24. Sloane #3
It’s a slow grind at first, my knees pressed into the couch on either side of his hips, riding up and down on him by pressing with my legs, my arms locked around his back, his face buried in my throat.
It’s the closest position there is — chest to chest, his heartbeat against mine, no distance anywhere, nowhere to hide and nowhere to go, just the two of us wrapped around each other in a warm empty house, moving together.
He’s deep like this, deeper than anything, and every time I sink down I feel all of him and have to bite back the sound.
His hands slide down to my ass and grip, and he helps me, lifting and guiding, taking some of the work, pulling me down onto him harder each time, and I let him, I let him set a rhythm and drag me down onto his cock deeper and faster, and I drop my head back and let it build.
“Look at me,” he says, rough, and I bring my head up and meet his eyes, and that’s almost too much, the eye contact, the closeness, because this isn’t fucking, this is the other thing, the thing I have no defenses for.
He’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the room, the only thing anywhere, and his hands are guiding me down onto his cock and his mouth keeps finding mine between breaths, and he’s murmuring things, soft filthy true things — you feel so good, that’s it, right there, God I love watching you take me — and I’m coming apart in his lap with my arms wrapped around him, and the spiral is gone, there’s nothing in my head but him, and I think, helplessly, the thought I won’t say: I could love you.
I think I already do. That’s the whole problem.
I come with my face pressed into his neck and his name in my mouth, clenching around him, and he follows me a few strokes later, his arms banding tight around me, holding me down onto him as he spills inside me, my name a broken thing against my shoulder.
We stay like that. Tangled in his lap, both of us wrecked, his heartbeat slamming against my chest, his hands stroking slow up and down my back. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to another human being.
And that’s exactly when the math comes back.
It comes back quiet, the way it always does, sliding in under the afterglow while I’m still wrapped around him with his breath slowing against my throat.
Two days in Greenwich, it says. At the table.
With his family and the house with a name and the gardens and the bottomless certainty.
And you’ll perform it beautifully, because performing is the one thing you’re better at than he is.
And every single person at that table will be kind to you.
And you’ll spend three days feeling exactly how far you climbed to be standing in the room, and you’ll come home, and the gap won’t have closed, because the gap can’t close, because it’s not a gap you can study your way across or audition your way out of.
It’s just true. He’s from the table and you’re from the floor and right now, while he’s young and in love and the season’s good, the difference looks like a love story.
Give it time, says the oldest voice in me, the nine-year-old who’s never once been wrong. Give it time and the difference stops being romantic. Everything good does. You know this. You’ve always known this.
“You’ve gone somewhere,” Beau says, into my hair. Not accusing. Just feeling me leave, the way he always feels it.
“I’m here.” I make myself stay loose against him, make my voice come out warm. “Just tired. Long shift.”
It’s the first time I’ve lied to him in this house.
He doesn’t catch it. Or he catches it and lets it go, the way we let everything go, the careful architecture of the two of us not-saying.
He just holds me tighter, presses a kiss to my temple, murmurs something about how it’s going to be a good trip, how my mom’s going to love you, how I want this so much, and I lie wrapped around him in the warm and let him be happy, and I do not tell him that I’ve already started, somewhere underneath, the slow careful work of saying goodbye.
I don’t even know that’s what it is yet. Not consciously. Consciously I’m just tired, just spiraling, just doing the thing I do.
But the nine-year-old knows. She’s already packing. She’s been packing since I said yes.
She’s just waiting for the floor to give her a reason.
That night I lie in his bed in the dark with his arm heavy across me and his breathing gone slow and even, and I watch the ceiling, and I think about a long table in a house with a name, and a black turtleneck dress, and a family of four who are going to be kind to me, and a boy who wants to show me off to a world I will never, ever belong to.
I think: I should tell him I can’t.
I think: I should tell him the truth — that it’s not the forks, it’s the ledger, it’s the floor I come from and the table he comes from and the math that doesn’t work.
I think: I should, for once in my life, say the true thing out loud before it’s too late to say it gently.
I don’t.
I pull his arm a little tighter around me, and I memorize the weight of it, the way you memorize a thing you’ve decided you’re going to lose, and I let myself have one more night of pretending the floor is going to hold.
It’s so warm in his bed.
That’s the part nobody warns you about. How warm it is, right before.