Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (27 page)

Who is beautiful.

Outside the van, all the sounds of the street are muffled. The windows are tinted and it’s started to snow again, so it feels like we’re the whole world, just us, and it’s even warm enough, because we’ve gotten so hot.

When I kiss up his neck, over his jaw, he starts to buck, a little, but then stills, so I grind back, and do it again because I’ll die if I don’t.

And I want him to know it’s okay.

What we’re doing here, I want it, too.

Then his hands are on my ass, and I’m thinking that’s where he wanted them this whole time, because he is very serious about groping my butt, tracing the seam of my jeans as far as he can reach, kneading me and pushing me against him while he pushes up, just a little.

“Pull your hair back,” he whispers.

I toss it over my shoulder, and then shiver when he starts kissing my throat while moving us together with his hands.

Then I feel his big hands slide under the gap of the waistband in my jeans, and he scratches his nails, a little, over just the tops of each cheek. I shiver.

“Unfasten your jeans.”

I lean up to look at him.

“I want to touch you,” he says, “but I don’t—”

Then I slide my hands down over his chest, and fumble a little at my button-fly. He watches me, his hands moving in little circles over my skin, and as soon as I unbutton enough that I make my tight jeans slack, he’s sliding his hands down.

He hesitates at the lace band of my panties, so I put my thumb on his chin and kiss him, breathe into him, touch my tongue against his.

Even breathing hard, his hips meeting mine, he still has his strange graceless grace. His body feels big against mine, but every time he moves in the bench seat, another awkward part of me finds a place to rest on him, until we have this rhythm, my loosened jeans gliding along his erection, our soft T-shirts bunching, my arms crossed behind his head, our mouths kissing, our throats humming.

When he sweeps over both cheeks of my ass, first it’s so deliciously gentle, and I get that warm, pin-prickle sensation all over the skin of my back, over the skin he’s exploring, all the way over my thighs.

Then he says my name and spreads me with both hands while pushing me against him. He feels between, skidding through sweat there, his fingers so, so soft, not hesitant,
teasing
. Teasing just around
there
, kicking up such impossible, dirty, unexpected pleasure, my brain goes dark.

I still, and hold my breath, bury my face in his neck, the rich, perfect pin prickles get intense, almost like something I could hear, and they’re washing over me, hot, sharp, millions of them, while he explores me, his face in my neck, his heart pounding against my chest.

It feels so
good
, and I want to keep still but all this sensation is gathering and distracting me so I kind of
wallow
all over him, to feel his warm body all along mine, and I push my ass up into his hands, and for a moment, one of those hands travels low, finds me wet, so obviously swollen for him that his firm, slippery touch makes me moan and
push and feel like begging.

“Evan,
Evan
,” is how I beg, then his hands are stroking up, over the curve of my sensitized bottom, back over the loosened seat of my jeans where he squeezes, like he’s thanking me for letting him turn me on beyond all possible reason.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says, and I am glad his voice is all fucked up and when he says it his hips bump up, hard, into mine, and I’m glad, too, that the grip of his hands gets too tight on my ass, on my hips, because I want his awkward, unchecked desire rubbing against me.

My thighs are shaking, hot, and so he thrusts against me harder, and he feels even bigger, or maybe it’s that I’m so swollen—so wet I’m sliding against my underwear with these explicit little yanks in the opposite direction of our hips.

It’s not quite enough.

I grab his face again and let us kiss all sloppy, our tongues coaxing, wanting, and that makes it all better and even worse.

His arms come up all the way around me, trace my spine, try to slide under my tight bra strap.

“Here,” I say, and I reach back and unhook the little row of hooks because he doesn’t look like he could manage the structural engineering of a full-figured bra in his current state. He watches me, flushed, while his hands swoop over my skin where my bra is releasing from my back and ribs.

His big hands need no help finding my breasts, and I have to breathe instead of kiss, or I’ll die.

He plays with the sore dents the underwire and straps have left, circling over them while I watch him watch the movements of his hands under my shirt.

