I reached for Jasper's hand, the one busy squeezing my upper thigh, and shifted it between her legs. "Show me," I ordered, my fingers over hers. "Show me how you do it when you're alone."
"When I'm alone," she started, veeing our twined fingers over the place where I moved in her, "I lie back and let a toy suck my clit and another work my G-spot." She brought our fingers up to the hood hiding her pearl. "Don't see why I should have to do all the work when I can play with toys instead."
I closed my other hand around her breast, her nipple pinned between two fingers. "Will you show me that?"
A purr rolled through her that I felt in my bones. "Maybe. That might be interesting."
My hips jerked in a messy, erratic rhythm. "Might be?"
That gorgeous, piercing moan of hers filled the room and I knew we were close to the end, the in-between space behind us now.
"I doubt you can sit back and watch. You'll last two minutes before taking over. You'll want to show me the right way to do it."
That sent me shifting to my knees, both hands gripping her hips, turning her until she was flat on her back. "Isn't this better?"
She went on teasing her clit with luscious circles that made me want to fuck her and lick her and kiss her and bite her all at once. That made me want tokeepher.
"It's different. It's totally different," she said, her head tilting back into the pillow.
"I guess I'll have to see that for myself." I pumped into her, fast and reckless now, like she was mine to break. That was the singular thought in my mind as her body clenched around me, sucked me in, held me prisoner.
"Does that make you jealous?"
"Of your toys? Not in the least. They're my coconspirators, Peach. Not my competitors."
"Ohhhh.I like the sound of that."
When I caught hold of my release, I caught another flash-forward, this time with Jasper in a wedding dress. As I filled the condom, I leaned into her, my lips pressed between her breasts to prevent myself from saying something premature. Something permanent.
As soon as I was able to walk steadily, I headed into the bathroom and straightened myself out.
This was the wrong time to run away with wild ideas about marriage and—Jesus Christ—babies. I'd told myself for years I didn't want any of it and I had to remember that some good times with Jasper wasn't meant to change anything. I preferred a solitary life. I didn't want anything else. Marriage and kids weren't the paths for me. Too complicated, too messy, too tenuous.
I believed that as devoutly as I believed in the religion of nature. And yet, when I gathered a sleeping Jasper into my arms and closed my eyes for the night, I thought about all the lives we were allowed to live with the time we had, and I whispered into her hair, "I wish you were mine to keep."
20
Jasper
I droppedtwo slices of bread into the toaster and asked, "Do you happen to have a nail gun I could borrow?"
Linden belted out a tremendous belly laugh from behind the Sunday newspaper. As he set it down on the kitchen table, he gave me a fond smile that did terrible, terrible things to me. Just the worst. "Why do you think you need a nail gun?"
"I don'tthinkI need one." I frowned down at the cherry tomatoes on the cutting board in front of me. "IknowI need one. It's going to take me two years to finish the porch if I have to bang every single nail into place. A gun would make it much quicker."
"Also quicker to nail your hand to a board."
"I wouldn't do that."
"No one thinks they're going to shoot themselves with a nail gun. It's always an accident, Jasper." He shook out the newspaper, folded it in half and then in half again. "Why not work on something else?"
"I've done everything else. Generally speaking."
"What does that mean?"
I fussed with the burrata and basil for a minute. "It means I've cleaned out most of the house and done most of the work I can do on my own. You know, without a nail gun."
I didn't need to detail or justify my avoidance of Midge's bedroom. It did not need to be said this morning, not when it was a bright, sunny October day that had started out with the kind ofmaybe we're asleep, maybe we're awake, maybe we're a little pervertedsex that legends were made of and I had this gorgeous pint of tomatoes to drizzle with balsamic glaze. I wasn't popping that bubble with my inability to step into Midge's room without crying.
