1230 Avenue of the Americas 5 страница

He may be insane, but that ass looks mighty fine as he walks away.

Sitting in my lizard and concrete shelter for a while, I contemplate going home and immediately discard the thought. I contemplate going to Lola’s and hanging out with her and Greg for dinner, but I’m sure she’s giving her dad the full rundown of our insanity over the weekend. No doubt he’s laughing his ass off, and I don’t really want to be the killjoy who got sentimental. I contemplate heading over to Harlow’s place in La Jolla, but even though some brainless beach time sounds amazing, the genuine love and intense focus of the entire Vega clan would provide too stark a contrast to my own family’s weirdness.

So I drive downtown.

ANSEL PULLS THE door open and breaks into an enormous smile, which slowly fades as he sees I’ve come empty-handed, no suitcase. Nothing but my tiny cross-body bag slung over my chest.

“I can’t come to France with you, ” I start, looking up at him with wide eyes. My pulse feels like a heavy drum in my throat. “But I didn’t want to go home, either. ”

He steps to the side to let me in and I drop my bag on the floor and turn to watch him. There’s really only one reason I’m here, in this hotel room, and I think we both know it. It’s easy to pretend to be the lover in a movie, coming to the hotel for one last night together. I don’t have to work to be brave when it’s safe like this: he’s leaving. It becomes almost like a game. A play. A role.

I don’t know which Mia is taking over my body, but I’m shutting out everything but how it feels to be so close to this boy. I only have to take one step closer and he meets me halfway, sliding both hands into my hair and covering my mouth with his. Ocean and green and still the lingering scent of me on his clothes.

His taste, oh. I want to feel so full of him that every other thought dissolves under the heat of it. I want his mouth everywhere, sucking at me like he does. I love how he loves my lips, how—after only one night together—his hands already know my skin.

He walks me back to the bed, lips and tongue and teeth all over my cheeks and mouth and jaw. I fall backward when my knees hit the bed.

He pulls at the hem of my dress and unsheathes me in a single determined tug, then reaches behind me, ridding me of my bra with a tiny slip of his fingers. He makes me feel like I’m something to reveal, something in which to revel. I’m the reward at the end of his magic trick, exposed beneath the velvet cape. His eyes rake across my skin and I can see his own impatience: shirt flung across the room, fingers tugging at his belt, tongue flicking at the air, searching for the taste of me.

Ansel gives up on undressing, instead kneeling on the floor between my thighs, spreading me, kissing me through the fabric of my underwear. He nibbles and tugs, sucking and licking impatiently before he slides my last remaining article of clothing down my legs.

I gasp when he leans forward, covering my most sensitive skin in a long, slow lick. His breath feels like tiny bursts of fire where he kisses my clit, my pubic bone, my hip. I push up, leaning back on my hands to watch him.

“Tell me what you need, ” he says, his voice raspy against my hip.

With this, I remember weakly that he made me come with his hands and body, but not his mouth. I can sense the need to conquer this, and wonder how long he tried before I grew impatient, pulling him up and into me.

The truth is I’m not sure what I need. Oral sex has always been a stop on the way to somewhere else. A way to get me wet, to make the circuit of my body. Never something done until I shook and sweated and swore.

“S-suck, ” I say, guessing.

He opens his mouth, sucking perfectly for a breath of time and then too much. “Not so hard. ” I close my eyes, finding the bravery to tell him, “Like you suck on my lip. ”

It’s exactly the direction he needed and I fall back against the mattress without thinking, my legs spreading wider, and with this he grows wild. Palms firmly planted on my inner thighs to keep my legs open, sounds pressed into me, vibrating through me.

One of his hands leaves me and I can feel him moving, can sense the shifting of his arm. Propping myself on an elbow I look down and realize he’s touching himself, eyes on me, fevered.

“Let me, ” I tell him. “I want to taste you, too. ”

I don’t know where these words are coming from; I’m not myself right now. Maybe I’m never myself with him. He nods but doesn’t stop moving his hand. I love it. I love that it’s not weird or taboo. He’s lost in me, he’s hard, he’s giving in to the need for his own pleasure while he gives me mine.

