Benny
I head for my study when we get home, knowing I’ll be unable to sleep. Hating how I forgot myself back there.
I should’ve resisted the impulse to go and get her in the first place, resisted the urge to kiss her. Francine always wants what she can’t have. She’s a cat who hates a closed door, and like a cat, she’ll lose interest the moment she gets what she wants.
Been there, done that.
When I come out a little bit later, I find her curled up asleep in the den with Sleepless in Seattle playing. She’s in the loveseat next to the fireplace. It really is the best seat in the house—you can see the fireplace, you can see the TV, you can see the view out the window over the river.
But it’s not the best for sleeping.
I stand there, annoyed on her behalf, unsure what to do. She didn’t even choose the couch; she went for the small loveseat. She’ll feel like shit tomorrow.
Our wedding night all over again. Though unlike tonight, I was drunk, too—we were both lightweights back then, I guess. Unprepared for the tequila punch.
I’d kissed her that night—thoroughly and ravenously and over and over. And then again at the wedding ceremony; the moment they’d instructed us to kiss, we’d drunkenly and exuberantly obeyed. I had my wits about me enough to know we shouldn’t sleep together, though. Francine was eager to, but I wanted us clearheaded. It was important to me. The whole thing was important to me.
Not so much to her.
She remembered at least some of that night—a lot of the fun parts, from what it sounds like, and still she took off. Never looked back.
She shifts and a lock of hair falls over her cheekbone. Maybe this charade needs to end. I need to give her the papers and cut her loose.
The first time I ever saw Francine was in the season kickoff meeting to ‘Alejandro.’ All the dancers and stagehands were gathered in the auditorium seats where the audience would normally sit, and the managers and directors took to the stage to go through the schedule and rules.
I noticed her right away. How could I not? She was the most beautiful woman there. The most beautiful woman in the world.
It didn’t occur to me to talk to her. She might as well have been another species. I was too blunt on a good day; self-conscious about every little movement. My awkwardness only got worse when I was excited about something; I’d come off intense, angular. Annoyed.
When I was interested in something, people thought I was glaring. They assumed I was annoyed when I wasn’t. Yes, I’d get annoyed from time to time. I’d get annoyed when people would act illogically or when they’d refuse to grasp the most obvious of things. I’d get annoyed when people made assumptions about my annoyance, an unfortunate feedback loop.
I was fine as a loner.
Until Francine.
She struck me as very nearly magical in the way that she breezed through rehearsals, nailing the choreography with minimal effort, drawing people into her enchanting sphere of charm.
At the same time, she had this curious quality of being outside of the herd, though it was impossible to put my finger on exactly how, because she was the center of attention. I slide my fingertips against each other, remembering the feel of her face.
I remind myself that a woman like her always has to be the center of attention wherever she goes, even if it’s two people in a limo.
Still I should move her. It would be best if she was in a bed.
I consider getting a blanket and a pillow, and then maybe sliding a pillow under her head. I stand there, vacillating intensely between being annoyed and concerned. Though when I’m honest with myself, my annoyance is mostly concern.
She shifts in the chair, frowns. Troubled. I really should bring her to the bed; she’ll feel shitty enough as it is tomorrow. She’d hate that she’s sleeping like this.
It’s here that I make my decision. Gently, I scoop her up, lifting her slowly into my arms and pulling her into my chest. I head silently across the living room and dining room, down past the river in nightscape, flashing here and there where spangles of waves catch the moon.
She’s light and warm in my arms; frail, even, though I know that she’s anything but. A dancer is an athlete with the explosive core strength of a wrestler.
The dancers came from different dance backgrounds and dance traditions; a few of them had come out of gymnastics and circus arts, but when they’d compare notes, it became clear that none of them had even an iota of the background and discipline that Francine had. Yet she acted like she was on perpetual vacation.
Francine was the girl who wanted to stay out the latest, to have the most fun, to eat the most decadent foods, to date the flashiest guys. It baffled me because getting to her level of ability took extreme practice—I was a manically dedicated person myself, and knew another maniacally dedicated person when I saw her.
I head down the hall, walking smoothly, taking care not to let her feet brush the walls.
