Chapter 36
Chapter 36
Present day
Taormina, Italy
Conor opens his door a few minutes past midnight.
“When I arrived, and you brought my luggage upstairs…Did you choose the room that was the farthest away from yours for me?”
“You know I did.”
I grin and walk inside, brushing past him. He’s ready for bed: his hair is tousled and damp at the edges, as though he just washed his face. He wears only low-slung thin sweats that look really nice on him, and I wonder if they were purchased by the same person who keeps him in suits.
I put on what Nyota referred to as my very slutty short pj set —intentionally. “A valiant effort,” I commend him, sitting on the sill of his open window. No Etna from here, but he really does have a stunning view of the pool.
“If ultimately useless.”
“Miscalculated, huh?”
He exhales a laugh. “With you, I always do.” He closes the door, walks to the center of the room, and I have to grit my teeth at how incredibly… Conor he is. One of a kind. My kind. “Maya, it’s been a long day.”
“Agreed.”
“I’m tired. Not at my best.” It’s the same even-keeled tone he uses when he’s trying to rationally talk Kaede into not eating a crayon.
“That’s fine. I’m sure that Conor Harkness’s not best in bed is still better than most guys’ superlatives.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“No? What do you mean?”
A displeased pause. “It’s not a good idea. Us, alone. It’s difficult to control myself.”
I shrug. Feel the tips of my hair bounce around my waist. It’s usually too heavy and messy to leave loose, but Conor likes it. I know it even though he never said so. “Is that why you’ve been visibly turned on since I entered the room?”
He swears under his breath.
“I don’t mind. I mean, it’s not like you can hide it.”
“Maya—”
“I’m tired, too.” I give him my most sunshine smile. “Let’s just sleep. Can I stay here?”
“You don’t want to be anywhere near me.”
“Why?”
“Because, Maya, I just got off a phone call with Tamryn’s lawyer and I’m going to have to tell her that my shithead siblings refused the settlement offer, because my closest friend’s wedding is a shitshow, and because none of my fucking quants have given me a satisfactory response on a fucking simple question that —”
“It’s okay,” I say, moving into him. I press the flat of my palms right under the jut of his ribs for balance, rise on the tip of my toes, and kiss the stubbly corner of his jaw. “Rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I’m halfway to the door when his hand closes around my wrist. The veins on his forearms are in sharp relief. “I thought you wanted me to leave.”
His jaw shifts. “Where are you going?”
“Mount Etna, I was thinking. Heard it’s lovely there, this time of the year. Come on, Conor, I’m going to my room. Where do you think I…” Oh. But of course. “I won’t call up the guy.”
He seems to be grinding his teeth.
“I told you, I have no interest in…” I shake my head. “Listen, I thought you’d just spent the afternoon making sweet life-affirming love to Avery. And then you were trying to tell me what I couldn’t do, and…I just wanted to get a reaction from you. Not-Hans is here on vacation with his girlfriend. He just pretended to flirt with me.”
“He didn’t.”
“Pretty sure. I was there.”
“Maya, he wasn’t pretending. I guarantee you that every boy your age wants you. Men my age want you. Wherever you go, every-fucking-body is looking at you.”
I laugh, because he’s a lunatic. I love it. “Say they do? I don’t care. Not-Hans is not my type. He’s at least two decades away from a colonoscopy.”
His glare is venomous.
“Don’t be bitter, Conor. You still have all of your natural hair.” I pat his hand and try to free myself, but he doesn’t let go. Which is…interesting. “I thought you were tired?” His face says a lot of things, and I can’t begin to understand them. “And that you didn’t want me here?”
Silence. In the soft golden light, he’s unreadable.
“It’s funny. Ten months ago, you tried to eject me from your life, but you never once managed to say that you didn’t want me. And tonight…” A flick of my free wrist. “All you need to say is that your days have been better without me in them, and that I should leave you alone. And I will never bother you again.”
He lets go of me. His face shutters. “Some lies are too big. Even for me.”
