Chapter Twenty-Five
When Micah started moving on him, John thought he might actually die.
It was all too overwhelming—the feeling of being buried deep inside her, the way she looked wearing only his black hoodie, unzipped and gaping open to show her breasts bouncing every time he thrust up into her.
He gripped her hips so hard he worried he was hurting her, and he removed his hands only to have her lift them and put them right back where they were.
“ Fuck ,” she said. “You’re getting me so close.”
“You like doing this on the stage, don’t you?” he asked, his mouth close to her ear. “You like when you think someone might see.”
She moaned, rocking against him. “Yes,” she said, as if the word was torn out of her. “I do—I like it.”
“I spent years watching that ass move around the stage,” he said.
“It drove me crazy. You in those tight pants, bending over, dancing, the way you’d roll those hips.
” He slid his hands down under her ass, hitching her up on top of him, gratified by the way she arched her back, her breaths coming in short, desperate pants.
“You like thinking about me watching you, don’t you?” he asked. “You like thinking about what I might do if I saw a naked picture of you.”
He could feel the orgasm roll through her—the way her muscles clenched around him, her stomach tensed up, the way everything her body seemed to be coiled so tight and then, with a final guttural cry, she relaxed against him, breathing hard.
“Fuck,” she said again, but this time there was a different tone to her voice.
It was half matter-of-fact, like Okay, that happened , and half full of wonder, like Whoa, that happened .
He pulled her toward him, kissing her until he felt his own orgasm edging closer, his dick still hard and aching inside her.
After a few minutes, she lifted herself off him, and even that sensation, the sudden rush of cold air on his dick, still wet from her …
When she lay on the stage and pulled him down on top of her, his moves weren’t quite as graceful as he would’ve liked, his knee bumping her thigh, his elbows on her hair, spread out on the wood floor.
“Sorry,” he said, shifting his weight after she tried to lift her head and winced a little.
“?’Salright,” she said, wrapping her legs around his waist, her heels digging into the dip of his lower back. “You can make it up to me.”
He knew he’d never forget any of it. Not those small moments of awkwardness or humor, intimate in their own way.
Not the way she looked, his black hoodie parted to show her perfect breasts, her nipples tight and wet from where he’d had his mouth on them.
Not the sounds she made—high, breathy gasps until he thrust harder, and then it’d be a low moan, ripped from somewhere in the back of her throat.
Not the way she felt , shuddering around him as she came again, his mouth pressed to hers in a hungry kiss, her hands tangled in his hair.
And then she was splayed out on the floor, her body loose and spent, and he reached up to encircle her wrist with his hand, as if to hold her in place. It wasn’t until she linked her fingers in his that he realized he was trembling, and she gave his hand a squeeze.
“I want you to come inside me,” she said. “ Please. I want to be filled up with you.”
It was those words that did it, as much as anything else.
John thrust inside her until he could feel his orgasm build at the base of his spine, bursting out of him in a series of shocks that vibrated through his entire body.
John had never been particularly loud or quiet when he came—he’d never really thought about it before—but this time he couldn’t help the ragged, drawn-out expletive he half yelled as he spilled inside her.
Afterward, he lay on top of her, their bodies touching everywhere from where her breasts pressed against his chest to where she was rubbing her foot along his ankle bone.
He braced himself on his forearms, not wanting to put all of his weight on her, and played with her hair that was spread out on the floor.
“You rock my world,” he said, able to keep a completely straight face until she swatted his arm, and then he couldn’t help but break.
She was laughing, too, covering her eyes with her hand. “New rules,” she said. “You can’t say any of those phrases to me during sex or for the ten minutes afterward, especially if you’re still inside me.”
“Ten minutes? That seems harsh.”
“Five, then.” She grinned up at him. “Except the whammy bar exception, which extends for twenty-four hours in either direction around any sexual encounter.”
“Oh, so I can never say it,” John said. “Just put that into the rules if that’s what you mean.”
He was definitely being presumptuous. He was conscious of the fact that they were on borrowed time—there were less than two days left of the cruise, and then what?
They lived across the country from each other.
They’d discussed the past but hadn’t discussed any sort of future.
He didn’t even know what a future could look like.
“I like not having too many rules,” Micah said, twining her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck. “Except one I always follow is using the bathroom after sex—is there one in here, do you think, or do I have to go back out to the hallway?”
John knew she had a point, and they couldn’t stay like that lying on the stage forever. Still, it was with a little reluctance that he finally lifted himself off her, reaching down a hand to help her up.
“Let’s go look together.”
—
There wasn’t a bathroom in the theater, but there was one right outside, so they’d both gotten dressed and made their way separately to the facilities.
John made it back to the theater before Micah did, and he took a seat in the front row, staring up at their equipment still set up on the stage.
He wanted to hang on to the euphoria from the last hour, the way it had felt, being with Micah.
But the minute he’d started thinking about the future, his mind couldn’t seem to get off it, and now it tripped through a thousand different anxieties and doubts.
They still had to actually rehearse their song, but he wasn’t worried about that.
The music part had always been easy between them, natural, a way of communicating that seemed so much less fraught than actual words.
He knew that Micah had insecurities about playing guitar onstage, but it really was a fairly simple song.