Then the cups ease up over my breasts, kind of freeing them all at once with a bounce. It feels good, one step closer to easing this ache.

“Jesus,” he whispers, low and rough, and again,
“Jesus,”
for emphasis, I think, and then, “How do you like to be touched here? Like this?” He brushes, hardly brushes, over my nipples and I make some kind of sound and I can’t help it, I reach up and under and follow his hands and fingers to feel what he’s doing, because it’s almost a little much.

But could be a little more.

My hands over his have pushed my T-shirt up and my breasts are bared, and even
his big hands can’t hold them all, but he is trying, with that almost smile on his mouth, and if I weren’t so crazy-insane with almost coming, I would laugh.

“Like this,” I say, but my voice is all weird as I show him he can press and pinch harder, and he says, “Yeah, let me,” and he rolls both my nipples at once and I put my fingers in my mouth because it looks so good and feels so good I need to bite something, suck something.

“Fuck, Jenny,” and our eyes meet. He’s still pulling, firm and slow, at my nipples, in time to how my hips have started to move, which is a little faster, with intent.

I pull my fingers from my mouth and put my lips at his collarbone pulling aside the neckband so I can taste his skin. “Don’t stop,” I tell him.

“Not ever,” and the way he says it makes me ruck up his T-shirt, I need to feel his skin on my skin, and he’s hot, his muscles tight, when I fit a hand between us, the back of my hand slides through sweat on his belly. I hold on to his nape with the other hand, we’re past kissing, so air hungry, but our mouths at each other’s neck still tasting between our gasps.

I grasp him, and his hands still and then tighten around my breasts. I turn my hand to press where I need to, where we’re rubbing tight together, and he’s hot and hard along my knuckles, and I’m so sensitive, even through jeans, I shudder.

“Yeah,”
he says, and it should be so awkward, dry humping, my hand helping us both, his hands softly thumbing my nipples while his fingers play with the goose bumps on my breast, now trying to kiss between breaths like an army is at our door, but it’s beautiful.

We’re beautiful.

This is what was always underneath.

What was over us, concealing, was beautiful in its way—dramatic and endless feeling.

But what’s underneath are the matchbox cars you forgot you left in the grass, the wild violets, the chalky seashells ringing the flowerbeds.

I always love the small things, the wild things, the things that change and adapt, the things you don’t see at first but were always there.

The things I could lose, the things that are most precious and dear and telling.

I come away from our kiss again and rest my forehead on his shoulder. I’m nearly there, and I pull up on his T-shirt more, want him as exposed as I feel.

There’s a tattoo on his rib, on his side.

A black, lowercase
f
. A number next to it.

I buck out of rhythm, shock like a riptide of cold blood through the chambers of my heart, but I’m already nearly there, his mouth and his hands and our friction are finally enough. “Open your eyes,” I stutter, and he does, and I look and look, desperate, even on the very worst edge of coming all over him, and he looks back, sees something, maybe some of my utter incomprehension, and we try to keep looking at each other, until we can’t, because it’s too good, too awful, because it’s all come to the surface.

I pant against him.

The look on his face when he held C’s picture.

His
picture. Evan’s picture.

You’re so beautiful
, C wrote to me last night,
Evan
wrote to me last night, after I sent him my picture.

I keep myself from tracing that
f
.

I come, shuddering, my arms around him, looking at him, bewildered.

Trying to understand.

Trying to trust my body as it falls.

My heart, beating painfully out of time.

This man I believed never withheld a thing from me.

Now we’re just holding each other, supertight, I let him hold me.

He doesn’t know he’s comforting me.

The snow’s picked up, I can tell even through the fog on the dark windows. Even when I ease next to him, his arms are tight.

We watch the snow accumulate over the windshield, one snowflake at a time.

Dr. Allen is doing her thing, making me look into her instruments and click my remote when I see the wiggling lines, measuring with her string.

“How’s therapy?” she asks.

