Electrify Me (The Fireworks Series Book 1) (7 page)

Chapter Twelve – Charlie

Her apartment is in Montlake, just over the bridge. It’s a cozy one-bedroom on the top floor of a heritage-style house. The minute we walk in the door, she tosses her giant purse on a little sofa and makes a kind of clicking noise with her tongue as she pulls off those boots. While I’m averting my eyes from the torn tights coming off too, a striped cat pops through a little pet door in the window above the radiator.

“You have a cat?” I ask.

“Yeah, that’s Mauly. It was Molly, but then I discovered he was a boy, so I changed it. Mauly. Like Darth Maul.”

I crouch down and give Mauly a good scratch. He seems to like it, even rolling over and letting me have a little tummy action.

“I hated the prequels, by the way,” Gloria says.

“What?” Mauly grows bored of me and wanders into the kitchen.

“The
Star Wars
prequels. I named him Mauly because it was the only thing that fit. Not because I liked that stupid character. Those movies are terrible.”

“Oh. Of course. Original three or nothing. Carrie Fisher rocks.”

“Right?”

She beams at me as though we just discovered we’re both part of some obscure religion that forbids dating outsiders. Then we stand there, grinning like fools because neither of us knows what comes next. This is uncharted territory for me. I mean, I’ve had girlfriends, of course, and hook-ups. But I’ve never rescued one from a kidnapper. And I’ve never felt so connected to a girl so quickly. Maybe I’ve never felt connected like this at all. I just want to curl up and go to sleep, so tomorrow will come faster so I can get up and make her breakfast. How sad is that?

“Oh, my God!” Gloria says suddenly. “I just remembered something. It’s my birthday!”

“Today? Like New Year’s Day?” She nods, pressing her lips together. I take a tentative step towards her. “What do you want for your birthday?” I hope she’ll say something involving us both getting naked. I’m dying to see her naked.

“A hug,” she says instead.

Oh, well. That’s good too. I take the last step and wrap her in my arms. She smells like stale weed, disinfectant and root beer. I’m certain I smell even worse. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is about the best hug I’ve ever had in my life. With her boots off, she’s small enough to tuck right under my chin. And even though her hair is full of grit and grass, I lay my cheek against it and just hold her. She wraps her arms around my waist and squeezes for a few seconds before untucking the back of my shirt and…

“Ahhh…your hand is cold!” I step back and take both her hands in mine, trying to rub some life into them. “You’re ice cold. Why don’t you take a warm bath?”

“I don’t have a bathtub.” She pulls her hands from mine and untucks the front of my shirt. I gasp when she slides her fingers under, partly from cold but partly, well, because she has her hands under my shirt.

“You’ve got abs,” she says. “I didn’t notice that before.”

“I…uh…I’ve been working out. I mean I’m going to apply to be a firefighter, so I need core strength.” Wow. Way to sound about five years old, Charlie.

Gloria doesn’t seem to mind. She starts unbuttoning my shirt from the bottom up. “You’re going to be a fireman? God, that’s so sexy.” She opens my shirt and trails her hands over my stomach and chest. “I’m going to train my cat to get stuck up trees.”

“Firemen don’t really…” But I don’t finish my thought.

Gloria grabs me by the front of my trousers and drags me down her hallway. “Come have a shower with me.”

She’s half-naked by the time we even get to the bathroom. After she turns on the shower, she strips the rest of her clothes while the water heats up. I just stand there like an idiot, watching her.

Her body is like an art class–one of those ones that emphasizes the circles and curves that make the human shape. She has an adorable round face, soft rounded shoulders the color of sun-kissed sand, perfectly round, plump breasts with tantalizing pink circles around her pert nipples. Her hips curve out from her waist, and there’s a little round tummy below her cute little belly button. Without the black tights, the shape of her legs is even sexier, if that’s possible. They look both soft and strong, as though I could rest my head on them or they could choke the life out of me like a python. Even her knees are little circles–even her toes. The smallest one looks so much like a vanilla jellybean, I want to get down on the floor and pop it in my mouth. I have a feeling she might like that.

