Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) (17 page)

And until I met him, I didn’t even have that hand to give, not in my own dimension and not in any other.

But I did now.

I pulled back and took in a deep breath, the sound like marbles rolling around in a tin can.

He pressed his forehead against mine and made a sound remarkably similar. “I didn’t know people like you were out there, Maggie.”

I took the opportunity to slide my palms flat against the base of his back, to feel the rich topography of his bones against sinew and skin and muscle. His breath shuddered from a different impulse than my own, and I felt him thicken against me, felt his arms tighten. He dipped his head down and gave me a kiss that from any other man would have been a question. But from Tyler, it was permission.

“You’re in charge,” he said, the words redundant. His lips had just told me so.

I took him at his word and pulled back, smiling. “I need a shower,” I said with a laugh, the chuckle a little too self-conscious. I wanted to be confident, to stand bold and open. I wanted to show him the old Maggie, the one without scars. The one who had never been broken in the first place.

But as he stood before me and searched my eyes with a look that was so raw and authentic that a thousand versions of myself all coalesced into one, I realized that she’d been there all along. He took my hand in his, playing with each of the five fingers, rolling them against his calloused fingertips, touching the knuckles, playful and unhurried. Then he entwined his fingers in mine. Each of the five fingers matched perfectly with the others, and he walked me slowly to the bathroom.

I let go of his hand at the door and made a motion to go in, when I realized his heat was right behind me. I turned around, and my nose bumped into his chin.

He laughed, then leaned down, his hot breath in my ear as he said, “How about we shower together and take it from there?”

My first reaction, deep inside, was a resounding
no
. And yet, split seconds later, I had the presence of mind to question the first reaction. Why not? What was wrong with a shower? I was hyper aware of everything already, as if I had to get this perfect at the same time that I had to etch every single breath into my memory forever.

I’d learned a long time ago that you could hold two completely contradictory truths in your head at the same time. Unfortunately I’d had to learn that on the ground, being abused with hands attached to faces I didn’t know, trying to take away one of those truths. I appealed to my better nature, the part of me inside that knew that the knee-jerk judgment was often nothing more than the wrong truth getting there first as if it were a race, and the one who won always got its way.

I said nothing—this was my turn to have words fail me—and instead I answered him with action, reaching in for the shower knob and turning it on Hot.

The sudden feel of his hand against the nape of my neck as I pulled back from turning on the shower, the casual intimacy of his touch, the way he moved in and out of the space between us, as if we’d been lovers forever, made me feel as if something had shifted inside both of us. The idea that our other selves had morphed into something combined, like we had been Tyler and Maggie separately, and now we were forging a new identity.

On the car trip so far, everything had been about defining ourselves. Staking out our claim. This is who
I
am. This is who I am. Don’t like it? Well, fuck you. You
do
like it? Well, Oh
shit!
—I don’t know what to do with that.

The way Tyler’s warm hands pushed against my ribs, pressing in and toward and into me, was a negotiation, one of the body, and one that had hardly been settled yet.

“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said. They were the right words at exactly the right time. He didn’t have to say them. And yet, the fact that he knew to say them meant more than the words themselves.

“I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the case, Tyler,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes. He couldn’t stop looking at me. Our hands were an afterthought, but they seemed to know what to do. His fingers unbuttoned my jeans with a kind of tenderness that made me gasp as he slid down the zipper and slipped his fingers between the thin cloth of my panties and curled them around my hips, down the slope of my buttocks, pulling the pants down into a pool at my ankles.

The cold chill of the air wasn’t the only shock I experienced. My skin went pebbly with gooseflesh. And as he reached for the hem of my shirt and pulled up, my arms willingly raised, my hands clasped together then apart, as if I were praying to a lesser god, as if I were thanking a minor deity.

“Hold on,” I said, turning away, pulling out one, then both of my contact lenses. They were disposables, so I tossed them in the small trash can and turned back to look at him.

