Chapter 24 Stuckness
Stuckness
Jack didn’t know what to say. He was without words. Partly because he couldn’t believe he’d just propositioned Blair Kellermoon. Perhaps he had used his allotment of words for the day—for the week? For the balance of his lifetime?—doing that.
Partly because Blair Kellermoon had said yes.
But mostly because he didn’t have moves. Most of his sexual entanglements, be they short-term things or his relationship with Emily, had not been initiated by him.
But then he rethought things. Had he propositioned Blair, or had Blair propositioned him? He had said the words. But only because she’d touched his foot with her foot.
She’d touched his foot with her foot. He sounded like a teenager. But also, having his foot touched by Blair’s foot had made him feel like a teenager. Her toes were little blocks of ice, but through some strange alchemy they had set him afire.
Perhaps they had propositioned each other.
Regardless, someone was going to have to make the first actual move here. And it was his house.
It occurred to him that this would be the first time he’d had sex here. In this condo, the ill-advised purchase of which wasn’t going to come back to bite him after all—at least not yet—because Blair had helped him write his second book.
There was something poetic about that.
“What are you grinning about?”
He got up and extended a hand. When she set her book on the coffee table, he said, “Bring it.”
“Why?”
“In case we want to do some postcoital SSR.”
She cracked up, but she picked the book back up. Took his outstretched hand. “PCSSR. Mrs. Billings would be horrified.”
He pulled her up, and something came to life inside him, just like before.
Unlike before, he was in command of his wits.
He made a decision that this time was going to be different in one important way: He was going to take his time.
They would take their time. Even if it was torture. Especially if it was torture.
He pulled her closer and bent over and whispered in her ear, “We are going to do a lot of things that would horrify Mrs. Billings.”
She huffed a little sigh. It was a quiet, measured sigh, but the particular mix of relief and resignation it imparted just about undid him.
He was already hard. He started walking them toward his bedroom.
He was going backward, tugging her along, keeping her close.
She stared at him as she walked, her eyes wide.
He flipped on the overhead light on the way in. He wanted to see her secret gray roots. He was smart enough, though, not to say that out loud. She made a face he interpreted as an objection to the sudden illumination, which was fair. He reached around her and turned the light back off, chuckling.
She didn’t share his amusement. Not that she should, but she seemed so solemn. A little stiff, even.
He tried to address the latter issue by sitting down on the bed and pulling her onto his lap. She came, but it was like moving a puppet. There was enough light from the hallway that he could see the furrows in her brow.
“Hey,” he said. “We don’t have to do this. This is a completely optional activity.”
“I know, I know! I want to. I really want to. I just… I haven’t had sex with anyone since Reggie, and I haven’t had sex with Reggie for literal years.”
“You’ve had sex with me, remember?”
“Right.”
“So this is the second time. The second time you do something, all the pressure is off.”
“I don’t know, I’m feeling a fair amount of pressure.” She made a silly face. She was trying to make a joke, but he could tell she hadn’t meant it—entirely—in jest.
“Let’s be serious for a moment. We don’t have to do this. We really don’t.” It would be an immense disappointment, but he wasn’t into anything less than mutual enthusiasm. “We can go back to precoital SSR on the couch. Noncoital SSR.”
“No, I want to. I just… I mean, I take your point about us having already done this, if the metric is orgasms, but this is… premeditated.”
“Let’s not overthink it. Let’s just do what feels good. When it stops feeling good, we stop.”
“OK.” She smiled, and it was a little self-deprecating and a little coy, and it made him crazy. His dick twitched. Her eyebrows flew up. “Oh, something felt good there, I gather.”
“You felt good,” he said, opting for the truth.
A part of him wondered if they ought to have a conversation about parameters, about what this was and what it wasn’t, but he decided against it.
She was in his lap in his bedroom; that ship had sailed.
And more importantly, he was confident that they did not live in a universe in which Blair Kellermoon had designs on him.
The only thing she’d ever had designs on was In Time, for her book club, but that ship had sailed, too.
She’d been sitting perpendicular to him on his lap, but she suddenly shifted, straddling him.
“Oh God,” he bit out, and he hated how clichéd, how nonspecific, that refrain was, but all the words that usually lived in his head had evaporated.
She kissed him, and it was as if he’d never been kissed before. Her lips were soft but… bossy. Like her, he supposed. She pressed her tongue against his mouth—apparently her worries were gone, or, more likely, she’d decided to proceed despite them—and he opened for her.
They kissed and kissed, and she rocked against him, and he told himself to draw things out. To be cool. To make it good.
Eventually he broke the kiss, and he was gratified both by the little mew of protest she emitted and by the fact that she was breathing heavily. He was, too. He consciously slowed his breathing as he pulled his T-shirt up and over his head.
She shot him a smile so wide her dimples popped and began unbuttoning her pajama top. Once again the only words he could summon were Oh God. At least he kept them internal this time.
Her breasts were perfect. They just were. Small, like her, and perky like her. Tipped with the same pink as the pinstripes in her pajamas. He lifted his hands. He lifted his eyebrows, too, asking permission. In response, she shoved herself into his hands.
“Oh God.”
Damn. He had said that one aloud.
“Should we do pants, too?” she whispered after a few moments of him kneading her breasts and her writhing in his lap.
“Yep,” he said, despite the fact that normally he endeavored never to say Yep or Yup, considering them crass substitutions for the English language’s longstanding and perfectly adequate affirmation. “Yes,” he corrected.
She squirmed off his lap and took off her pants. It felt like his limbs were moving through molasses as he tried to do the same. Eventually she got tired of waiting, or so he assumed, because she shoved him onto his back and divested him of his pants herself.
