Picture Perfect (15 page)

I nodded, biting my lip. His lips fluttered over my eyelids, down my neck, and licked all the way around my breast again. “These are the most gorgeous breasts I’ve ever seen,” he growled, never letting his lips leave my skin, like it would kill him if he broke contact.

It might have killed me.

Then his tongue was tracing a hot trail down my stomach, swirling into my navel and making me writhe with anticipation. He had to stay on his path, I knew now, or I would die. Part of me wanted that tongue swirling around my clit, and the other part wanted him inside me, filling me, proving he was mine, again.

I cried out when his mouth moved between my legs, alternately sucking and tugging my soft wetness between his teeth. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand not being filled by him one second longer, his fingers plunged into me, dipping in and out and stroking concentrated spots that had only gotten general attention from his thrusting.

All of a sudden, the orgasm hit me like a truck, flaring from a small point and brutally taking control of my whole body in a fraction of a second. I threw back my head and screamed, loving the knowledge that no upstairs or downstairs neighbors would hear anything. This night belonged to just me and Nate.

As I came down from my climax, a totally new urge took over. Nate had made his way back up to my mouth, but there was only one other place I wanted mine to be now. “I want to suck you,” I growled against his lips, and it was my turn to flip him on his back, straddle him, and slowly lick my way across every inch of his delicious pecs and abs. I wanted him in my mouth. All of him.

The solid line separating his abs from his hips was the tastiest, and I sucked every inch of skin there, nipping it with my teeth on my slow route down to where I knew he wanted me most. When his silky soft hardness bumped my cheek, I couldn’t wait a second longer. I sucked him into my mouth, swirling my tongue around the head and thrilling at the tangy salt taste of him, ten times hotter than my mouth. I grinned at the groan that came from up above.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he said as I took my turn licking him up and down, chasing my lips with my hand until he was harder to the touch than even I could have ever imagined.

“Stop,” he gasped, clutching my hair gently in his hand. “Stop it. You have to stop, or I’ll…”

I lifted my head and smiled at him innocently.

“Oh, that’s it, sweetheart. I need to be inside you. Now.”

I squealed as he reached under my arms and clutched my shoulders, basically throwing me back on the bed and plunging into me without hesitation.

I let out a full-volume scream. God, it felt so good.

“I’m so sorry,” he gasped.

“For what?” I half laughed, half moaned, as the incredible sensation of his hips grinding against mine washed over me.

“For going so fast. Just, after that, all I can think about is….” His voice trailed off, like he was ashamed of what he was about to say.

“Fucking me?” I finished, grinning and pausing to suck on his neck.

His forehead fell against my shoulder as he sighed. “Yeah.”

“Well, stop thinking about it. Just do it.”

He took one long hard, look at me, and then plunged into me harder than I ever thought possible. I cried out—couldn’t help it. It was the strangest mix of pleasure and pain and pressure. I knew he was a big boy, but damn. It felt like he was touching, stretching, stroking every part of me, inside and out. The sheer sensation of it touched some place inside me that was wildly deeper and more sensitive than my clit ever could be, and another orgasm rocked through me, making every cell of my body tremble.

Just when I thought I couldn’t keep going another second without flopping, exhausted, back onto the sheets, Nate slammed into me with one, two, three quick strokes. He let forth an earth-shattering cross between a groan and a growl, and then went still, his hot breath huffing against my neck.

“Jesus, Cat. Holy shit.” He finally rolled off of me and we lay there for long minutes, kissing and grinning and laughing. Finally, he reached over me and grabbed a box of tissues from the nightstand. We cleaned up, rolled together under the sheets, and wove our bodies together. My hands couldn’t stop roving over him, and the fact that he let me trail my fingertips over him, and returned the action, made drifting off to sleep in his arms almost as blissful as having him inside me.

