CHAPTER 4 NORA #3
“I thought of this,” he says, taking my hand.
His mouth his warm, his tongue laving gently between my fingers.
He sucks them into his mouth, making a sweet, smacking sound as he lets go.
“I thought about what you might taste like again.” He drags his tongue down my collarbone, kisses my neck.
“That time at the hotel,” he whispers into my skin.
“I could still smell you on my hand.” He bites me back, a gentle press of teeth on my breast. “Sometimes, when you pick me up from the airport—” he drags his tongue between my breasts, his hair tickling my skin, “—I get in your car, and I have to grip the armrest to stop myself. Have you ever noticed?”
I shake my head, the sheets swish beneath my sawing legs.
“It’s so I don’t put my hand between your legs.” He presses his nose into my side, under my breast, inhales like he needs a hit. “Can you imagine that?” he teases. “Me fingering you while you’re driving down the highway?”
I press the back of my head into my pillow, arch my back, searching for contact. But he steadies me with a hand on my hip, guiding me back down to the mattress.
“I think about it, too.” I gasp as he squeezes me. “How long it would take before I had to pull over.” Sometimes I sit in the car after he’s gone, feel the heat of where his body was pressed into the seat.
He settles himself between my thighs. “When you fall asleep on my couch, when the movie is over, and I send you home in a car.” Finn takes one of my legs, then the other, over his shoulders.
“Sometimes I lie on that spot, when it’s still warm, and it smells like you.
” He kisses my thigh, sucks what I can only hope will become a bruise into the delicate skin.
“And I jerk off. I make a mess of myself, Nora. Just thinking about you.”
He fucks his tongue into my pussy, a delicious tease for what he’ll do later, and I wish the fireworks were still going, their pops and bangs a cover for the sounds I make against the back of my hand. He moans at my sounds, when I clench my thighs around his head, run my fingers through his hair.
I think about him, thinking of me. One hand pressed against the bathroom stall door, the other flying furiously over his cock, the sounds that would have echoed in the bathroom, the clink of his belt and his huffed, labored breaths, and the cut-off groan when he finally came.
I imagine his hand on my thigh when we’re in my car. The slow slide of his palm up my leg. The shimmying and shaking I’d do at a red light to help him get my pants open.
No. No.
The next time I pick him up from the airport, I’ll be in a dress with a skirt that can pool around my hips.
He’ll growl when he finds I’m not wearing any underwear.
I might be able to make it to his building’s parking garage or maybe we’d have to pull over in some dark dead end or behind a strip mall in a suburb.
I picture him on his couch, the leather brown and worn.
He’s on his knees over the spot I slept in, the blanket he laid over me cast aside.
He fucks into his hand and he imagines it’s me and when he comes he says my name into the silence of his apartment and with that rough sound, guttural and adoring in my mind, I come on his tongue, on his face.
A shout escapes me, pushes past the back of my teeth.
I hold his face to me as my orgasm rolls and rolls, my hips roll and roll, my legs shake and I keep screaming, until my pulse glugs heavy in my throat.
When I open my eyes, Finn is above me, his lips glistening, his eyes bright.
He pushes my hair out of my face. And for a moment, I think he might tease me.
He might ask Did you come? as if the echoes aren’t still reverberating off my bedroom walls, as if my neighbors don’t know.
But he doesn’t. He just leans down, kisses me, his tongue a heavy presence in my mouth, like he wants to share the taste.
My body shakes, tiny earthquakes, at the brush of his tongue, his fingers against my skin. Finn leans over the side of the bed, the drawer opens, and after a bit of searching he sits back up with a condom. He opens it and I’ve never loved the smell of latex more.
I roll toward him, press him down onto his back and climb on top.
Finn holds himself up for me. He’s so fucking beautiful.
His hair a dark stain on my pillow, his body seems to take up most of my bed.
As I slide down onto him, we both gasp. He squeezes my hip, a stopper, a brake. Closes his eyes, his head tipped back.
“I’m so glad I kissed you,” he says. “That New Year’s.”
“I’m so glad I kissed you,” I say as I take him fully, my body stretching around him.
