Chapter Four – Jack
Chapter Four
Jack
There was pizza, there were naps, there were movies, and there was snuggling, and anything else we could do short of needing condoms we did—she reached over and jacked me off because she could, and I loved the hot feel of her skin on mine, and the way my cum looked against her hand.
And then I took one of those rubber sword-looking things out and fucked her while she played with herself, just to watch her come, to hear her voice rise and watch her body shake.
But at ten p.m. Thea looked at the clock on her phone, every bit a Cinderella. “I’m sorry Jack, but—"
“I know,” I said softly. I’d looked at my phone an hour ago, and had been feeling the minutes count down since.
She rolled out of bed and stood. “This has been really amazing. But I’ve got to shower and—"
“I’ll call a ride.”
“Good,” she said, and gave me an apologetic smile.
For all the fucking we’d done, there was a distance between us now—almost the same as the distance between us in high school. She had her place, here, and I had mine, back in Texas. The past sixteen hours belonged to an alternate reality.
“Like, really amazing,” she said, with emphasis, and then danced over to me to lean up and peck my cheek with a chaste kiss.
“Agreed,” I said with a rueful smile, watching her walk through her bathroom door. She didn’t even bother to close it as she stepped into her shower. Between the steam and the door’s crinkled safety glass she probably couldn’t see me, but she knew that I was there.
“It’s okay if you have to pee, just don’t flush!” she shouted, from the other side of the shower.
Her bathroom counter was laced with feminine things, perfumes and potions, and her make-up kit was like an arsenal, with just as many colors as I had at my tattoo station back home. I lifted a necklace out of a heart shaped bowl—it was a fat emerald encircled by diamonds.
Somewhere there was an admirer who could give her that. How on earth could I compare?
I couldn’t.
That’s why I had to go.
My stomach and my heart sank, as I watched her blurry body moving behind the shower door, rinsing me away, and I couldn’t stand it.
If you’d asked me before that moment if I had had a possessive bone in my body, I would have said no—but watching her, I became a creature made of claws, and all I wanted was to grab hold of her and never let her go.
I slid the shower door open and stepped in.
“Jack!” she protested, as cold air swirled in with me.
She was soaking wet, rivulets of water streaming down her face, her hair in wet blonde tassels—and she looked just like the girl I’d rescued from her shattered car.
I put my hand out to touch her cheek and stroked my thumb across the small scar she had from the accident, right above her cheekbone.
Without thinking, she leaned into it, like a cat.
“Are you clean yet?” I asked her.
Her eyes flashed up at me. “Not hardly.”
“Then hand me the soap.”
I rolled the soap between my hands until they were full of lather, and then soaped up every beautiful piece of her, washing all evidence of me away. She stood there and let me, like she knew I was trying to memorize her because I was, then I commanded: “Turn around.”
She did as she was told, quivering, waiting—as I knelt down behind her and spread her ass wide. I pressed my tongue against her asshole and felt her whole body shake, as she instantly went up on her toes to give me access.
“Oh God, Jack.” One of her hands darted up to grab the shower nozzle and bring it down, to run the water over her clit as I gently kissed her there, and then pushed my tongue inside.
Within seconds, she was moaning, begging, one hand pressed against the shower wall, the other holding the nozzle as she bent over. “Please, please,” she danced for me, for her orgasm, in the spraying water as my tongue probed her. “Please.”
I grabbed hold of her ass with both hands, loving the curve of it, the meat of it, the way kissing her here made her mine.
“Oh God, oh God,” she started begging the Creator, and then, “Jack—Jack—Jack!” She named each wave of her orgasm after me, coming fast and hard, I saw it rippling through her body. She sagged against the wall to pant, as I pulled back.
“There,” I said. There was no part of her now I had not known and tasted.
No mysteries left. I stood, breathing in the thick steam.
My cock was hard, curving up toward my belly, but it didn’t matter—I was going to have a hard on for Thea until the day that I died.
I took the shower head and ran it over myself, once, twice, and then got out of the shower to start raking myself with a towel.
She stayed in the shower behind me, and I heard her phone beep as a message came in while I went to collect my clothing off of her floor.
Three minutes later, when my jeans were on and I was pulling on my shirt, she ran into her living room, phone in hand. “Don’t go.”
My hands paused in disbelief. “What?”
“You heard me,” she said, licking her lips to smile. “How much longer are you in town for?”
“My flight leaves at three, tomorrow.” I could feel my pulse at all points in my body, throbbing with hope.
“Change it. Go get your bags and come back. Give me another day here. We won’t even leave the apartment. I’ll bring home more condoms—a box.”
