Chapter 29
Laine
When he got back in the car, he looked relieved, and joyful because of it.
“Done,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
He took my hands. “Carlos will bring him his money and get the pictures for me. Then we can burn them, or hide them, or whatever you want.”
“I don’t want you to pay for this.”
“If I pay, I know it’s done. Pay me back if you want. I don’t care. All I care about is making sure this is gone by morning.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was grateful, humbled, and unworthy. The better he was, the more unworthy I felt, and I knew it was wrong. I knew it wasn’t helpful, and I knew it wasn’t true, but I had no idea how to stop feeling like that.
“Are you going back to the party?” I asked. “It’s in your contract.”
“Fuck the contract. I told Gali to drive us back to my place. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s all right.”
He drew his thumb over the line of my jaw, the pressure just enough to make me want him despite everything.
“Can you ever get that picture out of your mind?” I said.
“It wasn’t you.”
“It was.”
“That picture was of a confused, lost girl. You aren’t any of those things.”
I considered letting him off the hook by telling him he didn’t have to take me home. He didn’t have to spend the night with me. But he was a grown man, and if he didn’t want to, he wouldn’t choose to. I wouldn’t assume I was unwanted or a pity fuck. I would take him at his word. So I kissed him, and we kept kissing until the car took a sharp turn into a driveway. I looked away from him, out the window. It was getting dark, but I could still see the modern house that was as big as the Hatches’ had been. Everything about it was clean and trimmed and perfect.
I sat back and straightened my skirt. “Thank you.”
“I haven’t even done anything yet.”
“For helping me. Thank you.”
“I’ll say this once, but it should be obvious,” he said. “If you want to wait because of what happened tonight, I’ll wait.”
“Damn right you will. Except I don’t think I can.”
There was a quick knock at the window. Michael knocked back in response, and the driver opened the door.
“Thanks, Gali,” Michael said, getting out. “I think that’s it for the night.”
Michael held out his hand for me, and when I took it, he led onto the driveway I’d glanced at through layers of glass. Gali closed the door with the thup. Our fingers looped together as we made our way up the walk.
“Nice house,” I said. The windows were warm against the flat light of the Los Angeles sky, and the ground swept up and away in the distance, like the ocean decorated in tea lights.
“It’s bigger than any one person needs, but it’ll do in a pinch.”
We stopped at the front steps to kiss, and he jangled his keys.
“Keys?” I said.
“Yeah?” He stood in front of the huge wooden door, its size proportional to the rest of the house, and the detail in the glass matched the expense.
“It’s funny the mundane things I think people like you get to skip.”
“People like me?” He punched numbers into a keypad, disabling the security system, and turned the key.
“Magic people. You know.”
He laughed, opening the door. “Yeah. Me. Magic.”
He stepped aside, and I walked in, my heels clopping on the wood floor. A few strategically placed lights were already on, revealing only what needed revealing. He had a perfectly balanced and furnished home full of right angles and masculine colors. The walls were soft grey, and there was glass everywhere, showing off the view and the turquoise, bean-shaped pool in the backyard.
“Can I get you something?” He passed me, walking backward into a kitchen that, like mine, was defined by an island, the open space around it, and its spotless lack of use.
“Water?”
“That, I have.”
We went into the kitchen together. He filled a glass from the fridge door. His perfect hand gripped the simple glass, his beauty shattering the ordinary nature of his task. I leaned on the counter, looking out onto the living room, the painting over the fireplace, the view. The stairway to the second floor was exposed wood and metal with just a railing. Was his bedroom up there? What would be different when I walked down those stairs?
“You were pretty amazing tonight,” I said. “In the movie. I thought you were going to jump through the screen and sit in my lap.”
“Scary guys are my specialty.”
He handed me the glass, and I drank. He stood so near to me that only the distance of the tipped glass separated us. When I was done, he took it and put it on the counter. As I drew my hand across his cheek, I flicked his stubble under my nail. His eyes, jade and blue, were so close to mine, and his hands on my body, unmoving, waiting.
