My train ticket was for 7.13 a.m. I rolled to the clock and read 4.47 in demonic red numbers.
Last night in town. Last night in this bed. Last night being the girl in the red house on School Road. I sat up, blew out a breath, got up and found my keys.
Faded jeans, brown boots, that shirt with the feathers embroidered on it. My middle of the night – or early morning, depending on how you looked at it – uniform screamed vulnerable, frantic ... needy.
He answered the door in a pair of grey sweats. That was all.
‘I leave tomorrow. Hours, actually.’ I traced the line of his threshold with the toe of my boot. I pushed myself into the doorway to feel the heat of him.
‘I know.’ Jason touched my lower lip and then his mouth touched the place his finger had. ‘You don’t have to go, you know.’
‘I do. But I don’t have to go without having had you,’ I said. ‘I can at least deal with that before I go.’
A new life waited for me. A new life away from small towns and small-town boys, who for various reasons had always wanted me but never done anything about it. So I would do something about it – before it was too late.
Jason didn’t speak, just tugged me in and kissed me hard, the electric jolt of contact a searing reminder of one lone kiss a million years ago. Maybe it was only seven years ago, but it sure as shit felt like a million. We’d had one kiss and never another since. But now, he pressed me up against the old white door with the number 11 tacked to the front. And this kiss crushed that kiss a million years ago.
‘Why did you never try?’ I blurted. I had to know. It might be stupid, misguided or just plain asinine – but I had to know before my life rolled on and away from him.
‘You were too big for me.’
‘Is that a fat joke?’
His body smashed flat to me, the heat overwhelming and welcome. His breath sweet on my face. Jason’s hands found my beautiful fragile top and raked it up over the ladder of my ribs to expose my belly. A multitude of goosebumps rose to the occasion.
‘No, Elsie, too big like too much – too precious. Too wanted. You were the girl to me. So much so that I was pole-axed. I kept you at arms’ length. And I blew it.’
He was the antithesis of what I was off to become. Busting my way out of our little town, off to be an artist. Off to work for a firm in the city. Me running away from the farm boys with dirty boots and faded jeans and sunburn on their noses from the first warm sunny day in the fields. Boys like Jason with his work-firmed forearms and big booming laugh and corn-fed prettiness.
‘That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ I said. When he pressed his hands to my breasts, I pushed myself into the cups of his palms. Let my eyes fall shut and my heart speed up. I had wanted this since we were old enough to want. How in the fuck had it taken so long?
‘I know. What can I say, stupid.’
‘You’re a dumbass,’ I said, amiably.
‘I know.’
He peeled the top down and under it I was warm and bare and braless. His mouth, a hot reminder of all the masturbatory fantasies that had starred one Jason Prescott, blazed a wet trail over my skin. My nipples peaked and pebbled for him and I touched the front of his sweatpants – half afraid there would be no erection there for me, half terrified there would.
His cock was hard and seemed to jump at my touch. I squeezed him lightly and kissed him when his mouth found mine. ‘Be good to me,’ I said.
‘Be good–’ His eyes flew wide for just a moment.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
‘Elsie, you’re not ...’
‘As pure as the driven snow?’
Jason nodded, that look of his that always indicated his urge – thanks to his good-good heart – to hide or simply drop dead.
‘Jesus.’
‘Is my homeboy,’ I joked. ‘But yes. And no. I’m experienced in all things that are not actual fucking,’ I said. ‘The world’s biggest joke, right? In this day and age, a 20-year-old virgin.’
‘Jesus,’ he said again, but his gaze tracked my mouth as I talked. It made me shiver the way he looked at me.
As excited as I was in my gut to get out of this fucking town, I was heartbroken to be leaving that gaze – that face, that big-big heart. We had substituted friendship for love in our own personal equation. I would miss him on many levels.
‘If you keep calling him, he just might show up. And that might ruin the mood.’ I touched his face and he sucked my finger into the heat of his mouth.
‘Virgin,’ he said against my throat, working at my jeans with his fingers.
‘Only in the most traditional sense of the word.’
‘Virgin,’ he said again.
It was the only thing I could do to shut him up: I dropped to my knees. Those beleaguered sweatpants gave up the ghost pretty easy. How many times had I imagined pantsing him just to have something dirty happen? How many times had that been one of my waking dreams, spaced out at my stupid job, thinking dirty thoughts of pretty boys. And here I was at half-past five in the morning, bags in the car, on my knees in front of him.
‘Elsie.’
‘Shut up, Prescott,’ I said and took him in hand. Just for a moment, though, because then I took him in my mouth. Relishing the silken warmth of his cock against my lower lip, my tongue. I sucked him to the tip and somewhere in it all we had turned and he was now pressed to that door. Why were we still in the foyer? And why did I care where we were?
Still, the door seemed apropos, I thought. I was leaving. And for the moment, the only thing stopping me was Jason.
My tongue travelled every salty inch of him, my fingers stroking skin I had imagined pressed to mine for damn near half a decade. I felt emotion clog my throat and prick my eyes but I swallowed hard – working him with the motion – so he groaned. I continued on, cherishing the moment I was in, right here, right now. With him.
His fingers wound in my hair and I saw in my peripheral vision, twin chunks of dirty blonde grasped in his grip like leashes. My pussy flickered at the thought of the hold he had on me – physically, emotionally.
I got him right there – right there where he was tugging my hair – and he ground out the words, ‘Stand up.’
I stood. ‘But I was enjoy–’ and that’s as far as I got when he slammed into me, walking me back, kissing me fiercely. He yanked at my jeans so they tangled in my boots and we were a twisted mass of two people wrestling leather and fabric into submission.