He had no doubt she’d be great. He was excited to see her do it.
His singing part got him a little more nervous, but even that he assumed would be fine.
Micah would be able to coach him, and worst-case scenario he’d ask them to turn his mic down even more than they normally would for backing vocals.
He’d be there to provide a little depth to the choruses but wouldn’t worry about his voice coming through too much.
The bit he couldn’t figure out was all this , the stuff outside the music. After so many years of pining for Micah, of dreaming about her, of telling himself all the reasons why they couldn’t be together and it would never work…it couldn’t be this easy, could it? To simply be with her?
And how did she feel? She got presumptuous herself, about the sex part.
He loved when she got presumptuous. He loved when she talked like everything they’d done had been inevitable, and it was a foregone conclusion that they’d keep doing it.
But he didn’t know where she stood on anything else, if this was all fun for her, a way to relieve some tension, or if it meant something more.
He didn’t know if he could trust her to be honest with him about her feelings, because he sure as hell hadn’t been honest with her about his. Lies of omission were still lies.
He was so lost in his thoughts that he only heard Micah approach when she was practically all the way to his seat, and he tried to give her a smile, not wanting her to see all that was going through his head. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
She sat on his lap, facing him by straddling his legs, which he knew he shouldn’t encourage.
They really did need to practice, and the longer they stayed like that, the more chance there was that they’d just end up fooling around again.
Especially since Micah still wore his hoodie, zipped up this time, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it.
But he also didn’t want to go back to anything real just yet.
She touched his bottom lip, frowning a little. “You’re bleeding again,” she said. “We must’ve opened it up, when we were—I’m sorry, I was trying to be careful.”
He ran his tongue over the wound, tasting the metallic tang of blood.
He’d noticed it’d flared back up when he was in the bathroom, and he’d dabbed it with some paper towels, hoping that would take care of it.
He knew it wasn’t a bad injury—he didn’t need stitches or anything—so he wasn’t too worried about it.
“You tried to ask me about my dad,” he said. “A couple days ago.”
Her gaze was very serious, as she looked down at him. He knew she knew. She had to know. He figured she’d always known. But it seemed important, suddenly, to actually tell her.
“Was he a violent man?” he asked. “Did he drink too much? Did he hit me? I guess those might be your questions. And the answers would be yes, he was violent, yes, he got worse when he was drunk and he was always drunk, yes, he hit me. Pushed me, shoved me, kicked me, threw things at me, whatever he needed to do to feel better about himself after something had set him off.”
Micah reached out to touch his face, her hand on his cheek. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered. “I mean…I’m not trying to blame you. But I would’ve…”
He smiled, wanting her to know he appreciated the sentiment even if he knew it would’ve been futile. What could she have done? She could’ve told an adult, he supposed, but he hadn’t wanted that. He’d wanted everything to be different. He’d also been scared to have anything change.
“When I was really little,” he said, “I didn’t tell anyone because I thought it was normal.
I didn’t know anything else. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that it wasn’t normal, and that my survival depended on me keeping it a secret.
At least, that’s how it seemed. I can see now how if anything the opposite was true. ”
“I worried about you all the time,” she said. “But I didn’t know what to do, if you didn’t want to even talk about it. Like that time with the clarinet, you didn’t answer the phone, I thought—”
John knew the exact incident she was talking about, because it had been one of the worst ones.
His dad had flown into a rage at the prospect of possibly having to pay money for John’s mistake, and he’d beaten John so badly he’d stayed in bed for days afterward.
He’d known it was Micah calling, and he’d also known he couldn’t talk to her.
He’d picked up the phone and hung it up, hoping she would get the hint.
“He broke all my CDs for that one,” John said. “To pay for the lost clarinet, he said.”
Which hadn’t made any sense, of course. He could’ve taken the CDs to a used record store and gotten maybe thirty dollars out of them, depending on their condition.
John had always taken very good care of his music.
But the point had never been the money—it had just been to hurt, and destroy, and John would be left angry with himself for caring about anything enough to even let his dad get to him that way.
“I’m so sorry, John,” Micah said, her eyes shiny.
One reason he’d never told her was that he’d thought he couldn’t take it if she started looking at him with pity.
But he realized that wasn’t what this was.
She was looking at him with pain, yes, but it was caring .
She cared about him, and she hurt when he hurt.
It felt good, actually—to share all this with her and let her carry just a little bit of it, too. “I’m sorry I didn’t do more back then.”
“You did everything,” he said. “You were my friend when I most needed one. Those times, just hanging out in your room, listening to music…they meant everything to me. And then once we started the band, I knew—I knew —you’d get me out. And that’s what you did.”
She smiled down at him, but it looked a little wobbly. “That’s what we did.”
“That’s what we did,” he agreed. He grasped the zipper at the top of the hoodie, unable to help himself from sliding it slowly all the way down.
He didn’t intend to start anything. He just wanted to see her, to touch her.
He couldn’t get enough of it. He pressed his fingertips onto the chord shape tattooed on the smooth skin under the swell of her breast. That chord had always been her favorite—something about it being the saddest, she used to say.
So of course it had been the one he’d had to use to start the song he’d written for her. Written about her.
“If only,” he said. “Ready to crack this song wide open?”