Chapter 15
SARAH
affection | BETWEEN FRIENDS
‘Are you ever going to tell me who your favourite artist is?’ Alex’s voice broke through her blissed-out haze.
‘What?’ Sarah blinked slowly, trying to bring her brain back into her body.
‘Your favourite artist. Who is it?’
He lifted himself on one elbow, blue eyes boring down into hers. She ought to go. But his king-sized bed—with its soft feather duvet, memory foam mattress, and pillows that were a perfect medium firmness—was coaxing her towards sleep. It would be so easy to drift off.
‘Oh. Wasn’t planning on it,’ she said, around a yawn. Five more minutes, then she’d leave.
‘Why not? I can see you naked, but this is an intimacy too far?’ Amusement sparked in every line of his face.
‘It’s just so much more fun keeping you waiting.’
He’d asked her each time they’d seen each other that week. Three surreptitious meetings that had involved one of them slipping out after Abby and Erik went to bed and venturing to the home of the other. Her eyes fluttered shut but, feeling the mattress shift, flew open again to find Alex hovering above her. It offered a spectacular view of his arms, and she wondered—after a string of cigarette-thin creative types—when obnoxious muscles had become so attractive. Probably around the same time as obnoxious smirks.
Which she was presently faced with.
‘I’ll remember that for next time, Princess.’ His lips ghosted down her throat towards her breasts, never quite making contact. When he reached her nipple, he paused, blew out a light breath that had her body stiffening in anticipation, and abruptly rolled away.
‘Bastard,’ she hissed.
‘It’s just so much more fun keeping you waiting.’
‘Not the same,’ she groaned.
‘Isn’t it? We both want something, and the other is holding out on us.’
‘Why do you care so much?’
Something that looked surprisingly like desperation transformed his pretty features for a fraction of a second. It was immediately replaced by a smirk. ‘Just do.’
***
He texted her guesses each day after that.
Alex: Basquiat?
Sarah: Not exactly my style.
Alex: Warhol?
Sarah: Seriously?
Alex: I thought you’d enjoy the critique of consumerism and his attempts to equalise art.
Sarah: Sure. Not my favourite though.
Alex: Duchamp?
Sarah: Go fuck yourself.
Alex: Gladly. Can I think of you while I do it?
Sarah: I’ll give you a clue if you never ask me that again.
Sarah: We’re talking pre-19th century.
Alex: Raphael?
Sarah: No.
Sarah: But you’re getting warmer.
Alex: Good.
Alex: We might have needed to end this arrangement if you’d said yes.
***
‘You’re evil,’ Sarah whined, as Alex brought her right to the edge for a third time, then stilled his fingers.
‘I’ve told you what I want to hear.’ Alex’s smile was wicked, a demonic leer marring that otherwise angelic face.
‘Seriously? You’re not going to let me finish until I tell you?’
When they’d discussed their limits earlier in the week and she’d agreed that he could make her wait for it, she hadn’t expected him to have this level of patience.
‘I have nowhere to be this afternoon,’ he said, shuffling back on his knees. ‘And I told your flatmates I’d be out for a while, so I have no doubt they’re going back to my house for some alone time after their appointment with the caterer.’ He dropped to the bed, his head disappearing between her thighs. One sharp nip to the sensitive skin there had her squirming. ‘Seems like a ridiculous hill to die on, but I’m happy to take all day to break you if that’s what you want.’
‘You realise that means edging yourself all day too?’ Maybe she could talk him around.
Alex scoffed. ‘Does it now?’
Only his breath touched her as he spoke, sending little sparks of pleasure through her body. She was wound so tight that he might have been able to get her there just like that.
‘Not very gentlemanly to finish first.’
‘I’ve never pretended to be a gentleman with you.’ Then he finally lowered his head enough to taste her.
After three firm strokes of his tongue, she was ready to combust. He knew it too, pulling away just as she was about to get there. It was alarming how quickly he’d learned her tells.
‘Aleksander. Please,’ she whimpered. ‘I’ll give you anything you want.’
‘All I want is an answer, Princess.’ He raised himself over her again, sapphire eyes glinting in the afternoon sunlight streaming through her window. ‘How stubborn do you want to be about this?’
Mostly they met up at night. But he’d texted her an hour earlier to ask if she was free. And suddenly she found herself wishing all their rendezvous had this same soft lighting that turned his skin and hair gold. The fairy lights in her bedroom, the lamp in his—he looked beautiful in both. But he didn’t glow like he was now.
