“It’s not.” He’d arrived at my underwear, the tips of his fingers tracing over damp cotton. “You know how I know that? Because tonight I get to have you… and no one else does.”
“You’d better earn it. Hayes Campbell.”
“I always do.”
It might have been the ghosts of the Chateau Marmont, and the feeling that wild things had happened there. It might have been the fact that we’d been separated for two weeks. It might have been my sudden determination not to be replaced. But that night, although Hayes might have had another word for it, we fucked like rock stars.
He was thorough and intense and insatiable. And the third time he handed me a new condom package to open, while he simultaneously disposed of another, I paused.
“Do you never need recovery time? Ever?”
He smiled, shaking his beautiful head. “I’m twenty.”
I tried to remember what sex with Daniel was like in the beginning, and sex with my two boyfriends in college, and sex with the boy from Saint-Raphaël, all who were in the realm of twenty, and while I could remember the appetite, I did not recall this level of stamina. But maybe that was just me getting older.
“You tired?” he asked, taking the condom from me and slowly rolling it on. Just watching him do that was a turn-on. Hayes, with his dick in his hands.
“Yes. But don’t let that stop you.”
He laughed. “Do you want to stop? We can stop, Solène.” Even as he was saying it, he was lifting me by the hips, hoisting me above him, determined. Round four.
He took his time guiding it in. Eyes peeled to mine, teeth sinking into his bottom lip, hips rising. “Just say the word and we can stop.”
“Really?” I smiled.
“Really.” His hands moved up over my hips and around to my ass. “Although, I’m no expert, but… it feels to me like you don’t want to stop.”
“Is that what your dick is telling you?”
“Fu-uck.” He started to laugh. “I think I might love you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m just putting it out there as a possibility.”
I stopped moving then, folding into him, close. “Not even as a joke.”
“Okay,” he said, serious.
“You’re trying not to mislead me, remember?
“I like you.” I kissed him, deep. “A lot. But as long as you’re fucking other people, you’re not allowed to make jokes about being in love with me.”
“I’m sorry.” His hands had moved to my hair, holding it out of my face.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. And then: “Are you angry with me?”
I shook my head, rising up off his chest, moving on top of him again, not wanting to lose this precious thickness. His gift that kept giving. “Does it feel like I’m angry?”
He smiled, even as his breath was quickening, his hands cupping my breasts. “I’m not sure. I can’t read you.”
I didn’t respond, but the thought went through my head that maybe it was better that way.
When it was over and I lay on top of him, feeling the layer of sweat between us and drinking in his four-times-over postcoital scent, he held me, tighter than he ever had, and said nothing.
In the morning Hayes blew off an appointment with his trainer and chose to come with me to the gallery instead. “I want to see whatyou do when I’m not with you,” he’d said at some point during our debauched night. He’d uttered it at a moment in which its meaning could have been taken in a variety of ways. But when we awoke, he made himself clear. “So it’s Take Your Lover to Work Day, right?”
I had an unexpected surge of nerves driving down La Cienega with him in the front seat of the Range Rover. The idea that I had his life in my hands, this irreplaceable commodity, and that should anything happen to him on my watch I would be forever culpable. It was like driving with Isabelle as a newborn all over again: the pressure, the fear.
