Please (9 page)

“
Years ago, before I ...” she paused, an image of Steve flashing through her mind. She consciously deleted it, smiling up at Sebastian. The intensity of his gaze both frightened and thrilled her. “It’s been a while,” she said.

“
Your body remembers.” He took one of her hands from his neck, brushing her fingers against his lips briefly before twisting her in a turn. A surge of sensation ran from her fingers directly to her core. She stumbled, but Sebastian caught her, pulling her close to him. He rested his cheek against her head, lacing his fingers through hers where they rested on his shoulders. They danced like this for one song? Ten? Elizabeth wasn’t sure. It felt like an eternity, and it felt like an instant.

“
You’re so fucking beautiful,” he breathed into her hair, holding her almost fiercely. Then he released her, pushing her away from him, so that they were only connected by their fingertips and the thin line of energy that ran from Sebastian’s eyes to hers. Elizabeth tried to maintain his gaze, but she only lasted a few seconds before she had to look away. It was too intense.

Suddenly
, Sebastian stopped. Elizabeth looked up at him, confused.

“
I’m sorry. I can’t do this,” he said, dropping her hands and walking off the dance floor.

Elizabeth followed him, a hollow ache rising in her chest.
“Sebastian...” she started.

He stopped, turning to face her.
“Elizabeth, I can’t pretend that I don’t want you anymore. I think I should go.” He looked at the floor, rubbing his hands over his head in obvious frustration.

“
Sebastian.” Elizabeth placed herself directly in front of him, blocking his exit. She was surprised at the surge of panic that she felt. “Please don’t go.”

He met her eyes, his expression betraying nothing.
“What?” he asked, flatly.

“
Please don’t leave,” she said, aware of the pleading tone that had crept into her voice. “Please.” Elizabeth glanced furtively around the bar. No one there knew her, she was sure, and the other patrons were too busy dancing and flirting to notice the small drama unfolding in their dark corner of the club. She knew what she had to do.

Slowly, she kneel
ed. The concrete floor was cold on her fishnet-covered knees. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, pressing the palms momentarily to her burning cheeks before letting them drop to her sides. She looked up at Sebastian, an embarrassed half-smile twisting on her lips. As if this were a joke. “Please,” she said, her voice quavering. “I’m begging you.”

A glimmer of a smile passed over his face before he reached down and pulled her up, lifting her as effortlessly as she lifted Gwen.
“What was that?” he said, staring into her eyes, intently, “I didn’t hear that last part.”

Elizabeth fought to maintain eye
contact, though she wanted to look away to hide her shame. “I’m begging you to stay. I want you ...” she hesitated.

“
Yes,” Sebastian encouraged, his eyes gleaming. He held her face in his hands.

“
I want you,” she said in a whisper, averting her eyes at the last second, “to fuck me.”

A broad grin spread across
his face. He tilted Elizabeth’s face up and kissed her, softly at first, then harder, his tongue alive and hungry in her mouth.

The cab ride back to the Mercer was exquisite torture. Sebastian looked out his window, one arm wrapped casually around her lower back. Elizabeth pretended to look out her window, but Sebastian
’s hand was on her thigh, under her skirt, his middle finger slowly widening one of the tiny diamond-shaped holes in her stocking. She couldn’t concentrate on anything but that one finger on that one little patch of skin.

Back in her room, they kissed, standing, eyes closed, mouths devouring. Sebastian was slowly maneuvering her backward, toward the bed, or so she thought, so she was surprised
, when he pulled his lips from hers, that she found herself at the foot of the bed, facing the full-length mirror.

“
Look at you,” he said, standing behind her, pulling her hair to one side and kissing her neck. “You’re so fucking hot.”

She looked at herself, eyes half-lidded, hair wild, mouth bruised like an art nouveau painting
of some lust-soaked courtesan. She looked out of control, savage, dissolute, and, she had to admit, kind of sexy.