I woke
with a start. There was no green-numbered glow of an alarm clock anywhere nearby, but the lightening indigo of the sky I spied out of the one crack between the curtain and the window told me that sunrise would be soon, and I had no idea how long it would be before Nate’s mom got back. I fumbled through the dresser drawers in his room, finally pulling out a t-shirt that looked like it would be a tent on me.
Wilkes-Barre lacrosse
, it said, and I grinned at this relic from Nate’s childhood. Somehow, the more time I spent in this house, the more love I felt for him, and the more I wanted my story to be completely a part of his.

I felt a pang of sadness that I hadn’t told him last night how I felt, but when I remembered the amazing sex we’d had, I realized I didn’t really regret it. There would be more time.

As I pulled the shirt down over my head, and found some boxers in another drawer—a size large, I realized, even though he wore a medium now—I found my way to the bathroom. Thank God for his mom—she had a normal selection of face and body washes to allow me to clean up. I even found a spare toothbrush, still in its package, and I promised to replace it the next day when I could get away to a drugstore.

Twenty minutes later, I’d made a pot of coffee, rushed out to the car to grab my suitcase, and gotten into some stretchy jeans and a sweater that actually made me feel cute. I sat there on the couch in his mom’s small living room, browsing through the newspaper that had magically landed on their front step that morning, wondering what Nate was going to tell his mom about where I’d slept, and grinning at the thought of him stammering his way through an excuse.

I leaned back on the couch and soaked up the feeling of being in his childhood home. My eye caught on a small bookshelf in the corner, and what looked like a row of yearbooks and photo albums on one of the shelves.

Oh my God. I had to see this. A huge part of me actually really wanted to see fat-kid Nathaniel West. I didn’t know whether it was to relive that time at camp, to gloat to myself over how gorgeous and buff he was now, or to feel a little better about myself being less than thin. Which, I now realized, I hadn’t thought of for a single second last night. I grinned at the realization. My hands brushed over the fake leather spines with gold embossed lettering. I grinned as I did the calculations. This was one was from ten years ago. The year I would have met him at camp.

I flipped through the glossy pages, chuckling at the ridiculous gelled hairstyles and graphic tees the boys wore. Buck teeth, ridiculous amounts of freckles, and bodies too scrawny for their shirts lined page after page. I got through most of them before I arrived at the “W”s. There he was. I gasped, and my hand flew up to cover my mouth, hoping to stifle the giggle that bubbled up there.

I wasn’t laughing because I was making fun of him—no, it was mostly because the craziest thing was that I could
see
Nate—the one I knew now. I could see the sparkle in his eyes and the way his mouth quirked into a half-smile when he was trying to look cute. He was adorable. And I could totally see what it was about him that made me do more than laugh at him when I pulled his name for Seven Minutes in Heaven, ten years ago at summer camp. I flipped it closed, then before putting it away, flipped to the inside back cover. A bunch of signatures scrawled in bubbly kid-handwriting scattered across the blue-paper covered hardcover.

I shelved the yearbook and picked up the next one on the shelf, from two years later. It was obvious that Nate had gotten a little taller, and had some clue of what to do with his hair, but he was still ridiculously pudgy. A swoop of fat circled his jaw, and I brushed my fingers against the picture, trying to see how this little boy would turn into the man I knew so intimately. The one I wanted to be around all the time. I flipped to the back page of this yearbook too, and there were far fewer signatures for this year. I frowned.

I turned back to the page with his picture, and examined it again. He was pretty geeky, but not so very different-looking from any of the other guys. There was something different about this year’s picture, though. The sparkle was gone from his eyes, replaced by something harder, more distant.

I pushed the book back into place and pulled out the next one. This time, I flipped to the back cover first. Almost no signatures, except for a couple scrawled
Stay Cools
and
See you next years
.

The picture of Nate—whose name actually said “Nate” now, not “Nathaniel” made me gasp. In the two years since the last photo, he’d grown eight inches, maybe ten. And, by the looks of it, hadn’t gained a pound. Same eyes, same cheekbones, now visible without the fat hanging off of them. A hint of the jawline he’d have four years from then, just rounder with youth. And, I noticed as I cocked my head to the side, he was trying to clench it, make it look harder. Stronger.