As he kisses and sucks and licks with such uninhibited hunger, I’m afraid I won’t be able to come and his enthusiasm and effort will be wasted. But then I feel the tight pull, the edge of something that grows bigger and bigger with every breath across my skin. I thread my hands in his hair, rock up into him.

“Oh, God. ”

He groans, mouth eager, eyes on me wide and thrilled.

I relish the tight swell of my tendons, my muscles, the blood rushing so heated and urgent in my veins. I can feel it build, spread out, and race through my limbs, exploding between my legs. I’m gasping, hoarse and senseless, offering no words, just sharp sounds. The echo of my orgasm rings around us as I fall back onto the pillow.

I feel drugged, and with effort I push him away from where his lips press to my thigh so I can sit up. He stumbles to his feet, pants undone and slung low over his hips. I look up at him, and from the light coming out of the bathroom I can see how wet his mouth is, from me—as if he was hunting, as if I was caught and devoured.

He wipes a forearm across his entire face, and steps closer to the bed just as I lean forward and take him in my mouth.

He cries out, desperate. “Already close. ”

It’s a warning. I can feel it in the jutting thrusts of his hips, the tense swelling of the head of his cock, the way he grips my head like he wants to pull back, make this last longer, but can’t. He fucks my mouth, seeming to know already that it’s okay, and after only six sharp jabs across my tongue and teeth and lips, he’s holding steady, deep inside and coming with a low, rasping groan.

I pull my mouth away from him and he runs a shaking finger across my lip as I swallow.

“So good, ” he exhales.

I fall back on the pillow and feel like my muscles have been completely silenced after the frenzy of my entry into the room. I’m leaden and numb, and other than the heavy echo of pleasure between my legs, the only thing I can feel is my smile.

The room has turned pink in the late afternoon sun pouring through the window, and Ansel hovers over me on rigid arms, breathing heavily. I feel the rake of his gaze move across my skin, come to settle on my breasts, and he smiles at the same time I feel my nipples grow tight.

“I left marks all over you the other night. ” He bends, blowing air across one peak. “I’m sorry. ”

I laugh and tug his hair playfully. “You don’t sound sorry. ”

He grins up at me, and when he pulls back to admire his handiwork again, I give in to the unfamiliar instinct to cross my arms over my chest. In dance, my small frame was a benefit; my small breasts were an ideal nonhindrance. But in the bare skin world of sex, I can’t imagine my 32Bs cut it.

“What are you doing? ” he asks, tugging on my forearm as he kicks off his pants. “It’s too late to be shy with me now. ”

“I feel tiny. ”

He laughs. “You are tiny, Cerise. But I like every tiny inch of you. I haven’t seen your skin in hours. ” Bending, he circles my nipple with his tongue. “You have sensitive breasts, I discovered. ”

I suspect I have sensitive everything when he’s the one touching me.

His palm spreads across one breast while he sucks at the other and his tongue begins to move in small, flat, pressing circles. It revives the delicious throb between my legs.

I think he knows it, too, because the hand cupping my breast slides down over my ribs, across my stomach, down my navel, and between my legs, but he never stops circling with his tongue.

And then his fingers are there, two of them pressed flat, and he’s making the same circles in the same rhythm, and it’s as if a tight band connects between where his tongue and fingers are, pulling tighter and tighter, warmer and warmer. I’m bowing up off the bed and gripping his head, begging him in a hoarse voice to please please please.

The same rhythm, both places, and I’m worried I’ll fall apart, melt into the bed or simply dissolve into nothing when he hums over my nipple, his fingers pressing harder, and then he lets up only long enough to ask me, “Won’t you let me hear you one more time? ”

I don’t know if I could survive it. I can’t survive without it.

