I call Evan’s office first thing, and I’m told he’s out of the office. When I leave a message, to call me, the person on the phone tells me she’s sure he’d want to hear from me and asks if it’s okay if she passes on my message for him to call me personally.
For the first time, ever, it makes my heart race, sharp, painfully, to talk to him, but he tells me he’ll meet me for lunch.
It’s early, so I have to occupy myself until then, and since I’ve turned over a new snowflake, I decide to leave the house for the entire morning, before meeting Evan for lunch.
So I am crunching over the salted sidewalks in a little neighborhood between mine and campus where all the good shopping and eating is, and I am buying Christmas presents to send to friends, and to have ready for my mom when she comes on Christmas Day, and you can already feel the snow in the air, ready to fall.
It’s perfect, and finding a beaded curtain for my mom made with hundreds of teeny mirrors and SOMEBODY IN OHIO LOVES ME T-shirts for my friends and letterpress stationery for Melissa, who’s obsessed with all things handmade, makes my whole world feel a little bigger, in a not-scary way.
Plus, the day is sunny, the drifts of snow extrawhite where they pile up away from the street, and the city’s decorations are so pretty.
Then I find the coffee shop Bob recommended to me a million years ago, that I told Evan to meet me at, called Shelby’s House of Sprouts and it reminds me of home—equal parts caffeine and things organic and aggressively wholesome.
I pile all my shopping bags around my feet and sit down with a soup-bowl-sized mug of coffee and a scone as big as my head and all I am missing is a view of Puget Sound and my mom scribbling lines of poetry into her notebook.
“You found it,” says the voice at my table and then I remember, suddenly, that it wasn’t Bob who recommended this place to me.
Evan recommended this place to me.
I look at him, and he’s holding a bag from the bookstore, and his coat, and a giant mug of coffee, and somehow, a plate with a sandwich.
I hadn’t even seen him come in—the only table free is blocked from the rest of the coffee shop by a divider of houseplants.
“Okay.” I sigh. “You can sit.”
He smiles. “That’s good,” he says. “Because you’re at my table.”
He sits, all arms and legs and that weird grace he has that has lately made me want to lick some part of him, any part of him.
“You’re not going to believe me, but I thought it was someone from my lab that had told me to check this place out.”
He arranged his sandwich plate and mug for what seemed like a long time before he looked up at me. “Actually, I do believe you.”
“Oh.” I watch him bite into a sandwich that looked like a Seattle shade garden between two pieces of bread. He watches me watch him while he chews. “Why do you believe me?”
“Why do I believe that you’d think that someplace you’d like to go was recommended to you by someone you trust?”
“Oh. Right.”
“Yeah. But do you like this place?”
“I do.”
“I thought you might. It seems like something you’d find back home in Seattle.”
Why is he so nice? It makes it difficult to get him to do things that aren’t so nice. With my mind, I mean.
“I’m sorry, I am. Thank you for meeting me here.”
“You’re not going to believe me,” he says, “but it doesn’t bother me at all that you’d forget I recommended this place. We’ve had a long way around and I’m really glad you called.” He takes a big bite of his sandwich.
I watch him chewing, trying to figure out if this is one of his Yoda-like moments, where he means to preoccupy me with one thing and then I end up having an epiphany about another.
“Also,” he says, “I feel like I should apologize to you.”
“What for? No, not at all. Actually—”
“No, I just should have made it more clear, yesterday, when I came to see you, that I was actually completely unable to be your OT, and—”
“Right, no, that’s what I’m trying to say. I fucked that up. I can’t”—I look up at the pressed-tin ceiling, blushing, no doubt—“ask you to work with me, not like that, when the thing is that I like you. And you probably like me? But if not, it’s fine because—”
“Yes, it’s fine. That’s fine. That’s better than fine, Jenny.”
I look closely at him. He looks like he usually does, except he is wearing a zip-up hoodie, which is good, I can’t handle another one of his T-shirts, and his hair is possibly messier. He’s abandoned his lunch and brings his fist to his mouth while he looks back at me.
“The kissing thing?” I ask. “Is it—”
“More like, the wanting to do more than kissing thing. And yeah, that’s better than fine, too. More than it should have been.”
“Oh.”
“Yep.”
“We haven’t actually kissed, though.” I make myself keep looking at him, even though the ohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod part of my brain is sort of dialed to eleventy billion.
