24. Fifteen Minutes
24
Fifteen Minutes
CARLY
NEW To-do list—December 25
Get on the first flight home
Pack
Burn this infernal stick-on bra
I t had to be the lowest point of my life. After being dressed down by Audrey Jones Hayes, I’d done exactly what she’d told me to do. What I’d sworn I wouldn’t. Not for her. I’d broken a promise to a man I liked. Who said he cared about me.
But I hadn’t done it because she’d told me to. I’d done it because it was the right thing to do. For him. Still, the stricken look on his face stuck—ugh, the irony, considering my current predicament—to the insides of my eyelids, which were currently shut against the agony.
Not from emotional pain. Physical pain.
All because of a stick-on bra.
I’d found this one online, and now I understood why it had been so cheap. It adhered with industrial-strength airplane epoxy that refused to release my skin. My left boob, the one I’d tried to free first, was red and angry looking. I couldn’t spare too many more skin cells, or there’d be blood. But after losing the battle with Audrey, I wasn’t ready to concede to a pair of silicone boob hammocks.
I never should have come. I hadn’t made one contact at the wedding. Aside from Helen Choi, who was just being nice in front of Hayley. She’d never actually call me.
At the prenuptial dinner, I’d let Brad bully me. At the reception, Audrey had cowed me. The trip was a waste of Tessa’s air miles and the proceeds from selling my last Hermès bag.
Sitting on the floor of my bathroom in my thong and the cursed bra, I yanked again. Pain sliced through me, forcing a cry out of my throat that ended in a pitiful sob. The stuck-on cup hadn’t given an inch.
A tap on the bathroom door came a second before Andrew’s urgent voice. “Carly, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Sniffling, I rubbed at the inflamed skin on the top of my left breast.
“Can I come in?”
“Absolutely not.” I looked like hell with red lines across my middle from my shapewear and my soft belly spilling over my panties as I curled up on the floor. I’d taken off my makeup, so nothing smoothed over my crow’s feet or smile lines.
“Please? I want to see that you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” I repeated, my voice stronger this time.
“I don’t believe you. What the hell did my mother say?”
“This has nothing to do with her.” I grasped the edge of the cup and, taking a deep breath, yanked. It ceded a quarter inch of my skin. Hissing in pain, I stopped.
“Carly?” His voice wavered with concern. “I’m coming in.”
All I had time to do was drape my torso over my knees to hide my red skin before he opened the door.
“Oh.” His eyebrows smashed together.
“It’s a fashion crisis,” I said, “not an emotional one.”
“How can I help?”
“You can’t. Unless you’re willing to give me a skin graft after I peel this bra off.”
His gaze skated over the reddened skin on the side of my chest. “It’s stuck to you? Like with glue?”
“It’s a thing. I couldn’t wear a regular bra with the low neckline of my dress. I wear these all the time. They’re not usually this sticky.” It would be the last time I cut corners.
He nodded. “We need a solvent. Anything alcohol-based would be irritating. Something oil-based? The hotel lotion?”
No wonder he was a rising star at his bank at thirty-two. “That’s not a bad idea. There’s some coconut oil in my makeup bag.” I pointed to the fold-out case hanging from the back of the door. “The blue packets.”
While he rummaged for it, I clambered to my feet. My creaky knee went off like a shot.
“Sorry,” I said. I accidentally caught my reflection in the mirror. I hadn’t taken my hair down yet, but a few strands had escaped. And not in sexy tendrils but in clumps, stuck together with hairspray.
And the silicone bra cups looked ridiculous surrounded by puffy, reddened skin.
As he turned back toward me, grasping the packets of coconut oil, I sucked in my stomach.
“What are you sorry about?” he asked.
“My knee. It creaks sometimes. These things happen when you get older.”
“I’ve got a bad ankle. I broke it playing soccer, and it still aches in the winter.”
“Not exactly the same, but thanks, I’ve got it from here.” I reached for the packets.
“Let me.”
Two words that hardly anyone ever said to me. Not Audrey or any of the other wives in my former social group. Not Brad. No one since my mother.
I’d just ended things, and Andrew Jones still offered me help.
I nodded.
He tore open the packet and squeezed out the white lotion into his palm. He looked to me for guidance.
“Rub some of it against your palm to liquefy it. Then, um, here.” I pointed at the top of my right boob to give the skin on the left side time to recover.
He rubbed the oil onto the skin around the silicone, then gradually moved his fingers to the edge of the cup. The sucker didn’t budge, but he kept at it.
“You know,” he said conversationally like he wasn’t touching my bare breast, “my mother has a lot of ideas about my life. Ideas she hasn’t asked me about. But it’s my life, not hers.”
“Mmm?” The combination of the pain from the adhesive and the pleasure of his touch had stolen my power of intelligible speech.
“She thinks I want what my dad had. What Charles has. What my brother has. But I’ve never been like them. I don’t need a big house, an important job with hundreds of people who depend on me, or children. I like kids, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not interested in having my own.”
