Chapter 22 #2
When they first arrived, before they even left the car, James had to write for Nelle to have access to the entire house, which thankfully worked.
Inside, Penelope prepared the tea while James set up the DVD player per her fuddled instructions.
Nelle pulled back a curtain behind the couch.
It was still light out, but dim, and the lamplight inside turned her reflection orange.
She moved to the nearest shelf of books, skimming through the pages of a thriller, until Penelope swept in from the kitchen with a tea tray that she set between the couches.
Now they stew, wordless. A film called The Princess Bride plays on the thirty-two-inch TV.
Penelope finally speaks. “Need any milk?”
“I’m fine,” Nelle says. “Thanks.”
James waves a hand. “All good.”
“Good, good.” Penelope purses her wrinkled mouth.
“Do you have a cat?” James asks, cutting pointed glances to the larger cat sculptures tucked around the room.
“Yes, Ptolemy. But he hides from new people.”
After another pause, Penelope says, “So you’re Wallace’s . . . ?”
“Daughter.”
“Daughter,” Penelope repeats. She sips her tea.
“I’m sorry if he never told you about me. He was a secretive man.” Nelle sets her tea on the coffee table. “If it’s any consolation, you’re news to me, too.”
James interrupts the next awkward beat. “So, have you always lived in Scourie?”
Penelope smiles sympathetically. “You must be fatigued from the drive up, if that’s the best small talk you can muster. No judgment here, though, I’m exhausted just from going into town.”
She gathers the teacups, though they have only taken a few sips each, and carries the tray away.
When she returns, she says, “We adhere to the sun’s bedtime around here. When she goes down, I go down. Take the guest room if you’re sharing. Second door on the left down the hall. Toilet’s attached.”
Nelle and James say their good nights and shuffle to their room.
He digs their toothbrushes and clothes from the backpack while she takes stock of the room.
Iron bed with a white quilt, one shuttered window, a slim door to the bathroom, blocky mahogany nightstands holding opal-glass lamps, wallpaper dotted with tiny tulips peeling at the corners.
“Are you going to take a shower?” she asks.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” James says, rinsing his toothbrush. “It feels a little weird, doesn’t it? To shower in a stranger’s house? I mean . . . we talked for a total of ten minutes.”
“I guess.” Nelle washes her face, towels it off. “She doesn’t feel like a stranger to me.”
They climb into bed, pitched into darkness.
“Do you care if I turn on the lamp?” she asks.
“Not at all.”
She clicks it on, and the room becomes a watercolor of incandescent yellow and shadows.
“I hope tomorrow’s not as awkward,” she says. “I didn’t know how to act. What to say.”
“You did great.” James rolls onto his side. “I promise. I think she was nervous, too. Maybe it threw her off that Quill never told her about you.”
“Maybe, but I don’t want her to dislike me because of that.”
“If she does”—James kisses the tip of her nose—“then she doesn’t deserve to know you.”
A ripple of pleasure spreads down to Nelle’s toes. She cups his neck and pulls him to her. Lips brush. She savors the anticipation. This tantalizing exchange of breath. His bare toes skim hers, stoking the animal within her.
But James loses control first, dipping down to pull a kiss from her. She lays everything she is at the altar of his lips, offering her body up. As they kiss, she feels subsumed by this celestial, glittery state.
Her pajamas are silky and small—a button-down shirt and shorts—and James’s fingers feel like bolts of lightning along her exposed calves, her thighs, her neck. She arches her back, pushing into him, needing more.
“Touch me,” she gasps, barely able to get the words out. “Touch me, James.”
He works at the buttons of her shirt, grazing her breast. One by one they release, until the fabric splits like stage curtains, unveiling her naked torso. Blood rushes south. Pulsing and hot and wet for him.
The hunger in James’s voice is almost unrecognizable.
“You’re beautiful.” He licks his lips.
Nelle isn’t scared, though some part of her feels like she should be. “Take off your shirt.”
He pulls it over his head and tosses it aside. She studies the rigid lines of his stomach, his slender muscular arms, the dust of hair trailing down to his sweatpants.
Nelle sits up, level with his sharp collarbones, and lets her mouth guide her where it wants to go.
Her tongue swirls his right nipple, and he lets out a little groan, hands grappling for the back of her head.
She sucks on it and lets go, then teases the other with her teeth.
