Sixteen
I t’s dark by the time I get back to the lodge. Mainly because I didn’t want to stop once I started writing. I looked up, and everyone was gone. It was just me, and someone vacuuming on one of the lower floors. Meera and Julio said to tell you goodbye , she said, as I passed her. They didn’t want to interrupt your flow.
Then I get a little thrill at the thought of having a flow.
In fact, I kind of can’t wait to gabble about it to Beck, like a big dork.
We’re supposed to space out the prompts but I started every single one of them , I see myself saying to him the second I get inside. Hell, I’m buzzing so hard I can almost imagine showing him some of my scribbling. Or even telling him that I no longer think it’s that silly or mad to want to write romantic stories. That I think I can do it, and have all the feelings inside me that might make that possible.
But then I step through the door and he says, ‘Darling.’
And he sounds so big and bright and happy to see me.
So relieved. So real .
It takes almost nothing to believe it. He goes to take me in his arms, and I let him. I welcome him. Like he really is my husband. Though somehow I suspect most husbands don’t sweep their wives up the second she responds. Or dip her in a way that wouldn’t look out of place at the end of a romantic movie. I have to grab him just to keep myself standing.
Or so I tell myself.
It feels less like that once I’ve got my hands on his burly shoulders, and his huge arms, and his great broad back – and all those things feel amazing . I have to physically restrain myself from rubbing all over them. And even more so when he just kisses me. Firmly, confidently, and so on point I completely forget that I’m supposed to be nicely distracted. He parts his lips, and I get the slightest flicker of tongue, and I become ravenous. Like a wild animal.
Nothing can stop me from kissing him back.
Or from doing it in a way I know is too much. I rock my mouth into his, all hot and wet and good, and he makes a sound right into me. A groan of shock, I think it is – though it doesn’t feel that way. There’s a helpless, desperate quality to it that makes me think of someone eating a delicious meal after years of gruel.
I imagine him stuffing it into his mouth, eyes going back in his head. Fingers sticky with food he shouldn’t eat, and then him licking each one clean. And it drives me on. I don’t stop. I practically climb him to get at his mouth better. One of my hands ends up in his rich, thick hair, and my leg is somehow off the ground and at his hip and oh, the sound he makes for that.
How he just sinks into it, more sounds spilling out of him like a symphony of desire. I could swim around in it. I could do nothing but this for the rest of my days. Just keep fucking his mouth with my tongue, until he pulls back abruptly, all breathless, and says my name against my lips.
Hazy, he calls me. Like it’s my real name.
And nothing has ever sounded more like it is than he makes it sound now.
I can feel myself inching a little closer to believing it. As if I’m scaling some mountain called No, don’t worry, you’re actually totally compatible and this is not going to end up destroying emotions you’re not used to having. You’re not going to ruin him forever, nothing is going to end up fucked up beyond repair.
It’s fine. It’s fine.
Even though it isn’t. And not just because we’re all wrong for each other.
There’s also the fact that we have definitely gone too far. We’ve seemed too much like people who’ve been waiting a thousand years to fuck each other. Instead of people who fuck fully dressed, and will soon never want to fuck again. So I step back. And I try to laugh, and sort of slap Beck on the shoulder – like that was just a big joke.
Though I don’t need to.
Doug doesn’t seem to care or notice in the slightest. Like this wasn’t that sexy at all, it was just the baseline of convincing him. All of which means one terrible and harrowing thing:
We’re going to have to do it again, just to stay afloat.
T he good part is that we don’t have to do it again that night. But the bad part is I know other similar challenges are barrelling down the pipe at me. Like the fact that we’re about to have another night of hell, in our one much-too-small bed. The same bed that I can’t stop thinking about as we sit across the kitchen table from each other, eating dinner.
He chatters away about his day, I think about it.
Doug complains about the pasta, I think about it.
By the time our hands brush reaching for the salt, I’m so charged up that this slight touch makes me jerk back. Like it burned me. My face heats; I can’t meet his gaze. Then I do, and his gaze is so full of concern. Are you okay , he mouths, in the middle of Tammy telling a story about a girl in her writing group.
She’s so nice and cute , I hear in the background.
While in the foreground there is just Beck, and his dark, expressive gaze. The way it holds mine, unflinching, and without one single hint that he would like to pay attention to anything else. Because of course he doesn’t want to pay attention to anything else. He’s not interested in shying away from emotions or actual problems another person might have. He doesn’t play games, he won’t just make you guess.
He cares.
