Chapter 49: A romantic second date.
I bring flowers. I’m not usually a bring-flowers-to-a-date kind of girl, but it seems like the right move. I’m still barely out of the doghouse, after all.
Amy opens the door, sees me, sees the flowers, smiles. She takes them out of my hand once we’re inside her apartment, and she rewards me with a peck on the cheek.
“I’ll put these in some water,” she says, and for some reason, I can’t help but think of my parents, of my father refusing to take “no” for an answer when he first asked my mother out.
Hell, maybe Marty McFly was right. Maybe I’d simply needed to try harder, and God or the Universe or fucking British Airways decided to give my sorry ass one more chance by putting Amy and me on a plane together again.
“Told you so,” McFly says at my elbow while Amy’s in her small kitchen, digging for a vase.
“Go away, McFly,” I mutter. I don’t turn to look at him; I think if I do, it’ll only encourage him.
Dinner goes smoothly. Afterward, Amy puts on some music and we both retire to her sofa, each of us working on a second glass of red wine. Amy opens up to me a little, tells me the story about her and Wendy and the professor who came between them. She tells me about the panic attacks. She tells me about the car accident — and shyly, self-consciously, she unbuttons the bottom of her blouse and pulls it to one side to show me the scars. I don’t need her to tell me that she’s insecure about the scars; it’s written all over her face.
I reach out to touch them but stop myself a few inches from the surface of her skin. I feel the energy crackling there between my fingertips and her ribs, the miniature electrocution waiting to happen all over again.
My eyes flit up to hers. She’s breathing hard, but she also looks more open, more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen her.
“May I?” I ask. “Is it okay to…?”
“Yes,” she says quietly, almost inaudibly.
The electrocution I expected comes the moment the pads of my fingertips meet her scars. Goosebumps and heat run like a rash up both my arms and down my center, melting lower into a pool of something warm and wet.
Amy must feel something similar, because she gasps and lets her eyes flutter closed.
“Anika,” she whispers. “Put my heart back together. And promise me you’ll never break it again.”
I take the glass of red wine out of her hand, place it on the coffee table. Put mine next to it. I trace the scars with the pad of my thumb, bring my other hand to her face. I stroke her cheek with the back of my fingers.
“I promise.”
I lean Amy back onto the couch slowly and gently, kissing my way up her throat, nipping gently at her jaw.
“I promise,” I say again, and kiss her while I undo the rest of the buttons of her blouse. My hand skirts up her stomach, across a bra-covered breast, thumb stopping long enough to tease her nipple into hardness.
“Baby,” she breathes.
I sit her up far enough to take off her shirt, her bra. I suck against her clavicle. And you know what the good thing about long fucking albatross arms is? I can suck on Amy’s clavicle and unbutton her pants at the same time.
“Are you… Are you giving me a hickey?” she asks.
I push myself up. “Why? You don’t have to be a bridesmaid anytime soon, do you?”
“Anika,” she says, my name a blend between want and chastisement.
I only smirk, drop my mouth back down to the base of her throat while I push her pants down past her hips. She lets out a soft moan, which tells me I’m on the right track.
I kiss her hard, sliding my hand beneath the band of her silky underwear. She’s wet, so fucking wet, that it makes me answer her moan with one of my own, totally losing track of my kiss. I dip the tip of my index finger inside her — just the tip — reveling in the way her hips buck up to meet my hand.
“Anika,” she says into my mouth. “I want you. I’ve always wanted you.”
I push two fingers in this time, moving inside further, stroking against her front wall.
Amy’s hands come up, fingers digging into my shoulder blades, squeezing me towards her.
I rock my hips forward, thrusting deeper, finding Amy’s rhythm until we’re moving together, our breaths coming out in short, matching pants. I drop my face into the side of her neck, licking up with the tip of my tongue until I find her ear, taking it between my lips as she drives down against my fingers.
She mutters something in German, then French, then her hips jerk up against me so hard that I nearly lose my balance. But I don’t. I put one foot on the floor to steady myself and push harder. For a split second, my mind rushes back to the night I lost my virginity with Jenny on a park bench outside Columbus, one foot digging into the earth, the other on the bench. And instead of the memory hurting, it tastes sweet, like red wine on the back of my tongue, like I’ve completed a circle that had been broken for too long. Then the memory goes, and my mouth finds Amy’s.
A couple minutes later, I feel the earthquake of her orgasm shudder down her body, squeeze itself around my fingers, dissipate out through her hips. Her body goes limp beneath me.
“Motherfucker,” she says once she catches her breath.
I smile against her neck, begin to pull myself out of her.
“No,” she says quickly, catching my wrist. “Not yet — oh.”
An aftershock tremors through her.
She tugs on my wrist. “It’s okay now. Just — just don’t go anywhere yet, okay?”
I laugh. “I’m not going anywhere. Do you really think I’d just, ‘wham, bam, thank you, ma’am’?”
“No, I just — I don’t know.” She wriggles to the edge of the sofa. “Just lie here with me a minute. Will you?”
I’m much too fucking big for Amy’s modern little European sofa, but I comply anyway, wedging my right side into the narrow gap she’s created for me, threading my arm under her neck and around her shoulders. I drape my other arm across her chest, nestling her into me.
She sighs contentedly. “You’re tall,” she remarks.
“So I’ve heard,” I say drily.
She tugs at the arm draped across her chest, wraps a hand around two of my fingers, puts them into her mouth. Her lips close around my second knuckles, her tongue slides into the gap between my fingers as she pulls them from her mouth, slowly.
My breath catches.
“And you’re long,” she whispers. “All over.”
She drops my hand back onto her chest, smiles, and closes her eyes.
We lie there for a while in comfortable silence. I listen to the slowing sound of her breathing, smell the rich scent of red wine coming off her breath in little puffs.
“Amy?”
Heavy eyelids flicker open. “Hmmmm?”
“What’s going to happen with us? You’re here in Basel. I’m going back to fucking Ohio… Is this it? Is tonight all there is for us? I’ve done long distance relationships before. I don’t want another one.”
Instead of looking concerned like I think she should, she just smiles and lets her eyelids drift closed again. “We can talk about it in the morning,” she says. “For now, you’re going to be here five more nights, right?”
“Yeah, but I — ”
“Shhh. Then let’s just focus on five more wonderful nights, okay?”
She smiles again, turns so that she’s lying on her side, too, nuzzling her face into my chest.
Amy sleeps. I lie awake, thinking that I’ve resolved my past but still don’t have a future.