15. Elias
FIFTEEN
Elias
I make damn sure that we don’t get more than two hours of sleep.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Mia is crying as she sits on my face, around eight o’clock in the morning, grinding down on the flat of my outstretched tongue anyway.
“Just one more,” I try to say while being smothered to death by her pussy. A good way to die , I think. I reach around and slip the tip of my finger into her ass. “Give it to me,” I say, and she explodes like the good student she is.
She timbers sideways like a tree, and I take a deep breath of fresh air. I tear the condom off my dick, tie it off, and throw it on the pile of what feels like one hundred already on the ground.
We catch our breaths, our limbs all tangled up. I find her hand in the pile of appendages and grip it tightly so that I don’t say one of my weird and inappropriate and needy thoughts out loud, which have become increasingly insane and more and more of a problem with the more and more sex we have.
And we’ve had a lot of sex. I almost just yelled something like, “THIS IS GREAT! LET’S NEVER STOP!”
“Ow,” she says, and I realize I’ve been squeezing her hand too tightly.
I pull myself into her instead, resting my head between her tits, listening to her heart rate slow while holding her around the waist, smoothing my hands up and down her sides.
She plays with my hair, scratching at my scalp.
“Mmm…” I tell her. “Feels good.”
“You’re like a giant oversized cat,” she tells me. “A lion.”
“Does that mean I can eat your pussy?” I tell her, licking at her nipple.
“No,” she shrieks. She shoves me off of her as best as her little body can. “No more. No touching. My pussy is closed for business. She needs a break. A vacation from her vacation.”
I’m laughing, trying to burrow my way between her hands and crossed legs. She tries to run, scrambling off the bed, but I grab her leg and yank her back. I plant a big kiss on top of her pelvis. “Fine. But checkout is at eleven. So she only gets a two-hour vacation.”
“That’s not a vacation at all,” she moans under her hands.
“She better appreciate the time off,” I say, taking my rightful place between her boobs once more.
She keeps scratching my head. “Why haven’t you ever dated anyone?” she asks me suddenly.
I tense. “I’ve… kind of dated,” I say. “But that’s not really my style.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t start this way,” I say. “I used to date. I used to get dumped a lot, too,” I laugh, but it isn’t genuine.
Mia is highly concerned. “Why?”
I shrug. “Too dumb. Too poor. Who knows?” I don’t like this turn. I’m starting to feel itchy.
Mia is now horrified. “You are absolutely are not too?—”
“I like being single,” I say, cutting her off. “I like…”
“Fucking your way through Manhattan?” she says plainly. “You’re not too dumb or too poor. That’s ridiculous. You own your own business, for fuck’s sake. You’re a fucking catch.”
I sigh. “Do we need to talk about this right now?”
“If this is all the time I get with you, I want to know.”
I tense. “Want to know what?”
“Why we have to stop this?”
I pull away, sitting up. “What are you implying?” I panic, even though I just had the same thought a few minutes ago.
She glares at me with X-ray eyes. “Why do we have to stop this?” she repeats.
I take several heart palpitations to blink at her. “What happened to ‘just giving you lessons’? On how to flirt, date, fuck, whatever?” My heart is going to beat out of its chest. “I told you, this ends today,” I tell her firmly. “I’m not ruining thirty-two years of friendship with Leo over this?—”
“So you’d rather fuck up twenty-nine years of friendship with me?” she asks me quietly, slowly sitting up too.
“You pushed me, Mia. You begged me?—”
“Did you think you could just fuck me, add me to your Blonde Brigade, and it would all be okay afterwards?” she asks bitterly.
I stare at her blankly, my heart crawling up my throat. What is happening?! I ask myself, for what seems like the ninth time this week.
“Fuck,” she says, after seeing whatever look is on my face. “Sorry,” she says, putting her face in her hands. “Wow. Sorry. That was really needy and cruel.”
I can’t really say anything.
“Sorry. I don’t know why… I just thought… with all the ‘mine’ and the ‘only you’ and the touching… I’m sorry. I misunderstood. You probably say that to everyone. It’s all a part of the game,” she mumbles.
I make myself numb. I refuse to address this. “Mia,” I attempt slowly, clearly, like I am explaining this to a child, while trying to keep the condescension out of my voice. “We agreed. This was just sex. For the weekend. And it was going to end today.”
She takes a deep breath. “Okay.” Another breath. “Right,” she says sadly. “Sorry. That was it. It’s done. I’ll go… I have one more workshop to go to, anyway.”
Neither of us moves, eyes roaming across skin and memorizing every inch of the other’s body. My fists are clenched so hard that I think my nails are breaking the skin, all so I don’t touch her face, her collarbone, her waist.
“Okay,” she says, but it’s not. She stands up and starts rummaging through her bag, and I map all the marks I’ve made all over her body. She goes to the bathroom and shuts the door to get dressed.
I throw on clothes, grab my wallet, and walk out the door.
The next time I see her is in the lobby of the hotel, and I fucking hate the way she’s smiling at me. It’s empty, fake.
“Ready to go?” she asks brightly, and it makes me want to scream. “I called us our Uber. It’ll be here in a sec.”
“We’re back to this again?” I murmur.
She frowns. She’s a good actress, but she forgets that I’ve known her for her entire life. “Back to what?”
I raise an eyebrow at her instead.
There’s a flicker of anger behind her eyes. There . “This is me trying to act like our twenty-nine years of friendship ,” she sneers, “isn’t all fucked now that you’ve had your dick inside me about a thousand times in the last twenty-four hours.” She looks away, whispering hysterically, maybe to me, maybe to herself. “Do you see my fucking neck right now?”
I glance down at the mosaic of bruises and bites I’ve left, and I feel nothing but satisfaction.
She turns and looks at me straight on, blue eyes on fire. “We’ve grossly miscalculated this. You realize you have to be inches away from me while we travel home for the next like six hours? Do you not remember that we live together ? That we fucking work together? Commute to work together? We’re always fucking together, Elias, and you’re annoyed at me for trying to pretend that everything is okay and that this isn’t really fucking weird?!” It’s safe to say she’s hysterical at this point.
So am I.
I walk away from her, running my hands through my hair. She’s right. This is so fucked. How did we not think about this?
“Our Uber is here,” she says with false cheer, brushing by me. “Excuse me while I continue to pretend that this weekend never happened.”
Mia’s right. It’s a unique sort of torture, sitting inches away from each other on the plane, standing next to each other on the subway, walking home, our arms brushing together and sharing snacks and getting dinner. I spend the next six hours with my hands in my pockets or clenched in fists, so that I don’t touch the strip of collarbone above her shirt, pull on her hair, rub the red spots on her neck.
It’s even worse when we get home. We drag our suitcases into the living room and stand side by side, our arms barely touching, quietly panicking.
“Has our apartment always been this fucking small?” I say, glancing down at her. Her face is as shellshocked as mine.
She blinks, shaking herself out of it. She smiles that fucking smile at me. “Night, Elias,” she answers, drags her suitcase into her room, and slams the door.