He looks at me in this really intense kind of way and then leans over, close. Everything is live, humming.
“No. We haven’t. We haven’t really kissed. My mouth’s only just touched. Here, and here.” He touches my forehead and temple with his thumb.
Ngh.
“Did we,” I start, “take the other kind of kissing and stuff off the table? I mean, in a total sort of way?” My voice sounds really strange, and if he weren’t Evan, weren’t open, honest, didn’t look at me like that, like I’m just the best thing, it would be harder to look at him, meet his eyes.
“Kind of. I keep remembering what your hair smells like, though. I think I’m going to take it back.”
“Take what back?” The not kissing? Because, if he leans in a little more, I am in favor. I am in favor of that hair curling at his temple and that scruff on his neck. I am in favor of his lower lip, the chap on it from the cold air. “My apology. For wanting to do more than kiss you.”
“You didn’t actually apologize.” I lean closer, and feel myself drop, helpless, into that force field that electrifies around a person you’re going to kiss.
“Then I’m not going to.”
“What about later?” I meet his eyes then, dead-on. My heart chokes and slows down, pushing and pushing the blood to my skin.
It’s been so long since I’ve felt this way, like I could let go, let my lower brain steer things for a while.
Let a man do anything he wanted, let him look at me however he’d like to, get all far gone and lost, a body against mine, rough hair, slick penetration.
One small adjustment of the fine focus of my life and there he is—blue eyes, hot skin.
“I’m worried about later,” his voice is lower, softer. “I have all these new reasons to worry about later, when it comes to us. There is probably a lot of apologizing to be done later.” Then he blows out a huge breath, like he doesn’t exactly want to be talking about any of this.
“Wait.” I pull back a little, just enough to think, but my voice stays low.
“Yeah?”
“This is completely stupid. I mean, I’m not stupid, I don’t think. I’m fiercely intelligent. That’s a true fact. Also, I get it. It’s not right for us to be not kissing and working on therapy plans together. Except, that now, I want to work on therapy plans and I also want to do all the not-kissing stuff that’s really just a lot of kissing.”
He smiles at me. “You make it sound pretty simple.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is.” I don’t want to admit that, actually, it doesn’t feel precisely simple. I have been kind of a poor judge of simple, lately.
“I really want it to be simple,” he says, and looks worried. But then, he looks down for a moment, and when he looks at me again, he says, “You’re beautiful” in a voice that has dropped his wryness and is instead, just, I don’t know.
Boy voice.
Boy you kind of like voice.
Low and scratchy, or something.
“Crazy-smart, too,” he says, almost against my mouth. “I could listen to you talk about your research all day. And sometimes, I can tell you know how to enjoy things, and have fun, and sometimes, you kiss me at bus stops.”
I’m just watching him speak, how he’s not looking away or fidgeting, now. We’re just this girl and this boy, and our table is a little too private, and our knees are touching, and so are our hands, and our faces are close.
Then he says, “Say something, say something else,” but he smiles, like he knows this negotiation between us, before we do something more than almost kiss, is almost the best part.
“Will you get in trouble?” I can’t believe I just said that.
My question swoops through me, live.
It’s not what I meant to ask, exactly.
But as soon as I do, both of us lean in a little more.
He smiles, he’s so close I can imagine that smile against my mouth. “You should know I already talked to my supervisor about you. Before I even went to the lab with you, that day.”
“Oh.”
“Before we even did that exercise in the lobby.”
Oh.
“I talked to her because I was pretty sure I was going to kiss you sooner rather than later.”
“That is”—I take a breath—“a really strange reaction to a difficult client.”
“It’s probably not the difficult-client part that got me thinking about kissing, exactly.” He puts his hand over mine on the table, and I feel it between my legs, over my thighs.
It starts to ache when he traces my knuckles. “Do you remember the day you came in with that huge strawberry milk shake?”
“It was a smoothie, and I think it was pomegranate.” I don’t even know if I’m speaking out loud, it’s all I can do not to let my eyes roll to the back of my head from all this delicious anticipation.
“There was like three gallons of whatever it was.”
“You would know, since all of it ended up in your lap.”
“You were using that giant cup to kind of gesture at me, while you yelled about night-vision goggles.”
“I don’t remember yelling, exactly.” I think I was kind of yelling.
I had just failed a test concerning my night blindness that put me in a more serious category for my diagnosis, and he had completely gone after using the night-vision glasses, which were awkward and pinchy and huge and I decided I would just never go anywhere in the dark, basically.
