Here & There (57 page)

*
None of this comforts me. I’m still alone. Still shivering on a boulder the tide has surrounded, with barely enough light left to read, while storm clouds roll in, wondering if I wouldn’t be better served to make a bonfire of all this. At least I’d finally feel something like a mother’s warmth.

Hilary’s wake is a goddamn Charybdis, and I’ve spun out beyond the centripetal pull of sanity, hung up on hunting nanobots at the cost of Lorelei’s embrace. Spurning la petite mort for hysteria.

The weight of Hilary’s rantings weigh on my lap. The chill from Lorelei blows down from the house, its own offshore wind.

I stuffed the pages and folders back into the knapsack. I took off my shoes, rolled up my pant legs, slipped down into the rising tide, and stomped to shore.

Lorelei waits, on the porch, lit up by the blazing logs in a terracotta firepit. The sleeves of her dress shirt rolled up past her elbows, the tails of it hang just even with the white trim at the bottom of her green athletic shorts. Even in twilight her legs glimmer. She sits on the arm of one of the well-varnished Adirondack chairs, her feet on the seat. A bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir stands on the table next to her, a half-empty glass sits in her hand. A woven blanket draped over her shoulders.

She laughs at the sound of me tromping up the deck stairs. My wooden thumps sound weary.

Beleagured chic, she had called it once.

My book bag under one arm, shoes under the other, my feet covered in sand up above my ankles. The first drops of rain march across the leaves behind me.

It isn’t until that last step, when we finally make eye contact, her pupils glowing with the moonlight, that I feel the weight of it drop off. The knapsack and sneakers clatter onto the deck. I should feel relief. Instead all I have is a sensation of untethering, like a tense cable fraying apart. I am drifting away in every direction at once. Lorelei’s gaze is burning a hole through my fibers, like the sun through a magnifying glass.

Somehow I make my way over to the hammock hanging in the corner. I sit there with my back to her, withering under her heat vision, listening to the sky slip open and the rain flutter down onto the leaves and knock against the roof of the veranda.

I don’t hear the chair creak when she stands up. Nor the wine bottle quietly
woomp
as she pulls out the cork with her teeth. Or the deck pat against her feet with every footstep.

I’m too busy rehearsing my apology.
Lorelei, I’ve been on a real tear, and I never wanted to take you down with—

Her fingers shark through my hair and grab a handful at the back of my head. She flexes her fist, and the follicles pull in unison on the back of my scalp, dragging threads of tension with it out from my skull.

The release shudders down my spine.

Lorelei cups my head as I lay back into the web. Her lips pursuing mine. There’s no doubt. No question this time. Just the tangle of her hands in my hair, the heat of her cheek on my palm, the soft parting of lips, and a flood of purple, dark, intense burgundy, as she cascades the Pinot Noir out of her mouth into mine.

The warm intoxication surrounds my tongue with an electric current, priming it. Her tongue slips in past my lips, sliding against my own, the soft underside velvet against my tastebuds.

I welcome the weight of her as she crawls onto me, savor the lashes of the hammock cutting into my back, the creak of wood with every swing of the pendulum of us. Delight in the pain of her teeth tugging at my bottom lip. Her nipples press through her shirt against my chest. My hands slide up her moon-soaked legs, over her green shorts, and slip under her shirttails, fingertips tracing over the rolling hills of her ribs. I’m lost in the landscape of her.

She leans against my chest with hers, to free her hands to reach behind, grab mine, and pull them down over her ass. The sensation of her taut muscles flexing and releasing in my palms drives me over the edge. My fingers dig into her flesh. I pull the heat of her against me, pressing the hardness of me into her.

Her lips brush across my ear and out comes a soft moan. I pull and press again, but she wriggles free, shimmies her way up the hammock, climbs up my torso, her knees boxing my ears, leaning out grabbing the post the hammock hangs from for balance with one hand, while the other reaches down, hooks under the white trim and pulls her green athletic shorts to the side.

Her taste inundates my mouth, as the soft texture of my tastebuds drag across her, until my tongue hardens into a point and circles. Looping from top to bottom, each circumscription mirroring the gyrations of her hips, until I sink my tongue into her. The universe shrinks into tight
darkness. She shudders away from my mouth and courses her way back down my body, sits up, her legs on either side of me, feet firmly planted on the deck below, and unbuttons her dress shirt. I tear mine off.

The applause of the rain on the leaves picks up. The wind pushes some drops beneath the eaves, and it patters against the railing, fragmenting into smaller drops, splashing against my cheek.

Lorelei leans down.

Her tits press against me.

She sucks my earlobe and unzips my pants. Murmurs into my neck, “Your mouth felt so good on me.”

I swell in her grasp with this suspiration. I’m so fucking hard it hurts. I feel her fingers hook under the white trim again, pulling her shorts to the side.

Somewhere in a distant corner of my brain, a high school health teacher’s admonitions echo into a hurricane, something about condoms, but everything goes quiet when she tucks her pelvis under, and I slide into her, bare, a strigil rippling through her insides, shivering tremors in its wake.

She’s so wet that, on the first rock of her hips, I’m thumping against the back of her. One of my arms has reached beneath her shirt, under her arm, across her back, and over her shoulder. I hold her in place against the force of my hips, thrusting up, and her pelvis curling under.

Sweat drips off her and puddles on my chest, pooling in my neck.

I am surrounded by Lorelei.

She is anchored to the ground, driving me deeper inside of her, grinding against my stomach, tightening with every shift, constricting with each plunge, and I’m pushing back with hardened determination.

Lorelei breaks out of my grasp and sits up, straddling me, her hands buttressed against my chest, hips angling for greater penetration, her core squeezing me with anticipation.

I feel it rising out of me. The surge.

“Lorelei—”

She nods.

