Nothing More Beautiful (47 page)

Recovered, Vince lifted me up, propelling me
onto the bed. He flattened me across the king mattress. Vince
always made sure to give as much as he received—and to give it just
as well. His eyes told me that I better get ready to explode. My
panties were already soaked before his tongue even touched me, and
the moment it connected with my clit, my entire body contracted in
a huge crunch, and then released in a powerful wave of delicious
delight.

Emma climbed onto the bed, naked, her
breasts hovering over my face. She bent over my stomach, planting
delicate kisses down to my hipbone; all the while, Vince’s tongue
swirled around my clit and pussy. She leaned back and I followed
her eyes to Vince between my legs. “You said before you wanted to
know what it tastes like. Do you want to find out now?” she
asked.

I nodded, a bit reluctantly. “Yes,” I said,
licking my lips. She straddled my chest, slowly inching forward, my
tongue encouraging her to scoot closer. My hands wrapped around her
legs, and I brought her the rest of the way to my mouth. At first
it just tasted like skin, a little salty. When her lips began to
spread, her sweet wetness flooded my mouth, and I imagined what
Vince was doing and tried to mimic his movements. He explored my
whole region, though his focus stayed on my clit, always going back
to that bundle of nerves that shot ripples of ecstasy through my
body and up to my neck. The pressure building there, coiling like a
spring—a spring that always erupted.

He was devouring me like it was the best
thing he’d ever tasted, and his deep-throated rumbles told me he
enjoyed it as much as me playing with his balls. I followed his
lead, and soon Emma threw her head back, yelling at the heavens.
She angled her hips closer to my mouth, just as I ground mine
closer to Vince’s face. It was an unstoppable reflex: our bodies’
way of showing we wanted more—more—more.

Her body rocked as she came, her thighs
crushing my head. But I didn’t mind; I embraced her orgasm, and
only quit when she fell off of me.

Without her sweetness distracting me, the
pressure swiftly reached its limit, the spring about to release all
its tension—and suddenly a wave of red slammed into me, again and
again. I lost myself in the moment, the extraordinary sensation
that wrapped me up in a tight cocoon of euphoria, and only the
feeling existed. It flooded every little corner of my writhing
body.

We took a short break after that, recharging
on water and wine. My legs dripped with sweet juice—juice I wanted
to watch Emma lick up. “It’s your turn, Emma,” Vince said, as we
crawled onto the bed. “My tongue is just getting warmed up. Now lay
down.”

She quickly obeyed, spreading her silky
legs. Vince dipped his head between them and I studied what his
tongue did. He pressed his tongue flat against her lips and parted
them slowly, deliberately, running along the edges of her sensitive
folds. He swirled around her clit, and then bit down with a gentle
touch.

I watched for a few minutes as he continued
to change up his routine, eventually sucking on her clit for long
intervals.

Emma waved me to her. “You’ve tasted me, now
I want to see how sweet you are.” Her heady tone brought my leg
over her breast, and I straddled her the way she had straddled me.
She wasted no time, her arms locking around my legs, drawing me to
her mouth and the ravenous lust within.

Her hands massaged my ass as she circled my
clit with her tongue. Moans escaped into my pussy as Emma reacted
to Vince. I responded with heavy, uncontrolled breaths.

Sex growls and grunts, along with faint
gasps and long groans filled the room. The thought of Emma between
my legs cranked up my heart rate, and I entangled my hands in her
hair, pulling gently, listening to her beautiful noises.

Emma came for the second time—a thunderstorm
of intensity, her whole body convulsing, as wave after wave crashed
into every nerve inside her. Veins throbbed all over her face and
neck, her eyes rolling back into her head.

I climbed off of her as she came down, still
craving my second orgasm. When I looked back, I saw Vince standing
up as he withdrew two fingers from Emma, his cock now fully erect.
It glistened under the light, begging to do its job—beckoning to
the pool between my legs. Our eyes locked, and without a word, I
knew it was time to start his second main three-way fantasy: having
sex while his face was buried between another pair of legs.

