He follows the line of my jaw, learning it with his lips, tortuously slow, dragging the full curve of his lower lip up the slope of my chin, and then his mouth is tangling with mine again, deeper this time—a kiss that makes my head tip back against the brick from pleasure as much as from the pressure of his lips, his desire in every rolling, perfect thrust of his tongue, showing me the way he’d move against me, inside of me, if it weren’t for these clothes and this semipublic place and the bare, hard surfaces against my back and everything else that’s probably going to stop him. His sister, his staying, his—
“Greer,” he says again, pulling away from my mouth, as though he heard the drip of cold water thoughts. “Tell me.”
“I don’t want you to stop.” My eyes are still closed, my hands moving up and over the soft fabric of his shirt. The muscles of his shoulders bunch, lean and striated and perfect. The skin on his neck is warm, and I let my palms rest there, linking my fingers at the back and pulling his mouth to mine again. When I swipe my tongue against his lip, he makes a noise, a low grunt coming from his chest, and I press mine against his, trying to feel that sound as we kiss and kiss, and there’s no more cold water thoughts after that.
I don’t know how long it is before his knees dip slightly, and my breath hitches with anticipation, expectation—maybe he’ll press me against this wall with that hardness between his legs, maybe I’ll wrap my legs around him, maybe we’ll join our bodies the way we joined our hands that first night—
“Feel this?” he asks, bringing me back to myself, stopping me from living in my imagination, and I’m grateful for that, since this is better than anything my imagination does on its own, and that’s saying something given my years of practice with it. I realize he’s only dipped his knees enough to reach his fingertips against the side of my leg, right above my knee, and when I tip my head down in a small nod of acknowledgment, pressing my lips to his shoulder, he moves again, trailing the rough pads of his fingertips up, underneath the fabric of my skirt. He traces the line of my quadricep in a way that makes me flex in display, in delight. HowstrongI feel when he touches me like that. How beautifully in control of myself and of him.
He moves slow, his breath warm and even against my neck while mine grows shallower. By the time his hand is all the way up, right at the hipline of my plain cotton underwear, I’m practically grinding my forehead against his collarbone, seeing those bright splatters of color behind my eyes while I wait for him. When he teases at the fabric, his index finger tugging the seam minutely away from my skin, I jut my chin forward, scrape my teeth in a light nip against his chest, and he breathes out a quiet, surprised laugh.
“I like that,” he says, right into the shell of my ear.
Then he moves, first his mouth lifting to catch the sensitive top edge of my ear between his teeth, a light hold that feels like the most delicious, gentle collar to keep me still. His hand shifts to tuck between our bodies, his fingers dipping beneath the front of my underwear, teasing the soft skin that’s right above where I need him. I move my hips, tipping them up, but he only presses his teeth down slightly in answer, chasing it with a soothing flick of his tongue before he moves his mouth back to mine.
I should’ve known he’d be patient, should’ve known he’d pay attention to everything. When he lowers his fingers to touch me, he’s soft, exploratory, quiet at first, listening to the catches of my breath, the whimpering exhalations that grow more regular when he sets his other hand to my breast, rubbing his thumb over the most sensitive part, using the fabric to his advantage. He learns the shapes of me, learns what I like, and once he’s got the knowledge, he uses every bit of it, letting his fingers play more roughly, spreading the wetness between my legs, dipping first one and then two inside of me, a move I reward with another scrape of my teeth against his chest.
He speaks to me then, rough and tender words against my mouth—how good I feel on his fingers, how wet I am, how much he’s thought about this. “Two days,” he says, almost a growl, “two days and I missed you so fuckingmuch,” and that’s pretty much what does it; that’s what makes my breath come fastest, my hips riding his hand shamelessly as I come, clenching around his fingers and feeling his free hand move from my breast to grip my waist tight, pulling me toward him even as he softens his touch, stroking gently through every last pulse.
“JesusChrist,” he breathes, sagging against me, still holding me up. His forehead is pressed against the brick wall behind me; I’m basically a pancake between it and him, if pancakes had spectacular, fervent orgasms in the greaturban outdoors.
