10. The length of the bone
The length of the bone
Don’t touch yourself. This was his game, then, giving her one thing not to do, and, of course, that injunction consumed the front and middle and center of her brain, until all she wanted to do was to reach between her own legs and urge his hand to move. Her imagination drove her hips toward the pleasure he withheld, becoming greedy and greedier, until he pulled his hand away.
The tiny sound as his finger left her was her body’s plea for his return.
“Are you paying attention?” His voice was slower, deeper, asserting control.
She shivered.
“Remember, I said don’t touch yourself while I’m gone.” He punctuated his command by smoothing his hand from her buttocks to her lower back.
She felt bumps rising on the backs of her arms, anticipating the next place he would stroke. She pictured him spanking her, his hand coming down on her bare buttock, and the popping sound igniting the silent room, and she couldn’t help herself. She moaned.
“One rule to follow. Then you’ll get what you want.”
She heard his bare feet pad across the floor. The fucker was leaving her like this.
“No hands.”
She gritted her teeth and muttered into the tensed muscle of her arm. “Screw you.”
He laughed from the doorway. “Deal.”
In his absence, the silence felt like liquid pressing on her bare skin. She closed her legs. Opened them again. She couldn’t seem to find a cool spot as she wiggled into the mattress. She should have asked him to rinse his penis. She wanted to suck him until he was as confused as she was. Her hips made circles against the bed, and she marveled that this morning, she’d been humping a pillow in this exact spot, but now the naked Apollo downstairs had promised to take her again. So much for prophecies.
What the hell was delaying him?
Finally, he returned, carrying a handful of markers and the bottles of water he’d bought earlier. He stopped halfway across the bare wood floor to pose midstride with his weight on his forward leg, as if he were modeling for an artist. His long limbs and tapering triangular shape embodied the classical ideal, and the way he held the pens in front of his body, his elbow bent so that they were almost at chest height, evoked the stance of Polykleitos’s Spear-Bearer, albeit with the modern armament of permanent markers.
While she absorbed Nico’s confidence and his immersion in the moment, her last deeply buried qualm flew away. With this sun-loved man standing in the room, his dark hair cascading to his shoulders and other hair emphasizing places to be further explored, she didn’t care that their anatomy was in charge. She was driven by needs too; women were. A day awash in desire and sex felt magically conjured, a wish fulfilled by the Delphic Oracle. Nothing wrong flowed from admitting and taking what she wanted, even if it was simply sex, especially when he’d been so eager to know she consented and read her needs so closely.
“Like anything you see?” An eyebrow waggle combined with a hip shimmy caused that long thing to sway.
She snorted and sat up. Even if being thirty-five and giggling over a man’s penis was absurd, she excused herself because the way his cock appeared to want to shake hands interfered with her brain function. “Honestly? You remind me a little bit of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, a statue of a spear-bearer.”
“Is that a step up from the average koo-rose?” His pronunciation of kouros was awkward, but he clearly meant the mannequin-like sculptures of nude males who always faced forward with their left leg advanced in front of the rest of their body. He correctly interpreted her surprise. “The internet does include pictures of Greek statues, you know.”
“Oh, you’re a step up from stone.” She let her grin show as her gaze followed his planes and angles. “Most definitely.”
“Keep talking.” He knelt at the edge of the mattress and offered her a water bottle. In his other hand, she saw the red, blue, and black permanent markers, one of which she’d used this morning to write on herself.
When he set them next to the mattress, the words on her arm seemed to tingle. She knew that the markers weren’t here for a packing task.
“Tell me about these spear guys who make your eyes sparkle.”
It was Nico’s spear that made all sorts of her parts light up, but she wasn’t going to say that out loud. He knew.
She picked up Nico’s hand while considering what to say that wouldn’t sound pedantic. “The sculptor Polykleitos worked in roughly the second century before the common era. Historians think he wrote a text laying out a mathematical formula defining the”—she was about to speak the inevitable phrase—“ideal male proportions.”
A smarter woman would have had a bet riding on her blurting that out.