He waits, until I nod. And only then does he focus back on Tammy – like the polite gentleman he is. He listens to her talking about this girl, this fabulous girl, this girl I’m starting to suspect Tammy has a huge crush on, in a way that’s hopefully going to end very badly for Doug. And he tells her that the girl, Mandy, sounds lovely and open to being very good friends.
While Doug seems completely oblivious.
He’s just stuffing the cacio e pepe Beck made into his mouth, like it’s going out of style. Despite the fact that he claimed, at several points, that only dipshits and losers know how to cook fancy foo-foo pasta. I didn’t even know it was fancy , Beck had said. I just really like cheese .
And that feels very true, once I’ve got a mouthful of the stuff.
It tastes like a block of Parmesan is making love to my mouth. I have to stifle a moan and stop myself from shovelling it in. Then I remember I don’t have to stop in front of Beck. He’s not waiting to be a pain in the ass about it. He’s just looking at me surreptitiously, in between telling Tammy that tomorrow they won’t have to put up with him running the workshop on plotting.
And his eyes gleam, to see me loving his food.
It’s the reason he kept giving you the pies , my brain informs me. His love language is food and feeding people and watching them enjoy it . Only of course I know that it wasn’t exactly love, in my case. It was more like niceness, true niceness, true kindness, of the sort he doles out to absolutely everybody.
Like right now, when Tammy wonders if she should have some more. He just gets up, and grabs her some. Almost absentmindedly, so as to not draw attention to it. No big deal, who cares if you put on weight, have some more , the gesture seems to say. And Tammy seems puzzled, but happy about that.
She tucks in, between shooting him little confused looks.
Like his awesomeness is starting to sneak up on her, too.
And then I find myself imagining her hitting on him, and them dating, and oh god, it’s so awful I don’t know how to deal with it. I get a surge of nonsensical jealousy so intense that it stays with me all through dinner, and doing the dishes, and the game of Scrabble we somehow end up playing afterwards.
I find myself searching for any sign that he and Tammy are in love, despite the fact that she is clearly in love with Mandy Taylor, the girl in her writing group, and Beck is completely focused on trying to work things so I can get a triple-word score. ‘No, honestly, I thought the word foot was the best I could do. I didn’t even see that age over there I could have added it to,’ he says.
All of which is a complete lie.
And of course only makes everything worse, when we finally have to go up to bed. Now I’m too hot to stand this and all in my feelings – about thirty seconds before we climb the stairs together. Slowly, slowly, and so close I feel like I can make out the heat of his breath on the nape of my neck. My hand is on the rail that lines the staircase, and his goes too fast behind it, and they almost touch.
And now we’re in the bedroom.
Standing across the bed from each other.
Staring and staring into each other’s eyes, as if that makes any sense at all. Then he goes to take off his T-shirt – to break this weird tension, I think. Only when he does he seems to realize what that means, about halfway through, and stops. He holds it there, with the material lifted just enough that I can make out the thick hair all over his belly, somehow rough and soft-looking all at the same time.
Then just as I go to look away, he laughs.
‘I don’t know why I’m hesitating, you’ve seen me without my shirt on,’ he says, so amused by his own foolishness that he rolls his eyes at himself. Like come on Beck, where’s your head at, talk some sense. Though of course it’s not sense to me. He just accidentally trapped me in a complete nightmare.
Now I have to keep looking as he actually takes the whole thing off. I get to see his burly chest and his strong shoulders all over again, before he snags his pyjama top and slips that on.
And slipping it on doesn’t help.
It has a lot of buttons, and he fastens each one agonizingly slowly. All I can think about when he does that is what it would look like in reverse. Plus once he’s done, it makes such a contrast with the rest of him. It’s like something a nineteenth-century gentleman would wear before donning his smoking gown and retiring for the night.
Only he’s so big inside it. So hairy.
And it’s dangling over his bare thighs, in a way that makes it look like he has nothing underneath. Then he strips his shorts off and I have to know there’s nothing underneath. He’s completely naked there now, in a way I feel way too weird about.
Though at least it doesn’t seem so weird when I turn around, at this point.
I haven’t seen that part of him. It makes sense to not stare as he pulls on his pyjama bottoms. Plus I’ve got to get changed myself, and he has definitely not seen anything on me. In fact, he’s already staring at the ceiling before I even put my back to him. And when I glance back I see his eyes stay there, as I slip out of my top all quick.
Though I swear, I hear him swallow thickly when I unclip my bra. As if he made out the sound, and knows what it means, and is just a little affected. Just enough that it takes some effort not to make him more so. I force myself to stay turned away, so the only thing that sees my bare breasts are the blinds and the wall. There’s no way for him to glimpse a thing.
Or so I think, until I see it.