“Then stop being so terrified of me—”
“I’m not afraid of you. I am afraid of myself, and of the person I become when I’m around you.” He leans over me, crowds me, his eyes a cold burn into mine. “I have never wanted anything as desperately, as ungovernably, as persistently as I want you. Not a single goddamn thing. Not my dead mother back. Not revenge. Not the well-being of the people I love. Not professional success, not even my own happiness. Absolutely nothing has consumed me as mercilessly as you have.”
My throat constricts, bitter. “So ten months ago you pushed me away, and never thought of me again.”
“Is that what you think? That ten months ago I woke up, had a difficult conversation, ripped the Band-Aid, and spent the rest of my life reaping the fruits of my bravery?” He shifts deeper into me. His lips brush against my ear, like he cannot bear to hold my eyes as he speaks. “For ten months, day after day, I woke up and fought my most base instinct, which was to call you—no, to come to you. Every day since that phone call, I spent remaking the choice to free you of my presence in your life, so that you could have a better one. Make no mistake, Maya: we may not have spoken or seen each other, but for the last ten months my relationship with you was the most labor-intensive and all-encompassing presence in my life.”
Every word hurts. Every word pulsates through me. And yet, I ask: “I told you that I loved you, and you said…” I pull back to see his reaction. “You said that it would pass.”
“I did.”
“How did that work out for you?”
A smile tugs at his lips. “I said that it would pass for you, Maya. I was never under the illusion that it would so much as fade, for me. And I was prepared for it.” A heartbeat. “I still am.”
I gasp, incredulous. “Why? I’m standing in front of you, telling you that for me the last ten months never even happened—”
“Maybe it just wasn’t long enough.” He seems lost. “And you need more time.”
I want to bite him. I want to sink my incisors and my canines into him and make him bleed. I want it so bad that my hands and my shoulders are shaking, and honestly fuck these games . “Do you want me to leave?”
“It would be best if—”
“ Not the question I—”
“No, Maya. I never want you to be anywhere but with me.”
My heart stops. Restarts with a riot. The cautious hope for a breakthrough. I force myself to breathe evenly, and make my decision.
I lay my hand against his pecs. Run it down his smooth skin, curling it around the elastic of his sweats. My meaning is: If I stay, this is happening. If I stay, I’m not going to let you pretend that we’re good friends reconnecting. And Conor has always been good at understanding what I’m trying to say.
But then he tells me: “If you stay…You’re in charge.”
That , I didn’t expect. “Are you one of those CEOs who enjoy doing their dominatrix’s laundry?”
Soft laughter. “Would that be an issue?”
“No.” I think about it. “It might be fun.”
“I’m happy to help you with your laundry, but…” His hands cup both sides of my head. “I need you to decide, because nothing has changed. You’re still younger and less experienced, and—”
I have no interest in listening to him rehash his greatest hits, and I don’t mind being in control. I don’t mind taking his hand and leading him to the couch. I don’t mind putting my hands on his bare shoulders and pushing him down to a sitting position. I don’t mind taking my clothes off while he watches, legs spread wide like the men on the bus, eyes darker than ever.
The pink sheer panties, I decide after I see the hitch in his throat, are allowed to stay. “Feel free to tell me how pretty I am,” I tease as my shirt slips to the ground. But Conor remains silent, lips parted, the muscles in his chest shifting with every breath. The ridge of his erection strains his sweats, a wet patch already darkening the front.
I straddle his lap, but he doesn’t touch me. He’s so tense, I wonder if he’ll shatter in a million pieces. When I move forward and lick his clavicle, a shiver reverberates through him. “Do you think about me?” I murmur against his skin. “When you are doing this with other people?”
“No.” I bite him—just a bit of teeth, to show him how little I liked his answer. That’s okay , I tell myself. He’s thinking about me now. But his hand comes up to push a lock of hair behind my ear. “I don’t do this with other people. Not since Edinburgh.”
I pull back. Search his face. He runs his fingers through my hair, a sweet, warm caress at odds with the fact that I’m all but naked in his lap. With the severity of his erection. “Avery?”
He thumbs my cheekbone. Shakes his head. “You were always there.”
“Where?”
“In my mind.”
I nod. Something sticks in my throat.
Expands even more when he says, “Since the first day I met you, you have been the best thing in my life. And you weren’t even in it.”
