Chapter 7
Chris
I’d seen this episode countless times, but it was so nice to laze on the library couch and zone out to throwback TV with a laugh track and commercial breaks. It gave my eyeballs something to do while I tried not to think, feel, or catastrophize while Daphne took another of her scalding showers.
For two days I’d been floating. If I didn’t touch ground soon, I might lose sight of Earth and exit the atmosphere.
Alone was my ground. I was used to alone. It centered me, even if I resented it at times.
In this short time, Daphne had become an immediate and unusual companion. Being with her felt like being alone. Just as pressureless and easy. But so right. She filled my world with easy laughter, rich conversation, and so much sex my dick felt almost bruised. It was heaven.
I wanted this. Everything about this. So why couldn’t I trust it? Why was it so much easier to accept the hardness, the sadness, the loneliness, than to even consider things might be working out for the good?
Yesterday morning, our hands had touched, and I could feel something. Her cold fingers had brushed mine across the frontal bone, and I didn’t move my hand away. I knew it wasn’t exactly professional. I should have pulled away as soon as she had a grip, but I’d felt the blood rushing through my fingers, so close to hers, and I was paralyzed. When her finger slid further down and pressed against my thumb, neither of us looking at each other—both of us staring at the skull, wondering what in God's name was happening—I knew she’d felt it too. Whatever force had slammed into me, knocking me askew and hurtling toward Daphne had also slammed into her.
I willed my hands to stop shaking. To keep myself from reaching toward her, pulling her into my body and wrapping her in my warmth, covering her mouth with mine.
Out in the woods, we’d found every possible reason to touch. For those touches to hold longer than necessary. Each one was electric, flooding my body with energy.
This had never happened to me before. I’d had plenty of girlfriends. I liked all of them. But it was always just... nice. No flood. No electricity. No caged beast energy. I’d never wanted to simultaneously rip a woman’s clothes off and fuck her in the middle of a crime scene while vowing to be her protector. No one before had ever made me feel like I needed to shield them from everything bad in the world. I wanted to fight dragons for her.
I was deeply afraid.
Even when I’d been with Decca, my emotions had been complicated, but there’d never been this feverish need .
I pushed up my glasses and scraped my hand over the scruff that was forming on my chin.
Decca and I had fallen into bed blind with desire—not for each other, but to forget our work and our troubles. Sometimes it was blessed relief at the end of an emotionally crippling case, other times it was just blowing off steam with someone trustworthy, yet ultimately disposable. There was never an us. It was war-zone sex, a tool we used to cope. Decca was just... there. As I was for her. That was how we could so easily fall back into friendship with no bitterness or resentment after I learned she’d not only never cared about me like that, but she’d married Gus out of the blue.
For a couple weeks after Decca’s announcement, my ego had been bruised, my hopes dashed that a romantic love might someday develop between us. But after seeing her again, it was like we’d never gone to that dangerous, fuck-buddy territory in the first place. My friend was back and our relationship was just as strong and platonic as it had always been.
With Daphne, it was the opposite.
I needed sex because I needed to consume her and be consumed by her. To be as close as possible. From that first hour, it had somehow felt like we were one, and being separated from my one was akin to torture.
But it had all been too easy.
And I didn’t know what that meant.
I wasn’t the scary, toxic, afraid-of-his feelings man. At least I tried not to be. I always wanted feelings. I welcomed them. I craved them. But at this point in my life, I’d recently started to believe I’d been sold a bill of goods about love. That I’d been waiting for something that didn’t exist.
Mid-thirties weren’t exactly old, but it seemed like I should have fallen in love by now. The fact that I hadn’t—unless you counted my elementary school crush on Sarah Childs, or my sixth grade crush on Eboni Turner, or my seventh, eighth, or... okay, I had a lot of school crushes that felt a lot like love when they were nice to me, or a lot like heartbreak when I saw them holding hands with other boys instead.
