Chapter Twenty-Three
After hours of sex, they fell asleep in the bright sunshine, a warm breeze filling the apartment with the sounds of the city. Around two in the afternoon, Sam pulled the sheet off his sleeping girlfriend to look at her. She slept with her mouth open and would probably be horrified to see a tiny puddle of drool on her pillow. He didn’t care. She was gorgeous, drooler or not.
Unable to resist, he curled up behind her. He pressed his chest against her silken back and slid his hands up and down her arm. When she stirred, snuggling into him, he cupped her breast, feeling the weight in his hand and fondling the tiny nipple that topped it like a cherry pit.
She buried her face in the pillow and moaned, still caught in between sleep and waking.
“Eve,” he whispered.
“Mmm.” She let him touch her, sliding her ankle up over his leg, opening her legs to the exploration of his fingertips.
She was already wet.
He rested his hand on her hipbone and nestled his dick in the cool crack of her ass.
“Is this okay?” he whispered, kissing her neck.
She arched her back. “Yes.” She kept her eyes closed, but she was smiling.
With a little bit of gentle prodding, he found her opening and slid into her tight sheath, gasping again at how small she was. He carved a space into her, listening as her pussy stretched wetly around him. He kissed the back of her shoulder and spooned her against him, moving his hips just enough to work his way deeper into her.
He licked his finger and stroked her clit again, slowly and languorously as he made love to her in silence.
When she was close, she slid off him and lay flat on her back. He climbed on top of her and eased his aching cock back into her without a word. She opened her eyes and touched his cheek as he thrust, her wetness cradling him as he rocked his hips back and forth.
She came in a hard shudder, milking his cock in long, crushing strokes. A few breathless seconds later, he pulled out and came, too, recreating the first time they’d had sex. Eve slid her fingertips through the puddle of cum he’d left on her skin.
“Beast,” she admonished him, smiling.
Car horns sounded, someone yelled in the street, a truck in the alley backed up with a steady series of beeps. But everything faded in comparison to Eve. The entire world might as well have been far, far away.
They showered together in her big claw-footed bathtub and Sam brought her to yet another climax, rubbing her pretty pussy with his fingers and a bar of soap. Looking down at him with a lazy, sated smile, she let him wash her asshole.
“I’ve been here, too, you know,” he whispered, getting down on his knees and pressing the tip of his tongue against the tiny opening.
“I know,” she said, spreading her legs wider.
Minutes passed. As he licked her, he ran his fingers up and down the plump lips of her pussy, working her tender clit with the barest pressure until she was dripping, yet again. When she moaned, he pulled back, withdrew his hand, and spread her slickness over his cock.
“Jesus Christ,” he hissed.
Overcome with hunger, Sam bent Eve over, pushed his dick into her ass, and slammed her hard as she held onto the lip of the bathtub. The blood rushing through his body turned to liquid fire as he reamed her, all gentleness gone. He whispered filthy things in her ear and she screamed with wild pleasure, stroking herself to another enormous orgasm. When he bit her shoulder, she moaned. The sound ignited his climax, and he came in hot, endless pulses.
When they were finished, he withdrew gently and took her in his arms.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered, panting. “I didn’t know it could be like this.”
“Like how?” he murmured.
“So…filthy. And so right.”
Sam had nothing to wear. Eve put on a T-shirt and shorts and carried all of his clothes down to the washing machine in the basement to get the pepper spray out. Then she ran across the street to the Mexican market and came back with a small feast: tortillas, big green chilies, cheese, limes, and beer.
Together, they roasted the chilies over her gas burners, stuffed the chilies with cheese, and made tacos. Sam put on her fluffy bathrobe and they sat at her little folding table eating tacos and drinking beer. She told him about meeting Chris Mercutio, getting the job at Squid, and quickly becoming chef de partie. She told him about where she got her inspiration for dishes, and how happy she was whenever people told her they enjoyed their meal.
She had created a rich life, all on her own.
It made him love her even more.
****
Their horniness was boundless. That afternoon, Sam found ways to make love to Eve in her armchair, against the windowsill, on the floor, on the countertop in the kitchen, and against the bathroom sink. His stamina astounded her, and that old practical knowledge of physics came in handy as he figured out the best positions to make her come. After her fifth orgasm, she fell asleep, completely spent.
She woke up after the sun had gone down. He had folded the laundry; it sat in neat piles on her table. But he was still naked, sitting in her armchair reading a newspaper.
“Hey, I was wondering,” he asked, “what’s in that giant box over there?”
Eve looked up, still drowsy from her nap, but she bolted up when she saw where he was pointing. “Oh. Yeah. That.” As impossible as it should have been given what they’d been doing for the last twelve hours, her cheeks heated with embarrassment.
“Why are you blushing?” he asked. Smiling like a buffoon, he went to the box and looked at the return label. “Eros Junction? Ooh-la-la.”