“You were yelling. And then the lid came off your drink, and then I was dripping with cold, pink goo.”
“Yeah. Not one of my finer moments.”
He strums over my knuckles and the lust is just bolting right through my middle, hard and sweet.
“Except, that it was. Because you went from yelling to helping, and laughing at yourself and you were even tearing pages out of this lab book from your bag to try to clean up the smoothie and it was like you didn’t even know where you were rubbing. I realized that even though this was serious, your pain and your diagnosis, you didn’t take yourself seriously. In the best way, I mean. There was this incredible, massive grief and you still drank giant pink smoothies and yelled and tried to be helpful and kind. Not like you were noble, just like”—he looked up to find the words—“you were the kind of person that was nice to have around, in this life, in this fucked-up life, in general. The kind of person that made everything mostly bearable.
“After that is when I talked to my supervisor.”
I smile, let myself enjoy really looking into his eyes. “I totally realized later that I had been rubbing lab graphs on your junk and it took three beers before I was over it”—I captured his finger with my thumb—“by the way.”
We sat like that, my thumb over his finger, looking down at our hands. Then his other hand is under my jaw, and he tips my face up to look at him.
His big hand at my cheek, his thumb under my jaw—God. I let myself blink slowly, to recover, to enjoy the lush high coming over me.
“I really want to kiss you,” he says.
None of the kisses in my experience have enjoyed so much premeditation, and I think all this talking about almost kisses and wanting to kiss someone has made everything completely unbearable, in a way that feels like nothing, nothing he could do to me could relieve the ache.
He’ll try and try and I’ll just ache more.
I can’t help looking at his mouth, which is in one of those almost smiles, but now I can see the curve under his lower lip and the patch of bristles there and God, that would feel so amazing against my tongue if I just licked right over that lip, halfway into those bristles with one of those kisses that’s about tasting and trying not to bite and biting a little, anyway.
“I want to kiss you more, when you look like that,” he whispers.
“You have this great mouth,” my horniness says.
“You almost killed me in your lab locker room.”
“Yeah? Was it my clogs? The safety goggles?”
“Yes.”
I laugh, and so he looks at my mouth, again, and then he leans the rest of the way over and I was wrong about his mouth, because it doesn’t feel amazing, it feels like I’m being rubbed with heat from something deeply radiant, magnetized.
The physical yearning is intense, wrong, almost, if wrong is exactly what you want to be doing, all the time.
His hand on my jaw is holding tight, hard, and it’s insane because the way he touches me usually are these light touches, these directive touches to politely guide me through a door or an activity, or get my attention.
But his hand is honestly holding on to me, his fingertips are into my hair, almost pulling it, his thumb is pressing under my chin, and he knows where he wants me, which is close, and at an angle so he can get his mouth over mine, and then I finally breathe, I think, because it’s his tongue I feel next on the inside of my lower lip and then I need to reach up and hold on to him, too.
“Jenny,” he whispers, when my hand is around his nape, but that’s all he says before he kisses me again, and you know how tongue kissing is sometimes all you can think about with a guy, but then you’re kissing and can’t work out how to get it started?
With Evan, I don’t even realize how deep we’re kissing, it’s just simple and hungry and dirty because it’s Evan.
It’s Evan with both his hands bracketing my face.
It’s Evan whose mouth is a little rough with mine, and like he wants to be rougher, like he wants to hold me a little too tight, and I want him to, with one of my hands over his on my face, and my other tangled in his messy hair, and let myself get soft and pull him closer.
I feel his grunt in my mouth, and fuck, fuck he rakes his hand into my hair all the way and he pulls it, hard, I think he’s fisting it, and he sucks in my lip and bites it while he pulls, greedy for me, hot for me, and I feel another sound in his throat, so low I can’t hear it, and every time he comes for my mouth between breaths he gets me where he wants me by that fist in my hair, the sting washing tight, icy-hot goose bumps over my spine, into the crease of my ass, my God, and then pulsing with dark, dark pins and needles all through the slick swollen mess of myself, my clit.
It’s a kiss that isn’t supposed to happen and he isn’t supposed to take, and so it tastes so good, it’s spiked, it’s drugged, and I’m messed up, I’m so messed up, I want to bite, too, but it’s better just to get fucked on this burn, this shot of something so ill-advised that it doesn’t let you breathe until it’s soaked through your middle, hot.
