Two weeks had passed, and finally, on this sunny Sunday morning, I was finally feeling back to my old self again. I poured myself my morning cuppa and sighed, letting myself lounge on the sofa for a few minutes before going on my weekend run. It had been a rough month for me.
I had let myself fall for a nice girl, which was a stupid move in the first place, only to find out she wasn’t so nice after all and have the absolute shit beat out of me. I wasn’t sure if heartbroken was the right word…we had only been on one date, anyway. But Eliza, to me, had represented something I had never thought I would find: a woman who I could really fall for inside and out. I hadn’t just lost Eliza, but I had lost the dream that she had represented for me. It seemed I’d be stuck hooking up with random girls and feeling the emptiness that came along with that for life. Eliza had been my last shot at something different, and she had failed me.
Work had been painfully awkward, but it was doable. I managed to pass off the black eye and bloody nose as a football injury, and I showed up to work ten minutes early to avoid Eliza, who I now only saw at company meetings, where we sat at opposite sides of the table, avoiding each other’s gazes. I wondered why she was still here: I figured her fiancée would have carried her back to South Dakota by now, the smug asshole.
I sipped at my cup of tea and tried my best to relax. This weekend I had stayed in, an unusual practice for me, but it had helped me to recover and revitalize myself from everything that had happened.
I sighed as I felt a small hand run up the length of my leg. Oh yeah. And then there was Megan.
“Good morning,” she whispered, suddenly palming the hardness of my cock underneath my gray sweatpants. Megan was the perfect antidote to counteract my heartache. She was young, beautiful, emotionally uninvolved, and exactly the distraction I craved.
“Good morning yourself,” I said, watching as Megan slowly cuddled up to me, keeping steady eye contact the whole time. “Come back to bed, will you?”
“If you insist,” I said, suddenly pinning her down on the couch. “But I’d rather have you right here.”
“Feeling impatient, are you?”
“Very,” I confessed, pulling off Megan’s tiny nightgown and kissing her neck, listening to her sigh as I left soft caresses down the length of her body. A thought interrupted, a nasty one—the kiss with Eliza felt different, it was extraordinary it was—but I cut it off, lifting up Megan’s wrists to pin them above her head.
Megan sighed as I leaned down to kiss her, and I groaned as I felt her legs wrap around my waist. The woman was still as insatiable as ever, I thought as I felt her grind against me. She was exactly what I needed right now.
“Get up,” I ordered with a smirk, and Megan smiled as she slid off of me. I took her hand and led her to the kitchen wall, the only one in the house that didn’t have one of my cousin’s atrocious paintings.
I grabbed Megan by the bum and lifted her up again the wall, where she promptly wrapped her legs around my waist. “Didn’t think you would have the energy to take me up against the wall this early in the morning,” Megan said, yawning. “You’ve never struck me as a morning person.”
“We’ll see about that,” I whispered in her ear, and in a quick motion I stripped her black panties down the silken lengths of her legs and threw them onto the floor. I stroked her, teasing her, as I slid my sweatpants and boxers off, releasing my rock-hard erection.
Megan groaned as I pushed into her slowly, her back still pressed up against the wall as I began to move. She let out tiny moans as I ravished her neck, and she threw her head back against the wall in utter pleasure as I began fucking her harder against it. I was consumed with the incredible feeling of being inside her as she gasped my name, and I struggled to hold her up as she convulsed more and more in response to my movements. I brought my fingers down to her and stroked her until she came with a long and satisfied sigh. I felt my own orgasm approach and pushed her harder into the wall for my final few thrusts until I felt myself come apart inside her, and I weakened and lowered her down to the carpet.
“Let’s sleep for a bit,” Megan said, sliding down from the wall. “And then round two?” She winked. I followed her back into the bedroom and laid down next to her a bit reluctantly. Holding her up and fucking her like that had stripped me of all of my energy. All I wanted to do was to fall fast asleep.
I turned over in bed and sighed, staring absentmindedly at the wall. My eyes travelled across the exposed brick to a guitar, one I bought when I first came to this city years ago, and I hadn’t touched it in years.
I had felt like a different person with that guitar in my hands, a cocky boy just off the plane from London and reveling in the feeling of having American girls melt at my feet like butter. When you’re young and you escape for the first time, it’s like you’re not yourself, at least for a while. You put on a skin, a city skin, one of confidence and steel and daring, because it’s the only way to survive. Your moral compass only sets in later. To survive, you have to become someone else, at least for a while, and I had forgotten how that felt.
Eliza, getting on the highway to a city she had never seen, running from something and to something she couldn’t quite explain…I had been like that once too. She had put on the mask of her new life, created an identity that hadn’t included Ben—it couldn’t have, for the sake of her own sanity. I remembered the way I hadn’t called my mum and dad for months on end and abandoned all my old friends in England, and my old ways. To run desperately to a new life also meant leaving an old one behind, and you needed a strong, merciless heart to do so. I of all people should know.
I turned and looked at Megan next to me, sleeping peacefully as her mascara smudged my pillow. She was brilliant yes, but brilliant like all of the others were. She was no Eliza Cameron.
Eliza Cameron was a supernova. And she was what exactly what I needed. I would be kidding myself to think otherwise.