Awake (6 page)

-10-

Wade sleeps in my bed. I find him there already passed out. I know this is good news but a profound disappointment overcomes me. His eyes had been dazzling me and I wanted another drink or two of them before we turned down the lights.

When I snap off the small lamp near my dresser my room becomes totally dark. I hang up my robe and slowly slide under my sheet and comforter. I am now in the dark alone in my own bed with Wade. I don’t know how we arrived here but I know I never want it to end.

“Wade,” I whisper to check on him. Nothing. He will not wake and when he does he will probably awkwardly apologize and depart. This is my one night with Wade, for better or worse. I move my hand slowly under the blankets. When it nears the heat of his back I stop. I let my fingers linger there as close to his skin as possible without touching.

Suddenly I reach out all five fingers to experience the wonder of his skin near his shoulder blade. His life force ignites my cells. I quiver and hunger and flower for him. I put my other hand over my mouth as the thrill becomes audible escaping my lips as a sudden gasp.

Enough. I pull my hand away and turn over. We are back-to-back a couple feet apart. The darkness all around us and the desire to be touching him work together to spark a nervous electricity in my veins.

Every inch of me, skin and bone, heart and mind, possesses a single tantalizing thought. Wade. I am forgetting the world out there, the world of the day, the world of light. We are here in the darkness of our souls, hidden away from all others.

The blood that trickles through my veins belongs to this other world, the secret world of night. If Wade wakes and if his lips come looking for mine, I will not be able to resist. He can do with me what he wants. He can even fuck me sweetly through the night.

For a long time I lie awake alone with my fantasies. At first I embrace the deliciousness of the thoughts but eventually I try to chase them away. He will never wake and I will never sleep. I manage to resist checking if he still has on those tight and uncomfortable shorts of mine.

I give up completely on ever falling asleep but then I do without warning because in a flash I startle awake. Time has passed. I feel my heart skipping beats, accelerating. His arm is around me. He has pulled my back tight against his chest.

It becomes clearer. His arm is completely under my tee shirt. His cupped hand quietly resting on one of my breasts. My firm nipple excitedly pinched gently between two of his fingers.

Somehow I know he is asleep and has been. I also now know he did not wear those tight shorts of mine to bed. It must have been hurting him. His manhood is pressed against my butt and back.

He instinctively must think I am Tori. I don’t care. I am so wildly happy to be in his arms with his hand on me and feeling his animal pleasure on my backside. I arch slightly to pressure his goods with my butt and can immediately feel him stiffening and growing.

I stop moving. One more ounce of bad girl and he will grow too big to remain sleeping. I’ll take a few minutes to enjoy the torture of this incredible sweetness, then I must slip away from his arms. A cool shower will wash away all evidence of my overflowing heat so I can prepare to resist him when he finally does rise from his stupor.

* * *

I close my eyes and let the cool water roll down my face. I remind myself he’ll soon be leaving my apartment and return to a life that does not include me. My thighs and breasts have become very sensitive in ways I don’t understand. They ache tenderly and need some kind of contact, some kind of rough handling.

Perhaps I should pleasure myself. It should be quick and easy in this state, but I know that I might get loud because the hunger for release is beyond anything I can control.

My eyes open in a panic. I hear something. Him. He’s opened the door to the bathroom and he enters. I cover myself because my shower door is transparent and he can see me naked even if distorted a bit by the wet glass.

The door to the shower opens and I am speechless. I don’t know how to react. Wade’s naked and his stone face stares at my eyes.

“Mind if I join you?” he says and steps inside the small shower. “I’m really big into conserving water.”

That’s not all that’s really big about Wade. Again, speechless.

He closes the shower door before I can form a word. “Or I could go if I make you uncomfortable,” he says with no intention of leaving.

I catch myself staring down at his magnificence so I turn quickly around. I am not so innocent though. I know that boys have always liked my cute little butt. “Well, you’re here now,” I say nonchalantly.

“Cool,” he says short of breath.

I close my eyes and let the hot water pour down all over my head and neck, trickling slowly down my back. Wade stands behind me. I wait for him to touch me, to hug me, to press his monster against me. My body grows warm and weak in anticipation of first contact.

“Why are you here, Wade?” I ask quietly.

He doesn’t answer. I’m not even sure if he heard me.

“I just am,” he finally says. He steps forward. His firm penis jabs the small of my back and then slides up at length against my spine. I bite my lip to prevent myself from gasping.

Desire tickles me at my core. He sets his strong hands gently on my hips which causes a feeling I have never experienced, a pulsing ache deep inside my heat.

“Wade,” I say not trying to hide my sexual agony, “you shouldn’t be here. You should go.”

“I’ll change everything. I’ll do whatever you need me to do,” he says moving his hand forward to cover and caress my belly.

Here we are. The point of no return. Or nearly. My legs weaken and my morality rides the water down the drain. One possible solution remains, one way to avoid total damnation in my own eyes.