He pulls away to pant against my mouth, his forehead against mine, and I realize he’s squeezing my nape, keeping me right where I am.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he says.
“My house,” I tell him. “Come home with me.”
* * *
We’re walking along the sidewalk with all the shoppers, kind of fast, and he’s got all of my bags hung on one arm so his other hand is free to lace through mine.
It’s unreal. This is unreal, the cold and the shoppers walking all around us, and the glittery window displays, and his big hand all through mine, his arm pressed into my side, his glances in my direction that make his almost smile look completely different. Because it is promising something, to me, Jenny Wright.
And I think that smile always has been promising me something, but I was too wrapped up in my own sadness to see it.
So it makes sense, I think, that seeing this promise cracks through my sadness, and it makes sense that I feel like I am in the middle of some kind of unreality, because my entire reality lately has been to be sad. Ohio, for me, has been a sad place. Even with my lab and ESEM—because of my diagnosis, maybe especially with my lab and ESEM. I finally achieved what might get taken away.
This doesn’t feel sad. His kiss didn’t feel sad. The way we’re walking, breathless, the taste of our kiss still in our mouths, is not sad.
It’s not because I need Evan, either.
I need myself.
Kissing Evan is an entirely unexpected bonus: in fact, Evan is an entirely unexpected bonus. The fact of his enjoyment of so many ordinary-life things—a woman who could laugh off dumping a smoothie in a man’s lap, pratfalls, simple science, snow.
He’s a man who sees this huge big picture, the entire view, and takes it in.
I feel the entire promise of the holiday, actually, the fresh newness of the year as the old one goes away. How the white blanket of snow isn’t really concealing but tucking everything in to sleep, to get rest, to be made new.
I realize, too, that the only times I let myself really feel the full scope of my sadness was with Evan. He’s seen my anger, too. When I trip over chairs or bump into walls, it’s not just that he knows why, it’s that when it’s him that sees me stumble, I let myself kick the chair and the wall back and swear and otherwise lose my shit.
I dumped that smoothie on him during our third session, and he had already seen all of this, and yet he talked to his supervisor about my potential irresistibility.
Which meant he saw something that all my sadness had been concealing. The Jenny that’s always been Jenny sleeping underneath, and maybe getting stronger, or at least resting to face what was ahead.
I squeeze his hand, and he squeezes back, so certain and immediate it takes my breath away.
I hated therapy, but I never missed a session. I thought I hated Evan, but I never asked for another therapist. I couldn’t tell my mom that to keep myself from crying to sleep every night I was having a cyberaffair with the former tenant of my apartment, but Evan, while maybe he didn’t know precisely that, he knew that I cried. Knew that I spent too much time sitting alone in the dark.
Knew that what I was most afraid of was not the darkness of the whole world, but the darkness covering the small things, that it was the small things that made up my whole life.
He gets the big things.
Confronts them.
He stops at his van and lets me in, and then runs around to the other side. When he’s in his seat, and the packages dumped between us, and the door’s closed, he turns toward me.
For a moment, maybe I take a breath, but just one.
He’s looking at me, all over, not in my eyes.
I am wearing my giant green coat, but the way he’s looking at my body my coat seems to have burst into flames and I am actually naked, framed in fire.
Then he grabs my hand and pulls me to lurch after him into the bench seat directly behind the captain’s chairs. I start to settle next to him, trying not to tangle myself in my own legs, then he turns to face me, and reaches across and grabs my thigh, right by my butt, and then he freaking jerks me around with one of his long arms and big hands into his lap.
I am straddling Evan Carlisle, and he yanks on my coat until we’re chest to chest, and then he’s unsnapping my coat, watching my face.
“Okay,” he says, “just so we’re clear, I’m no longer your occupational therapist.”
“Huh, but aren’t you the best one?” He widens his thighs, and I notch close. My hotness pressed against him makes my eyes feel heavy.
He puts his hands over the tops of my thighs to adjust me on his lap, squeezing, hard, digging his fingertips in, watching his hands, and it feels so good, and unexpected, and I realize it’s been so long since I’ve felt the simple pleasure of human touch, let alone this insane agony of Evan’s unhesitating hands.
He slides off my coat.
“Tell me what you want.”
