Roomies

I move in, resting my lips on his, and he groans, rolling over me, bringing a hand up to cup my jaw. Tension melts everywhere inside, and I rock into him when he settles between my thighs.

Making up is . . . pretty fun.

Calvin pulls back slightly, grinning down at me. “Six months before we met, huh?”

“At least,” I say, laughing and blushing. “It was a pretty epic crush.”

I slide my hands around his shoulders and then into his hair as he kisses lower, to my breasts, and my stomach, and then beneath the covers, where he kisses one thigh and then the other, and then sweeps his tongue across me.

Wanting to watch, I push the covers away, and he looks up, smiling into another kiss. He teases, pointing his tongue, nipping—almost as if he’s performing for me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I whisper.

A long, soft suck and then: “What’s that?”

“And the answer is yes, I imagined you doing this before I met you.”

He pulls back a little, expression heating. “Imagined me kissing you here?”

I nod, and a deep ache builds just watching him watching me.

“Would you touch yourself?”

“Sometimes.”

He glides a finger over me, up and down, and then pushes it inside. “You’re getting wet just telling me about it.”

I dig a hand into his hair. “I’m not going to apologize for fantasizing about you.”

“I would fucking hope not.” He watches what he’s doing. “I don’t want you to stop fantasizing, either.”

“What do you fantasize about?”

He closes his eyes and bends to lick me, thinking. Pulling back, he says, “A lot of things,” and I feel the heat of his breath against me.

A lot of tings.

I tug at his arm, and he climbs back up my body, bending to kiss me with an open, hungry mouth.

Pulling his hand over my breast, I say, “Tell me.”

He squeezes, and then bends, sucking. “I think about saying some filthy things to you while we’re on the couch. I like when you’re facing me, so I can lick you how you like it.”

Oh. My blood heats and I arch into his mouth.

“I think about having you near the window and letting those paparazzi down on the street watch us. I get a little kick out of imagining those pictures on Twitter.”

I reach down, wrapping my hand around him, and he groans before coming back up to kiss me.

“I think about how you look when you put me in your mouth. How fast I come when you do that.” He slides his hand between us, pushing two fingers into me, and we start to move, his words speeding up. “I think about being somewhere with you, and you do that—you go down on me and no one knows.”

“Like at the theater?”

“Or anywhere,” he says, breath hot on my cheek. He grunts, fucking my hand, so close to where I want him, and I guide him there, nudging his own hand away from me. He slides in bare, so deep, and I cry out before he swallows the sound.

We haven’t done this before . . . we need to put on a condom.

“I think about this,” he whispers, “just like this. Oh, Christ, it feels good.”

It does, and so neither of us stops it. It’s so easy to keep moving, to fall into that rolling rhythm; in the past weeks he’s figured out what I need and starts there: deep, pressing, immediately. My hands roam the skin on his back, down over his ass, his thighs, as far down as I can reach.

He must know he’s forgiven because he doesn’t talk anymore, doesn’t check in with me to be sure I’m okay, and this is something I adore most about him. I think he trusts that if I didn’t want this right now, I would tell him. He isn’t going to let something go unsaid.

But even so, as he moves in these perfect circles over me, another shadow steps into view. I wonder what it is we’re fixing here, and to what end? I’ve already established that we don’t need to be intimate for him to stay here. And we certainly don’t need to be in love. But he kisses me like it’s love, and as he pushes faster into me, he sounds like a man overcome with love, and when he rolls so I’m on top of him, he watches me with something that looks a lot like love in his eyes.

But how would I really know?

“Why did you stop?” he asks, cupping my hips. “Is it okay?”

His chest has a faint sheen of sweat—from exertion, from the heat of our bodies moving together—and I press my palm to it; his heart is racing. I search his face. His eyes are clear, maybe a little worried.

“It’s good.”

I am so bad at asking for what I want.

“Did I hurt you?” he whispers.

Shaking my head, I say, “No.”

He sits up beneath me and wraps his arms around my waist, looking up at my face. “What are you thinking? What can I say to make this okay?”

“I guess I’m wondering what we’re doing.”

He gives me a wicked, cheeky smile. “I thought we were busy making love.”

“Is that what this is?” I honestly have never felt this before, so I don’t even know what to call it. But I’m not sure I can do this and keep myself from falling in love with him.

He kisses my chin. “Does it feel like something else to you?”

“I think it’s starting to feel like that to me, but I don’t actually know.” I press my mouth to his and let him deepen it, before pulling away the tiniest bit. “It feels like we should make sure we’re on the same page after”—he kisses me—“what happened with Lulu and—”

He interrupts me with another kiss. “And the fact that we’re already married?” he asks. His hand moves up my back and into my hair.

“Yeah, exactly. We’ve talked about logistics and backstory and fantasy, but we haven’t really talked about feelings.”

“You were gone all day yesterday. I woke up this morning and you still weren’t here.” He tilts his head, sucking on my neck. “I thought I fucked it up with you, and I honestly have never felt so panicked in my life.”

“The initial plan was a year,” I whisper.

“I say to hell with the initial plan.”

“It’s more complicated than just having a new girlfriend. We took vows.”

Calvin grins up at me. “I’m aware.”

“Doesn’t that paradoxically complicate the new plan?”

“How am I supposed to know?” He laughs into my shoulder and bites me gently. “I’ve never done this before. I just know I’m falling for the girl I married.”

twenty-four

Calvin hands me my buzzing phone. “Lulu again.”

I put it facedown on the coffee table and turn back to my laptop. For the first time in ages, I woke up with words in my head, and I’m determined to get them down before they fade back into fog.

He lies behind me on the couch. “Aren’t you going to call her?”

“Not right now.”

I can feel him reading over my shoulder. “What is this?”

“I don’t even know, actually.” I’m so tempted to cover it up, to hide the words by closing my screen because it feels like a bare tree trunk—all naked and vulnerable to the elements. Instead, I pretend my hands are glued to the keyboard. I’ve listened to Calvin stumble through a new run of notes or work out a new composition a hundred times already, and he’s never shy. Why should I be?