I close my eyes, overwhelmed by the wastefulness of the last few years. All that could have been. “What a romantic way to say that you think about me when you masturbate,” I joke.
“Maya.” His head tilts backward, resting against the leather. There’s a red flush on his cheekbones.
“Really? That’s the line, Conor?”
He groans. “It’s the Catholic guilt.”
I grin. “You do think about me, then?”
“I try not to.”
“Does it work?”
Laughter, exhaled. “Not once.”
“Aww.” I pretend to pout, and his thumb finds my lower lip. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you aren’t.” But he’s smiling, too, and looks more beautiful than ever, and I decide to lean backward, my palms on his knees, my ass settled on the lower part of his thighs. I’m spread wide open, but he is doing a great job of holding my eyes, as though his gaze sliding to my tits might unleash a nuclear apocalypse.
“Tell me about these fantasies of yours.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Oh, I do.”
His throat convulses. Visibly. “I don’t know that you would find it particularly sexy.”
“Try me. Are we in a church? Do I have tentacles?”
Making him laugh turns me on as much as making him hard. “Do you want tentacles, Trouble? I can give them to you next time.”
“Maybe. Are we tickling each other? Turning into werewolves?”
The flush deepens. This is a side of Conor no one else sees. A little boyish. Timid. I adore it. “It’s embarrassing, Maya.”
“You don’t have to tell me. But if you do, I might be able to make it come true.”
He huffs. Shakes his head. But after a minute, voice gravelly, he says, “I come home from work—”
“Stop. Too unrealistic.”
He pinches my knee, lightly. “I come home from work, and you’re there. At the table. Doing whatever it is that you do. Studying. Equations. Reading a novel. I have no idea.”
“At least you don’t think I split atoms for a living.”
His lips twitch. “You’re just doing your thing. The same stuff I’ve seen you do countless times in Eli’s kitchen.”
“But I’m naked?”
“No, you’re just…It’s my house. You’re in my house. And your stuff is around the place, scattered everywhere. Like you live there.”
“You’d never be able to get it up in the presence of clutter.”
He snorts, but he’s rock-hard. That wet spot, expanding.
“And then?”
“And then, you look up, and smile. Come to me. Welcome me home.”
I wait for him to continue. “And…?”
“I kiss you, and you kiss me back. And I close my arms around you, because I can. And you’re warm, and you like it, what I’m doing to you. I press you against the table and you’re soft under me and…” Conor sighs. Like just saying all this stuff is turning him on beyond belief. He reaches for his cock and holds the base tight.
“What happens next?”
“I’m usually finished before it escalates. Most times, really. But if I play it further, usually I take you to my room, and—”
“Conor.” I tilt my head, amused. “Are you saying that the peak of your erotic fantasies is doing it in a bed?”
His fingertips trace the pale skin of my thigh, the place where the muscle turns into fat. A touch so light, his fingers may just be hovering over me. “In the fantasy, you’re my girlfriend. My…More than that, maybe. I figured out a way to have you and also set you free. And you are—” He looks away, like out of all the embarrassments, this is the one that burns the brightest. “I’m not afraid to hurt you. You are mine, and used to me touching you. You welcome it. It’s…We have a life, Maya. That’s ours.”
You could have it, I think. Something tears inside me. You could have had it for the past three years, if you hated yourself just a little less.
“That sounds like a highly problematic fantasy,” I say, not sure whether I’m joking. “Am I older, in it? I don’t have the tragic past that makes me highly susceptible to the undue influence of father figures?”
His hand closes around my knee, warm. “You’re not. You’re just you.”
Heartbreaking, that he would change nothing about me. “It’s you who’s different, then. You have found a way to give me the world, and take me, too.”
He nods with some difficulty. All I want is to take this self-loathing man and make him happy.
Next to us, his phone lights up with a work call that he ignores in favor of lifting a hand to my rib cage. It hovers there until I say, “You may,” and then his thumb brushes around my nipple, softly, delicately, like it’s made of a highly explosive substance. When his cock twitches, I lean forward, not letting my hips make contact with his. The front of my panties is wet and slick. I’m sure I’ve soiled his sweats by now. “Do you want to know my fantasy?” I ask, rubbing my cheek against the scratchy surface of his throat.