We’re both tall, so in his lap, we’re pretty much eye to eye. The bow of his top lip is swollen from my mouth, his blue eyes are bright and looking over my face. He has been so careful with me.
“I want you to do exactly what you’re thinking.”
His eyes rest in mine. I can’t breathe, hardly. “I’m thinking some pretty bad things.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He drags the heels of his hands up my thighs until he has his hands around my hips. I am not a small woman, but the way he presses his thumbs in, on either side of my fly, makes me feel like he’s determined to get his hands on every possible inch.
“How can a nice guy like you think bad things?”
“How can I not when you look like you do? When you’re so fucking smart? The things I wanted to do to you watching you prepare that slide in your lab, God. I think I broke something.”
I have to close my eyes for a minute.
I’m in his lap, his hot hands around my hips, and I feel the burn of tears in the sides of my nose, in a painful thickness in my throat.
I open them, to look at him. It’s hard to look at him. He’s breathing hard, he’s watching me, he’s risking, for me.
So a tear falls, so what? He’s seen it all, already. It seems completely right that he should see me unsnap his coat while tears fall, while my hips rock in his hands, while my breath hitches.
He lets go so I can slide his coat from his arms.
Then I unzip his hoodie, take that away from his body.
Then I pull my sweater over my head and close my eyes again because he whispers, God, Jenny.
The van is cool, but the air just around our bodies, in our thin T-shirts, is warm.
I kiss him once over his lower lip, chaste and lingering, then I brace my hands on the seatback at his shoulders and close my eyes and kiss his neck, just under his ear.
His hands move to my back, as he takes this big breath.
“Tell me what you want to do with me,” I whisper.
“Your mouth,” he says. “I want more of that.”
I want to feel the skin of his neck against my tongue but after the undressing, I suddenly feel a teeny tiny bit shy, so I smooth my hands over his cheeks and kiss him with my eyes closed.
Inside the van, our breath is loud, the sounds of our kissing, too.
He keeps his hands on my shoulders, except when he lets go to gather my hair where it has fallen over our faces and to drape it over my shoulder, like he needs a little room to do this, to kiss me.
Every time his mouth moves over mine, every time our tongues touch, I feel like I’m getting squeezed tight all over and need to escape by rubbing all over him.
I make myself keep my hands on his face, his neck, soft and light, meet his kisses, his mouth as softly as I can stand it.
I want this to last.
The heat of him, those shivery moments where he moves my hair aside so gently, the sound of his breath almost voiced in his throat.
We open our eyes, sometimes, between kisses, and every time we look at each other, he gives me that almost smile that I realize, now, was always, always, for me, and disguised his thoughts of touching me, just like this.
Underneath that smile are his hands, restless over the places he’s letting himself touch me.
Underneath we are stirring, tangling, waiting.
Evan gets his hands around my hips again, the same kind of grab that puts a big black line between then and now. He should get a job getting his hands around a woman because he does it all serious and professional, like he’s competing for the best way to hold a woman and showing everyone that he knows we like it when hands press and shape and fingers dig and thumbs circle.
I open my eyes, and catch his again, and that’s so hot, I think because by looking at each other, we have to admit what we’re doing. We’ve caught each other doing something kind of dirty, but neither one of us is stopping.
In fact, I raise a little and move my hips closer, until he closes his eyes because it feels so good. I have to close my eyes because it feels so good.
I have to let him hold on to me because kissing him and straddling him finally breaks something inside me and all I want to do is move on him, against him, even though I’m keeping my kisses sweet, just pressing them on all the places I’ve been looking at for so long—his worried eyebrows, his dark whiskers, his smiling mouth.
Then his neck, where I end up just resting my face because he smells good and I’m breathing hard, and my heart is pounding between my legs.
He slides his hands under my T-shirt, to rest against my bare lower back, and God, I can feel his hands shaking, and I involuntarily push back a little, a reaction to the skin on skin, and he presses back, guiding my movement, and then we go still because, fuck, this is dry humping, tipping my hips up and back like that.
“Wait,” he whispers, and then he tips his own hips up while driving me into a new position with his hands at my waist; he arranges something about how he’s sitting.
Then, he presses against my back again, and now I feel him, so hard and so thick inside his jeans; I feel him against where it seems like the entire pulse of my body has gone.
I put my arms all the way around his shoulders, rest my cheek against his, and let my hips go loose, let myself move how I want to.
It makes my eyes roll, it makes my body restless, it makes my breasts feel tight and heavy, and my arms and legs feel light, almost disconnected.