With him, my sounds are hoarse and free, I don’t seem to hold back words of pleasure, and it’s completely without thought. I offer up everything and my sounds spur him on until he’s sucking frantically and I’m arching into his hand crying out—

Coming

Three fingers plunge into me, the heel of his hand taking over outside. It’s pleasure so intense it hurts. Or maybe it’s knowing how easy this is and how good, and that I have to either give him up or do something crazy to keep him. My orgasm lasts so long I run through both of these scenarios multiple times during the most intense pleasure of it. It lasts long enough for him to unlatch his lips from my breast and move to my face and kiss me, sucking all of my sounds into his mouth. It lasts long enough for him to tell me I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

My body quiets and his kisses slow until it’s just the small slide of his lips over mine. I taste like him and he tastes like me.

Ansel leans over the side of the bed to pull a condom from the pocket of his jeans. “Are you too sore? ” he asks, holding it up in question.

I’m sore, but I don’t think I could ever be too worn-out to feel him. I need to remember exactly what it’s like. The scattered shrapnel of my memory won’t suffice if I have to let him go tonight. I don’t answer aloud, but I pull him over me, bending my knees at his sides.

He kneels, brows drawn as he rolls the condom down his length. I want to pull out my phone, take pictures of his body and his serious, focused expression. I need the pictures so I can say, See, Mia? You were right about his skin. It’s as smooth and perfect as you remember. I want to somehow capture the way his hands are shaking with urgency.

When he’s done he places a hand by my head and uses the other to guide himself to me. The moment I can feel the heavy press of him, it occurs to me that I’ve never felt so impatient in my life. My body wants to devour his.

“Come back with me, ” he says, moving barely in, and back out again. A torture. “Please, Mia. Just for the summer. ”

I shake my head no, unable to find words, and he groans in frustration and pleasure as he slowly pushes inside. I lose my breath, lose my ability to breathe or even care that I need to, and pull my legs up high, wanting him deeper, wanting to feel him entering me forever. He’s heavy, thick, so hard that when his hips meet my thighs I hover at the edge of discomfort. He’s the one making me lose my breath, making me feel like there’s not enough room in my body for him and air at the same time, but nothing has ever felt so good.

I’d tell him I changed my mind, I’ll come with him, if I could find words, but with his arms braced beside my head he starts to move and it’s unlike anything else. It’s unlike everything else. The slow, solid drag of him inside me builds an ache so good it’s enough to make me feel a little unhinged at the thought that the feeling will end at some point.

He’s giving me a gentle warm-up, his eyes on mine as he pulls slowly out, even more slowly pushes back in, occasionally ducking down to slide his mouth over mine. But when I scrape my tongue over his teeth, and he jerks forward, sharp and unexpected, I hear my own tight gasp, and it unleashes something in him. He starts to move, hard and smooth over me, perfect curling thrusts of his hips.

I don’t really know how many times we had sex the other night, but he must have figured out what I need, and he seems to love to watch himself giving it to me. He pushes up on his hands, kneeling between my spread legs, and already I know that when I come it will be unlike anything I’ve felt before. I can hear his grunting breaths and my own sharp exhales. I can hear the slap of the front of his thighs against the inside of mine and the slick, smooth strokes of him moving in and out of me.

I won’t need his fingers or mine or a toy. We fit. His skin slides across my clit again and again and again.

Lola was right when she teased about how it would be with Ansel and me: it is missionary, and there’s eye contact, but it isn’t precious or soft-focus the way she meant. I can’t imagine not looking at him. It would be like trying to have sex without touching.

The pleasure climbs up my legs like a vine, building into a flush I can feel spreading across my cheeks, across my chest. I’m terrified I’ll lose this sensation, that I’m chasing something that doesn’t really exist, but he’s moving faster, and harder, so hard he has to hold my hips with his hands so he doesn’t push me off the bed. His eyes rake over my gasping lips and my breasts that bounce with his thrusts. The way he fucks me makes my slight body feel voluptuous for the first time in my life.

I open my mouth to tell him I’m falling and nothing comes out but a cry for more and yes and this and yes and yes. Sweat drops from his forehead onto my breast and rolls onto my neck. He’s working so hard, holding so much back, waiting waiting waiting for me. I love the restraint and hunger and determination in his beautiful face and I’m at the edge, right there.

Warmth rushes throughout my body a split second before I fall.

