Chapter 18

“I lied,” I say.

Maddie opens her eyes. “Whaa?”

She is pretty wrecked, which makes me exceptionally happy. That orgasm looked—well, it looked like it felt terrific, obviously, but also kind of like she was listening to a broadcast from outer space, you know? Like, she was so far away from me, so far inside her pleasure, that it almost hurt to watch her.

Now she’s back, watching me with a hazy look on her relaxed face. I am still buried to the hilt in her, and she is clenching around me, aftershocks, and every one of those spasms threatens to push me over the edge. I have to concentrate with all my mental capacity to keep from coming.

“This is my favorite part,” I say. “When you’re all satisfied and just lying there lazily watching me and you’re all swollen up and tight and every time I thrust—”

I illustrate, and she makes a noise that sounds almost like pain, except I know it’s not.

“—you make that little noise.”

Yes, in case you’re wondering, I remember. I remember all these things about Maddie from before.

I do it again, a few more times, for good measure, and her head falls back against the pillow and her face flushes and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to make her come again, and easily.

If I hadn’t been teetering on the edge before, I am now. Each thrust feels so damn good, from the tip of my cock to the base and deep in my balls, not to mention that place low in my gut, almost at the bottom of my spine, where it’s all gathering itself for an epic orgasm.

“C’mon, baby,” I cajole, and her eyes go a notch darker and she makes that noise—whimper, moan, I don’t know what you call it, Maddie’s sex noise. I thrust myself deep into her, feeling the heat and squeeze and hug of her around me, the long, sweet strokes of pleasure with no real beginning and no real end, and when I’m as deep as I can go and just a little deeper, I circle my hips and her eyes roll back in her head and she starts making her signature sounds one right after the other, whimper-grunts of satisfaction and need.

“I love watching you,” I tell her, and her pupils shrink and her blush gets deeper. She looks right back at me, her gaze locked onto mine.

I might be sorry later that I’ve said all this. But I’m not sorry now. It needs to be said. She needs to know. When someone makes you feel this good, you have to give her full credit and thank her for it however you can. Right now I’m thanking her by relentlessly continuing the bump and grind of my pelvis against hers. And I’m watching need rise in her face as color, like sap in a tree in the spring, and I watch and watch until I lose track of holding myself back and she’s coming again and I’m coming, every muscle in my body rigid and shaking, pleasure roaring up my spine and swamping me.

I collapse more or less half on top of her, half next to her, trying not to crush the life out of her.

“Fuck, Jack,” she says. “That was…”

We both laugh because she’s clearly not going to finish the sentence.

“There are no words?”

“There are no words.”

And then we’re both quiet for a minute. I think we’re both remembering.

After I fucked twenty-one-year-old Maddie against the wall of the boathouse in the woods near Revere Lake, I helped her unwind her legs from around me and set her back on the floor. She wobbled a little, and I reached out to steady her.

I’d had a lot of sex by that point in my life. Drunk, sober, stoned, in bed, against walls, on horizontal non-bed surfaces, with high school girls starting when I was fourteen, and later women, older women and younger women, women who wanted to stay over afterward and women who were as happy as I was to scratch an itch and move on.

Before Maddie, I used to say there was no such thing as “bad sex.” All sex was at least “good.” Some sex was “very good” or “fucking awesome.” Some women could do stuff with their mouths or their hands or their pussies that should be celebrated in a Sexual Hall of Fame. Some could energetically bounce themselves on a dick in ways that defied gravity.

The sex that Maddie and I had just had was a different beast entirely. It wasn’t a physical act. It didn’t seem to be about sexual skill or experience at all, although something superhuman had definitely helped me take her up against that wall. It was about how it felt to see Maddie crying on the shore of the lake. How it felt to take Maddie in my arms and discover that she was perfectly familiar, like I’d held her a thousand times already. How it felt to kiss her as if we could just pick up where we’d left off when I was thirteen.

How it felt to bury myself inside her and forget everything else.

My chest tightened. I’d just started to come down off the sex high and remembered that she was going to go back to college. And even if she weren’t going back to college, she was Maddie Adams and I was Jack Parker and this sex wasn’t a thing that could keep happening. It was a moment in time, like a shooting star.