It makes me feel so swollen between my legs that I start to take slow breaths; I still want to draw this out, and if I don’t think about how I am breathing, I’ll stop thinking, entirely, and come all over him.
“Jenny?”
I try to answer, but answering would change how I am breathing.
And even though he’s so hard and his hands are digging into my spine so tight, his showing me, silently, how turned on he is makes him seem so vulnerable, like he wants me to tell him what to do, for once.
Like he doesn’t know what to do about it but tell me, like he told me I was beautiful, like he told his boss he wanted me, like he doesn’t even know what to do except keep himself in check because he’s been keeping himself in check for so long.
I don’t think, either, given his confidence in his work, his unstoppable competence, that he’s very used to not knowing what to do.
I shift against him and his hands clench into fists at my back.
He does know what he wants, though.
So now I’m grinning, because I just—feel like myself, like Jenny who is a little crazy about someone and loves holding people and could stand to lose a little time to kissing and coming and smiling with a man who thinks I’m beautiful.
Who is beautiful.
Outside the van, all the sounds of the street are muffled. The windows are tinted and it’s started to snow again, so it feels like we’re the whole world, just us, and it’s even warm enough, because we’ve gotten so hot.
When I kiss up his neck, over his jaw, he starts to buck, a little, but then stills, so I grind back, and do it again because I’ll die if I don’t.
And I want him to know it’s okay.
What we’re doing here, I want it, too.
Then his hands are on my ass, and I’m thinking that’s where he wanted them this whole time, because he is very serious about groping my butt, tracing the seam of my jeans as far as he can reach, kneading me and pushing me against him while he pushes up, just a little.
“Pull your hair back,” he whispers.
I toss it over my shoulder, and then shiver when he starts kissing my throat while moving us together with his hands.
Then I feel his big hands slide under the gap of the waistband in my jeans, and he scratches his nails, a little, over just the tops of each cheek. I shiver.
“Unfasten your jeans.”
I lean up to look at him.
“I want to touch you,” he says, “but I don’t—”
Then I slide my hands down over his chest, and fumble a little at my button-fly. He watches me, his hands moving in little circles over my skin, and as soon as I unbutton enough that I make my tight jeans slack, he’s sliding his hands down.
He hesitates at the lace band of my panties, so I put my thumb on his chin and kiss him, breathe into him, touch my tongue against his.
Even breathing hard, his hips meeting mine, he still has his strange graceless grace. His body feels big against mine, but every time he moves in the bench seat, another awkward part of me finds a place to rest on him, until we have this rhythm, my loosened jeans gliding along his erection, our soft T-shirts bunching, my arms crossed behind his head, our mouths kissing, our throats humming.
When he sweeps over both cheeks of my ass, first it’s so deliciously gentle, and I get that warm, pin-prickle sensation all over the skin of my back, over the skin he’s exploring, all the way over my thighs.
Then he says my name and spreads me with both hands while pushing me against him. He feels between, skidding through sweat there, his fingers so, so soft, not hesitant, teasing. Teasing just around there, kicking up such impossible, dirty, unexpected pleasure, my brain goes dark.
I still, and hold my breath, bury my face in his neck, the rich, perfect pin prickles get intense, almost like something I could hear, and they’re washing over me, hot, sharp, millions of them, while he explores me, his face in my neck, his heart pounding against my chest.
It feels so good, and I want to keep still but all this sensation is gathering and distracting me so I kind of wallow all over him, to feel his warm body all along mine, and I push my ass up into his hands, and for a moment, one of those hands travels low, finds me wet, so obviously swollen for him that his firm, slippery touch makes me moan and push and feel like begging.
“Evan, Evan,” is how I beg, then his hands are stroking up, over the curve of my sensitized bottom, back over the loosened seat of my jeans where he squeezes, like he’s thanking me for letting him turn me on beyond all possible reason.
“You’re so beautiful,” he says, and I am glad his voice is all fucked up and when he says it his hips bump up, hard, into mine, and I’m glad, too, that the grip of his hands gets too tight on my ass, on my hips, because I want his awkward, unchecked desire rubbing against me.
My thighs are shaking, hot, and so he thrusts against me harder, and he feels even bigger, or maybe it’s that I’m so swollen—so wet I’m sliding against my underwear with these explicit little yanks in the opposite direction of our hips.