He sees it happen. He watches, mouth parting in relief, eyes blazing in victory. My orgasm crashes over me so hard, so consuming, I’m not myself anymore. I’m the savage pulling him down onto me, rutting up into him and gripping his ass to pull him in deeper. I’m pure desperation beneath him, begging, biting his shoulder, spreading my legs as wide as they’ll go.

The wildness unhinges him. I can hear the sheets pop away from the mattress and feel them bunch behind me as he grips them for leverage, moving hard enough that the headboard cracks into the wall.

“Oh, ” he groans, rhythm growing punishing. He buries his face in my neck, groaning, “Here. Here. Here. ”

And then he opens his mouth on my neck, sucking and pressing, shoulders shaking over me as he comes. I slide my hands over his back, relishing the bunching definition of his tense posture, the curve to his spine as he stays as deep as he can. I shift beneath him to feel his skin on mine, mixing my sweat with his.

Ansel pushes up to his elbows and hovers over me, still pulsing inside as he presses his palms to my forehead and slides them over my hair.

“It’s too good, ” he says against my lips. “It’s so good, Cerise. ”

And then he reaches between us to grip the condom, pulling out and slipping it off. He drops it blindly in the vicinity of the bedside table and collapses beside me on the mattress, dragging his left hand down his face, across his sweaty chest, where it comes to rest over his heart. I’m unable to look away from the gold band on his ring finger. His stomach tightens with each jagged inhale, jerks with each forceful exhale.

“Please, Mia. ”

I have one last refusal in me, and I squeak it out: “I can’t. ”

He closes his eyes and my heart splinters, imagining not seeing him again.

“If we hadn’t been drunk and crazy and ended up married. . . would you have come with me to France? ” he asks. “Just for the adventure of it? ”

“I don’t know. ” But the answer is, I might have. I don’t need to move to Boston yet; I plan to—soon—because I had to leave my campus apartment but don’t want to move back in with my parents for the entire summer. A summer in Paris after college is what a woman my age should do. With Ansel—only as a lover, maybe even just as a roommate—it would be a wild adventure. It wouldn’t carry the same weight of moving in with him for the summer, as his wife.

He smiles, a little sadly, and kisses me.

“Say something to me in French. ” I’ve heard him say a hundred things while he’s lost in pleasure, but this is the first time I’ve requested it, and I don’t know why I do it. It seems dangerous, with his mouth, his voice, his accent like warm chocolate.

“Do you speak any French? ”

“Besides, ‘Cerise’? ”

His eyes fall to my lips and he smiles. “Besides that. ”

“Fromage. Châ teau. Croissant. ”

He repeats “croissant” in a small laughing voice, and when he says it, it sounds like a completely different word. I wouldn’t know how to spell the word he just said, but it makes me want to pull him on top of me again.

“Well, in that case I can tell you, Je n’ai plus dé siré une femme comme je te dé sire depuis longtemps. Ç a n’est peut-ê tre mê me jamais arrivé . ” He pulls back, studies my reaction as if I’d be able to decode a word of it. “Est-ce totalement fou? Je m’en fiche. ”

My brain can’t magically translate the words, but my body seems to know he’s said something wildly intimate.

“Can I ask you something? ”

He nods. “Of course. ”

“Why won’t you just annul it? ”

He twists his mouth to the side, amusement filling his eyes. “Because you wrote it into our wedding vows. We both vowed to stay married until the fall. ”

It’s several long seconds before I get over the shock of that. I sure was a bossy little thing. “But it’s not a real marriage, ” I whisper, and pretend I don’t see it when he winces a little. “What does that vow mean anyway if we plan to break all the others about ‘until death do us part’? ”

He rolls over and sits up at the edge of his bed, his back to me. He curls over, pressing his hands onto his forehead. “I don’t know. I try not to break promises, I suppose. This is all very weird for me; please don’t assume I know what I’m doing just because I’m holding firm on this one point. ”

I sit up, crawl over to him, and kiss his shoulder. “It seems I fake-married a really nice guy. ”

He laughs, but then stands, moving away from me again. I can sense he needs distance and it pushes a small ache between two of my ribs.

This is it. This is when I should go.

