“Can you sing?” Ada asked.
They were reclining on the bed, nearly naked, Marvin Gaye on the radio. They’d ordered a pizza from the only place open at this time of night and willing to deliver to their motel. Alonzo had thrown on a clean pair of pants to run down to the lobby. He bought a few cans of soda, and they stripped down to their underwear to eat a very late dinner.
It wasn’t a date, but if it had been, this would have been the best date of Alonzo’s life.
“Can I sing?” he echoed in a questioning whisper, thinking about it. Avoiding the question.
“I’ll take that as a no,” she laughed.
He scratched at his chin and laughed. “I don’t even sing in the shower, I’m that bad.”
She doubled over in laughter. “Damn shame.”
“Is it?”
“Mmmhmm. I love a man who can croon.”
“Croon?” Alonzo asked. He turned onto his side and leaned on one elbow, looking up toward the head of the bed.
It was a dangerous move, he thought, to look at Ada in nothing but a pair of panties. All that soft, bare skin, her nipples hard and calling to him, her body smelling like fresh peaches once more. The bedside lamp made a halo of her afro. Never mind. There was no danger, only certainty, he realized, as his dick started to harden all over again.
But he didn’t look away.
Ada scooted down toward him, reclining on her side to face him. She paused for a second to let him look at her — and to look at him — before moving closer. They were so damn close that he could feel the heat of her surrounding him. She bent her leg, and her knee grazed the tip of his dick.
Alonzo swallowed a groan.
She reached out and dragged the tips of her nails through his chest hair. “I want a man who’ll sing to me on our wedding day,” she whispered.
“How you gon’ get married if you don’t want to date?”
“Don’t get caught up on the details. I want a brotha,” she continued, her nails moving down his ribs and stomach, “who’s gonna memorize my favorite song and hum it for me when I’m sad.” Her palm flattened against his lower stomach. His dick was practically jumping, trying to get closer to her hand.
Ada didn’t move any faster. It was torture, but he’d endure it.
Alonzo lifted his own hand to stroke her cheek with his thumb. Ada closed her eyes and sucked her bottom lip into her mouth as her fingers slipped into his underwear.
“That’s not asking for much,” he said in a strangled whisper. “Not enough if you ask me.”
“You think so?” Her hand circled the length of his shaft, and she began to stroke him in a loose, teasing grip.
His thumb moved toward her mouth, and her lips parted for him.
“I think when you meet the right man, he should give you everything you want just as soon as you ask, maybe even before.”
She opened her eyes. “What if he can’t sing? Should I ask him to learn?”
Alonzo’s mouth curved into a smile, a soft moan escaping from his mouth. He pressed his thumb against her bottom lip. “I bet he’d try.”
“Hmm.” She pressed her lips together around his digit. He felt the tip of her tongue against his nail. She tightened her grip around him and stroked him harder. Faster.
“Goddamn,” he breathed.
Ada began to suckle his finger as she scooted closer. She pushed him onto his back and used her free hand to pull his underwear down his hips just enough to free his dick so she could stroke him easily.
“Fuck,” he sighed, closing his eyes, trying to breathe through this moment, so he didn’t embarrass himself and come too soon.
She sucked intently on his finger once more before pushing his hand aside. Ada threw her leg over his lap with a sigh. She hovered above him with a hungry smile on her face.
When he looked between their bodies, he saw one of her delicate hands still cradling his shaft and the other pulling her underwear aside. She aimed the wet tip of his dick toward the warm cleft between her legs. He groaned and held his breath, waiting for her to sink down his length, but she didn’t. Of course, she didn’t. That would be too easy, and if there was one thing he was learning about Ada, it was that easy was not the name of her game.
But worth it absolutely was.
He fisted the blanket with one hand and cupped her breast roughly with the other. He didn’t trust himself to hold her waist for fear he’d try to take over, but he couldn’t help but touch her. He needed to touch her.
His thumb brushed her nipple as she moved his dick over her clit. She groaned. He shimmied up the bed, moving his dick through her folds. They groaned together at that contact and then focused, moving together to glide against one another.