It’s not quite enough.
I grab his face again and let us kiss all sloppy, our tongues coaxing, wanting, and that makes it all better and even worse.
His arms come up all the way around me, trace my spine, try to slide under my tight bra strap.
“Here,” I say, and I reach back and unhook the little row of hooks because he doesn’t look like he could manage the structural engineering of a full-figured bra in his current state. He watches me, flushed, while his hands swoop over my skin where my bra is releasing from my back and ribs.
His big hands need no help finding my breasts, and I have to breathe instead of kiss, or I’ll die.
He plays with the sore dents the underwire and straps have left, circling over them while I watch him watch the movements of his hands under my shirt.
Then the cups ease up over my breasts, kind of freeing them all at once with a bounce. It feels good, one step closer to easing this ache.
“Jesus,” he whispers, low and rough, and again, “Jesus,” for emphasis, I think, and then, “How do you like to be touched here? Like this?” He brushes, hardly brushes, over my nipples and I make some kind of sound and I can’t help it, I reach up and under and follow his hands and fingers to feel what he’s doing, because it’s almost a little much.
But could be a little more.
My hands over his have pushed my T-shirt up and my breasts are bared, and even his big hands can’t hold them all, but he is trying, with that almost smile on his mouth, and if I weren’t so crazy-insane with almost coming, I would laugh.
“Like this,” I say, but my voice is all weird as I show him he can press and pinch harder, and he says, “Yeah, let me,” and he rolls both my nipples at once and I put my fingers in my mouth because it looks so good and feels so good I need to bite something, suck something.
“Fuck, Jenny,” and our eyes meet. He’s still pulling, firm and slow, at my nipples, in time to how my hips have started to move, which is a little faster, with intent.
I pull my fingers from my mouth and put my lips at his collarbone pulling aside the neckband so I can taste his skin. “Don’t stop,” I tell him.
“Not ever,” and the way he says it makes me ruck up his T-shirt, I need to feel his skin on my skin, and he’s hot, his muscles tight, when I fit a hand between us, the back of my hand slides through sweat on his belly. I hold on to his nape with the other hand, we’re past kissing, so air hungry, but our mouths at each other’s neck still tasting between our gasps.
I grasp him, and his hands still and then tighten around my breasts. I turn my hand to press where I need to, where we’re rubbing tight together, and he’s hot and hard along my knuckles, and I’m so sensitive, even through jeans, I shudder.
“Yeah,” he says, and it should be so awkward, dry humping, my hand helping us both, his hands softly thumbing my nipples while his fingers play with the goose bumps on my breast, now trying to kiss between breaths like an army is at our door, but it’s beautiful.
We’re beautiful.
This is what was always underneath.
What was over us, concealing, was beautiful in its way—dramatic and endless feeling.
But what’s underneath are the matchbox cars you forgot you left in the grass, the wild violets, the chalky seashells ringing the flowerbeds.
I always love the small things, the wild things, the things that change and adapt, the things you don’t see at first but were always there.
The things I could lose, the things that are most precious and dear and telling.
I come away from our kiss again and rest my forehead on his shoulder. I’m nearly there, and I pull up on his T-shirt more, want him as exposed as I feel.
There’s a tattoo on his rib, on his side.
A black, lowercase f. A number next to it.
I buck out of rhythm, shock like a riptide of cold blood through the chambers of my heart, but I’m already nearly there, his mouth and his hands and our friction are finally enough. “Open your eyes,” I stutter, and he does, and I look and look, desperate, even on the very worst edge of coming all over him, and he looks back, sees something, maybe some of my utter incomprehension, and we try to keep looking at each other, until we can’t, because it’s too good, too awful, because it’s all come to the surface.
I pant against him.
The look on his face when he held C’s picture.
His picture. Evan’s picture.
You’re so beautiful, C wrote to me last night, Evan wrote to me last night, after I sent him my picture.
I keep myself from tracing that f.
I come, shuddering, my arms around him, looking at him, bewildered.
Trying to understand.
Trying to trust my body as it falls.
My heart, beating painfully out of time.
This man I believed never withheld a thing from me.
Now we’re just holding each other, supertight, I let him hold me.
He doesn’t know he’s comforting me.
The snow’s picked up, I can tell even through the fog on the dark windows. Even when I ease next to him, his arms are tight.
We watch the snow accumulate over the windshield, one snowflake at a time.