26 - A PRIVATE PLACE
Lacey
I lay in the gray pre-dawn for a while, waiting for my sexual longing to settle. It didn't. It hadn't been settling for weeks. The want had stopped being about anything in particular.
I got myself there fast, one hand under the waistband, not thinking about anyone, chasing the craving that wouldn't leave me alone. I came with my face in the pillow.
The relief lasted maybe six seconds.
Christ, Lacey. This isn't normal. This is not what your body is supposed to be doing.
I lay there with my hand still inside my underwear and thought, quite clearly, that I had a problem.
I was supposed to see Ricardo today. He'd called it a fun run. After the restaurant I didn't know what to expect. Maybe just a jog?
I can meet you at the trailhead at one.
I gave him the address.
I'd put on a panty liner before I'd even brushed my teeth, because I couldn't have anything rubbing against me, because I evidently had no say in the matter.
The morning dragged. I had three patient charts to finish before Tuesday. I sat with them and got through none of them. I'd read three lines and find myself staring at the wall, already somewhere else, already in the trees. After the third try I gave up and just waited for one o'clock.
I'd had a healthy appetite before. Okay, more than healthy. But that was something I had. This was something that had me.
Twelve forty-five. I changed and checked the mirror. The Lacey Bonds in the glass looked the same as the one who'd stood there months ago, when nothing had been wrong with anything. I made myself stop looking.
I drove the mile and a half to the trailhead and saw Ricardo's bicycle locked to the post at the entrance.
He came out of the shade of the trees as I was getting out of the car. Ricardo. That gorgeous man, hair still damp from his ride over. He gave me a big hug and a bigger kiss right there in the lot. I made myself not look around. Ricardo didn't care who saw. I wanted to be like that.
"Beautiful girl," he said, into my hair.
I laughed, a little, at nothing. At myself, maybe. At the fact of standing in a public lot in the middle of a Sunday because my own body had marched me there.
"What's funny?" Ricardo said.
"Nothing." I shook my head. "Long week. Let's run."
"Sí." He smiled. "A fun run."
He had a little backpack with him. I hadn't noticed it when he came out of the shade.
"You don't need the backpack," I said. "You can leave whatever's in it in the car."
He winked. "I need the backpack."
We ran. The first half mile we said nothing.
Ricardo was an easy runner, light on his feet, his breathing even.
I couldn't find a rhythm. My hips felt loose, and the fabric of my shorts was rubbing against me in a way I'd hoped the run would take my mind off; instead, it was making everything worse.
By the half-mile marker, I was wet through the liner and through the shorts and I had an idle thought, maybe I have a hormonal imbalance.
After a mile, where the trail thickened into trees and curved away from the lot, Ricardo stopped.
"This is a good place."
"A good place for what?" I was still catching my breath. "We've gone a mile."
"Lacey." He stepped closer and took my elbow. His palm was warm. "You know my thing."
"I know your thing."
"I love the dangerous. The maybe getting caught. The public."
I laughed, breathless. "Ricardo. We are not having sex on a running trail in the middle of the day."
He looked theatrically wounded, and a small unwelcome thing drummed in me anyway. My pussy apparently decided that being a problem in public was an interesting variation on the problem.
Stop it, Lacey.
"No?" he said. "Then can we at least dance?"
"Dance."
"Something romantic. I'm feeling romantic."
I looked at his running shorts. "You're feeling horny."
He laughed. Ricardo had never been ashamed of being horny in his life. He'd never been ashamed of anything.
He kissed me. My mouth, then my neck, slow, like he had nowhere to be. The fog came up.
"I'll dance with you off the trail," I said. My voice came out rougher than I meant. "Not where someone can see me. And you're sweaty."
I was sweaty too. I left that part out. He was already smiling at the concession.
I didn't have the discipline to refuse him. I'd used up whatever I'd been issued.
I went off the trail to a small clearing about twenty feet in. I could still see the path through the underbrush. He followed, dropped the backpack on the pine needles, and took me into his arms.
He smelled like sweat and pine and the cologne-ish deodorant I'd teased him about once. The animal in me, the part that had been awake since dawn, decided that today it liked the smell of male sweat.
His hand ran down my back. Slow. From between my shoulder blades to the small of my back and lower. I should have stopped him at the small of my back. I didn't.
His hand settled on my ass and pulled me into him. The hard line of him pressed against my belly. I knew that cock. I'd had it in my mouth. I'd had it inside me.
"Ricardo."
"Mmm?"
He kissed me properly, open-mouthed, and the desire went from request to demand, and I stopped pretending to myself that I was going to walk back to the car.
Oh no. I'm one of those women now.
He dropped to his knees faster than I expected. I'd braced for a slower negotiation, the kind where I got to keep pretending I was choosing. His mouth pressed against me through the fabric of my shorts and I gasped and took his head in both hands.
"Ricardo. Stop. Not here."
I didn't push him away. I pulled him closer. My mouth was telling him to stop and my hands were telling him to stay.
He breathed hot through the cotton. He kissed me through it like it wasn't there. I held him to me and stopped saying stop.
Then he pulled back on his own. "Wait," he said, breathless. "Wait."
I stood there keyed up so far past anything I recognized that I couldn't have walked the twenty feet to the trail if I'd wanted to.
Ricardo was opening the backpack.
He took out a blanket. A real one, thick, navy, the kind you buy for a beach. He'd folded it small and packed it in the bottom of the bag and carried it on the run.
