Chapter Fifteen
Maisie
I come for him again, and again, and because we forgot to set a time limit, a third time, too.
I knew oral sex would feel good—I invested in an excellent showerhead system a few years ago and never looked back—but Everett’s face buried between my legs, sighing into me, moaning, murmuring encouragement while he comes into his own stroking fist is like nothing I could’ve expected.
I didn’t know my body could make these sensations, but somehow, Everett did.
It’s freeing, giving my pleasure to someone else’s hands, and frankly astonishing to come from them.
Part of me wasn’t sure Everett could do it.
Not for lack of skill, and definitely not for lack of attraction, but because of how difficult it can be for me to make myself come.
All the anxiety and worry and never-ending thoughts spooling through my brain build this wall between me and letting go that I can’t always get over.
The more worried I am, the higher the wall.
And letting someone else touch me for the first time?
During a zombie apocalypse, no less? I thought the wall would be a thousand stories high.
And maybe it was, but it crumbled beneath Everett’s heated gaze, the sure slide of his hands down my hips, the hot suck of my breast into his mouth.
I didn’t know what desire felt like, what it added to the equation.
And I had no goddamn clue what it would feel like to be wanted this way.
His yearning is a revelation, a physical presence between us.
I feel it as much as I feel him. This deep, powerful wanting that borders on pain, on frenzy. I’m drunk with it.
My fingers go lax in his hair as I pant up at the red velvet ceiling of this presidential movie theater. Breathless. Spent. Floored. He presses gentle kisses down the inside of my thigh, sending reverberations of the last orgasm through my body.
“Maisie.” It’s all he says as he closes his eyes and nuzzles against my leg.
I caress his cheek. The pinpricks of stubble against my palm plucking something deep between my legs. “Come on. It’s late.”
I lead him up to the bedroom I chose in the presidential residence earlier in the evening.
Not the president’s—I’d never sleep in the same bed as that guy—but one of the fancy guest suites down the hall.
It’s filled with priceless relics from the nation’s earliest days, a massive four-poster bed, and sheets so crisp and smooth it feels like sliding between two cool breezes.
Chicken curls up by the window on a deeply cushioned chair that was Jackie O’s favorite, the little placard states.
“Are you tired?” Everett asks, but it seems like he’s asking something else. He glances at me, then the bed, then back to me. We didn’t expressly say the lesson was over when we made our way up to the bedroom, but with the change of location, it feels undoubtedly implied.
“Yes,” I admit, confirming what I think he’s really asking. I’m exhausted, happy and used up in the best possible way. “But I don’t want you to leave. I—want you to stay. Is that okay?”
The corner of his mouth lifts, and he runs a hand down my arm. “Absolutely.”
We slide into bed, lying on our sides and facing each other. Sharing a bed—another first for me. Everett tucks a hand beneath his pillow, his face mirroring the same contentment I feel in my bones.
“So,” he begins. “Favorite museum today and go.”
I laugh, surprised. “Hm. National Gallery of Art.”
His eyebrows rise. “Really—why is that?”
My smile relaxes as I remember all the swirling feelings I’d had as we walked through the gleaming halls of art, contemplative and quiet.
“Every time I looked at a painting, it felt like being someone else. Like I had the artist’s eyes, and their life, and got to live in this moment they chose to capture.
All the hours they must’ve spent sitting in front of that painting, seeing it, and then I got to see it, too.
Walking through there, I made a thousand little connections with a thousand different people at a thousand different moments in their lives that I never would’ve had otherwise. ”
Everett’s lips part, and he breathes out long and slow. “That is exactly how I feel about movies.” He blinks. “Or used to, at least. They lost their luster after Louise got sick.”
“I think you still love them,” I say slowly, thinking of how entranced he was during Jaws. “Maybe you just lost the connection to the part of yourself that does, and that’s what you need to find—the way back.”
“Maybe that’s you, Maisie.” He smiles ruefully. “You’re my way back.”
