Chapter 19
The room was darkening around the two of them, fusing together in the cocoon of coitus. Their skin tones swirled together in the fading light like the exact moment that milk hits a robust espresso. Aaron and Vanessa lay there in his bed for hours as the world carried on. The day darkened and the people piddled around in rooms just a few walls away, and yet the two of them were the only people alive. It felt post-apocalyptic in nature, the way that she kissed him with a tantalizing softness that made him dizzy with desire, the tenacity with which he grabbed her breasts and awakened an animal in her that, all her life, she never knew could exist. It felt as though they were alone in a newly extinct world, a world all to themselves, a world where no one could judge them and there was a sense of urgency about the act: dire, imperative.
They were ferocious with each other at first, shaking in passion pent-up by mounting days of effervescent impatience. Their hands were desperately deliberate, twisting all over each other's skin like a time-lapse video of lush ivy sprouting up a garden wall. She nibbled on his bottom lip, took it between her teeth and gently sucked on it, mentally citing a blurb she read in an issue of Cosmopolitan she stole from her mother's bathroom when she was eleven that stated that such an act would "drive him insane," and ensure that "he'll think about you long afterward." She had kissed like this with every boy before, never questioning the validity of the article. It always seemed cemented in her mind as a sexual gospel of sorts. It couldn't be wrong. She read it in Cosmo at such an age that Cosmo was lauded as a kind of coming-of-age Kama Sutra, a sensual bible for the sexually inept.
Once it was all over—once the two of them thoroughly fatigued themselves, their batteries drained—they lay together as the last shreds of Tuesday bid them farewell. Aaron lay on his back and closed his eyes, watching the color blue float around his mind in several different shades: a whirring rainbow of sapphire behind his eyelids drifting him under a cobalt sky, down an azure river, into a cerulean sleep. And yet, Aaron couldn't sleep, not yet, anyway. Not only was it too early, too premature, too infantile to drift off at this hour, but the primary reason still glimmered beside him. Vanessa was here.
They never talked about Vanessa staying over, never discussed such formalities. In the Maldives, it was all very casually cloak-and-dagger. She would sneak over when the coast was clear, after all the board meetings, after the investors retired back to their own rooms, before dinner would be served and eaten with strained pleasantries in the company of dull colleagues. After all the work of each day was done, Aaron and Vanessa would instantly fall into his bed and begin. No foreplay, just brass tacks. The passion would unfurl as soon as the door to Aaron’s suite shut behind him. They would do something quick, something that felt almost cheap, something that lasted no more than ten minutes.
And then, for the proceeding two hours, they would explore each other's body with their eyes, with the skin-to-skin contact that made every touch feel more charged just because they were there, they were naked, and they were together. They would always do this and, at some point in the afternoon (it was always the afternoon), Vanessa would sigh sharply, almost as if she were expecting something, expecting Aaron to ask her to stay, and of course he never did.
He couldn’t, not with the company hinging on the tightrope of collapse with every passing month of lost revenue. Not when all eyes were on him to turn the profits around. Investors and employees, of course, would flippantly wave off Aaron’s feelings for Vanessa as uncontrollable lust, getting his dick wet with minimal effort. And admittedly, to the casual observer, it seemed that way. But no one knew about Vanessa’s life being snatched away from her just as she stepped over the threshold from adolescence to adulthood. But Aaron recognized that from the unbiased perspective, Vanessa seemed like a hot little side dish, a stereotype in disgusting clarity. As much as he hated himself for doing it, he had to keep his affair with Vanessa a secret until he could turn things around at work. For now, she was his behind closed doors, after the lock clicked itself into place, once the curtains were drawn.
Vanessa’s sigh would always fly out into the air and linger between them, her head resting on his chest and their legs intertwined. She would always make one last-ditch effort to subtly woo him—to make him realize that she couldn't possibly leave him in bed alone—by blinking a few times, her head tilted sideways in schoolgirl naïveté. Butterfly kisses along his chocolate skin.
At first, he was staunch and resolute. No one can find out, he demanded internally. And yet, Vanessa persisted on this Tuesday afternoon as four o’clock loomed over the ocean outside. She didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want him to make her leave, so away her eyelashes fluttered, the tickling across his collarbone radiating through him like an aftershock from the way she’d made him burst in ecstasy just moments before.
“Just stay,” he mumbled into her hair—honey-colored and spilling across the pillow beside him—as he flung his other arm around her, pulling her to fuse with him once again. Afternoon had danced across the electric blue horizon of the sea, painting the skies a different shade of orange with each passing hour. Aaron and Vanessa lay there, limbs tangled together and breaths synchronized below the lapping blades of the ceiling fan, the waves whispering below the deck. Flip-flops clacked against the floorboards outside of the room as hotel guests scuttled out to the impossible blue of the sea. Sleep fell over them, their bodies clean and hollowed out by orgasm, their minds alight with the essence of one another as the orange faded to fuchsia and bathed the sea below in glimmering serenity.