We were all forced to dine together after shows and rehearsals—some weeks even with assigned seating. Those in charge thought it would inspire camaraderie between the dancers, the stagehands, and tech crew. I found these meals to be a torment and an exercise in delineating just how acutely I didn’t belong, but at least I came to understand a lot about dancers in general, and Francine in particular.
She started dance at three, and by ten years old, she was boarding at an elite academy, hundreds of miles from her home on the plains, putting in ten-hour days of workouts and stretching and drills and dances. There were strict dietary regimens, lots of yoga and physical therapy, magnesium baths for her muscles. When her day was over, she’d drag herself up the ladder to the bunk bed she shared with another dancer who was also far from home, and start her school studies.
I settle her into her bed and go in search of a warmer blanket than what she has. I don’t know where anything is. Why should I? I never have guests. I try the linen closet, but it’s just sheets. I send Mac a text and wait alone in the silence of my hallway.
The almost monk-like nature of her preteen and teen years became even clearer to me when I realized how unfamiliar she was with the workings of a normal high school; she’d never snuck out of the house, she’d never gone to a party or football game or a music festival. I hadn’t either, but it wasn’t surprising in my case. Francine would’ve loved those things.
In the world, but apart from it. Like a fairy tale creature.
The night we were married we told each other everything. Francine confessed how shut out from her peers she felt, like an alien from outer space. And being the youngest of a large rural family, her parents and siblings treated her as the permanent baby. Nobody believed she could hack the dance world. People didn’t think she had grit.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Before I could stop myself, I was telling her how awkward I always felt. I would act too intense and put people off. I told her about my high-energy, outgoing, tech-challenged family and the jokes that I was maybe switched at birth. You’d think a family like that would’ve made me more socially adept. It didn’t. We joked that we were aliens who’d found each other.
By her own admission, she remembered a lot of that night. Not all of it but a lot. Enough.
Mac gets back to me: ottoman blanket storage, another feature for guests that never gets used.
Mac was adamant I keep guest amenities just in case, and I went with it, more to placate him than anything. Because what the hell do I need with guest amenities? I only have business visitors, and if and when I would ever have a non-business visitor, I would put them up at a hotel, including my parents, though they never visit. The few holidays I ventured back to Michigan, I always stayed at a hotel. We’re not close like other families.
I bring her the blanket and then I go back and get the water and the aspirin and I bring it in and I set it on the bedside table where she’ll see it. I decide that’s everything I can do, so I head back to the kitchen to make a bagel.
I stuff the two halves into the slots of the toaster, watch the wires turn red.
The Monique and Igor thing was the first time I’d ever engaged in any kind of joking or humorous interaction whatsoever, though I would have never admitted it. What kind of person doesn’t joke? It sounds psychotic. It’s not that I couldn’t recognize or appreciate humor—I always have appreciated humor and I laugh when things are actually funny—a rare occurrence, but it happens.
However, Francine’s Monique and Igor thing was one of those rare instances when something was actually funny, though I seemed to be in the minority about it. Cast members would smile politely as if her fake daughter stories were simply odd, but really they were hilarious. The one thing that was missing from those jokey humblebrag stories of hers was a competitor for Monique. With that, Igor was born. Unexpectedly. A surprise baby like me.
Suddenly I was telling an Igor story, putting it up against her Monique story.
And suddenly we were having fun.
Me. With a sense of humor. It had everything to do with Francine; we clicked invisibly. Synergistic operating systems under the surface. Two fake children, uniquely ours.
The night that we got married, she described the picture she had in her head of Monique, which looked suspiciously like her. And the picture that she had of Igor looked like me. “Igor is brilliant and misunderstood like his papa,” she’d said, “though one must overlook the tragic little teapot performance incident.”
When I get up the next morning, there’s coffee made and the cutting board has a little puddle of juice from an orange sliced into six sections.
I flip Pandora on the penthouse-wide sound system, assuming she took off, but when I wander into the den, she’s on the couch with Spencer. Her hair is down, glossy as a mirror. She’s in a T-shirt and pajama pants, one leg outstretched with the pants leg rolled up. She’s pressing an ice pack around her knee, forming it into a semicircle.
The Beau Cirque dancers used to do that, trying to press the ice or the heat all the way around their sore joint. Usually they preferred pressing it for each other, so that the person with the injury could focus entirely on relaxing it. That seemed to be the gold standard—somebody else doing the pressing while the injured person relaxed.