I nodded, hypnotized. “What do you want, Andrew?”
“I…” His shoulders slumped. “For my career? I want to do fulfilling work. And I have that. Both with my job and with the videos.” He paused his work on the bra cup. “Do you think the videos are ridiculous? Indecorous?”
“Indecorous?” I giggled, high on endorphins. “Who even says that?”
“Vic.” His tongue stuck out between his teeth as he returned to work, and I gasped as he freed my nipple. His oiled-up fingers slid over the pebbled nub, sending a pulse of arousal straight to my sex. But he wasn’t doing it to get me off, so I clung to our conversation to refocus myself.
“And what about the family part?”
“I have a family already. My mother. Charles. My little sisters. Jerk-off Jackson and his family.” He sighed through his nose. “After Dad died, Mother wasn’t in good shape.”
“Oh, no.” I’d been afraid of that. When I’d gone to her house a few days after the funeral, Andrew had accepted the fruit basket but barred my entry, saying his mother was resting.
“She got better. Eventually. But until then, I took care of my sisters and made sure they got to school and their activities and stuff. I even learned how to braid Natalie’s hair. She said I sucked at it though.”
I stilled his hand. “But you tried. Most teenagers wouldn’t have stepped up like that.”
“Sure, they would.” He shrugged. “You do what you have to do. But it was a lot, and I don’t want to do it again. You know?”
Interesting. Audrey had been certain he wanted children. “I get that. But you’re so good in those videos, like you’re talking directly to kids.”
“You’ve seen them?”
“I—” My cheeks burned. “I may have watched one or two. After I met you that day on the soccer field.”
“And you thought I was good?”
“You were brilliant, Andrew. Even I understood the Pythagorean theorem after I watched it, and I struggled in high school math.”
“Thanks.” He focused on the bra cup again, and with one last tug, it was off. He tossed it into the sink. “One down.”
He started on the left cup, his smooth fingers working the oil into my skin and wedging under the cup with breathtaking care. As the silicone reluctantly un-stuck, he touched every newly freed inch of my breast, taking special care around the areola and over the nipple. I was so sensitized I felt the ridges of his fingerprints, and I held in a gasp. It was heaven.
But heaven was out of my reach. I cleared my throat. “My mom used to help with stuff like this in my pageant days.”
He looked up into my eyes and blinked. “I saw that photo at your place.”
“Mom was a former Miss Texas. I was four when she entered me into my first one and eighteen in my last. A talent scout convinced us to move to LA, and I got my first major modeling job.”
“Did you like it?” He wriggled a finger underneath the silicone stuck to the lower half of my breast.
I sucked in air through my nose and focused on the sconce next to the mirror. “I liked the competition. I could’ve done without the unhealthy diet. But by the time I was twenty, I supported both of us on my income, and I was proud of that.”
His fingers stilled. “I bet you were.”
Finally, the last bit of glue released my skin, and the second cup joined its evil twin in the sink. My unsupported breasts sagged, and I covered them with my hands. Despite my attempted distraction, I was tingly all over, and my nipples were pointed, demanding peaks.
“Really? I’ve basically given you a breast-cancer check, and you’re covering up?”
I winced. A breast-cancer check didn’t sound sexy at all, yet I was turned on. “I—sorry.” I dropped my hands to my sides.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“No, not at all.” I felt floaty and shivery and needy. But nothing hurt.
“Good. Because, Carly, I…” He came up behind me. With his right hand, he lifted my right breast and rubbed circles across the nipple with his thumb. Then he pressed his hips to my backside, proving he was as aroused as I was.
He met my gaze in the mirror. “I heard what you said, but don’t you feel what’s happening between us? I’ve never felt so…so…”
“Turned on?” That was all this tightness in my chest and the ache in my core was.
“It’s more than that. At least, for me it is. Carly, I…” He took a deep breath but stopped when he saw my expression in the mirror. “Okay, I get it. You’re not ready to talk about this. Not yet.”
“Andrew—”
“Coconut oil is edible, right?”
“I…what?”
He stepped in front of me, then his head descended over my throbbing left breast. He lapped at the tender, reddened skin. The warm wetness took my already oversensitive body to the next level, and I gasped.
He looked up as his tongue traced the arc of my breast. “Okay?”
“Unngh.”
“I’ve heard human saliva is a natural painkiller…like orgasms.”
The words rattled around in my brain. Fortunately, he didn’t wait for me to respond.
“It’s okay, darling. I’ve got you.” He went back to work, holding up my breast in one hand while he licked the nipple. A second later, my stomach swooped when he tunneled his other hand inside my panties and found me wet and swollen.
He switched to my right breast, clamped onto my nipple, and sucked, sending a thrill of pleasure from my chest straight to my center as he nudged a finger inside me.
I moaned as my vision tunneled.
“You’re a good girl,” he said. “You can come.”
And goddamn it. My traitorous body took that as a direct instruction. Despite the pain I’d been in only fifteen minutes ago, pleasure shot through me, and, shuddering, I came and came and came.