“Well,” she said, and he wondered what had happened to the tentative, worried Blair from before.
“Everything good?” he asked, but was he talking to her or to himself?
“Do you have condoms?” she countered.
He had to think for a second. “I do.”
He blinked a few times, stunned, until she said, “You want to go get one?”
“Yep!” Hopping out of bed and heading for the bathroom, he took a moment to compose himself. Slow, he instructed his reflection. Cool. No more Oh my God. No more Yep.
He did a passable job, he thought, on implementation.
He came back sheathed, and they kissed again.
She writhed some more. He bit his tongue until he remembered he could use his tongue in other ways.
He got to work on one nipple, and, impressed by the sounds she was making, pulled her onto his lap as she’d been before, except this time there were no pants involved on either side.
No pants whatsoever. She slid down on him and he couldn’t help it.
“Oh God.”
“What time do you usually go to sleep?”
Blair woke Jack with the question, which was his first postcoital surprise. He tended toward insomnia. “Around midnight, usually.” But here it was—he checked the clock on his nightstand—all of ten o’clock and he’d been dozing. Being flattened by pleasure would do that.
“We are temporally incompatible,” Blair said.
“Did you say ‘temporally’ as in time or ‘temperately’ as in temperature?” His brain hadn’t fully geared up.
He eyed her. He was sprawled on his side facing her, but she was sitting up, her back against his headboard.
She’d put her pajamas back on, which was disappointing, though he didn’t know why.
He was sufficiently flattened that he wasn’t sure if he was up for a repeat performance.
But he didn’t want to be done with the evening yet.
“I said ‘temporally,’ but I think both are true.” She pressed the sole of a foot against his calf. It wasn’t as cold as earlier, but it was distinctly cool.
“Good Lord. Even after all that?”
“Why are you always so warm?”
He thought back to the night she’d invited him to come to California.
Jack’s second postcoital surprise was what he was about to tell her. “This past fall, when we were first texting, the condo was cold. I was cold.”
“Do they not turn the heat on in the building until some arbitrary date?”
“No, no, that would be me. I don’t turn the heat on until some arbitrary date.”
“And what date would that be?”
“As late as possible.”
She was looking at him like he was a puzzle. “Did you think heat would make you soft?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I must have. Though it was more that it just didn’t jibe with the way I saw myself.”
“So instead of turning up the heat in your house, you moved your body to a hot place.”
“Apparently. Isn’t that stupid?”
“Nah. It makes a certain kind of sense.” She smiled. “Especially if you’re the kind of person who likes to make life difficult for yourself.”
Maybe she hadn’t been looking at him like he was a puzzle. It certainly seemed like she had him thoroughly figured out. “Here’s what I’m trying to say, though. I don’t think it was just literal heat. I don’t think it was just about heating my body up. I think it was you.”
Her eyes danced. “I am known to be rather attractive.”
“No—”
“Well, thank you very much.”
“Will you let me talk, woman? I’m trying to emote here!” Why, though? He had no idea.
“Yikes, yes, of course.”
“I think I accepted your invitation because some inner part of me knew that you’d get me unstuck. That—if we’re still dealing in overly heavy-handed metaphors—it wasn’t coldness so much as it was stuckness. Which isn’t a word.”
“Stagnation,” she said.
“Torpor.”
“Sluggishness.”
“Inaction.”
“Ennui.”
She smiled, signaling the end of the volley. How he had missed their silly thesaurus game. He had always enjoyed it, but he’d had no idea how the addition of nudity would add to that enjoyment.
It was also occurring to him, for the first time, that the game always ended with her. He would always keep the ball in the air, but eventually Blair called it, and it wasn’t, he somehow knew, because she’d run out of words.
Blair didn’t do that—run out of words. It was one of the most compelling things about her. He used to think she talked too much, but he was beginning to question that stance. For example, he wished she would say something now.
She did not oblige him.
He rolled over and levered himself out of bed. He pulled a pair of socks out of his dresser and tossed them to her.
“Sleep is very important,” she said as she put on his socks.
He turned back to the dresser. She’d redonned her pajamas, but if she was that cold, he should get her another layer.
“I spent years sleeping next to a snorer,” she said. “I don’t want to do that anymore.”
“I don’t snore.” He picked up and rejected a University of Minnesota sweatshirt. It was strangely stiff. She should have something softer.
“I don’t want to compromise on my sleeping environment.”
Ah. He turned. “Are you trying to tell me that you don’t want to sleep with me—sleep as in slumber?”
She made an apologetic face. “Yes.”
“That’s fine.” He didn’t want to sleep with her, either. In addition to the temporal/temperate mismatch, he wasn’t great at sleeping with women. He hadn’t ever really analyzed it beyond the fact that he liked his own space.
So what happened now? They were in his bed. “Are you waiting to be excused?”
It came out snarkier than he’d intended. Though he had to ask himself why he had intended any amount of snark. He’d just gotten done thinking about how he didn’t want to sleep with her. So why would he be bothered by her leaving?
Because when she was here, his… stuckness abated.
“I guess I am,” she said. “It seems rude to just up and leave.”
He found another sweatshirt, an older, softer one from his former high school. “You’re excused.” He tossed her the sweatshirt. “Don’t get cold on the journey back to your room.” He should get an electric blanket for her bed. Did they still make those?
She got out of bed, and it was all he could do not to grab her hand and ask her to stay. For a while at least. Long enough to demonstrate that he wasn’t as much of a jerk as he appeared to be.
He said nothing.