Page 36 of Lovestrung

I didn’t want any of them to see me, but I couldn’t keep away.

After our kiss, I had to see her one last time.

How could I have ever believed I could keep my feelings for her in check?

It was impossible.

As she hugged her parents and turned away, her shoulders square and head held proud,

I felt my heart crack and gasped for air.

This was it. She was leaving.

I knew she’d come back, but what would happen then?

There would never be a last time where she was concerned.

8

Longing

I didn’t know I was in love with her until she was gone.

I did know that I was in lust with her and had been for years, but that was entirely different. It was forbidden because of our history and because I was too old for her. In all honesty, it was a piss-poor excuse – the three years between us was nothing – but that’s how it had always felt to me. Ever since she was fifteen, and I had given in to be her first kiss, I had grown used to forcing myself to only think of her as my little sister, but now…now, things had changed between us.

That kiss…fuck me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When her lips had touched mine, it was like I’d been sucker-punched in my gut. All the missing pieces inside my soul clicked into place, and a whirlwind of emotions had pierced through me the longer we kissed. It was like a veil had been lifted from my eyes, but it still felt forbidden. Maybe that was the reason I’d found it so hard to let her go in the end? The forbidden was alluring. It ensnared you if you let it – it would consume you, heart, body, and soul if you allowed that to happen. It could make you weak, or it could make you stronger, depending on which way you looked at it.

But no, I knew that wasn’t the reason I’d wanted to keep kissing her. Why it had been almost impossible to let her go. While I was definitely still in lust with my best friend, I could no longer deny the truth from myself.

I was unequivocally, helplessly, definitely in love with her as well. Her taste was embedded firmly inside me, I couldn’t imagine never tasting it again.

* * *

A lot of my friends in Blacksburg believed that I got laid on a regular basis because of my side job as an erotic model-slash-porn star – and it wasn’t because I didn’t get a lot of offers – but if they knew I turned down more women than I slept with, their eyes would bug out. They’d never believe me. The easiest thing to do had been to let them keep thinking I went home to a different girl every weekend, got my dick well and truly fucked, and that was that. It wasn’t as if I cared about the assumptions they made about my lifestyle, anyway. No, the job had been necessary for the past two years, and if my co-stars and I sometimes ended up in bed together after our paid gig was over for the day, that was fine. I was a man, plain and simple. I had needs that needed to be seen to from time to time, though I managed to bury them more often than not, and as long as the women were consenting adults, who was I to turn down their offers when we both needed an itch scratched?

It wasn’t as if it was a bad job, but I’d never have considered doing it if it weren’t for the fact that I knew the owner – my best friend, Lucas Michaels, had started it five years ago when he was only twenty-two years old. Some people might say that it was strange that a man decided to go into the porn industry, but Luke had never done what was expected of him. Born and bred into one of the wealthiest, southern families in Charlottesville, he’d defied any and all things that would turn him into “a boring stickler for traditions”, as he tended to say when people asked him what had possessed him to set up his business.

I kind of understood what he meant – his parents were snobs, it was that simple. They never saw their son as more than a troublemaker who sought out to embarrass them at every turn, but they underestimated him and his brilliant knack for business. Everything he touched turned into gold, but despite his own success, I sometimes worried why he never seemed to be content, always striving for more.

The night he offered me to become an erotic model at Privé, we’d been at a bar, and at first, the job seemed like the perfect solution for me and my need for independency: I got paid to model with beautiful women and we had to be naked or close to it. Our faces were either cut out of the photos, hidden in shadows, or behind masks for the more explicit, erotic movies the company also filmed and produced for their monthly subscribers – and there was respect on all sides.

“Plus,” he’d said, tilting his beer at me, brown eyes serious and determined, “the pay is fucking good, man. It’ll solve all your problems.”

And that’s how it started. I quickly found out that it wasn’t a sleazy firm that made crappy, unrealistic or cheap porn at all; no, it was tasteful, sexy as hell, and I had actually enjoyed working there for the most part. The bad part was that while my friends were accepting – some were even envious – there were the Montgomerys to consider. I’d hate for them to be disappointed in me if they ever found out what I’d been doing, and I didn’t want to lie to them if they asked me what I got up to. That was the main reason I’d kept away from them for a year.

Yes, it was better they didn’t know.

And now…now there was Penelope.

Sweet, feisty Penelope who refused to let me keep my distance. The girl who’d always preferred to be called Pippa because it was similar to the fictional character, Pippi Longstocking – the girl who was as strong as a hundred men and travelled the world alone, only accompanied by her horse and a tiny monkey. My Penelope was still the same and yet so different from when we grew up. No, she was definitely not a girl anymore – it would be wrong to keep seeing her as that now that her taste had awoken me with a hunger that unmatched anything else. She was a woman.

A woman I craved and loved like crazy.

Fuck my life. Things were about to get a whole lot complicated, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.

Nor did I believe I wanted to.

She’d been away for eleven months now. Eleven long, lonely months. Months filled with craving her as if she was a drug, and nights spent dreaming about her so often I’d lost count. Nights where I’d wake up, my dick so hard and achy I’d have no choice but to jack off to the memory of her lips. To imagine her lying beneath me, spread wide and writhing as my mouth and my words showed her how crazy with lust she made me feel. The way she’d felt in my arms – as if she’d fitted perfectly and no other woman would ever come close – was my favorite memory in a sea of favorites I shared with her; it was always at the back of my mind, almost impossible to ignore, even at lectures or at work.