Chapter Nineteen #3
“I don’t want to be like that anymore,” she says quietly.
“Waiting to die?”
“No. Waiting to live.”
I turn, feeling hopeful and yet afraid to be hopeful, to meet her eyes already looking up at mine.
There, in the shifting waters of her gaze, I see all the timorous, needful wanting of my own heart reflected back at me.
I lift a hand to her soft cheek, smooth and ceramic from the whipping spring winds, and tilt her face up to mine.
“You don’t have to. Happy birthday, Maisie.”
I tell her in the fierce press of my lips against hers everything I’m too afraid to say. That I would venture into a hundred dead cities by her side. That her slow, cautious smile’s brought me back to life when nothing else could. That, thanks to her, I see beauty again.
I feel again.
Her fingers dive into my hair, pulling me inexorably closer.
I give in to the soft melt of her mouth against mine and the taut core of heat forming within me, filling my dick with the sheer, maddening want of her.
So much want, it overflows my heart, splashes over my barriers, streams down my body like a heavy, drenching rain. I gasp against the side of her mouth.
“Can I teach you about living in the moment, Maisie? About asking for what you need, and taking what you want?”
“Yes,” she says, more breath than word.
Her jumpsuit’s zipper zings softly down, the shiny fabric splitting to reveal the stunning truth of her beneath.
Crescents of strong, hard muscle frame the silk-smooth plane of her chest, ending in voluptuous knots of breast. She spills out of her flight suit, impatiently yanking it down her waist, her hips, her thighs.
I twist her around to face the city, taking each of her hands and bracing them against the wall.
Her skin, pebbled by the cold, is deliciously warm beneath my roving hands, the press of my groin.
“Everett,” she breathes out my name, and it feels like the first time it’s ever been spoken.
The sight of her there, clothes puddled between her ankles, her pale, naked skin stark against the steel cityscape beyond as she bends forward, slick and ready and desperate for me, is so erotic, I feel lightheaded with desire.
I snarl against my own flight suit’s zipper, yanking it down until I’m naked, too.
I hadn’t had sex in years, hadn’t even kissed a woman since my wife, and for these first times back in the ring to be with Maisie?
Gorgeous, powerful Maisie, looking up at me with lust-blown eyes and calling me Professor?
Pretty sure if I die in Maisie’s care, it won’t be from zombies.
I press one hand into the low arch of her spine, and she tilts her shining cunt up to me as if by command.
“Such a fast learner,” I murmur as I drag my other hand between her parted legs, where I sink my middle finger deep within her wet.
“And so goddamn beautiful.” She groans, and I groan in response, clenching my cock and pressing it into the cleft of her ass.
“I can’t pretend anymore,” I pant, watching my thick erection part her cheeks, grinding against her there. I sink another finger within her, feeling her stretch for me. “I can’t pretend I don’t want you, all the time.” The words scrape out of me, by some force not my own. “All the ways.”
“Then don’t,” she says, her words broken on a moan as I withdraw my wet fingers and slide them up, rolling her clit between them until she gasps. “Tell me what you want.”
“Can I have you?” I drag the flared head of my thick, hard cock down until it’s surrounded by the wet pucker of her cunt. A push away.
“You,” she gasps, “already do.”
And before my mind can gallop off with her words, she pushes back onto my dick, enveloping me in her burning heat.
I groan again, gripping her hips as she sinks onto my cock, taking what she needs, what she wants, until there’s no space between us left, and I’m buried deep within her.
The pleasure is stupefying. Her body works me like a vise, gripping, tugging, wringing animal sounds from my throat until I fall over her back, wrapping an arm around her to take the round bell of her breast in my hand, the other reaching until I can rake my fingers into her hair and pull lightly.
“Slow down, baby, please,” I rasp into her ear, her back breaking out into goosebumps beneath the heat of my chest. “Or I’m going to fucking explode.
” I grind into her from this new position, the restraint it takes not to fill her to the brim right now maddening.
Her breath hitches as I coil around her, spreading her legs apart as far as the pants around her ankles will allow, thrusting into her, all of New York shimmering below us.