Watching her reflection in the mirror, a cocky half-smile on his lips, he ran his hands up the outside of her
stockinged legs, pushing her dress up. He hooked his thumbs over the elastic of her ridiculously expensive panties and slid them over her hips and thighs until they dropped in a silken puddle at her feet. Then he slowly unzipped the back of her dress and pushed it off her shoulders. It fell with a soft rustle to the floor.

As he slipped his hands under her bra strap, Elizabeth put her hands on
his, stopping him. Sebastian arched an eyebrow but obeyed, running his hands down her arms instead. Focusing on the sensation of his lips on her neck, his hands on her skin, Elizabeth closed her eyes.

“
Ah-ah-ah,” Sebastian scolded her, nipping at her ear. “Open your eyes,” he whispered. She felt him step away from her and did as instructed.

Looking at her in the mirror, he whipped his shirt over his head and, in one quick move
ment, grabbed the desk chair and sat down on it, pulling her down to sit in the wide v of his legs. Elizabeth gasped, feeling the smooth, hot skin of his torso and the length of his erection beneath his trousers, hard and insistent, pressing against her back.

“
Keep your eyes open,” he whispered, his hands sliding up her inner thighs, spreading them wide. “I want you to watch.”

With one hand, he separated her lips, revealing her most private parts, pink and glistening.

“Oh,” he moaned, pressing himself closer to her. “You don’t know how many times I pictured this,” he whispered, his eyes locked on hers in the mirror. “Imagining what it would be like to see you. To touch you.” Keeping her spread wide with one hand, he traced her inner lips with his index finger. “To taste you.” He plunged his finger into her, and she gasped, her eyes involuntarily closing. “Keep watching,” he reminded her, bringing his hand to his mouth.

“
Oh, God,” he said, licking her juices from his finger. “You don’t know how bad I want you.”

Emboldened by her lust and his obvious desire, Elizabeth pushed her ass against him.
“Show me,” she said.

It was as if her words had released the floodgates of his hunger. He pressed her against him and thrust two fingers into her, once, twice. Slick and slippery, his fingers worked her clit, faster and faster. His long tongue flicked up her neck to her earlobe. His breath was hot and wet in her ear. His shaft, barely restrained by his trousers, pressed against her urgently. She felt her eyelids fluttering closed.

“Open, Elizabeth,” Sebastian insisted, his voice low and harsh as he rubbed faster, harder. “Watch yourself come. Now.”

She did. Head thrown back,
slitted eyes watching the mirror, she felt the vortex of her pleasure consuming her. She cried out and bucked against his hand, pressing him into her, deeper, deeper. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a light sheen of sweat on her forehead.

His fingers still inside of her, Sebastian nipped at her neck, smiling that slow sexy smile.
“Mm. I love a woman who comes on demand.”

Elizabeth gave him a crooked half-smile.
“I don’t do that for just anyone, you know,” she joked.

He laughed.
“I know.”

He slid his fingers out of her and stood up, pulling her with him. Her legs felt wobbly, her knees weak. He turned her around to face him and held her close, kissing her forehead, her cheeks, her jaw before tilting up her chin and kissing her lips, slowly and sweetly at first, then with greater urgency. She wrapped her arms around him, her hands on the warm smooth flesh of his back.

He dug his fingers into her hair, bringing his lips to her ear. “Tonight, you’re my student. You do exactly what I tell you, but if you want to me stop, all you have to say is ‘no’. Understood?”

She nodded her head in affirmation, her heartbeat picking up pace.
She couldn’t imagine ever wanting to stop.

He took a step back from her, and she had a moment to take in the full splendor of Sebastian Faulkner. Military-tight hair, sculpted features, full lips and eyes that screamed sex. Broad shoulders, lean brown stomach and that long, hard rod pressing against the front of his trousers. He saw her looking at it and a wicked smile spread over his face.
One hand went to his fly as he stepped toward her, grabbing her hair with the other. His grasp was firm but gentle.

“
Get on your knees. Now,” he whispered.

Licking her lips, she willingly obeyed.

