He existed only inside her ocean.
Cal sat on the foot of the bed next to Jocelyn, listening and observing as she laughed and shared stories. Everything she did and said mesmerized him. Wearing the same robe, the hem split open, her leg bent atop the white feather bed, holding a grape between her teeth, twirling it — he could watch her for hours.
“How long have you been a teacher?” he asked once the conversation had reached a comfortable lull. She probably aspired to be a painter. No, she is a painter. But he knew she wouldn’t say that aloud — not to him, not now.
“Almost as long as you’ve been alive,” she replied, and Cal grinned. “That’s probably hard for you to imagine.” Jocelyn stood, pushing her hands into the pockets of the robe. “That smirk must get you into trouble, Prescott.”
“I don’t get into trouble or make mistakes, Professor Ryan.”
Jocelyn rested her elbows on the ledge of the bedroom window — the one with the fat-tiled sill and lace curtains — and stared into the night. The moon was full and quite visible from this side of the house. The only thing eclipsing its extraordinary luminosity was Jocelyn.
Cal put the fruit bowl on the dresser, next to the empty plate of cheese they’d already devoured, near two framed photographs, both pictures of girls. The same girl, it seemed. Only, in one, she was a toddler, and in the other, she was grown, perhaps Cal’s age. Then he took further inventory. A wide variety of frames, containing people and paintings, drawings and sketches, dotted the walls. Cal could feel Joc in them, and what he felt surprised him.
“I have a healthy imagination,” he said, adding to what she’d mentioned, after joining her at the wide window.
“I bet you do.” She peered at him. “Do you even know how old I am?”
Cal slipped behind her and slinked the robe off her shoulders, skating the tips of his fingers across the breadth of her collarbone. “There is no old with you,” he breathed, hoping he sounded the way she felt — safe and soft, like a wave he wanted to ride over and over.
Her head turned, their eyes locked, then Cal glanced outside, pretending a moment he could see two dancers on the moon. “I know you’re a mother.”
“You didn’t know before?”
Her entire body shook, perhaps due to the perpetual California wind, but Cal preferred to think the chill surfaced as a result of his fingerprints attempting to catalog every inch of her skin — the nearness of her moon to his ocean.
“No, not until I saw the photos,” he replied.
“She’s in her first year of college.”
“Here?”
“No.”
Cal gathered Jocelyn’s hair, pushed it aside, and began to kiss her neck and shoulders.
“What about you?” she asked. He loved watching her shiver, loved seeing and feeling the goose bumps erupt all over her olive skin. “Your parents? Where do they live?”
“Are we doing this now?” He planted kisses on her nape. “Proper introductions? You didn’t tell me your daughter’s name … or where she lives.”
“You didn’t ask…” she whimpered.
Cal’s hands slid toward Jocelyn’s stomach. He untied her robe and split open the lapels, his eyes following the material as it dropped to the floor. But as he glanced up, his gaze tripped over a tattoo inked across the small of her back.
Turned out, he hadn’t seen every topographic mark on her body, every crevice, every magnificent feature, and now, if possible, he was even more eager to explore.
“Do you have any?” she uttered.
“No.” He read the ink like braille.
“Do you want one?” Jocelyn turned around, and his arms dropped.
“I want to kiss you.” Cal met her eyes, placing his hands on her waist.
The breath he inhaled contained hers, along with things he couldn’t name or label. Somehow, this woman — this teacher, this artist, this supposed conquest — caused a temporary shutdown of his system. The way she had earlier on the couch. He did want to kiss her, but he couldn’t move.
“Undress, Cal,” she said, but he didn’t budge, his feet feeling like they were stuck in the sand by the shore, waves washing over them until they were heavy, muddied, impossible to lift. “Give me one.” She patted his right pocket. “Then get into bed.”
Locked inside the aquarium of her body, swimming through her chasms, lost to her abyss, Cal barely moved. Only his eyes shifted, back and forth. He still wanted to kiss her, but his mouth felt parched.
Jocelyn took his hand and led him to the bed. After Cal removed his pants, they climbed in together. Once settled, she curled beside him and peered into his eyes. With one hand on his bare chest and the other against his face, she whispered, “You said nothing scares you.”
Cal swallowed.
Waited.
Then he rested a palm against her cheek. It was slightly damp, his palm. She was warm, reassuring, everything he never knew he’d asked for.
Fuck… He swallowed again.
Here they were...
On top of the fitted white sheet, naked, their breath coming and going like the tide, an aching between their legs, a school of fish finding the current inside their stomachs.
“You said you wanted to kiss me.”
Cal pulled Jocelyn’s face to his as the last syllable bounced, kissing her forcefully, fiercely, pressing his lips to hers, wounding her with his necessity, his urgency, with the feelings he denied. Then he slowed the pace, listening to the sounds of her whimpering, both hands over her cheeks, cradling them, kissing the woman whose mouth was a hiding place.
If his tongue stayed inside her warmth, reality didn’t exist.
He existed only inside her ocean.
No woman kissed like this. No one tasted like this.
But he wouldn’t have known. Cal had only kissed teenagers — in-a-hurry, undecided, insecure teenagers. Jocelyn was the antithesis to those forgotten kisses. She moved with purpose. Slow and sure, confident without pretense.
She kissed away reason and death. Loneliness.
Several minutes passed as they became increasingly tangled up together, then Jocelyn pulled away and gazed into his eyes. Pieces of her hair clung to him, dangling over his face and chest. The smell was sweet like her breath.
Then she looked away, her eyes glossing.
“What?” Cal cupped her face. “What is it?”
Jocelyn smiled, rolled the condom on, then straddled Cal backward, placing her tattoo in his eyeline and his dick inside her body. Two seconds passed, and he feared he might come — they fit so perfectly. She was so warm. It didn’t matter that they’d already done this downstairs or that he usually had no problem maintaining some sense of self-control when inside a woman.