The way she was looking at me—and the way I needed her, I’d always needed her—I answered before thinking about Bruce, or flights, or clients. “Bring home two.”
I did fly home the day after that though, my cock chafed, my body sore. A hundred dollars to change the flight had bought me another day’s time with her. When I got back to Dallas, Bruce only had one question.
“Was it worth it?”
“Completely.”
“Good,” he said with a laugh and then we went back to all business.
I honestly didn’t expect to hear from Thea again. We’d exchanged numbers, but both of us knew how impossible a relationship would be, so I didn’t reach out to her. I didn’t want to seem desperate, or worse yet, in denial.
So I was surprised when three days later, she sent me a text.
You still jerking off to me?
I smiled down at the phone while I considered what to type. Every night.
Good.
After that it was a week of silence then another tease and I couldn’t resist responding. I knew all the things girls did to guys to yank their chains—and vice versa—and yet I still let her pull.
I tried to throw myself into my work, trying to not let her silences torment me—I had more than enough imagination to get by alone at night—and I had a lot of options, I appealed to a lot of types: girls my age who were every bit as tattooed as I was, older women looking to get into younger trouble, and church girls with a secret devil-may-care side.
I’d had them all, and could get them again, but they all paled in comparison to Thea, my dancing Dorothy, who’d taken her ruby-red stilettos and pierced my heart.
I got her next text while I was in line at the grocery store. I have two days off. Come out?
Self-respecting Jack—the Jack I’d become since leaving my one-horse hometown—knew better than to respond. But high school Jack wagged his tail to agree.
And so for a while it was like that—her sending texts, me scrambling to buy flights and rebook appointments, ignoring when angry clients then cancelled on me. I didn’t have any other obligations, other than to Bruce, who’d started to radiate a sense of weary disapproval.
My plane would land and I’d catch a cab or she’d pick me up, and we’d go straight to her apartment.
I didn’t ask why we never left it, or why she wouldn’t let me.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to know what the rest of Vegas held—it was a happy blur of neon until I reached the soft cotton of her sheets, the softer skin between her thighs.
Eight months passed like that, with me coming out and pounding her senseless every third or fourth week: Thea’s hands clawing my back, my breath on her neck, both of us fucking like we were desperate, like the fucking was our air.
Each time leaving her was a little harder, a little heavier, like my cock was setting an anchor into her that I buried deeper with every thrust.
And in between we’d lay beside one another, her shoulder tucked into my armpit, her head leaning in beneath my chin, and talk.
I’d tell her about the tattoo studio I’d own someday, my own or Bruce’s, if he left it to me when he retired like he was always threatening to.
And she’d tell me about a trip she was saving for, she had it planned out, city by city, a literal trip around the world—not just in hostels, scraping by, but in style, at four star resorts wearing designer clothes, sitting by pools and going to galleries.
It was what she was saving all her tips for, while other girls spent theirs on diapers or on drugs.
But sometimes late at night she’d seem sad.
Our first nights together were always wild, and often as not we wouldn’t make it to the bedroom, I’d end up taking her against her couch or on her floor.
The nights after that though, I’d catch her staring into space and she’d feel distant, even though my arms were wrapped around her tight.
When I’d ask her what was wrong, I could always sense the answer hiding right behind her teeth—but then she’d laugh and play it off with a ‘nothing!’.
And after that she’d rise up and devour me and her distractions worked—I couldn’t ask her any more questions when her tongue was in my mouth.
I always wanted to push her away and find out more, but I was afraid I wouldn’t like the answer.
And I liked the sensation of her needing me, even if it was needing to distract me—or then having me distract her—which I was worried made me some sort of emotionally damaged sick-fuck… but not enough to stop flying out.
Over that time, her collection of jewelry grew. I asked her about it in her bathroom one night, after she’d blown me in the shower, pulling back to let me shoot myself all over her perfect breasts.
She smiled disingenuously and laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about that—it’s all fake.”
I doubted fake jewelry felt so solid or was engraved with the word ‘Cartier’.
But the things I wanted to say to her, the ways that I felt—I knew I had to keep them to myself.
I didn’t deserve her, I never had. All of this was glamour and luck, and if I breathed on it wrong the bubble would burst. Just like that first night when I’d seen her spinning, when my eyes had glinted off of her because she was too bright—I knew asking what this was now, if we were anything to each other, would break it.
Somehow I managed to be okay with that, always holding my hopes in reserve, trusting in the way she made me feel, in the way I knew I made her feel—until the day I landed and she didn’t come to get me.