But of course, I’ve ripped her away from all of her girlfriends who would probably do this sort of thing for her.
“Good morning,” I say.
She looks up. “Thanks for the aspirin.” I can read everything from her tone. She feels angry. Shut out.
The heat pack is draped over on the back of the couch, probably having cooled off. That’s the dancer technique from Beau Cirque—ice-heat-ice-heat-ice. They were always very specific about beginning and ending with ice. It was considered a bad sign when a dancer was ice-heating a lot.
“What?” she asks.
“You want me to heat that?” I ask.
“No.”
“Is that a yes?” I ask.
She looks up. If she thinks that’s funny, she’s disguising it well. “No.”
I stand there, frustrated. I want to heat up the heat pack for her. And what about this injury? A picture pops up in my mind of her confiding in me about it. Maybe I can help her think this thing through or find resources for her knee. I want to protect her wishful thinking. I want to pick her up and carry her across the condo again—not to her bedroom, but to mine. I try to look annoyed while I fight like hell to get my reactions to her under control. There’s a first—me trying to look annoyed.
“I’m standing right here. I may as well.”
“You don’t get to be a cold and remote captor one minute and then a caring husband the next. I’m your show horse that you need for whatever reason. I’m a convenient employee for the next two weeks. Do you go around getting ice packs for your other employees?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I say, frustrated. “It’ll ruin the whole process if you have to get up and walk all the way back to the kitchen. Lest you forget all that time I spent in the auditorium. Why not maximize all of the tools that you have at your disposal?”
“Like you did with me?” she asks.
“That’s right.” I grab the heat pack and head to the kitchen, tossing it in the microwave, stopping at every ten seconds to get it just the right temperature—just bearable to the touch. That was always the goal. I rest my palm onto it and then I give it another few seconds and then I take it into her.
She holds it, evaluating the temperature. “Perfect,” she says.
“Move over.”
“Just give it to me,” she says.
“I’m right here. Let me.”
“I have these things on the ends of my arms, you see.” She holds up her hands.
“It’s better for somebody else to hold it and you know it,” I say. “You can concentrate on softening the joint.” That’s what dancers always used to say.
“Leave me alone. Let’s just get through this thing, okay?”
Get through this thing. What the hell am I doing? I should tell her she can have the papers. They’re still in my briefcase. All I have to do is sign them and give them to her to sign.
“Move over, come on.”
I see it in her face when she’s about to relent. I feel it in my chest. We’re too connected, or at least, I’m too connected to her, a woman who discards people as easily as peanut shells.
She rolls her eyes and scoots over. I settle in next to her and she puts her legs over my lap, wincing briefly. I don’t like it. Her pain tugs on something deep inside of me—some primal need to protect her, to find a solution.
Fuck.
I hold the heat pack in a concave manner so that it gets all the spots at once. She leans back, eyes closed, finally relaxing. “Thank you. I guess this is nice,” she says.
“You guess,” I say.
A smile lights the corners of her mouth. She smells like spicy flowers—even the shampoo she uses is her specific Jasmine. A melodic song is playing over the sound system. Something sweet and old by Bowie. I’m glad it’s not something annoying.
Her legs feel fucking amazing on my lap. I could so easily lean down, press my face to her PJ—pants-clad thighs. No other woman has ever inspired the urges in me that she does. Even her flaws are sexy—her impulsiveness. Her fanaticism. Her pigheadedness when it comes to injury—even that makes me want to kiss her.
But I keep it objective. I’ve seen guys lose their objectivity over a woman and it’s not pretty. She ripped a hole inside me once before and I won’t be that besotted kid again, twisted up in painful knots of one-sided love—or what he thought was love.
“That’s the problem with palatial penthouses,” she says. “Everything’s far away from wherever you’re sitting. Extreme wealth really is so inconvenient.”
“Oh yeah?” I say.
“In little apartments, the microwave is just a few steps away from the comfortable living room chair. Way better.”
I keep the contact light and present, nearly all the way around to the back of the knee.
It’s strange. In my long-gone juvenile ideas of us together, it was always her dazzled by me in some way; it was never anything so human as this. One person caring for another.
“You have good friends,” I observe.