“I changed therapists, and I’m working with Allie Gould. She took me out in a trainer car yesterday to learn how to use the extended mirrors.”

“You’re going for a daylight license?”

“Yeah, I am.”

She sets down her ophthalmoscope after testing the movements of my eyes. “I think that’s great. Allie’s good.”

“She is. She likes going where I am. She set up software and headphones and a mic for me at work, and she spent a couple hours with the lab tech to learn about the ESEM so she can think about how my bench work would be adapted, if I would need it.”

“That sounds like Allie.”

Dr. Allen looks at me for a moment. “Look, Evan told us in a chart review for you that he excused himself as your OT. You two developed feelings for each other?”

“Yes.”

She looks like she wants to say something, so I give her the permission she needs. “He was always totally professional.”

“I know that. He did everything like he was supposed to, it’s just that I know what he was thinking, and I’d like to ask you your perspective if you’d like to talk about it.”

Not really. I don’t really want to talk about it. Evan and I haven’t talked about it, what I saw on his skin, that C had shown me in pieces. He did everything like he was supposed to except say, that day in my office when he discovered I was Lincoln—
I took these pictures
.

Which, of course, meant I should be able to say
I’ve seen this tattoo
, though that
choked and lodged inside my throat.

Before, it seemed like the only thing unspoken between us was a kiss.

Now it’s two whole other people who are supposed to be strangers.

“I guess,” I hedge, “I don’t have a perspective, not yet, it’s new.”

“Look, I probably shouldn’t say anything at all, it’s just that you’re special. You’re a special woman. Now, I know Evan, and he’s special, too, and I don’t actually have any theoretical reservations, but you’ve had the most dramatic few months I can imagine.”

I laugh, kind of. “I can. Imagine I mean. And the thing is, with Evan, there isn’t anything to worry about.”

Which feels empty, in my mouth, to say.

We have C and Lincoln to worry about.

“Will you—talk to me about it? If you need to? I don’t want to presume, but you and I? We’re in it for the long haul. Or, at least I am.”

Oh. I feel the tears.

I never had any reason to sit at home in the dark, I’m finding.

None.

None.

Evan Carlisle-Ford
, in particular. In my confusion since our afternoon together, I looked him up in the campus directory, looking for little pieces to put together. Obviously, he didn’t use the hyphenate of his name at work, or maybe he didn’t use his given first name with his family. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have enough to put together from the beginning, not enough data.

I wondered if I had all the data now.

I had this hypothesis, about love, about living, but I wasn’t sure how it would be proven.

“Jenny?”

“Yeah?”

Dr. Allen sits down across from me, puts down my chart between us.

“We need to talk.”

* * *

I was so good.

I listened.

Asked questions.

Looked at Dr. Allen’s numbers.

Just rough percentages, she said, but too much loss of peripheral than she is comfortable with inside the time frame.

Answered her questions about my
functionality
.

Discussed therapy, again, my wholehearted participation in it.

She smiled at me and gave me a hug.

I hugged her back, just like I always do, tight, with my whole heart in it.

It’s snowing and the sky’s dark with it. The flakes are tiny, and coming down fast, the kind of snow that will drift in huge piles. I’m starting to get a sense of the snow, a crash course in it. I’m starting to be able to look at a snowflake and see the snowfall.

The snow that had been so pretty last week, that had been such a pretty backdrop to my shopping, to desperate kissing, had given over to intermittent storms.

Tomorrow, the city will be a mess. Children’s schools will close, or be delayed, traffic will slip and slide over the freeways. If it’s still snowing like this, the plows might even wait it out, conserve their salt and their gasoline until it lets up, until the sun breaks and gives the dark asphalt a chance to help them out.

It feels good, out here in the snow, the air cold enough to break open my lungs and let me breathe. There is never anyone in this courtyard, and there hasn’t been anyone here since it started snowing, most everyone has left for the winter break—no footprints.

Just the white blanket over everything.

Covering everything up.

I want to mess it up.