Face Time (26 page)

“I want that person to be me.” He unbuttons the waistband of my pants and pulls them off. A huge breath empties from my lungs, relaxing my body to sink into the bed. “Hey,” he whispers, right over me. “Did you think I’d say no?”

I shake my head at him. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Don’t think. Just feel. You deserve this more than anyone.”

He crushes me to the bed with a heavy kiss, giving me a chance to undress him. I slide my hands down his back feeling all his muscles before unbuttoning his jeans and pushing them down. Lee pulls them off, and when he’s back, hovering over me, he smiles.

I bring my legs up and wrap them around him, slip my hands into his boxers, and grab his ass. I’ve wanted to do that for weeks. His butt is solid, tight, and perfect, like imagined it would be. All of the running has paid off. I drag my right index finger up between his cheeks, and he gasps and pulls away. I’ve pulled the trigger on Lee. He’s determined now. Off comes my bra and his mouth is over my right breast, licking, sucking, and teasing me until I’m squirming. Goosebumps erupt along my abdomen as he inches his hand down to my underwear. He pushes it aside and slips his fingers around me a few times slowly. Agonizingly slow.

“Oh god, Lee.” I can feel his smile against the skin of my chest, but he rises up over me. His fingers tease me again, making a slow trip around but not in. “I need to come or I’m going to cry.”

“Keep your eyes open,” he whispers, his eyes darting around my face, taking in every last detail of my lips and flushed cheeks. I reach up and take his head in my hands, gripping into his hair, keeping eye contact as he slips his fingers into me. I groan, my legs clenching together. It’s hard to not close my eyes and let go. Lee is watching me steadily as he speeds up his fingers. I can’t stop a whimper, and the pleading look I give him makes him work even faster.
 

“Please. Please, Lee.” I beg for the release, beg him with a whisper right next to his lips. Looking into his eyes, I find what I’ve wanted for the last two years alone. Love. Lee loves me. It’s not lust, not just the sex talking. His lips meet mine, lightly, and I close my eyes as he plunges his fingers inside of me and up, hitting my G-spot and making me orgasm so hard I shake and seize up. Lee is an experienced lover. He knows not to stop. He moans as my body contracts around his fingers but he keeps going causing another wave to roll up my spine. I arch my back in response, my body pressing up against his.

I think he’s about to halt, but I’m not ready. The first time with a man is always rocky for me. He doesn’t know my body, and the fact that I like to come three, sometimes four, times before I’m ready to move on. “Don’t stop, Lee. Three times. Always three.”

“Again, Laura.” He presses his body into my side, and he is rock hard and ready next to me, but I’m just not done. Lee speeds back up again, and, this time, the orgasm is slower to build but crescendos so high I scream in response. I’m glad everyone’s at work. The neighbors two floors down would have heard that.

Lee pulls his fingers from me and my underwear down my legs. I’m giggling and moaning and incoherent. He stands and drops his boxers, and I rise to my elbows to look at him. I can’t believe it. Last night, I thought I screwed this relationship up and it was over. Now, Lee is standing in my room, next to my bed, with candlelight behind him, and he’s beautiful. His body is almost hairless and sculpted. Flawless. His dick is long and hard, and it twitches when I reach forward and wrap my fingers around it slowly. I bring my mouth to the tip and taste him, taste Lee. I suck on the head and he moans. I’ve wanted him for four weeks. I wanted him the night of our first date, and he’s been so far away since then.

“Laura, do you have condoms in here?” He brushes my hair back and lifts my face away from him to look up. I shake my head slowly at him. I didn’t want to tell him earlier that when a woman doesn’t have sex for three years, she is mighty unprepared for it happening out of the blue. I didn’t want to stop, though.

He leans down and kisses me, pulling my face roughly up towards his, his tongue sliding down mine, animal and controlling. My body sinks as he pulls back, biting my bottom lip before he turns and leaves the room, stark naked. I watch his perfect ass retreat from my room, and when I hear his bag open in the other room, I sigh in relief. He comes back in with a string of condoms.

“I came prepared,” he says, ripping one open. He slides the condom on, and I pull on his hand so he crawls onto the bed.

“I want to be on top,” I say, as I push him down against my pillows. He’s mine. I don’t know how long I’ll have him, but right now, he belongs to me. I straddle him and lower myself onto him until his entire length is inside of me.
 

