Book Lovers, page 28
His lips brush mine, light, careful, warm. I open to him, knowing how it will feel when I turn the page but unwilling not to turn it at all.
29
HIS FINGERS SNAKE into my hair, his tongue dipping between my lips. A sound rises out of me, and he eases me onto the desk. In the past, our connection has been frantic, mindless, but now he’s so careful and tender it makes me ache.
His fingers brush one of my dress’s shoulder ties, tugging the knot loose before moving to the other one. My hands are under his shirt, feeling his smooth, warm skin until it’s alive with goose bumps.
He tastes like coffee, with a wintergreen edge. His tongue skates over my bottom lip and his hand trails down my side.
I pull him closer, and he jerks me to the edge of the desk, his mouth more urgent now, his teeth sinking and releasing as we pull together and draw apart, each breathy gap making the next kiss more needful. His palm rakes up to my chest, his thumb stroking over my nipple, and I shiver. His heart hammers against me, and mine matches its pace, two metronomes falling into sync.
Lightning screams across the sky, followed by a low boom. The fire gutters, then flares. Little by little, Charlie kisses away the ache of these past three weeks. His lips skim my jaw, my throat, his hands moving back to finish unknotting the ties at my shoulders. The bodice of my dress gapes, and my heart spins like a pinwheel beneath his warm breath as his mouth moves down me.
I tip my head back, my lungs catching when his tongue brushes the inner curve of my breast. Charlie pushes the fabric lower until warm air meets my skin. His eyes lift to mine as he drops his lips to me, watching me as he draws my nipple into his mouth. When I start to arch, his tongue and teeth carefully skim across my skin.
His name slips out of me. Our mouths collide again, deeper, surer. His hand finds the hem of my dress and slips up the inside of my thigh. I widen my knees, his palm grazing higher until it reaches the lacy band at my hips. His other hand does the same, and I lean back, lifting myself so he can gather the fabric and slip it down my legs.
His eyes lock with mine, his grip tightening on the creases of my bare hips, as he kneels and brings his lips to the inside of my knee, kissing higher until his mouth sinks between my thighs. I lean back onto my hands, breath going shallow as the heat of his tongue melts against me.
I roll my hips into the pressure and he groans, his hand sliding up over my stomach, pressing me back until I’m lying on the desk.
I think about suggesting we move. I think about asking if doing this, here, is disrespectful. But then I’m unable to think at all, because his tongue has found a breaker switch in my body, cutting power to my brain entirely.
“Nora,” he rasps. A small sound of acknowledgment hums out of me. “We shouldn’t have waited. We should have been doing this since we met.”
My hands tangle in his hair. His are under me, cupping me, angling me up to his mouth.
Slow, hungry, purposeful. For once nothing between us is happening by accident.
The pressure grows until I’m shuddering under him, my hands twisting into his hair as I arch, crying out. He straightens and pulls me back to the edge of the desk, our mouths sliding together, our hands in each other’s clothes. I get his shirt off, undo his pants. He peels off my dress, then lifts me and turns to lay me on the couch, his tongue under my bra.
“This is the one,” he says, almost reverently, “you wore the night we swam.”
I rake my hands down his back, taking in every firm curve and hard line: my first chance to have as much of him as I want, and also possibly my last.
He kisses the base of my throat. “I remember exactly how you feel, Nora. Like fucking silk.”
My mouth softens against the side of his neck, his pulse against my tongue. My hands raze down him, pushing past his loosened pants and briefs, my nails biting into his skin as I rock into him. I reach between us, and when I wrap my fingers around him, a burst of too-bright light flashes through me, turning everything to dark, shimmering spots for a second. “I remember how you feel too.”
He groans as he moves himself within my hand. I push his pants below his hips. He goes on moving slowly, heavily against me, getting closer and closer to me. No matter how I shift beneath him, he seems always just barely out of reach.
Until he’s not. Until his mouth is running urgently over me, and his hands are tearing my bra straps down my arms, and the whole thing winds up bunched around my waist. Then we’re both half-crazed for each other, his hands on my thighs, my mouth on his shoulder, his tongue in my mouth, his erection moving against me until my insides are violin-string taut.
“Birth control?” he asks.
“Obviously, but—”
“Got it,” he says. Of course he does. He’s just like me: even when we’re both out-of-control obsessed with each other there are still a few (dozen) threads holding reason in place. Charlie moves off me, finds his wallet, and comes back with a condom, no further questions asked, no huffing, no hint at frustration, no implied uptight, nag, or bore. He tucks his hand against my jaw and kisses me with a tenderness I feel all through my body, all these little pockets of warmth nestled between bones and muscle and cartilage: Charlie, diffused into my bloodstream. And then finally, he’s pushing into me.
Slowly. Carefully. He draws back before I’ve gotten any relief, and a laugh rattles out of him at the sound I make. “I had no idea it was possible,” he says, “for you to want me as much as I want you.”
“More,” I say, too deep into this now to second-guess admitting something like that.
