Текст книги "Everything I Left Unsaid"

Автор книги: Molly O'Keefe

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Inside the library, it was quiet and empty and smelled like old books and air-conditioning.

Without looking too closely at the kind-seeming woman at the desk, I headed right over to the bank of computers on the far wall.

“Excuse me, miss,” the woman said, using that quiet librarian voice that somehow managed to travel across the room. I wondered if there was a class for that in college.

“Yes?”

“You need to sign in to use the computers.”

“Pardon?” I glanced around the empty library.

“We just need you to sign in, so we can prove that people use the computers here. That they are an asset to the community.”

“I’m not part of the community—I’m just passing through.”

“I still need you to sign in,” she said with a smile.

I’m being ridiculous, I thought, walking back over to the desk and the clipboard there, the red pen attached with a string and masking tape. Panic fluttered in my belly. I wasn’t a good liar and I’d been lying about my name all across the country the last week.

What if she asked for ID?

“You forget your name, sweetheart?” the woman asked, eyes twinkling.

I wish.

With a quick breath, like I was about to dive underwater, I picked up the pen and scrawled Layla McKay across the form and thought of Dylan.

He lurked in the back of my brain all the time. When I stopped thinking of something else, there he was. Filling my head with thoughts that made me uncomfortable.

“Thank you,” the librarian said.

“No problem.”

I sat back down at the computer and scanned the headlines for Oklahoma papers. No mention of me in Tulsa. Oklahoma City. Or in the Bassett Gazette, the town newspaper closest to the farm. I’d been checking that one religiously since I’d left.

I did a quick search of my name and all that showed up was my marriage announcement, my mother’s obituary, and the announcement of the land Hoyt sold to the electric company to put up windmills.

Nothing. Oh dear God. Nothing.

It had been twelve days since I’d run. And it didn’t seem like he’d even gone to the police.

I sat in the chair a little bit longer because my legs felt like jelly, my arms useless spaghetti noodles. There was no big search underway for me.

I had never made a will, but I imagine if he claimed abandonment or whatever, he could do what he wanted with the land. I had no idea how these things worked. But he was my husband after all. No one would argue with him.

This was the best possible outcome of my leaving. There would be no fuss. No scene of him in front of reporters with flashing cameras, pretending to cry, pretending to care.

But it meant that I’d vanished…everything I’d been. Twenty-four years of being alive, of being a daughter and a student and a member of a church. Of working, sweating, crying, laughing as Annie McKay. Gone.

No one missed me. Or worried. Or wondered. I’d vanished and the world just kept on spinning.

That no one seemed to be searching for me was a relief. Yet behind the relief…there was something else. Something I couldn’t look at yet.

Relieved was enough for now. Relieved was all I could handle.

“I know you said you’re not from around here, but we’re having a book sale this week,” the librarian said. “Paperbacks are a dollar, hardbacks are three.”

I got to my feet, bracing myself against the table for a moment when it felt like my knees were wobbling.

The librarian pointed to a little rack of books by the door, full of beat-up old bestsellers and hardback textbooks and literary novels.

I loved books. Loved reading. It not only gave me an escape from my own world, but opened a door into other worlds. It allowed me, at the beginning of my marriage, to suffer with some grace. As long as I had another world to go to, what did I care about how small and strange and terrifying my own life had gotten?

Then Hoyt took away my books. Put them right in the burn pile, and the smell had been worse than anything. Like every dream going up in smoke. I’d tried to get some at the library, telling him it wasn’t costing him anything. But he didn’t like it.

And then I snuck them when I could, hiding some garage sale books in the barn.

But he’d found them.

And that had not gone well for me.

“I’m fine,” I said to the woman, feeling unbelievably outside of my body. Like I was floating somewhere near the ceiling, watching my thin arms and legs all scraped up from the work I’d been doing. The stupid bad dye job.

The scarf.

Stop. Fucking. Saying. That.

Everyone can see you are not fine.

“Actually,” I said and stopped at the shelf, “let me see what you have.”