By college, the crushes had stopped. And when my friends had aged out of hookups and they’d started finding the people who would become their partners, that hadn’t happened for me, no matter how much I tried to force it.
Had it happened now?
It was probably just chemical. Hormones. My body received dopamine from her oxytocin, which flooded her system with every orgasm. Our hormones were dancing and I was following her lead.
Except I didn’t think love was just a feeling. It was a choice. And I found myself making the choice. Deciding to love.
And it was just the slightest bit terrifying.
“I looked up your home on Zillow.” Daphne’s voice startled me from somewhere behind.
“It’s worth forty million dollars, which means you’re stupid rich. Probably a billionaire. Where are you?” She spun around, searching for me.
“You can’t trust Zillow. And I’m not a billionaire.” I groaned as I shifted, propping my head on my hand to see her over the back of the couch. “I’m a dentist.”
My gaze went cold. My whole body froze. A wicked smile spread across her face. “I wandered into a whole room dedicated to gift wrapping.”
Her wet hair was parted down the center and pulled into two low pigtails, each tied with thick red satin ribbons.
She wore a plain white t-shirt, so thin I could see her nipples underneath. The dark shadow at the apex of her thighs.
Like a package just waiting for me to open.
She sipped her cocoa from the mug I’d left on the bathroom counter for her, resisting the urge to join her in the shower—this time.
Her nipples poked through the threadbare material—she must have really dug deep in my closet to find it—and made my mouth water. I wanted to burst from looking at her.
“I was going to try not to touch you until tonight.”
She came closer and leaned over the back of the couch. “You don’t want to?” She pouted.
“I do want to. I’ve been laying here, arguing with my cock, telling it to calm the fuck down, trying to prove I wasn’t a lecherous man incapable of keeping my hands to myself.”
“What if I don’t want you to keep your hands to yourself?”
“Come here.”
She sat crossed-legged on the other end of the couch—too far away—tugging the hem between her legs to cover her exposed pussy.
I looked anyway.
“First, tell me how you became a dentist with a billion-dollar trust fund.” She tucked my legs around her like a blanket.
“A dentist with a trust fund and a social conscience. My parents aren’t even billionaires. You can stop hating them before you even meet them.”
“I’m going to meet your parents?” She placed her mug on the coaster and widened her legs, grabbing my t-shirt to pull me toward her, between her legs. I was frequently finding myself between her legs. Not that I minded in the slightest. If I could live here, I probably would.
“As soon as they get home,” I said.
Visions danced in my head. Daphne helping serve at our annual Thanksgiving feast, dolloping extra helpings of sweet potato casserole to anyone who flirted with her. Daphne helping small children compete against their older siblings at the annual Easter egg hunt on our expansive lawn. Daphne in a big, white dress. Or a tiny white dress as we hopped a plane to Vegas to avoid the big wedding my family would want from us.
I was getting way too far ahead of myself.
I sat up and nestled back. “Come over here.”
She crawled toward my lap, lifted her leg over mine, and sat, biting her lip and looking at me from under lashes much darker than her hair.
I pulled her lip out from between her teeth and leaned forward to nibble it. She tasted like crisp peppermint toothpaste and hot cocoa. A combination of sensations rather than flavors.
“Did you enjoy your shower?” I slid my hand inside her t-shirt in search of her nipple.
She moaned as my fingers teased circles around her puffy areola. The telltale sign her nipples would soon be huge and hard as rocks, jutting up from the tips of her perky round tits. My favorite fidget toys. “I even had to turn the cool water on at the end. I was as red as a lobster when I got out.”
I traced her lips with my tongue, before kissing the outer corner of her mouth.
“My parents are going to get back from Germany and find their water bill as high as their beer bill. When no one was supposed to be here.”
“Your parents drink beer?”
“It’s Germany. Of course they do.”
“But they’re rich. I don’t imagine rich people drinking beer.”
“Know a lot of rich people, do you?”
“Only you.”
“Mmm.” I pulled her off my lap so I wouldn’t be too distracted to get out what I needed to tell her.