“It’s just…I…uh. Oh, no.” She buried her face in the pillow.
The box had already been opened, so he plucked out the enclosed note and read it aloud in a terrible approximation of a Southern accent. “‘Hey, Eve! Thanks for coming to help out with the grand opening! Here are some goodies I thought you might enjoy. Love, Tiffani. P.S. I appreciate any product feedback you could give me on the website. P.P.S. I’m sure XL-sior was really nice, but maybe it’s time you tried something new. Just a suggestion. XOXO.’” Sam laughed. “What’s the XL-sior?”
“Nothing,” said Eve, her voice muffled in the pillow. “It’s nothing.”
Then Sam looked into the box. “Holy shit,” he said, sobering up. “That’s a lot of…stuff.”
“She’s got a lot of inventory.” She looked up at him, her cheeks hot.
He picked up the box and brought it to the bed. “Let’s see.”
In less than ten minutes, she was riding him, screaming and coming hard yet again, his cock buried deep in her pussy as he held the soft head of a big white vibrator against her naked clit. As she collapsed forward, she placed her hands flat against his slick chest. He put the wand aside and grabbed her hips, lifting her gently off his steel-hard cock with a soft pop and a rush of clear, hot liquid.
Unable to resist, he flipped her onto her back and buried his face between her thighs, sucking at her and working her labia with his tongue as she gasped, breathless on the last shudders of her orgasm. He dipped a finger into her and licked that, too, with a groan of pure lust.
“Lie on your stomach. Flat,” he said.
She did it, melting into the mattress. He turned the vibrator back on and slipped it under her, knowing exactly where to put it to make her moan.
“Arch your back.”
She lifted her ass and he climbed on top of her. His chest hair grazed her back as he bit gently into her shoulder.
“Arch it deeper.”
She lifted herself up on her elbows, pressing her clit harder onto the vibrator. Her tender pussy was dripping as he ran his fingers up and down the sides of her labia, slowly spreading the slickness all over her flesh.
He grabbed his shaft in his hand and rubbed the head of his cock in slow circles over her swollen pussy lips. She was so wet, the slick, slurping sound was louder than the electric buzz of the wand.
“I’ll never get over how wet you get.” He positioned his cock just inside her opening, planted his hands on the mattress, and swung his hips forward; penetrating her brutally and pinning her clit flush against the wand.
Eve gritted her teeth against the sensual onslaught. “Oh, God.”
“You like this, don’t you,” he growled. He was sexy, potent, and almost scary when he was like this; he turned her on so much she lost her mind. He shoved his cock deeper, making sure she rode the hard buzz of the vibrator.
He pressed her into the mattress until she was one raw, exposed nerve, humming from the need to come again—yet again. She’d lost count how many orgasms Sam had given her today.
“Fuck me, Sam,” she whimpered. “Please. Please, give it to me.”
“What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”
“Fuck me, please. Fuck me.”
He drew his thumb through the moisture that had gathered around her clit. Then he massaged the tight aperture of her ass. Eve moaned deep in her throat. Like spanking, this was something she never thought she’d enjoy until him.
“This okay?” he whispered.
She nodded, shutting her eyes tight and biting her lip.
He thrust his cock into her and turned up the switch on the vibrator. Her entire lower body built up more tension than her nervous system could handle. But Sam was about to overload her grid. He pulled out halfway and thrust again, this time popping the first joint of his thumb into her ass.
The feeling of fullness and invasion was compounded by the powerful buzz of the vibrator. She shifted her hips, but she couldn’t move; she was pinned down by a cock, a thumb, a sex toy, and a sex god himself—fully fucked.
Then he pistoned into her, thumb and cock perfectly synchronized. She couldn’t breathe. She’d never felt so aroused in all her life, as though he had taken full possession of her body and was showing her what it could do.
“Eve,” Sam said, his voice like thunder above her. “Do you know how much I’ve wanted this? How much I’ve wanted you?”
He ripped the orgasm out of her. As she screamed, Sam came deep inside her. She drowned in pleasure; an ocean of it rained down on her and she found herself lost in its undercurrent.
Sam turned off the vibrator and withdrew gently from her body. He wrapped her up in his arms and kissed her again and again, holding her tenderly and rocking her back and forth for a long, long time.
“Are you all right, baby?” he whispered.
“I’m all right,” she managed.
“That was…intense.”
She nodded weakly. “Intense.”
With a sigh, she tucked her head under his chin and listened to his breathing slow down.
He’d come looking for her, and he’d found her.
She wrapped her arms around him, feeling his solid body curve protectively around her. The understanding came to her at once, fully formed and clear as pure water.
I’m here. I’m finally here.
Sam felt like home.
They fell asleep, woke up, and made love again, but this time the downstairs neighbor had had enough and pounded on the ceiling with a broom, yelling expletives in Spanish that both Sam and Eve understood.