In the end I bought ten paperback books. One of them was Fifty Shades of Grey, so worn the cover was nearly falling off. Chunks of pages were threatening to fall away from the spine.

“We’ve had to replace that book three times,” the librarian said with a twinkly smile.

“I’ve never read it.” I could not imagine the shit storm that would have fallen on my head had I tried to bring that into my home. But news of it had even managed to make its way to the rock I lived under. It had caused something of a revolution.

And I was ready to be revolutionized.

I clutched the plastic bag of books to my chest and headed back to my car. My hands were shaking so bad I barely got the key in the lock, barely got my body inside the car, the door shut behind me.

It was hot, and it smelled like the peaches I’d bought off the clearance rack at the grocery store.

I rested my head against the steering wheel.

He wasn’t looking for me.

I bought chocolate chips.

And a dirty book.

I pressed my hands to my lips, unsure whether I was going to laugh or cry. Until I was doing both. Loudly. Like a crazy person.

A sudden knock on my driver-side window made me jump, spilling my books all around me.

A cop stood out there. I must have shot him the worst look, because he stepped back and lifted his glasses up onto his head. He smiled.

I’m a nice guy, that smile said. I swear.

I used the old crank to unroll my window, brushing the tears away from my face with my other hand.

“I didn’t mean to spook you,” he said. He had a nice face. Round, with a little blond scruff around his chin. An uncommitted beard.

“It’s all right,” I said, my voice reedy and thin.

“I just…I saw you and I wanted to be sure you were all right.”

He saw me in the middle of some kind of freak-out. A panic attack. I was caught in that wide chasm between what I’d had and what I could have. What my life had been and what I wanted it to be, and every step, every huge step I’d taken away from what I knew and into the unknown, felt terrifying.

“I’m fine.” I gave him my best smile, which apparently wasn’t convincing, because he asked, “Are you sure?”

No. I’m not, but I’m trying here. I’m trying harder than I ever have and it’s so damn hard.

“Yep,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

Funny, but I felt like this time it wasn’t totally a lie.

In the twilight, hours later, the heat had broken and the breeze coming in through the windows was cool. My little trailer was ripe and delicious and homey with the scent of pasta sauce, bubbling away on one of the burners of my two-burner stove.

But my body was restless. Aching.

I sat up from where I’d been lying on the settee and put the book down on the table.

God.

I mean. God.

Between my legs, I throbbed. Actually throbbed. I felt swollen and wet and…throbby.

Honestly, I’d never felt this way before. Like my skin was too tight and aching and I needed something…something to split me open. To relieve this pressure.

No wonder that book was so popular.

I clasped my hands to my lips, closed my eyes, and tried to will the feeling away, but the more I thought about it, the worse the ache became, until it was in my bones.

I turned my head, staring back at my room.

The phone was in there.

Dylan.

I call him and…what? Have phone sex? Honestly, Annie McKay, is that what you’re thinking? You have no idea how that starts. How it even happens.

But I would bet my last seventeen dollars that he did.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I went back and grabbed my phone and took it back into the kitchen.

Away from the bed.

See how crazy you are?

Its face was dark and my intentions uncertain.

I’m twenty-four. Girls my age do this shit all the time, and worse! Why do I have to be different?

Dylan wanted to know about Ben, I thought, searching for a respectable reason to call the man. Something more…me. More passive and meek. Ben, a man with a penchant for tattoos and tomatoes. A harmless guy. So what would be the harm in calling Dylan and letting him know that the old man was fine?

Because Ben was not the threat.

Dylan is.

No, not even that was the truth.

I am the threat.

I’d promised myself in that bus station in Tulsa that I wouldn’t lie to myself anymore. The self-deception would stop. Because it had made me complicit in my abuse to some extent.

All married couples fight. That was one I told myself quite a bit.

Hoyt’s just under a lot of stress—that had been a doozey.

I’ll be fine.

That had been the worst of them.

So I wasn’t going to lie to myself now.