He pulls on his underwear and leans against the closet door, watching me as I get dressed. I pull my panties up my legs, and they’re still wet from me, from his mouth, too, though the wetness feels cold now. Changing my mind, I drop them on the floor and put on my bra and my jersey dress and step into my flip-flops.

Ansel wordlessly hands me his phone and I text myself so he has my number. When I hand it back, we stand, looking at anything but each other for a few painful beats.

I reach for my bag, pulling out gum, but he quickly moves to me, sliding his hands up my neck to cup my face. “Don’t. ” He leans close, sucking on my mouth the way he seems to like so much. “You taste like me. I taste like you. ” He bends, licking my tongue, my lips, my teeth. “I like this so much. Let it stay, just for a bit. ”

His mouth moves lower, down my neck, nibbling at my collarbone, and to where my nipples press up from beneath my dress. He sucks and licks, pulling them into his mouth until the fabric is soaked. It’s black, so no one but us will know, but I’ll feel the cool press of his kiss even after I walk out of the room.

I want to pull us back to the bed.

But he stands, studying my face for a beat. “Be good, Cerise. ”

It occurs to me only now that we’re married, and I would be cheating on my husband if I slept with someone else this summer. But the idea of anyone else getting this man makes something simmer in my belly. I don’t like the thought at all, and I wonder if that’s the same fire I see in his expression.

“You, too, ” I tell him.

Chapter SIX

I’M SURE I know what the phrase “weak in the knees” means now because I’m dreading having to get out of my car and use my legs. I’ve been with three people other than Ansel, but even with Luke, sex was never like that. Sex where it’s so wide open and honest that I know even after it’s over—and the heat has dissipated and Ansel isn’t even here beside me anymore—that I would have let him do anything.

It makes me wish I remembered our night in Vegas better. We had hours together then, rather than the paltry cupful of minutes tonight. Because somehow I know it was more honest and free and doubtless than even this was.

The heavy thunk of my car door slamming echoes down our quiet, suburban street. My house looks dark, but it’s too early for them to all be in bed. With the warm summer weather it’s most likely that my family is out on the back patio, having a late dinner.

But once I’m inside, I hear nothing but silence. The house is dark everywhere: in the living room, family room, kitchen. The patio is quiet, every room upstairs deserted. My footsteps slap quietly on the Spanish tile in the bathroom but fall silent as I move along the plush hallway carpet. For some reason I walk into every single room. . . finding no one. In the years since I started college—before I moved my things back into my old bedroom only days ago—I haven’t once been alone in this house, and the realization hits me like a physical shove. Someone is always here when I am: my mother, my father, one of my brothers. How strange that is. Yet now I’ve been given some quiet. It feels like a reprieve. And with this freedom, a current of electricity curls through me.

I could leave without having to confront my father.

I could leave without having to explain anything.

In an impulsive, hot flash, I’m certain this is what I want. I sprint to my room, find my passport, tear off my dress, and pull on clean clothes before hauling the biggest suitcase from the hall closet. I shove everything I can find from my dresser into it, and then practically clear my bathroom counter with a sweep of my arm into my toiletries case. The heavy bag thuds down the stairs behind me, falls over in the hallway as I begin to scribble a note for my family. The lies tumble out, and I struggle to keep from trying to say too much, sounding too manic.

I have an opportunity to go to France for a few weeks! A free ticket, too. I’ll be with a friend of Harlow’s Dad. She owns a small business. I’ll tell you about it later but I’m okay. I’ll call.

Love you,

Mia

I don’t ever lie to my family—or anyone for that matter—but right now, I don’t care. Now that the idea is in my head, the idea of not going to France pushes me into a full-on panic because not going to France means staying here for a few weeks. It means living under the dark cloud of my father’s controlling bullshit. And then it means moving to Boston and starting a life I’m not sure I want.

It means the possibility of never seeing Ansel again.

I look at the clock: I only have forty-five minutes until the plane leaves.

Lugging my bag to my car, I hurl it in the trunk and run to the driver’s side, texting Harlow: Whatever my dad asks you about France, just say yes.