Their midnight meetings felt borne of desperation and hunger, that base human urge not to be alone in the dark, even if they never stayed the night. But there was a strange intimacy to seeing him in daylight. It felt more intentional, somehow.
‘I’ll tell you after.’
‘It’s cute that you think I trust you. Condom?’ She handed him one, scowling. ‘You’re sure it’s not Duchamp? Because you certainly seem embarrassed to admit it.’
‘It’s like you think I wouldn’t slap you.’
‘It’s like you think I wouldn’t enjoy it.’
Sarah searched his face for any sign he was joking and came up short. Huh .
What she hadn’t anticipated was that sex with Alex, talking and all, would be…fun. She’d known it would be good. His first performance had been plenty persuasive in that regard. But their bickering—or more accurately, her bickering and his teasing in return—had segued effortlessly into the bedroom. Suddenly she found she didn’t mind talking so much.
Alex let out a strangled sound as he lifted her hips and pushed into her. ‘You always feel so fucking good.’
It didn’t hurt that he kept saying things like that.
Maybe it was the disarming sincerity in his tone. Previous partners had too often sounded like they were reciting the script of bad porn when they’d tried to talk to her in bed. But every bit of Alex’s praise felt genuine. And more than that, based on his reactions to her body, it felt earned.
When he started moving, alternating short, sharp thrusts and long, languid strokes—just uneven enough that she couldn’t sink into the rhythm—she broke.
‘Gentileschi.’ The utterance burst out of her as he aligned a particularly deep thrust with a pinch of her nipple.
His expression when he looked at her again was rapturous.
‘Was that so difficult?’
The pace he set then was brutal, as if he was as desperate for her to come as she was. And she did within minutes, releasing a scream as her vision whited out.
Alex followed her thirty seconds later, dropping her hips back to the bed before he collapsed on top of her. ‘Oh, your neighbours must love you,’ he said. ‘I’m going to remind you of the perks of having sex in a house, Princess. You can be as loud as you want.’
‘Sorry we aren’t all capitalist vultures who can afford Holland Park’s rent prices.’
His face pulled with disgust. ‘You wound me. My house is not a rental .’
They lay in silence a few moments more, until Sarah mumbled, ‘I have a confession.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘Only on dopamine.’ She laughed, still shocked that his presence in her bed, weight crushing her to the mattress, was…pleasant. ‘I don’t think I’ve come that hard, ever.’
Alex rolled effortlessly off her and pressed a kiss to the pulse point behind her ear, surely fluttering wildly under his lips. ‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘Me neither.’
Later, after Alex had filled a bottle with ice water and placed it next to her bed—Sarah couldn’t think that anyone had ever done that for her either—and he was sliding back into his shirt, she asked, ‘Do you even know who she was? She’s barely covered on most syllabi, if at all.’
He paused, and even with his hair neatly styled once more and his trousers somehow still pressed, standing there with only one arm through his shirt was the most dishevelled she’d seen him.
‘No. But my uni offered a short course on her. She was amazing. Feminist icon, consistently ignored in favour of men who weren’t nearly as talented as her? Plus the fact that people tend to perceive her best known piece as a takedown of men, when the overwhelming theme of her work is simply uplifting women? I’m not surprised you love her.’
Sarah sat up, stunned into silence, because in one fell swoop, he had nailed why she’d first become obsessed six years before.
‘What?’ Alex smiled. A full, genuine, slightly crooked smile, so different from the perfectly balanced slice of amusement she was used to. A dangerous smile, soft around the edges as it lifted his face and crinkled his bright eyes. ‘I know I’m full of shit most of the time, but I really do love art.’
‘How about you? Duchamp seems more your style,’ she teased, trying to deflect from the strange feelings bubbling in her stomach, brought to life by his unfailing ability to perceive her.
Alex rolled his eyes. ‘While I appreciate the absurdism there, do you see a urinal tattooed on this body?’
She didn’t. But she did see David on his right bicep. Had salivated a little over God and Adam’s hands stretched across his shoulders each time he turned his back to her.
Because it was excellent work.
Obviously.
‘Michelangelo?’
He inclined his head.
‘That’s why you hate Raphael,’ she said, smiling at the ridiculousness of him holding onto a centuries-old rivalry where both participants were long dead.
‘I know everyone thinks I have commitment issues,’ he said, finally slinging the second arm into his shirt and buttoning it, ‘but I’m pretty loyal when I want to be.’