Howie
I crack one eye open and see Ella perched on a stool at the kitchen counter, headphones half-on, Jason's laptop open in front of her.
She's in pajama shorts and an oversized T-shirt, bare legs crossed at the ankle, hair piled in a messy knot on top of her head.
She's mouthing along with whatever she’s hearing in the headphones, occasionally tapping an answer on the screen.
She’s fucking gorgeous.
But I can’t be having those thoughts. I stretch on the couch, needing to pull all my performance training to the surface so I can focus on what I said I’d do for her. Sex tutoring is basically like a backhand clinic. We’re just working on skills.
The road trip nearly killed me. Not the games — we went two and one, which is fine.
Not the travel, not the hotels, not Spinner's snoring through the wall.
It was the texting with Ella. Every night in my hotel bed, phone in hand, her name on my screen, my brain supplying images I had no business entertaining.
I had to take care of myself in the shower after the "I want" text.
Braced against the tile with the water running too hot, thinking about the taste of her mouth, the feel of her collarbone under my fingers, the sounds she made on this couch.
I came so hard I saw spots and then stood there with my forehead against the wall, water drumming my back, knowing I was absolutely fucked.
And then I got home, and she touched my face in her sleep and said, "I missed you," and I nearly detonated in front of her brother.
I watch her tap another answer. She does a small fist pump — got it right. My first thought is “that’s my girl,” but … that’s a dangerous group of words.
I glance around even though I know Jason is out with his nutritionist today. These food acquisition missions are an all-day affair because sourcing Jason’s specific elk and bison quotas apparently requires visiting four different farms way out in the boonies.
Which means we have the apartment to ourselves. All day.
I sit up on the couch, letting the blanket fall, and pad barefoot to the kitchen. Ella doesn't hear me — headphones — so when I slide onto the stool beside her, she startles so hard she nearly knocks the laptop off the counter.
"Jesus, Bernard!"
"Sorry. Morning."
She pulls one earphone out, pressing a hand to her chest. I try not to look at the way her T-shirt stretches across her breasts when she does that. I fail. "How long have you been awake?"
"Just woke up. What are you studying?"
"Pharmacology. Reviewing mechanisms of action of cardiac drugs.” She turns the laptop toward me, showing the practice interface with the audio controls.
"Look at this — the text-to-speech feature reads the questions out loud, and I actually get them right.
I've been passing practice sessions all week. "
She says this like she's reporting game stats, but I can see the brightness underneath, the pride she won't let herself fully feel. This is the woman who told me she was stupid. Who evidently believed it.
"That's amazing, Ella."
She presses her lips together. "It's because of you, partly. The way you quiz me in the car… I realized I learn better through listening."
I should not say what pops into my own dumb brain. Yet I hear the words forming, and I don’t bother to stop them.
"Well," I say, "I've been told I give great aural."
Ella stares at me. Her mouth twitches. She bites her lower lip, and I watch the color flood her cheeks, and I think: this is it, she's going to throw the laptop at my head. I deserve it.
Instead, she says, very calmly, "Is that so?"
"I mean. So I've heard."
"From whom?"
“A gentleman never tells.”
She's smiling now — really smiling, so big her nose crinkles — and the kitchen is warm, and Jason is gone, and she's sitting beside me in shorts with her bare knee almost touching my thigh, and the word "aural" is hanging between us like a lit fuse.
"So," she says. “That means you should totally blab.”
The mouth on this girl. I grin at her. “Ella Rujkowski. What are you implying?”
She shrugs. “That you’re the kind of guy who gives out sex lessons…”
My pulse kicks. "I am.”
“Well.” She bites that lip I tasted last week. “I’d like to start the day off right, if that works for you."
If that works for me. If having Ella Rujkowski in my arms works for me. I exhale through my nose and nod, because words have temporarily left my body.
She closes the laptop and climbs down from the stool, adjusting her hair. “Could we go into the bedroom? Just … because there’s a door.”
I nod and follow her in there, wordless.
I duck into the bathroom and brush my teeth.
The room smells like her—shampoo, fruity deodorant, laundry detergent.
When I emerge, Ella sits on the bed facing me, cross-legged, and the confidence from the kitchen is already wavering.
I can see it — the shift in her eyes, the way she touches the hem of her T-shirt.