Who I really was.
“I live off my dentist’s salary and whatever I earn as an assistant professor,” I said. “I realize that’s already a lot higher than the median income, but it’s not rich like this house is rich. I purposely don’t live like this for a reason. My place in Knoxville is small. I live downtown not because it’s fancy, but so I can see other humans when I’m not working with the dead. Even if I’m just watching my community from the window, I know they’re out there, living. Drinking and eating in the plaza, walking their dogs, playing in the fountain when it’s hot. Sometimes that makes a big difference in my mental health when I come home from a case.
“I saved money to buy my car. It didn’t take long, and it wasn’t much of a hardship, but some small sacrifices were made.
“I have a small library of first editions I’m proud of, and a watch collection I’m embarrassed about, now that I think about it. But so do men without trust funds.”
Without meaning to, I rubbed the crease where her skin folded at her hip. It was just too hard not to touch her somewhere.
“I’m not telling you this to change your mind, or to convince you I’m some kind of a hero for living within my ample means. I just want to lay it all out there and clear up any false expectations you might have.
“And yes, on a yearly basis, I’m awarded my interest dividends from my trust fund. Which is not billionaire huge, but it’s still mind-bogglingly huge. It’s huge enough that if I allowed myself to take it, I could buy fifty Mercedes AMG GTs every year, and it wouldn’t hurt to make the wire transfer. It’s huge enough that my children won’t have to work, my children’s children, nor their children. On and on down the line of my descendants, until one of those idiots decides to squander it all and invest in something stupid, in which case, I will float out of my grave and haunt him for the rest of his days.”
“So, you admit you’re rich.”
“I never said I wasn’t rich; I said I wasn’t a billionaire. And I’m not. Year after year, those funds go into a separate account managed by my lawyer and after my standing pledges are distributed to the right charities, whatever’s left goes to new projects I want to support. My ethics always take priority.”
“What did your people do to acquire all this money?”
“Not by prioritizing their ethics, that’s for damn sure.”
Her face registered shock now, and this time, disapproval. I sighed and sat up.
“The usual way: by exploiting any and everyone who crossed their paths.”
I’d been hoping to avoid the unavoidable, but it was better she learned where I came from before she read about it in history books. “There were a lot of income streams. The largest was the L&C line. A transcontinental railroad that displaced a lot of nations out of their ancestral lands and forced low-wage, dangerous labor on immigrants and the formerly enslaved. I’m pretty sure the only thing my ancestors weren’t guilty of is actual enslavement, but then again, I could be wrong. We don’t have many records that aren’t in the public domain. There was a fire in the twenties. Conveniently got rid of a lot of evidence when my great-great-grandfather was facing federal charges.”
“Chris?”
Reluctantly, I met her eyes.
“You are not your ancestors.” She cupped my jaw and pulled my face to hers.
I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting disapproval. Condemnation. Especially from someone with a heart like Daphne's.
Part of me felt like I deserved the wrath she wasn’t dishing out. It wasn’t my fault, but it was still a hard pill to swallow, being born into privilege that was built on the corruption and greed of robber barons, the stripping of raw materials from the earth, the exploitation, pain, and terror of men, women, and children. It wasn’t something I thought about all the time. For all I knew, my ancestors had lovely personalities and made their money with perfectly respectable and upright business and legal dealings. But it was unlikely. It was a source of shame, and one I couldn’t hide from Daphne. She deserved to know why my parents and I tried so hard to atone for the sins of those who came before us, who’d passed down the name.
That was why I’d grown up in kitchens and was asked which charities I’d like to give an extra gift to instead of what I wanted for Christmas. It wasn’t that I lacked anything, even emotionally—though thirteen-year-old me was super annoyed when I didn’t get the Xbox all my friends had. But in my parents’ determination to raise me as normally as possible, they sometimes went a little overboard with their restrictions.