Cradling his empty palm, she felt the cool damp left by the water bottles. “Writers a few centuries later claimed that his formula began with the length of the bone at the tip of the pinkie finger.” She caught his pinkie between her thumb and first finger, and stroked from the base to the end, pressing lightly to feel each joint where his bones connected, each crease, each callus.
His breathing grew louder.
“Supposedly, he related the length of each finger to the other fingers.” Her thumb caressed the inside of each of his fingers, first the pinkie, then the ring finger, the length of his middle finger, and then to his first finger. She squeezed her fist around his thumb and tugged gently.
In reaction, his eyes fluttered closed.
“He set a ratio for all the fingers to the palm.”
She pressed hard at the center of his palm, where the lifeline and largest creases left a gap that seemed to be made for her to massage.
“The palm to the wrist.”
His wrist was too wide for her fingers to completely encircle, so she watched the veins angle across the roped tendons as she stroked them.
“The wrist to the forearm.”
Her hands moved up to the joint of his elbow as he leaned toward her, his silk hair falling forward to brush the corner of his parted lips.
“And so forth.”
She squeezed, pulled down the length of the hardened muscles back to his wrist, and breathed out a whisper.
“And so on.” They had leaned so close to each other that she could feel her own breath deflect from his shoulder.
His searing heat forced her away from him to search for the water.
“Art history.” His eyelids fluttered open when he spoke, showing dark pupils. “Fuck.”
“It’s my thing.” She struggled to twist the white plastic cap so she could drink, thirsty with need, but also awkward and shaking.
He popped the seal on the second bottle and swapped with her, and they both drank.
While she let the cold water work from within, he picked up the red marker, still capped, and placed the plastic-covered tip on her ankle. The depression behind the joint was a spot she’d never considered, but the touch jolted through her, telling her there must be a bundle of nerves clustered close to the surface. That small gesture had alerted them all. When he drew the closed marker up the curve of her calf, the thin plastic bottle collapsed in her grip, sending a surge of water into her mouth.
Gulping, she felt cool drops on her chin. She was intimately aware of how her lips fit against the mouth of the bottle, her lower one cradling the opening and the upper one pressed into the hole, trying to prevent the flow from swamping her. When she had to swallow, his gaze focused on her throat. It felt like he would watch her drink it all, but water wasn’t quenching her thirst.
He rotated the marker, and now the side of it rubbed up and down the tightest spots on the outside of her thigh, the ones that she was always supposed to stretch and never managed to. The puny plastic implement wasn’t a foam roller, wasn’t enough to ease her tension, not nearly enough. She wanted his hands.
When she replaced the bottle’s twist cap, the way his gaze followed her motion made her aware of the elongated bullet shape she gripped, how she wrapped her fingers around it and parted her lips, how the ribbed plastic felt. Even the word rib raised all sorts of connections in her mind. Condoms advertised them.
Not to mention, rib was only a few letters away from ridge , and that word made her think of his stomach muscles. His cock, she couldn’t help noticing, was again partially erect, and she could see one particular ridge of pink flushed skin, separating the smooth bifurcated head from the shaft.
“What else did your sculptor do?”
“Well, Polykleitos—” Her voice cracked in the middle of a name she’d said a hundred times. “Presumably, he used live models, so I guess I should show, not tell.” She set the bottle next to the mattress and rose to her knees, then lifted her arms, elbows bent, until her raised hands were even with her temples but about a foot away from either side of her head. “Another statue he’s well known for is the Diadoumenos , which depicts an athlete tying a long ribbon around his forehead after he wins.” She curled her fingers as if holding a stretched piece of cloth in each hand, even though she doubted Nico had noticed that detail given how his gaze had focused on her upthrust nipples. With her hip bones facing the door, she rotated her shoulders and upper torso a few degrees toward him to recreate the sculpture’s full effect. “Of course, it’s a classic contrapposto example too.”
“Hmmm.” His shoulders swayed closer to her. “The coffee-shop pose again.”