“I do. I’m really lucky—I absolutely lucked into that building. And then my roommate moved out, and I was so sad, but this shy, rural girl answered my ad and we were instant best friends. Noelle—you met her.”
“The mail carrier,” I say.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’ve been here for years and I don’t even know my neighbors,” I say.
“Most people in the city don’t. I think part of it is that a lot of us are just so passionate about the things that we’re passionate about, and that connects us. I have friends who are artists or in the theater or starting their own little businesses…they all get what it’s like to be giving up a lot of your life to chase a dream, and not everybody understands that. Not everybody understands when you’re not automatically free to watch a football game on Sunday or go out on the town. Not everybody understands when you say you won’t be free for the next six months. But my crew at 341 understands that. You understand it.”
“I certainly do,” I say, shifting the pack.
She gazes out the window. “When you live in the same building, you can walk down the hall and have a twenty-minute visit with a friend without blowing up your whole day. In rehearsal season, I’m so busy, I’d only see other dancers if I didn’t live there.”
This twist of sadness moves through me thinking about James. Strangely, it helped to talk with her about him.
“You were friends with the gang at Beau Cirque,” I remind her.
A fleeting smile touches her lips. “And you were so over them. You were your own little island with a keep-out sign.”
“Hardly,” I say. “It was the reality that I had in front of me, that’s all.”
I feel her gaze snap in my direction. “You would’ve changed it if you could have? Even with the Beau Cirque dancers? You wanted to be chummier?”
“Well, I would’ve settled for not making them nervous. I didn’t want to have resting annoyed face.”
She narrows her eyes. “You mean, like resting bitch face, except you looked annoyed?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re telling me you weren’t annoyed all that time?”
“Not all that time,” I say.
A smile touches the corners of her lips. “I don’t know, Benny,” she says. “I think you were annoyed some of that time.”
“Fine. Some of the time. I’d say it was only fifty percent of the time that I was annoyed. The rest of the time I only looked annoyed.”
She’s just laughing now. Only Francine would laugh about this. “I don’t know if that helps your case!”
“What?” I protest.
“Annoyed only half the time. Please, folks, don’t get the wrong idea. Benny’s only annoyed about half the time, lest you think he’s annoyed all the time.”
“There are a lot of annoying things out there,” I say.
“And vexing,” she adds.
“Many people are far more easily vexed and annoyed than I am.” I form the pack over the part that is the traditional pain point, pressing gently.
“That feels good,” she says.
This puffs me up ridiculously. But lest things go too well, the Dave Matthews Band comes on.
The Dave Matthews Band does not feel good. It feels like nails, in fact, scratching on a chalkboard. I stare longingly at my phone, just out of my reach on the side table. What the hell! Why does that keep happening? If only the phone were nearer, I’d zap that song to high heaven.
She’s staring at me, wide-eyed.
“Sorry, I hate that band,” I say.
“It’s okay if you want to get up and change it. I would totally understand.”
“That’s okay, I’ll pour bleach in my ears later,” I say.
“You’re not gonna change it?”
“This is a very delicate procedure with your knee here,” I say.
The way she looks at me, it’s like I turned into Mother Teresa or something, just because I don’t want to leave my post of knee-pack holding, even though turning off the most hated music on the planet could only be helpful. She may not hate the Dave Matthews Band the way I do, but it has to be doing something destructive to her on a quantum level.
The strains of Dave Matthews go on. It blows my mind, because how can a band pack so much insipid annoyingness into one song? Teams of musicologists could work around the clock studying it and never figure it out.
“Dude, change it! Every fiber in your being is itching to change it!” she says.
“Maybe Sloan-Kettering can give me a lobotomy later,” I say.
She smiles and I feel this rush of affection for her that I quickly tamp down, because I know better. She pushes my hands from her knee and lifts her legs. “Grab your phone and change it already! It’s like you’re being boiled to death right before my eyes!”
I twist to the far side of the couch and lunge for my phone, stabbing a decisive thumbs-down.
I settle back in and she flops her legs back down onto my lap like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I carefully press the ice around her knee and we sit in companionable silence. It feels good to be with her.
“I still need to get those Dave Matthews Band tickets for us and Juliana,” she teases.
I give her a dark look.
She pets Spencer’s scruff. “So how’s the sale coming?”