“Now, that,” Charlie says, pushing deeper this time, “I know is impossible.” I lift myself up, drawing him closer. His head tips back and a groan rises in his throat. As we move together, the world goes soft and dark, everything shrinking to the points where our bodies meet. His hands massaging me, his mouth unraveling mine, my nails digging into the contours of him to urge him closer than our bodies let us get.
I’m already sad at the thought of this ending. If I could make the feeling last for days, I would. If the world was ending in twenty minutes, this is how I’d want to go out. He thrusts deeper, harder.
“Fuck, Charlie.”
“Too hard?” he asks, slowing.
I shake my head. He understands. No more caution or restraint.
“I thought about you everywhere,” he says. “There’s nowhere in this town we haven’t done this.”
Half laughing even as I’m wrapped around him, ravenous, I ask, “How was it?”
“My imagination’s not as good as I thought.”
My brain feels like fireworks across a black sky. Charlie sits up and pulls me into his lap, pushing back into me. I brace my hands on the back of the couch, working myself against him harder, until every tilt and roll of my hips has him swearing into my skin. One of his hands winds into my hair, the other flattens on my back, holding me where he wants me.
“I want more of you,” I gasp into his mouth, feeling each beat of his heart surging through me. Harder, faster, more, all.
“You’re perfect,” he rasps. “That’s the word, Nora. You’re fucking perfect.”
Oh, God. Oh, God. Charlie, on repeat in my mind. “Please,” I say.
After that, there is no more talking. I have never been so glad for someone to see straight through me, to read me like a book, as he brings me to the edge again, and again, and—yes, the romance gods would be proud—again.
30
WHEN I SIT up, Charlie catches my arm, his eyes heavy and warm. “Stay,” he whispers.
My heart flutters. “Why?”
He tucks my hair behind my ear, mouth quirking. “So many reasons.”
“I just need one.”
He sits up, his hand settling between my thighs, his mouth pressing to my shoulder tenderly as the pressure of his thumb moves in a slow circle. “One.”
“In that case,” I say, “maybe two.”
He leans in and kisses me deeply, his hand gentle at my throat, thumb nestling into the dip at its base. “Because,” he says, “I want you to.”
“I don’t stay over at strange men’s places,” I say, blood fizzing.
“Then it’s lucky this isn’t my place.”
“Yes, because if it were, your parents would come running in, bleary-eyed with a shotgun, thinking you were being burglarized.”
“But at least we’d already be inside a getaway car,” he says.
I laugh, and the corner of his mouth hitches higher.
“Stay, Nora.”
I feel that blooming in my chest again, like petals uncurling to leave something delicate exposed in its center. And then a stab of panic, a needle in my unprotected heart.
“I can’t,” I barely whisper.
His disappointment is visible, only for a moment. Then I watch it dissolve as he accepts it, and it feels like some of those healed-over stitches in my heart open back up. He sits up, searching for his discarded clothes, and I touch his arm, stilling him. More than anyone I’ve ever met, Charlie craves honesty, and he doesn’t punish anyone for it. He takes it as immutable and synthesizes it into his world, and I don’t want to be another person dealing in half-truths with him.
“I was staying at my boyfriend’s place.” It actually hurts to say the words. I’ve never had to before. Libby already knows, and I don’t talk about this with anyone else. I’ve never wanted to make myself that vulnerable, to see the pitying looks, to feel weak.
Charlie’s eyes hold mine.
“Jakob,” I say. “I was with him the night my mom died.”
His brow softens.
I haven’t weighed out pros against cons, costs versus benefits of telling him. I just want it out. Want to hand it—this thing I’ve never been able to fix—to him and see what happens.
“He was my first serious boyfriend. Maybe my only serious one, in a way. I mean, I dated other men for longer, but he was the only one I ever chose like that.” Over everything else. Or maybe it was that I didn’t choose him. Just fell headfirst into my feelings for him, without any caution.
“I was twenty, and I was always over at his place, so we decided I should move in. And my mom—she was such a romantic, she wasn’t even trying to talk me out of it. She wanted me to marry him. I did too.”
Charlie says nothing, just watches me, leaving space for me to go on, or to stop.
“My phone died at some point in the night.” My voice is hoarse now, like my throat is closing off to keep the rest in. But I can’t stop. I need him to know. I need to not be alone with this for another second.
“When I was with him, I’d just . . . get so swept up. When we woke up, I didn’t even plug my phone in until after we’d made breakfast.” Eaten. Had sex. Made more coffee.
The back of my nose burns. “Libby had been calling me for four hours. She was alone at the hospital, and . . .” Nothing comes out after that. My mouth is moving, but there’s no sound.
Charlie sits forward, pulls me in against his chest. His mouth presses hard against the top of my head, his thumb brushing over my shoulder.
“I can’t imagine.” He pulls my legs over his lap, crushes me to his chest again, smoothing my hair and kissing it.
I close my eyes, focusing on these sensations, in this moment. I’m here, I promise myself. It’s over. It can’t hurt me anymore.
“Libby would wake up screaming.” My voice is wet now, thin. “For months after Mom died. And I couldn’t sleep at all. I was too scared I wouldn’t be there if she needed me.”