Shock registered on his face. “Your blue eyes!”

“They’re fake.” I gave him an appraising look. “C’mon. You knew that.”

His eyes narrowed. Softened. “I like your brown eyes better. They’re more you.”

“They
are
me.”

“And that’s why I like them.”

He unhooked my bra in seconds and I stood before him, completely bare, stripped down to nothing. “Your turn,” I said as his eyes traveled down the length of my body, then rested on my hands.

“No, Maggie,” he said with a half smile, “It’s
your
turn.”

My hands didn’t quite shake as I reached for his waist and found the button of his jeans. My breath didn’t quite tremor as I unzipped him and then unfurled him, his body revealed to me inch by inch as the denim dropped. My mind didn’t quite resonate with the sound of a thousand gongs ringing at once as I pulled his shirt up, his arms unbelievably strong, the muscles rolling in and out of vision with a kind of military precision, and then a natural aptitude that made me appreciate him even more.

By the time I was done, it was my heart that shook. The rest of me remained preternaturally still.

We were completely revealed to each other, in all our flesh and in all our colors, and together we were a work of art.

I closed my eyes and could feel his energy vibrating inches from me, from all of me, from everything I had to offer him. When you strip yourself down to the essence of who and what you are, you come to realize that that has to be enough for yourself, that you, naked and vulnerable, weeping and happy, joyful and in sorrow, are always, as is,
enough
.

I opened my eyes because I realized I had to see him that way. I had to look at the whole of him, naked and raw, vulnerable and open, and come to see that he, as is, before me now, those picturesque arms reaching around me, those legs pressed against mine, was enough. More than enough.

That he was everything, and that together we could be infinity.

The steam filled the room with a kind of ethereal glow, even in this dingy cabin in the middle of the desert. Water was at a premium, and as that thought floated through my mind, Tyler took one step, pulling me into the shower, the water breaking through my trance as his chest moulded against my breasts and his abs pressed into my belly.

What had been intellectual and psychological, some sort of analysis in my mind about the meaning of myself, turned into a simple rush of emotion and of instinct that I couldn’t name, but that could only be felt. The water gave us permission to stand so close, like it was urging his arms around me, his fingers in my wet hair, his palms against my jaw, his lips kissing and exploring mine. My hands stayed in safe zones on his body, so unaccustomed to the feel of flesh so different from mine. Aside from a few furtive kisses and that one encounter with him two months ago, I hadn’t touched a man—I hadn’t given myself permission.

The ripe promise of being touched by someone as if we had all the time in the world made my heart slow to a natural beat, even as the water tapped out its own lyrics on our skin, the push of our hands against each other’s bodies growing more urgent, more eager. We were wet and wild, filled with a sort of abandon that comes from too much time spent living in our heads, living in separate bodies. This combining was less a give and take and more a claiming of each other.

He kissed me hard, then pulled away, looking into my soul. I looked right back. His eyes were filled with a kind of pleading lust that made me laugh. I only laughed because I knew that my own eyes must look the same.

“What is this?” he asked, reaching down before I could answer and kissing me, biting my lower lip and pulling it between his teeth, then smiling. There he was. That was the Tyler I knew was there all along, the one he showed small slivers of in all-too-infrequent grins.

“Whatever it is,” I said, breathless, “I don’t want it to end.”

“Me neither,” he said, then reached down and cupped my ass, pulling me close to him, making me light inside with a fire that even the shower couldn’t extinguish. I was warmth personified, and he was hard against my hip. My hands stayed in those safe zones on him, not because I didn’t want to touch the parts that felt so  intimate, but because the eroticism of breaking through to that step felt like it would rush us through all of the pieces that I wanted to enjoy just as much.

This discovery had a sequence. It had a purpose. It held a logic of its own. And even the flashpoint of lust that threatened to take over my entire being and devour everything that stood in its path couldn’t rob me of what was rightfully mine, and couldn’t take away from Tyler what he knew just as much as I did.

