LAUREN

 

I felt stupid doing it, but I went shopping before my date with Gabe. Of course, I told myself that I wasn’t shopping because of him, I was merely shopping as I desperately needed some casual clothes that didn’t consist of worn sweatpants and stained t-shirts. But still, if it hadn’t been for Gabe, I would have been quite content lounging around the house dressed like a slob. I ended up buying several pairs of jeans and some printed tops and shirts, still casual, but a lot better than my usual comfortable clothes.

Gabe pulled up right on time. I felt that familiar flit of nervousness again, but as soon as I pulled open the car door and Gabe smiled at me, it vanished.

“Hey,” he said over the blare of the music before turning down the volume.

“Hey, yourself.” I settled into the seat and pulled on the seat belt. He reached out and ran his hand over my thigh and down to my knee, unable to contain his grin.

We drove out to the countryside and pulled up at the ruin of a dilapidated house standing proudly in the centre of a plantation of pine trees. Its desolate beauty hitched in my throat. I lifted my camera to my eye and began pressing the shutter, trying to capture the forlorn beauty. “It’s so beautiful, Gabe,” I exclaimed every time I came across a crumbled and rotten board, the new shoots of spring creeping over it.

“I hoped you would like it.  It would be my dream to live somewhere like this.”

“Like this?” I laughed and gazed over the building where entire chunks were missing. “Something like this would have to be torn down, wouldn’t it?”

Gabe nudged the door and it groaned against the rotting floorboards before creaking open. “Not if I had anything to do with it. I’d love to somehow preserve its beauty and protect it from further decay, while making it livable again. Like somehow building a house around it with some of the walls made of glass so the old building was still visible.”

“Is that even possible?”

Gabe walked ahead of me, gingerly avoiding the holes of exposed dirt in the floor. “Careful,” he said, holding his hand out.  I lifted my camera and took a photo of him, hand outstretched, the light streaming through an open doorway behind him, framed in ivy. “I’d like to think it’s possible,” Gabe continued once he had helped me over one particularly large hole. “That’s why I want to become an architect.”

“You do?” I asked.

He frowned. “You didn’t think I wanted to pour coffee for the rest of my life, did you?”

I shrugged as he led me down the hallway a little and into another room. “Why not?”

The room had a broken window facing out of the porch and an old, overstuffed chair sitting in front of the fireplace. A blanket had been laid over the leaf-strewn floor and a picnic basket rested on it.

Gabe grinned at me shyly. “Too much?”

I blinked. “It’s sweet,” I assured him.

“Sweet?” He groaned, flopped down on the chair and swung his leg over the side. “I just wanted to do something… you know, nice, to let you know that I like you and stuff.”

My mouth twitched and I bit my lip. “You like me and stuff?”

“You know what I mean,” he said wryly.

I sat down on the blanket and pulled the basket over. “Sweet isn’t a bad thing, Gabe.”

“It’s not?” He joined me on the blanket.

“Not at all. In fact, no one has ever made me a picnic before.”

“Well, if I’m honest, Peta made the picnic,” he said.

My eyes flew wide.

“I didn’t tell her who it was for or anything,” he said quickly. “I felt bad about pulling yet another sickie, so I went into work and explained that I needed the afternoon off so I could take this girl I was rather keen on out on a date. She was fine with it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “She was fine with it?”

“Fine might not be the right word, but she assured me I’d still have a job tomorrow and she made me up this basket.”

I opened the top flap of the basket and pulled out one of Mark’s famous buttermilk scones. I lifted it to my nose and inhaled. “He really is the best at these, isn’t he?”

Gabe stretched over and lifted one out of the basket. Leisurely, he lay on his side across the blanket, head propped on his hand and looked over at me. “I want to know about you,” he said. “Tell me about your family.”

I shrugged. “There’s not a lot to tell.”

“Well, I’ve told you about mine.”

“You haven’t told me much about your family at all,” I protested.

Gabe lay back on the blanket and rested his hands under his head, staring up at the patch of sky visible through the ceiling.

“Ah, where to start? It’s a bit of a complicated story. My mother was Dad’s second wife, he’s got two older children with his first wife, and then Clark and me.”

We fell silent, thinking of the brother he no longer had. Gabe took a deep breath before continuing. “They split when we were young and Dad won custody, just like he did with his first two, though they had been sent to boarding school by that stage. I’m sure Hamish only won full custody because he had more money.”

He looked down at the blanket and traced the floral pattern with his finger while he talked. “Dad moved on and married some ditzy thing.” His eyes flicked back up to me. “I don’t see them that much, not after…”

He fell silent and I ate my scone, breaking pieces off and popping them into my mouth one by one.

Gabe cleared his throat. “Sorry, talking about my family isn’t exactly a happy affair. Your turn now.”