“The negotiation of it is done. We’ve met each other. There are a few more details to handle, but the next step is to finalize the terms and then close the deal.”
“And that happens when?”
“In five days, supposedly.”
“Supposedly?” she echoes.
“Well, there’s the reality of working for somebody for a year,” I say. “It’s a year of my life.”
“Oh my god, are you rethinking that crazy plan?” She sits up. “Are you coming to your senses on that?”
“It’s not as simple as coming to my senses,” I say. “A lot of things would have to change if I nixed the sale. I started the business with a friend who had a similar vision, and that friend is gone.”
“Right,” she says softly.
“Being in the trenches with a best friend like that, solving problems, getting ideas, weathering defeats, having each other’s backs, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
She doesn’t rush to fill the silence that follows. I look up and she’s watching me, and I feel her kindness, her compassion.
“Six months,” I add, meaning, that’s how long he’s been gone. “People have moved on. Rented his home. Filled his chair. Closed his memberships. Like he’s erased.”
“You remember. Spencer remembers.”
Of course she gets it. She sits there silent, a warm presence on my lap. Maybe I can’t trust this easy feeling between us, but I’m eating it up.
“Was he into robotics like you?”
I sniff. “Was he as big of a nerd as I am? Is that your question?” I ask.
“Maybe.”
“Yeah, though you wouldn’t have known it from the outside—he looked like he belonged in the Rocky Mountains more than subway cars, but he knew his way around a lab. We loved having freedom to pursue crazy ideas. Solutions to impossible problems. We gave each other a lot of shit. We played a lot of ping pong.”
“A friend like that is everything, Benny.”
I shift the pack. Her empathy feels real and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want things real with her. I don’t want to be unraveled. Those things belong in the past.
“To find a counterpart in that way,” she adds. “Will Juliana’s firm allow you to continue those pet projects at least?”
“No, they’re all in on the microrobotic cleaners.”
“Well then why sell to them?” she asks.
“Because I can’t run the firm alone. Big-picture thinking is not my thing,” I say. “Don’t forget, I’m the microrobotics guy.”
She gazes up at the ceiling. There’s a skylight up there, and you can see fluffy white clouds sailing slowly across the bright blue sky.
“My roommate Noelle and I used to eat chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream,” she says. “The only good part was the chocolate chip cookie dough. So, whenever we’d have it we were both always angling to get the bites with chocolate chip cookie dough. One day I found a package of just chocolate chip cookie dough. And I was like, why are we not getting this? So we got it.”
“It was better?”
“Much better. So my question to you would be, what are the chocolate chip cookie dough parts? Is there a way that you can arrange your company so there are only chocolate chip cookie dough parts?”
I shift the pack. “How did I skip the chocolate chip cookie dough section in my business courses? I can’t imagine how it happened.”
“Seriously!” She pokes at my thigh. “Tell me the chocolate chip cookie dough parts.”
I’m watching her, mind spinning.
“What?” she says.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re looking at me funny.”
I adjust the ice pack. It’s a good question she’s asking. Simple. “Chocolate chip cookie dough parts,” I say. “Working with the team in the lab. I’m not good with people—”
“Wuuuuut,” she jokes.
“Right?” I say. “But when we have a project between us, a natural thing to orient around, then I enjoy a team.”
“What would you work on? If you had that year and that team. If you weren’t in Juliana’s lab.”
Before I can stop myself, I’m telling her about microrobots scavenging vibrations for energy. She thinks I’m making it up. I’m laughing, going on and on, fed by her amazement. At one point I notice she’s beaming at me. “What?” I ask.
“I love how intense you are about it,” she says. “When you’re in that lab, you probably give it your whole soul.”
“My whole soul! Let’s hope not,” I say, and she snorts.
I don’t know what to do with her affection, her help, her kindness. This marriage is a mirage and I’m dying of thirst.
“I mean, can’t you get a team like that?” she asks.
“I have one, but I can’t run the business without James.”
“Can’t you find another James? And you go, here’s some money, please steer this thing and leave me alone in my lab? Aren’t there headhunters and things?” she asks. “Don’t you deserve to be happy?”
That question, I don’t know what to do with it.
I sit there with her legs in my lap like the sexiest keyboard in the world, my hands formed around an ice pack, trying to still the thundering in my chest.
