FORTY-ONE

They’d staggered up the stairs and careened down the hallway—he bounced off a wall at least twice—and finally finally made it to his bedroom. Because life occasionally wasn’t shitty, he’d changed the sheets the morning before and was caught up on his dry cleaning.

“Oh, my God,” she panted, hands busy at his belt. “Immaculate fireplace. Gorgeous kitchen. A zillion cookbooks. More bookshelves. Mint green walls in your bedroom. Tasteful curtains and thick cream carpet. Were you Chuck Williams in a previous life?”

“No.” Jesus. Her hands. She was divesting him of clothing like a focused, sexy octopus. His one contribution was to nearly tear her sweater getting it off her; he wanted her so badly his hands were shaking. A significant part of his brain had decided this was a fever dream. It couldn’t actually be happening. Ergo it wasn’t.

She gave him a gentle shove and his back hit the bed as she shimmied out of her black pants and made short work of her coral-colored bra and panties. Her hair was a rumpled cloud of reddish-blond waves and her breasts were small and sweet and plum-sized. He was surprised to see she was short-waisted; her long legs distracted from that, and she was speckled with freckles down her neck and across her chest.

“You are really beautiful,” he managed, perhaps the most inadequate statement in the history of language.

“You’re pretty cute, too.” She kicked her clothes away, then climbed on the bed, crawled over him, bent down to kiss him

(God her mouth, I love her mouth)

then pulled back. “Is this okay?”

Was this okay? The woman he had dated eighteen months ago had taken his occasional impotence as a personal challenge, so sex with her was a bit like being caught in a rowing machine.

This? This was hot and sweet and fumbling and wonderful. Was this okay? Was he a carbon-based life-form? Would the Cubs win the World Series again? Did Angela have a delightful constellation of freckles he wanted to count and map?

“I—I’m hard-pressed to think of anything more okay.”

“Hard-pressed,” she teased, and her hand was on his stomach and then sliding down, and then her fingers curled around his cock, the part of him that currently had no idea what dysthymia was. “Oh, my. Should have guessed. I mean, you’re tall. And you’ve got these wonderful big hands.” She leaned down to kiss him again and her grip tightened at exactly the right time and exactly the right pressure, and he gasped into the kiss.

“What do you want?” he managed, his hands coming up to settle at her waist. “Tell me. I want to touch you, tell me what you want.”

“Beard burn.”

He blinked up at her and saw she was trying—unsuccessfully—to hide her grin. The thought that this was a lurid fantasy was getting harder to shake. “Er, what?”

“It’s out there, right? But last week, when you showed up at the house all rumpled and stubbled, it really, um, did something. For me.”

She wanted stubble? He would oblige and grow stubble. He would grow anything she wanted. She could have his beard stubble, she could have the breath in his lungs, the blood in his heart. He felt his jaw. “Unfortunately, I shaved for our da—for our tombstone cleaning.”

“Just do the best you can.”

So he tightened his grip and rolled her over until he was on top, and rubbed his cheek against her neck and the tops of her breasts while she giggled and squirmed beneath him.

“I’m gonna have beard burn in the most interesting places.”

“This is already the oddest and most wonderful sexual encounter of my life.”

“Oh, please. You ain’t seen nothin’.”

She was right. Minutes later—seconds? hours? his sense of time had vanished along with his underwear—he was inside her slick heat, one hand gripping the headboard, the other fisted (carefully!) in her hair. He was using the headboard to hold himself back as well as give himself some brace. He was afraid if he let loose he might shove her through the wall.

“Jason.” She groaned, her long legs coming up and tightening around him with marvelous strength. “That’s—ah—Jeeeeeezus that’s—more.”

“Really?” Please don’t let that be an auditory hallucination.

“Yeah, c’mon, I won’t break. Fuck me. Harder. You can—oh fuck, that’s good, that’s perfect, please don’t stop—”

(oh, thank God, I’m not sure I could)

“Just—let me—I need to—almost—” He could feel her legs loosening their grip around his waist as she reached down between them, between her legs, and he took the hand out of her hair and caught her wrist.

“Show me. What you need. Put my fingers where you want them. Please, I have to touch you.”

So she did and he brushed his thumb around and over the slippery button.

“Easy-easy, light and fast, that’s nnnnnnggggggggg oh more please more like that please that’s just right ah . . . ah . . .” And then she was arching beneath him and everything got almost impossibly tighter and hotter and at the peak of her pleasure he buried his face in her neck and counted back from one thousand by sevens

(1,000, 993, 986, 979, don’t come don’t come 972, 965, 958 not yet 951)

and he took his hand away, mindful of oversensitivity, and then she shivered in his arms and was still.

“Oh, God, Jason, that was so—you.” She was looking up at him, wide-eyed. “You didn’t . . . ?”

He stroked his thumb across her lower lip and she sucked at it, then kissed the tip as he pulled his hand away and reached down between her legs. “Now,” he breathed against her mouth. “Again.”

And started to move.