I don’t want to think about that right now.
Jamie’s bare skin presses against mine, his breath hot on my cheek and a few loose waves of his hair brushing my brow.
All I want to think about is this.
Living with Jamie is like a dream.
I never thought I’d be the kind of person to say something like that. Never thought I was one for drifting around the apartment in someone’s enchanted footsteps, soaking them up with every movement and word and fall of fingers on keys.
But here I am, and I can’t even hate myself for it, because I feel like I’m living in a fantasy—and after everything that’s happened these past several months, I deserve this little pocket of relief.
Some things don’t change, of course. We practice. I sit on the sofa and take notes on Jamie’s technique and silently stew about how much better it is than mine. I hide in my bedroom to scroll through endless posts on the multiple sclerosis subreddit, seeking out horror stories like that’ll dull the pain when my own future hits. We argue at dinner about whether Midwestern politeness or New York candor is the better virtue.
And then there are the kisses stolen in hallways, Jamie pressing me up against the wall with his body taut against mine, his hands searching for the shape of my curves like he can never get enough. The heat that burns between us when we share a piano bench, playing a duet, our wrists crossing and his knee tipping out to seek another point of contact. One day I give in, abandoning the melody to bite his neck, dragging my tongue all the way down his chest.
I relish the way his breath audibly catches and slip off the bench to kneel between his thighs.
“Marigold,” he starts, the sound of my name rough on his lips as I squeeze him through his pants. He’s already rock hard. I wonder if he feels the way I do, constantly on the brink of dragging him close. Dragging him to bed.
I unzip his trousers, and he tilts his hips just enough for me to adjust the fabric out of the way. I slide my hands up beneath the hem of his shirt and kiss the bulge straining against his cottonunderwear. Even with cloth in the way, it earns me another low rumble from somewhere deep in Jamie’s chest, his fingers slipping into my hair and tightening there.
I make him wait for it, dragging the moment out as long as I can before my own impatience wins. I draw his cock free and kiss the hot head, gripping his strong thigh with my free hand. He hums out a soft noise when I finally take him into my mouth, the piano answering with a discordant clang when the small of his back hits the keys.
I love the way I can make him react. The easy, pliable nature of his body—how responsive he is to every touch, like an instrument only I know how to play. I suck him until I can tell he’s close; then I pull back, shimmying out of my underwear and straddling him on the bench.
I sink down onto him slow, wanting toearnthat moan that I tug from his lips. His hands grip my hips slightly too hard at first, fingertips digging in before Jamie seems to catch himself and relents slightly.
“Fuck,” he mutters, words half-incoherent against my mouth as I kiss him. “Do you know how impossible it is to act normally around you when you do things like this?”
I roll my hips down against his lap. “Like what?” I smirk a little—but I want to hear him say it.
“Sit there and play duets with me,” he says. “Wear things like this.” He plucks at the soft fabric of my dress, which—to be fair—I’d known was too short when I’d put it on this morning. “Fuck me this good.”
I laugh soft and low as I move again. I want Jamie to lose his capacity to speak so coherently. I want him to stop being able to speak atall.
“Maybe I don’t want you to act normal,” I say. “Maybe I like you better like this: all tousled and desperate.”
He hums out a heavy noise and tips forward to drag his mouthalong my collarbone. His hand finds my breast, his palm warm even through the cotton fabric. I pick up the pace, working myself on his cock. I want him past the point of no return. I want to watch him fall apart between my thighs.
The grip of his hand on my ass tightens, like he’s trying to pull me into a faster rhythm. I lean forward, my hair tumbling over like a curtain bracketing us into our own private space, sharing the same air. I lower my lips to his neck, teasing at his skin with my teeth.
“You win,” he mumbles. “I’m desperate.”
“You’re damn right.”
I brace my hands against the edge of the piano, shivering a little at the jarring sound those notes make when my palms unintentionally press against the keys. I fuck him harder, chasing those moans. The hand that had been on my breast finds its way between our bodies instead, searching out heat and drawing a soft, tight noise from my own chest.
It’s maybe a little rough, the way I grip his hair after that, twisting my fingers into the loose brown waves and using it as leverage to snap my hips forward again, kissing him bruisingly hard on the mouth. Punishment, I think, for all those times he acted so frustratingly oblivious to my presence. Or worse, irritated by it. He doesn’t have anything to hide behind now—it’s all too clear, hasbeenall too clear for a week now—what that simmering resentment was really about.
He doesn’t finish before I do, never does, even when it means he has to bite his lip hard enough I see the white of blanched skin beneath his teeth, his short nails digging into the flesh at my hip and his moans rough and ragged where he traps them between us in a fierce, sloppy kiss. I almost want to hold back, drag this out longer—see just how flushed and desperate I can make him.
But my body has better ideas, and I give in to the surge of heatand euphoria that rides through me, muffling a soft cry against his shoulder as he tumbles helplessly after, spilling himself inside me.
It’s the first time we’ve fucked without condoms, and as awkward as it could have been—those next ten minutes running around with paper towels, searching for the all-purpose cleaner spray—it somehow isn’t. Jamie’s laugh and his pink cheeks, half-amused and half-embarrassed, stick with me. I want to make him look like that again and again.
Cessy, when she finds out about our fledgling relationship, is incandescent with glee. “I knew it,” she insists. “I fuckingknew it,you can’t hate somebody that much and not want to fuck them, it’s like a scientific impossibility,” which is rich coming from someone who claims she barely graduated high school thanks to her shitty grades in physics.
“What happens after Stockholm?” Jamie asks me one night when we’re in the shower after a marathon fuck session in which he managed to make me come not once, but three times, his name raw and rough in my throat. “When I beat you, I mean.”