Their chests almost rubbed, and she couldn’t help imagining him tossing her on her back and pounding into her. Soon.
“Maybe calling the Diadoumenos a victory celebration isn’t quite right.” She inhaled and paused, knowing that her breasts pushed forward and upward, into maximum visibility. “Doesn’t it seem more like surrender?”
“Teasing me with your arty ways?” His eyes narrowed.
“What if I am?”
“Then you’ll get exactly what you deserve.”
"That's the plan."
“Lie on your stomach.” Definitely a command.
She shivered while she complied. She brushed close enough to his cock to notice the light scent of soap, barely a hint of condom or sex left on him, but didn’t have time to taste him before the weight of his hands fell to her shoulder blades and pushed her flat. Then he straddled the backs of her thighs and, surprisingly, went for that spot where the fisted muscles of her neck spread their tension to her shoulders. His hands seemed to take the ball of need from inside her and spread it out to her skin, and then rub it into something warm and intoxicating. A drug. In her veins. He wasn’t seeking her erogenous zones, but rather the on/off switches embedded in her musculature. Her thoughts faded to wisps when his thumbs started low in the curve of her back and traversed up the outer edges of her spine to the base of her neck, then switched to deep circles across her upper back.
“S’good,” she muttered. His hands, the hands she’d watched all day, were stripping each part of her back and mushing her into the mattress. He took her will and drive and left her feeling like a stick of butter in the sun, with the illusion of structure until you poked a knife in it and discovered it had become a block of soft liquid under its familiar contours.
“Relax.” His hands left for a moment, and then she felt a cool point press into her skin, but it wasn’t sharp.
Not his fingers. One of the markers? She was muddled trying to figure out, distracted by the way the hard tip followed a path from the base of her neck along the length of her back, distinct from the feeling caused by his pressing thumbs. When it tweaked her skin, her pussy recognized something that could fit inside or tickle and suddenly awakened, begging.
“I said, relax.”
Like she was going to be able to relax with him dragging that point across her skin, first zigzagging, and then figure eights that spanned the back of her ribs.
A tiny noise that sounded like the plick of plastic parts separating must have been the cap coming off the marker. She felt the next press on her skin, softer this time, and knew he’d switched to the writing part of the marker. In the hollow at the base of her spine, he made choppy lines, touching her for an instant and then lifting away.
“What, may I ask, are you doing?” Even she could tell her words were half speed. Whatever he answered might matter when she was fully awake, but that wasn’t going to be in the next ten minutes.
“Giving you a tattoo. One that’s not permanent.”
“That’s not the name of those pens.” She sensed movement and guessed that he was selecting another marker from the stack next to her arm. Not worth opening her eyes to confirm.
“They’ll last as long as you need them.”
Too cryptic for her satiated brain, so she immersed herself in the sensations crossing her skin. The cool marker tips, their motions irregular but also soothing, might be writing. Other than the first few short strokes, his motions felt like looping swirls that seemed to curl back on themselves. She’d look later. When she wasn’t exhausted. Until then, his drawing could stay a mystery.
Mystery writing. Secrets.
On her back, Nico changed to shorter, denser strokes. She assumed he was shading an area of his drawing.
Written secrets. An idea teased at the edge of her consciousness, and she fought to lift her eyelids. An idea about writers. With secrets.
Three markers, red, blue and black, in a row next to her face when Nico’s fingers finally trailed up her sides, close enough to her insanely ticklish spots that a shock loosened an idea she hadn’t even known she’d known.
A secret writer. Aunt Bea and her magazine career. That was the reason her mother had kept those boxes. Her sister had undeniably written the fake letter from the farm girl who’d owned Percherons before she went to the city. She’d married her boss soon after she’d arrived in New York. Divorced him later—she remembered her aunt saying that putting a nice suit on a turd didn’t make it into chocolate whenever she’d mentioned that marriage—so that had to be Aunt Bea’s story. The notes on the covers must be from her too.
Nico must have sensed a change in her. “What woke you?”