The phone was in my hand because I wanted to call him. Because my belly was full and my shelves were stocked with food I liked. Because my hands were raw from honest work, because I’d had a week of safety in this world I’d carved out for myself.

Because between my legs I was sore with…desire. Lust.

Those were such strange words. Foreign to my life.

Because I wanted to see what would happen if I talked to Dylan again.

What I might do if he asked.

Tell me no.

Because I wanted to be asked to do something I couldn’t quite do on my own.

I pressed the power button and the phone slowly blinked to life.

He answered a breath after the first ring, but instead of his voice all I heard was the revving of an engine. Or lots of engines. I pulled the phone from my ear.

“Just a second,” Dylan yelled into the phone and then I heard his voice, muffled as he yelled to someone else on his end, “I’ll be in my office.”

A second later the roar of the engines was gone. “Hello,” he said.

Oh.

His voice made me ache harder. I sat back down on the settee and crossed my legs, squeezing them together until sparks shot out through my nerves.

“Is this Layla?”

I closed my eyes in a kind of embarrassed relief, because truly his voice sounded like he was smiling. “It is.”

“You okay?”

No. I’ve been reading a dirty book and it’s worked on me and I don’t know what to do with myself, and I thought if I called you, you might tell me.

“Fine.” My voice was shaky. Everything about this was shaky. “Everything is fine.”

Lie! Lying liar!

“I’m real glad you called.”

“You are?”

“I didn’t like thinking I’d scared you.”

No more lying. So, instead, I went with total naked honesty. “Truthfully, I kind of scared myself.” He made a rumbly curious sound that raised goose bumps across my spine and the silence after my words was loaded, filled with questions I didn’t have the answers for yet. “You…you’re at work?”

“I am always at work.”

“You work in a garage or something?”

“Why do you ask?” Something cold laced his words, something slightly defensive. Or accusing. Very distrustful. Like I had no right to wonder about him. Or ask.

“Because when you answered your phone it sounded like engines in the background,” I said quickly.

“Right. Yeah, you could say I work in a garage.”

Still, the small note of suspicion and distrust in his voice cooled me down some and made me doubt what I was doing all over again. Jesus, what do I know about this man? He could be worse than Hoyt.

“Look, I just wanted to tell you that Ben is fine—”

“You talked to him?”

“Sure. Wasn’t that the point?”

“No. It’s not the point. You’re supposed to watch him. Not talk to him.”

“What?” I laughed, imagining myself peering through the blinds at him. “Like a spy?”

“You need to keep your distance. He is not a nice guy.”

“I really don’t think we’re talking about the same person,” I said. “An older gentleman, with a silver buzz cut—”

“The words Free tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and Dead on the knuckles of his left?”

So, that’s what those letters were. “Well…I couldn’t actually make out the words…but—”

“It’s the same guy. I know he seems innocent, and probably real likable, but that’s not real. That’s not the real him.”

“He gave me a bunch of tomatoes. I made him some pasta sauce.”

He was breathing heavily into the phone and his voice was hard. Not the way I’d heard him before. If he’d sounded like this the first time we talked, I wouldn’t have called him back. I would have been too scared. Of him. Not myself. “Layla, I know you have no reason to trust me, but please…please don’t get messed up with him.”

“Okay,” I said, placating him. I’d promised myself I’d stop with the self-deception; I didn’t say anything about lying to some stranger on the phone.

“Do you trust me?” he asked, sounding doubtful. “Because I need you to trust me.”

“I don’t know you.”

His chuckle felt like a hand across that tender skin at the nape of my neck. The skin that had never been touched before. Not in kindness.

And I didn’t know if Dylan’s voice was kind. Or if he was. All I knew was that my body reacted to him.

“I guess that’s true.”

“Are you an ax murderer?”

“No. You?”

“Nope. Well, at least we got that out of the way.” I laughed. “Though maybe it would be funny if both of us were, you know, ax murderers. Like the worst coincidence. Or maybe a dream come true—I imagine that ax murderers don’t get to date—”

“You sound nervous.”

