15 - A THIN FLAME #2
I clinked with both of them and took my first sip. The vodka hit cold and sharp. I finished the first glass faster than I should have. The second nearly as fast. The warmth spread through my chest and made everything more unreal than it already was.
I was reaching for a third when Janice's hand closed lightly around my wrist.
"Easy," she said.
I laughed. "Right. Yes. Sorry."
"Don't apologize. Just slow down."
I set the glass down.
Then a woman came to our table.
Confident, beautiful, wearing only a tiny black thong and heels. She moved through the room like she owned it. She leaned down and kissed Janice open-mouthed. I stared. There was nowhere else to look.
She pulled back, smiled at Janice with dark, warm eyes, and lowered herself to her knees between Janice's legs. She looked up, flushed, open, without a trace of shame.
"Can I service you tonight?"
Her hands went to Janice's thighs and began, slowly, to part them.
I stopped breathing. My heart slammed once against my ribs, hard, like it had been startled out of its rhythm.
I knew I should look away. I told myself to look away.
But I sat absolutely still and watched the quality of the woman's wanting, the ease of her on her knees, holding herself ready and waiting for a word, and my lust went rogue before my mind had any say in it.
Janice touched the woman's chin and tilted her face up. "Not right now, baby. Maybe later."
The woman pouted. "Did I do something wrong?" Then she brightened. "Are you going to punish me?"
Janice leaned down and whispered in her ear. The woman's eyebrows lifted. She glanced at me, quick, then back to Janice, and nodded.
No, I thought. No. I want to see that.
"Go ahead," I blurted.
My own voice sounded strange to me, far off, like it belonged to someone else.
The woman drew Janice's underwear down, and Janice lifted to help her, and then she bent to it and the breath went out of Janice in a way I felt in my own chest. I was watching the giving-over, the woman gone soft and certain and busy between my best friend's thighs, Janice's hand sliding into her hair to keep her there, and what it did to me had almost nothing to do with what my eyes were doing.
I was soaked. It arrived fast and complete, no buildup.
I could see my own hands flat on my own knees and could not feel them.
My face was so hot I was sure it showed across the room.
Every sound Janice made went straight down through me and came back as more of the same, no peak, just rising, and I sat there rigid on a barstool in a room full of strangers and came quietly apart where no one could see.
Ricardo's breath was at my ear. "Do you want that, Lacey? I can do that for you."
I nodded. “Yes,” I breathed. There was no thought in it, only the wanting. Yes. Oh, yes I want that!
His hands drew me to the edge of the stool.
He reached up under my skirt and hooked the waistband of my underwear, and I lifted my hips for him, lifted them myself, helped him take them off me.
He pushed my knees apart. He kissed the inside of my thigh and I was shaking, teeth clenched, the ache in me gone past anything I had a name for. Yes.
Then Janice came, somewhere above me, and the sound of it reached down.
She came back to herself and her eyes opened and she smiled at the ceiling, and then she saw Ricardo down between my knees and the smile dropped, shock crossing her face for half a second.
"Wait," I said. I sat back hard. "Wait."
Ricardo had my knees apart still, leaning in.
I put my hand flat on his head. "Ricardo. Stop."
He went still. He straightened. But his hands stayed where they were, on my knees, like he hadn't caught up to the word yet.
"Ricardo." Janice, sharp, sharper than I had been. "She said stop."
His hands came off me then. He looked from Janice to me and back, and there was no temper in it, nothing pushing, only a young man lost, running back the last sixty seconds for the place he went wrong and not finding it. "I did something?"
"No," I said. "I just. Let go. I feel exposed."
He had already let go. He sat back on his heels, hands open on his own thighs, watching me the way you watch a piece of music that has stopped in the wrong place.
Oh my god. I barely know him. I just opened my legs in a room full of strangers.
I looked up.
Nobody was looking at me. Or that wasn't quite right.
There were eyes in the room, idle, drifting, like any bar in any city.
None of them were on me, exactly. None of them stared or even seemed interested.
But the room itself had gone impossibly aware of me, or I had gone impossibly aware of the room, every part of it sharpening to one fact, that I was in public and I had spread my legs for a near stranger, and somewhere I was already composing the sentence I bared my pussy in a club and finding it didn't fit inside any other sentence I had ever thought.
I cast around.
"Where are my panties?" I asked.
The question was so absurd I almost laughed. Where are my panties? The kind of thing you say when you have lost your keys, your phone, your sunglasses. It would have been funny if it weren't mortifying.