Soon, I’d leave for Ella’s. We planned for an early start because a squall was building just across the Canadian border, and it might roll east over the mountains later. I wasn’t even halfway through my first winter here and I was already wary of snowfall forecasts. The weatherpatterns were so unpredictable. Storms had a way of settling into our valley and lingering, hemmed in by the mountains, dumping inches more than the weatherpeople said they would.
I knew we’d be outside most of the morning, and that the fresh air and skiing – and Ella’s goofiness – would function as natural mood boosters, but I still planned to work out before I left. I’d take all the help I could get at this point.
I ate another huge breakfast. A frame as large as mine needed constant fuel, and after so many days in a row with a limited caloric intake, there was a risk my body would cannibalize my muscles to burn as energy.
Once I finished with breakfast, I went upstairs and stripped my bed. I’d gone through all of my spare sheets over the last few days. I dumped them in the washing machine, turned it on, and then threw open the windows in my bedroom to air it out. It smelled like an animal den in here. Musky. Slightly ripe. I wished I had something to burn – a candle, or incense, or hell, even sage. I made a mental note to order some later, and in the interim I doused the room in cologne and then closed the windows.
Skiing might trash my legs, so I chose an upper-body routine for my workout. I tired faster than I would have a week ago, and instead of pushing myself, I listened to my body and stopped.
I was stepping into the shower, my muscles already sore and overinflated from lifting, when I remembered Ella’s hamstring. Hopefully she was feeling better by now. I tore my right one in high school, and it took months to fully heal. I’d hate for her to push herself too early and do more damage.
An image of her wrapping that heating pad around her thigh flashed through my mind, followed by the sound of bliss she’d made.
My dick decided that now was the perfect time to stir back to life.
“Is your relationship with Ella entirely platonic?” Brian asked me yesterday.
“Yeah,” I’d told him. “Why do you ask? Do you think I’m not ready for anything romantic?”
“I thinkyouthink you’re not ready, which is important, and we should talk about that soon. But the main reason I’m asking is that with this new lower dosage regiment, you might start feeling and experiencing things more intensely. Your sex drive will start to return, for example.”
That was welcome news. I’d had a pretty respectable sex drive since puberty. Chalk it up to elevated hormone levels brought on by my involvement in competitive sports. When the depression set in, it plummeted, another symptom I’d overlooked. The meds had only further curbed it.
No wonder the sight of Ella’s bliss had stirred something in me. I was less concerned about it now than I was at the time. She was beautiful, and she had arched her back and made a face that could have been construed as sexual. My libido, just waking up after a prolonged slumber, saw it and overreacted.
I reached down, thinking back to a particularly memorable sexual partner I’d had a few years ago, and brushed my fingers up the length of my cock. It swelled even further, straining against my abdomen.
I dropped my hand to my side and leaned back against the shower wall, letting the water run over me, reveling in the sensation of being turned on. The sheer novelty of it. The glorious, borderline painful need to ejaculate.
Jesus. This was worth dropping the dosage for. Hopefully I didn’t have any more regressions; I didn’t want to up the meds again and lose this feeling.
I washed the sweat from my body and then lingered in the shower, my fingers wrapped around my girth as I stroked myself. All too soon, it was over, my release spilling out of me in a rush that, while it felt damn good, still seemed muted compared to my memories.
I climbed into my Jeep an hour later. Ella texted me a detailed list of instructions in case I lost signal on the way to her house, taking me up the hill I lived on instead of down it, out of what she said was an abundance of caution.
I checked her route on my phone before I left, comparing it against what my GPS wanted me to do. It was a full seven minutes longer, but that was because she had me taking back roads, avoiding town completely, most likely to keep someone from somehow recognizing me through these blackout-tinted windows.
I grinned. Jack was right. Ella was good people.
I decided to forgo my phone’s map and instead followed her instructions. She went through all that trouble putting them together, after all. Several of the roads I took were new to me. There was no one else on them – not a surprise in an area this sparsely populated – and so I drove below the speed limit, taking in my surroundings and the distant views of the mountains. It was beautiful up here. Stark. Still pristine. How it must have looked everywhere hundreds of years ago.
Ella’s place was so out of the way that I thought I was on the wrong street when I got toward the end of the directions. I hadn’t seen a single house yet. Did anyone even live out here? I was just beginning to worry there was a typo in her texts when I noticed a mailbox peeking out of a snowbank. I slowed the Jeep. The mailbox had her house number on it.
I turned the wheel and followed the narrow lane that led into the trees. Pines lined the driveway. Their trunks were massive. It looked like I was driving through an old-growth forest. Up ahead, sunlightstreamed through the trees. I passed from the woods into a wide clearing with a squat log cabin nestled in the middle of it. Snow clung to its roof. Smoke curled up from the chimney. The scene looked like something from one of Ella’s greeting cards, too quaint to be real.
I knew I had the right house when the front door opened and she emerged from it to stride down the porch steps, her dogs right on her heels. She lifted a hand and waved at me when I rolled to a stop, a huge smile spread over her face.
Seeing that smile lifted my mood from good to great.
Chapter 11: Ella
Iwas nervous when Ben pulled up. I hadn’t seen him in five days, and I worried that all the preparation I’d done to gird myself against his good looks wouldn’t be enough.
I stayed on the bottom porch step as his Jeep rolled to a stop, watching the dogs barrel through the snow toward him. He got out of the vehicle and leaned down to greet them. I took deep, bracing breaths in and out, praying that Megan was right and prolonged exposure to him would raise my tolerance, like an assassin taking larger and larger doses of poison, so if an enemy slipped her some, it wouldn’t kill her.
Ben rose from his crouch, waved hello, and then pulled a backpack out of the Jeep – probably his snow gear, since he was in jeans and a flannel jacket. He turned and ambled up the driveway toward the freshly-shoveled front walk, backpack thrown over a shoulder, one hand on the strap, the other in his jacket pocket. He looked like he could have been walking a runway.
Jacket by Tom Ford. Backpack by Ralph Lauren. Body by Battle Ropes.
