After several minutes of eye-popping tongue movements, Ollie came up for air, and I honestly couldn’t have formed words if he’d said anything. I was a wreck. It had been years since anyone had done that to me with such skill and attention to detail. I hovered in a dreamlike state somewhere on the edge of consciousness.
Ollie departed the room, which brought me back to earth. I called out his name. Oh no, he’d always hated doing that, and it had been a ridiculously hot day – I wasn’t exactly shower fresh down there. He was probably desperately swishing mouthwash – but then he came back into the room, his trousers pitched into a tent in the front. He was holding condoms and lube. “It’s unbearably hot upstairs. I thought we’d stay down here,” he said and grinned. He pulled me down onto the floor and began to kiss me all over again.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing, I … I thought you’d left because you were having second thoughts.”
He brushed the hair off my face. “This is all I’ve thought about for eight months, Ard. If you think I’m giving up on my chance, you’re a madman.” And with that, his head disappeared between my legs, and I let out a yell of such animalistic intensity and volume that we had to scramble to shut the door before Kennedy made it into the room to try and join in.
Just as I couldn’t take any more, Ollie let me go and finally took off his trousers and underwear. He stood above me, letting me look at him. His slightly sunburnt arms and legs and the smooth skin of his thighs, the firm stomach, and the perfect dick that I had considered my second home for five years. He lay down again and rolled on top of me, ripping the condom out of its wrapper and pausing to stare at it.
“What?”
“It’s weird to use one with you, that’s all. I can’t remember when we even stopped buying them.”
“Yeah, that’s not a ‘right now’ conversation. Just like how we’ll also discuss why you brought condoms and lube with you in the first place.”
He grinned.
“Budge up, dear, and open your legs, there’s a good lad.”
He thrust straight in, but it wasn’t painful. It felt perfect. Like no time had ever elapsed, like it had only been a few days since we’d last done this. Like we were back in our flat in Bermondsey, in the bed we’d picked out, in the expensive sheets I’d bought for us from Heals, in the bedroom we had spent ages finding the right arty print to go above the headboard for. That the fights and the heartbreak and the name-calling and the crying and the screaming had never happened. That I’d never found the texts, that I’d never snuck home from my book tour a week early when I should have been in Newcastle and found him with Jamie the pupil from his barristers chambers in our bed.
That he’d never acted like it wasn’t even a big deal, like he’d never been smug about it and tried to laugh it off and claim I was overreacting, like he didn’t say I was acting crazy. Like, a few days later, I hadn’t been sitting alone in a hotel room crying so hard I thought I was going to make myself sick when I started getting voicemails from him where he sounded hoarse. “Arden, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. Jesus, I’m an idiot. I’m sorry, where are you? I’m sorry, please tell me where you are, and I’ll come to you, and we can try and make this right. I’ll do anything.” Message after message.
I still to this day don’t know what flipped the switch in his mind, why he’d acted so awfully those first few days and laughed in my face and then turned into a snivellingwreck, begging me to take him back days later. Maybe it was bravado. Maybe he’d been so shaken I’d figured it out that he’d doubled down to try and save face. It was the only reason that I’d been able to think of. Because for those few days, I was convinced that he’d never loved me, and that I’d imagined everything between us for those past five years.
But then he’d told me again and again how much he loved me. That he’d never loved anyone else. That he could never love anyone else.
By then, it was too late.
“Arden? Baby, are you okay?”
I jerked back to see him looking at me, his face flushed, his mouth opened a touch, concern in his eyes. “Is it too much? Am I hurting you?”
“No, it’s good. It’s great in fact.”
He grinned and bent down to kiss me and then pushed in deeper. “Oh, Oliver.”
“Arden, Arden! Oh, Arden!” he yelled. He buried his face in my hair as his hips pushed forward and every muscle in his body tensed. I couldn’t work out what was his and what was mine, what was pain and what was pleasure. We were enmeshed completely. His hot breath in my ear. His hands gripping me, his body cemented to mine.
“Arden,” he said into my hair in a choked whisper. “I never stopped loving you. Not for a second, baby.”
I gripped one of his arse cheeks in each of my hands and held on for dear life. “I’m not going to last much longer,” I said, or he said, I couldn’t tell.
“I’m close,” he called out, and we both finished in a crescendo of yelling and grunting, sweat and tears and God only knows what else.
He lay on top of me afterwards, his head on my chest while I stroked his hair, and maybe it was the heat, or the length of time since we’d last been intimate, but the mostpeculiar sensation was flooding my body. I couldn’t identify it. I’d never felt anything like it in my life.
Chapter 9
I awoke with a shudder. My chest heaving as if I’d forgotten how to breathe.
Where was I? What house was this? What room was I in? What day was it?
Panic began to envelop me. Sunlight was streaming in through an open window, and the room was dazzlingly bright. I didn’t recognise anything. I was in a huge four-poster bed with a canopy above me. There was no other furniture in the room. Wooden floors stretched for miles on either side of me before they reached the walls.
The bed was empty except for me. I looked around for any clues. I was naked and had no clothes to hand. Grabbing a blanket off the bed, I slowly made my way over to the door and opened it.
