BRENDAN HAD HIS HAND between Emily’s legs as she drove them back to her place in Hale. She nearly crashed twenty-six times on the four mile drive. He wouldn’t let the passion come at her hard enough to allow her to climax; it was just enough to tease her.
Over the course of the following months, Emily would learn that Brendan loved to sexually tease.
Laughing about something or other as they approached her front door, Emily fidgeted with her house keys as Brendan held her arousal in a tight grasp from behind her. She closed her eyes as his surreal scent gained on her. Her head unconsciously tilted backwards. It was starting to annoy her; she couldn’t pinpoint it.
His fingernails painted lines of red up the sides of her legs as he deliberately lifted the bottom of her dress and gripped her hips. Her neck was hot beneath the warmth of his tongue.
Are you going to open the door? he whispered in her ear.
Um . . . she whimpered.
She miraculously got the door open.
Their clothes and shoes branded a trail from the living room down the hallway to Emily’s bedroom. She had finally managed to take the photos of her and Seth down, and felt, in the moments she was wrapped into Bren like a shiny gift, that she had nothing to hide. It was an odd concept to her, but that’s not to say she didn’t like it.
If someone were to follow their breaths and look in from the outside world, they would find Emily on top of Brendan in a halfway upright position, one of his hands gripping her hip and the other around her neck. When he let go of her hip and steadily ran his fingertip up the arch of her foot, her body convulsed as the most intense orgasm conquered her. She collapsed onto him with a smack, and he supersonically flipped her over and gave her three more. He disappeared into the bathroom for some indeterminable amount of time—it could have been three seconds or three hours—and through the cell her orgasmic prison kept her senses in, she didn’t see or hear him return. She would have fallen asleep like that, never knowing or caring if Brendan had or would ever return to her, but then his warm arms wrapped around her, and she was gently pulled from her reverie. She didn’t open her eyes. After her initial bewilderment wore off, a serene swell of air escaped her, and her existence evanesced into him.
And she slept. She slept in Brendan’s arms for thirteen hours.
***
His hand was in her hair, massaging her head, his arm holding her tight against him, as she slept with her breaths in the crook of his neck. He hadn’t been intentionally trying to wake her so he could go home. He was without his car after all, but he could have called one of his friends hours ago if that’s what he really wanted. He hadn’t been trying to wake her for any specific reason—he felt sort of guilty; he’d never seen any person sleep so peacefully except maybe himself—but the truth was that Emily loved to be touched. She went around acting like that was not the case, refusing hugs from people and ruling personal space, but she loved it. It’s why their sex was so good, he decided. It was his hard touch and his ubiquitous presence that made her come so fervently, and the very reality that the electric sensation of his hands set her off (more than once in a night) is what set him off. He guessed maybe that indirectly made him a narcissist, but he didn’t fucking care.
Brendan had fucked a lot of women over the course of his manhood. He’d be lying to himself and everyone else if he said that women didn’t flock to him, though he didn’t know why. But never like this. If his humanly flawed body would allow it, he would fuck the shit out of Emily for days. It wasn’t her body or her aesthetically pleasing face or her dripping vagina, necessarily, but the reaction she gave. It was her reaction to him that was the reason he was here right now. She was so sexy, and he couldn’t get enough of it or her. He didn’t know if it—this—would ever be enough.
When Brendan looked back at the moment that he was watching Emily sleep as if he were some creepy dude from a book that Emily may or may not have liked to read, he would have liked to say that she woke gently, blinking her eyes open and smiling under the afternoon light that snuck through the blinds, but that’s just not what happened. She woke with a start, her body convulsing in his arms. He held her tightly as she gasped, forcing air into her constricted lungs. The beat of her heart against his chest reminded him of his drummer Weston’s double bass. The right thing to do was to ask her if she was okay, but clearly that would be a stupid question.
“Sorry,” she whispered, swiping her hand across her face to remove the hair from her eyes.
He tucked her face back into the crook of his neck, massaging her head with his fingertips again, and asked her if she had heard the latest from The Cotes. She hadn’t.
He played it on his phone. Her plump lips formed a smile against his neck, and moisture fell on his chest.
If he had it his way, this would be the only time Emily would cry. Emily would only cry tears of joy when art took hold of her heart. Brendan’s definition of art was that which made you feel something. And there was no art like Emily Colt. In order for her to achieve such happiness, all he had to do was make her fall in love with herself.
Of course, only she could do that.
***
It was pretty easy to forget about Brendan when there were others around that forced their presence upon Emily. She’d really only spoken to Ada, her best friend from junior high, all of five times in the past three years. But Ada had somehow gotten wind that something was up and had texted Emily out of nowhere.
Everything okay?
Yeah, I’m good. But Seth and I broke up.
Oh no! Are you sure you’re okay?
I’m fine.
In that case . . . let’s go get trashed. We’ll have a breakup party!
Ada was fucking nuts, obviously. But Emily was . . . well.
I’ll see you on Friday.
Ada wanted Emily to join her and her boyfriend Mark, whom Emily had never met, for dinner, but Emily had stayed at the shop late.
Where are you? her phone vibrated against the wooden surface of her desk in her office.
Yeah, running a bit late. I’ll meet you at the bar.
Dammit! I have like five guys here who want to meet you.
Emily’s heart flared inside her chest and she let her head fall back against her chair.
Ada, I swear to god I’m not coming if that’s how this is going to go.
I’m sorry! It just kind of happened. Come to the bar. It will be just us, I promise.
Gina’s was a run-down sports bar with bricks for walls in a corner of their world that no one would ever go to on purpose. But they had cheap drinks, and Ada apparently knew everyone there including the bartenders, so they were basically free. Emily’s tab after four hours of drinking would end up costing her a whopping eight dollars.
Ada was a pretty girl, with platinum blonde hair and pink tattoos. As much as Emily would sustain her policy that all humans were insufferable, she had to admit internally that she had missed Ada and it was damn good to see her. They talked like drunk girls would, about failed relationships and about rebuilding a lost friendship. Ada’s boyfriend got mad at her when she started to get too drunk, and Emily rolled her eyes, signifying her time to go, until Ada waved Mark off and introduced Emily to a somewhat-cute blonde guy named Terrence. He liked comics and good music and Disney movies. He and Emily fell into easy conversation as drunk people so often do, until the bar was closing and they exchanged numbers. He said something like I hope to see you again when he hugged her goodbye.
She arrived home to the ding of her phone when a text came in from Terrence.
I hope you made it home okay.
Emily smiled at her phone, mostly because Brendan never gave a shit if she made it home okay, and she replied that she had.
When she fell asleep somewhat drunk and as content as Emily Colt ever got, she didn’t even consider the fact that Bren hadn’t responded to her text from five hours earlier. That he was probably out fucking some other girl, and that’s why he hadn’t replied.