“I have a confession,” he said.
A lump grew in my throat. Were we doing confessions? Did I have to drop my life at his feet? I didn’t want to. Not tonight. Not ever, but especially not tonight. “Let’s confess stuff later.”
“This is a now kind of confession.”
“Okay.” My voice cracked, because I didn’t want it.
“I don’t live here.”
“Excuse me?”
He stepped away. “Let’s do this quick before I lose my nerve.”
“What?”
He didn’t explain or even give me a chance to utter another question. He pulled me out of the kitchen, through the living room, through another room with chairs and a rug and couches, another room with a television, another functional room with storage, another that looked like an entryway of sorts, and out of the house.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer as he pulled me along a stone path. The drop-off into the Hollywood basin was to my right, and this man ahead of me, saying nothing, pulling me across his property, around a wall, and to another doorway with flowers planted all around the entry. He pushed me into the door, and his passion accelerated, lips on mine, tongues meeting, twisting, hands finding the boundaries of my clothing.
“I want you,” he said, gravel in his throat. “All of it. Nothing between us.”
“Where are we?”
He opened the door behind me, and by force of inertia, we were through the door.
“The guest house.”
I didn’t have time to see much. Just leather couches, paintings. It was neat but warmer, with blankets and exposed stone. One story. And there were his lips, his hands, his hair in my fingers, the rush of fluid between my legs as I pushed his jacket off his shoulders. He yanked off his tie, his eyes on fire. He was the guy in Big Girls, all heat and perfect lips set to a task as he stepped forward.
I gasped. “Nice house.”
“One bedroom,” he said. “Nine-hundred-twenty square feet.”
The ravenousness in his voice took the strength out of my spine. I turned around to face the view. Same as the big house but cropped by shrubs. Somehow, it was less grand. More manageable.
“I can imagine you here,” I said. “More than the other.”
He brushed my hair away from my neck. “This hair,” he said into my ear. “Never cut it.”
I would have agreed to anything when he kissed the base of my neck. He slowly pulled down the zipper of my dress and slipped the straps off my shoulders, drawing his fingers over my arms until the dress fell to my feet.
With slight pressure to my shoulder, he turned me around and looked me up and down. I’d worn the pale pink underwear for him, and it got the exact reaction I wanted and feared.
“You like it?” I said, trying to sound normal, but I sounded breathy and nervous.
He scooped me up so quickly I squeaked. His right arm was under my knees, his left arm holding up my back. I looped my arms around his neck and let him carry me to the dark bedroom. It was small, lit only by the glitter of the city below. He laid me on the bed and turned on the lamp.
Details blurred around him. A closet door. A photograph of the Hollywood sign from the back. Pale blue walls. And him, a focal point so strong it was impossible to see anything outside him standing over me with his shirt unbuttoned halfway and a hungry look in his eye.
I was propped on my elbows with my knees pressed together by instinct or training, because the pinpoint of arousal where my thighs met felt vulnerable.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, putting one hand on my knee, “and you’re mine.”
He put his hand on my other knee and parted my legs. I threw my head back as every sensation made my body react. He slipped his hands inside my thighs and got on his knees at the side of the bed.
“Michael?”
“Laine?” He kissed inside my knees, working upward with his lips and tongue.
“I want to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want you to be disappointed, but oh God, that feels so good.”
He looped his fingers under the sides of my panties and slid them down before tossing them off. “I won’t be disappointed.”
“I’ve only ever come one way.”
“Tell me.” He put his lips back on the inside of one thigh and drew his hands up the length of the other.
“Myself. I can only make myself come. Or sometimes fingers like the other day but never—”
I couldn’t finish, because his lips reached home, and his tongue took me, luscious and soft, gentle and firm, while he spread my legs farther, exposing me completely to his mouth.
I looked down. His eyes watched me over the horizon of my body, protecting me, making sure I was with him. He brushed a finger over my nipple as he sucked on me gently, and he stretched his arm until he cupped my chin in his palm. I turned my head and took his fingers in my mouth. He groaned into me, vibrating, sucking harder, and the impossible seemed possible.
