Chapter 24 #2
“You sound so tortured,” I exhaled after my hips twitched towards him.
I’d attempted to mask anything that matched his hungry desperation.
Something was brewing in my core, anxiety and heat were coursing against another like a river meeting the ocean.
Brackish currents were swirling back and forth and making me lightheaded as he thrummed his fingers across my waist.
“You don’t know how awful it’s been being here without you knowing,” he’d moved his mouth down my neck, each word a staccato of heat as it spread across my skin, “I wanted to show up on your doorstep nearly every night for the last week. It’s not possible for me to leave you alone like this. I always want to chase after you.”
He was a master of yearning, he could tilt his jaw and dampen his eyes in the kind of way that made you melt at the sight of it.
It’s like any bit of acting training he’d had was to prepare himself to look at me like this right now.
He was searching for the inevitable rejection, creating an extended pause that I could fill with yet another statement about how “this will never work.”
The words lingered on my tongue, sitting in the back of my throat waiting to be invited out. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Not now, when all these tiny pieces had fallen into place to bring me here.
I shimmied my dress up my thighs and slipped off my underwear as Evan fought to unbuckle his pants. I helped him from behind and he pulled me up against him as his fingers gripped onto my hips.
His fingers dug into my skin as he grew hungrier for me.
There was no need for politeness and hesitation. We’d met these bodies before. We were maps with familiar routes worn in the paper.
I straddled his thigh and settled onto him, dragging myself against him, cursing how good the friction felt. His dick strained at his boxers and he’d been rendered motionless. He didn’t know what to reach for, what to grab onto, his hands were useless.
“Want you—” he started, a desperate, pathetic moan.
I freed his cock from his boxers and fisted it as I grinded on his leg, pumping up and down. He shuddered at the release. All this pent up tension, the months of wondering and waiting.
“I haven’t thought of anyone else but you since June,” he said.
“I jerk off to the thought of you, more than I want to admit. I can’t contain myself when I think of your body, the way you feel when I’m inside you—ah, fuck,” he jerked forward, already on the precipice of completion. “Need to be inside of you.”
My breathing grew shallow, my clit throbbed with every thrust of my hips. “I’ve wanted you for so long I don’t know how to be normal about it,” I said, also on the edge of climax.
“So don’t be,” he grunted.
I dipped my head onto his shoulder as sparks fluttered upward inside me.
My grinding got fiercer, more desperate.
I chased an orgasm that I hadn’t been able to fulfill myself in months.
I wasn’t looking at him anymore but I felt him.
I felt his heaving breathing on my skin.
I felt his cock twitching. I felt his release spill onto my fingers.
I felt my own release pool out beneath me onto his pant leg.
I drew back and looked at him. His eyes were shut, bliss crossed his tightened features.
My index finger brushed along his jawline as I cupped his face in my hand.
“Please don’t let this end here,” he said quietly.
I stroked his cheek and kissed his temple. He smelled like the bar melding with his expensive cologne. He was both the multimillionaire celebrity and Evan from camp, all at once.
I’d tried to place him into boxes, forcing him to be either one or the other. He was neither, he was both. Maybe I’d always struggle to understand it.
I wrote stories that contained the complex, full spectrum of human feeling. I told my agent and my publisher I didn’t want to be confined to a singular genre or label. Evan deserved the same train of thought.
“We have eight weeks,” I said. “We’re smart enough to figure things out by then.”
“So you’ll stay a little while longer?”
I nodded and climbed off his thigh to settle on the seat next to him. He draped his arm around me and combed his fingers through my hair, finding a strand to twist around. We sat in contented silence for a few minutes.
Then Evan shifted and got up, his pants remained unbuttoned and he pulled his shirt off over his head.
“Come on,” he said as he led me across the apartment towards the bedroom. Every step more solid. Every glance more playful.
I stood in the doorway as he flicked the light on.
“Oh my god,” I mumbled.
Evan slid his palm down his cheek. “I forgot about this little detail.”
The entire room—floor to ceiling—was covered in mirrors. I wasn’t looking at one Evan, I was looking at a dozen of them, all reflecting back at me.
“My assistant found it for me and didn’t read through the whole listing, since I’m only here for a short while it didn’t make sense to find a new place—”
“Is the headboard leopard print?” I doubled over in laughter. “Please tell me the sheets are silk—”
“They were until I ordered new ones. I was not about to slide around all night.”