I’d meant to keep her at arm’s length, but I’m doing a shit job of it. Things are feeling real now, and I’m feeling raw.
I need more of her. And I also need her to stop.
I lower my voice. “Are you even concentrating on relaxing your muscles?”
Her gaze rivets to me. The low voice affects her—I noticed that earlier.
“Or are you worrying about my business?” I rumble, brushing her thigh as I adjust the pack.
“I can do both at once,” she says.
I draw a finger up her shin bone, up to where the pack covers her knee. Her skin feels like warm silk.
A wary light appears in her eyes.
“I can’t have my show horse limping around, can I?” I lower my voice to an even deeper rumble. “It simply won’t do.”
She sucks in a breath. “You mean, your magnificent show horse?”
“I can’t have my magnificent show horse in anything but peak condition.”
Her voice, when it comes, is throaty. “Because of how you like to work your assets?”
I slide my hand down her calf, taking full control of the situation. “I like to work my assets wickedly hard.”
She gasps as I slowly push a sock off her foot, then I bare the other. I’m not a foot guy, but I’m not above going with the flow. I let her feel the weight of my hand, let her feel like I’m in control here.
Even this slight touch overloads my senses, threatens to crash my control. Which tells me that I shouldn’t be doing this—I really shouldn’t, but I can’t seem to stop myself. It’s the feel of her skin. It’s her heated expression. It’s her Francine-ness.
“With your wicked ideas?” she asks with a mischievous gleam.
“That’s right,” I say.
She tries to sit up but I settle my other hand on her belly, push her back down. “Stay there,” I say. She’s threatening to steal all of my practiced control just by lying there—I don’t need her hands on me, sending me over the edge.
She watches me, belly quivering with arousal.
Carelessly, I toss the ice pack.
A grin touches her lips.
I lay an arm lazily over her calves, holding her there while I creep my other hand down, down from her belly to the tie of her pajama pants. Slowly I loosen them, watching her watch me, aroused, which is a total turn-on. I’m hard as rock under the perfect weight of her legs. I can feel my pulse clear into my cock.
Francine reaches for me. “Let me—”
“Not a word, not one word,” I say, pressing my hand down to the wetness between her legs.
She lets out a surrendering groan.
I pull her pajama pants clear off.
“Your shirt,” I rasp. “Off. Now.” I say it almost as a warning, letting her know that this is my show.
Her skin looks alive, cheeks darkened with excitement. Shaky hands move down to the hem of her shirt, then she pulls it clear off her head. Her flimsy bra that does nothing to disguise the sexy brown coins of her nipples. How many hours had I spent wondering what she’d look like?
I reach up and graze a hand over one perfect breast.
She tugs at my shirt. “I’m feeling a bit of clothes inequality here,” she says.
“And you’ll continue to feel it,” I say, kneeling on the couch between her knees, efficiently stripping her bottom half bare, exposing her perfect mound, just a strip of dark hair that I have big plans for.
“If you think you’re doing Sexorator 2000 again…” she says.
I don’t know what she’s talking about. All I can focus on is how badly I need to taste her.
Roughly I hoist her leg—the non-injured one—over my shoulder, struggling not to lose my senses in the face of her hotness, her spicy scent.
“Benny—”
“If you don’t have that bra off in the next two seconds...” I turn and place a kiss on the inside of her thigh.
Her lips part, forming a soundless “o.” That fucking “o” is everything. I kiss her thigh again, struggling to maintain control. “If you don’t have that bra off in the next two seconds.”
In my days of polishing my sex technique, I found it best to give commands. The more unreasonable, the better. I’m not bossy by nature, but when I learn a thing, I learn it well, and right now I’m learning her. One of us will be losing control and I plan for it to be her.
“Now. If you want to keep going…”
There’s a torn look on her face. She wants this but she doesn’t quite know what to make of me like this.
I kiss higher, a bit nearer to her sweet spot.
Her rib cage rises and falls. “God, Benny,” she says, voice hoarse with wonder.
And then, wide-eyed, she does it—she pulls her bra off, revealing perfect breasts, smooth and perfect as the rest of her. I groan. I’m so fucking horny, I feel like my skin might rip apart from the inside.
I kiss my way up her inner thigh as she pants, rocks with need. I plant a kiss on that strip of hair. “Open your knees. Wide—wide for me.”
