Chapter 27
JOHN
After brushing my teeth in the same guest bathroom I used for the Thanksgiving-hand-towel incident, I return to Olivia’s former bedroom to find her wearing yet another old cropped T-shirt that’s practically threadbare.
How many crop tops does this woman have?
I want to see her in all of them. This one has Snoopy and Woodstock on it.
It used to be a full-length shirt, and she cut it to expose her belly.
She probably did this when she was a teenager.
Why? I’d like to think that her devious intention was to give herself easier access to her tits while dreamily thinking about me.
While I was two states away in a dorm room that overlooked the Charles River, quietly getting myself off to thoughts of her.
Wouldn’t it be something if that were true?
She’s braided her hair into two pigtails that are hanging from either side of her head and pointing directly at her boobs.
Stretching on top of the bed, she’s casually doing the splits, wearing nothing but that thin top, a pair of black cotton boy shorts, and red nail polish on her pointed toes.
She is a masterful cocktease. A true genius of easeful boner-inducing acts.
She is a singularity. The point at the center of a black hole where all the mass is concentrated, the laws of physics break down.
Where everything I think I understand stops making sense.
I will devote my life to making sense of it, but I am willing to let go of what I’ve known and just…fall into it.
Tonight.
Do I need her to choose me over anything else?
I’d be lying if I said I don’t want her to.
But I will allow myself to disappear into the great, big unknown that is Olivia Tamsin Montgomery.
One day, one night at a time.
Last night, we were both so tired we fell asleep right away.
Tonight will be different.
I shut the door and turn the flimsy lock on the doorknob.
This room has been used as Mrs. Montgomery’s craft room since Olivia moved to San Francisco, and it has recently become the puppy room.
But her double bed is still here, with the same lavender-colored duvet. The same soft, peach-colored sheets.
The cocker spaniel, whose name is Bob, whines from the hallway and scratches against the door. I hear Mr. Montgomery gently shush him, pick him up, and pad down the hall to the main bedroom, closing the door.
Olivia yawns, and while I’m putting my toiletry kit back into my suitcase, she slips between the sheets, turning onto her side to face away from me. “Nighty-night,” she says.
Oh, I see how this is going to go.
“Night.” I take off my pajama top, turn off the overhead light, and climb into bed, on my side, facing her back.
The curtains are open, and the room is dimly lit by the glow of the streetlamp outside.
I can hear her breathing and the sound of my beating heart, and I swear I can hear my dick getting harder as it stretches the fabric of my pajama pants.
I tug at the end of one of her braids. She exhales a quiet laugh but otherwise ignores me.
I press a kiss against the exposed skin at the back of her neck and trace the tip of my index finger down her spine. “Thank you for tonight,” I say.
She shivers, and I press my body up against hers, molding myself to her curves.
She wiggles and pushes back into me so the part of me that is enthusiastically protruding fits comfortably between her ass cheeks.
My arms circle her slender waist, and I count to thirty in my head before sliding one hand up her taut stomach, under her sham of a T-shirt.
“Did you think about me?” she whispers as she rubs and clenches her ass cheeks around my erection. “In bed? When you were in college?”
“Only every night.”
She sighs when I cup her breast, as if I haven’t done this a hundred times in the past week. “I thought you hated me.”
“I hated the feeling.”
“What feeling?”
“Of wanting you.”
“Tell me another one of your fantasies,” she says.
“Well. One of them went a lot like this.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You’d be asleep in bed. I’d tiptoe into your room and shut the door.”
“Oooh, tiptoeing. So hot.”
I tweak her nipple for that. “I’d slide into this bed behind you, and we wouldn’t say a word. You’d just press up against me, take my hands.”
“Like this?” She puts her hands over mine. Holds one of my hands over her breast and slides the other one down, into her boy shorts, where her warm elixir pools between her legs.
“Exactly like that.”
She rocks her hips. Presses my hand flat against her clit. Invites my fingers to enter her. Moans softly when they do. “Was I sweet to you in your fantasies?”
“Sometimes.”
“Did I do exactly what you wanted me to do?”
“Most of the time.”
Her head turns toward me the slightest bit. “Was I a bad girl the rest of the time?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Did you punish me?”
“Only because I knew you loved it.”
Olivia pulls my hand out from the best place on earth. “I’ll tell you a secret if you take off your pants,” she whispers.
“I’ll take my pants off even if you don’t tell me a secret.” I pull my pants off, tossing them aside.
She shimmies and wiggles and tosses her underwear away, leaving her Snoopy shirt on. She reaches for something in the drawer of her bedside table, tears that something open. “I thought about you too,” she says quietly, with a tone that’s almost threatening.
And it does.
She is threatening my sanity.
“It was only one time, though, when I was a teenager.” She rolls the condom onto me, straddling me.
The covers have fallen down around our lower legs.
I explore her thighs, her hips, her waist. I can’t stop touching her.
“It was Thanksgiving,” she says. “Remember that time you stood up and I accidentally touched your…?”