I was five, running the length Venice Beach with Sunshine and Rover. We went every early morning, the night rain over and leaving the air thick with salt water. I tasted those mornings on Michael’s fingers. His tongue was more than a surface but the promise of a mounting wave that rose higher and higher, curling into foam at the top.
I remembered the seagulls on the wet sand, a clustered pool of rippling white feathers, and I remembered running into it as if I would splash in a puddle. When I got to them, they broke apart, flying upward in a squawking cacophony, and me in the center of it, the space around me no more than the beat of wings, splitting upward to the grey sky; the disordered but peaceful pool of birds I’d intended to wade among, gone, dynamic, and purposeful.
I broke apart like those seagulls when I came, losing all sense of place and time, overtaken with kinetic blackness, breaking apart into his mouth, lying flat on the sand in a carpet of foam, slowly forward then back into the vibrating stillness of the sea.
I opened my eyes. The white ceiling looked back at me, crackling with the last of my orgasm. “Jesus, Michael.” My eyes fluttered closed again.
“You were saying something about me being disappointed?” He crawled up the bed until his lips were right above mine.
I smelled myself on his face, and I kissed him. “I forgot everything I was trying to say about anything.”
“Good.”
I wedged my finger between the placket of the next shirt button and slipped it through. He got up on his knees above me and undid his cuffs, tossing the cufflinks onto the night table. I yanked his belt free of the buckle as he pulled his shirt over his head.
I’d seen his body on film, flat and huge like some fake, painted shape and blowing through the frame like an icon of perfection. I was glad he had to stand to get his pants off, because it gave me a second to connect what I’d seen already with the reality of what was before me, which was just as perfect but real.
He wasn’t a big guy but taut and toned, every bow and bend a piece of a flawless whole. And, of course, the part of him I’d never seen, which was erect, sent a new shudder of anticipation through me.
I covered my face. I heard him rip open a condom wrapper.
“What?” he said.
“You’re so perfect, I can’t even look at you.”
He laughed and fell on me, pulling my arms away and pinning them over my head. “Look at me, please. I love it when you do.”
I did, but all I could see was his face, the stubble on his cheeks, and the blue flecks in his green eyes. I relaxed my legs, and they opened for him. He shifted until his shaft was against me, sliding as we kissed and frictionless against my arousal. I wanted him as I’d never wanted anyone.
“Please,” I moaned. “Let’s go. Let’s do it.”
“So impatient.” He let my hands go and reached between us to run his fingers over me.
My back arched.
“And wet. Very wet.” He got on his knees and looked me up and down, then he put his hand over my face, moving it over my lips. I kissed his hand, but he kept moving it down, over my neck, my breasts, my belly, watching me squirm as he put it between my legs. He put his dick against me. “You ready?”
“Yes.”
He entered me with purpose and strength but not any faster than necessary, stretching what hadn’t been touched in so long. I thought he was going to break me, and I thought when I cracked, pleasure would fill the fissures. I pulled him on top of me, wrapping my arms and legs around him.
His weight on my body, the pressure of his arms around me, trapped me in a cocoon of his flesh and surrounded me with his scent of cinnamon. Even when we rolled and changed, he enfolded me, and I felt safe. I just lived that security, that release of anxiety, pushing against him because I wanted to crawl inside him.
I didn’t expect to come—I only expected to enjoy his body—but I felt as though I might. He must have felt it in the way I tensed and gripped his back.
“Laine,” he whispered, looking me in the eye, “come for me.”
“Oh, Michael. I…”
“Yes,” he said, continuing the affirmations until everything went black and electric, and I said his name.
He groaned and sped up his strokes, his face tightening. I put my hand on his cheek, feeling his tension and release, and realized I didn’t just want him but loved him.
I loved him. Without regret, washed in the unguarded moment of our ultimate pleasure, I loved him.