Chapter 30
Chapter 30
The other dog is a mutt, too, but much smaller, and so terrified of us, its little sable-coated body never stops trembling. It takes me and Conor very little time to pry it out of the gap in the wall, but the entire time Tiny stares at us, an impatient supervisor clearly distrustful of his staff.
“He’s a him, I think,” I tell Conor. “Aren’t you, handsome?”
That last part is a bald-faced lie—so obvious, Conor raises an amused eyebrow.
“Oh, shut up,” I say, biting back a smile. So maybe he’s not the platonic ideal of canine beauty. His underbite might interfere with mastication, and one of his eyes is larger than the other. He’s at once skeletal and stocky, too wide for his length and comically tiny-headed. His floppy red ears, though, are a spectacle. And: “Some of us value temperament over looks,” I tell Conor after the dog stops hiding behind Tiny, approaches me to cautiously sniff my hand, and then licks it.
Conor snorts. But when the dog lets him scratch the top of his head, he reluctantly concedes that, “He might be growing on me.”
“Tiny. Look at you, making local friends.”
“Takes after you,” he mutters, and I need a moment to figure out that he’s talking about Not Hans.
“You think he just did it to make us jealous?”
I feel the weight of Conor’s eyes on me, his confusion fizzling in the air, and it sinks in that he really doesn’t get it. He truly believes that I would walk away and sleep with someone else. You have to know , I want to tell him. You have to know that I’ve been in love with you for three years longer than it was wise.
But this is Conor’s M.O.: he pushes me away because he fundamentally doesn’t believe that I know what I want. In his head, I’m still a twenty-year-old with shiny-object syndrome. One who cannot be trusted to make her own decisions.
Depressing, that’s what it is.
“Think he’s still a puppy?” he asks.
“Maybe?”
“Wonder how Tiny found him.”
“My guidebook said that there are lots of stray animals here in Sicily. Maybe they met around the villa and led each other here?”
He nods, thoughtful. “We need to take him to a vet.”
“Lucrezia will know who.”
The dog wags his tail with excitement—of meeting new people, of being free, of warm hands petting him. But when thunder roars through the cave, he and Tiny both duck for cover under a protuberance jutting out of the rock wall, curling into each other.
Conor sighs. “We should wait for the rain to be over before we go back. And we might need to carry the puppy.”
“Is your phone back at the Lambretta?”
He nods. “Yours?”
“I lost track of it a while ago. In my room, maybe?”
“Isn’t your generation supposed to be attached to phones?”
“Yes. And yours is, too. You weren’t born during the Great Depression, Conor, you’re a millennial. Can you stop acting like everyone you knew growing up died of measles?” Then I notice his smile. I keep falling for this shit. “Fuck off,” I mumble, turning to inspect the cave.
It’s stunning. A large chamber of all-encompassing blue. The walls are rugged and not excessively high, but the rounded ceiling gives the place a cathedral-like appearance. At the mouth of the grotto, rain ripples the surface of the sea. Ribbonlike streams of light and rainwater filter through the cracks in the rock, a pleasant, soothing rhythm, interrupted only by the occasional birdsong as the island’s inhabitants take shelter.
But where we are, the deep belly of the cave, is undisturbed. Cocoon-like, intimate. The stone gently slopes into the sea, and I scoot down to let my feet soak. The fish quickly swim away, confused by the intrusion, and I cannot help laughing. We may be stuck here, but…
“I’m not mad about it,” I say.
When Conor gives me a quizzical look, I step into the water. It starts shallow, but deepens more dramatically than I expected. Soon, my feet cannot touch. I dip my head, then push back my flattened curls and wash off the dirt, and sweat, and the dread of having misplaced my brother’s dog.
I don’t expect Conor to join me, or to come as close as he does. And yet, here we are. Studying each other as he watches me stay afloat, the indigo-tinted shadows playing on the bones of his face.
“I can’t believe it,” I tell him.
“What?”
“Last night you made me come, and I didn’t even wake up to your customary ‘It was a mistake’ note.” I pout. “I thought it was our thing.”