When I returned to awareness, Andrew nuzzled my neck. He dragged his lips up to my earlobe and whispered, “Feeling better?”
“Ye—” I swallowed to clear the gravel from my voice. “Yes. What was that, some kind of tantric technique they teach on ClickClackGo?”
He chuckled against my temple. “I think it had something to do with the extra endorphins from the pain. But, sure, I’ll take some of the credit. It felt like a good one.”
Nodding, I curled my fingers into the front of his shirt to hold him to me.
“Hey.” He tipped up my chin. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Uh-huh. It was a weird day.” From afternoon sex with Andrew to my ex’s wedding to finding out his new wife was pregnant to my fight with Audrey, it had been a lot, especially with my bathroom meltdown and Andrew’s care to top it off.
“Let’s get you to bed.” Supporting me with a hand around my waist, he led me into the bedroom and pulled back the covers. Wearing only my panties, I lay down. He tucked the covers around me and bent to kiss my forehead.
“Stay,” I whispered.
He sat heavily on the side of the bed. Stroking my still-crispy hair out of my face, he asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I didn’t mean it. I mean, I did at the time. I thought it was the right thing to do. Maybe it still is, but I shouldn’t make those choices for both of us.” I’d hated when Brad made decisions like I wasn’t worthy of having an opinion. “That is, if you want to stay.”
It took effort, but I kept my heavy eyelids open to take in his response.
He trailed a featherlight touch over my cheek. “Of course I want to stay. You’ve changed your mind about leaving tomorrow? We’ll go back together on Friday?”
I turned my head to kiss his palm. “Yeah.”
His cheeks lifted in an irrepressible grin. “Don’t think I’m weird, but can I brush your hair? I think you’ll sleep better if I brush out this hairspray. That’s what Natalie says anyway.”
“She’s right.” I started to push up on my elbow.
“Stay there. I’ll grab your hairbrush.”
He was gone for a minute or two, and when he walked back into the bedroom, he’d taken off his suit. He still wore an undershirt and his boxers, and he smelled minty.
“Hope you don’t mind. I took a swig of your mouthwash.” He helped me sit up in bed, then he squeezed in behind me, wedging me between his spread legs.
He started at the ends, holding the hair and brushing out the clumps so it didn’t hurt my scalp. Slowly, he worked his way up, pulling out a hairpin every now and then.
“No one’s brushed my hair like this since my mom died.”
“I’m so sorry. How old were you?”
“Twenty-three.” The gentle pull on my scalp was hypnotic.
“Can you tell me about it?”
I let his rhythmic brushing relax me. “We lived in LA, and she was dating a studio executive. He took her up in his helicopter, and there was an accident. They both died. And the pilot.” Fleetingly, I wondered why I was spilling my history like this. Normally, I kept it buttoned up safely inside.
He paused his brushing. “That must have been terrible.”
“We’d always been close. So yeah, it was a dark few months. I guess that’s why it was so easy for Brad to sweep me off my feet.”
He started brushing again, a little more forcefully. I shivered at the tug on my scalp.
“Was your dad around?”
“No, he was never part of my life.”
“Ah.” He kept up the long, rhythmic strokes. “I’m sorry. My dad worked hard, but he used to spend fifteen minutes with each of us at night. He used to brush Nat’s hair. That’s what she wanted.”
“What did he do in his fifteen minutes with you?”
“In the summer, when there was still light, we played catch. Other times we’d play one-on-one. There was a light by the basketball hoop.”
I smiled, remembering. “You were always the sporty one.”
“I wish we’d talked more. We talked, but it was usually about technique or my team. I wish we’d talked about what was important.”
“Hmm.” I didn’t remember much about his father, Jasper. He’d died two or three years after I married Brad. He was often late to his wife’s parties because he was working into the evening at his startup. Though now, I mused, perhaps he was late because he was spending an hour with his kids. “I’m sure he thought your sports and your teams were important. Because they were important to you.”
“Maybe. If I’d known we’d have so little time, I’d have asked him about other stuff.”
“What stuff?” He’d made it to my scalp with the brush, and the gentle massage made my eyelids droop.
“About his work. About being a man. About relationships. And love.”
I hummed. I’d talked about things like that with my mom.
“All done,” he said, setting the brush on the bedside table. “Lean back.”
I did, though his lean body wasn’t as soft as a pillow. He pulled the covers over us and turned me to my side. With long strokes, he brushed his hand over my arm and my back.
“If he were still here, I think he’d tell me to suck it up and be honest.”
“Hmm?” I nestled my cheek into his chest and rubbed my nose across his shirt, inhaling his scent. I loved whatever product it was that made him smell like the ocean.
Under my cheek, his heart picked up its pace. “My feelings are real, Carly. I’m falling for you.”
My heart skipped a beat. I knew I should say something. But my exhausted brain couldn’t come up with the right words. All I said was, “Go to sleep, Andrew.”