24. Maybe in Connecticut
24
MAYBE IN CONNECTICUT
Nick
Sure, I did say this was wrong.
But I guess I bent the rules again.
You broke them, dickhead .
But dammit, breaking the rules feels so good as Layla’s skin flushes, her cheeks red in a post-orgasm glow.
We’re sardines here in the backseat of her sports car, parked outside a country club Rose’s parents belonged to way back when.
The place I worked at in high school, waiting tables. I traveled here from Queens, since the tips were better in Greenwich, so I know all the nooks and crannies, but I don’t want to tell her my stories of the club right now.
Nope.
This is the place where I was looked down on. Where the members tossed their greenbacks at me with barely a second thought.
I feel a little defiant tonight, wrapped up with Layla outside the country club that I could now buy a million memberships for. But I never will. I won’t buy one. Anywhere.
I like it better on the outside.
And on the outside, I get to have this . A woman who doesn’t judge.
This fantastic woman, basking by my side.
And I think I’ll take a little more of her, thank you very much.
As she breathes out hard once again, I lift my fingers to my mouth and suck off the taste of her.
I groan salaciously.
She turns her head, watching me with avid eyes. “How do I taste?”
“Like salt and sex and sweetness,” I tell her.
Her gaze drifts down me to the ridge in my slacks. Hard, insistent.
I’m not asking for a hand job. I’m not asking for anything. I didn’t make her come so I could come too. But when she palms me, I groan.
“Let me,” she whispers.
I shake my head, but it feels futile already. “You don’t have to. I just wanted to take care of you. I always want to take care of you.”
“And I want to touch you,” she says, insisting, gripping me tighter.
“There’s hardly any room here. Don’t want to make a mess of this car,” I say, to give her an out.
With a roll of her eyes, she tsks me. “I’m not going to use my hand.”
Oh, fuck. Oh, hell. Oh, yes.
That’s a horse of a different color—the blow job color.
“Suck me off, beautiful,” I tell her.
“I thought so.” She’s speedy, maneuvering between my legs, undoing the button on my pants. I help her along, eagerly pushing down my slacks, my boxer briefs, then offering her my throbbing cock.
She nibbles on the corner of her lips, then curls her fist around the base. Lust rattles through my whole body. I’m a raging forest fire already.
“Lick it,” I command.
She obeys, her lush blonde hair spilling across my lap as she flicks her tongue over the head.
“Yessss,” I gasp.
I’m in dirty heaven as she draws me into her warm mouth. It’s a fiesta of my favorite things—her hair fanned out on my lap, her lips around my dick, her scent filling the car.
Her .
Just her.
She’s diligent, a blow-job worker bee as she sucks with speed and purpose. Fine by me. No woman should have to finesse a blow job in the back of a car.
“Won’t take long,” I mutter as she swallows more of me.
I swear she smiles against my dick.
“Gonna watch you the whole fucking time,” I say.
She lifts her face briefly, her eyes flashing with wickedness. Then, she’s back to work.
Pushing those gorgeous strands away from her face, I savor the filthy view. My dick filling her mouth, pushing on her cheek. Her swollen lips stretched around my shaft. Her eyes watering just a bit.
What a sight.
My thighs shake.
She sucks harder.
I’m not far off. “Do that again,” I urge as my chest heats up.
She complies, sucking harder, taking me deeper.
My balls tighten. “Gonna come,” I warn.
I lose it, coming down her throat in seconds as I enjoy the fantastic sight of this beautiful woman hellbent on owning my dick.
Well, she does own it.
But she’s owning a hell of a lot more of me too.
That’s the problem. And I’m not sure I’m going to find a solution to it tonight, so I stop trying.
It’s only an hour to Manhattan. But a few minutes into the return drive, her stomach growls.
I grab the opportunity her belly is offering. “Let me feed you before we get back,” I say.
Once we reach the city, I’ll have to snap back to my proper role. Father, businessman, friend to Layla.
Here in Connecticut, we’re still in no-man’s land. The tryst zone.
“If you insist,” she says.
“I do.”
Ten minutes later, we’re walking into a roadside diner at a rest stop. Layla tosses me a smile. “I love diners,” she says.
“How unusual.”
“Don’t mock me for liking something,” she says, a little hurt.
No way do I ever want to hurt her. “Sorry. That was a dick move. I’m glad you like diners,” I say, to ease my callous remark. “Especially since not everyone admits they do.”
“But I’ve never been to a rest-stop diner,” she adds, quick to forgive.
I wrap an arm around her waist. “Good. I get another first.”
She shivers against me, then eyes my arm. “I thought this was wrong,” she says, like she’s catching me on a technicality but one she wants to find too.
Let’s take this loophole we’re making up on the fly, Layla.
“Maybe in Connecticut, it’s not,” I offer as we reach the door to the diner. “Want me to stop?”
She meets my gaze, her eyes wide, vulnerable. “I don’t. That’s the issue.”
I squeeze tighter, a little sad, but glad, too, for this stolen moment. “Same here,” I say, then brush a kiss to her soft cheek.
A hostess ushers us to a booth for two, and we order quickly, Layla opting for a salad and fries while I pick an omelet.
When we shut the menus, she looks at me with a particular intensity in her eyes. “So, what did you mean with the whole not everyone admits they do comment?”
Ah, I figured I wouldn’t get away with mic dropping that. But it’s for the best. “I just like that you’re…real. You don’t seem to have these judgments about school, or jobs, or where people come from.”