“It’s a nineties drug dealer’s fuck den, oh my god,” I clasped my hands around my mouth.
“It is deeply unsexy,” Evan said, propping his hands on his hips. “We can cover the mirrors if it’s too weird or—”
“There’s a disco ball?” I asked, centering my focus on the ceiling. I turned and found another light switch, when it clicked on the room dimmed and the disco ball began spinning. “This is incredible.”
Evan stalked across the room towards me. “If you’re fine here in the sleazy sex room, let’s have a little sleazy sex.” He positioned himself behind me and slid my sleeves off my shoulders. He dotted kisses across my bare back as gentle fingers unzipped my dress.
He took his time sliding it off me. He reveled in my bare skin.
He dragged his hands over the folds of my back and memorized the creases.
I was facing the mirror, I watched my own body revealed before me bit by bit, piece by piece.
Any dislike or indifference fell off me like my dress and bra did.
Seeing how Evan looked behind me—grasping my skin, cupping my breast—I felt more beautiful than I had in a long time.
He slid his hand down my stomach and brushed my hair aside. “Let me fuck you like…”
“Like what?”
“Like you want me. Like this isn’t a mistake.”
“It’s not,” I turned towards him, forcing eye contact. I felt the slickness between my legs building. “You’re okay to go another round?”
He furiously nodded. “I think my body wants to make up for lost time. I can’t deny it of what it wants. I’m also prepared for once,” he opened the bedside table and pulled out an unopened box of condoms.
“Please tell me those did not come with the apartment,” I said. I was already haunted by the activities that these mirrors had witnessed over the last few decades.
“Fuck, no, I bought them. Well some poor sap delivery driver did, I wasn’t about to let myself be seen at the drug store picking these up. But they aren’t from the sexual deviants who enjoyed this room’s amenities before I got here.” He opened the package and extracted one.
He’d still been partially clothed, his pants hung low around his hips and he’d barely pulled his boxers back up.
His abdomen tapered into a V and a tuft of hair was barely visible above the waistband.
He slid his pants off with one hand and tore the condom open with his teeth using the other, growling satisfactorily.
He perched himself at the edge of his bed, legs spread apart. His rapidly hardening cock standing up between them. “Come here.” His slowly sobering slur made his accent all that much stronger and it sounded like a singular word.
I stepped towards him, watching my silhouette saunter for infinity in the mirror across from me. Evan wrapped his hands around my waist and stared up at me.
“I’m going to fuck you while we both watch ourselves. I want you to see yourself come and how fucking pretty you look when you do,” he said, deep and low.
“Yes, please,” I whispered through trembling lips.
He spun me around and I bent forward, angling my body so it was aligned with him. I slid myself backwards, watching in the mirror how Evan’s jaw tensed and his muscles clenched as he entered me.
“You feel so good like this,” I said. “Fuck, you look good too.”
Evan squared his hands on my hips and looked at my reflection.
“Look how good we look together. How we fit so perfectly. We can turn this into something, Dani. We will turn it into something, I like you too much to let you go.” He traced the petals of each flower tattooed on my shoulder.
Goosebumps prickled up from the sensation of his rough fingertips on my flushed skin.
I pulled myself away from him and speared myself on his cock again. Our bodies moved in rhythm. My hips bounced as his thrusted. I groped at my own breasts, let my own fingers circle my nipple to spread this stimulation through my entire body.
And I watched us. I watched Evan and the way his hooded eyes couldn’t break away from me.
Each sound that came out of him was a whisper of my name, as if he had forbade himself from saying it all this time.
“Dani, Dani, Dani,” like it was a curse or incantation. Something to will himself to speak me back into his life. Each inhale of my skin was treated as precious as oxygen, each caress of my hip like he would lose all sensation in a flash of light.
Somehow, after not one, but two, meals, he still seemed hungry. He wanted to savor each taste of me like it would be his last.
The thread between us had grown so taut it snapped.
I came in a quick rush, it overtook me so fast I wasn’t able to steady myself for it. When the shockwave shook through me I braced my hands on my knees for stability.
Evan gripped my hips and pulled me down with him onto the bed. Our bodies collapsed into a messy heap.