She knew enough about men to realize the only magazine articles they wanted to hear about while naked included phrases like “Seven Positions,” and the authors’ identities were irrelevant.
The mattress smothered her giggle. “You.”
His hands settled lower, curving around her hips to pull her butt in the air. “Let’s see if I can make it worth your while.”
This was going to be position three. Or perhaps five. No, definitely nine.
And then his mouth fastened on the curve of her butt, and she heard herself make a high-pitched sound into the night, like a bird’s desperate call. Never before had she appreciated how that part of her body had so many nerves that it could be suckled like a breast, that a man’s mouth, a man’s teeth, could worship there. She could feel the connection pulse directly to her breasts. She swayed her shoulders, rubbing her nipples against the mattress, and heard the sound of a plastic wrapper ripping.
“Does this way”—he nudged her knees farther apart, spreading her legs so that his hand could find the center of her desire. One of his fingers slipped into her while another one pressed her clit—“work for you?”
“Yeeeeesss.” She buried her face in her folded arms and raised her hips higher. She was open for him, her body racing ahead to imagine his cock penetrating her waiting flesh. She felt swollen, as if the engorgement in her breasts and pussy had spread to every part of her body and taken the strength from her bones.
And then he pushed deep into her pussy while he held and supported her. His finger found the button at the top of her opening, flicked, and flicked again.
She trembled, weak-jointed with the need to submit, and knew she wouldn’t be able to stay in this pose if he didn’t support her hips.
“You’re beautiful.” His groin smacked against her bare skin, and the sound made her gasp. He pulled back and slammed into her again, the slap of their skin as loud as their breathing. “And so fucking smart.” His words sounded like they were yanked from him, jerky and rough. Again, he drove deep and took her into the pounding rhythm.
She didn’t care if he was spouting lines. Didn’t care, because desire whipped her too, drove her to push backward and force him as deep as she could take.
“So fucking”—he pulled back, she tensed with the opposite reaction, and then they collided with enough force to make her grunt—“smart.” Again, slicker and faster and so hard. And again, deep enough that she felt his balls slap her body where they connected. “Fuck.”
She felt so dirty with this man. His fingers dug into her hips, his thumbs wrapped around and pressed into the yielding flesh of her buttocks, and she had to abandon any of her own motion and move only as he directed. It was so good, so necessary. His cock filled her so deeply she saw stars. So much fucking. She was getting tighter, squeezing. She could feel it starting in her thighs. Her pussy opening and closing at the same time. Locking down on him, trying to keep him, but trying to move faster too.
“Yes, yes, fuck.” She didn’t know what to say to keep him doing this. Doing her. “Harder.” That. That would do it.
He listened. She didn’t know how he thrust harder, but he did. He shouted without words and pumped so deep into her that her voice disappeared, then he hung, waiting, as the tight grip she’d had on her desire shattered from their connection. She felt the waves rocking her pussy, and then he groaned and shuddered behind her, coming only after he’d felt her control explode. Behind her closed eyes, the world shrank to nothing but the sensation of his cock and his hands. His blinding magnificent cock sunk to his balls in her pussy. She doubted they’d ever be able to separate.
Her knees collapsed, and they tumbled together, gasping for air. He drew out of her body and rolled over.
“That,” he said, and then his eyes fluttered closed.
She didn’t need words to know what he meant. They’d broken some barrier between this world and the next. Perhaps she ought to acknowledge that they’d let a wild force out into the world through the door they might have opened, but he was senseless.
Excellent idea.
By the time she opened her eyes again, the windows had become gray-purple rectangles among the darker shadows gathered along the walls. Nico sprawled on his stomach next to her. One of his arms curled between them, and his other hand rested on the floor. The empty house cocooned them.
She had to pee, she needed more water, and she ought to retrieve the clothes strewn around the first floor. At least her underwear and shorts were close enough to grab as she crept out of the room. She didn’t quite trust that there was nothing left on which to stub her toe until she had navigated the hall and reached the bathroom. Without towels or mats to soften the sound, the light switch’s click echoed in the white-tiled space. Likewise, the mirror amplified the overhead light, making her cringe when she saw the red creases the mattress seams had left across her cheek.