It’s a joke. A funny one, I would argue. But his eyes turn laser-focused. “Do you regret—”
“No,” I say forcefully. Shaking my head, I swim back toward the edge until my feet find solid ground. I sit on the rock and lean back, watching Conor not trust me about my own fucking inner life.
“If you don’t want to—”
“Conor, please.” I meet his gaze with a steady, amused expression. “I know it’s asking for a lot, but do me the favor of not explaining my consent to me.” His eyes shift skyward, but he comes back up, too. The water barely laps at his upper thighs. “I like you, this way,” I tease.
“What way?”
I point at his body. The shorts plastered to his skin. The thick outline against the cotton. “When you can’t hide that you want me.”
“I always want you, Maya. And I’ve never been good at hiding it.”
My toes curl against the stone. “Most people, including your closest friends, have no idea,” I say, remembering what Minami told me last night.
His snort echoes against the walls.
“Then again,” I continue, “you’ve been giving them what they wanted to see for a long while, haven’t you?” I lean back. Cross my legs. For the first time since we stepped on the island, I glance down at myself. He really does have an excellent view of my tits. And of everything else. “Do you really think that I’m a childish brat?”
He winces, as though the conversation we had on the first day has been an ugly, achy thorn for him, too. “I think you’re impatient. I think you can be ruthless when it comes to getting what you want. And given the hand you have been dealt, you have every right to be.” He wets his lips. “I don’t think you’re childish. And even if you were…You’re young. You have so much room to grow. And…” A long, long pause. “It doesn’t matter, Maya. Because I like you the way you are.”
I smile. “It’s nice, when you let yourself treat me like I’m an adult woman.”
He works his jaw, like he’s debating something inside his thick, unyielding skull. “I like it, too,” he says at last, kneeling in front of me. The lower half of his body is submerged. “It’s my favorite thing in the world.”
“What is?” I exhale. Let him unfold my legs like I’m a doll and pick a position for me. “Acknowledging biographical truths?”
He shakes his head. Leans down, and I’m dizzy. I can’t think when his tongue does that—licking droplets of saltwater off my skin, finding a pebbled nipple through the see-through lace. “Pretending. That this could work. God , Maya.”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t touch you.”
My hand finds his cheek. “I thought your weird little security blanket of a rule was that you could touch me , and I couldn’t touch you .”
“Fucking hell.” His breath comes fast, loud even over the patter of the rain. I feel his forehead against my belly. “Like I said,” he mumbles, bending my knee, pushing my leg up. “I was a goddamned saint for three years. I had it down. I knew exactly how to avoid you.”
I run my fingers through his hair. Watch him look down at me. The way the fabric adheres to every inch of my cunt. He can’t see me yet, but he can . “Did you consider not coming to the wedding?” I ask.
“You know I did.” His hands find my inner thighs, splay me open so wide, my muscles groan. He yanks my underwear to the side, none too gently. It bunches there, slick, right next to my bare slit, and…
I hadn’t shaved in months before this trip. I did before coming here, simply because I knew I’d be wearing bikinis, and I’m glad of it now. I doubt Conor would care either way, but I love feeling every pass of his tongue, every little movement as he nibbles and teases and eats .
He’s not nice about it. Other guys have done this to me, and they weren’t bad by any means. But there was a daintiness to it, delicate licks, ghostlike touches. Conor groans. Conor sucks. Conor clutches and bites and swears. Conor looks, while eating me out, like other men do while I go down on them.
“Please,” I gasp, not asking him for anything except to continue. He’s relentless and ruthless. He can’t read my mind, nor does he skip the awkward phase of figuring out what to do. He does, however, shorten it to just a handful of trials.
Quick learner, and all that. All those years in academia.
“I– yes, there .” I writhe. Squirm against the rock even as it scrapes the skin off my back. Lift my hips right off the ground to meet his mouth. The sounds he tears out of me echo through the cave, but I’m long past shame.