“Jack,” Maddie said. Her voice was unsteady. “Are you always that good?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And I wanted to tell her the truth: that no one is that good by himself, that it always takes two, but—

It was too fucking complicated and she was leaving.

“Yup,” I said.

I was that kind of asshole.

She sighed.

I helped her put herself back together. She smoothed her hair down and wiped a finger under each of her eyes to get rid of the smeared mascara.

“Okay?” she asked, showing me her handiwork.

She was so pretty, even with lake-damp hair and messed-up makeup. Maybe more so because I’d been the one to ruin the makeup. “You look—” I’d been about to say “beautiful,” but I didn’t want to sound like a tool. I’d just fucked a good girl against the rough wood wall of a boathouse with the smell of mildew all around us, and now I was going to send her back into the world with my cum still hot between her legs, and telling her she was beautiful would be a sad half-assed attempt to make us both feel like we hadn’t crossed some line that shouldn’t be crossed.

“You look fine,” I said roughly.

I thought that was it. I hugged her and she walked away, and five minutes later I walked out of the boathouse, and I don’t think anyone gave our disappearances and reappearances a second thought. Maybe Maddie told Mia what we’d done, and maybe she didn’t; maybe she was starting to feel shame about fucking in a boathouse or against a wall or with all her clothes on or for one-night-only, or because it was me and I wasn’t the kind of guy she’d seriously date. But overall, I felt like we could both pretend it hadn’t happened. And that was good.

Right?

Wrong.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep that night, and I couldn’t sleep the night after, and nothing I did—not mining the spank bank for every kinky hookup I’d ever had, not counting sheep, not going for a 1 a.m. run—nothing helped.

I just wanted her. It was so plain and simple and elemental. I wanted her. Up against the wall of a boathouse. In the sand, at the water’s edge. In my truck, over my kitchen table, in my bed.

But I might have resisted. I might have.

She was the one who showed up at my apartment, three nights after the party at the lake. I was in a studio over the drugstore at that point, and she rang the doorbell. I opened the door and there she was, wearing a flimsy sundress and looking uncertain.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, confirming my asshole status.

“I don’t know.”

It was so honest, and she looked so lost, that I opened the door wide and let her in. I let her sit down on my couch, and I poured her a beer and we sat awkwardly.

“No,” she said suddenly. “That’s a lie. I know why I’m here.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“I want to do it again.”

“You. Want. To—?” Pretty sure my mouth was hanging open.

“I want to have sex with you again.”

“You know that’s not how it usually works. You don’t just show up and tell someone—”

“Fine,” she said, crossing her arms. “Tell me you want me to go. Tell me you don’t want to have sex with me. I’ll leave, I’ll leave you alone, and that will be it.”

She glared at me, all dare and challenge.

I thought about it. About telling her I didn’t want to have sex. About her walking out the door. About me closing the door behind her and spending tonight the way I’d spent the last two nights, with my hand on my dick and my mind hopelessly tangled up in the way sex with Maddie had made me feel.

Then I thought about telling her the truth. That I hadn’t stopped thinking about what we’d done for five minutes straight. That I was hard as a rock, that I’d been hard more or less as soon as I’d seen her in that sundress, that when she’d said she wanted to do it again I’d nearly passed out from the rush of blood from my head to what I’d thought was an already fully flushed dick.

The first way was smarter. Safer. Neater. But I couldn’t make myself take it.

“I lied, too,” I said, my heart galloping.

It was her turn to raise an eyebrow.

“When you asked, after we fucked, if I was always that good? The answer is no. I’ve never been that good. It wasn’t me.”

“If it wasn’t you, who was it?” She looked hopelessly confused.

“I mean, it wasn’t just me. It was us. How we were together. We were that good.”

She made a soft, surprised noise. Pleased. She licked her lips.

I wanted my tongue where hers had just been.

“Come here,” I said.

She did.

We had sex fifteen more times during nine more nights over a total of seventeen days.

I don’t seem like the kind of guy who would remember those numbers, do I?

I remember everything.