My mouth was hot and dry. Worse than the creek bed back home in August. “I…ah…a little. I guess. Yes.”

“Are you trying to be brave?” His voice tipped into that familiar place where we’d been last time. Like, he was letting me know there was something more he wanted to talk about. Underneath the laughter and the banalities, there was a darker place we could go.

“I’ve never been brave in my life,” I said, longing so hard for that darker place. If having a dirty book would have gotten me in trouble, wanting this forbidden thing would have gotten me hurt I don’t know how bad.

But not here.

Not with him—this stranger on the phone.

This is why I called, because I don’t know how to find these dark, forbidden places on my own.

“You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”

“Are you telling me I shouldn’t?”

“No, but you said you scared yourself last time we talked.”

The trailer was small and dark, and it was as if there were only the two of us in the wide world.

“I did,” I murmured, feeling almost powerless. But in a good way. Like I was giving up the power instead of having it taken from me. The act of willing surrender made all the difference.

Made it okay.

“Then talking to me is brave.”

“I guess so,” I said, giving myself some points when I was usually so damn stingy.

“What else do you want to be brave about?”

Everything. My life. My body.

“I bought a dirty book today.” I closed my eyes and slapped a hand to my forehead. Honestly, could I be any less cool? I felt like a teenager.

His chuckle was low. Rough. “Did you? Was it good?”

“I’m not done. But yeah…it’s hot.”

“Was that brave?” he asked.

“Very. You tell me one,” I said, mortified and on edge.

His sigh was the kind of sigh that came after a long, hard day, when it seemed to be you against the world. I was pretty familiar with that sigh. “Well, I fired a guy today. A friend’s brother. I let it go on for too long because I owe my friend a lot. But in the end, I had to let the guy go.”

“I’m sorry. That’s a hard thing to do.”

“You ever fire anyone?” He sounded surprised.

“Once,” I said, not wanting to remember. “It was awful.”

“Yeah, today sucked. You go.”

“A brave thing?”

“Yeah.”

I couldn’t tell him about the cereal and the chocolate chips. I already sounded like an idiot with the book.

“Yesterday, it was so hot I wanted to lie down on my bed in the middle of the day naked and let the wind blow over me.”

I bit my lip and he exhaled slowly through his nose and I sensed that I’d shocked him. Or excited him. I sure as hell shocked and excited myself. But it was happening. I’d said those words and my body was coiled, hot and anxious. Full of restlessness and embarrassment and a kind of yearning that hurt.

For sex. Lust. Orgasms. Oral sex. Red rooms with whips. Blindfolds and handcuffs. Kisses in elevators that changed a person’s entire life.

Things other women took for granted that had been denied me, my entire life.

I wanted to feel my body from the inside out, in a way I never had before.

“Did you do it?”

“I chickened out.”

“Why?”

“Self-conscious, I guess. Too much sunlight maybe.”

“No sunlight now.”

I held the phone away from my face for a moment and took a deep breath.

“No,” I said. “There isn’t.”

“Why don’t you do that now? Open your windows, take off your clothes and stretch out on your bed, and then you can tell me what else you want to be brave about.”

This is why I called. Exactly why I called. I can’t chicken out now.

I got up from the settee and walked to my bedroom. My fingers opened the fly of my shorts and when they fell to my ankles, I stepped out of them and kept walking. I took off my tank top. I hadn’t bothered with a bra because of the heat, and I didn’t have much up top anyway.

The underwear stayed on. I was still Annie McKay after all.

The windows were open, the breeze making the little beige curtains wave.

In my threadbare pink bikini underwear, I lay down on my made bed.

The wind danced across my stomach. Over my nipples, turning them into hard beads. I almost touched one. Almost.

It was like when I cut my hair and felt the wind against my neck for the first time. I felt exposed and raw.

Brand new.

“How’s it feel?” he asked, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a murmur.

“It feels good.” I was lost for a moment in the cold and heat of it. The strange vulnerable thrill of it.

“Yeah? Tell me.”