“You feel so good, Lee.” I grind my hips on him and my vision starts to fade.
 

Lee pulls my face down to kiss me as he thrusts up into me. “Laura, you’re so beautiful. I’ve been waiting to be inside of you. It’s all I want.”

I pull away, my hands on his chest, and start up a rhythm. I suddenly can’t wait to make him come because I can feel the orgasm building in me again. His hands are on my hips guiding me.

“Lean back, baby.” He pushes my chest back, and it’s just too much, another climax tingling my spine until I’m numb. He rubs against my G-spot and the orgasm builds in a wave. He’s close so I reach down and lightly grasp his balls, and he comes loudly, calling my name. Then the only sound in the room is our heaving breaths. I keep him in me and lay down on top of him, sealing him to my chest with our sweat, and resting my forehead on his shoulder, I kiss his neck right below his ear. Lee squeezes me tight.

“That was a nice trick,” he says, sighing. “I could have gone longer, though.” He turns and kisses me on the bridge of my nose. “I want this every day for the rest of my life.”

“Me too, Lee. Except maybe when I’m sick or you’re gone on business.”

“I’ll get you another vibrator and talk you through it.”

I push myself off of him and glance over the side of my bed. “You know…”

He laughs, and I purposely squeeze my insides around his dick. His eyes widen for a moment before his breathing kicks up again. “Yes. Another round before lunch. Plug in that wand. I want to use it on you.”

Shivers race all over my body.

“Mmmm, Lee. I’m happy you’re here.” I lean down and kiss him again. Slow and sexy, wanting every last moment.

When I pull away, he quirks a sweet smile at me, and I can’t help but think I’m lucky right now. Whatever happens later, at least I had this.

“There’s no place I’d rather be.”

Laura makes breakfast for lunch, and I sit at her kitchen table and watch her cook. She slipped on tiny little shorts and a tank top, and every time she bends over I go insane with lust. Not because I just had the best sex of my life, but because I can have that sex for the rest of my life if I play this right. I want her. No one else.

But after we eat, she reaches out her hand to me, and the good mood and conversation of lunchtime ends.

“Come with me, Lee.”

She opens the door to her room and flips on the light. The candles are all out now, and the place still smells like smoke and sex. The area at the foot of her bed is cluttered with clothes so she picks them up in her arms and tosses them on the other side. Pointing at the floor, she says, “Sit here.” I sit down cross-legged and wait as she opens her closet and pulls out an old cardboard box.
 

“This is everything I managed to bring back from Asia.” On top is a thick journal, and her hand shakes before picking it up, dropping and fumbling for it.
 

Opening the journal to the last page, she shuts her eyes for a whole minute before handing it to me.
 

I read,
“I’m pregnant. And I have no idea who the father is. I’m just home from the family doctor. He refuses to give me the strong antibiotics I need to kick whatever has lodged itself in my intestines because I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant. How could I let this happen? It doesn’t matter. I have an appointment tomorrow to talk with someone about an abortion. I can’t have this baby. I don’t want it. I don’t even know whose it is.”

“Laura…” I start, but I’m not sure how to continue. She looks at me for a moment, her body as rigid as a plank, and nods her head.

“I honestly don’t remember a lot about my time in Asia. I was a very sad and depressed person, and I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Lee, I’ve slept with dozens of guys.” She’s staring down at the journal in my hand so she doesn’t have to see my reaction. I think I’m keeping my face calm, but I can’t be sure. Dozens? Plural? I’ve only ever slept with six women. “I was promiscuous and self-destructive. I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to hear all this, but it’s true, and I can’t hide my past from you any longer. I also did a lot of drugs, which is why I can’t remember most of it. It’s a blessing in disguise.”

“What drugs?” I can’t look away from the journal. This all happened to the woman I’m totally in love with.

“Opium, mainly, which was a hard habit to kick when I got back, but I don’t think I was addicted. Even now.” She reaches for the journal and flips the pages to the beginning. On page one is a recount of the first guy she met and slept with. She even numbered him. I start to flip the pages, just searching for the numbers, and they climb steadily through the twenties into the thirties. I stop. I don’t want to know any more.