“That’s funny,” I say, feeling my throat tighten against the thought. “Because you feel like my way forward.”
His eyes go impossibly soft. He slips his hand across the sheets until it finds mine and squeezes. “I’m glad we found each other, then.”
Me, too.
“Everett, why don’t you want to go home to your parents?
” The question’s been sitting in my gut all day, ever since I saw the desolation in his face at his sister’s house when he discovered where she’d gone, and where he’d have to go if he wanted to find her.
I want to understand this impulse to leave everything behind, as if his reasons could explain Mom’s decision to leave her home, too.
What happened? What does it take to give all that up?
His whole frame seems to brace itself beneath the covers.
“Home?” he finally says. “Honestly, the word has lost all meaning to me now. What vague recollection I have of it are the years I spent with Louise. That home disappeared, though, when she died. Whatever came before—the shitty New York City apartments split among four roommates, and before that, my parents’ house in West Point—never really qualified.
After we left D.C. and moved to New York, my parents enrolled me in a military boarding school nearby.
They did it without even asking me.” Everett shakes his head.
“I started high school there, in a new state, in an entirely new life that I didn’t want.
My parents had decided that it was time for me to follow in their footsteps.
To stop watching so much TV, to start the long and illustrious military career they were sure I was destined to have.
It was never a question with them, not even a statement.
They issued commands, and as their son, it was my job to obey.
Never hesitate. Never have a single thought of my own that they didn’t personally authorize. ”
Everett drags a finger down the sheets. “But I wasn’t cut out for the military, and my parents were furious about it.
The brief interludes I spent with them and Gemma between the long, lonesome, exhausting semesters at school were often worse than what my drill sergeants exposed me to—constant criticism and disapproval.
Nothing I did ever pleased them, even when I broke all the best, most interesting parts of myself and tried to hide them away.
“So, eventually, I stopped pretending. My academic grades were still excellent, but my performance in military education was abysmal. Their wrath was exactly as bad as anticipated when I ran away after high school graduation and didn’t show up for the USMAPS program at West Point after they pulled all their strings to get their bumbling son admitted.
And when they discovered I’d secretly applied to NYU and enrolled?
They did everything they could to ruin it—cut me off financially and refused to pay for anything, thinking that I’d be too poor to do anything else but fall in line.
But it didn’t work—I knew how they’d react, and I’d planned for it.
Tucking away funds, applying for financial aid, then throwing myself into film school with its stories of heroes and villains wholly different from my own.
” He huffs, a sad sound. “I even got Gemma a secret phone she could use to call me without them finding out.”
“Wow,” I breathe out, shocked but not quite sure why.
After all, didn’t my mother do the same thing?
Control my life down to the quick? She was just better at it than Everett’s parents were.
Started earlier. Took me out of society so young I had no clue how to set a different course for myself.
Unlike Everett, I didn’t know the language of escape.
Or that there was anything out there worth escaping for. I only knew fear.
“That was that. We lost all communication until about five years ago, when Gemma and Louise ganged up on me. Gemma begged me to give my parents another chance because they wanted to reestablish ties, and Louise wouldn’t let it go until I finally gave in.
So we started communicating again, but it soon became clear they don’t know how to love me anymore.
They did when I was young, but once I set off on a path different from the one they picked for me, it’s like their disapproval was all they could feel.
They acted like I’d betrayed them somehow.
” Everett’s brow pinches. “But it was either betray them or betray myself. In the end, I chose myself.”
“No wonder you don’t want to go home,” I say softly. “It isn’t home. Not really.”
“I haven’t had a home in a long time,” Everett admits.
I marvel at the words. On paper, Everett and I couldn’t be more different. But our feelings, the way our lives shaped us, hurt us, made us, couldn’t be more alike.
“Why do you want to live with Gramps?” Everett asks, and I can tell he’s wanted to ask this for some time, too.
There’s something about the dark of this bedroom, the way the crescents of our bodies have waxed together into a full, glowing moon in our own night sky, that makes words easier. Questions like stars shining around us.