Chapter 10
Ash
Not even CJ reverting to being a stand-offish cow can subdue Ash’s tremendously good mood today.
She got fucked six ways to heaven last night, came three times, and every cell in her body feels alive, primed, switched on.
Maybe this is what life is, maybe this is what she has come here to understand: you get to choose your own vibration.
Some people aren’t here to evolve themselves, they’re here to be their unevolved asshat selves to help prime the ones actually ready for personal growth.
CJ is a test, and to pass it Ash has to learn not to be ruffled by her mercurial moods, not to take anything personally – how can it be personal, after all, when they’re not even friends?
Ash is an island, floating in the sea, and islands that float in the sea do not let their weather be determined by outside factors.
Ash can be her own sunshine. Or something like that, whatever, she’s working on the similes and metaphors.
The point is: CJ can get to fuck. Nothing is going to spoil Ash’s ability to treat cloud nine as her own personal hammock.
‘You look beautiful today,’ Luis says with a sly grin and a cheeky wink, as Ash sets herself up on a Turkish hammam towel Willow gave her as a ‘travel safe and well’ gift.
She’s got her book, her sunglasses, her AirPods and a good playlist …
today is a day for just being. And also for perving on the T-shirt-free fine specimen of a man that Luis is, of course.
He’s a dirty, glorious shag, and Ash has every intention of making sure it happens again, and again.
The sooner the better, if right now this second isn’t an option.
‘I feel beautiful today,’ Ash smiles. ‘Last night was …’
Luis bites down on the corner of his bottom lip, tips his head to the side to look at her, eager to hear the adjectives spoken in his name.
‘I had a good time,’ he tells her, when Ash fails to sum up exactly what last night was.
It makes her happy, chew on her own lip, smile with her eyes.
She’s never had much of a poker face. Time stops then.
Suspends itself so these two people who have only just come to learn what the other tastes like might exist in their own small world just long enough for memories of slapping and biting and nibbling and licking to course through them.
Ash feels her nipples harden, body ripe for Luis’s touch.
She could drag him behind a rock right here, right now, to sate her appetite for him.
‘Would you mind helping me with my sun lotion?’ she asks, quite obviously totally unconcerned about UV protection.
She wants his hands on her, that’s all, craves his touch.
There was a point, last night, after they’d had sex for the first time but before they did it for the second, where they lay in their own mess, talking, saying nothing, really, just being together, whispering how hot and sexy the other was, fingertips tracing sweaty skin, and Luis began to ask after Ash’s ability to follow instruction.
It wasn’t pervy, didn’t feel gross, it felt sexy and bold and provocative.
‘What do you mean?’ Ash asked, her breathing getting deeper. What was he asking her to do, exactly? How far was he wanting her to go?
‘If I tell you to sit up, for example, will you sit up?’
Ash furrowed her brow. ‘Sit up?’ she repeated. ‘OK …’
She put her back against the headboard, legs in front of her and crossed at the ankle.
‘Good,’ Luis said. ‘And now bend your legs for me. At the knee.’
Ash froze slightly at this, taking a second to make sure she understood.
‘Yes,’ he encouraged. ‘So I can see you.’
Ash isn’t shy about her body, or about sex – she’s had two long-term relationships, and to keep the magic alive she considers herself to have thrown herself into satisfying several sexual proclivities: threesomes, foursomes, sex parties, the Kama Sutra, whatever it took to make her exes believe she was a cool girl and up for anything.
She thought that’s what men wanted, the type of girlfriend who’d give anything a go, a lady in the streets and a freak in the bed.
She had a good enough time doing so, although really, one-on-one is more her thing.
Luis asking to see her, to see her body, for her to expose herself to him, asking with so much tenderness and curiosity …
well. It was by far the most intimate sexual thing she’d ever been faced with.
Ash coyly bent her legs, and let Luis push apart her knees so that the most delicate part of her was on full display. He leaned right in, smelt her, and then used his fingers to spread her apart whilst looking at what she revealed.
‘Your pussy is beautiful,’ he told her, not looking up, and she believed him. She believed him when he said he was looking for a wife, too. That might have been the sexiest thing of all.
Her recollection swims around them both as Luis paws at her skin, spreading the chilly sun lotion across her back and massaging it into her shoulders. He leans so close to her that she can feel the heat of him, his breath in her ear hot and heavy as he says, ‘Is this OK?’
‘Mmmm,’ she murmurs. ‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’ he repeats, and she cocks her head, looks up and over her shoulder.
They could kiss, if they wanted to, but Ash senses that isn’t appropriate today, not in front of everyone else from CoLab. Instead, they get to have their little secret together, stoke its flames so that tonight, perhaps, when they get back, they can do it all again.
‘Could somebody do me, too?’
Ash looks up to see who is blocking her sun.
It’s Miss Give-Me-My-Space herself, CJ. Luis pauses his stroking motion on Ash’s back, and Ash hates that she’s a) cross they’ve been interrupted, and b) cross it’s by CJ, who Ash has a sudden thought about, clear as a bell: she has a crush on Luis.
CJ has a crush on Luis! Oh god, how did Ash not see it before?
CJ hated Luis laughing and joking with Ash, has a face like a slapped arse any time she gets wind of Luis and Ash spending time together …
it’s all falling into place with startling clarity.
Luis must be agonising to work with – he really is handsome, and charming, and funny.
To think that CJ seemed so happy with her boyfriend the other day, so in lust, if not in love, and they have a child together!
Yet she still wants more, still wants Luis – or at the very least doesn’t want Luis to have anybody else, doesn’t want Luis to have Ash.
Luis motions for CJ to sit down beside Ash and says, ‘Sure. One moment please, lovely CJ. I must attend to beautiful Ash, first.’