“Fuck,” he says, and then he repeats it when I contract around the first knuckle of his thumb with a rush of heat. It slips inside me quickly, and my cunt squeezes it in, asking for more, and—“ Fuck ,” he says again, low and drawn out, and I wish I could tell him, show him how good this feels, but my orgasm shoots up my spine and wraps around my vocal cords. There is not enough air in the world. My body is made of snapping tension and loose pleasure and nothing else. This is how people die and still ask for more.
“Conor,” I gasp after a while. Above me, little stalactites drip from the ceiling. “You…”
I fall silent, because he does it all over again, with my fingers pulling at his hair and my heels shoving into the muscles in his back. His nose rubs against my clit and he licks me clean only to make me convulse again, and there is no scrabbling away from this pleasure, not until he lets out a low, barely stifled growl against my inner thigh, and decides that I’m free to go.
Then I lie there.
Most of my time is spent convincing Conor that I’m a grown woman, but right now I feel like a girl. A fluffy, insubstantial thing. Boneless and winded, with nothing to keep time save for the residues of pleasure twitching through me.
I can’t move. Not even to look him in the eye as I ask, “Let me do it to you.”
He slides my underwear back in place, and even that makes me spasm. His forehead slides against my belly, supplicant-like. Close-lipped kisses right below my navel. A silent no .
“Conor.” I pet the short hair at his nape. “I would love to suck you off.”
His voice is muffled against the skin of my stomach. “I already—”
“I know you came when I did.” His hands got really rough for a while, there. His grunt filled the entire cave. “Let me do it anyway. You’ll like it.”
He chuckles. “You’re being very optimistic about my ability to get it up again so soon. I’m certainly not in my prime.”
“Really, Harkness?” I find the strength to prop myself up on my elbow. “ED jokes?”
He shrugs, boyish. Cute. Licks his lips—not suggestive, just hungry. Happy. “They’re all the rage in my age bracket.”
“Hmm.” He won’t come to me, so I force myself to go to him. Slip back into the water. My arms loop around his neck, his arms loop around my waist. I lay my cheek on his shoulder, and we float like that, peaceful, overheated bodies cooling in the sea. The beat of the rain grows lighter, more spaced out. Golden sunrays begin creeping in. “Not to set unrealistic expectations,” I tell him, lazily, “but I think you would really enjoy having sex with me. I would make your head explode.”
“I think so, too. Since you always do.”
“Then why won’t you let me—”
“Maya.” A weary exhale. “I don’t want to take advantage of you by exploiting our age difference or power imbalance—”
“Conor?”
He stops. Looks at me, patient.
“On any given day, how much time would you estimate you think about our supposed power differential?”
I’m trying to make him laugh. Make him realize how ridiculous he is. But he doesn’t break eye contact. “ All of it,” he says, dead serious.
My heart cracks. The backs of my eyes burn, because—shit.
Shit .
“If only you—”
“Maya, just…don’t, please.”
“Don’t what ?”
“I don’t need you to go down on me, or to blow my mind, or to show me how good it would be, because I’ve already imagined all of it. All I want is…” He pulls me even closer. My chin nestles into the side of his throat. “This is enough. Just having you here for a few minutes.”
You don’t have to settle for a few minutes, I want to scream. I’m here. I’m here for you to take. You can have all of my time.
“Can I at least kiss you?”
Calmly, he says, “I’d rather you didn’t.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to keep my anger locked inside. Poor Conor, I think. My beloved control freak. So afraid to lose it .
Poor Conor, and poor me.
“Okay,” I say, tightening my embrace, feeling him do the same to me. I like to think that contact helps. That his flesh is whispering to mine. All the things he cannot say, all the things he never says, all the things he doesn’t want to say. I let myself get lost in the fantasy of his body and mine eloping together. Building the future we’ll never have. They’ll keep each other up well past their bedtimes, go antiquing during little weekend trips in rural Texas, adopt pets from the local shelter. I make myself chuckle, which is better than bursting into tears. Conor pulls back, probably to ask me what’s wrong with me.
Which is, to the second, when I feel a burning pain in my calf.