She pulled me back down and widened her legs, settling herself comfortably under me. “I’m proud of you. You’re a good man, Chris Carter. And I’m proud to know you.”
“I could be telling you what you want to hear.”
“You’re not. I might not have known you long, but I know your heart. I see you.” She got that look of wonder in her eyes again. The one that made me want to get lost in them.
In this position, my glasses were sliding off my face. As much as I wanted to see her face, I didn’t want to hit her in the bridge of her nose with a pair of heavy frames. I took them off and tossed them on the coffee table.
She didn’t even let me kiss her slowly, she met me more than halfway, sucking my lip desperately into her mouth with a moan. God, I loved her moans. My tongue reached out to slide along her lip, coaxing them apart to feel her breath. This wasn’t her usual fever of a kiss. It was languid, lazy, as we nipped and licked and sucked.
Her hands made their way under my shirt. Fingernails raked over my chest and stomach, sending shivers down my spine. Underneath me, her hips writhed and her legs wrapped around me.
My hands were back on her tits, always her tits, as I coaxed the hard peaks even harder. Her skin was still warm from the shower—was it still red, too? Jesus, how hot was that water?
“You know..." I pinched her nipple, and my body melted from her gasp. “There’s hot water at my place, too. You don’t have to keep binge-showering here, like you’ll never encounter a tankless water heater again.”
Under my hands, her body froze. I adjusted my head to see her better.
“Am I...?" she started. “Are you inviting me over... when we get home?”
“Did you think we wouldn’t be together after this?” I put my glasses back on and sat up. I needed to see her eyes to say this. “Daphne, it’s taking all the strength in my body not tell you that tomorrow, when we get home, that word will mean something different to both of us. That we’ll spend tomorrow afternoon packing up your things at your dad’s house and moving them into mine. That you’ll never have to take another rushed shower again, because even in the event of an apocalypse, when running water is only a figment of the imagination, I would spend all my time boiling your water and McGyvering your camp showers, just so I could make you happy.
“I’m dying to tell you that you’ll always have real Mountain Dew—not Mountain Thunder. And hot cocoa made with warm milk and Valrhona chocolate instead of powdered packets—as long as you promise to brush your teeth afterward
“And that I’ll take care of you and you’ll never have to work, unless you want to, and I know you want to, and I respect you for that. But if you want to stay home with our kids in the future, that’s okay, too.”
Daphne’s breath hitched as she inhaled. The edges of her mouth turned up into a tiny smile. There were the beginnings of tears in her eyes.
“But I can’t say that yet. Because all that is crazy. It’s insane to ask someone you just met yesterday to move in with you tomorrow. And neither of us are insane. So, in the meantime, you’ll just... be my girlfriend?” I smiled. “Until it’s not insane to be my wife.”
Her nostrils flared as she dove in to kiss me. I tasted salt and wiped her tears with my thumbs.
“You can’t tell me all that and not fuck me afterwards,” she said against my lips.
“I wasn’t exactly planning on doing my taxes after all that.”
I ran my fingers down her wet clit and speared her on my fingers. Two fingers, pumping in easily with her flood of moisture.
She whimpered as I slowly worked my fingers in and out. “Are you sore, sweetheart?”
She nodded. “But it feels good. I like it. I like that you made me sore.”
My dick jumped and pre-cum leaked out. I was going to have to take her soon, or I’d be coming in my sweatpants.
But no, I wanted to go slow. Take in every moment of this experience.
“Chris.” She grabbed my wrist. “I don’t want to squirt everywhere and get this pretty room all gross.”
I’d almost forgotten how much of a mess she made—a delicious, erotic, mind-numbing mess of fluid that came out of nowhere. Technically, it was mostly lymph fluid from her urethra, but the fun part was knowing I was the one who got to make her body do this insanely cool thing.
“Please don’t let me ruin your mom’s sofa. It probably cost more than my student loans. I couldn’t bear it.”
I groaned but sat up, pulling her with me.
“Actually, I had something different in mind,” she said, sinking to her knees.