“I read the obituary you wrote about Sam Cooke,” she said out of nowhere.
Alonzo blinked, trying to follow the path of this conversation as it led from her pussy to that sad essay. He couldn’t. “You did?”
She stroked the length of him and shifted her hips, rubbing herself up and down his length, but refused to let him inside. She was gorgeously maddening.
“H-how’d you find it?”
She shook her head. “Not today, but I thought I’d recognized your name when Ed told me you’d be filling in for Stu. I knew it was familiar, but I couldn’t figure out where I heard it. And then today, I finally realized.”
“Because you’d read my other piece.” He was wet with her arousal and struggling to speak.
“I didn’t just read that obit. I told everybody I knew to read it. I didn’t know who you were, but I knew then that you were gonna be the next best music critic. One of us to write about us.”
Alonzo was still blinking in confusion, some mixture of awe, embarrassment, and pride warring in his chest even as lust stripped him down to the bone. “Why are you telling me this now?” he asked, rolling her nipple between his fingers.
A small moan fell from her lips. “I think you’re soft.”
“Soft isn’t really the word I’d use in this moment,” he quipped, mostly to hide the sting he felt from that rebuke.
Ada pushed his hand from her breast and leaned toward the bedside table. One of her nipples brushed his lips, and he licked it with the flat of his tongue. Her hand tightened around him again. She sat up straight, and he strained to keep his mouth on her for as long as possible. But then he was pressing his head back into the mattress because if it had felt good for her to watch him put on a condom, it was even better to have her do it herself.
“My goodness,” he groaned.
Ada lifted from his thighs and finally — dear Lord in heaven, finally — began to lower her hips and let him inside her again.
He struggled to keep his eyes open to watch her, but he was thoroughly excited by the view.
Her breath was labored when she spoke again. “When I first read that obituary, I remember thinking, here was a man who’s in touch with himself. He couldn’t be real. But now I’ve met you, and I’ll be damned if you ain’t exactly what I thought you were. You’re too damn nice, too damn nervous, and so damn soft.”
Again, Alonzo wanted her to clarify what she meant because he felt harder than ever now that she was shifting her hips, riding him in slow, torturous circles. He couldn’t concentrate on the song on the radio, but vaguely, he realized that she was moving in time with the beat, and that made him fall for her just a little bit more.
“I’m not soft,” he ground out, fingers sinking into the blanket again.
She leaned forward, pressing her chest to his and bracing herself on the mattress as she started to ride him faster and harder. “What I’m saying, Alonzo Reid, is maybe you have gifts that are more important than singing, but you’re too damn nice to realize it.”
“You think?” he asked, lifting his hips, desperate to feel the warm friction of her.
“It’s a possibility,” she gasped, grinding down onto him. “So what else are you good at?” Her eyes fluttered closed for a second, and she groaned a sigh.
“Let me show you,” he whispered against her lips, and he licked at her smile.
Finally, he grabbed her about the waist and lifted her up his body until her wet sex was covering his mouth.
“Oh my God,” she groaned as his tongue parted her lips.
She smashed one hand into his small afro, gripping his hair tight to keep his mouth exactly where it was. As if he had any plans to leave.
Ada’s thighs clenched together, covering his ears. For a man who loved music and sound, the new kind of racket that came between Ada’s thighs was something like a revelation. There was no quiet. There was his own pulse, her filtered screams. He watched her enjoy the pleasure she took from him. He tasted her in unhurried swipes followed by soft and then hard suction. Wherever he could get his lips and tongue, he licked and suckled and devoured. When she shivered, he sucked harder. When she cried out to Jesus, he angled his chin to rub her somewhere new. He dug his hands into the soft flesh of her hips. And when she came, wet and cursing and hissing and over and over again, his name was on Ada’s tongue, just like her taste was on his.
Alonzo never learned to sing on key, but over the next thirty-eight years, every time Ada was sad, he put on some Teddy Pendergrass and buried his face between her legs.
Anything to make her shudder and smile and come like she had the weekend they met.