She's nervous. The bravado that got her to say "deflower me" over meatballs is different from the vulnerability of being here, in daylight, about to take clothes off.
"We can stop anytime," I tell her. "Any second. You say the word."
"I know."
"I mean it, Ella. This isn't… there's no momentum that can't be stopped. I've got great brakes."
"Did you just compare yourself to a car?" She laughs. The nervousness eases. This is how we work — the joke opens the door, the real thing walks through it.
"Should I take this off?" she asks, touching her T-shirt.
My throat dries. "If you want to."
"I've never—nobody's seen me. Without a shirt."
"Ella, you don't have to—"
She pulls it over her head.
She's not wearing a bra. She’s just there, an adult Ella Rujkowski, bare from the waist up, sitting on my bed in the morning light, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
Her breasts are full and heavy, soft, with dark nipples that are already peaked from the cool air or nervousness or desire or all three. Her stomach is round and soft, and there's a scatter of freckles across her chest that I didn't know existed and now constitute my entire reason for living.
She crosses her arms.
I reach forward and gently pull them apart. "Don't."
"I'm—it's a lot. I know I'm—"
"Ella." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "You are so fucking gorgeous. I need you to hear me. Any man who is ever lucky enough to see you like this better worship the opportunity, or I will personally wring his neck."
The words land between us, and I hear what I just said — the possessiveness, the violence of it. But that’s what we’re doing here, preparing her for a datable guy.
"Can I touch you?" I ask.
"Yes."
I climb onto the bed beside her and start where I started last time — her jaw, her neck, her collarbone.
Known territory. She exhales, and I feel her settle.
But this time, when my fingers reach the edge where the fabric stopped me before, there's no fabric.
Just skin. Warm, soft, impossibly smooth skin that gives under my fingertips as I trace down from her collarbone to the swell of her breast.
I cup her in my palm, and her breath catches so hard I feel it in my own lungs.
She's looking down, watching my hand on her, and her lips are parted, and her eyes are wide, and I realize she's never had anyone's hands here.
Not like this. Not with intention and desire and the kind of reverence that makes my own hands shake.
"Okay?" I murmur.
"Don't stop."
I brush my thumb across her nipple. She gasps and grabs my forearm, fingers digging in. The sound she makes is small and sharp and goes straight to my groin like an electric current.
"Bernard—"
"I'm here."
"I want to see you too."
Fair is fair. I pull my T-shirt over my head and drop it on the floor. She stares at my chest with an expression I'd describe as clinical if her pupils weren't blown black.
"I've seen shirtless men," she says, like she's trying to maintain professional distance. "In hockey arenas and a medical context."
"How's this context?"
"Different." Her hand comes up and flattens against my sternum. "Very different."
"Your turn. Touch wherever."
She explores me the way she did before — methodical, curious, thorough.
Fingers tracing muscle groups she can name, mapping my scars, testing what makes me react.
But bare skin-to-bare skin changes everything.
When she drags her nails down my ribs, I shudder.
When she traces the line of hair below my navel, I stop breathing.
"Can I see …" She gestures vaguely downward, and I feel every drop of blood in my body change direction.
"Yeah. If you want."
I stand. Thumbs in the waistband. Hesitate. "Fair warning, I'm not snipped. Some women think it’s weird looking.”
"I've seen uncircumcised penises, Bernard. I'm a nurse."
"Right. Clinical context. This is—"
"Different. I know." She looks at me steadily, expectant, and I push my sweatpants and boxers down and stand there under Ella Rujkowski's gaze, somehow the most vulnerable I have felt in my entire life, including every locker room and every doctor's office and every time I've been naked in front of another human being.
She looks. Really studies, with the focused attention she gives everything, and her lips part and she says, "Oh."
"Good oh or…"
She swallows. "You're … proportional."
"Proportional?”
"To the rest of you. Which is very large."
I feel my face split into a grin I couldn't suppress if Coach himself were standing behind me. "Ella Rujkowski, you like my big cock?”
"It was an anatomical observation." But she blushes, and smiles, and looks at me like I'm a specimen she'd very much like to study further, and I'm so hard it actually hurts.
I sit back down beside her, both of us stripped — me fully, her from the waist up — and pull a blanket across my lap because I need to focus, and that's impossible while she's sneaking glances at my dick.
"Today's about you," I tell her. "I want to make you feel good so you know what you like. Can I?"