I slide my hands down his back, tucking my hands underneath his shirt so I can feel his warm skin, but he reaches a hand around and stills me. “Better not. I’m—I need to get ahold of myself.”
“What about—”
He steps back, a full, deliberate step, and we’re back to watching each other now, both of us breathing heavily—me in aftermath, him in what I can only hope is anticipation. “Not here,” he says, in that same rough voice. “I can’t have what I want here. Come back to my—”
And it’s just that quick that something cracks in the air between us, both of us realizing at the same time what the end of the sentence is.Come back to my sister’s place?Come back to your best friend’s place?I only see a brief flash of something in Alex’s eyes, but that’s all I need to see before I lower my own, staring down at my paint-splattered shoes on the concrete ground beneath me. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if I could offer an alternative other thanCome back to my twenty-minutes-away townhouse and listen to my sister’s boyfriend snore throughthe thin walls.
But I can’t.
The alley feels close now, narrowly oppressive instead of narrowly intimate.
A fleeting, perfect moment of freedom, but all of a sudden it feels like Alex and me, we’re bothtrapped again.
* * * *
“I mean,” Zoe says, her voice high and annoyed. “You could’ve gotten ahotel.”
Here’s a thing most people don’t think about: how a granite countertop feels on your forehead after you’ve been facedown on it for fifteen minutes, confessing to your best friend what you’ve just done in the dark with your other best friend’s brother. It’s pleasantly cool, particularly if you make occasional shifts, setting your warm skin on some untouched region, like flipping over your pillow in the middle of the night. But it’s also punishingly hard, a brutal reality check for your face, all your bones sharp and juttingand in the way.
“Zoe,” I groan, lifting my head and feeling my neck smart in protest. “You’re missing thepoint.”
From her spot leaning against her sink, Zoe stares at me, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. “I’m really, really not.” She turns, runs a hand towel under a stream of water from her fancy faucet, wringing it out slightly before handing it to me. “Here. You have paint all over your face.”
You should see my underwear.“Thanks.” I rub halfheartedly—a little wistfully—at my cheeks and the bridge of my nose, a freckled and paint-splattered mess. I’d come to Zoe’s right after leaving Alex, who’d walked me back to my car silently and declined my offer of a ride back to Kit’s. “Better I walk,” he’d said, the tilt of that roguish smile tinged with regret. It wasn’t as awkward as what had happened at The Meltdown, but it certainly wasn’t resolved either. All that boldness, all that secret Greer come to life—it’d retreated when I’d remembered the limits to Alex and me. The places we didn’t have to go, sure, but also the time we didn’t really have, and the complication of how we know each other in the first place.
“Kit wouldn’t be mad, you know,” Zoe says. “She’d love it.”
“That’s the problem, I think.” I look down at the towel I’ve probably just ruined. There’s more paint than I thought on it, rainbow smudges everywhere.
If it bothers Zoe, she doesn’t say, taking the towel from me to rinse it again. “What do you mean, that’s the problem?” When she gives the towel to me this time, she leans her elbows on the counter so we’re across from each other. Her face is fresh and clean from a shower and she’s in her pajamas, but I can tell she was working when I showed up, her laptop on the coffee table and a half glass of wine beside it, the TV turned on low volume to a news program I know she wasn’t really watching.
“Alex is—complicated.”
Zoe rolls her eyes so hard that I imagine them simply falling out of her head with the sheer force of it. “Did he tell you that? Because if so, I’m glad you didn’t get the hotel room. Get him a T-shirt instead. We’ll have ‘fragile’ printed across the front.”
“No, he didn’t.” I pause, still cautious. There’s nothing I’d say to Zoe about what Alex is going through—the panic attacks, the fear about his work and his future. But of course Zoe already knows about Alex raising Kit; she knows they’ve fought before about his lifestyle. “Do you remember when Kit told us about her homecoming dance her junior year?”