Then she glimpsed her back.
Nico hadn’t merely doodled on her body, she understood as she twisted to see the full design in the mirror. He’d created undulating poppies, the petals bright red against the pale skin usually covered by her waistband. He’d shaded the blue and black markers to create glossy centers leading to the pure black pistils. Where he’d wanted highlights, he’d left her skin uncolored. Somehow, with a mere three colors, he’d woven a tapestry on her body. She’d never personally wanted a tattoo, even though she’d admired other people’s designs, but these flowers stole her breath.
And then she recognized the other element of his art. The angular script that she’d initially thought represented stems and pointed leaves was actually numbers. Ten digits, starting with Eugene’s 541 area code, were legible in the reflection. He must have written them backward. She twisted again, trying to see if there was anything else—a word? A message?—hidden in his design, but there wasn’t. He’d given her what appeared to be a phone number, presumably his, and left the next choice to her.
Her imagination spun with scenarios of long-distance dating as she rinsed, donned the few clothes she had, and slipped down the stairs. At the bottom, she gathered his jeans and boxers. She would return to Seattle tomorrow morning, and then on her own time, she could decide what she wanted to do. Neither of them had to address the topic tonight. This guy seemed to know all the ways to fill a one-night stand with possibility, but without infusing pressure or awkward expectations.
Damn, he was good.
In the kitchen, she found their shirts, cupped water in her palm to drink like Nico had done, and then dried her wet hand on her shorts. While stretching muscles that multiple rounds of sex had jolted into use, she felt as if Nico’s drawing had enough weight to press on her skin. He must want to keep in touch, making this potentially more than a one-and-done fling.
She’d like to see him again too, although she had no idea how the logistics would work. Nico was in Eugene, and Seattle was the place where she’d built a life for her daughter and herself. Callie loved her school, their neighbors were their best friends, and she had a great job.
The rattle of her phone vibrating against the counter announced an incoming text, startling her in the quiet room. Answering it was a good way to stop overthinking.
Aleesha had sent a photo.
Whoa, the spontaneous kayaking guy was super-hot. Dark, with a nice beard scruff and short hair. Sharp cheekbones that balanced out his nose but lips that softened his face enough to make him swoony. They were in front of that hotel on the Seattle waterfront with the giant outdoor fireplace and the big views of the ferry and Olympic mountains, although she imagined Aleesha wasn’t going to spend much time staring out the windows, given that her message said she’d text by ten in the morning.
Well, well. Some sort of acknowledgment seemed to be required.
Remember what I said about life jackets?
It’s like the Titanic here.
Aleesha
***
Running out of jackets and definitely going down.
She added a thumbs-up. Damn, she was a total mom-emoji texter. She might as well have sent a gif of some middle-aged lady doing a bad version of a Beyoncé dance.
As soon as Aleesha sent the talk-to-you-later abbreviation, Megan set down her phone and left the counter to open the back door. The slightly cooler air felt reviving, and she knew she wasn’t ready to go back upstairs. Better to let Nico sleep.
A moment later, she flipped on the garage lights. The two boxes of magazines remained next to the stack of things going north with her in the morning.
Thanks for the gift, Aunt Bea. You were a great writer. Nothing notable on the outside of the simple cardboard containers hinted at the confidence and hard work it must have taken a wheat farmer’s sheltered daughter to build her own life as the marvelous Aunt Bea. I’ll enjoy your legacy.
She would take more chances too. Having an adventure didn’t mean she had to sneak away from her family. If she closed her eyes and listened to herself, if she asked for what she, Megan, wanted, then maybe—not maybe, yes, definitely yes—she’d carry on a piece of Aunt Bea.
I’ll call Nico once I’m home. It’s what you would do, isn’t it?
I hope you enjoyed Service Included, my first new book in ten years. Restarting a career after children move out is a big task, and I'd be extremely grateful if you took time to leave a rating or review so others can find my books, too.