Her own nipples harden like pebbles in sympathy.
“Stop, stop,” James says as Nelle tugs at the hem of his pants.
She looks up, breathless with lust. “Why?”
“Not yet,” he says.
It’s hard not to roll her eyes. “This again? There is no right moment, James. There’s just this moment.”
“Was the Eiffel Tower not the right moment for our first kiss?”
Nelle slumps back against the pillows, feeling no vulnerability, even half naked in front of him.
“You know I’m right about this,” James says.
He’s not wrong. “Fine.”
“But,” he lights up, “there is something I’d like to do to you. If you’ll let me.”
The creature inside Nelle, starving for him, goes wild. “Anything.”
James cradles her left breast and skims his lips across her right.
Soft breath brushing the milk-white curve, each kiss making it harder and harder for her to breathe.
God, she wants him. All of him. Wants to wrap her hand around that hardness between his legs, to feel him inside her. But not tonight. Soon, but not tonight.
He sucks and bites her nipples before marching his mouth down her stomach.
His fingers curl over the waistband of her shorts.
“Is this okay?” he asks.
“Yes.”
Slowly, he peels the silky material down her thighs, over her ankles, and tosses them aside. No underwear.
Nelle spreads her legs, inviting him in.
James crumbles between her knees. Desire races through her, begging for release as his lips move along her inner thigh, scorching every spot they touch, until his breath hits that throbbing between her legs.
His kiss, at the apex of her sex, brings the sensation of being submerged in the roaring ocean.
Her brain goes numb, giving complete control over to her body.
James curls his tongue upward, encompassing all of her in one fiery stroke before homing in on her swollen bud again.
She shudders, thoughtless, fingers grasping to keep her from floating away.
The bedsheets, James’s hair, the iron headboard.
If she’s moaning, she doesn’t know, and, frankly, doesn’t care.
Surely Penelope, if she has ever experienced something like this before, will understa—
“Oh my God,” Nelle groans.
James’s tongue flickers faster. His hands slide underneath her, cupping her cheeks and lifting. That’s it—she’s done. Undone. Fuck.
With one more stroke, his tongue slides into her, and Nelle’s pulsating pressure explodes. She is a red balloon, a golden bird, a flying fucking horse—
Her thighs clamp around his head, and distantly she has the thought that she might be suffocating him as she rides out the waves of pleasure, rocking against the mattress. As her body sizzles, she finds James watching her, head propped on his hand.
Nelle kisses him and, exhilarated, tastes herself. “Why haven’t we been doing this the whole time?”
The next morning, the glint of Penelope’s black eyes tells James that she knows exactly what they did last night. If so, then she must be choosing to reward rather than scold them because she offers to buy breakfast at a café by the bay. And to his dismay, she offers to drive.
James throws on his denim jacket, journal and pen in the pocket, and as they’re ready to walk out the door, he excuses himself to the bathroom to scribble, Nelle rides with Penelope to the café.
Nelle sits in the passenger seat on the bumpy ride into town. James isn’t paying much attention, preoccupied with his memories of last night. Nelle’s wetness on the sheets, how hot she throbbed against his lips, how she tasted. It took all his self-control not to give in to their mutual impulses.
The “café” is a charming food truck parked beside a cluster of picnic tables. In the back seat, James pulls out the journal and writes for Nelle. They find a table while Penelope orders. James taps his shoe to Nelle’s.
Her lips twist. “What?”
“I wanna kiss you.”
“Which part of me?”
James adjusts his pants before Penelope sidles onto the bench beside Nelle with a tray of food. The right moment better come soon.
Breakfast is delicious: hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with pepper, beans and toast, juicy slices of bacon, and some sort of onion-pepper-potato hash. He doesn’t realize how hungry he is until his plate is scraped clean and his stomach growls for more.
“How often do you come here?” Nelle asks.
“Every day,” Penelope laughs. “The last thing I want to do when I wake up is cook.”
Nelle squints at the bright morning. “It’s a nice view, too.”
Green hills swell alongside the black water.
A breeze hustles in from the vast Atlantic, raising goose bumps on James’s arms. He drapes his jacket over his shoulders.
Far across that water are his parents and Midi, going on about their lives without him.
He misses them, but not Lincoln. That town might be too sleepy to ever draw him back.
He thinks about Jessie, and his heart clenches as it strikes him, not for the first time, how badly he misses New York.