“Lee, I was only twenty-two and totally fucked up. I couldn’t love that baby because I couldn’t even love myself. I spent months in Asia having sex with any guy I could find because I just wanted to feel something.” She pounds on her chest with her fist, and I reach for her but she shrinks back. “I wanted someone to love me like I couldn’t love myself. My mother couldn’t love me because she was so sad about David’s death, and I had failed at college and life. My father never once loved me or said a kind word to me. David was the only person who ever cared, and he was gone.”

How does something like this happen to such a wonderful woman? I don’t get it at all, and the control I usually have on my rage is building. This is unfair. She never deserved to be treated this way.

“So I had the abortion and it sent my father over the edge. I committed the ultimate sin in his eyes. Only two men have ever called me a whore in my life: my own father and Rene. Two days after writing that final entry, I was having my planned miscarriage (that was what I called it for years) all over the bathroom at home. They gave me pills I could take at home because it was so early in the pregnancy, but I was weak and sick, and the bleeding was way too intense. My mom was catatonic with grief over Aunt Susan’s death and never noticed I was gone, but my dad found me bleeding out on the bathroom floor.”

I should be saying something, doing something, anything, to abate her grief, but I’m immobile. I take a deep breath and thumb through the journal in my hand, stopping on an account of her time in the north of Thailand when she smoked opium and had sex with three guys in a row, numbers thirty-six, thirty-seven, and thirty-eight. I gasp and immediately wish I had kept my mouth shut.

“Laura…” I look up from the journal in time to see her rise unsteadily to her feet. Her knees are shaking, and she’s so pale she’s practically glowing. She turns and runs for the door, but her knees give way, and she slams into the door jamb. Her forehead smacks into the door frame, and she bursts into tears. I jump up to help her, but Laura makes it out of the room to the bathroom where she kneels over the toilet. I think she’s going to puke up lunch, but nothing comes, and she moans before lying down on the floor.

“I’m sorry, Lee. So sorry.”

“Jesus Christ, Laura. You’re bleeding.” I quickly sit down next to her and pull her head onto my lap. The cut is minuscule but bleeding heavily. Goddamn head wounds. I pull the towel off the wall in back of me and put pressure on her forehead.

“You can leave,” she whispers, and my heart breaks. “I’ll understand. Rene found all this out, and we were through. I’m so ashamed.” She begins to cry again so I pull her to my chest and shush her.

For fuck’s sake, I knew what she had to tell me was big, but I didn’t anticipate this.

“Laura, you’re crazy if you think I’m going to leave you because of this.” I look at the journal where I dropped it on the floor and sigh. “Why did you keep the damned journal? Why did you keep everything?”

She sobs into my chest, whole sobs that shake her entire body. She pushes back from me and holds the towel against her forehead with one hand, swiping at her tears with the other. “Because that was the defining moment of my life, Lee. After that, I knew I was so damaged no one else would want me. I tried to live a normal life after, but it was no use. I never thought I’d date again, but you came along.”

The journal is a lie disguised as the truth. What happened to her feels like fiction, not a personal account of Laura’s life. These are things Laura did yet they are not Laura. I know they’re not her, but the ghost of this woman haunts Laura, deep inside her. It haunted her, her mother, her father, and it will never leave.
 

“This is not you.” I take the journal and shake it at her. “This shit does not define you for the rest of your life. This is a bump in the road, a lesson. It’s not who you really are.”

“It is!” she cries.

“It
was
you. This is not the Laura I know now. The statute of limitations is over for this. Way over.” I’m such a lawyer some times. I flip through the journal again and this time I see more than the men she slept with. I find passages of just Laura, sad and lonely. They remind me of my time in college. “Do you think I define myself by the shit I did in my twenties?” I ask, and she shakes her head. “No, I don’t. I did a stupid amount of drugs to escape my parents, and I was the asshole who stole my best friend’s girlfriend.”

“Lee…” she gasps. Good, she’s not thinking about herself anymore.

“Yep. I didn’t even date her for very long, and I lost a great friend. Stupid. I still hate myself for that. Then, a year later, I met the most wonderful girl —
 
also, Caucasian with dark brown hair, like you. Her name was Sarah, and we were madly in love… perfect for each other.” I stop for a moment and remember her. We did everything together, traveled, laughed, and cried together, and she was some of the best sex I’ve ever had until today. “But I ruined our relationship because I wouldn’t introduce her to my family. I was afraid of what they’d say and the hard time my mother would give me for dating someone who wasn’t Korean. We broke up, and I regretted it for years.”