“There’s only one thing I need from you,” I whisper as I lay my head back against his chest. “And then you have to go back to your life.”

I open my eyes and look up into his eyes. He’s so tall when he’s right next to me. I put my small hand on his big hand and slide it slowly down below my naval. His fingertips feel the confession of my body, the aching flower that has been waiting for Wade, hot and hungry and ever opening to receive him.

I smile when his eyes close as he presses two fingers perfectly up slightly against my ecstatic little button. I am embarrassed by the slight choking sound I make as I inhale suddenly. My chest heaves and retracts. His fingers find an even more pleasing angle of pressure. The tiny circles his fingers begin to make are so slow the rest of my body gives out. He quickly snatches me up with his other arm so I don’t fall.

He takes me with him as he sits down on the shower floor. He places my ass carefully on his powerful thigh without ever losing the pressure or exquisite rhythm of those little circles. This boy is not an amateur. OMFG.

I nestle in his arms and his hand plays me like a lustful, but melancholic violin. It never lets up. Not for one second does he let the feeling of ecstasy lessen. My breathing rises like a thrilled audience to applaud him.

There is no girl left here. I am merely his symphony. The work of his genius. His fingers are confessing his love. This is happiness. Tense bolts of electric anticipation strike a sexy fear in my bones. I know he will take me to a primal place of animal release.

I don’t fucking care about anything now. I want to be as raw as any animal has ever been and even as the thought is forming, my undoing races into being with icy hot suddenness. The screaming, moaning sounds that escape are feminine in nature but beastly and guttural and gloriously frightening. I scare Wade just a little before I stiffen and tremble and shake and collapse into him like I’ve been shot dead.

It’s just him and me. We lounge on the floor of my shower and the water sprays over us like a magical mist. I don’t move for a while unless I’m trembling from a little aftershock. I need time to recover.

When I catch my breath I search for the strength to kiss his muscular chest gratefully. I look up into his lonely eyes and bite his nipple softly. I smile for him and return my head to his chest.

Soon I will send him away, but not just now.

-11-

I sit in the back of physics trying to keep my eyes pointed to the front of the classroom. I’ve been unable to listen or catch much of what has been said, but I have learned this week how to hide in plain sight.

There are check marks on every attendance card for every one of my classes for the week, but I have been floating above it all reliving every moment with Wade again and again.

I have not heard from him in six days.

After the shower, I sent Wade away. I did not have the energy to reciprocate the pleasure he gave me. I have felt no guilt for what I asked him to do in the shower. It’s the only way I could think of to avoid having sex with him.

That pulsing ache deep within made it impossible to walk away completely. Although I needed him inside me then, pounding my depths sweetly, his fingers managed to release me, momentarily, so we could break apart. I did the best I could under the circumstances.

It pleased me when Wade offered to change his life so we could be together, but I’ve always known that can’t happen. If he runs from the daughter of Tom Wexler to the daughter of Jack Cassidy it would cause a semi-seismic scandal in multiple directions with two families and a company forever dragged down by it.

All of our names would fly around on the gossip circuit of the Palisades for months, maybe years. Most personally, it would drive a wedge between my father, stepmother and me.

I don’t want to do that to my family or even Tori, but more than anything I don’t want to be the thing that destroys Wade’s standing among his investors or compromise his friendship with Reed. He would lose his restaurant and he would have me to thank for it.

Shamed and alone and quite possibly penniless, he would in time learn to rue the day we ever met. Love can decay just like anything else.

I felt my phone vibrating in my purse earlier. Out of respect for my teachers I never take out my phone in class. It is almost always Kat anyway with some catty comment about someone she is dealing with in her class or job or maybe to tell me yet again about Kip’s hotness.

I’m happy for Kat that she has a nice little thing going with Kip, but some of us are not set-up so cozily for a Friday night. Some of us have to listen to lame pickup lines by drunk dudes or watch romantic comedies alone in our pajamas on a Friday night.

Saturday night is my twenty-first birthday. I can finally throw out the ID of Ursula Pederson and start using my own. Kat has insisted we go out with the girls to Sunset Strip.

Tonight I’m on my own and haven’t decided what to do. Just outside of class I stop to check the text. My heart skips a beat when I see that the message is from Alodia. Who knew she could text?

Girls night. My house at 7pm?

I smile and consider all the students rushing off to their all too generic Friday night plans of drinking, clubbing and romancing.

Yes
, I text back.

She texts back her address. She lives in Venice. Cool.

I’d like to start going back to the shelter, but on nights when Wade is not there. We have to move on. Both of us. I know that I need new energies in my life. People like Alodia, Vivi and Cesar. People who are passionate about things other than money and romance.

I also want to help out in the least pretentious way possible. I don’t want to be that lady wearing a ten-thousand dollar necklace who writes a hundred dollar check a few times a year to make herself feel better.