She whimpers, her nipple hard and peaked against my palm, as I slide my other hand down, down, the pad of my index finger finding the swollen bead of flesh between her legs. It pulses beneath my touch.
“It’s time for you to come, Maisie.” I stroke it gently as I grind into her, lavishing wet kisses down her back. “As loud as you want.”
She moans in response, as though she’d been waiting for permission.
Maisie’s entire core tightens beneath me, around me, writhing against me, and I cradle her as the orgasm floods her body.
She screams, a wrenching, guttural cry of pleasure, gripping the rails of the observatory deck, and I lose control.
The pride swelling within me at making her come like that makes me feral.
I pinion her to me by the hips as she quakes, and I fuck her.
Hard, long thrusts into her throbbing cunt, refueling her orgasm until I’m coming, too.
It’s nothing short of an exorcism. I howl at the sky as my body does its damnedest to mark Maisie as my own, to fill her with my love, to claim her as mine forever.
Maisie
I never dreamed I’d see the Empire State Building.
Suffice it to say, I never thought I’d get fucked senseless on its observation deck, either.
This is, without a doubt, the best birthday I’ve ever had.
Everett squeezes my hand as we walk through the large glass doors out into the New York City spring sunshine.
He hasn’t stopped touching me since we came screaming together beneath the big blue sky, as though the moment cemented the happiness flowing between us into a corporeal tether that requires his hands on me at all times.
After thirty years of barely being touched, my body revels in the press of his warm skin against mine.
It’s an epiphany I can feel. A new understanding of this world even as everything I knew from before falls away.
The rules are gone, both the ones governing this country and the ones we set for ourselves, and I’m truly learning, I think, what it means to live in the moment.
On our bikes again, we turn up Broadway, Everett coasting beside me, Chicken’s holster strapped to his back this time, which she seems to hate just as much.
This street is emptier than the others, just like most tourist spots have been so far.
People don’t enjoy sightseeing with debilitating diarrhea.
At least, most don’t. We see a few shit-covered backsides as we pedal toward Times Square, which, testament to the hustle, I guess.
We pass zombies in sandwich-board signs, the simple messages splattered in the blood of their victims. Cheap lip-filler ads hit different when the person holding them is missing the lower half of their face.
The weirdest thing about Times Square, though, isn’t how empty it is, or the gore-streaked doors to the theaters and whatever horrors remain inside.
It’s how if we lift our heads just high enough, we’re back in regular capitalist America.
The billboards still flash through a never-ending sensory kaleidoscope of perfume ads, luxury handbags, and Taylor Swift’s new album cover.
The news tickers below still stream headlines in red, but the news is six days old now.
It’s like our consciousness paused, this cultural moment the last one Times Square will have until the city’s electrical grid fully fails and the ads stop for good.
I hop off my bike and set it against a double-decker bus that’s crashed into a light pole.
It’s empty inside, the door torn off its hinges, and I bound up the small stairs to the top, then take a seat in the back row.
Everett releases Chicken to stretch her legs, then sits down next to me, and together we lean back, staring up at the giant screen lording over Times Square.
“That’s the North Star spectacular,” Everett muses. “Which has to be the most unintentionally ironic name America could give its most famous advertising jumbotron.”
“If this were a movie theater, what would you want to watch right now?” I ask as I lean against his shoulder. Without hesitating, he wraps his arm around me and brings me close.
“Hmm. When Harry Met Sally,” he finally says. “Best New York rom-com of all time. Then I’d take you to all the sights in the movie and do Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan impressions of all my favorite lines.”
“Are you good at them?”
“Terrible.” He smiles down at me. “But that wouldn’t stop me.”
“So don’t stop now, then. What’s your favorite one?”
“Oh, that’s easy. It’s Billy Crystal’s speech at the end, when he finally tells Meg Ryan how he feels.” He clears his throat. “ ‘When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.’ ”
My eyes grow wide as his arm curls tighter around me, holding me to him.
“Wow,” I finally manage. “Um, what does she say back?”
He tilts his head to the side, then grins. “That she hates him. But she doesn’t mean it.”
That startles a laugh out of me. “Sounds like a great movie.”
“It is. We’ll watch it sometime.”