Chapter Nineteen #3
It is everything I have dreamed of, everything that I have wanted.
I am hungry for him, my fingers scrabbling at the buttons of his shirt as he searches for the back zipper of my dress.
When our bare chests collide we groan in gratified unison, and I mourn all the hours we have spent not pressed skin to skin, not exchanging heat like we do now.
My body remembers him, recalls his shape and stretch and rhythm, and this time when I unbuckle his belt and close my hand around him he doesn’t pull away, only gasps my name.
“You’re so hard,” I observe stupidly, stroking this object of my affection.
Julian’s eyelids flutter, his chest expanding in a stammering inhale.
“Always, when I’m with you,” he repeats, and before I can retort, he takes my chin in a gentle bite, lavishes my neck and clavicle with open-mouthed kisses until he finally reaches my breasts.
I push them together with my upper arms, presenting them to him like a gift.
My nipples, already pebbled, throb under his gaze, and he jerks, a live, wild thing, in my hands.
Julian’s first touch is tentative, a feather-light course of his tongue around my areola that leaves it damp and singing for him.
His second is ravenous, a suck of my nipple into his mouth that makes me hiss in pleasure.
He wets his fingers, rolls the other between them, and it’s like he’s flipped a switch, taken me from panting with need to writhing with it.
“Please, Jules,” I cry, delirious. I scoot to the edge of the counter, direct him to where I want him. He slides against the seat of my thong, which is still on, why is it still on, and my eyes nearly cross. “Please.”
Julian’s moan rips out of him helplessly, and he ruts against me harder, pushing against my entrance through the fabric.
“I want to, Sean,” he says, voice shaking. “I want to so bad—”
I arch against him, demonstrating how badly I want him too.
“Then stop thinking so hard,” I whisper against his ear. “Fuck me. I want you to.”
Julian’s sigh is one of defeat. He breathes into my neck, a slow, almost doleful exhale. Then, finally, he drags my panties to the side, and with a firm, declarative thrust, gives me exactly what I’ve been begging for.
My world flashes white. White satin fabric, white walls, amber eyes, pleasure so all-consuming I think it might kill me.
My grip on the back of Julian’s shirt is vise tight and my throat feels raw from breathing or crying out or both.
There’s no gentleness in what he’s doing to me right now, no finesse, just an animalistic drive to pound me into the granite.
I hold on for dear life, let myself become undone.
He feels so good, like every part of him, from these soft lips to those strong hands to the dick that ravages me now, was made just for me, just for this.
“Tell me you’re mine,” a voice says in my ear.
Julian’s voice, but not from Julian’s mouth.
That one is busy and full of my tongue. Behind my closed eyes, my world flashes white again, and he comes into focus: Dream Julian, with his burnished bronze skin and eyes like hot coals.
His fingers twist my nipples as Real Julian’s grip my hips, his teeth tug my earlobe while Real Julian’s worry my bottom lip, but they’re both inside me.
I feel them both, like shadows of the other, their rhythm synced just so, so that I am always filled.
It’s sin personified, so debauched that just the thought of it drags me to the edge.
“Tell me, songbird,” Dream Julian says again. “I want to hear it.”
The temperature we generate rises to boiling, not just the heat of two bodies clasped together, but something else, something that floods me from the center of my chest to the tips of my fingers, pleasure that leaves my nerves shivering in their sheaths.
I remember this. I balked at it last time, but now it seems like there’s nothing to fear.
I embrace it. I want it. Give it to me, I think. Let me burn.
“Yes,” I sigh. “Yes, baby, please, I’m y—”
Julian pulls out of me suddenly, and it feels like someone has just turned on their brights.
“Shit,” he says. He yanks up his pants, tucks himself away, and has already started on the buttons on his shirt before I wake up enough from my daze to realize what has just happened. I watch, stunned, exposed, and only half fucked, until he reaches for his jacket.
“What are you doing?” I say in disbelief. “Are you…leaving?”
Julian refuses to look at me. His cheeks are still flushed with passion, but his expression is stony.
He snatches one of the cloth napkins that I only pull out for special occasions off the table and wipes the sweat from his brow, and that gesture is the one that finally breaks me.
I slide off the counter, pull my dress back up over my chest and down over my ass, and grab him by the front of his shirt.
“Are you serious right now, Julian?” I say. “Are you actually about to walk out, just like that, right in the middle—”
Julian pries my hand away, and the callousness of the gesture feels like a slap across my face.
“I have to go, Sean,” Julian says, not looking at me. “Sorry.”
If this were a movie, I would have snatched the earrings out of my lobes and thrown them at his feet, then grabbed a plate to aim at his head for good measure.
But it isn’t. I am quite sure I will get a good price on Tiffany on resale and I don’t want to go to jail for assault, and so instead I follow him to the door.
“What just happened? What’s going on?” I’m shouting nonsense now, letting my thoughts flow freely from my brain to my mouth to his fleeing back. “Am I missing something? Did something happen? Is there—is there someone else?”
This gets his attention.
“Stop,” Julian says.
He sounds so cold, like he had with Melody, like Alicia before her. His chill freezes me in place. We stare at each other, chests heaving, but otherwise suspended in this vat of hostility that has no reason to be here.
Julian is the one to finally break the silence.
“You were right. We’re in different life stages. We want different things. I was na?ve to ignore those differences, but I can’t anymore.”
This, I think, has to be a nightmare.
“What do you mean?” I whisper.
“I’m twenty-seven years old,” he says. “I should be staying out until three a.m., going to forest raves, making mistakes. I thought I could grow up with you, but the reality is: you’re right.
I don’t know what I want yet, but it might include the things you don’t.
Marriage. Kids. The fucking picket fence.
Someone who isn’t so in love with their job that I don’t figure out they know how to do more than boil water for the five months that I know them.
I want that. Not whatever this”—he waves in my general direction—“is supposed to be.”
I wince. In a matter of seconds, he’s managed to take this magical, special thing we had together and turn it tawdry, wave his hand and turn me from his lover into his fool.
“That was mean,” I say, stunned.
Julian shrugs.
“Radical honesty,” he reminds me, and I am almost sick right there at his feet.
“Okay.” I swallow my nausea and cross my arms, lift my head high. “Sounds like this is it, and you want out. We’re done. Is that right?”
I hate that he is still so beautiful to me. That when he finally looks at me, I can search for the sadness in his eyes and find it.
“Yeah,” Julian says. “We’re done.”
I open the door for him.
There is no fanfare. Julian doesn’t apologize, or tell me good night, or offer platitudes wishing me well. He walks out and closes the door, and with the suddenness of a flash bomb, it is over. From his crate in my bedroom, Onix begins to whine.
The last time I got dumped, I was thirty years old.
I had been with my fiancé for eight years, only two of which could be called happy.
He lied to me, made me feel like every little thing wrong in his world was my fault, cheated on me, got me pregnant.
The day I bled out in the cath lab bathroom, he ignored my first twelve calls.
On the thirteenth, he told me never to call him again, and I had never felt more useless and unlovable in my life.
This doesn’t hurt like that did. But it comes too damn close for comfort.