It’s time to get feeling alive again, stop dragging my tail. I’ll treat myself to a manicure and then figure out what one wears to girls night at a sixty-year-old professor’s house.

* * *

I take a taxi to Alodia’s Venice bungalow. Showing up in a town car with a driver on her tree-lined, bohemian street would have made me feel like a snob. I arrive ten minutes early. I am charmed when I realize her little avocado-colored house is right on the Venice canal.

There are wild flowers all around me as I walk up her narrow footpath to her covered porch which features a gorgeous lilac-patterned rug. A skinny, gray cat tickles past my ankles. When I step forward to the interior door, Alodia pushes it open and greets me with a bright smile and an even brighter apron.

“How beautiful you are, Minnesota,” she says and then gives me a quick hug and shoos me into her magical dwelling.

Alodia takes my hand and walks me through her home full of cluttered collections of artifacts from seemingly every culture on Earth. The only common thread I see is color. There are no muted colors. There are no prime colors either. Everything pops. There’s texture and tone to everything. Every color seems like a color I’ve never seen.

“Alodia,” I say, “your magic is everywhere.”

“I am just a lifelong collector of lost things,” she says. “I like to bring in only colors that exist outside the rainbow.”

We enter her kitchen which overlooks the canal. The rustic view through the overgrown greenery of her backyard makes me feel like I have been transported to Italy. Tuscany maybe. I visited there with my father the year I turned sixteen.

At the table, a cute old lady in a wheelchair shucks an ear of corn and smiles up at me. “Oh my, that is a one-of-a-kind Joie Signe top,” the cute little lady says referring to my blouse.

“You behave, Simone,” Alodia instructs. “Erin is our special guest tonight.”

I reach out to shake Simone’s hand which she wipes with a towel before taking my hand with a gentle grace. “Charmed,” she says.

“You’re right. It’s from the new line,” I say, “but I don’t think it’s one of a kind. It’s just not out yet.”

“Not out yet,” Simone says. “A girl connected in the fashion world. You just became my new best friend.”

I sit down next to my new best friend and start shucking corn. I want to show them that I am more than my father’s money. I know how to get my hands dirty.

Alodia smiles at Simone’s surprise when I rip through the husk and clean the corn quickly like a good Minnesota girl. “She did not always live in the house on the hill,” Alodia quips.

Alodia is so sweet to me, but I actually did always live in the house on the hill. The first house was just on a hill in Minnesota where corn on the cob is as cherished as the sushi at Urasawa on Rodeo Drive.

“There’s a man in your back yard,” I say suddenly startled as a man trips over a bush outside the window.

“Oh that’s not a man,” Simone says. “That’s just Billy Bermuda from next door.”

Alodia opens the back door and helps the man into the kitchen. He brushes off his Bermuda shorts and tan legs.

“Good evening, ladies,” he says. “Looks like I’m the last here for ladies night.”

“Glad you could make it, William,” Alodia says. “You need to start using the front door before you break your hip.”

“Oh I won’t break my hip, you old diva,” William says. “I’m still young and spry. You’re the one who’s old enough to have screwed Frank Sinatra. You’re due to slip in the shower any day.”

These people and this place make me smile. “Really, Alodia?” I ask playing along. “You did it with Sinatra?”

To my surprise she blushes.

“They didn’t do it,” Simone offers. “Old Blue Eyes was in his fifties and Alodia was in college. They didn’t have the blue pill back then.”

“Don’t listen to them, Erin,” Alodia says. “The whole story is Frank kissed me on the lips after he signed an album for me.”

“All Frank needed was a coat room and he would have made short work of you, Alodia,” William says. “No pun intended.”

“Vivi sends her regrets,” Alodia says taking the clean corn to the stove. “William, introduce yourself, please, honey.”

He ignores my hand and leans in for a hug. “I’m William Maroney the Third,” he says with a wink. “I’m just as pleased as fruit punch to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you as well, William,” I say totally smitten with his jester-like energy. “Maroney, huh? They lead me to believe your name was Billy Bermuda.”

William grabs his chest and lets his mouth hang open in mock shock. “Don’t you believe one word that comes out of that Simone’s mouth. She is an evil little woman and she does bite and bite hard. Some old timey sailors told me so. God’s truth.”

William winks to me a second time and then bends down to kiss Simone’s grinning face. She shakes her head and slaps William’s hand affectionately.

“Who has tonight’s theme?” William asks.

Simone and Alodia glance to each other puzzled.

“I think its Vivi’s turn, but she’s on stage tonight,” Alodia says.

“How about we let this perky little one decide then,” Simone suggests.

“Me?” I say feeling immediately odd that I knew perky meant me. They all look to me for a theme, but I’m clueless. “I think William should do it seeing how he risked life and limb to be here.”

“Now I don’t like how you set that up, but I’m going to have to agree with you,” he says. “Tonight I want to hear about first loves.”