Chapter 8 #4
“The judge would have loved that. ‘Mr Ross, please approach the bench, and tuck your willy away while you’re at it.’”
I laughed as he came to lie on the floor next to me. “Oh, this is nice and cold,” he said. “I get the appeal.”
“See? My madness has meaning.”
He undid his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves as I spoke. His tie got discarded. “Can I take off my shoes, or will you complain?”
“You have smelly feet!”
“Yes, which you reminded me of all the time. Fuck it, I’m taking my shoes off.”
A sock was thrown in my direction. “Bleurrgh!” I said and held it away. “I bought you these,” I commented. They were blue socks with a pattern of pineapples, but only around the foot. The neck of the sock was plain. “Party on the foot, business up the leg,” I remembered.
“They’re my favourite socks,” he said, resting on an elbow. “I smile every time I put them on.”
“Do you?” I asked, rolling over.
“Of course. They’re from you.” He was staring at me intently. I looked down and noticed that this time I was the one wearing running shorts and a thin T-shirt.
He was gazing at me still. “Ollie,” I said in what I hoped was a warning tone.
I’d barely moved when he was on top of me, his mouth finding mine.
I wanted to resist and thought, for a second, that I could, that I could push him off and we could pretend it hadn’t happened.
But then his tongue was in my mouth, and I gave in and kissed him back as hard as I could.
He rolled over on top of me fully and held my wrists above my head as his mouth moved along my jaw line and down my neck.
“This is a bad idea, Ollie,” I whispered.
“Shut up and let me fuck you, like I know you want me to,” was the answer I got.
I groaned and tried – very weakly – to move away, but instead Ollie opened his legs.
He used them to bring mine together and trap them in between.
He propped himself up and took off his shirt.
I was helpless. Almost instinctively, I reached up and grabbed his pecs, my favourite body part of his, and ground my palms against them as hard as I could.
I leaned up and my mouth found one of his nipples.
“Oh, God, Arden!” he whispered. “Fuck, babe, I have missed this!”
Somehow over the next few minutes, all my clothes vanished, and I found myself lying naked on the floor with a half-dressed Ollie on top of me.
His hands sliding all over and touching every part of me, exploring every nook and cranny that he already knew in exact detail.
“You look great,” he whispered as he kissed me somewhere around my navel.
He stood suddenly and grabbed my arm. I jerked up and found myself being pushed against the fireplace.
“Face the wall,” he said. I didn’t argue.
My mind was racing. Oh, God, this was a disaster.
This was a huge mistake, this was … oh God.
Ollie was kissing the back of my neck as he pinned me against the wall, and it was all I could do not to dissolve into a puddle on the floor.
He kissed every vertebra on my spine as he slowly, slowly made his way down to … wow.
“You hate doing that, stop, you don’t have to, we can do other things,” I whispered hoarsely.
“Shut up unless I tell you to talk,” he said and gripped my knees to force my legs apart.
Ahem. Dear reader. Well, it appears we know each other a little better now. So, skip ahead if you want.
After several minutes of eye-popping tongue movements, Ollie came up for air, and I honestly couldn’t have formed words if he’d said anything.
I was a wreck. It had been years since anyone had done that to me with such skill and attention to detail.
I hovered in a dreamlike state somewhere on the edge of consciousness.
Ollie departed the room, which brought me back to earth.
I called out his name. Oh no, he’d always hated doing that, and it had been a ridiculously hot day – I wasn’t exactly shower fresh down there.
He was probably desperately swishing mouthwash – but then he came back into the room, his trousers pitched into a tent in the front.
He was holding condoms and lube. “It’s unbearably hot upstairs.
I thought we’d stay down here,” he said and grinned.
He pulled me down onto the floor and began to kiss me all over again.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing, I … I thought you’d left because you were having second thoughts.”
He brushed the hair off my face. “This is all I’ve thought about for eight months, Ard.
If you think I’m giving up on my chance, you’re a madman.
” And with that, his head disappeared between my legs, and I let out a yell of such animalistic intensity and volume that we had to scramble to shut the door before Kennedy made it into the room to try and join in.
Just as I couldn’t take any more, Ollie let me go and finally took off his trousers and underwear.
He stood above me, letting me look at him.
His slightly sunburnt arms and legs and the smooth skin of his thighs, the firm stomach, and the perfect dick that I had considered my second home for five years.
He lay down again and rolled on top of me, ripping the condom out of its wrapper and pausing to stare at it.
“What?”
“It’s weird to use one with you, that’s all. I can’t remember when we even stopped buying them.”
“Yeah, that’s not a ‘right now’ conversation. Just like how we’ll also discuss why you brought condoms and lube with you in the first place.”
He grinned.
“Budge up, dear, and open your legs, there’s a good lad.”
He thrust straight in, but it wasn’t painful.
It felt perfect. Like no time had ever elapsed, like it had only been a few days since we’d last done this.
Like we were back in our flat in Bermondsey, in the bed we’d picked out, in the expensive sheets I’d bought for us from Heals, in the bedroom we had spent ages finding the right arty print to go above the headboard for.
That the fights and the heartbreak and the name-calling and the crying and the screaming had never happened.
That I’d never found the texts, that I’d never snuck home from my book tour a week early when I should have been in Newcastle and found him with Jamie the pupil from his barristers chambers in our bed.
That he’d never acted like it wasn’t even a big deal, like he’d never been smug about it and tried to laugh it off and claim I was overreacting, like he didn’t say I was acting crazy.
Like, a few days later, I hadn’t been sitting alone in a hotel room crying so hard I thought I was going to make myself sick when I started getting voicemails from him where he sounded hoarse.
“Arden, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.
Jesus, I’m an idiot. I’m sorry, where are you?
I’m sorry, please tell me where you are, and I’ll come to you, and we can try and make this right.
I’ll do anything.” Message after message.
I still to this day don’t know what flipped the switch in his mind, why he’d acted so awfully those first few days and laughed in my face and then turned into a snivelling wreck, begging me to take him back days later.
Maybe it was bravado. Maybe he’d been so shaken I’d figured it out that he’d doubled down to try and save face.
It was the only reason that I’d been able to think of.
Because for those few days, I was convinced that he’d never loved me, and that I’d imagined everything between us for those past five years.
But then he’d told me again and again how much he loved me. That he’d never loved anyone else. That he could never love anyone else.
By then, it was too late.
“Arden? Baby, are you okay?”
I jerked back to see him looking at me, his face flushed, his mouth opened a touch, concern in his eyes. “Is it too much? Am I hurting you?”
“No, it’s good. It’s great in fact.”
He grinned and bent down to kiss me and then pushed in deeper. “Oh, Oliver.”
“Arden, Arden! Oh, Arden!” he yelled. He buried his face in my hair as his hips pushed forward and every muscle in his body tensed.
I couldn’t work out what was his and what was mine, what was pain and what was pleasure.
We were enmeshed completely. His hot breath in my ear.
His hands gripping me, his body cemented to mine.
“Arden,” he said into my hair in a choked whisper. “I never stopped loving you. Not for a second, baby.”
I gripped one of his arse cheeks in each of my hands and held on for dear life. “I’m not going to last much longer,” I said, or he said, I couldn’t tell.
“I’m close,” he called out, and we both finished in a crescendo of yelling and grunting, sweat and tears and God only knows what else.
He lay on top of me afterwards, his head on my chest while I stroked his hair, and maybe it was the heat, or the length of time since we’d last been intimate, but the most peculiar sensation was flooding my body. I couldn’t identify it. I’d never felt anything like it in my life.