“Look in the mirror,” he managed several agonizing seconds later, nodding at the large mirror above the dresser, wanting to please Jocelyn beyond anything he’d ever experienced.
Her eyes popped open, met his for a couple of heart beats. Deep concentration, pleasure, the sun rising over the ocean in the early morning, lit her face.
“Fuck … you’re so fucking sexy.” Cal eyed her breasts, her nipples, her belly button — the sweat, the strain, the risk. His stomach swirled, filling with the notion that what they were doing wasn’t only sensational but taboo.
“Fuck…” She shook as Cal thrust upward and cupped a tit. “Yes, yes… Please.” He handled both breasts, squeezing and caressing and pinching her nipples until she began to grunt and scream and heave.
Until she begged for him to scratch an itch Cal wasn’t sure he could relieve.
“Slap me, Cal.”
His palms slid to her waist. His eyes closed. They both went stock-still.
“I…” he began, opening his lids, blinking, but no words followed.
She guided his palm to her ass, glancing at him over her shoulder.
“Are you sure, Joc?”
“Yes, please…” She nodded, starting to ride him again. “Slap my ass. My thighs. My tits. Hurt me. I need you to. So much.”
“Fuck, Joc…”
Starting off slowly, Cal struck her ass cheeks, over and over. Then he increased the tempo and the pressure. His palm stung. He could narrowly breathe.
“Oh, God … yes…” Her voice echoed throughout the bedroom. Along with her sounds. Beautiful ones. “Please. Harder. Please.”
The begging was almost enough to send him over the edge — yet he held on, slapping her again and again and again.
“Fuck,” she groaned, and he stared at her reflection, her eyes rolling, her head turning side to side. “That’s so good. More… Please… Please…”
“Goddammit, Joc, how long do you think I can hang on?”
“Forever.”
Cal’s hands enveloped her tits. He pinched her nipples, harsher than before, needing to see the hurt, the ache, the pleasurable grimace over the whole of her face.
Fuck… He couldn’t breathe or think or breathe.
The orgasm grew closer, his balls tightening, near bursting. And another feeling, that fucking new familiar one — closer than anything else — choked him. The feeling in his throat. The one he’d been trying to ignore all night.
How many times had they done this before? All of it. The way he’d held her earlier in the bathroom. The way she felt now. The first time he’d seen her in the classroom. None of it was new. It was old and familiar and…
Their eyes met in the mirror.
“Have we done this before too?” he strained, desperately trying to hold back the inevitable.
Jocelyn’s head fell back, exposing her neck. Cal stroked her there, giving her throat the slightest pressure while watching a few tears slide into her mouth as she cried out, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” over and over and over. “Come, Cal. Come…”
Fuck, he didn’t need her permission.
Or perhaps he did.
It took every ounce of self-control he thought he masterfully possessed not to release everything he held back — his ejaculation would be the least of it. But he wasn’t selfish. Twenty-one but not stupid. Cal wanted Jocelyn to reach the summit first. She would see first light, draw in a glorious breath, and look out over the earth.
Cal touched her clit, taking over what she’d already begun massaging, hoping to bring her to the brink he had met.
Then his release began.
Without his permission.
But he had hers.
And it felt so fucking good.
Hands gripping her hips, thrusting up, up, up, his head shaking, eyes rolling, incoherent sounds leaving his lungs…
“Mmm, yes, fuck … come. Come, come, come…”
Jocelyn twitched. Everywhere. He felt her muscles relax as her upper body fell forward, between his legs, her insides pulsing around him.
Cal stared at her spine, her skin, at the way she breathed, memorizing her sounds and smell.
She released more than an orgasm.
She was crying.
Head buried, face covered, barely making a sound, but he knew she wept. Cal had learned people’s tells and tics before he’d been taught to count.
Combing fingers through her hair, he made circles and sweeps across her backside, waiting for her breathing to calm — for his to calm as well.
Then Cal looked out the window.
Are the two dancers still on the moon? he wondered. Or are they here now? His hands slid toward the flower inked across the width of her tailbone as he listened to the stories her body told. He listened. Paid attention. Took notes.
Moments later, Jocelyn sat bolt upright, her gaze appearing to get caught in the moonlight. She took in several breaths before scooting off the bed.
“Don’t put it on,” Cal said as she reached for her robe. He propped himself up on an elbow.
She smiled. “I need to pee.”
“Precisely … don’t put it on.”
“Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be?” She squinted and grinned.
Cal returned the smile, his green eyes glossing with stuff his mother would label ridiculous, sentimental bullshit. Although Constance would never use such frivolous words. Cal’s unabashed smile, all these feelings. “Preposterous,” his mother would say. “Not appropriate for someone his age. An accomplished man doesn’t give away his hand.”
None of that mattered. Not right now. Not with his heart full of Jocelyn’s cries and whisperings, her scent and orgasm, and her peculiar, girlish-like wonderings.
No … he had nowhere to be.
He was home.
Here, with her. Home.
This was his being. It was his be.
She was where he might not have to be, nor where he should be, but Jocelyn was where he would be.
Be…
The word sounded off in his head in a yogi-like hum.
“Here,” he blurted and stood. “I have to be here.” He walked toward the bathroom, passing her, and she followed. “I still have another condom.” He looked over his shoulder. “Remember?”
Jocelyn shook her head and smiled, her brown eyes beaming, her face communicating the same innate girlish musings Cal wanted to memorize and bottle, keep and possess. To put into a time capsule. Being in her presence turned his neatly defined world upside down. Wrong became right, thinking became feeling. Cutouts became a collage.
The ocean reflected the moon.
And a student and teacher, the two dancers, became one.