The only angular thing on her body is the triangle of shiny brown pubic hair, which is like an arrow saying “insert penis here.” I’m still staring at it, the steam of the shower rising behind her, when she speaks.

“You might enjoy the shower more if you’re naked too.”

I have never stripped faster in my life, including the time I fell asleep on an anthill.

The shower is only a few degrees off scalding, so much so we both gasp from the heat of it. But we soon acclimatize. She opens a bottle of some citrus-smelling soap, and we lather each other from head to foot. It feels splendid to be clean. She takes care with the cut on my head, declaring it to be smaller than she expected and healing on its own. I finger-comb the tangles from her hair, with considerable help from a hazelnut-scented conditioner. When both of us are squeaky clean and smelling of fancy desserts, we just let the hot water stream over us, and our hands and lips, tongues and other parts meet and mingle and tease each other.

Gloria lays her hands on my shoulders and, with a little pressure, invites me downwards. I don’t need to be asked twice. Kneeling in the shallow, swirling water, I slip one of her gorgeous thighs over my shoulder and sneak a glance at her face. She looks down at me, her lips pursed, her eyes alight with expectation and desire.

And something else. God. I could fall in love with her by sunrise.

I slide my fingers up her wet thighs and find her opening, slowly pushing two fingers inside. She makes an approving noise, curling her fingers into my damp hair and pulling my face forward. I part her folds with my other hand and behold the sweet, little round button of her clit, like a pink pearl on a bed of satin, just asking to be kissed and sucked.

She gasps as I flick it with my tongue and moans softly when I circle it with my lips and suck gently, moving my fingers inside her.

There’s something meditative about giving oral. As together we develop a rocking rhythm–her hips and my tongue making interlocking circles–I feel myself relax, body and soul. All the knots this night has tied me up into begin to fall away. And then other knots untangle too, as though my past just washes away with the soapy water, swirling down the drain like the nothing it is. There is no past. There is only now. I swear, licking a girl’s clit is like yoga.

I glance up to see her looking down, such love in her expression I feel as though I could catch fire, despite the water pouring over me. Yes, love. I’ve stopped thinking that was impossible. We’ve been through more as a couple in one night than most couples do in a year. Is it so crazy that we’re already in love?

Gloria opens her mouth in a silent cry, the hunger in her face betraying how close she is, and seconds later her pussy is convulsing around my fingers, her hands pulling at my hair as she moans incoherently. While she’s still twitching, her leg muscles give out, and I have to move quickly to catch her as she slides down the wall.

“I’ve got you,” I pull her into my lap. My cock prods tantalizingly close to her pussy. If she would just move a fraction to the right…

“Need a condom,” she says dreamily, breathlessly.

“And a bed maybe.”

We clamber apart and I help her stand.

“Why don’t you dry off and get into bed?” she asks. “I want to finish combing my hair.”

I hate to leave her, but after a cramped shower, a dirty table and the back of my truck, the idea of making out in a bed sounds like heaven right about now.

Chapter Thirteen – Gloria

Times like these, when I least want my hair to be the ethnic mash-up that it is, it goes all Cubana Africana on me, one-eighth of my hair DNA tangling and curling and sticking together like some new, advanced kind of Velcro. Ten minutes later, after I have bullied it into a mangled braid, I wrap myself in a towel and bolt for my bedroom, expecting to find Charlie rock hard and eagerly waiting for round four.

Instead I find him face down on my sheets, wearing nothing but batman boxers, fast asleep. I’m a little insulted until I step around the bed and use my powers of investigation to surmise the series of events since he left me in the shower.

Mauly is curled up in the crook of his shoulder, looking his usual irresistible self. Many times I’ve been on my way to do something else and found myself stopping to give him a scratch. So Charlie fell prey to Mauly’s charms, lying down for a quick snuggle before succumbing to the exhaustion that is also weighing on me.