“That feels like a trick question.”
“It’s odd. It hasn’t exactly been my thing. Alfie used to complain that I didn’t do it enough.” My eyelashes flutter against his jaw. “But I think about going down on you all the time .”
He swears, sharp and unintelligible. The thumb circling my nipple stops, but his grip tightens.
“Conor, I just know that you would look so pretty , coming several inches down my throat, and—”
“You need to fucking —” He squeezes my hip so hard, there will be coin-sized bruises blooming there. I cannot wait to count them. “You need to stop. Please .”
I kiss his cheek, apologetic. “How long do you think you’d last?”
I think it might be an automatic reflex, the way his hand slams my core down, against the outline of his cock. His breath comes in quick, noisy puffs against my temple, and when I reach out I expect him to swat my hand away, but this time he lets me pull down the fabric and grip him. We stare at each other, chests rising and falling together. I push my underwear aside and run the head of his cock against my labia, then my clit. Feel how heavy he is, how hot and thick. My name is a deep grunt that travels through space and time.
His hands fist in the cushions.
“Okay?” I ask.
A rough exhale. “Yeah.”
I sit up. Arrange us. He’s hot and slippery against me. “I’ve never had sex without a condom,” I say, maybe to punt. This is going to be a lot, on multiple fronts.
“Me neither.”
“Would you like me to use one?”
There is genuine amusement in his laugh. “No, Maya.”
I smile. We’re being irresponsible, stupid, problematic. I don’t care. “No condom in your fantasies? Am I on birth control?”
“It’s…” His cheeks are scarlet. He looks in the middle distance. Admits, low: “Neither.”
And I can’t wait anymore. I let gravity and my weight take over, and slide down on him, taking several inches in one stroke.
“Jesus— slow .” His palms slide under my panties, grip my ass. “Slow the fuck down, or you’re going to—”
“I like it w-hen—” I try to speak. It comes out breathy and mumbled. “I like it when it hurts a bit. And I am in charge.”
Conor’s jaw twitches. He groans something about how unbelievable I am, wonders whether I’ve fallen from the fucking sky . His hands shake, but I’m too busy trying to adjust, and—
I lift myself up, down. The friction is heaven, and we both groan. Conor stares at me—face, tits, the place where my cunt clutches tight around him—like he doesn’t fully understand what is happening. Like he thought he knew the rules of the game, but just realized he had no idea what he’s playing.
“Do you want me to stop?” I ask, but I’m still bouncing on top of him, a little more than half of him inside me on the downstroke, inching deeper, feeling like a muscle that needs to be broken into, trained and opened. When he’s nearly all the way out, the length of his cock is suddenly wet and shiny. It turns me on beyond belief.
Judging by his grip on my waist: him, too.
“How do you even exist?” he asks, hushed. Sweat pearls over my skin, drips between my breasts. I cross my wrist around his neck, looking for support as I move on him. His gaze fixates on something past my shoulder. The wall mirror behind us.
He’s staring at us. At me. At my ass moving over him. “You like it?”
“Fuck,” he chokes out, and I drop a kiss onto his cheek.
“It’s okay. I know you do.” He’s in as far as he can go. “This is the most full I’ve ever been. And you have seen my dildos. Remember?”
“Christ.” His knuckles brush up and down my flank. Inside, he’s splitting me up, but his touch is butterfly-light. “I remember. I fucking remember .”
“Yeah?”
“Afterward, I told myself that it was a good thing. That maybe you enjoyed…that you’d be able to take me easier.”
My hold on him tightens, something close to a hug. There is pleasure here, smeared with the pain of the stretch. I wonder how I’ve managed to live without it so far. “Does anyone?”
“What?”
“Take you easily.”
He shakes his head.
“Good. I’ll be the one.”
His hand lifts to my cheek. “Maya, you already are.”
I come right there, suddenly, before he does. It’s like a natural disaster, violent and unsettling. Good, fucking biblical, even, but it rips me, tears me apart and bleaches my head white.
When my vision stops spotting, his breathing is racehorse-fast, mouth half-open. His hands are around my waist, thumbs resting on my hip bones.