She smiles, shakes her head. “I hope I don’t.” But then she winces, like the question pains her. “But others have?”
I heave a sigh, drag a hand across my beard. Do I want to dive this deep into my past? We’re not supposed to get close.
Or…closer.
But one look at Layla and the patience in her eyes, and my plan to keep my younger years to myself crumbles. I want to get closer to her, even just for tonight, so I serve up my past on a plate. “My ex’s family hated me. Maybe that’s understandable. I’m the asshole who got their princess pregnant. Their words . But they didn’t like where I was from,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“I waited tables at that country club where they were members. That’s how I met Rose. I was the guy from the other side of the tracks because my family didn’t have money.”
“That’s terrible,” she says, quick to defend me. “That’s a shitty way to treat someone.”
She sounds so tough, so independent, and so damn certain of what’s right and wrong. A welcome sign perhaps that twenty-somethings are less judgmental than their grandparents. I sure hope so.
“I’m over it,” I say with a shrug that I hope comes off as careless.
“But it still stings?” she asks gently, seeing through my act immediately.
I don’t say anything at first. This kind of vulnerability with a woman is new to me. Hell, it’s new with friends, with family, with anyone but Finn. Vulnerability is not an emotion I like to traffic in too much.
But I invited her into this conversation. I ought to let her in all the way. “I suppose,” I mutter.
Her expression is warm as she says, “I know that was hard for you to say. But thank you. I want to know you ,” she adds, then bobs a hopeful shoulder. “Since, maybe in Connecticut we can get to know each other.”
My heart lurches. “I want to know you too,” I say, then clasp our fingers together and return to the tale. “Anyway, my parents lived paycheck to paycheck. I had to earn my own dough and find scholarship money to go to college. I was here a lot working. All day. I’d have swim team practice all week, meets on Saturday morning, then I worked the rest of the weekend,” I say.
She listens attentively. “That’s a lot to balance, Nick.”
“It was, but my friends and I—the waiters, the caddies, the club attendants—we had fun after work. Hung out in that spot where you took me tonight.”
“You knew that spot,” she says, a smile breaking through over this shared history.
“I did, beautiful. Bet you came here with your dad, bet he took his lovely family out to lunch, bet you and your friends sneaked off to explore the grounds,” I say.
The smile widens. “We did. But I never took a boy there .”
I return her smile, feeling a little like I have an ace up my sleeve. “And I never took a girl there,” I say, playing my card.
“Really?”
“I swear,” I say.
“So I get a first of yours?” She sounds too delighted, and I want to stay here in this happy, flirty place with her all night.
“You sure did,” I say, reaching for her hand and running my thumb along her index finger. She shivers.
But that’s my cue to stop. I can’t get caught up in her and me, in our sweet nothings. I clear my expression so I can focus on the serious story I need to tell her. “Anyway, like I was saying, I met Rose here. Waited on her family. And then later, when Rose found out she was pregnant, her parents kind of took over all my choices.” A flash of self-loathing hits me square in the chest. Those hard days return to me in sharp relief. I’d fucked up. Big time. “Which made sense. They were rich. They had means. They had nannies. I was heading to a community college, hoping to land a swimming scholarship to a state school, which I did. But Rose had already been admitted to Yale. And her parents pulled me aside after the lunch service one afternoon. I was in my waiter’s uniform, and her dad said to me in a quiet hallway behind the clubhouse, Rose is done slumming it with you. And you will not ruin our daughter’s chances at Yale .”
My face is red hot, all over again.
Layla reaches for my hand across the table. It feels good—her touch as I tell this story.
“He said she will finish college like all Bancrofts do . And if you want to go to school too, we will raise her child while she’s at Yale. He’ll have our name. He’ll be a Bancroft.”
“Oh, Nick. That’s what you meant by their rules,” she says, frowning.
“Yeah,” I say hollowly, scrubbing my free hand across my jaw, like that’ll erase the shame I felt then. But time has healed that wound, since that’s what time does. “They barely let me see my own kid when I was in college, right after he was born. I didn’t have much choice in the matter. The only way either one of us could go to school was if the Bancrofts raised David in those early years. Rose and I were lucky, I suppose, to have that option.”
“I understand what you mean,” she says.
“I wouldn’t quite call it a Faustian bargain, but I had to go along with their wishes if I was going to carve out a life someday for myself, for my son, for the mother of my child.”
“That’s hard. You made the only choice you could make,” she says.
I’m glad she sees it that way. That’s how it felt to me. I had no other options. “I just wanted to pay the bills, make my own way. Take care of my family,” I say. I don’t share this story with just anyone. Hell, I don’t think I even told Millie. But I want Layla to understand me. To know why I said this is wrong . “So that’s why David and I don’t have the same last name. When Rose and I graduated from college and finally got married, there was still no relenting. A name was a little thing. I didn’t push. I just said thank you, then moved into a small apartment with my wife and my kid. Until Rose and I both finally admitted we were a terrible match.”
Layla links her fingers through mine. “That’s a lot to go through,” she says.
But she’s been through a lot too. “We all have stuff to deal with. I’m just glad he’s a good kid. I’m glad I have a good relationship with him. We’re in the same city again. We work together and see each other a lot. I don’t want to mess it up, Layla,” I say, and I sound desperate.
Desperate to have it all.
But I can’t.
Even when she squeezes back. Even when it feels so right to share pieces of myself with her.
But it’s not right, and we’re going to leave Connecticut very, very soon.