“Yes.”
Fuck.
Yes.
“I was so mad at you and so turned on.”
Watching as she lowers herself onto me, I hold my cock steady for her and listen to her gasping and hissing. And I watch as the magic happens.
“It was the first time I’d ever fingered myself.”
“Jesus.”
“I was so wet, Johnny. And so mad that I felt that way because of you.”
When I’m in as deep as she can take me, she’s still for a minute, eyes closed, acclimating. I hold my breath and wait for her next move. Her next move is, as always, phenomenal. She pulls the top off over her head, arches her neck, her back, rocking her hips slowly, slowly.
“In my fantasy, my family left us alone to go buy ice cream. It was just you and me in the dining room.” She guides my hands up to her tits, slides my right hand farther up to her neck.
“We sat there staring at each other for the longest time.” She circles her hips, clenches around me, sways her head.
“And just that, even. Just staring into your intense, infuriating eyes—it was so hot.”
I stroke her jaw. Tilting her chin down, she kisses the tip of my thumb and then sucks my entire thumb into her warm mouth.
I can’t suppress the groan, but she covers my mouth with her hand, muffling it.
When she slides her mouth up, releasing my thumb, she continues.
“We just waited for the other to make the first move. I started to laugh, and all of a sudden, you stood up, grabbed me, and pulled me up to kiss you. I bit your lower lip and then kissed you back.”
She rocks back and forth with a little more urgency. Covering my mouth with both hands, she lowers her chest to mine. “You swept your arm and cleared the table. Things went flying and crashing to the floor. I climbed up and lay back, and you ripped my tights.”
“Yeah, I did,” I say into the palm of her hand.
“You fucked me so good, Johnny. It was fast and hot and dirty. Don’t come yet, okay?”
“Mmmph.” She uncovers my mouth. “I made you come?”
“Of course.”
“When you were fingering yourself, I mean?”
She dips down to kiss me. “I was under the covers, facedown into that pillow, screaming.”
“Fuck. Olivia.” That might not be true, but fuck.
“Tell me what else you thought about.”
“Huh?”
She stops moving and whispers into my ear, “Tell me what to do. Choreograph me.”
My head is spinning. What do I want her to do? Pick one thing. One day, one night at a time. One quiet thing.
I hold her by the hips, flip her onto her back, and say, “Show me how flexible you are, Tiny Dancer.”
Her eyes flash with mischief, and she smiles gleefully.
I brace myself, flattening my hands against the mattress on either side of her neck.
She bends her knees and raises her feet up in the air to rest her ankles on my shoulders, on either side of my neck.
She is impossibly tight around me. I thrust gently because I’m in so deep. It’s good. Nothing is better than this.
Except when her hands circle my wrists and she moves my hands up to hold on to her ankles. “Push down on my legs,” she says, grinning. “Until they’re behind my head.”
Maybe the next time she invites me to do this, I will suavely mutter, As you wish, and proceed to do just that.
This time, I make a guttural sound, push her legs down—like the sexiest levers that ever levered—and choke back tears.
Because I am the luckiest man alive and this is the best thing that has ever happened to anyone.
Olivia’s feet are pressed back, on either side of her head, into the pillow behind her.
Her toes are pointed. I don’t know if there’s a name for this position, but I would call it the Die Happy, because I would.
I would die happy—thrusting and quietly groaning and saying her name, over and over until I just evaporate into glittery, happy, sex dust.
She manages to cover my mouth with one hand and her own with the other.
As if her flexibility and tightness and warm wetness and eagerness weren’t sexy enough, Olivia’s thoughtfulness and moaniness put me right over the edge.
I lose myself in her, and I don’t want any of it back.
Whoever I become on the other side of this orgasm will be a better man.
Surely. I will live only for her. Surely everything I say and do after this will be the right thing and exactly what she wants and needs. Surely.
An hour later, I can’t sleep. Olivia is sleeping soundly. I’ve been staring up at the dark ceiling. Well aware that I am as in love as a man can be and absolutely fucking terrified. I would do anything for this woman. Anything. That can’t be good.
Can it?
It’s too soon to ask her to marry me.
But it’s too late to pretend that I can live without her.
I would rather die than let some other man have her.
Surely she would never want another man.
Surely.
I carefully slide out of bed without waking the beautiful dreamer, put my pajamas on, pick up my briefcase, and go down to the kitchen. That’s where I did my homework when I slept over here as a kid, while everyone else in the house was asleep.
I turn on one overhead light and take out my good pen and a notebook.
I’ve always done this kind of analysis by hand.
Going analog helps my brain when I have to make big, important decisions.
I will analyze the risk versus reward of proposing to Olivia now.
The way I’d analyze a start-up that’s looking for funding.
A new relationship is a start-up. It’s just a matter of knowing when to scale.
I would, after all, be investing the rest of my life in one person. And asking her to do the same with me.
My heart and my body want what they want.
But they’ll still listen to reason.