Chapter 6

When Elizabeth awoke, floating to the surface of her consciousness from a deep, dreamless sleep, it was to the intangible but distinct feeling that she had forgotten something vitally important or done something incredibly stupid. Opening her eyes to find herself looking at the bristled curve of the back of Sebastian’s head on the pillow beside her, it became all too clear exactly what that was.

A surge of adrenaline washed over her, sending her scuttling out of the bed and into the bathroom, heart pounding. She saw her reflection in the mirror over the sink, standing with her back against the door, eyes wild, like a D-list actress in a cheesy horror movie, and she laughed, despite herself, hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. She was still wearing her bra, she noticed, but that was it. The stockings must have disappeared at some point
during the night. It was all a bit of a blur.

Wrapping herself in the bathrobe hanging on the door, she sat down on the toilet, trying to collect her thoughts and settle her heartbeat. Images of the night before flashed through her mind. Kneeling in front of Sebastian, unzipping his pants while he watched in the mirror. The sound of the zipper. The feeling of his hands gripping her hair. Lying on the bed, her knees jack-knifed around her ears, Sebastian on top of her. Straddling Sebastian
’s narrow hips, looking into his dark, long-lashed eyes. His hands on her hips, on her breasts, on her ...

“
Oh, God,” she moaned, out loud, cupping her hands over her face. “What have I done?” I’ve cheated on my husband, she said, this time silently. I’ve broken my marriage vows. I’m a cheater, an adulteress, goddamned Madame Bovary, Elizabeth berated herself. But she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. She just felt so damn good. Tired. Sore. But so damn good. Her body was still humming from his touch. When was the last time Steve had touched her that way? When was the last time she had wanted him to? A memory of Sebastian’s tongue sliding up the back of her knee, of her sucking Sebastian’s fingers leaped to her mind, sending a shiver of pleasure through her.

“
Sebastian,” she whispered, loving the sibilant hiss of his name. He was still out there, she realized with a jolt, sleeping.

Elizabeth carefully eased open the bathroom door and padded quietly into the bedroom. He had rolled over onto his back but was still asleep, his beautiful face chiaroscuro in the shaft of sunlight that streamed in through a crack in the curtains, the rise and fall of his bare chest slow and regular.

She couldn’t help smiling as she admired that amazing body. Milky-tea colored skin stretched over smooth, hard muscles that would make Michelangelo’s David weep with envy. A light covering of dark hair, just enough and in all the right places and none of the wrong ones. With difficulty, she resisted the impulse to touch the smooth, hairless stretch of skin that ran from his hip to his armpit. What was he still doing here, she wondered? What could this sleeping god want from her that he hadn’t had last night? He’d broken her resistance; the game was over. Now they could go back to their real lives; him to LA and seducing starlets and her to Iowa, to her next draft and Gwen and Keenan and Steve.

Steve. A pang of guilt speared Elizabeth
’s heart. She pulled her gaze away from Sebastian and, widening the crack in the curtains, looked down on the street below. It was already filling with yellow cabs, bicycles, Vespas and fast-moving pedestrians clutching cardboard coffee cups. She had made Steve a cuckold, she thought, using the word she had recently read in
Madame Bovary
. It sounded silly to Elizabeth, clownish and impotent, which, she supposed, was probably the point. Women were
betrayed
. It was a romantic word, resulting in no loss of dignity. But men were cuckolded. Unmanned. Shamed. Humiliated.

Though her eyes were looking at the busy street below, she couldn
’t stop thinking about Steve. But the feeling of guilt was slowly dissipating, and in its place, Elizabeth was surprised to find, was a quietly simmering anger.

In a way, Steve had driven her to this, she thought. He had changed. It wasn
’t just about their pathetic sex life, or how he had let himself go, physically, or even the way he treated her as if she were just another thing on his to do list, a note of creeping exasperation rising in his voice with every exchange, or the way he never remembered her birthday, or Valentine’s Day, or their anniversary, or even Mother’s Day unless Elizabeth explicitly reminded him herself. No, she realized, those things were just symptoms of the disease that was consuming their marriage like a lazy cancer, slow but persistent.