“The hardest part of the last three years,” he says, words punched out of his lungs, “was knowing exactly what you look like when you come.”
I’m still twitching, little contractions around his cock. “You like making me come, don’t you?”
“I like everything about you.”
“I just want to return the favor, Conor. Is it too much to ask?” I squeeze him with my internal muscles. Watch him shudder. “Let me give you this.”
He shakes his head. “Harder.”
“What?”
“I can make you come harder than you already have.”
I laugh. “I don’t think that’s possible. And we agreed that I ’m the one in charge. You said you’d do what I tell you—”
“Tell me, then,” he rasps against my jaw. “Tell me to pull out and curl my fingers inside you and eat you out until you pass out from it.”
“No. I already—”
“I don’t fucking care. Tell me.”
Against the gentle burn of his beard, I say, “No.”
He lets out an annoyed, guttural sound. “Then ask me to go deeper.”
“What?”
“Tell me to get inside you even deeper.”
“I don’t think that’s possible—”
“Tell me to go fucking deeper , Maya.”
It sounds like an order, but he’s begging. That’s why I nod, without expecting the way he tilts my pelvis. A grunt, and then he’s in to the hilt, and—
“ Fuck ,” I say.
“Tell me to move you. Tell me to show you how to use my cock to make yourself come.”
I can barely think. “Show m-me. Please.”
He does. Like I did before, up and down, empty and full. Except that I was using his size to stimulate every part of me, and he knows exactly how to—
“Oh my god,” I say, coming again. This orgasm is shallow, wet. Erratic. No less good.
Conor studies me as I relearn how to breathe. Says: “This might be the only decent thing I’ve done in my whole life. The one thing I’m good for.”
“W-what is?”
“Making you come.” Another angle, this time me leaning backward, leaving room between our upper bodies. I can almost see him move inside me, rocking back and forth under the skin of my abdomen. Conor lets out a grunt, but then his hand presses down on my bellybutton. All at once, the space he’s carved inside me shrinks, disappears, and I’m coming again, so hard that I space out for a second.
I stir back to find my cheek on his shoulders. He inhales deeply, filling his lungs with the scent of me and sex and salt air. Shivers with pent-up restraint.
“What would you do?” I ask in his ear. “If you weren’t afraid to lose control?”
He shakes his head. Like he can’t imagine such a scenario. But then says, “I would want you under me. I would pin you down. I would lock you in a room and not let anyone look at you, ever. I would…”
I wait. But he doesn’t continue until I say, “Whatever it is, it won’t shock me.”
“It will.” His fingers slide down. Draw messy circles around my clit.
“T-try me.”
His exhale sounds like a snarl. “It’ll terrify you.”
“It won’t.” I grind against the heel of his hand, feeling like I’m contained by him this way, not a person but a beam of raw nerve endings, reduced to the places where he strums me and fills me.
“I would put a baby in you.”
I’m coming, again. Dropping from a great height. I arch my back as the pleasure quivers through me, Conor’s teeth grazing the side of my breast. As I ease down, he allows himself to suck on my left nipple, hard. It’s a small, short-lived indulgence.
“You’re not going to let yourself come, are you?” I breathe out, words tangled between gasps.
He’s trembling. An exposed wire, pulled taut. Still, he shakes his head.
When I climb off him, his cock looks to be in pain, but I’m too angry to care about it. I limp to the bathroom, desperately trying to walk straight and pretend like what happened didn’t knock me over. The ceiling light is white, suddenly harsh, and the second the door closes behind me I stagger forward, elbows on the marble counter.
I just came more times than I could reliably say. I took and took and took—and yet I feel empty. More hollow than a drum. Like something cracked, and my insides spilled out.
I start cleaning up. My underwear is too drenched to put back on, so I leave it by the sink, next to a transparent case. There is a razor inside, not electric, not even a safety one—an old-school, straight razor. A blade . Like he just time-traveled into this century to bring penicillin back to his era. “Get the fuck over yourself, Conor,” I grit out, rolling my eyes. But in the case there’s something else, too. A vaguely familiar pattern, a shape that nags at me.
I reach out. Open it.
Find a cute, plaid scrunchie.
