It takes a shockingly long time to get my strength back. Weeks slide into a month, then suddenly, two months is around the corner.
I’ve started writing again, but the breaking news I had been working on was broken by other people, while I was unconscious, and then recovering. That’s life, and I don’t need to chase stories at all if I don’t want to.
But I do want to, that’s the problem.
I know I should talk to someone about that—Caroline, maybe. Jason, almost certainly. A therapist, no doubt. But I don’t do any of that. Instead, I think on it, stewing, and suddenly two months have gone by and I realize—shit, I’m grumpy.
“I was thinking,” Jason says one morning after we shower together, and he is painfully gentle with me, as always. “How would you feel about going out for dinner?”
I burst into tears.
He stares at me in horror. I stare right back, equally horrified, because I don’t cry, and if I did, it wouldn’t be over a very reasonable suggestion that it is maybe time to return to the land of the living.
“No, it’s too soon,” he corrects, albeit wrongly.
“It’s not too soon,” I say, furiously wiping my eyes. “It’s that I want more for my life than dinner to be a momentous event.” I take a really deep, all the way to the bottom of my lungs breath. “I don’t have any good stories to write, and I’m worried I won’t ever again, and I’m feeling a bit cooped up.”
He nods. “Okay. Yep. That’s bad. Let’s fix that.”
I slump against him. “Can we fix it over dinner?”
So he makes a reservation at a very private restaurant in Arlington, and I get dressed up. It’s the first time since the shooting that I’ve put on makeup—and the first time since I left California that I’m staring at myself in the mirror as I do so, and not some carefully constructed alter-ego.
Jason comes in as I put the finishing touches. He stands behind me and brushes my hair, now long enough to cover my shoulders, out of the way so he can kiss my neck.
“You look good enough to eat,” he whispers.
I shiver at the tempting thought. “Yes, please.”
“Right here?” He spins me around and lifts me onto the bathroom counter. “Hold on tight.”
I lean back against the mirror, bracing my hands on the counter, and he kneels in front of me. “You look good, too.” I let out a breathy laugh as he nips the inside of my thigh.
Ever so slowly, he’s getting rougher and more intense with me. I grab on to each moment with both hands.
He tugs my panties to the side and kisses my sex, a soft open-mouthed taste that ends in a teasing flick of his tongue against my clit. I rock against his face, suddenly very horny, but he only gives me two more slow-tongued kisses there before he stands up and crowds against me. “We’ll be late for dinner.”
“So mean,” I breathe. Then I lunge at him, tasting myself on his lips.
He slams me back against the mirror, his hands cushioning behind me, and thrusts his tongue deep into my mouth. “Make no mistake,” he growls. “I want more of that as soon as we get home. But we’re going to go out for dinner, like grown-ups, and talk about grown-up things like work. And fucking.”
I can’t wait. I shimmy my hips and he helps me down again.
Then he looks at me again. “Something is different about your face.”
I touch my bare mouth. He drops his gaze to my lips and smiles. “Yeah. You aren’t wearing any lipstick.”
I wrinkle my nose. “I don’t, actually. Usually.”
“Huh.” He leans against the door frame. “You know, I wondered that. If the red and pink lipsticks were different personalities.”
I groan. “Is that what we’re calling my former identities?”
“Am I wrong.”
“No.” I give him an impish smile. “But yeah, this is the real me, I guess.”
He takes my face in his hands and looks at me, really looks carefully. His gaze rakes over my mouth, my cheeks, and my heavily lined eyes. “Were you a goth as a kid by any chance?”
“Guilty as charged. I never really outgrew it.”
“Fascinating. And yet when you were being someone else, you went ultra-feminine. I like both looks,” he hastens to add. “I like you, and however you choose to decorate your face.”
“A-plus answer.”
Dinner is incredible. We take our time with each course, and as promised, we talk about work.
“It’s actually amazing that nobody else has the details on the full scope of those incriminating images and emails. I’m still the only journalist who has the numbers, and most of the names.” I drag in a deep breath. “For a long time, I thought if I got my hands on them, I’m dump them into the public like the Panama Papers. I even had a good name picked out for the release.”
He waits expectantly.
“The Pervert Papers.”
It gets a laugh. That makes me feel good. But then he shakes his head. “But you can’t.”
Nope. “I know. And I don’t want to anymore, either. It’s just, that’s what I thought the scoop would be. So now it feels like dry procedural stories, which isn’t what I do.”
“No, it’s not.”
“If I can make a suggestion,” he offers.
“Please.”
“Go back to your roots. Only one of us managed to get Gerome Lively facing life sentences, and it wasn’t me with my shock and awe takedown of him at sea. You did it by making individual narratives more powerful than anything else. I didn’t know it was you, Ellie, but I was reading Melinda Gray from day one. You’re very good at what you do.”
My chest feels tight. I rub it. “What I do isn’t enough, though.”
“It is. And it will be again.”
“I’m scared of letting those women down, letting down the girls they once were.”
“Nobody is promised justice in this world, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying to make it happen. That’s all they expect from a superhero.”
I sigh.
“Maybe that didn’t help.”
“No, it did.” I take his hand across the table. “I didn’t realize how sad I was about that.”
“You compartmentalize a lot.”
I snort. “Yeah.”
We sit with that depressing thought for a few moments in silence, then he leans in, just as I take a sip of water. “Which brings me to the grown-up discussion about fucking,” he whispers.
I sputter, and water goes everywhere. “Jesus, I’m glad that wasn’t wine.”