Elizabeth thought back to when she and Steve had first met, four years after she graduated from ISU. She had a teaching job at a charter school in one of Chicago
’s affluent suburbs. The pay wasn’t great, but by sharing a cheap two-bed in the city and limiting their nights out clubbing to a couple of times a month, she and Emily, who was interning at CKRP, had managed to save up enough money to spend a summer vacation backpacking around Southeast Asia.

The trip couldn
’t have come at a better time. A couple of months before, her on-again, off-again romance with her college boyfriend, Noah, had finally died a sudden, violent death when he told her that he was moving to Colorado to live with a girl he’d met online. Elizabeth had spent a total of twenty-four hours in her sweatpants whining to Emily and eating nothing but Ben and Jerry’s. But no daughter of Connie McCanna could allow herself more than a day of self-pity. The next morning she got a haircut, spent her entire paycheck on slutty dresses and tight jeans and for the next few months threw herself into bed with a series of comically unsuitable men, counting down the days till their departure with big red X’s on the calendar in the kitchen. Emily, who often had to share the kitchen table with her conquests the morning after, was probably even more relieved than Elizabeth when they were taxiing down the runway at O’Hare at last, unwieldy back-packs stowed safely in the cargo hold.

“
The rampant slut behavior stops now,” Emily said, somewhere over the Midwest, tossing back the dregs of her complimentary Bloody Mary.

Elizabeth laughed and nodded her head, eyes fixed on the unopened package of crackers on her tray table. But Emily wouldn
’t let her off that easily. She gripped Elizabeth’s arm and shook it until Elizabeth looked at her.

“
I’m not joking,” she said, her eyes wide and earnest. “I’ve put up with it for this long because I know it’s your way of dealing with No-ass,” she continued, using their newly coined nickname for her ex, “but we are going to be sharing a room, and I don’t want to wake up to the sound of you humping and pumping with the likes of Ernie.”

Elizabeth hung her head with a guilty smile. Emily had evicted Ernie from their apartment just hours before.

“Seriously, Liz?” Emily continued. “Ernie? He was fifty fucking years old. And he looked like he hadn’t bought any new clothes since his twenty-fifth birthday. Bell-bottoms? A satin blouse?” Emily pronounced it so it rhymed with ‘house.’ “Phone call for you, Ernie,” she mimed holding a telephone, “It’s the Partridge Brothers. They want their wardrobe back.”

Elizabeth laughed, a pained look on her face.
“Oh, God. He was pretty tragic, wasn’t he? I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I thought that he was retro-cool or something.”

“
And what about that one with the lisp? What was his name?”

“
Oh,” Elizabeth groaned, putting her head in her hands. “Shelley.”

“
Shelley.” Emily’s voice was flat. “You slept with a guy named Shelly? Who performed a fucking off-Broadway revival of
Oklahoma
on our kitchen table at seven in the morning? That guy was flaming like the fireworks on the Fourth of July!”

“
He told me he was bi-curious,” Elizabeth said.

“
Yeah, he was probably curious about what it was like to sleep with a woman,” Emily answered, her voice thick with sarcasm, “never having done it before. And what about the pizza delivery guy ...?”

“
Alright, alright!” Elizabeth laughed, throwing her hands up in mock defense. “Don’t rub it in. I’m sorry. I promise I’ll be good from now on.”

And she was. At least for the first month, until she met Steve. But by that point, Emily didn
’t care.

“
At last, a fucking normal guy,” Emily muttered under her breath, when Elizabeth introduced them at Cafe Farang on Bangkok’s bustling Koa San Road, where the three of them were sharing lousy pad Thai and Tiger beer.