She complies and I push my tongue clear into her hole. She gasps. I shove it in more, fuck her with it, and then I fuck her with my fingers while I drag the flat of my tongue clear up her pussy.
Small hands fly to my hair gripping the strands as I lick her.
My name gusting out of her lips is the hottest thing I’ve ever heard. I take her folds into my mouth and I suck, letting her feel the inside of my mouth. I suck her and then I lick her some more. And then she’s coming, crying out, sex pulsing under my merciless tongue.
“Oh my god,” she says as she comes down. “What…” she asks, breathy, unable to form whatever question flew through her mind.
My hands are on her breasts now, and I’m kissing them. For the first time since we started, I let myself really take in this situation. It’s Francine—fucking Francine!—Sprawled out on my couch, naked and dizzy from an orgasm that I just gave her.
And everything in me swells, so much so that I’m in danger of rocketing right out into space.
Her hands are on my hair again and she pulls my mouth up to hers.
I get back ahold of myself and kiss her expertly, smooth with just the smallest edge of hunger showing, the perfect amount of tongue.
“Oh my god,” she says into the kiss, wriggling under me like the pleasure is still radiating through me. My cock might never go down again. And then her hand is on my belt.
“Off,” she says, giving me back my command. And I comply, clambering off the couch. I pull off my shirt first, because we’re doing things my way. Her nostrils flare as she looks me over. She trails lazy fingertips down my stomach, my six-pack.
“Mmmmm,” she says, and all of those hundreds of daily crunches in the workout studio are worth it, hundreds of crunches, reps upon reps of every muscle workout possible, all fueled by imagining just this moment.
Except not quite this moment.
It was a product of my juvenile imagination after Vegas nine years ago. It involved Francine being filled with remorse for having cast me aside like she did. It was her lusting after me, bitterly regretting her mistake, filled with lust and so freaking sorry. And I’m of course indifferent to her. I’ve gone on to bigger and better things. She has no more chance with me for anything but a quick tumble.
As one year turned into two, I grew out of that ridiculous fantasy, stopped orienting around her, stopped even considering her, though I kept up the workout regime.
I unbuckle my belt, yank it off with a flourish and toss it.
Francine slides her hands up my jeans-clad thighs, up to my fly. “Let me,” she says. “I want to…” Pressing a palm over my impossibly steely erection. “I want to go all kinds of crazy on you, Benny!”
I’d imagined her saying things like this, but more generic. And I wouldn’t be affected the way I am now—I’d feel nothing but cold victory, the triumph of showing her what she’d never have, somebody so far beyond all of those losers in limos that she dated. I saw myself looking down dispassionately as she closed her lips over my cock. And then I’d grab her head and pump right into her.
Reality, needless to say, is radically different.
The high, excited hum she makes when my cock springs free kills me. She kisses the side of it, making Francine sounds.
I can barely function enough to shove my garments off my legs.
She looks up with a lusty smile. “I am going to so...” She doesn’t finish the sentence because she’s Francine.
She kisses the other side of it and I shove my fingers into her glossy hair.
I think my skin might peel off from sheer desire. “I am going to so...” And then her mouth is over me, finishing this sentence. I’m stroking her head, spinning so hard with pleasure it’s a wonder I can keep standing.
I come with a guttural cry.
She waits for my dick to chill out before pulling her mouth off me, because that’s how physically in tune she is with me.
“That’s one way to punctuate a sentence,” I say.
“Sometimes an exclamation point just won’t do.”
I’m laughing in spite of myself.
She beckons me down next to her, and without thinking, I go, squeezing in next to her on the small couch.
Francine only wants a divorce in the end. The sooner, the better.
Even so, I pull her head to my chest, wrap my arms around her head. I don’t want to let her go, but I don’t need to be face-to-face. I don’t want a divorce, but I don’t trust her in some essential way. I want to be free of the past and that kid that I was, but it’s all around me.
Her scalp is moist with sweat against my pounding heart.
“Are you a cuddler, Benny?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
I can feel the shape of her cheeks change, as if she’s smiling. She doesn’t believe me.
I’m not smiling. I’m looking up at clouds through the skylight, all puffy and fluffy and weightless against that technicolor blue. They look fake.