Something had made him really, really angry in the two years before this picture was taken, and I was willing to bet it had something to do with the lack of signatures in the back cover.

That was the last yearbook on the shelf, which made sense. None for his senior year, but I wouldn’t have gotten one either if basically no one had signed the inside of last year’s.

Getting people to sign a yearbook was basically the entire reason for buying one in the first place. I knew that well enough, since mine had been filled every year. Part and parcel of transforming from the skinny stick bug in ninth grade to the only girl at school who was a model.

Seemed that Nate and I had both had a weird time of transformation in high school. The only difference was that mine had become more bearable while his seemed to have been much, much less.

I ran my hands over the rest of the books on the shelf. Photo albums, it looked like. I pulled one out and flipped through pictures of Nate as a baby—taking baths in the sink, learning how to hold a baseball bat when he was so tiny the bat itself was bigger than he was. A tall man, rippling with muscles, held the bat while Nate rested his hands over the man’s. Must have been his dad.

On the next page, there was a much larger picture, and this time Nate must have been four or five, He was sitting on the man’s lap, cradled in his arms, with solid, round arm muscles. The next thing I noticed after Nate himself was his dad’s face—and how much he looked exactly like his father.

I flipped the page again. More photos of Nate and his dad, at an arcade, hiking, in the kitchen. The resemblance between Nate and his dad was so striking, it was almost as though I was looking at photos of Nate with a child.

And then, two pages later, Nate looked suddenly older, and had started to round out into the fat kid Nate I knew. There were pictures of him playing with Legos, reading a book, posing with a dog. But the absence of photos with his father was too conspicuous. I knew what I would find when I turned the page.

A photo of Nate and his dad on a California beach. It looked like summer, the way everyone around them was wearing a swimsuit and the sun glinted off the water in blinding, diamond sparks. But the most obvious difference between this photo and the others was the way Nate and his dad stood—about six inches apart, arms crossed over chests. Nate smiled, but it wasn’t the same sweet-little-boy smile in all the pictures before. And not the same smile I saw when Nate and I spent hours under the covers, talking and kissing and grinning at each other.

The last photo album I pulled wasn’t nearly as organized. There were a few pictures of pudgy Nate, then fat Nate. A bunch of them had his hand in front of the camera, and it looked like somewhere around age fourteen, Shelley had just given up on taking photos of him. I didn’t blame her.

Stuffed in the pages, too, were a few random things—birthday cards from grandparents, ticket stubs from baseball games. Newspaper clippings, where Nate’s name was listed at the bottom of an article about the junior high lacrosse team, at the bottom under
Members not mentioned
. No plane ticket stubs, no more pictures with Dad.

Then, a picture with Nate’s dad sitting next to a hospital bed, his arm around a beautiful blonde woman who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me. And holding a newborn baby.

I’d bet a thousand bucks Nate had a baby half brother or sister out in California that he wasn’t telling me about, and that his dad having a brand new family so far away was a big part of what had been pissing him off in that yearbook photo.

I flipped the page, and saw a picture of tall, but thin, Nate, in a graduation gown, in front of his high school. His mom had the big hair and press-on nails and a dress that was maybe a bit too short. She looked ecstatic, and Nate looked annoyed. A hint of a smile was there, though, and I saw that same expression he’d had last night—he loved his mom, and he was tolerating what he saw as her antics. It was actually pretty sweet.

I flipped the page, and there was a stack of white papers folded in half and stuck inside. I was just about to unfold them, when another stack of pictures fell out. They were all of Nate shirtless. This must have been the bodybuilding thing he was telling me about.

