Scandalized(39)

We return to the living room with a plate of warm cookies and tea, and Eden turns on John Oliver. I sit on the couch, and before I can pull my legs up crisscrossed on the cushion, Alec sweetly invades my space, lying down with his head in my lap. He takes a bite from his cookie, chewing as he studies where he might take his next one, and on instinct my hand goes to his hair, combing it off his forehead. It feels like silk between my fingers, and I remember touching it when he made love to me in Seattle, when he kissed me between my legs only yesterday, when I swept it off his forehead today in the water.

He hums quietly, taking that second bite, and our eyes meet. “Want one?” he asks, even though I am perfectly capable of reaching the plate myself.

I shake my head. It’s a struggle to push away the world outside of this apartment, where the reality of him and our circumstances and the impossibility of an Us feels like a weight on my chest. Instead, I try to remember what it is that he wants, why he’s here. He’s here to just be a guy with his head in a girl’s lap.

Eden’s voice rises from where she’s lying on the floor. “Frank, how does someone like you get an entire day off on a trip like this? If something’s canceled, don’t they have a million other things waiting to take up your time?”

I can feel his nod on my lap. “I asked them not to reschedule me,” he says. “I really needed a day off. I haven’t had one in…” He pauses, thinking. “I don’t even remember the last time I didn’t have something scheduled.”

His first day off in who knows how long and he spent it with me. My heart feels too big for my body.

“Do your people know you’re with her?” she asks, tilting her head to me.

“No,” he says. “But they know I grew up around here. So they probably assume I’m seeing old friends.”

“Which you are,” I say.

He stares up at me, and another vine grows up inside me, wrapping around my wildly beating heart. “Which I am.”





Ten


I dig under the sink for a toothbrush for him, coming up to find him standing directly behind me. His smiling eyes meet mine in the mirror, and like this we brush our teeth, mouths foamy and grinning. Does he feel it, too? This anticipatory giddiness? It’s a little like being ten and handed a crisp twenty-dollar bill outside a candy store. There’s something delicious in my future and I don’t even know where to sink my teeth first.

When I bend to spit and rinse, his hand comes over my waist, beneath my shirt, fingers seeking skin. When we switch positions and he bends, spits, rinses, I wrap my arms around his middle and let myself go blank inside, just holding him and feeling the hard planes of his back pressed flat against my cheek.

In the bedroom, he peels away my clothes without hurry. A gift teasingly unwrapped. It isn’t the first time we’re touching and looking, but it’s the first time there’s no ticking clock in my ear.

Though there may be one in his.

I pull his shirt up his torso. “What time do you have to leave in the morning?”

He pauses his exploration of my chest to look at his watch. “Around six.”

I glance at the clock on the nightstand. It’s a few minutes before eleven. I can work with this.

He moves to taste my neck, hands sliding up over my breasts.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” I ask.

“Some promo shoots.” His thumb and finger close over my nipple in a soft pinch. “A fan meet-and-greet and signing at around one thirty, I think.” He straightens, looking at me, and finally lets me get his shirt off. “Do you have an office you have to go to?”

I shake my head. “I have a desk, but I’m rarely there.”

“Are you working tomorrow?”

“I’ll probably make calls,” I say. “Follow up on a few things.” I don’t say Josef Anders’s name but it penetrates the space between us like a dark spot in a photograph anyway. My heart begins to thrum in anxiety. The pressure to do this right is intense.

He unbuttons his jeans, distracting me from my impending panic by kicking them off, and then pulls me back onto the bed, guiding me over him.

I look down at him, tracing his jawline with a fingertip. His eyes fall closed, he hums, and from this vantage point, I register how much I like being on top of him because I get to witness how he gives in to pleasure so absolutely. Alec’s eyes drift open and he watches me watching him, and the silent moment of understanding makes me ache. Reaching down, he shifts under me to get his boxers off.

I feel like I’ve been hungry for this since he grew hard against me underwater, arching in futile weightlessness as we bobbed in the deep ocean surf. The hunger grew with him sleeping silently next to me on the hot sand and on the quiet drive home where he resumed his wandering exploration of my thighs—occasionally pressing a firm hand between my legs and then sliding away, teasing—and somehow reached a frantic peak as I saw how easily he integrated into my life with Eden.

I come over him now, trapping him between us, sliding over his length. Not taking him in, just rocking. “I’ve been worked up like this all day.”

Eyes closed again, he smiles at this, mumbling a soft “Me too” as his hands come up over my breasts. I want to capture this view on film, burn it into my long-term memory: Alec on my bed, Alec underneath me. The long line of his neck, the sharp point of his Adam’s apple, the masculine curve of his collarbones. He has a small bruise on his chest that looks like a bite mark, from yesterday or the time before. I don’t even know. It would easily be hidden beneath a shirt, but it’s there in front of me like our perfect little secret, and the knowledge of it lights me up like sunrise inside.