Chapter Fifteen #3
“I’m on birth control,” I say, trying not to let him hear my voice waver as his tongue dips into my ear. “I have been since I was sixteen. We’re more than covered for that part and I’ve had tests run at my gynecologist since my last…since…” I blush. “But I’m healthy and all that.”
“Same,” James says. “God, Juniper. You really can’t know how long I’ve imagined this. How often I’ve tried to not imagine it.”
Later, maybe, I’ll try to work out when the lines blurred, which one of us smudged the careful boundary of pretend or if the fences themselves were imaginary to begin with, but right now…
“Me too,” I say. “I’ve wanted to do this, too.”
I feel him twitch against my thigh, and the blood in my veins turns into scalding hot chocolate that threatens to burn me up from the inside out.
“Any time,” he says, pulling back to look me in the eyes.
His pupils have blown out, and the way his hand shakes when he pushes the hair back from my forehead makes him nearly unrecognizable to me.
He’s losing his grip on his James-ness, and I’m here to see it.
“Any time you want to pause or stop or…Whatever you need.”
“I’m not afraid,” I tell him. “And you shouldn’t be, either.”
Whatever he was using to hold himself back snaps and his lips crash into mine like high tide against a sunbaked, thirsty beach.
James is everywhere, and it’s not as if he has more than two hands, but it’s like his knees, his rib cage beneath my fingers, the way his feet brush against mine as he moves upward to angle his mouth in a new, spine-tingling way…
His whole body, every limb, is alert and mobile in a way I’ve never seen before.
Hands are not the only things that touch and feel and drown in sensation.
It’s like we’ve been waiting for permission for weeks, like we’ve been circling each other and throwing down promises and reasons between us in the hope it would keep us apart, but now that we’ve stepped around them, now that we’ve made an exception for this one day—well, two —we’re helpless to stop it.
Compelled by need or magic or some heady mix of the two.
James must feel the same way, because I catch snippets of the words he mutters in between kisses. Words like mine and Juniper, god, Juniper, and perfect perfection.
I laugh at the last one.
“Perfect perfection?” I tease.
“You are,” James says, no laughter in his voice. “You really are.”
He’s so sincere, so focused, like all of the watching was building up to this. I’m flattered and my heart is fluttery, but I also…
“You’re still in there…right?” I ask, uncertain. “I mean, I know this is…this is this, but you’re still…We’re still…ourselves?”
I don’t know what I’m trying to say, but James must.
He nips playfully at my collarbone, unbuttoning the top button of my pajama shirt and pushing it a little to the side to manage it.
“And what makes us ourselves?” he asks. He draws back but keeps his thumb hooked on my bra. “What do you think of when you think of me?”
“Besides your cheery disposition?” I ask sweetly.
That earns me another nip, this one a bit harder and followed by a sweep of his tongue that extends from collarbone to my neck.
He never does give me a verbal answer, instead raising his head to watch me as he slowly unbuttons my shirt and then moves to pull my pajama shorts off, too.
He’s watching, I know, for a sign that I want him to stop, but he finds none. Because as foreign an experience as this is, it’s the most at home I’ve felt in my body. Maybe ever.
When he pulls me up gently by the shoulders to slide my bra straps from my arms, I awkwardly try to take his shirt off at the same time.
Somehow this results in the hem of his shirt getting caught in the plastic part of my bra strap, and there is a brief moment when I wonder if this will be the end of it, our very bad one night idea.
This is the kind of snafu that takes you out of the dream and back into reality.
But James just tosses our combined bra-shirt to the side of the bed. They make a dull thump against the curtains as they fall to the floor.
And now there is only his pants, my underwear, and the disturbing void where my self-consciousness would usually be rearing its ugly head.
Even when James watches me sink back against the pillows, his eyes darkening as his gaze scrapes me raw from head to toe, I don’t feel embarrassed or silly.
If anything, I feel the kind of hunger I’ve only read about in books…
Especially when he leans forward as if in a trance and hooks his thumbs beneath my hips, toying with the fabric of my underwear.
“Are you still okay?”
I raise my hips off the bed in answer, and my underwear joins the growing pile beside the bed.
James must know I’m not at all coordinated enough to remove his pants and boxers on my own, because he makes quick work of those, too, stripping them off in an impressive yoga-like move that reminds me once again that this man has been taught how to use his body to its fullest advantage.
