Not Going Down the Hall
Maribel
He brings a plate upstairs full of whatever Hendrix didn’t burn. Two forks. A beer he already opened. He sets it on the bed and pulls his shirt off because the room is hot and the window is cracked over the lot.
I take the shirt.
He looks at me. I pull it on. It hits mid-thigh and smells like him. I sit cross-legged on his bed and steal the first forkful before he can sit down.
“That was mine.”
“You brought it to me.”
“I brought it to the room.”
“I’m in the room.”
He sits. His knee bumps mine and stays there. Downstairs a bottle hits a table and somebody laughs and then the building goes quiet again. Ordinary night. Nobody at the edge of the gravel. Nobody bleeding.
I eat. He watches my mouth.
I know that look now. I put it on him in this bed with my hand and then with his mouth between my legs. He came on my stomach and I slept here anyway. In the morning he poured coffee like his hands were normal. They are not normal. I have had those hands.
“You’re staring,” I say.
“You stole my shirt.”
“You took it off.”
“Tactical error.”
I laugh. It comes out easy. I set the plate on the chair and stay where I am, in his shirt, on his bed, with a man who has already seen me come and still looks at me like he hasn’t had enough.
“Movie?” he says.
“No.”
“Good.”
I get in his lap.
I don’t make a speech about it. I swing a leg over his thighs and sit down on him and his hands find my hips like they belong there. He’s hard under the jeans. I feel him against me, cotton and denim, and I roll once just to watch his face change.
It changes.
“Pluma.”
“I know.”
I kiss him. He kisses back like the permission is already spent. His mouth is hot. His hands slide up under the shirt and find bare skin, my waist, the undersides of my breasts, and I make a sound into his teeth that I don’t swallow.
“Jeans,” I tell him.
He gets me off his lap just long enough to shove them down and kick them away. Then I’m back where I was, nothing under his shirt, his cock against my heat, slick already, the head of him sliding through the wet when I move.
He drops his forehead to mine. “Drawer.”
I reach for a condom. He takes it and rolls it on with his jaw tight, and I watch because I like watching him do anything that has to do with my body.
When he’s done I put my hand around him and line him up.
He goes still. The kind of still a man goes when he’s about to get a thing he wants and he’s still giving me one second to change my mind.
“Maribel.”
“Yes.”
I sink down.
The stretch knocks the air out of me. He’s thick. I already knew that from my fist and I still wasn’t ready for this, the slow full press of him opening me, inch by inch, until my thighs are shaking and he’s only halfway in.
“Fuck,” he says, coming undone. “Look at you taking me.”
I breathe. I take more. My hands are on his shoulders and his are on my hips, and I can feel every place we’re touching. When I finally sit all the way down I have to drop my forehead to his and stay there a second with him buried in me.
He’s shaking.
I did that.
“You feel—Jesus, Pluma. So tight. So wet. Don’t move yet. Let me feel you.”
I move anyway. A small roll of my hips, just to see. His breath punches out. His fingers dig in. I do it again, slower, and watch his mouth fall open.
“You like that,” I say.
“I like you.” His voice is shot. “I like your cunt on my cock. I like that you sat down on me in my shirt like you own the room. Ride it. However you want.”
I go slow first, because I want to feel every inch of him drag out and push back in. Then faster, because his hands tighten and I like that too. I like that I can make a man this size lose the thread. His shirt sticks to my back. Sweat forms between my breasts. I don’t care.
I find a rhythm that drags him over the place that makes my stomach pull tight, and I stay on it. His mouth finds my throat, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, and then he’s looking down between us at where I’m taking him. The sound he makes is filthy and helpless.
“That’s it. Fuck. Take it. You have no idea how good you look on me.”
I do, actually. I can see it in his face. I can feel it in the way his hips keep twitching up to meet me like he can’t help it. I put my hands in his hair and use him, slow and deep, and when I clench around him he swears into my mouth.
Stars explode behind my eyes as the waves take over and I come hard around him. “Mateo,” I whisper as I float back down.
“Yeah. I’m here.” His hand slides between us and finds my clit, thumb circling while I move. “Give me another one. I want to feel you come on my cock again.”
I was already close again, skating the edge of pleasure. The thumb finishes it. I come with him all the way inside me, shaking, making a noise I don’t try to stop, and he holds me through it and keeps his thumb there until I jerk and catch his wrist.
I’m still pulsing around him. He’s still hard. His forehead is against mine and he looks ruined.
I pull him down.
We go over onto the mattress, my back on his sheets, his weight between my thighs, and I keep him inside me the whole way.
The shirt is rucked up under my arms. He looks at my face once, and whatever he sees there is enough, because he drives into me the way I wanted, deep, no careful little test strokes.
“Yes,” I tell him. “Like that.”
He keeps going, one hand braced by my head, the other hooked under my knee, opening me so he can get deeper.
The wet sound of it fills the room. I wrap my other leg around him and pull.
Every thrust lands. The bed knocks the wall and I don’t tell him to be quieter.
I can feel how close he is in the way his rhythm breaks.
“You feel perfect,” he says against my mouth. “Fucking perfect. This cunt. This mouth. Stay with me.”
I’m with him. I’m not going anywhere. I drag my nails down his back and he groans and fucks me harder. I like that too, the loss of the last of his composure, the way he says my name like it’s the only word he kept.
“Maribel—I’m gonna—“
“Do it.”
He comes with his face in my throat and his cock buried to the hilt, a broken sound I will hear later when I can’t sleep. His whole body goes tight and then heavy, and I hold him there, full of him, breathing under his weight, my mouth on his shoulder.
I have never felt this safe. This right.
For a minute neither of us moves.
Then he kisses the side of my head, pulls out careful, and deals with the condom without turning it into a project. He grabs the shirt I stole, the one that’s damp now, and wipes between my legs like it’s nothing. Like we do this. I let him.
He drops onto his back and I stay on my side facing him. The sign hums through the window. His chest is still going too fast. I put my hand on it until it isn’t.
“You good?” he asks.
“I’m good.”
“Yeah.” He stares at the ceiling a second. A laugh leaks out of him, quiet. “You stole my shirt and then you stole the rest of it.”
“You took the shirt off.”
“Worst decision I ever made.” He looks at me. “You can take the room. If you want it. Door still locks.”
Not a push. An exit he thinks I still need.
I look at the hallway through the crack of his door. My bolt is down there. The bed Mess made. The bag. All of it still mine.
I pull his sheet up over both of us and put my head on his shoulder. His skin is hot. Mine is too. I stay anyway.
“I’m not going down the hall.”
His arm comes around me. He doesn’t say good. He doesn’t say stay. He just holds me like he heard it, and after a while his mouth lands in my hair, quiet.
I close my eyes in his bed, on purpose, and I sleep.