I swallowed. Oh God. I didn’t have the guts for this one.

“It’s been hot for days, hasn’t it?” he asked, as if he knew I’d hit a limit. “And that breeze just cools down all that sweat. Makes you almost cold in places.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Good girl.”

I shouldn’t like those words. I wasn’t his good girl. I wasn’t anyone’s. But my eyes fluttered shut and I lifted my fingers to my nipple. For just a second. It was hot and hard. Burning, nearly. And then I put my hand down on the quilt beside my hip.

But I couldn’t quite stop the hitch in my breath.

He made a sound—that sound—again. Something had turned him on.

“What else do you want to be brave about?” he asked.

“I’d like to eat dessert for breakfast one day.”

His laughter was dark and rich like brownie batter and I wanted to eat a bowl of it. Of him.

“That’s an easy one,” he said.

Not if you’re me. Not if you were raised by my mom.

“I want to give a man a blow job.”

The silence on the other end pounded.

“You haven’t done that?” he asked.

“No.”

“Jesus, how old are you?”

“Twenty-four. How old are you?” God, I hadn’t thought to ask.

“Twenty-nine.”

“We could be lying,” I said. “Both of us.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’ll never lie to you.”

I couldn’t make him the same promises—I had, after all, lied about my name, about staying away from Ben. About being totally naked. I wasn’t ready to tell him the truth.

Or willing to.

“I’m not lying about my age,” I said.

“Are you a virgin?”

“No.” Those memories, cold and uncomfortable, terrifying and sad, were in my brain’s front hall closet too. “Just…not experienced.”

“Has a man ever gone down on you?”

I shook my head, my mouth dry, words gone, but then I realized he couldn’t see me.

“No,” I said.

“Did that happen in your dirty book?”

“Yes.”

“It turned you on.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you called me?”

Oh my God. “Yes,” I breathed, and he groaned.

Sex with Hoyt had been awful on a bunch of levels and the memories spilled, uncontrolled, out from where I’d tried to hide them. At the beginning, before I knew better, I’d asked him once if he’d like that…like me to put his penis in my mouth.

He smacked me right off the bed.

Whores talk like that, he’d said.

I closed my eyes, my arms lifting to cover my breasts, an old awful embarrassment filling me right to the top, pushing away all my excitement. Tears burned behind my eyes.

I can’t do this. This isn’t me. This isn’t for me.

I opened my mouth to tell him I’d made a mistake. I never should have tried this, no matter how bad I wanted it.

“You’re missing out on one of life’s great pleasures, Layla,” he said.

My eyes sprang open at the fake name.

My cousin’s name.

I’m not me. This isn’t me, having this conversation.

I’m Layla. And Layla isn’t embarrassed. Layla doesn’t give a shit what some asshole like Hoyt thinks about her. Layla’s probably had phone sex half a million times.

Recommitted, I cleared my throat. “I’ve never been skinny-dipping.”

“Well, now you’re killing me.”

“There’s a swimming pond here. Maybe I’ll try it.”

“That sounds like a good idea.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What—”

“Hold on now, we’re not done with you.”

“Oh.” I flushed at the attention, the focus this man put on me. It was uncomfortable, but I forced myself to take it. Absorb it. So different from Hoyt’s mercurial, violent focus.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.

“It would be weird if I said no after all this, wouldn’t it?”

“Are you touching yourself?”

“What, like…masturbating?” I shrieked. Actually shrieked. So impossibly not cool, Annie.

“Not necessarily.”

“Then…what are you talking about?” I asked.

“Just touching. Just feeling your skin. Your body.”

“No. I’m not doing that.” I’d never done that.

“Put your hand over your belly, spread out your fingers as wide as you can.”

I did what he asked, the tips of my fingers touching the edge of my panties. My thumb and pinky brushed the small indentions next to my hips that were somehow ticklish and directly attached to the ache between my legs. The skin there was so soft. The hair on my stomach white-blond and fine. I’d never noticed that before.

