Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy) (18 page)

The only thing I cared about was leaning up and into him, my breasts pushing at the buttons of my gingham checked blouse as I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and my feet, in white Keds I’d bought for this trip but already managed to turn a dingy tan color, popped into the air as my knee bent and I let Skylar hold me up with his two firm arms gripping me tight as if to stop me from flying away, as if I was a balloon and he didn’t want to see me soar into the sky and out of reach.

He tasted like summer, like Los Angeles, like Iowa, like Skylar. Like the one true love in my life, a fact I was sure of but didn’t want to pressure him into admitting himself, especially since I knew what had happened with Sandra and that maybe I couldn’t compete.

“Is there something wrong?” asked Skylar, pulling away and putting me back on my feet gently. He always had a way of sensing that about me.

“N-no, it’s fine,” I said, looking away, my tell, which by now, Skylar knew.

“Emma, please, I thought you knew you could tell me anything,” he said, his big brown eyes reflecting the baby blues of mine in their whites. Fuck. Skylar could get me to admit anything to him.

“It’s just...I know you love me. But do you love me, love me?” I asked this looking into his eyes although it hurt me to ask this kind of question. At best, it was accusatory, and that wasn’t a good “at best”. At worst, it meant that I’d have to confront a truth I was afraid of.

“There’s a stage past love?” he asked, sort of confused.

I rolled my eyes and brushed a lock of golden curls behind my ear. “No, I mean like, true love.”

“Yeah, I truly love you, Emma.”

“Really?”

“As in, you’re my one true love, yeah. I don’t always feel the need to say it, and maybe that’s a problem, but Emma, I love you. I’ll always love you. You’re the one person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Not the one girl, not the one woman, the one person. If I had to go to a desert island, sorry babe but you’re coming with me. If I was stranded in Antarctica, it’s you I’d want to see more than anyone else.” Skylar sighed. I knew he hated talking about this lovey-dovey stuff, but he was my first real, serious boyfriend, and even though he was older than me by only a few years, what Jaelle had said before, which was now over a year ago, remained true. Time made a difference and I’d never catch up to Skylar in terms of age, but would we eventually end up in the same place in terms of emotional maturity? Only time would tell, but I wish Skylar could tell me instead.

“But Sandra...”

“Sandra’s gone. You’re here, and you’re alive, and you didn’t fuck your life up to the point that it killed you. Not that you didn’t try, but obviously, there were other plans in store for you, Emma. I can’t love someone who didn’t love themselves enough to change, but you did. Even if you started to drink again, or to smoke cigarettes, I wouldn’t be mad as long as you remembered what it did to you in the past, kept that in mind, and didn’t make the same mistakes again, falling into the cycle of addiction. But I love you, and more importantly, I believe in you. I never believed in Sandra, because she never even tried to change. She ran into the darkness, but you ran into the light.”

Skylar held his hand over my heart and felt my heart beating.
Buh bum, buh bum
. We’d gone past the point where his touch made my heart beat faster and gotten to the point where it’s what kept my pulse steady, where it was the metronome to which my life’s rhythm was synced.

“I was going to wait to tell you, but, yeah, the band got a record deal. Jay-Z is interested in having us do some more witch-hop style stuff, maybe with vocals by Lana Del Rey. We’re going to have a chance to make it big, and I want you to be there with me. We’re going to be doing studio work for the next school year, so yeah, I’m putting off college for a little while longer, but then, next summer, I’m going to get to go on tour if the album does well enough. I want you to see the liner notes, though.”

Skylar opened up his phone, still that clunky Samsung Beam, and showed me an image of the cover of the album, the standard picture of a band on a beach looking around. I recognized the place as McWay Falls, the only place in California where a waterfall emptied into an ocean, and the place where Dr. Dre’s “Doctor” video was set, a place closed off to the general public. This album was serious. The band’s picture was in a silhouette of a woman’s head with her eyes fading in over the band like that scene from the Great Gatsby with the optometrist’s sign. Around her head was a crown of flowers, also faded in, so I knew it must be Lana. Holy shit. Skylar was backed by Jay-Z and would be working with the new queen of dark pop.

“Oh, wrong picture,” he joked. “But seriously, here.” He opened up the track listing which was filled with random words as filler, but what he zoomed into, a line on the bottom, wasn’t. It read “dedication”, and each of the band members had a litany of names after their own, except Skylar’s.

His simply read, “For Emma.”

“You...you dedicated your part of the album to me?” Even though they were just three simple words,
Skylar: For Emma
, I kept reading them over and over. These were going to be the words thousands, if not millions, of girls were going to be reading and wishing read
Skylar: For Meagan
,
Skylar: For Teagan
,
Skylar: For BiebyGurl99
. But that’s not what it read.

