Don’t stop.
She comes so easily, her voice a high delicious scream that carves me hollow with desperate want: to fuck her again, to hold her again, to hear her again. I’m still in her and I want to bein heragain.
That feeling: I recognize it, against everything in me, as love.Completion.Missing her before she’s even gone. And I realize, all at once, that if we just keep going, we can’t stop. The sun won’t rise. The world won’t turn.
We’ll just be here forever, me and her, in this perfect vortex of vice and pleasure, in this place between reality and dreaming. In each other’s arms, utterly unable and unwilling to let go.
Lexie’s voice in my ear, perfect and vulnerable and cut clean to the bone: “Again.”
* * *
Morning sunlight turns the world outside Lexie’s windows pearlescent. The lawn gleams with dew and mist blows by in great cottony swaths, revealing stretches of stark, bright blue sky. The smell of coffee hangs in the air, and the heater is chugging, filling the house with warmth and comfort like a dream. When I roll over, I find Lexie’s side of the bed empty and made. Somewhere in the house, I can hear her humming.
I could just stay like this, I think. I could live here, with her, with her kids. I could find honest work and make a life like this.
But the illusion is that brief—a desperate minute, maybe two. Because reality is pressing close with every day I stay in town and don’t track down Jockey. The longer I wait, the weaker I look. I can pass off my first week as a recon, or intimidation. Two is going to look like fear.
“Breakfast?”
I’m lying in her bed with my arms folded behind my head. Lexie has appeared, leaning against the doorframe. She’s wearing my t-shirt, breasts loose and tantalizing beneath the thin fabric, a pair of black panties, and thick knit socks. Her legs are smooth and full, and all I want to do is run my tongue up them.
In one hand she holds a cup of coffee. In the other, a plate piled with food. “Breakfast in bed?” I ask, unable to smother my grin.
“Oh, no.” She gives me a smirk. “We’re civilized people, Liam. We eat at the table.” She turns and sashays back down the hall, leaving me to enjoy the view.
When I get to the kitchen, she’s reading the paper at the table. I grin and sit across from her. “You wear glasses?”
She gives me an annoyed look, but I can tell she’s amused. “I’ve always worn reading glasses.”
“Huh.”
“Don’thuhme,” she laughs. “I know I look like a dork.”
I shrug.
“You’re an ass.” But she’s smiling.
“Maybe.” I drink my coffee, sit back in my chair, and take it in. Her house is modest, but well-kept up and injected with a surprising amount of her style and taste. I know this kind of place; from the 80s, squat and simple. Usually it has popcorn ceiling and a dejected basement that smells like a riverbank.
But there’s no faux-wood paneling in the kitchen, and all the cabinet doors have been replaced with multi-paned glass. The window above the sink has one of those greenhouse cubbies, cradling a bunch of flourishing plants I couldn’t name. A few have frilly, snaking vines that have begun to climb up the cabinets.
The sliding door is bracketed by long pale drapes fringed in lace, and outside her yard is pleasantly overgrown, the lawn mowed down but the plants springing up and determined despite the increasingly frosty weather. Back there the great trees stand sentinel, and beyond them are the wilds. I think abstractly of Margot’s wolf, and her neighbor’s dead cat.
When I turn back to the table I find Lexie studying me, a furrow between her brows.
“What?” I ask, setting into my food. Fruit, a thick slab of buttered toast, a scoop of steaming oats topped with a pleasing array of nuts and seeds.
“What are you looking for?” Lexie asks, putting down the paper.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
She crosses her arms, expression thoughtful. “Go on. Ask.”
I look up from my toast. She’s always been perceptive, but there’s a razor-edge to the way she observes now. “The kids.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who’s the guy?” I can’t bring myself to sayfather, for some reason I don’t care to examine. “Anyone I know?”