A long time ago I asked one of my therapists how I would know when I was ready to have sex with someone again, and she said, “When you want to.”

And I said, “That doesn’t mean I’m ready.”

And she asked, “What other criteria do you think you need to have?”

As I touched Tyler, as I kissed him freely and my hands finally roamed out of the safe zones, I realized that what I was really asking back then was how can I trust myself? How can I trust myself to know what’s right when I’m broken? My fingers curved over the slope of his muscled ass, my palms following, trailing behind and documenting for my mind, my heart, my body what I needed to learn. All my self-consciousness, all my fears, all my worries that I somehow was too shattered ever to really find a path to this moment—it was all gone.

Chased away.

All faded out over seven years of careful, conscious, painstaking deliberation that led to the kind of freedom that let me touch him like this.

He hissed, inhaling sharply through clenched teeth as I pulled my hand forward and slid it between us. The firm flesh of his cock felt dangerous in my hand, my fingers instinctively wrapping around it, sliding up, using the water. I reached for a wrapped bar of soap sitting on the edge of the tub and discarded the paper, taking the soap and handing it to him, holding him firmly by his handle.

“We really should get clean,” I said.

“I think I like dirty.”

I bent down just slightly and looked up, the water pelting me and making me close my eyes. He groaned, my hand moving millimeters, my shattered soul moving worlds.

I stood at full height and he bent down, taking one of my nipples in his mouth, the sensation stirring an electric bolt that ran from my clit all the way up to the top of my head. I tipped my chin up and pushed myself toward him.

And froze.

The first image of that night seven years ago filled my mind. It was as if someone had poured a bottle of paint perfectly calibrated to fill in a colorized version of my memories. It was a still in my mind’s eye, a moment caught forever. One of my assailants’ hands buried in my long hair, yanking my neck back as he ripped my pants off.

Tyler stood immediately and let go of me, his hands moving to the sanctuary of my shoulders. “What’s wrong?” he asked, serious and concerned.

Shame pooled in a place below my navel, but above the part of my body that had been so violated. It crouched there, curled in the fetal position, waiting for orders. But it had been summoned, and it couldn’t go back to the quiet, dark place where I had made it live. It had taken seven years to get it to that point, to crawl into a box, one padlocked with a key that I had tried to throw away, but that kept coming back over and over again, living somewhere else inside me.

Now Tyler’s beautiful, erotic attentions had unlocked the box.

I couldn’t answer him. All I could do was stare and feel the shame pour in rivulets down from my mind’s eye to the tip of my toes. I wanted to will it away, to make it flee, to banish it forever. And yet, I also knew I needed to learn to live with it. That it was as much a part of me as the Maggie who needed to just keep going, to keep turning toward healing, to say yes to this man with dark, worried eyes, whose hands and lips and heart were so focused on giving.

“Hey.
Hey
,” he said, his voice cutting through some kind of fog that surrounded me. It felt like a suit of terror and want, of reproach and resolve.

“Hey,” Tyler said, gently tipping my face up to meet his eyes. “This can be enough. Maggie, this can be enough. I don’t need more. I—I—uh.”

Words failed him, and somehow that’s what cut through for me. That was what reached me. His words had failed him.

“We’re not doing anything you don’t want to do,” he said, “and if this is where this stops, that’s okay. Because this isn’t where we stop.” His eyes bounced from one of mine to the other, then down to my nose, my lips, my cheek, then back. It was like he catalogued me, like he was checking in.

“I want more,” I said, the words coming out long before I could even think about whether to say them or not. My truth stepped up and took its shot.

“Then how about this,” he said in a gruff voice. He cleared his throat, emotion clogging it. “You lead,” he said, “I follow. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“You keep saying that. You keep saying that. It’s okay, I know.”

“No, Maggie, I don’t think you really do know. I don’t think you really do, that’s why I keep saying it. And I’ll say it every day for the rest of my life if that’s what I have to do to make you feel safe.”