They look a picture–so adorable if I had the energy, I would get out my art supplies and sketch them for posterity. Instead I sigh, and Mauly, who as usual is only pretending to be asleep, looks up at me, his eyes squinted into a cat smile. He lifts one paw and lays it on Charlie’s sleeping face as if to say,
yes, keep this one
.

“I’m going to try, Mauly.”

I slip on some fuzzy pajamas and climb in beside them, pulling the quilt over us. Charlie stirs as I nudge Mauly out of the way.

“Oh, God,” he says as he opens his eyes and sees me. “I fell asleep. I’m so sorry.”

“What did I say about apologizing without being told to?”

Charlie smiles drowsily and rolls over, pulling me to rest my head on his shoulder.

We lay there, curled together, listening to the radiator gurgle and the faint sound of drunken singing drifting up from the street.

“Nice boxers, by the way,” I say.

“Thanks. They’re my favorites.”

“Why did you put boxers on anyway? Wasn’t the plan for more sex?”

“I didn’t feel right cuddling your cat naked. I barely know him.”

Sometimes when I’m tired and I start giggling, I can’t stop. This is one of those times. And apparently Charlie has the same problem. There are tears streaming down both our faces by the time we calm down.

“Do you want more sex?” Charlie wipes his eyes. “I think I could manage it if you get on top.”

“That’s a very nice offer, and don’t take this the wrong way, but all I really want right now is sleep.”

Charlie’s eyes are already closed when he answers. “Okay, good. Me too…”

Mauly starts to purr. That combined with my neighbor massacring “Auld Lang Sine” in the driveway, somehow works like a lullaby, and soon I’m floating in that beautiful almost asleep world where everything is bliss, before tumbling into the dark.

Hours later, with the golden sunshine of a New Year streaming through my curtains, I wake up alone. No man. No cat. I sit up and look around, blinking away the fuzziness of such a deep sleep. As I move, I feel the twinge of pain from my scabby bruised knees.

Not a dream then. That’s something. But I guess Charlie is gone anyway.

Then I feel another twinge of pain, this time somewhere in the region of my heart.

The whole point of an epiphany is that you don’t expect it. So while I’m thinking I’ll have a little cry, then get up and drink my last Diet Coke, clean the cat box and maybe read a book while I wait for the inevitable call from my mother, it hits me. The Great New Year’s Epiphany that’s been eluding me since I was fifteen years old:

If you fuck someone and then walk away from them, that doesn’t make you a bad person.

Wow. Fifteen-year-old me is shaking her head in amazement. He was just a guy from school I liked, and it was just a New Year’s Eve party. We were a little drunk and my friends had dared me and just because he never spoke to me again, doesn’t make him evil. And it doesn’t make me a loser. Not everyone has a fairytale first time. He was fifteen years old too, for God’s sake. Probably just as scared and embarrassed as I was. In the grand scheme of bad New Year experiences, that one is pretty low down on the list. Well below being kidnapped by a drug dealer, for example. Below getting ditched by my dad. Maybe just above the head lice.

It’s a relief letting that go, and that’s a fact. I feel fifty pounds lighter. And Charlie, wherever he is, I hope it’s not weighing on him either. We had an epically bad night. It would take a superhero to wake up from that and not run screaming into the streets when the sun came up. That makes me think fondly of his Batman boxer shorts. I lay back, smiling up at the ceiling.

“What are you so happy about?” Charlie, tousle-headed, wearing my kimono like a sarong and holding two coffee cups, stands in the bedroom doorway with the midday sun shining on his bare chest.

Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket–he’s beautiful.

“You’re here.” I say after admiring him for a few seconds. “You’re still here.”

“Where did you think I’d be?”

“I don’t know. Kwajalein Island.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s a long story.”

He sets one of the coffee cups on the bedside table, before clambering onto the bed with his own coffee and sitting cross legged beside me.

“I like stories,” he says. “Tell me all your stories. I have all the time in the world.”

I scooch up and take a sip of the best cup of coffee I’ve ever tasted, thinking if it’s stories he wants, maybe I’ll start with the story about getting kidnapped on New Year’s Eve.

That one, at least, has a happy ending.

The end.