Their meeting, at
Wat Po, the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, had a ring of fate to it. Elizabeth had literally tripped over Steve, who was crouched down at the foot of the enormous golden Buddha, trying to get a photo from a rat’s eye view. After exchanging apologies and names, they had discovered that they’d grown up within a hundred miles of each other and had both gone to ISU, though he had started two years earlier than Elizabeth and was in a completely different college. And later, over sweet, milky Thai iced tea, Elizabeth found out that Steve had also just been dumped by his college sweetheart. Over the course of the next month, as she, Emily, Steve and Steve’s friend Chase (now Emily’s husband Chase) wound their way down through Thailand and Malaysia and across the archipelago of Indonesia, they quietly fell in love.

Steve introduced her to
Bjork and Thich Nhat Hanh, and she shared Rothko and Kurt Vonnegut with him. They both agreed that they never wanted to live in the rural Midwest again, and talked about retiring to Vietnam and running a cozy little B&B.

Fast forward fifteen years, and they were back in small
-town Iowa doing all the things they promised each other they would never do. That happened to a lot of people, Elizabeth knew. It was called growing up. The only problem was that while Steve was perfectly content with the status quo, Elizabeth was not. She had started writing because it was the only way she could escape her small-town existence. Though she had never mentioned it to anyone, she harbored fantasies of running a guesthouse in Hua Hin once the kids were in college. She pictured a gracefully weathered colonial mansion with cane rockers on the porch, the smell of freshly baked baguettes and strong Vietnamese coffee, sharing witty banter and gin and tonics with the guests as the sky darkened to violet over the swaying palms and frangipani. She’d never brought it up with Steve, but she assumed ... what? Well, that he’d at least be open to possibilities outside of their zip code. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

Looking out the window of the Mercer, Elizabeth had
one of those moments of clarity that sometimes come after a completely out-of-character experience or a night of psychedelic drugs. What if Steve had been deceiving her all along? What if he’d been harboring a vanilla soul under a thin veneer of green-tea-basil-mint? He had slipped into small-town Midwestern life with the ease of a snake shedding its skin. What had happened to the man who had written her love poems, who had shared her wanderlust, who was eager for new flavors, smells, experiences? Elizabeth couldn’t even get Steve to try a new dish on the menu at the Hunan Palace anymore. The man that she had fallen in love with had never really existed, Elizabeth now understood. He was just a coat Steve had tried on to see if it fit. Clearly, it hadn’t, but by the time he realized this, Elizabeth was stuck in his pocket, the fabric pulled over her eyes.

Sebastian yawned loudly, startling Elizabeth and forcing her thoughts away from her husband to the man in her bed. She didn
’t immediately turn around, though, but kept looking out of the window, her heart racing, wondering what her next move should be. She didn’t have to. Sebastian made it for her.

“
Hey,” he said with quiet authority. “Come here.”

She turned to look at him. He was smiling his I
’m-hot-and-I-know-it grin. He stretched, arching his back, the duvet slipping down to reveal his firm stomach and an arrow of dark hair. Elizabeth walked toward him and sat down on the edge of the bed, hoping she didn’t look as awkward and unsure as she felt.

Sebastian reached for her hand.
“Elizabeth.” He said her name like an innuendo. “How are you?” He looked into her eyes intently, the smile not leaving his lips.

“
Good.” She smiled, looking down at their clasped hands. “Tired, but good.” She glanced up at him, shyly. “How are you?”

“
Good,” he said, pulling her to him, his grin widening. He flipped her onto her back and rolled on top of her. “Hungry?” he asked.

“
Mm-hm,” she answered as he nibbled along her jaw and down her neck. She was having a hard time regulating her breathing. “You?”

“
Oh yes,” he said, easing her robe open and kissing his way down the center of her body. “Very.”

*

It was the sound of voices outside the door that awoke Elizabeth that evening. She could tell it was late by the color of the light slipping in through the crack in the as-yet unopened curtains, the last marmalade rays of the setting sun. Sebastian wasn’t there.

She and Sebastian had literally spent all day in bed, or at least in the bedroom. Looking around the room, Elizabeth realized that they had used every piece of furniture in the room for purposes they were definitely not intended for. And the floor.