“Lorelei . . .” the desperation claws at my throat. “Stop . . .” it is barely a whisper. “I’m close.”

She shudders and drives her arms against my chest, sinks them into me, pylons pinning me down. “I know . . . I feel . . .”

She rocks and sinks me deeper into her, her lips wrapped around the base of me, her clit brushing across me, then grinding back. Brushing then grinding.

The surge extrudes upward.

My hands struggle for a purchase against her sweat-saturated hips. She slips through their grasp. Trying to push her off is like shoving a wave
of water. The hammock binds me against her, the more I back away, the more she sinks down with me, swallowing me deeper.

Lorelei nods, exhaling in sync with the rocking of her hips, “I want it. I want it.”

“Lore . . .” I can’t hold on, I can’t keep it in.

“I want it. Come in me, come in me,” her words blending together into one undulating sound, “Comeinmecomeinmecomeinme.”

Lorelei leans down and seals her lips against mine. She exhales into me, filling my lungs, stretching my rib cage from the inside, until I collapse inward and breathe back into her. Respiring back and forth into each other, our chests chasing and retreating from one another’s, as the oxygen between us fades, as we grow hungrier for air, inhaling the other deeper, as an exquisite blackness strangles us together. And she pulls her hips forward and then snaps them back across the frictionless plane of me, driving me into her tapering depths. My fingers dig into her hips. Finally I can’t take it anymore: I burst, spraying against the back of her, just as every one of her muscles constricts.

She splashes down onto me.

Her spasms milk the rest of my come into her.

Breath comes out in heavy sighs.

My fingers shark through her hair.

She mumbles into my chest, “I wanted your come in me. I wanted you in me.”

“I know. I did too. I just couldn’t give in.”

“I know. I had to tackle you over the edge.”

“You’re the sexiest linebacker I’ve ever fucked.”

Lorelei laughs into my chest. “I want this. I want you to stay in me.”

“I don’t want to ever be separate from you. I haven’t since the first day you walked into the office.”

She nods into my chest.

A raindrop splatters onto the railing and splashes us.

We drift off to sleep like that, salty and stuck together on the hammock, my prick still inside of her.

Well, that’s what should’ve happened.

Instead I came back to an empty veranda, drenched from rain with an angry welt growing on my forehead where a low-lying branch and I disagreed about who had the right-of-way in the dark.

I didn’t hear the voices until I was leaning against the frame of the backdoor, using an old towel to sweep the sand off my feet.

Lorelei’s laugh and a man’s voice.

My heart dropped to the floor next to my book bag.

“Danny? Is that you?”

“Yep.”

“Come on in and meet our host.”

What else could I do?

There they were, sitting on the couch that Lorelei and I had spent so many evenings on together, getting drunk and swapping tales. A bottle of Pinot Noir on the coffee table between them.

Lorelei was in tight jeans and a loose-knit sweater that seemed all the looser knit due to its adherence to form. Black bra too, in case you were wondering.

Sitting across from her was a pair of Nantucket red slacks, held up by a blue canvas belt that had a red crab woven in every inch or so, topped with a tucked-in light blue gingham short-sleeve dress shirt with, wait for it, a popped collar. But all I saw were his searingly-white teeth, glazed with Pinot.

The outfit’s name was Bret, or Brent, or Bart, something WASPy. Might as well have been named Baxter Whitehorse McMayflower. He was the friend of the lender of Lexuses whose SUV we had been jaunting around in. He was the chap who owned this little beach cottage in Newport.

“Dude, you totally know how to make an entrance,” Gingham whistled. “I don’t know whether to get a towel, an ice pack, or a camera.”

Lorelei didn’t just laugh at this blueblood wit, she touched his arm. The room sharpened into focus, like in that famous scene in
Raging Bull
, somehow the room grew and blurred, while my focus narrowed and zoomed in on Lorelei’s fingers brushing across his arm as if to sweep his too-muchness excess off.

“I’d settle for a drink.”

“Some Pinot Noir, man?” Gingham pointed with his chin at the bottle. “Oregon, not that French Burgundy jug wine. Willamette Valley.”

“Brent’s a bit of an oenophile.”

Of course he is. “Got any rye?” A bit of an overdramatically masochistic request. At least it might burn the numbness out of me, and then any bad taste left in my mouth would be my own doing.

“Oh yeah, man, I’ve got an awesome craft rye.” McMayflower strutted over to his liquor cabinet and offered a generous pour in his Waterford rocks glass. “Rī rye. Local blend, distilled over in Peacedale.”

I took the two fingers and shoved them down my throat intending to gag. Fuck it all if this actually wasn’t the first brand of rye I liked. Goddamnit. What could I do but have another?

“Smooth, right?”

“Actually it’s the harsh burn I like.”

He let out a
hmm
and left the bottle on the table next to the chair that Lorelei had covered with a beach towel for me.

Meanwhile, Lorelei had dropped back onto the couch. A little too close to center. McMayflower crossed his leg so his knee was practically touching her. “So I’ve been hearing about your little secret project.”

“You told him about my mother?” The heat of my accusation was stoked by the burn from the rye.

Gingham looked confused. “Your mother’s a chameleon?”

So she hadn’t told him about everything, just our hypothetical
Chameleon
campaign for Anomaly.

The hurt in Li-Li’s expression said it all. Her disappointment, my lack of faith. Her presumed betrayal turned me into a very real Benedict Asshole. It was visible only for a second. Her eyes dropped with disappointment toward her own glass, hit bottom, and then her smile rose up as she turned and put her hand on the red pants.

“Mother’s his code word for it.”

“A code word for a code word?” asked the WASP.

“Wheels within wheels, man,” I raised my glass, finally hopping on board. Lorelei kept her back to me and chugged away along her train of thought.