3. Elise
— ? —
Elise
Simon parks badly, across two spaces, and sits there for a second with his hands on the wheel like he’s deciding whether to say something else.
He doesn’t. He gets out, slams the door hard enough to rock the car, and walks toward the building without looking back at either of us.
“He’s furious,” Rowan says.
“He’s been furious since we left the driveway.”
“No, that was sulking. This is the other one.” He watches Simon go, unhurried, the way you’d watch weather. “He’ll do the whole circuit. Bathroom, then he’ll stand at the coffee machine reading every option like it’s a menu, then he’ll get annoyed about the price and get one anyway.”
“Ten minutes.”
“Fifteen, if we’re lucky.”
The way he says we goes through me like a hand.
Through the glass doors, forty yards off, I watch Simon push into the building and turn left toward the restrooms and disappear behind a wall. The lot is nearly empty. A semi idling at the far end with nobody in the cab. A minivan two rows over, doors shut, dark inside.
I should get out and stretch my legs. That’s what a normal person would do. Four hours in a car, a rest stop, you get out and you walk around and you buy something you don’t want from a vending machine.
I don’t move. Neither does he.
“Say it,” Rowan says.
“Say what.”
“Whatever you’ve been chewing on for the last thirty miles.”
I turn to look at him properly for the first time since we got in this car.
He’s got one arm along the back of the seat, the same as three weeks ago on my couch, and he’s watching me with an expression I remember from a different life.
From a desk and a doorway and a version of myself who was twenty-five and thought wanting something was the same as being allowed to have it.
“You stopped,” I say.
“I did.”
“On purpose.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve spent four months telling everyone you’re fine.” His voice doesn’t change. “Because you told me on the phone at two in the morning that you were fine. Because you’ve been fine so hard for so long that I don’t think you’ve let yourself want anything since the day you found out.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the whole answer.” He shifts closer on the seat, and now he’s close, close enough that I can smell him, that same clean thing he’s always smelled like. “I wanted to see what you looked like when you stopped being fine.”
My throat is tight. “And?”
“I’m not finished looking.”
Something in me that’s been clenched shut for four months comes loose.
I should say something cutting. That’s my whole thing.
I have a sharp answer for everything, I’ve never in my life let a man have the last word in a conversation this important, and I open my mouth and there’s absolutely nothing in my head except his hand and the highway and forty yards of asphalt between us and a man who’s going to come back through those doors.
I look at the building. Nothing. Empty doorway, glass, the glow of vending machines.
“Ten minutes,” I say.
“Maybe.”
“That’s not enough time.”
“It’s enough time.” He’s not smiling, exactly. “It’s not enough time for what you’re thinking about. But it’s enough.”
I hate him. I want to tell him I hate him. What comes out instead, low and steady and not shaking at all, which surprises me more than anything that’s happened today, is:
“Then finish it.”
Rowan pushes me back across the seat in one rough move until my shoulders hit the door and my legs are spread wide around him.
The space is tight, one knee jammed against the back of the front seat, but he doesn’t care and neither do I.
He shoves my dress up around my waist and drags my underwear down, pulling them off one leg before tossing them onto the floor near my foot where I can reach them fast.
He starts kissing.
Slow, open-mouthed presses along the inside of my left thigh, then the right. Higher each time. Warm and deliberate, working closer without ever giving me what I want. I stare down at the top of his head, frustration burning hotter than the rest of it. He could just kiss me. He won’t.
Instead he keeps going, mouth dragging along the skin right where my thigh meets my hip.
“You asked me to finish it,” he murmurs against me, voice low. “So I’m gonna take my time and make sure you feel every fucking second.”
He drags his tongue through me in one long, filthy lick.
Then another. Two fingers push inside me as he seals his mouth over my clit and sucks.
I fist his hair and pull, hard, trying to drag his face up so he’ll finally kiss me.
Rowan just turns his head and presses his mouth to my lower stomach instead, a line of slow kisses while his fingers keep working deep inside me.
I glance past his shoulder at the glass doors of the building. Still empty. No Simon yet.
He fucks me with his fingers at a steady pace while his tongue works tight circles.
I roll my hips up against his mouth because I want more and I’m not waiting for permission.
Every time I tug at his hair he answers by kissing somewhere else, the side of my thigh, the soft skin below my navel, never the mouth I keep trying to pull him toward.
He pulls his fingers out and lifts them to my lips.
“Open.”
I do. He slides them in and I suck, hollowing my cheeks, cleaning the slick taste of myself off them while he dips his head again and peppers more kisses along my thigh. Close. Still not where I keep dragging him.
I’m soaking the seat now. The wet sounds are loud in the back of the car. I keep glancing at the doors while he works me faster, fingers thrusting deep, tongue flicking relentlessly over my clit.
His other hand pins my hip down. I pull his hair again, harder, trying one more time to get his mouth up to mine. He kisses the back of my hand instead, then goes right back to licking me like he has all the time in the world.