The mirror. The freestanding swing mirror in the corner. The one I catch a glimpse of him in, behind me, eyes flashing big at whatever he didn’t mean to catch a glimpse of. ‘Oh goodness,’ I hear him let out, in this startled way. And I don’t want it to feel good.
But it kind of does. It sends this spike of excitement right the way through me. Followed, thankfully, by a spike of shame and horror. Sorry, I didn’t mean to assault your eyes with my tits , I want to say, as I scramble to tug on my own pyjamas. I get one arm in the wrong sleeve, and somehow manage to do two buttons wrong. Twice I almost drop it, in the middle of the whole thing. In the background, I can hear him almost whistling.
Then finally, finally I manage.
I make myself presentable.
And quickly realize I’m not presentable at all. I chose this sleep set because I thought it was nicely modest. In fact, it is nicely modest, to me. It covers absolutely everything, from my ankles to my neck. But of course the problem is – it covers all of that with slinky stuff. It covers it with silk. And silk is way, way more revealing than I have ever been forced to realize before.
The material keeps sliding between the cheeks of my ass. And clinging to the shape of everything between my legs. And I know that it’s hanging in a way that fully reveals how tight and tense my nipples are. Every time I move I can feel material gliding over them. They’re getting stiffer by the second, just because of that fact.
And because of him trying not to stare.
He moves toward the bed without being able to actually look in the bed’s direction. His hands fumble and feel for the duvet, and he clumsily peels it back. While I try to do the same without showing him anything more, accidentally.
By the time we get into bed, I feel like the air between us is electrified.
Even brushing against that empty space makes me buzz and jerk back. And I can tell he’s carefully avoiding it, too. He manoeuvres as if there’s a much bigger obstacle between us than the cushion worm, all big exaggerated movements and avoiding even touching it, until he finally settles right on the far edge of the bed. Absurdly right on the far edge.
He moves a millimetre, and he’s going to fall off.
I expect to wake to the sound of him thumping to the ground.
If I manage to sleep at all. ‘Goodnight,’ he says, in an oh-so-slightly wavery voice. Then he snaps the light off, and I just lie there in the dark, staring at a ceiling I can hardly see. It takes me an hour to settle enough to close my eyes.
But even doing that doesn’t really help.
It just means I can hugely hear him, now. The shift of his body on the bed, far more tentative than it should be. The shakiness of his breathing, as if he’s as unsettled as I am. Then even worse, somehow: the slowing of it, like he’s actually managing to fall asleep.
He drifts off, while I carry on squirming and aching and just wanting to touch myself more than I ever have in my life. Would it be so bad , I find myself thinking, as I squeeze my thighs together around that low pulse between my legs. Then just as I’ve convinced myself that I definitely shouldn’t do it, I feel him turn. I feel the mattress dip and shift.
And I don’t know, I guess he flings his arm out in his sleep. But it’s a really long arm, so it traverses the barrier between us, easily. It gets right across there, and suddenly, oh god, suddenly his hand is on me. It just lands on my body – and not even on anywhere innocent, either. He doesn’t get hold of my shoulder or my stomach.
He gets hold of my breast.
He almost cups it, with that big, heavy hand.
For a second it actually seems as if he’s squeezing it, greedily. And as there’s only that silky material between his palm and all the sensitive things there, it feels unhinged . Every time he breathes his hand shifts just a little, and brushes the tip of my nipple. It slides that silk right over the tip. Accidentally, I know, I know. But of course my body doesn’t know the difference. My body just thinks he’s gently rubbing me there, over and over, until I ache .
Pleasure spirals down from that one stiff point, sweet enough that I almost moan. I almost arch up into that sweet deliciousness, and only manage to resist because I know how bad that would be. He’s not meaning to do this.
But I would be, if I did.
‘Beck,’ I whisper, instead.
Then I give him a little shove. But the thing is, giving him a little shove makes him shift. It rubs his palm against that tender little point, and I just can’t help it. I make a sound. I gasp all shaky and hot, and of course that wakes him. He jolts like I shot him, and seems to realize what has happened all in a sleepy rush, then immediately jerks his hand away.
‘Oh my gosh, Hazy. I am so sorry, I am so sorry, I absolutely did not mean to do that, I promise that will never happen again, here, let me put something more between us, let me just grab another pillow,’ he says, and he fumbles to do just that. He shoves more stuff between us.
In the end it’s like a mountain.
No way is he ever going to be able to accidentally touch me again. And I want to feel good about that, I do. But I can’t, I can’t, because I know that by accident is the only way he’s ever going to do it. Even though I don’t think another accident would be enough for me now.
I want it over and over.
And on purpose.
Until both of us lose our minds.