I swallowed the last piece of scone. “Well, my family is rather boring, I guess. Mother and Dad have been married forever, and I’ve only got one sister, Morgan. There’s a six year gap between us, I think that’s how long it took Mother to agree to do the ‘marriage act’ again.” I used imaginary quotation marks to emphasise my point and Gabe snorted.

“Marriage act?”

“That’s what she calls it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was. Mother believes that coupling should only be committed for the God-given reason of creating children. Anything more than that would just be a sinful desire of the flesh.”

“Your poor father.” Gabe shook his head and snickered. “And do you always call her Mother?”

“Anything else would be too casual and she isn’t a casual sort of person. Morgan calls her Mum, but they have a different relationship than Mother and I do. She’s always been Mother to me.”

I reached into the basket and pulled out a bunch of grapes. Gabe followed the grape with his eyes as I put it into my mouth.

“Morgan got married to a nice, sensible man and had a kid one year later. As for me, I was just a disappointment, the black sheep of the family. Well, sort of, I never really did anything to earn that title. It was more just that I didn’t do what they wanted.”

“So you’re saying you’re really a good girl and they have you pinned all wrong?” Gabe’s eyes flashed teasingly.

“Well, not according to them, but in my mind, all I did was live with a man instead of marrying him immediately, and then I got pregnant out of wedlock which was a big no-no. When we lost the baby, Mother assured me it was because I was unmarried. It was also a huge failure on my part when he left.” I let out a deep breath and rolled my eyes. “I’ve given up ever trying to please her.”

Gabe bit into an apple and the crunch was loud in the stillness of the old house. “Your family doesn’t sound boring. They sound a little crazy.”

“Oh, if she knew about you, she would be convinced you came from the devil himself. And as for me, well, I’d be branded a harlot.”

“Harlot?” Gabe questioned.

“The biblical term for a prostitute.”

“That’s ridiculous. I never paid you,” he said with an impish grin. Then he laughed nervously when I raised an eyebrow. “Best not go there, huh?” He looked around the room nonchalantly before his gaze rested back on me, the shadow of a grin remaining. “What about your dad, what’s he like?”

“Dad’s just Dad.” I reached out and plucked a stray leaf off the blanket, tossing it away. It got caught on a slight breeze and tripped over the doorway. “He just does his own thing while Mother rants and raves around him. Occasionally, she’ll stop and ask him to agree with her, and he always does, but you can tell he’s just keeping the peace.”

“And Derek was your first boyfriend?”

I looked up at him and squinted. The sun was setting through the open window behind him and the rays of the sun were setting his hair alight. I held my hand up to shield the glare. “I met him at high school. I was into art and he was into music.”

I thought of a young Derek sitting across from me on a bean bag in his room, his guitar propped across his legs, and strumming some god-awful sound. You couldn’t call it a tune, it was a noise. A screech. He had a thick flop of black hair, an unlit cigarette hanging out his mouth, and wore only a long white singlet over his jeans. He was so exciting to me then, so forbidden. He would have been five years younger than what Gabe was now, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. So much had happened. So much had been lost.

I shook the memory from my head. Sitting up, Gabe reached out and took my hands between his. “I shouldn’t have asked, sorry.”

He brought my wrist to his lips and kissed the soft underside. The warmth of the pressure ran through my veins and flushed over my cheeks. I sat up a little straighter, but he didn’t let go of my wrist. He continued to slowly work his way up my forearm, leaving warm kiss-prints on my flesh. I swallowed and tried to calm my racing heart.

“What about you?” I asked.

He looked up mid-kiss. “Girlfriends?”

“I’m guessing you’ve had a few.”

He sat up straighter and looked me in the eye. “Well, no, I’ve never actually had a girlfriend, so to speak. In fact, apart from one other, you’re the only person I've slept with more than once.”

“So you only slept with all those women and never dated any of them?”

He dropped my hand and narrowed his eyes. “Just how many women do you think I’ve slept with?”

“Well let’s just say that word on the street is that you’ve broken a few hearts.”

“It’s not that many, people just assume. And I’ve never given a girl the impression that it would ever lead to anything further. I’m straight up with shit like that.” He scooted closer and picked up my wrist again, staring at me, while pressing his lips to my skin. “If I want something, I will make it known.”

He worked his way up my arm and trailed kisses over my shoulder until his mouth rested in the curve of my neck. I did my best not to let his attention overwhelm me, but with each kiss, my pulse quickened just that little bit more. Slowly, he pushed me back until I was lying on the blanket, staring up at him, and he lowered his mouth to my lips. He kissed me gently, then lifted his head and concentrated on undoing the buttons on my shirt. He flicked the first one open and leaned down to kiss me again. With each button’s release, his finger grazed against my bare flesh. When all the buttons were all undone, he sat back up and looked down at the narrow strip of exposed flesh. He reached to open my shirt, but I grabbed his wrists and held them firm. While looking at him hovering above me, there was nothing stopping me from thinking of the differences between us. His skin, so perfect, unmarked by scars, not bent out of shape by life. He had seen me naked before, of course, he had seen the scar that stretched across the base of my stomach, seen the loose flesh that remained, but not like this, not with me so exposed with nowhere to hide.