CJ flops down, round, pendulous breasts in tiny purple squares held together by flimsy ties.
She fake smiles at Ash, who fake smiles back.
Ash is furious. Not only does CJ have exactly what Ash has wanted for herself for years, a perfect partner and a perfect child, but greedy, gluttonous CJ also wants Luis, the first man Ash has mutually crushed on in ages, and had sublime sex with, and could potentially end up springing and flinging all over the place.
Well. Over Ash’s dead body. Nope. No way.
CJ is not about to, and never will, get in the way of Luis.
Luis is Ash’s. She is going to stake her claim and then savour the victory. Lisbon Ash is no pushover.
‘I’ll do your sun lotion,’ Ash says to CJ, once Luis is done. She grabs the bottle out of his hand before he can object. ‘Luis, I think the guys want you for a game of Ultimate Frisbee.’
Ash points in the direction of the three blokes from South Africa who have become friends at CoLab, all barefoot in board shorts, desperately waving Luis over as they push and shove each other playfully.
‘Luis, get over here!’ one of them shouts, as if on cue, and Luis looks between the two women and says, ‘Don’t have too much fun without me.’
They watch him saunter away and Ash grabs the lotion, squirting it into her hands. CJ doesn’t say anything, simply removes her bikini top, discards it, and cups her own chest to preserve her modesty.
‘OK, then,’ Ash says, as way of comment on CJ’s nudity, and CJ shrugs.
‘Easier than the straps getting in the way.’
Ash warms the cream between her palms before spreading her fingers wide and applying it to CJ’s back.
Her skin is velvety smooth, the colour of deep-stained oak, a ripple of muscle sat just under the surface, hard and defined.
Ash wasn’t expecting it, wasn’t expecting such firmness, such suppleness.
She works the cream into CJ in rhythmic runs, up and down, curving around CJ’s sides towards that hard stomach, upwards to the gentle arch of her breast. It feels charged, somehow, electric.
Even in a threesome with Simon, or group sex with Miles, women felt like more of a performance, as a way for Ash to get her man off, rather than for herself.
So Ash has never been aware like this, aware of another woman’s flesh, the beauty of it, the allure.
CJ is like a fine thoroughbred horse, all sinew and strength, and for a fleeting moment Ash wonders what it would be like to reach around further, to cup her chest, to run a finger over a thick, hard nipple.
She shakes the notion free: she’s confusing herself, lusting for Luis, thinking back to sexual adventures past.
‘Look at them,’ CJ says, pulling Ash from her thoughts.
Ash withdraws, wipes the excess cream on her arms, looks across to the men playing in the sand.
Luis senses their attention and looks back, pulls a face and flexes his biceps like a Strongman contender, revelling in his audience.
That’s more like it. Ash would like to think she knows a good man when she meets one.
She might have had her heart broken by both Simon and Miles, in the end, but both relationships were good.
Healthy. She felt seen and respected, right through to the end, with both of them.
That’s how she knows love exists, how it feels to love and be loved.
It’s holding on to that love that has been her struggle, loving and being loved without end.
Anyway. Her experience tells her Luis is a good one.
He’s a good man. And Ash owes it to herself to go for that good man.
‘CJ, I just want to say,’ Ash begins, and CJ turns curiously to look at her, Ash shifting so she’s at CJ’s side, all the better to see her too. ‘You can’t get in between the two of us, you know. I see what you’re doing, and I’m not going to let you spoil this.’
CJ blinks once, twice, three times. Then she says, ‘It’s adorable if you think Luis is in any way a one-woman kind of a man, Ash.’
‘I can make him a one-woman kind of a man,’ Ash retorts.
She’s emboldened by last night, by what he said about turning forty soon, wanting a different kind of life.
Maybe CJ doesn’t know him as well as she thinks.
The little she knows about CJ speaks to how CJ responds to strength, looks down on those who cannot hold their own, so Ash makes sure her voice is unwavering.
Ash will damned well be brave if it means CJ will actually back off. CJ cannot ruin this for her.
CJ smirks. ‘Is that so?’
‘Yes,’ says Ash. ‘You have a boyfriend. Leave some for the rest of us – or you’ll end up embarrassing yourself, babe.’
‘Babe?’
‘Babe.’
CJ shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything else.
Ash has made her point: CJ needs to give Ash and Luis their space.
Ash might have only just met him, but how is she supposed to test out any potential between them if she has to worry about CJ sticking her oar in?
In this Spring Fling with Life, Ash is going to just go for it, is going to sleep with Luis again, and finally get on the back of his moped to see this garden and anything else he wants to show her, and that’s that.
She didn’t know she felt so strongly until her hand was forced, but for fuck’s sake!
CJ has a perfect life already! She can piss off if she thinks she can steal any slice of orgasmic joy Ash might have, too. She can piss off all the way.
‘This has been very informative,’ CJ says, standing up. ‘Thanks for the intel.’
Ash doesn’t reply. She doesn’t actually know what else to say.
Did she really just tell CJ to leave her and Luis alone?
God. It’s going to be incredibly embarrassing if Luis actually doesn’t want to hook up again.
Although, all signs point to ‘yes’, in terms of him being into Ash.
Don’t they? She runs a mental list in her mind: the coffee, the looks across the room, the giggles in CoLab, the way they made love.
OK, yes, Ash has nothing to worry about there.
This is definitely the start of something, and she’s going to embrace every last bit of it.
Ash watches him launch himself to catch the frisbee, applauding him and letting out a whoop of encouragement. She doesn’t realise CJ is still nearby until CJ crouches down beside her again, a hand lightly on Ash’s shoulder.
‘What?’ asks Ash. ‘What do you want?’
‘Oh,’ replies CJ. ‘I just wanted to say, Ash: game on. Game. Fucking. On.’