Call me disrespectful or perverse. Call meselfish.But I’ve earned this.
Jack reappears with a wooden key fob in hand. Seconds later, he is backing out of the space and jouncing us along a dirt path behind the office. The cottages there are named after birds, as in The Piper, The Robin, and The Wren. Ours is The Swan, which I will later think of as metaphorical but now simply take in.
Leaving the truck from either side, we meet halfway to the door. He unlocks it, sticks in his head and sniffs, then moves aside to let me enter first. He’s right; it smells clean enough. The light is dim, but dim works. I’m vaguely aware of blue and white, of a double bed, a nightstand, an armchair and a dresser, not to mention air that hasn’t moved in days, but my urgency outstrips it all.
When I reach for the zipper at the back of my dress, Jack’s arms circle me, hands displacing mine at the tab. Before he pulls, though, he pauses.
“Are you sure?” he asks, and for a split second, the rest of the world is there.
But I don’t want the rest of the world right now. I don’t want anypartof the rest of the world right now. For the first time in thirteen years, I don’t even want to think of my daughter, though I can’t quite say that aloud.
Rather than speak, I rub the creases between his eyes with the pad of my thumb, run that thumb down his blade of a nose, then press my face to the spot on his neck just under the scruff of his beard. His skin is musky and damp. Two seconds, and I’m lost in it, but only until my zipper rasps and I feel a freedom on my back where there wasn’t seconds before. Drawing away, I reach for his belt. My fingers have barely begun to fiddle with its buckle, when he pushes them aside.
Practiced in unbuckling, he doesn’t have to look. His eyes hold mine, and I swear they’ve gone molten. Molten should be dangerous where footing is concerned, but Jack is my safe place. The danger for me is back at the cemetery, back at the house, back at wherever Paul Schuster has lived all these years during which he didn’t bother to identify himself as my father. Jack Sabathian may have changed in the twenty years I’ve been away, but the heart of him has not. Lifting a hand, I touch his mouth, then the bristle of mustache above it.
“Do you need help?” he whispers and shoots a heated glance at my dress.
With deliberate motions, I kick my shoes aside and shrug the dress off. Bending at the waist, I free my hair, which Margo had neatly knotted that morning, but with which the humidity at the cemetery has wreaked havoc anyway. I remove pins and an elastic, then, straightening, toss my hair back. I’m reaching for the clasp of my bra when I realize that, although Jack’s belt hangs undone, his hands are still.
“Do you have a problem?” I ask. I’ve never used this particular tone with him during this particular activity, but I’m still in the grip of defiance. And this is Jack, who knows defiance like a second skin.
Smirking, he says in a husky voice, “Yeah, I do,” and drops his hands to his sides. “You are too fucking beautiful. Take off the rest.”
Words and voice—both are a turn-on. Simmering inside, I remove the bra and step out of the panties, dropping both on the chair with my dress. When I turn back to him, his eyes are on my naked body. For a minute, I don’t move—and not out of shyness. Shyness was when we first made love, when I was grateful for the night, which hid the fact that my right breast was fractionally smaller than my left and that I had nicked the notch at the top of my thighs in an attempt to remove the hair there. Shyness was when I was grateful for a moonless night that hid the details ofhisbody, which I desperately wanted to see but didn’t dare, and, besides, we were rushing to do “it” before we were caught.
Last Sunday night, I had wanted to lose myself in his body and forget the rest of the world, but my need here is different. This need is for certainty, and Jack offers that. This need is for defiance, and what we’re doing in this cottage offers that. This need is to feel my own power as an antidote to being powerless in so much else.
Standing before him, I watch his gray eyes smolder and his arousal thicken behind the placket of his fly. He wants to touch me but is controlling himself, and something about that control snaps mine. Closing the little distance between us, I go at his clothes, tangling with his hands when they go at my breasts.
“Jack,” I breathe roughly, “help me.”
“You’re doing a fine job all by yourself,” he rasps but takes pity on me with the last of his clothes. The instant his pants are off, he takes my thighs from behind, lifts me so that I straddle his hips, and, telling me to hold on, tosses the duvet away with a single hand and takes me down to the sheets. In the next breath, he is inside me and then, with only the slightest shift of his hips, deeper still.
We both cry out at the sense of completion before we’ve even begun to move. And then we do. I may be the defiant one, but Jack is incapable of passivity. He is over me, under me, behind me, driving me higher, as I do him. I’m not sure when I lose control of the situation—whether it is with the first orgasm or the second. But, somewhere along the way, my defiance burns up, leaving onlydesperate desire in its place. And then, after a final, screaming climax, it, too, is spent.
Panting, we collapse on the sheets and lie side by side on our backs with our fingers laced between us. As reality returns, I grow aware of the warmth of the room, the scent of sweat and sex, the richness of the afternoon light that slips through a gap in the drapes.
“This was for all the times we didn’t dare come here when we were kids,” I say but in a whisper that is more nostalgic than rebellious.
“This wasn’t about that, and you know it.”
Yes. I do know it. It was about defying my present-day life by focusing in on the one thing that has always rung true. Rolling onto him, I settle my legs between his. He is flaccid at last, and though I know that his ability to rebound is epic, I can’t resist this last press, body to body. I chafe his scruffy jaw with my knuckles. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” he says with a smug look on his handsome, flushed face.
“Do you feel used?” I ask.
“I feel loved.”
“But I used you.”
His eyes sharpen, and smugness is gone. “We use the people we love, like when we’re hurting and angry and there’s no one else we can sound off to. And if we’re too young to realize why we’re doing what we are and too dumb to understand the consequences and too stubborn to apologize, we end up not talking for twenty years, and during that time, that whole time, we’re alone.”
I swallow. He’s right about this, too. But the direction in which the conversation is headed isn’t one I’m able to face in the midst of the rest. So, I close his lips with my hand and whisper, “Not yet, Jack.” The red readout of the nightstand digital says it is two. “My hour is up.”
“Take another.”
“I can’t. There’s too much… too much…” My voice wobbles. I take a deep breath to steady it, but the breath wobbles, too. There’stoo much with Paul, with Chrissie, with my father and my sisters, and, yes, with Jack. That quickly it all rushes back, like an eavesdropper tumbling through a door that has unexpectedly opened.