Beforehand, the three of us had agreed that
he wouldn’t penetrate Emma, to keep things simpler: Vince was
perfectly happy getting off with only oral love from her. He lay
across the bed, his cock defying gravity, and instructed me to
slide onto his cock so that we faced each other. Emma swung her leg
over his shoulder, putting her clit right in his face while she
faced me.

Emma raised her hips so that Vince could see
me fuck his cock if he wanted. “Kiss,” he said, after a minute.
Emma and I leaned into each other while I continued to grind
against Vince. Her mouth tasted like candy.

“Do you like what you taste like?” she
asked.

“I still have you in my mouth,” I said,
licking my lips. Our lips met again.

Vince’s hands roamed over Emma’s body,
gliding up her back, around her ribs, squeezing her breasts, then
back down to her thighs. His hands never settled, and I could see
the delicious shivers shooting through her.

The need to thrust took over, and Vince
repositioned us, with me on my back and Emma next to him. Red
lights lit up in my head every time he slammed into me, pulling all
the way out, then plowing hard, again and again.

Emma stroked his sweat-sheened abs, running
her fingers all over his hard body, before she dipped under to his
swinging balls. Vince went into overdrive as she massaged them.

His eyes locked with hers as he pounded
away. Suddenly he was crying out, coming inside me, still with his
eyes lost in hers, and I could see the burning passion in them—the
same storm of lust that was there when he looked at me in the
intense, true moment when he released himself.

I watched in horror as our love shattered in
those seconds.

I
had fooled myself into
believing that Vince and I shared real love. Despite all of the
tenderness and sweet words, it was all just carnal lust in the end.
I realized this the moment he came inside me while staring into
Emma’s eyes with the same look I had thought meant love—the love he
bore for me.

As soon as he pulled out, I grabbed my
clothes and sprinted for the elevator, dressing on the way down,
tears streaming down my face. A blubbering mess, I drove around the
city, not wanting to go home. It wasn’t until the next day that my
mind settled and I could form the coherent thoughts I wanted to
express. I hadn’t slept. Fueled by the need to relieve my chest, I
headed back to Vince’s to explain what had happened, taking a
circuitous route.

My phone died earlier in the morning, with
over 40 voicemails and 100 texts from Vince. I knew it was childish
to keep him in the dark. Grown people talked through their
problems—at least hypothetically.

The elevator doors opened and I stepped
inside Vince’s condo. He jumped up, sitting on the couch in the
solarium. “Jesus, Maci!” He ran over and threw his arms around me.
“What happened? You just left without saying anything. I called you
a hundred times. Why didn’t you answer?” His sentences were all
strung together in one long breath.

“It was all fake,” I said quietly, my voice
raw. “I see that now.”

“Fake? What do you mean? What does that
mean?” His voice was frantic, hysterical.

“Last night—” Tears were streaming down my
face, but I steeled my nerves and fought through the flood, my
voice quivering. “Last night I realized that I’m still the same
stupid girl I was a year ago, kidding myself that I was in love,
that someone else loved me the same way.”

“What are you talking about? I do love you,
Maci,” he declared. “I fell for you the moment you crashed into
me.”

I shook my head. “Last night—” I choked up
again. “When you were coming inside me last night, you were looking
straight into her eyes like you do mine, with the same passion, the
same affection—and then I realized: it’s only lust, not love.”

He stood there, his mouth open, dumbstruck.
“I was having an orgasm. That’s all it was, an orgasm. I always
have the same orgasm face, you should know that.”

“It was more than an orgasm, Vince,” I
shouted. “It was truth. It told me everything about our
relationship in those few seconds. I can’t do this, Vince. I
thought I could be open and experimental, so that we could grow and
be closer—more intimate—but last night I saw it was all a lie.
We’re not closer. You just want to fuck. It doesn’t matter
who.”

“How can you say that after everything we’ve
been through? There’s no logic, no reason behind those words.”

“I can’t live a sham for another six months
like I did with Ryan. I’m sorry, Vince”—I pressed the elevator door
and it pinged, opening—“I can’t—can’t do it.” In the elevator, I
tossed him his keys to the EverGo. “Don’t call me.”