I look at the glass doors again. A figure steps out.
My whole body locks. Heart slamming. For one second I’m sure it’s Simon and everything inside me goes cold and electric at the same time. Rowan freezes with his mouth still pressed to my cunt, fingers still buried inside me.
The person walks past the first row of cars. Not Simon. A woman in a trucker hat heading for the semi at the far end.
Rowan doesn’t wait for my body to relax.
He moves faster now, like the near-miss lit something off.
He sucks my clit harder and drives his fingers in deep, curling them on every stroke.
The sudden urgency makes it worse. I bite down on the fingers still in my mouth and roll my hips up to meet him, chasing it because I asked for this.
Tears prick hot at the corners of my eyes from how badly I want him to just kiss my mouth once. I tug at his hair again, rough, desperate. He ignores it and kisses the crease of my hip instead, then goes back to eating me like he’s starving.
I’m right there. My cunt flutters around his fingers in hard pulses. My legs shake. I clamp my teeth tighter on his fingers so nothing escapes. He curls them exactly right and sucks my clit between his lips, tongue relentless.
The orgasm hits silent and brutal. My whole body seizes. I come hard around his tongue and fingers, pussy clenching in thick waves while I keep my mouth locked shut around his fingers and breathe sharp through my nose. Every muscle locks up. I stay completely quiet as it rips through me.
Rowan doesn’t stop. He licks me through every aftershock, slow and thorough, drinking everything down until the last tremor fades and I go limp under his mouth.
Only then does he ease his fingers out. He lifts his head, mouth wet and shining. He leans over me in the cramped space and presses slow kisses along my collarbone, up the side of my neck, getting so close to my mouth I feel his breath on my lips. Then he stops short and kisses my jaw instead.
“Good fucking girl,” he whispers against my skin.
We have maybe ninety seconds to spare.
I know because I’m looking at the doors when he lifts his head, and Simon is not in them yet, and then Rowan is pulling my dress down over my knees and I’m reaching for my underwear where it ended up somewhere near the door and getting it back on in a series of movements that would look, to anyone watching, exactly like what they are.
My hands won’t cooperate. That’s the part nobody tells you. All the way through it my hands were fine and now they’re shaking so hard I can’t get the fabric straight.
“Hair,” Rowan says.
“What?”
“Left side.”
I fix it using the dark of the window as a mirror. My face is wrecked. Flushed all the way down my neck, mouth swollen, eyes too bright, and there is not one single thing I can do about any of it in the next sixty seconds.
Rowan settles back against his own door like a man who’s been sitting there for a quarter of an hour with nothing to do. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, once, unhurried.
Then he takes his phone out and looks at it.
“You’re unbelievable,” I say.
“I know.”
Simon comes out of the building with a coffee in each hand.
He walks across the lot the way he always walks, slightly too slow, like the world should be waiting for him, and I have time to watch him come the whole way and think about the fact that four months ago I would have felt something looking at him. Guilt, maybe. Something.
I keep waiting for it to arrive. It doesn’t.
He opens the driver’s door and drops into the seat and hands one of the coffees back over his shoulder without looking.
“Rowan.”
“Thanks.”
“They didn’t have the oat milk. I got you the regular.”
“That’s fine.”
Simon takes the lid off his own cup and blows across it and doesn’t start the engine.
I sit there with my heart still going and my thighs still shaking and my hands folded in my lap and wait for him to notice something.
Anything. The state of my face. The fact that the air in this car is not the air he left in it.
He drinks his coffee.
“Traffic report says there’s construction on the county road,” he says. “So we should stay on the highway.”
“You already decided that an hour ago.”
“I’m telling you now.”
He puts the cup in the holder and starts the engine and pulls out of the lot, and I watch the back of his head and understand something that I’ve probably understood for years without letting myself put words to it.
He isn’t going to notice. He has never noticed.
Not when I stopped talking at dinner, not when I stopped waiting up, not when I stopped asking where he’d been.
A person can sit four feet away from a woman coming apart and see absolutely nothing if he’s never once been in the habit of looking.
We’re back on the on-ramp before he speaks again.
“You two are being weird.”
I keep my face turned to the window. I don’t let it change.
“We’ve been in a car with you for four hours,” I say. “Weird is a low bar.”
“No, I mean it. It’s been weird since we stopped.” His eyes come up into the mirror. “You’re all flushed.”
I meet his eyes and hold them. Eyebrows up. Waiting.
“It’s ninety degrees,” I say. “And you parked in the sun.”
A beat.
“Right,” he says.
He looks back at the road.
Beside me, Rowan says nothing at all, and doesn’t move, and doesn’t look at me. But his hand comes to rest on the seat between us, palm down, fingers spread, the way it did an hour ago before any of this started.
I put mine down next to it.
Simon checks the mirror twice more before the next exit. The second time, he holds it.