“I need to work on my segues,” he says innocently.
Except that was very deliberate.
My lover is a funny, funny man. “So, fucking, huh? What exactly about my locked-down emotional state would make you want to talk about—oh, I see what you did there.”
“I think we both, because of who we are and how we have lived our lives, compartmentalize sex and intimacy.”
“Fair point.”
“And I’ve been thinking about that summer, five years ago.” His gaze heats up, hungry and aroused.
“I think of it often,” I murmur.
“Why was it so hot, and left such a lasting impression on us, if we weren’t really being true to ourselves or each other?”
I think he’s been reading just the right amount of modern philosophy books. “I have no idea, but I can’t wait to hear your hypothesis.”
He grins. “That summer—because it wasn’t you, because you knew we could never amount to anything, and you knew you wouldn’t be using me for a story—you were free to role play the combination of the two together. Sex plus intimacy.”
“That’s quite the hypothesis.”
“You can tell me I’m wrong.”
I shake my head. “You’re not wrong. I think that’s probably exactly right.” I take a deep breath. “But I think we should finish the rest of this conversation at home.”
Our drive back to his apartment is fraught with a delicious kind of tension. Inside, we open a bottle of wine and put on music, then fall onto the couch together.
“This was exactly what I needed,” I murmur as he trails his fingers down my arm.
“We both needed it.” He holds my gaze, but doesn’t push.
We both know I’ve left some things unsaid, and now is the time to dig deeper. I reach out and touch his face. He’s started to go gray, just a little, in all the right places.
Five years is a long time.
But I remember that summer so clearly. So I take a deep breath, and bare my soul. “It was so hard to see you again, after all that time. Scary. Absolutely frightening, and for no good reason that I could sort out. It took me a long time to admit to myself that it was so hard for me to be back in close proximity to you, because I knew that this time, I would have to know better than to fall in love with you.”
His blue eyes narrow, piercing me with their intensity. “This time?”
I’m shaking. “I’d already fallen for you once. I fell in love with you five years ago.”
He’s a statue, frozen and expressionless.
I run my fingers over his cheek and bravely push on. “I already walked away once, too, and I knew how hard that was. I couldn’t let myself feel that deeply again. So I couldn’t be the same person. I think I had to hold part of myself back.”
He catches my wrist, stilling my fingers. Then he slowly turns his head and kisses the inside of my forearm, raising goosebumps. “And now? Are you still holding something back?”
I shake my head slowly. “But it’s taken me a while to get my strength back, and I think you are maybe holding something back.”
He looks genuinely surprised. “Me?”
“You don’t need to be gentle with me anymore.”
“I want to be.”
“I know. But I want…the full range of experiences. Gentle. Hard. Demanding. Bossy. Needy. Urgent—”
He puts both of his hands on my waist and hauls me into his lap. Hard, demanding, and very urgent. “So we both need to let go of worry.”
“Yes,” I whisper. My breath is a prayer. How lucky am I? It’s an absolute miracle that I get to show him how much I love him and how much I want him. But I don’t say anything else.
He traces my jaw with his fingertips, then taps my lower lip. “Spread your legs for me.”
I twist in his lap so I’m straddling him.
He teases his fingertips along the elastic of my underwear. “Tell me what you want next.”
I squirm against his erection. “I want to ride you like this. I want you to pull my panties to the side and tell me…” I shiver. “Tell me to put your cock into my tight little pussy.”
“Jesus, I’ve missed your dirty mouth.” He kisses me hard, then tugs my underwear to the side exactly as I asked. “Do you want my cock?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I want to see your hands on it first. Unzip me.”
I fumble at his zipper, so excited, and when I curve my hand into his pants, I find him dripping with pre-come for me. Yes.
“Jerk me,” he whispers. “See that slippery seed? See how slick I am for you? I’m going to slide right into your body, all the way. That’s how excited you’ve made with your perfect, filthy words. Understand?”
“Yes,” I breathe.
“Rub your cunt against my cock. Show me that you’re wet enough.”
I roll my hips, desperate to bring us together. With his free hand, he squeezes the back of my neck. “Oh, that feels so good. I could come like this, use your soft little pussy to jack off.”
I whimper. “Please.”
“Please what?”
“I want to ride you. I want your cock inside me.”
“Then put me inside you,” he growls. “Show me that your tight pussy can take all of me.”
I push up on my knees and rock forward, hurrying because I’m aching for it now. I need that push, that stretch, that huge monster cock of his to fill me all the way up.
As soon as I find my hole, he pushes me down, his hand firm on my neck, me just a little itty bit of nothing in his arms, just a small sweet ball of sex on his lap, and I cry out because he fills me more than all the way up, he gets rid of that hollow feeling and then some.
“What’s my name?” he growls.
I smile. “Jason.”
“Who’s deep inside you?”
“Jason.”
“You can’t hide from me. You can’t hide that you need me.”
I shake my head. No.
His eyes soften, just for a second. “And you don’t need to, either.”
I clamp my hands on his shoulders and start to ride him, start to find a rhythm, and his hands move to my ass, my hips, and then up my body, clawing at my dress to get my neckline down.
His mouth finds my tits, my nipples, making them all puffy and achy, and then, as my climax rumbles in hard and fast, like a storm on the ocean, his mouth finds my neck and latches on.
I come on his cock, as he spills deep inside me, and he gives me a hickey.
“That’s it,” he murmurs into my skin. “There. Gah, you’re so good to me.”
That really feels like something I should say to him, but I’m absolutely, completely wrung out.