I ran my palm over my skin and then the back of my hand, from hip bone to hip bone.

I couldn’t stop my gasp at the electric sensation.

“You doing it?”

“Yes.”

“Now take that hand and slide it up your stomach, your chest, to your throat. Trace your collarbone.”

“I don’t…” My collarbone? Really?

“This is why you called me, baby. Let me do my job.”

I was panting—which I’m sure he could hear, but I didn’t care. I did what he asked, tracing the top and bottom edges of the delicate fluted bone.

“Touch your lips. Go real slow with your thumb. How does that feel?”

“Good. All of it…feels so good.” My lips were chapped, and somehow even that skin was attached to the ache between my legs because I was dying. Restless and achy and hurting.

“Lick the tips of your fingers. Feel your tongue.”

It was surreal, these parts of my body that seemed so pedestrian, so bland and normal every other moment of my life, but right now…they were electric. The air I breathed, the skin on my body—my entire self—was electric.

“Do it, baby.”

“Do what?”

“Slip your fingers between your legs.”

“I don’t…” I closed my eyes and moaned. There was too much happening inside of me—too many things. Desire and embarrassment. A terrible, sharp sense of my own ridiculousness.

“You don’t what?”

“I don’t…I just…I’ve never—” How could I explain my life to this man? The extreme temperatures I’d endured that left nothing…nothing for me. There was not a moment of my day spent on anything but appeasing first my mother and then my husband.

“You’ve never…?” he asked.

Once, I thought, but the memory was a bad one. Sour and awful. Terrible and unfinished; I couldn’t even count it.

“Never.”

“Oh, fuck, baby, I don’t even care if this is some kind of game you’re playing. I’m in. Whatever it is, I’m so fucking in.”

“It’s not a game.”

“Okay,” he said, and I could tell he still didn’t believe me. And God, wasn’t that easier? Wasn’t it easier if he thought I was worldly and experienced enough to think of this dirty little phone sex game to play with a stranger?

“Are you?” I asked.

“What?”

“Touching yourself?”

His low chuckle sizzled from my ear over my body. “No, this one is about you.”

About me. Oh God, why did that even turn me on?

Nothing good had been about me. Ever.

“Tell me what to do,” I whispered.

His breathing was hard and I heard the shift and squeal of a chair, like he was turning, or leaning back.

“God, you’re good, baby.”

I didn’t give a shit what he thought as long as this feeling was filling my body. “Please,” I whispered.

Again, that groan. “Slide your fingers down between your legs.”

My fingers slipped under the plain pink cotton of my underwear and I whimpered when the pressure of my hand made the ache worse. Sharper somehow.

“I like that sound you made,” he said.

“What next?”

“Cup yourself in your hand, your fingers low…you feel yourself there?”

“Yes. I’m…I’m wet. Hot.”

Dylan swore.

“Good, baby. Now take those fingers down between your lips, just keep following your wetness until your finger slips…”

I gasped. “Inside.”

“Yes.”

“Oh God.” I closed my eyes, sliding my finger out slowly and then back in. I lifted my knees up, arched my hips so I could get more of my finger inside, but somehow, as good as that felt, there was something entirely unsatisfying about it. “It’s not—”

“Use two fingers.”

I did and immediately the pressure inside was fuller…better. My fingers slipped and slid, buried between my legs. I felt the muscles of my channel against the skin of my hand in a way I never had before.

“You know where your clit is?” he asked.

“Yes.” Entirely in theory.

“Slip your thumb up to the top of your pussy—”

Oh God, that word. That filthy word…“Say that again.”

“Thumb?”

Impossibly, a wild gust of laughter blew through me. My fingers inside my body and I was laughing. He laughed too, and it was a whole new layer of connection.

But then somehow in the same breath, we both sobered.

“Pussy, baby. Slide your thumb to the top of your pussy.”

I did what he asked, so hard and so fast that when my thumb brushed my clit, I cried out.

“There you go,” he breathed, sounding somehow satisfied. “Work it with your thumb.”

“It…it hurts, a little.”