The doors slammed him into my past, and my
life blurred, devoid of reality. I felt all my walls crumbling
around me, burying me with all the lies, all the pain, and all the
love I had once believed existed.

OVER A MONTH WENT
by and
everything in my life had changed. Danielle had moved out, a
married woman now. She pleaded with me to work it out with Vince,
promising that what we had was worth breaking through whatever wall
separated us. She believed I had overreacted, that I had
misconstrued his expression. I argued that I had misjudged his
character, and my own.

Crosswords became my best friend, and I
spent most nights filling one in with Colby-Jack beside me. I had
found a new job at a bakery, too. It wasn’t anything like owning
your own place, but I had little to complain about—except the pay.
My coworkers were nice and considerate, for the most part. I even
had a new clunker. A beautiful ’93 Elantra named Ernie.

Vince hadn’t texted or called, or tried any
form of contact. Given the time to think the night through, as well
as the months spent together, it became a jumbled mess that my
brain either couldn’t—or refused to—sort out. Worn, I eventually
gave up, on the verge of an emotional breakdown.

Life dulled, colors faded, and I experienced
it all on autopilot, getting up, going to work, coming home,
sleeping. Day in and day out: it was all the same.

I had increased the frequency of calls to my
mother from once to twice a week, sometimes up to four. She poked
and poked me to get the dirt on what had happened between Vince and
me, but I sealed that vault tight. She regularly told me to give
him a call and to fight for him, since “men like him didn’t grow on
trees.”

In mid-July, my phone rang during my lunch
break on a Thursday. My brother, frantic, yelled at me to get to
Providence Hospital down in Oregon City. “Her neighbors called
911,” he mumbled. “She’s in the ER right now, and I’m just now
leaving work. You need to get here as fast as you can.” He hung up
without much more than that.

My boss gave me the afternoon off. The drive
tore at my stomach. I found my brother in the ER waiting room.
“They haven’t told me anything. All I know is that Mrs. Davis found
her passed out in the kitchen when she came over for lunch, and she
called for the ambulance.”

I tried to find out more from the nurses
after my brother’s failed attempts, but no one seemed to know
anything. About twenty minutes later, a woman approached us and
asked if we were related to Nora Goodwin. “She’s fine,” the woman
said. “We’ve moved her out of the ER and we have her under
observation. She should be released in a few hours.”

“What was wrong with her?” Donny asked.

“She had minor respiratory difficulties, but
she’s fine now,” the nurse assured us. “You can see her now if you
want.” She gave us directions to her room. Lying in her bed, my
mother looked weaker than I’d ever seen her, her eyes sunken in and
tired.

“These damn doctors don’t know what
happened,” she snapped when I asked her. “They keep repeating I had
minor respiratory difficulties like that means something. I guess I
can go home after a few hours . . .”

Donny eyed me with worry. “You need to be
more careful, mom,” he said flatly, like he had rehearsed the line
a hundred times in his head.

“Be more careful? Be more careful of what?”
Her fiery strength flared like her red hair. “I don’t even know
what to worry about or how to prevent it from happening again.”

“Just be more careful,” he echoed. After
half an hour, he got up to leave, heading back to the brewery.
“You’ll be fine driving her home?” he asked me before he left.

“Yes, Donny. I know how to drive a fucking
car.”

“Whoa, where did the attitude come from? I
was just making sure, all right? I just want mom to be safe, that’s
all.”

“She’ll be fine, I promise.”

“I know . . . I’ll stop
by around six, okay?” He hugged us goodbye and left.

A nurse came in a short time after that,
notifying us that my mother had been discharged. I helped her out
of bed. “You okay to walk on your own?”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m 58, not 90. I don’t
need to be treated like a fossil.”

“You’re at the hospital, mom. An ambulance
drove you here. That’s serious.”

She waved me off. “I’m fine. I feel fine—the
doctors say I’m fine . . . I’m fine, all
right?”

“All right already, I get it. Let’s get you
home.” Stubborn and persistent, she walked to the car on her own,
though I stood right beside her in case she needed extra
support.