He spread me out on that sofa – that ugly ass sofa that used to be his mother’s. It had been in the rec room – the scene of the crime – that infamous one single kiss a million years ago. He kissed my throat and muttered words I could not hear as I clutched the hideous plaid fabric. Words like: perfect, beautiful, love, insane and miss ...
I didn’t let those words land in my heart. I willed them to drift away.
All of it – the finality of it – made my throat work with emotion again. He stroked his tongue along my chest and over my belly. When he reached my pussy, parted me with his lips, touched the tip of his hot tongue to my clit, I let that emotion go and touched his soft blond hair. So close to the colour of mine that folks had confused us for siblings for years.
He sucked me hard, then soft, then hard, his fingers stretching my cunt with intense ease. He thrust gently and then hard and finally I said, ‘Now, now, now. A million years is too long to wait.’
He chuckled but the sweats were kicked off. His body, long and hard from hours of working sun-kissed fields, settled over mine and I swore I could smell sunshine and grass coming out of his pores.
Why was I leaving, again? Oh. For a life I’d always wanted. That was why. But for a splinter of a second I was sad, so I kissed him. Held his shoulders tight like he could save me.
Jason pushed himself between my legs, lean hips level with mine, cock hard and true. He locked eyes with me, then. Those amazing salt-water eyes that were blue sometimes, green other and even storm-cloud grey when he was angry.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Are yousure?’ I countered, putting my fingers on his skin – letting myself feel the smoothness along his side and his lower back.
‘I’ve always been sure,’ he said, pressed chest to breast with me. I could feel the muscles in his belly jump a little with the rush of it all. His heart banged wildly, hard enough that I felt it against my chest.
‘Could have fooled me, Prescott,’ I said. I snaked my hand between us and found him, ran the tip of his cock to the wet slit of my pussy and parted my legs just a little more.
‘Christ, I don’t want to hurt you,’ he muttered.
‘Rumour has it, it always hurts the first time,’ I said against his earlobe and then, ‘It’ll hurt way more if you shun me.’
‘I could never shun you,’ he whispered back and entered me.
I had that moment. That moment of tension and blinding fear but the want overrode it all and smashed if flat with lust and love that had been around for as long as I could remember. When my body hesitated and so did he, I forced my hips up, tugged him down and bit his earlobe so he hissed.
My hiss echoed his and we stilled – eyes locked, muscles trembling and then he was moving. Slow at first as my body warmed, hummed to life, gripped up around him. Pain bled its way toward pleasure, grew entangled until pleasure won and I locked my legs around him to get him deeper.
‘You should ... I don’t know if you’ll ...’
I put my fingers to his lips and simply said, ‘It’s good.’
His hipbones smacked mine, pelvic bone grinding to my clit. Just the right way, just the right pressure, just the right man. I had not saved myself forhim, but was glad that it was him – glad for this farewell.
‘Kiss me, kiss me,’ I chanted. I could feel it coming. The orgasm. I was no stranger to them – had had plenty in my life. Just not this way, not this kind, not this forceful.
My pussy clenched tighter and tighter as he pinned my hands to my sides by my hips, locked fingers with me, held me flush under him so that he could thrust and drive into me. He rolled his hips at will and held me firmly to the sofa as I kissed him, licking his lower lip. I held him tight and came with a long low cry that he swallowed, still kissing me, still holding me down.
‘Turn over, Elsie.’
I didn’t argue. I let him pull free of me long enough to turn me on my hands and knees. Then he slipped into me from behind – bending to lick up my sides until I shivered in the darkened room. His fingers found me and he rubbed my clit in slippery circles.
‘Again?’ I gasped, pressing my forehead to the sofa. My ass high, my body slamming back to meet him now. His fingers bit in hard along the flare of my hips and he held me, gripped me tight. I wondered if I’d have his fingerprints on me in the morning on that early morning train out of here and the thought alone tripped me over the line. ‘Yes, God, again, again,’ I cried as I came.
‘Fuck,’ he half laughed, slamming into me three more times before growing still and silent and sighing out his orgasm.
I rolled onto my back. ‘Thank you, knight in shining armour, for taking the virginity I offered.’ I laughed, but there was a hitch in my voice that embarrassed me.
He pushed himself against me and wrapped an arm around my waist. ‘Don’t joke it away, Els. It was too short. An hour long would have been too short.’
His cable box read 5.40 a.m.
‘My train isn’t for an hour and a half. We have time.’
His mouth found me. ‘I’m sorry it took so long to get here.’
‘Me too.’
His hand found my breast, my hand his cock. We started again. Mixing and flirting with fire and sadness and lust and love and things that have gone undone for way too long.
‘Those big feelings were always there with us. Maybe that’s why it scared me. Maybe that’s why we stayed away. Things that big and fierce and present can fuck with us tiny humans.’
I swallowed hard, ran my finger over the tip of his cock as he thrust a finger deep inside me. I could smell a faint coppery scent and knew that it was me. A little bit of blood – the sacrifice of my heart to a man who’d always owned it anyway.
‘Maybe one day you’ll come to the city and visit me,’ I said, parting my legs for him again.
Was this how it could be? Could you have each other and then moments later want each other all over again? I thought it could.
He settled between my thighs, licking my shoulder before biting my breast hard enough to make me sparkle with pain. ‘Maybe I will.’
But he wouldn’t. I was sure of it – and deep down so was he. But I opened my legs anyway and let him in. One more time. I still had until 7.13.