He'd planned this. From the moment he texted me back he'd planned all of it.
I also noted that I wasn't turning around and walking to the car.
"Come," he said. "Come."
I sank to my knees and kissed him.
He lay back on the blanket, the afternoon sun coming through the leaves in pieces across his face and across his chest where his shirt had ridden up.
He looked up at me like he'd been looking forward to the view for a week.
He stayed on his back, hands light on my hips, content to watch. He liked to watch.
I straddled him. The thin damp fabric of my shorts against the thin fabric of his was the only thing between us, and I lowered myself onto the hard line of him through it.
Oh God. I need him inside me.
His hand slid into my shorts and his finger found me, and I came down on it in a small uncontrolled way I hadn't authorized.
That was when I heard it. Panting. The crunch of shoes on dirt.
I ducked against his neck. "Ricardo. Stop."
He didn't move. His hand stayed where it was.
Two runners came down the trail, one just behind the other, twenty feet away, close enough that I could hear them breathe.
Close enough to call to. They watched the path ahead of them.
They watched their pace. They passed, and the crunch faded, and Ricardo started laughing into my neck.
"Oh my God," he said. "That was amazing."
His finger curled inside me. They'd been twenty feet away. They hadn't looked, and they could have, and the thrill of it was bigger than any I'd let myself have.
I want to be seen. God help me.
My hands were at his waistband before I decided to put them there. I pulled it down. He was hard, the head already wet.
"Tell me there's a condom in the backpack."
"Sí." He fumbled for it, tore the packet with his teeth, handed it to me. I rolled it onto him, too slow, my hands not steady, every second I spent on it a second he wasn't in me.
I pushed my shorts down one leg and lowered myself onto him.
He slid in, and it was good, it was so good, and I rode him with the sun on my neck and the blanket under my one bare knee and my bare skin open to anyone who looked into the trees.
And at the thought of being looked at, being seen, being known, I came harder than I had the first time. He gasped and went with me.
And while the last of it was still going through me, I heard them again.
Panting. Shoes on dirt. Closer this time, and more than one.
"Ricardo." My voice was clear now, but the thrill and fear rose together again. That I could get caught should terrify me. I could be seen naked in public. My breath caught. "Off. Let me up," I whispered.
He didn't let go.
His hands closed around my hips and held them, and he was still inside me, and he didn't move. The grip wasn't painful. It wasn't negotiable.
"Ricardo." I was almost panting, I could feel myself clench on his cock. "Let me off." My arms pushed against him as my pussy clenched harder to stay.
"No, no. It's okay. They can't see you."
I could see them through the trees, two figures, closing.
I pushed at his hands and his hands stayed.
He held me down on him with a strength I'd never had a reason to test before, and he wasn't laughing now, and he wasn't afraid, and he was watching my face.
Whatever was happening on my face, he liked it.
The light had gone glassy in his eyes, the look of a man who'd found the exact thing he came for and didn't intend to give it up one second early.
The runners were thirty feet out. Twenty. He let go.
I rolled off him onto the blanket, half-naked, scrambling for my shorts, and got them up over my hips as the first runner came around the bend.
A woman, another behind her. The first one's head turned a fraction toward the trees as she passed.
She faced front again. Then her head came back around, her eyes a little wider.
She kept running.
The crunch of her shoes took a long time to fade.
Ricardo lay there on the blanket with his cock softening in the condom, smiling up at the canopy.
I sat up and pulled the waistband the rest of the way over the useless liner and tried to make my hands work and couldn't, quite.
My heart was going in a way that had nothing to do with running.
He'd held me. I'd said off, and he'd held me anyway, two seconds, in which the woman might have turned all the way around, and I'd almost come again just at the thought.
"You held me," I said, flat.
"I was excited." He said it easily, like he said everything. "It was so good, Lacey. And you looked amazing, electric, and I felt you milk me!"
I looked at him and tried to find the line between a man too carried away to hear me and a man who'd heard me and decided not to listen.
Or who thought I didn't mean it. Even now the idea that I might have been seen acting like…
a slut, I heard the voice whisper in my mind and it thrilled me.
Ricardo's face gave me nothing to convict him with.
He looked young, lit up, a little lost in it, and that was almost worse, because I couldn't tell whether the holding had been an accident of his excitement or the point of it.
Whether he'd wanted me caught. At least he'd let go in time.
He started pulling his shorts up slowly, the way a man does when he's hoping a third runner might still come around the bend.
"You're really going to make me run back alone?"
"I don't feel like running this second." He stretched out on the blanket. "How can you run, after that?"
I left him there.
I jogged back toward the lot. The movement was wrong against me, swollen and wet, every stride a small report of what had happened. The fabric rubbed where his mouth had been and where his fingers had been and where the rest of him had been five minutes ago.
What am I doing? What am I doing?
But it had felt good. It had felt better than anything had felt in a long time. I was finally getting some of what everyone else seemed to have been getting all along, what women in books had, what women who weren't me had had since they were twenty-two.
And it was dangerous. Not the abstract kind. The kind with a man's hands on my hips that didn't let go when I said to. I should be angry. I tried to be angry. That was dangerous. We could have been seen.
But I loved it. That was the part I couldn't get around.
He hadn't stopped when I told him. It kept looping without any emotional effect. That was wrong, surely.
The quiet voice at the back of my head offered up the word.
Addict.
I stopped with my hand on the car door.
No. Not that. Addicts can't stop.
Right?