we were talking about it. Talking about the night before. And we were laughing and rehashing it and sort of blushing. This coy bit of I can’t believe the shit I was saying, but we were laughing. Teasing each other. And God, I couldn’t wait to get her alone again. Get my hands on her again. Usually she was the practical one. Nothing ever swayed her from class or rehearsal. But she was sitting in my lap and she was all in my eyes. She said, I just want to ditch this place and go back to bed with you. But Marie called her and she had to go. And she…” He squeezed himself tight, his ice-cold, shaking hands in fists, all of him shaking, looking for a place to flee.