“Why?” he asked and cocked his eyebrow, while my hand held his away. “I want to see you. Don’t hide from me.”

I almost laughed at that. “Look at you, Gabe.” I ran my hand under the hem of his t-shirt and rested it against his chest. “You look like you belong on the cover of a fitness magazine or something.”

“Really?” he said with a devilish smile. “I was hoping for more along the lines of a romance novel.” He bent down and kissed the dip between my collarbone and tugged to release my grip on his hands.

“Please?” he uttered.

Sensing my hesitation, he pulled me to my feet and over to where there were fragments of a mirror still left on the wall. Green mould stained the edges and large cracks ran up the broken panels. He stood behind me and began to lower my shirt over my shoulders, meeting my eye in the mirror. When my shirt fell to the floor, he unclasped the hooks of my bra and it also fell. Sliding his hands around my waist, he fumbled with the buttons on my jeans before slowly lowering them, his mouth so close to my skin, his breath ran hot across it. I closed my eyes as he lowered my underwear and I stepped out.

“Open your eyes,” he said, his lips brushing against my neck.

I stood naked before the fragmented mirror.

“You are beautiful,” he said, walking around to face me. He dropped to his knees and began to place soft kisses on the skin of my belly. I held my breath as his lips trailed over my scar, fighting back the memories it brought.

“Don’t hide from me,” he said again, before standing and kissing me deeply, gently reaffirming his words and begging for me to open to him. When he felt my hesitation melt away, he pulled back and took off his shirt, flicking open the buttons of his jeans while I watched him with hunger pooling in my depths.

Standing naked, he stared openly, his eyes trailing over every inch of me. When I began to fold in on myself, feeling exposed under his unabashed gaze, he shook his head and lowered me to the ground, running his hands along my sides before encasing my wrists, and pulling them up until they were stretched above my head.

“Stay,” he instructed.

His hands glided over me, coming to rest on the soft mounds of my breasts. He massaged the flesh in his hand, clutching and moulding it to his will. With both hands, he trailed over every exposed inch of my skin, drinking me with his eyes before devouring me with his mouth. I moaned and twisted and he looked up, smiling with satisfaction before returning his attention to my body. As he worked his way down, I felt his breath brushing against the apex of my thighs. I tensed and he gripped my flesh, holding me in place. He moaned when he tasted me and I clenched in response. The noises he made were uttered with such longing, they reverberated through to my deepest parts and I reached down and twisted my hands in his hair. He moaned again and I writhed under him.

Just before it became too much, before I shattered into pieces, he raised his head, moved to cover himself and then lowered into me, heavy and hard. I took him eagerly and raised my hips to allow him to thrust into me again, our bodies slamming together as I exploded from within. He cried out, and it sent trembling shoots of contentment through me. I ran my fingers over his back when he slumped over me, happy, content and marvelling in the gorgeous man that lay over me.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I had no intention of touching you. I didn’t want it to be about that out here.” He grinned apologetically. “Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.”

I laughed loudly in his ear. “Believe me, no apology necessary.”

“You are beautiful,” he said while untangling himself.

I stretched out on the ground and he lay down, resting his head against my stomach.

“You shouldn’t need someone else to tell you that.”

“It’s a little hard when you’ve been scarred and beaten by life,” I replied dryly.

“But that’s what makes you so beautiful.” He tipped his head so he could look at me better. “Don’t you see that? It’s our blemishes that make us who we are, not our perfections.”

“That’s awfully wise and mature of you,” I said, teasing him.

“No, I’m serious. Think about it, think about this house. A modern house, a house freshly built with its plain walls and straight lines, when you look at it all you see is a house. There is no character, no personality. But when you look around this house, you can imagine the people that used to live here, imagine what the house has seen over the years it sat abandoned and forgotten. Are we the first people to make love here in the last fifty years? Or have other people wandered across the fields and crept through its rooms?”

“So you’re comparing me to a rotting old house?”

Gabe laughed and turned his head to press his lips into my belly, kissing it firmly. “You’re impossible. All I’m saying is don’t hide yourself from me. I want you. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. Trust in that.”

He twisted so he was lying on his side, eyes directed at the underside of my breasts. Walking his fingers up my torso, he gently brushed them over my nipples causing me to draw in breath as they hardened under his touch. He sighed contentedly and smiled as he stroked my breasts, massaging them gently under his palms, his fingers leaving imprints as he pressed into the soft flesh. “Is it normal to want you again so soon?”

I followed the line of his body down to where he hardened and swelled under my gaze. After slipping on protection again, he rose over top of me, his eyes dark. Without uttering a word, I opened for him and he sunk into me. I relished the look of pure gratification that came over him, knowing that it was me that had filled him with such desire.

He was slow and gentle, rocking above me, eyes locked on mine until our breathing quickened and we both dissolved.