Only three blocks away from my house I can hear my phone buzz on the passenger seat, no doubt with her reply—Harlow rarely puts her phone down—but I can’t look now. I know what I’ll see anyway, and I’m not sure when my brain will quiet down enough for me to answer her WHAT??

Her, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING??

Her, CALL ME RIGHT THE FUCK NOW, MIA HOLLAND!!

So instead, I park—I’m being optimistic, and pull into the long-term parking lot. I drag my bag into the terminal. I check in, silently urging the woman at the ticketing counter to move faster.

“You’re cutting it very close, ” she tells me with a disapproving frown. “Gate forty-four. ”

Nodding, I tap a nervous hand on the counter and sprint away once she’s handed me my ticket, folded neatly in a paper sleeve. Security is dead at night on a Tuesday, but once I’m through, the long hallway to the gate at the end looms ahead of me. I’m running too fast to be worried about Ansel’s reaction, but the adrenaline isn’t enough to drown out the protesting of my permanently weak femur as I sprint.

At the gate, our flight is already boarding, and I have a panicked moment thinking maybe he’s already on the plane when I can’t pick him out of the mass of heads lined up to head down the jetway. I search wildly, self-consciously, and it’s a horrible, anxious feeling now that I’m here: telling him I changed my mind and want to come to France and

live with him

rely on him

be with him

requires a type of bravery I’m simply not sure I have outside of a hotel room where it’s all a temporary game, or in a bar where liquor let me find the perfect role to play all night. It’s possible I mentally calculate the danger of being relatively drunk for the entirety of the next few weeks.

A warm hand curls around my shoulder and I turn, finding myself staring up at Ansel’s wide, confused green eyes. His mouth opens and closes a few times before he shakes his head as if to clear it.

“Did they let you come down here to say goodbye? ” he asks, seeming to try out the words. But then he looks closer: I’ve changed into white jeans, a blue tank top under a green hoodie. I have a carry-on slung over my shoulder, I’m out of breath and wearing what I can only imagine is a look of sheer panic on my face.

“I changed my mind. ” I hitch my bag higher on my shoulder and watch his reaction: his smile comes a little too slowly to immediately put me at ease.

But at least he does smile, and it seems genuine. Then he confuses me even more, saying, “I guess I can’t stretch out and sleep on your seat now. ”

I have no idea what to say to that, so I just smile awkwardly and look down at my feet. The gate attendant calls out another section of the plane to board and the microphone squawks sharply, making us both jump.

And then, it seems like the entire world falls completely silent.

“Shit, ” I whisper, looking back down the way I came. It’s too bright, too loud, too far away from Vegas or even the enclosed privacy of his San Diego hotel room. What the hell am I doing? “I don’t have to come. I didn’t—”

He shushes me, taking a step closer and bending to kiss my cheek. “I’m sorry, ” he says carefully, moving from one cheek to the other. “I’m all of a sudden very nervous. That wasn’t funny. I’m so glad you’re here. ”

With a heavy exhale, I turn when he presses his hand to my lower back, but it’s as if our heated bubble has been punctured and we’ve stepped offstage and into the even more glaring lights of reality. It presses down on me, suffocating. My feet feel like they’re made of cement as I hand my ticket to the gate attendant, forcing a nervous smile before stepping onto the jetway.

What we know is dimly lit bars, playful banter, the clean, crisp sheets of hotel rooms. What we know is the unrequited possibility, the temptation of the idea. The make-believe. The adventure.

But when you choose the adventure, it becomes real life.

The jetway is filled with a strange buzzing sound I know will stay in my head for hours. Ansel walks behind me, and I wonder if my jeans are too tight, my hair too messy. I can feel him watching me, maybe checking me out now that I’ll be invading his real life. Maybe reconsidering. The truth is, there’s nothing romantic about boarding a plane, flying for fifteen hours with a virtual stranger. It’s the idea that’s exciting. There’s nothing escapist or glossy about overlit airports or cramped airplanes.

We stow our bags, take our seats. I’m in the middle, he’s in the aisle, and there’s an older man reading a paper next to the window, whose elbows press into my space, sharp but oblivious.