My cute, plaid scrunchie.
The one I last had in Edinburgh. In Conor’s hotel room.
Time stops. Restarts, counterclockwise. I slide the scrunchie around my wrist, grab a warm washcloth, and return to the gentle glow of the bedside lamp.
Conor hasn’t pulled up his pants, but he’s speaking on the phone, giving hushed instructions that I can hear but not understand. Still naked, I kneel next to him to clean him up.
His hand snatches my wrist.
“I have to go,” he says into the phone, abruptly ending the call.
His eyes linger on the washcloth, then flicker to me. “No.”
I tilt my head backward. Stare up at him. “Really? What are you going to do with that , Conor?”
He doesn’t reply, but tucks himself back into his sweats.
Whatever. Screw him. I stand, dropping the washcloth. That’s when he notices the fabric at my wrist. It was just a matter of time, since I’m wearing nothing else.
“I meant to…return it,” he says.
“Thank you for watching over my fifty-cent hair tie for the last three years.”
He blinks, vacant. “Is that how much one costs?”
“How interesting. Someone who can list every single factor that led to the 1987 Black Monday crash has no idea about the cost of a scrunchie,” I jab, venomous.
“No need to involve Alan Greenspan.” But then he admits, “You know why I kept it.”
Of course I know. And yet, something is changing. Maybe it’s his lingering gaze as I knot my hair on top of my head. Maybe his tone. Maybe the way he made me lose control while holding on to his for dear life. Whatever it may be, it unlocks something inside me.
A realization: the space between Conor and me is not the fluid, breachable entity I believed it to be, but solid. Uncrossable. I’ve only been fooling myself. There was never a chance for us. There is only the rest of my life. Without him.
Tears sting down my cheeks as I gather my clothes, tempted to just walk back to my room naked. Even if the entire wedding party sees me, it would be preferable to being here one more second, with him.
“Hey.” His warm hand wraps around my upper arm. Conor stares down at me, looking absolutely, completely devastated. “Did I hurt you?”
I let out a wet, hard laugh, and pull up my shorts. “You know, Conor, I’ve never had sex this good.”
“I…I don’t think anyone has, Maya.”
“How nice of you to say, when you didn’t even get an orgasm out of it.” I tip back my head. Wipe the backs of my hands over my face.
“I don’t need to—”
“You don’t need anything, or anyone, do you? That’s smart. And I am a fucking idiot.” I slip on my top. “For the last three years, I thought that there was a key to solving you. That if I learned the right steps, if I performed the right way, you’d stop lying to both of us and accept what we already were. But now…” I let out a bitter laugh. “You just admitted to jerking off to Little House on the fucking Prairie fantasies with me. You held on to a keepsake for three years. And I…I could probably force you to acknowledge that you’re in love with me, but…” I spread my arms wide. “It means nothing. It doesn’t matter how much you love me, because in your head I’ll always be too young and stupid—”
“Not stupid—”
“—to know my own feelings .” I’m too loud. I don’t care. “You will never stop seeing me as a little girl who wants you because of some misplaced daddy issues. Guess what, Conor? I’m not yours to set free! I am free, and I have chosen you freely over and over again. But you hate yourself too much to allow that. Deep down, you don’t believe that you are worthy of love, and you are so terrified of having me and hurting me, that you would rather spend the rest of your life giving me things I never asked for just, just to keep me at a distance. I don’t need you to make me come five times. I don’t need you to build my furniture. I don’t need you to vet all the physicists-turned-quants at Harkness, find the one that’s safest and most eligible, and send him my way. I don’t need fucking grand gestures, and I don’t need you to manage me like I’m one of your assets, Conor. I just need you to…” The stream of my tears smears the lamplight around him, like a halo. I’m stripping back my skin for him, showing the raw, mangy parts of me, and he…
He just looks at me, his face mostly shadows. His expression is impossible to make out.
“All I ever wanted was to love you and make you happy. All I ever asked was for you to try to do the same. I was willing to be patient, and kind, and figure it all out together. But you…” I shake my head, wipe my cheeks with my forearms, and leave.
I’m halfway up the stairs when I hear the sound of something shattering into a thousand pieces.