I learned to wait until she woke in a panic, to throw my blankets aside and scoot to the far side of my bed so she could slip in beside me under the quilt. I’d wrap my arms around her until she cried herself back to sleep.
I never told her it would be okay. I knew it wouldn’t. Instead I took up Mom’s old refrain for comforting us: Let it out, sweet girl.
“Jakob was great at first,” I say. “I barely saw him, but he understood. And then he got the chance to go to this residency, out in Wyoming—he was a writer.”
“He left you?” Charlie says.
“I told him to go,” I admit weakly. “I felt like . . . I didn’t have the time or the energy for him anyway, and I didn’t want to hold him back.”
“Nora.” His chin nudges my temple as he shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have been alone through that.”
“He couldn’t have done anything,” I whisper.
“He could’ve been there,” he says. “He should’ve.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But it wasn’t just him failing me. I kept making plans to visit and then canceling. I couldn’t leave Libby. And then . . .”
He brushes my sweat-dampened bangs out of my eyes. “You don’t have to tell me.”
I shake my head.
All this time, deep in the pit of my stomach, the shadowy monster of grief and fear and anger has been in the corner where I locked it, but it’s been growing, new ropes of angry black lashing out in every direction, starving, mad with hunger.
A demon that’s going to devour me from the inside out.
“I planned a surprise visit. Got Xanax, took a bus out because that’s all I could afford, left Libby alone. I could tell as soon as I saw him that things had changed. And then, the first night I was there, I woke up in a panic. I didn’t know where I was, and I couldn’t find my phone. All I could think was—that something had happened to Libby. I was . . . hallucinating, almost. My chest hurt so badly I thought I was dying.
“Jakob thought I was having a heart attack. He took me to the ER, and they sent me home a couple hours later with a huge bill and some breathing exercises. It happened again the next night, and the next. I told Jakob I needed to go home early. He bought me a plane ticket and told me he wasn’t coming back. He’d decided to stay.
“I wanted to figure something out. Libby only had a year of high school left, but I thought maybe I could move her out there with us. A week after I got home, he told me he’d met someone else.”
Like the universe was punishing me, for wanting too much, for even considering putting Libby through that when she was at her breaking point. It still makes me sick to think about.
Charlie’s fingers glide up and down my arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not that I am sure he was ‘the one’ or something.” I close my eyes, heart racing. “It’s just . . . ever since then, it’s been hard to imagine letting anyone close like that. Not when I’m so fucking broken I can’t sleep anywhere but my own bed. Even here it’s hard, with Libby right next to me. I’ve just never trusted myself since then.” I press my face into his warm skin as that ache yawns wide in my chest. “I’m sorry. I’m just . . .”
“Don’t be sorry,” he says roughly. “Please don’t apologize for letting me know you.”
“It’s embarrassing,” I say. “To be so obsessed with being in control that sleeping makes me panic. I’m a fucking mess.”
He turns me to face him, his hands laced against my lower back. “Everyone’s a mess,” he says.
“You’re not.”
He smiles faintly, the reflection of the embers in the fireplace catching the flecks of gold in his irises. “I’m living in my childhood bedroom.”
“Because you’re helping your family,” I say. “I threw mine under the bus the first chance I got.”
“Hey.” He touches my chin, lifts it. “Your ex left you in the fucking wilderness, Nora, on your own, and you did your best. You’re not the villain in his story. He is—and not because he fell for someone else, but because he exited your relationship the second you were the one who needed something.”
He cradles my face between his hands. “I’ll take you home whenever you want,” he says. “But if you want to stay, and you wake up screaming, it’s okay. I’ll make sure you’re okay. And if you want to stay, and then change your mind, I don’t mind driving you back at four a.m.”
I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imagining these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences.
Looking into Charlie’s face, I understand it. The way a crush of feeling and feathery impressions can move through your body, bypassing your mind. How a person can know there’s something worth saying but have no concept of what exactly that is. I’m not thinking in words.
It’s a feeling of not quite Thank you, not just You make me feel safe, but something that dances in between those.
“I want to stay,” I say. “But I don’t think I can.”
He nods. “Then I’ll take you home.”
“Not yet.”
He smooths my hair, tucks it behind my ear. “Not yet.”
We lie down together, my back pressed against his warm stomach, his arm draped over my hip, fingers brushing along my ribs like tiny skiers following the gentle slopes, until he’s hard again, and I’m drunk on the way he’s touching me. We have slow, dreamy sex, and when it’s over, I settle against his chest, feeling his heartbeat thudding softly against me, as calming as the lights and hums of the city blurring past my apartment window, a whole world that keeps spinning while you sleep.
If I don’t say it aloud, I think, it doesn’t count. Maybe it won’t even be true.
But it is true, and I’m not sure I’d want to stop it, even if I knew how: I am falling in love with Charlie Lastra.
* * *
In the morning, I skip my run. Libby and I sit on a blanket spread in the meadow, coffee in hand, and I tell her everything.
Eyes lit up from within, she says, “He’s staying?” and my heart crumples in on itself.