I ride him slowly, chasing nothing but the drag of his cock inside me, his viselike grip on my hips, his sweat under my palm.
I grind against him, take him to the tip then sink down again, and the whole time he watches me, his eyes a catalog of my body, of our bodies and all the ways they fit together.
His hand slides up my thigh, his thumb finding my clit, but after a few soft strokes, I shake my head.
Take his hand and kiss it. I could come again, maybe, but mostly I just want to feel this.
His sparse leg hair against my ass, the thickness of his cock.
I put his hand on my breast instead and he follows my lead, sitting up beneath me now, drawing my head down to his.
We kiss as he starts to fuck up into me.
He holds me to him, palming my ass, my waist. Sucks kisses into my skin that I return.
I slip my hand between us, because this man keeps making a fool of me with all these things I think I do not want. But I do want to come. I want to come sitting on his cock. I want to come and feel his answering pulses inside me.
I rub myself, lean back for a better angle.
Slide up and down on him. He doesn’t move.
He lets me use him. I come again, and it’s not a teeth cracking, screaming kind of orgasm.
I come slow-moving and slick, like oil, like honey, like the feelings for him that have crept up from my ribcage.
I come in pulses, and he presses and presses himself deeper until it almost hurts, but then he’s coming and filling me.
He’s coming and grunting and groaning. We’re coming and it’s better than fireworks, better than champagne, better than the cold outside or the warmth between us.
So much better that I know that next year and the year after and the year after that, this is what I’ll want to be doing on New Year’s Eve.
Eventually, we collapse onto the bed. I wince as he pulls out of me, and he presses a conciliatory kiss to my temple.
He leaves, the light comes on in my bathroom, and then he’s back with a warm cloth and murmured words.
He slips into bed behind me. Usually, I’d close my curtains, turn on a sound machine, wear an eye mask.
Maybe it’s the exhaustion after the long days of prep and the long night of sex, but probably not.
It’s the weight of Finn’s arm over my waist, his steady breaths against the back of my neck.
His quiet questions, How far can you see during the day and Before we clean up tomorrow can I make you breakfast.
It’s falling asleep next to the man I want to spend New Year’s Eve with.
I wake before my alarm, but fall asleep again, so I still have to slap at my little old-school mechanical clock.
Finn mutters a pleading No, but remains otherwise undisturbed.
For the first time in the last ten years, I’m tempted to roll over, bury my face in Finn’s armpit—stink or not—and fall back asleep on this glorious new morning.
I’m tempted, but I’m not about to let a man change my New Year’s tradition.
I pull the blanket that’s usually folded at the end of the bed, but is now crumpled on the floor, around my shoulders and sit on the edge of my bed with my journal in my lap, facing the windows.
Many Toronto condos end up having views of other Toronto condos.
I got lucky with an exterior-facing view of a huge slice of the city and even a bit of the lake.
The sky outside is a fantasy array of navy, lavender, coral, and purest pink.
My pen moves across the page with the kind of inspiration I haven’t felt in months.
For the goals I have this year, the dreams I have for my life, how they’ve changed, shifted, grown.
How some have died and been replaced with something new.
I write about my friends, Bea’s sometimes overbearing but always generous love, Josh’s devotion, Faraz’s quiet support, Judith’s fierceness, Deepti’s silly side, Brendan’s blind faith.
And Finn’s generosity, his support, his intelligence that I never bothered to give him credit for.
I write about his late night and early morning text messages, how I love watching his face change from brooding and grumpy to happy and goofy when he finds me waiting for him in the car line at the airport.
I write about the earrings he gave me and how intentionally he folded my dress and how he’s changed or maybe I’ve changed or we’ve both changed how we see each other and who we are.
I write until the sun rises above the buildings, the January light almost harsh in its brightness, and when I’m done, when I don’t think I have another thing I could possibly say about this year or last, myself, or Finn, I close the journal and hold it to my chest and watch as the city wakes up.
Finn’s hand spreads across my lower back. “Hey.” His voice is filled with gravel and sleep.
“Hey,” I say, not looking away from the window.
His weight shifts on the bed as he comes closer. “You okay?”