7. Elise #2
“You’ve been tight all day,” he murmurs, mouth right against my ear, so low I can barely hear it over the radio.
“Walking around this goddamn cabin with your dripping pussy. He had you for years and never once fucked you like this. Now you’re letting me fuck you right here while he’s eight feet away.
Spread your legs wider. That’s it. Take it. ”
I bite the inside of his hand and clench around his cock on the next thrust. He fucks me a little harder, still careful with the sound.
His thumb finds my clit and rubs tight circles that make my thighs shake.
I keep my eyes open and watch Simon’s back as Rowan’s cock drags over every sensitive spot inside me.
Simon reaches for something on the counter and turns halfway.
Rowan freezes mid-thrust, buried to the hilt. His palm presses harder over my mouth. My dress is bunched at my waist and his pants are open, but from this angle it’s just two people standing close at the table. I don’t move. I don’t breathe. My cunt pulses around his cock anyway.
Simon stirs the pan once. “Elise, you still like those smashed potatoes or did you turn into a roasted person while we were separated?”
Rowan doesn’t pull out. He just stays locked there, thick and hard inside me, hand over my mouth. His eyes are burning into mine.
Three long seconds.
Simon turns back to the stove, shoulders relaxing. “Whatever. I’m smashing them. They’re better that way.”
The second his back is fully to us again, Rowan starts moving.
Harder now. The table creaks once under me and he slaps his hand over it to hush it, never slowing the pace of his cock.
He fucks me with tight, urgent strokes, thumb working my clit the whole time.
His mouth stays by my ear the entire time.
“Look at you taking my cock on this table. He had you for years and never made you feel like this. I can feel how bad you wanted it. Come on it. Do it quiet. Come while he’s right there pretending he knows anything about you.”
I nod against his palm. The orgasm builds fast and sharp.
My cunt starts fluttering around him. I lock my legs tighter around his waist and squeeze my eyes shut as it hits.
It tears through me completely silent. My whole body seizes.
I come hard on his cock, pulsing and soaking him while his hand stays clamped over my mouth.
I bite down on the side of his palm to keep anything from escaping.
Rowan fucks me through every tight squeeze, slow and deep until the last wave passes and I go limp against him.
He eases out of me fast. I’m still shaking when I drop my legs and yank my dress down.
He tucks himself back into his pants, zips up, and steps back half a pace so there’s space between us.
I swipe my underwear off the floor and shove them into my pocket.
By the time Simon speaks again, Rowan is already leaning against the counter like he never moved.
“These are gonna be done in five,” Simon says without turning around. “You two want to set the table or what?”
Rowan answers in a perfectly normal voice. “Yeah. We got it.”
Afterward I sit at the table with my hands flat on the wood and my heart going like something trapped.
Simon is talking about the potatoes.
He’s been talking about the potatoes for a while, actually, the way he talks about anything he’s doing, and at no point in the last however many minutes has he required an answer from either of us. Which is its own kind of information about the last five years.
“You want them crispy or soft?”
“Crispy,” Rowan says, from over by the sink, where he is washing his hands for the second time.
“Elise?”
“Crispy’s fine.”
“See, this is the thing, you can’t do both. The video says you can do both but you can’t.”
“Then do crispy.”
“I’m going to do crispy.”
I look down at the table. There’s a ring in the wood where a glass sat long enough to go through the varnish, decades ago, before I ever met any of these people.
I don’t feel guilty.
I keep reaching for it, expecting the sting, and it isn’t there. What’s there instead is something enormous and shapeless that I have no intention of looking at directly right now, in this kitchen, with the radio going.
Simon serves at seven-forty and it’s genuinely good, and he’s so pleased that he keeps looking around the table waiting for someone to say so again.
“It’s good, Simon.”
“I told you I cook.”
“You don’t cook. You cooked once.”
“That’s still cooking.” He points his fork at me, grinning, and for one second he looks exactly like he did at twenty-six, which is a cruel trick for a face to play.
We eat at the table. All three of us, in the chairs, with the radio on, and Simon tells the story about carving his initials underneath it for the third time this weekend, and Rowan says he remembers it differently, and it becomes a whole thing about which summer it was.
At one point Simon actually ducks under the table to prove the initials are there.
They are. S.M., gouged into the underside of the oak with a pocketknife, about eight inches from where my hands were an hour ago.
“Ninety-eight,” he says, triumphant, coming back up. “Told you.”
“You were nine,” Rowan says. “It was ninety-nine.”
“It was ninety-eight.”
“You were nine in ninety-nine.”
“How do you even remember that?”
“Because I was thirteen and Mom made me watch you the entire summer.”
They argue about it for ten minutes. It’s the most normal the two of them have been since we got in the car.
I clear the plates.
At the sink with the water running and my back to the room, I close my eyes for a second and let myself feel exactly how strange this is. All three of us in a warm kitchen with a radio and a good dinner and a story about a pocketknife, like something out of a life that didn’t happen.
Then Simon says, behind me, “Hey. What happened to the table?”
The water is still running.
“What?”
“There’s a mark on it.” He’s got his phone flashlight on. He’s leaning over the wood. “Right here. Something got wet, it’s gone dark. Did we put a glass down without a coaster?”
Rowan is drying a plate.
“That table’s fifty years old,” he says. “It’s got a hundred marks on it.”
“No, this one’s fresh. Look at it.”
He’s looking at it. He’s standing over the table with his phone light on it and he’s looking at it, and I’m at the sink four feet away with my hands in the water, not turning around, and the radio is playing something with an accordion in it.
“Huh,” Simon says.
Then he clicks the light off and goes to get another beer, and I stand there with the water running over my hands until they hurt.