Her hands ran along the waistband of my sweatpants, playing with the elastic.
“I’m amenable to different.”
I glanced down as she teased my cock through the fabric. I’d foregone my usual boxers and as my cock hardened inside my pants, the soft fabric brushed my sensitive skin and felt like heaven.
She tugged the fabric down and pulled out my cock, stroking it greedily. The show was almost as good as the sensation.
“Can I?” She licked her lips.
“Baby, that’s not a question you ever need to ask.”
She lowered her head and licked it tentatively.
God, my cock looked good on her tongue. The way she stuck it out so naively, kissing the tender frenulum before opening wide and diving down as far as she could take me.
I held her pigtails while she started a nice, slow rhythm. With her head bouncing on my cock and that desperate gleam in her eyes, she was an adorable mess.
My adorable mess.
It wasn’t fair to think it. Not yet. But I wasn’t giving her up. I spread my legs further and jerked my hips, fucking her mouth as she moaned.
“Oh fuck, Daphne.” I was already on the brink of coming down her throat. “Where?”
She faltered for only a moment before popping off my dick and sinking to kneel on the floor between my knees. She tugged her shirt over her head and pumped my cock adoringly, aiming the explosion at her perfect tits. “Here, Daddy.”
Jesus. Yes. I couldn’t even remember coming. Only the thick ropes that shot out of my cock, striping her pink skin.
She looked so pleased with herself, kneeling at my feet with a goofy grin and large, steel gray dinner plates for eyes. The only thing I loved more than her naked tits was seeing my cum dripping off the peak of her hard nipple.
Holy shit, who was I? I wasn’t this guy. I never got this lucky.
“Why does this feel so good?” she asked later that evening, after gingerbread cookies had been made and eaten and two different versions of A Christmas Carol had been watched. She was treading water in the center of the pool, looking happy in the pure peace of the quiet night.
“It’s a luxury. Swimming when it’s this cold. The way the warm water relaxes your muscles. All luxuries feel good.”
“I don’t mean swimming.” She drifted closer to me. “I meant us.”
I knew what she’d meant. I just didn’t have an answer. Not one I was ready for.
“I don’t know.” I stared up at the starry sky. Not the faux stars of my bedroom, but the glistening balls of gas punched out of the cold night sky. I told my body to enjoy it. Relax into the wonder of feeling the warmth of the water and her naked skin slick against mine, of the genuine openness of her soul, of her curiosity and the bright glow of her mind as it leapfrogged from one thing to the next, pulling me along behind her.
Remember this moment.
There would come a time when I’d need to remind myself that perfection existed. If a career in death had taught me anything, it was that life was too fragile. It could all come crashing down, leaving beautiful people to rot in the rain and wind and scorching sun until nothing was left but a handful of teeth and bones.
“Can we trust this?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”
“I mean, this feels like toxic relationship good. Without the toxicity. Everything seems so right, but also good and wholesome. And still really fucking hot. Is that what... I haven’t really had an adult relationship. My only boyfriend was in high school, and no one could classify that as serious.” She dipped her head back in the water. “Is it always like this?”
I was quiet for a moment, warring with myself over what to tell her. I tried to think of all the reasons this wasn’t real. Our feelings were lying to us. We were too much, too fast. It was all just because we were both alone on Christmas, or that women were more likely to feel bonded to someone when they experienced orgasm because their bodies released oxytocin.
But I couldn’t say any of it. Because I didn’t believe it anymore.
“It’s never like this.” I lifted her legs and wrapped them around me, her weight buoyed by the water. “Not for me, anyway.”
Maybe something loomed on the horizon. Something insidious that threatened to destroy even the memory of these thirty-six perfect hours together. But tonight, I refused to let these thoughts take over.
Tonight was for creating new holiday traditions. And from the way her hand was pumping my cock under the water, it seemed our Christmas traditions would include fucking in a heated pool under the stars while snowflakes melted into the water around us.
This was going to be a merry Christmas.