Chapter 23 #2
It takes a second for our lips to start moving over each other’s, but when they do .
.. mmm, it’s a really good kiss. Firm, hot, powerful.
Down below, he’s hard where I’m soft, pressing into me, and we’re moving together and that’s perfect, too.
This is still almost surreal to me—I didn’t come here for this.
I never expected anyone to want me—or for me to want anyone back—so soon.
“Let’s go inside,” I say between kisses.
“Okay,” he murmurs deeply, and I take his hand and lead him in the door, through the house.
I hate to stop the hot perfection of the summer night make-out session, but if I don’t, part of me fears we’ll end up doing it on the back porch, and that’s just a bridge too far here.
I need at least an ounce of decorum if I’m to come out of this sane and feeling like I have any control over the situation at all.
As we enter the cloud-covered bedroom, his eyes, for some reason, fall on the teddy bear on my bedside table. “Who’s the guy?” he asks.
I try not to smile. “Meet Edgar J. Growlington the third.”
Matt shrugs, looking playfully jealous. “Seems fancy.”
“He is,” I concur. He wears a tweed vest and burgundy ascot.
Then I volunteer way more information than I need to.
“He’s been with me for over twenty years.
My mother and I were in a gift shop one day after my father died, and Edgar caught my eye.
She insisted on buying him for me even though I was well past what most people would consider teddy bear age.
And he’s been with me ever since.” That’s when I realize I’ve never told anyone that.
Not even Sydney. Not even Kevin. It’s been my secret.
Because the idea of a grown woman loving a stuffed animal is so . .. not Jessica Fox, WRTB 11.
“Sounds like he’s pretty special to ya,” Matt observes.
“We’ve been through a lot together.” A fact I understand only as I say it out loud.
“And he gets to sleep in your bedroom every night? Lucky guy.”
I want to commend Matt for the perfect segue back to why we’re here. I have no idea why I started blathering on about Edgar, but it’s definitely time to shut up. Because my body is still pulsing like crazy in all the right places. Places which, again, I never expected to pulse like this so soon.
“Kiss me some more,” I say—before this has a chance to get awkward, before I have a chance to remember reasons to feel weird.
Thankfully, like on the porch, the kisses consume me. I run my fingers through his hair while his hands explore my waist, back, bottom. We fall onto the bed and keep kissing and touching until, finally, he pulls back to start lifting my top.
I raise my arms, let him remove it. And my heart beats harder. Scars.
I realize I’m holding my breath, holding it until I actually can’t breathe, so I blow it out and push up his Dollywood tee.
He takes it off. His chest and stomach are nice.
Not chiseled and perfect—he’s not twenty-five.
But he’s fit and attractive, and I like what I see.
I like what I’m touching. I like it enough that I stop thinking about scars.
There’s a lamp on, so now I lean over away from him just long enough to turn it off.
“Don’t want the bear to watch?” he asks.
I laugh, loving him a little bit in that moment—since he knows good and well why I turned it off. I reply, “Exactly,” and adore him for making this part so easy.
More clothes are removed. My shorts, his jeans.
My bra. All that’s left is underwear. And whereas back on the porch I thought this might go lightning fast, now we’ve slowed down, and it’s undeniable that, as I’ve always known, turning out the lights in this room doesn’t really make it dark.
Something in the whiteness of the clouds on the walls and ceilings illuminates the space no matter the hour.
I see him, the planes and contours of his body, and I know he sees me, too.
I forget about that, though, when he begins kissing my breasts.
But I remember it again when he runs his fingers over the scar at the top of my right one, just below the dimpling left behind from removing the lump, and then he explores the port scar higher up on the other side.
And I’m on the verge of telling him he’s started doing a crappy job of letting me forget about my imperfections .
.. when he begins to kiss the scar on my breast.
His mouth is gentle, reverent, almost worshipful in a way that makes me pull in my breath.
I feel the kisses in the crux of my thighs.
And then he kisses the other scar, too, in the same way—like it’s some beautiful part of me that warrants his attention, and much to my surprise, something in this pleases and pleasures me all the more.
“Are there others?” he whispers, sounding as if he’s discovering gold or lost treasures. Making them ... normal. Maybe even better than normal.
“Under my right arm,” I answer, suddenly not trying to hide them anymore. I even lift the arm and turn my body to offer it to him.
He finds it with his fingers, explores it gently with soft little strokes. I don’t feel it much, because of severed nerves from lymph node removal in that area—and yet ... I do.
“Can I show you somethin’?” he whispers deeply.
“Sure.”
He raises off me and twists his torso, pointing to his own scar—on his side. It’s a large, jagged slash. And I instantly like it—because it’s just another part of him and finally something we have in common.
Reaching up, I run my fingertip over the length of the rough skin there. “Some altercation with a dangerous criminal back in Lexington?” I ask.
He grins down at me. “Fell on a garden hoe when I was ten.”
I laugh—but then quickly say, “I’m sorry. That sounds horrible.”
“It was.” He’s smiling. “But just wanted you to know you’re not the only one with scars.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, and I get it now.
I suddenly understand how little my scars matter to anyone but me.
Okay, maybe on the air at WRTB in a dress cut the wrong way, they would raise eyebrows.
Though they shouldn’t. And here in Lost Valley, in the real world, they don’t matter at all.
Even so, I slant him a half grin and say, “But you know that’s a little different. ”
He just shrugs. “Not really. Scar’s a scar.”
I think about that a minute. Maybe he’s right. They’re never fun to get. And like he said before, everyone has some.
That’s when he adds, “You can kiss it if ya want.”
I let out a soft laugh, and I do want, so I roll us over in bed until I’m on top.
I kiss my way down his chest and then over to his side.
I kiss his garden hoe scar and wonder what he was like as a little boy.
Then I forget about little boys because he’s definitely a man, a man whose body I want to kiss some more, until I’m done with kissing and, with a desperate prayer, ask, “Do you have ...?”
“Lord, please let me have my wallet on me,” he murmurs more to God than to me, and I hate that he has to pull away even long enough to lean over the bed and rummage in his pants.
Fate smiles upon us and he has what we need, and soon enough I’m straddling him, easing my hungry, suddenly empty-feeling body down onto that hardest part of him, filled and fulfilled, moving together, feeling the wonder of having given in to myself, the wonder of: What if I’d really left this place without letting this happen?
Because this is maybe one of the most unpredictably and unexpectedly perfect moments of my life.
I feel like ... a woman again. Like a whole, desirable, vital, vibrant woman.
Like his eyes are touching me. Like I’m dissolving into him, giving myself over to every sensation, letting myself be swallowed up by the moment, the sex, the intimacy.
And like everything is suddenly right with the world.