Weirdly—as James comes toward me naked and with a certain gleam in his eye—I think about On the Same Page. Which is not where I would have thought my brain would take me here, now, but it’s where I end up all the same.
Maybe it’s because that’s the last time I felt this passionate about something. Maybe it’s because the podcast was in many ways born of our first meeting all those years ago when James asked a question to calm me down in his dressing room.
Or maybe brains are just unknowable. That must be it, because instead of keeping the thoughts inside my head where they belong, it comes out now, the sudden deep knowing that no: I don’t want to do publishing. Really I don’t.
“I don’t want to go to the city,” I tell James when his mouth lands at the corner of my lips. “I think I want to find another podcast to do. Like you said.”
Endorphins, that’s what’s causing this. Because even as the words leave my mouth, they feel right, but my locked-away-from-the-hormones brain is screaming that they’re wrong.
“I don’t want to film another movie,” James says, his hands in my hair again. He pulls just enough that my roots feel the tug, and something like a squeak leaves my mouth. “Ever.”
“Let’s run away together,” I say, leaning up to explore his neck with my own lips. I can feel a guttural groan rumble beneath them as I make my way to his ear. “We can go stay with Luke and learn how to make gourmet toddler dinners and then take our knowledge to Serena and Leonora and Misha.”
And because it’s our one night, James laughs instead of scoffs.
“I’ve seen you walk,” he says. “We wouldn’t make it far as runaways.”
I shove him, but the effect is lost when my hands stay on his chest instead of falling away, my fingertips rubbing back and forth over his warm skin.
Any retort I had on my lips is stolen from me when he leans to kiss me again, and this time, there’s a change in it, a sharpness that makes my heart ache.
This time when I make a sound, he brings the hand he’s not bracing against the bed to my left breast and gently rolls the nipple between his thumb and index finger.
We’ve been dancing with lit matches, and James has just thrown his onto the kindling.
I reach down between us, and when my hand brushes his abdomen, his muscles ripple before he abandons my nipple to snatch my hand before I can reach his erection.
“You can’t,” he gasps. “Juniper, you can’t.
I’ll…I won’t make it if you touch me, and I want to come inside you.
” And for the first time all night, it looks like it costs him something to say, “But we don’t have to.
We can stop or we can just keep doing what we’re doing.
Though I should say even if we continue as is, there is a chance I’ll—”
“No,” I say, reaching up to stroke his cheek. “No, I want that, too. I want to know…” And now it’s finally time for my long-delayed self-consciousness to come online, because he has to know. “I’ve never…It’s never happened,” I say, closing my eyes. “Not with somebody else. So I might be…”
I trail off again, frustrated that I can’t string two thoughts together.
“So if it doesn’t happen, it might be me, ” I say. “I don’t have good rhythm, so you’ll have to tell me if I’m doing something wrong.”
James is staring at me with a closed expression when I peek at him, and oh my god. I’ve ruined it.
“You have bad rhythm?” he finally asks.
I nod.
“And how did you come by this knowledge, pray tell?”
I look up, hoping to catch a glimpse of the wolf-bear painting to take my mind off the complete humiliation that is my sexual history.
“My last…fellow science experimenter,” I say. “He told me.”
“Jesus. Fucking. Christ, ” James mutters. “The idiocy knows no bounds, does it? Who were these…. These… complete and utter fuckwits? ”
“I wouldn’t say fuckwits plural, ” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “There was only the one.”
“It’s a poor excuse of a man that blames the instrument for his lack of talent,” James says darkly.
It takes me far too long to realize his intended destination when he begins to make his way down my body, his lips drying as he drags them from my mouth, to between my breasts, to my stomach, to—
James Neely’s head between my thighs is a revelation. This is what the Renaissance painters should have depicted instead of creepy cherub babies. This is surely heaven.
He starts with kisses along my thighs, the crease where my legs meet my torso, and then—when his tongue moves to the bundle of nerves and laps languidly—I drown us both in sound. Moans I didn’t know I could make pour from me, and I don’t bother trying to stop them.
“ James, ” I moan, and my vocabulary has shrunk to only his name, because no other words leave my mouth. “ James, please. ”