“Good hurt or bad hurt?”

“There’s no good hurt,” I told him, my voice harsher than I’d intended. Good hurt. What an oxymoron. My thumb lifted from the kernel between my legs that was so sensitive right now I could barely stand to touch it.

His silence went on for a long time, long enough that I pulled my fingers from my body. The breeze over my body was not cool—it was cold.

I crossed an arm over my chest as if he could see me.

“Dylan?”

“You’re not playing, are you? This isn’t some hot virgin kink game with you?”

“Sure it is,” I said, trying to sound coy or something, not like my lungs were being crushed by failure and embarrassment. “You don’t like it?”

“Don’t lie.” His voice was harder than it had been and I responded instinctively.

“Not…really. No.”

“You’ve really never done this?”

Virgin kink. My entire awful, sad, and lonely sexual experience could be summed up as virgin kink?

I sat up, breathless and embarrassed again. My body’s humming, its ache and throb—the slick heat between my legs, on the top of my thighs—shameful more than pleasurable.

“Never mind,” I stammered. “Forget it. Forget everything.”

“Layla, stop. Don’t hang up.”

I didn’t hang up, but I didn’t say anything, either.

“Are you there?” he asked.

After a long moment, I said, “Yes.”

“Did that feel good, that stuff you were doing?”

“Yes.” It came out as a sob. My body felt combustible. My emotions impossibly wild. Totally out of control. I wanted to hit and scream and cry.

“It’s gonna go somewhere, baby. I promise. All those feelings, it’s going to get better and better. Let me…let me tell you what to do.”

“Are you…going to laugh at me?”

“Laugh? I’m the fucking luckiest man on the planet tonight. The only thing I’m going to do is help you come.”

I flopped back down on the bed.

“Put the phone on the pillow beside your ear,” he said. “I want you to use two hands.”

“This sounds advanced,” I whispered.

His chuckle was sexy and warm, and I smiled at the sound of it.

“Brush the palm of your hand over your nipple.”

I did it and it felt good, but in a watered-down kind of way, considering what my body had been feeling a few seconds ago.

“That’s…not enough.”

“Are your nipples hard?”

“Very.”

“I want you to pinch them.”

“Pinch?”

“Good pain, trust me, baby.”

I pinched my nipples. Hard and then harder until I felt the strange pleasure-pain of it ricochet in my body. I rolled them slightly between my fingers until the lust and heat and desire roared back through me.

A choked gasp slipped out of me.

“There we go. You want to come?”

“God. Yes.”

“Roll over on your stomach.”

I did, fumbling slightly with the phone, until I was on my belly and could still hear him.

“Grind your pussy against the mattress. It’ll make your clit—”

He didn’t have to finish his instructions before I was doing it, so ready to have this happen. To have all of this panicky, edgy sensation tearing through me—do something. Go somewhere.

“Oh God,” I muttered, lifting myself up on my palms slightly to get the pressure exactly right between my legs. Back and forth. Up and down. It was all the right pressure without hurting.

“You got it?”

“Yes, God…I want…”

“More?”

“Please.”

“Put your two fingers in your mouth, the ones you had buried in your pussy.”

I did what he asked. I could feel my fingers shaking against my lips.

“You can taste yourself, can’t you?” he asked. “Salty and earthy. Best fucking taste in the world.”

It was different. And strange. Tangy.

“Now put them back between your legs.”

“Inside?”

“Inside. But go slow.”

I lifted my hips and slipped my fingers under my panties again. I bypassed my clit, traced the edges of my lips, until I found the entrance of my body. Wet. Waiting.

“One finger at a time,” he said. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

I laughed.

“What?”

“I…want it so much it seems impossible to hurt myself, you know?”

“Like you could do anything to yourself right now and it would feel good?”

“Something…something like that.”

“Push that finger inside,” he said, his voice low and dark, and I closed my eyes and did what he told me to do.

But then I couldn’t get the grinding pressure right against my clit so I used my other hand, to push against my vulva, mashing my clit.