Sure enough, each photo had a black background from what looked like it must have been a competition. In the first one in the stack, he looked like a slightly buffed-up version of thin high-school Nate. I could see the shadow of the sides of his abs, and his shoulders starting to round out. I flipped the photo. His mom had dated it October of three years ago—our freshman year. I grinned, eagerly flipping through even more.

Four photos in, I’d seen the incredible transformation from skinny Nate to buff Nate—the Nate I knew, and couldn’t keep my hands off of every time he pulled his shirt off. Or I saw his muscles under his shirt at all. It was those delicious cut abs, traveling down over his hips and pointing straight to my latest favorite part of him. It was a little weird to see his skin get darker, and progressively shinier in the pictures, but I figured that was normal for a bodybuilder. No big deal. That one was dated June at the end of our freshman year.

The next picture, though, wasn’t just a little weird. It was
really
weird.

It featured Nate standing against one of those backdrops, but this time he was in a really serious bodybuilding pose. His skin was even darker and more oiled up than it had been in the other pictures, and his expression just looked….distant. Solid, and angry. No hint of a smile, no spark to the eyes. Nothing.

But the freakiest thing was the veins. Veins everywhere. They popped out of his biceps, shoulders, and neck, and they made my gorgeous Nate look gross.

That was the last picture in the stack, dated October of our sophomore year. The transformation in just a year was completely insane.

A thought flitted through my head. No way anyone was building that much muscle that fast unless—

I shook my head, trying to clear it of the thought. Nate would never have done steroids. Besides, even if he had, he didn’t look anything like that now. Sure, he was built, and hard-cut, and he worked out, but no more than an hour or so a day. And he ate normally, too. He was normal.

Now I was really curious about what was on those papers, though. I unfolded the stack of about twenty pages, all of them printouts from the same website—collegebodybuilder.com. The first article was called
College Bodybuilding – First Steps
, and sure enough,
by Nate West, USC
.

A smile flitted across my face as I read his somewhat clumsy writing outlining the differences between being in college and high school, and how bodybuilding could add some discipline to your routine. The thing that really got me was the last paragraph:

College is your chance to become someone different from who you always were. My whole life, I was the fat, dorky kid who no one ever wanted to talk to. College is my chance to form my body into something different, in a place where no one knows who I used to be. There’s no such thing as the old Nate.

I frowned a little bit and flipped to the next one. This one was called:
The College Bodybuilding Life – All One Discipline
. This one talked about how showing up to the gym every day and working on reaching your bodybuilding goals wasn’t so different from reaching your academic goals. One line said:
Some people think I’m crazy for spending three hours every day in the gym. But they’d never call me nuts for spending twice that much time studying – which I do. As an architecture major, I’m just as dedicated to learning about the structure of buildings as I am to maintaining and building a sound structure for my body
.

Three hours? Every day? No way, that wasn’t my Nate. He must have had, like, no life. I checked the comments at the bottom. Whereas there had been six on his first article, this one had exploded to fifty-seven—and from the first few that showed up on the bottom of the final page of the article, they were people who knew him. Friends. Names I’d never heard about.

Now that I thought of it, Nate never talked about his friends back home. Never texted, never e-mailed or Skyped with them.

If I had any doubt as to whether they existed, though, back at USC, the next article would prove me wrong. The title of this one was
Balancing Your Gym Life and Your Social Life
.

Most body builders stay away from partying, but this college boy loves to spend a night out. And even though I’m too young to drink (and the commenters can keep their naysaying to themselves, I know where you live, little bitches) I know that some well respected body builders will enjoy a night out on the town every now and then. Four, six, eight beers – as long as you can get yourself home and you know you’ll be safe (wink wink nudge nudge) then it’s no problem.

Underneath this article by Nate, who was apparently a total asshole the day he wrote it, was a picture of him standing in a bar. He was wearing a tight gray t-shirt with muscles even bigger than the ones he had now, straining underneath. He held a beer in each hand, and each arm was wrapped around a girl. One was taller than he was, and one was just an inch or so shorter.