“Oh, Jesus,” Eve said. “I know that woman. She’s made me jam.”
“Good jam?”
She nodded. “Decent. Strawberry.”
“I’ll buy you strawberry jam, baby.”
“That’s not the point.”
They were lying on the floor on her fluffy rug. He unlocked the handcuffs, massaged her wrists, and picked her up. He put her back in bed and climbed up beside her, careful not to brush against her backside, where her skin was glowing red from the vigorous spanking he’d just given her using a leather paddle from the box. She wrapped her arms around him and sighed with deep contentment as he held her tightly against him.
“Tell me something,” she said.
“What do you want to know?”
She ran her fingers through his chest hair. Through the open window, beer-bottle colored light streamed in weakly from the street lamps below. “How…how exactly…are you broken?”
He drew her closer. “What do you mean?”
“You said once that you suffered from nightmares like mine.”
Air stirred on her bare skin as he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah. That.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“It’s not that.” He paused. “But it’s not easy. I never even told the whole story to Charlie.” He winced for a moment, as if Charlie’s name caused him pain. “I moved to Santa Barbara for school. I’d gotten a swimming scholarship. I was studying mechanical engineering and getting pretty good grades. I came back for winter break to spend Christmas with my family in Oleander. The first day back, my mother asked me to take her to the supermarket. Before then I went to spend the day with my old swim teammates. We drank beer in someone’s garage. His sister came by with some of her sorority sisters.”
“I think I see where this is going.”
“I was a punk kid. Popular. Cocky. The Oleander newspaper interviewed me. ‘Slammer’ Lamont, they called me. They thought I was Olympic material. Girls were throwing themselves at me. So, I threw myself right back.” He sighed again. “In the Central Valley, after rain, we get these enormous banks of fog called tule fog. It’s the heaviest fog you’ve ever seen. That day, my mom decided to stop waiting for me. She drove herself to the market.” He paused. “On her way back, a truck accidentally ran her off the road and she hit a tree. She died instantly. She was less than a mile from the house.”
Eve squeezed his hand. The weight, the guilt—Sam had carried it. For years.
“My dad and my older brother Adam tried to convince me it wasn’t my fault. That if I had been there, my mom and I could have both been killed. But I blamed myself. If I hadn’t been irresponsible, if I hadn’t been late, we would’ve missed the fog altogether. I’d still have my mom. Jack wouldn’t have had to grow up without her. And my dad would still have his wife.”
Eve said nothing. She could play the “if” game, too.
“For a long time, I fantasized about this alternate reality where she never had the accident. I didn’t lose my scholarship or drop out of school. I didn’t stop talking to my father. I didn’t become a sea urchin diver, sacking up invertebrates all day. And I didn’t spend years having nightmares.”
“How did you stop the nightmares?”
He turned to her. His eyes were wide in the darkness. “Funny thing about time, baby. It tends to heal things in spite of the stupid shit you do to keep hurting yourself. All you have to do is let it show you how. And recognize the people who are there in your life to help you through.”
“Like Charlie is there for you.” She pressed a kiss on Sam’s shoulder. “Like you are here for me.”
He was quiet for a long time. “Now I have something else to tell you. I’ve been holding off because…it’s going to hurt.”
She stiffened in his arms. “What is it?”
“It’s about Charlie.”
Sam told her the story and held her until her sobs died down.
“We lost him so fast.” Sam squeezed her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Eve.”
He kissed her cheeks. She kissed his lips, tasting the salt of her own tears.
“I want to go see him,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
****
Sam and Eve left early in the morning and arrived just as the cemetery opened its gates. Eve wiped the dew off Charlie’s headstone with her hand and placed a bouquet of wildflowers in the small vase attached to the stone.
“Charles de Winter.” She turned to Sam. “You know, at his birthday party, he told me you were a good guy. That you had a sense of honor. I didn’t know him for a long time, but Charlie was always kind to me. And to have someone like that vouch for you—you must have really been important to him, Sam.”
Sam nodded. “He was important to me, too.”
After they arrived at his apartment, they went upstairs and Sam made tuna melts with pickles. Eve popped a couple of beers open for them and they sat out on the deck, eating lunch and watching the boats leave and enter the marina.
They washed the dishes together, opened the windows, and went to bed. In the bright afternoon sunlight, Sam lay on his back and Eve pulled a slow, sweet climax from his body, watching his handsome face move through the phases of hunger, agony, and ecstasy as she rode him. Then she came, too, her hands flat against his chest as he held onto her hips and steered her home.
Orange sunlight slanted into the room. Eve got up, put on a pair of shorts and one of Sam’s T-shirts, and looked out of the window across the alley. The bar was still shut tight.
“What’s going to happen to the Compass Rose?” she asked.
“He left it to me,” said Sam quietly.
“The bar?”
“The whole building.”