Skylar.

For Emma.

“Yeah, because my songs are about you, Emma.” Skylar pulled my chin up so I had to look him in the eyes, so that I had to see he was serious about this, about me.

“I thought they were about Sandra,” I whispered trying to turn but he gently put the back of his hand against my cheek and pushed it so that I was back to looking at him. It was amazing how he could use his touch to calm me, to control the parts of me I couldn’t control yet.

“What? No, I never wrote a song about her. Ever. Sandra was a mess, not a muse. Every song that I’ve written since I met you has been about you, from the night we first met. I didn’t know what it was about you, why I was able to put up with your antics, but I realized that maybe it meant something, that maybe, if you were the reason that for the first time since Sandra’s death, I was able to write something, to feel something, that there was something more to you. It scared me. Trust me, it did. But I’m not scared any more, of opening up to someone, of feeling something I know can be taken away, because I know that all the pains are worth the pleasures, that every tear is worth every kiss. I know that you’re my true love and I want to be with you forever, Emma.” He kissed me gently, butterfly kisses as tears streamed down my face and the kiss was broken by a cough. It was our turn to go on the Ferris wheel, so we handed over a wad of bills and got on.

The Ferris wheel made its way up over the small town and we could see all the way out to my parent’s farm, patches of corn fields all around us and the town looking small in comparison. It was like when we sat on the Hollywood signs and looked out over LA, except the sun was setting over the fields, which went on for as far as we could see, and there would be no bright flashing zooming pulsing lights to replace that sun.

Oh wait, it was the Fourth of July.

So yes, this one day of the year, Iowa would look somewhat like Los Angeles.

This wasn’t where we were supposed to be to catch them, though. We were supposed to head back to the high school football field, to find my family and watch with them, but I checked my phone. It was only seven, and the fireworks didn’t start until ten. We had time.

Of course, given our luck, the Ferris wheel stopped working when we were at the top. I guess it beat having it stop ten feet from the ground, feet practically dangling and without a view like the one we had. But Skylar wasn’t looking at the view, and neither was I.

I scooted over to sit closer to him and he wrapped an arm around my shoulder. I leaned my head in the crook of his shoulder and neck, and leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. That was all he needed.

Skylar turned and pulled me in, pushing himself against the sides of the small carriage of the Ferris wheel which I was afraid would break, spilling us out into Main Street. Fuck. Why did Skylar have to be so sexy, pressing his chapped lips against mine and tasting the delicious desserts we’d ruined our appetites with, the powdered sugar making our mouths thick with taste and desire.

I reached my hand under his shirt to feel his firm pecs but he stopped me.

“Emma. Wait. We can’t. Not here. But, we can...there”. Skylar pointed and I knew exactly to where. There was a clearing in the woods at the end of town and it was a bit of a hike, but it’d be worth it. I hadn’t had a release with Skylar since we’d come out to visit my parents, who had kept us too busy and too tired out to do anything about our “condition”, so once the Ferris wheel started to work again, we went to the clearing.

I hadn’t realized I hadn’t brought Skylar here before. When the “Twilight” movie had come out, tons of people had tried to recreate the meadow scenes here and there were some pretty cringe worthy Facebook shots of me and my friends trying to pull an Edward and Bella (or, I guess, Edward and Emma), with Robert Pattinson’s picture PhotoShopped in so that we could pretend that “he had totally been there you had to have been there to see it don’t judge me GOSH!1!”.

But I didn’t need to do that anymore.

I had Skylar and we had our own love story, the kind you can’t just copy and play out like actors in a movie, but the kind that develops organically and turns into something you just can’t control.

The kind that made me want to press him down into the field and just take him, then and there.

The kind that made me do it.

As I straddled Skylar’s lap, his raw denims getting extra faded from the Iowa dirt and dust and the wear and tear of the lifestyle, helping my dad and brother work the farm, I kissed him deeply, taking as much of him into my mouth as possible before I started to unbutton his cotton checked shirt that was like mine in terms of colors, a bright blue as bright as my eyes in the summer sunlight. Although the cotton was almost sheer and his tats were visible through the fabric, it was sexy as hell and it made me wish he could wear those kinds of shirts all the time in Los Angeles, but of course, he had an image to upkeep now, as a soon-to-be big time rockstar.

His shirt was large, to fit his arms and his firm pecs, so as he got up to slip it off, I started to unbutton my shirt too, but I was too slow. Skylar had tossed his shirt onto the ground and he started to help me with mine, and deftly, he unbutton my bra with one hand by slipping it under the back of my shirt, so that when I took of my shirt and bra, they came off in one fell swoop.

Skylar wanted me. As much as I wanted him. I could feel it in his pants, pressing into my shorts, which I wanted off desperately, but right now, I wanted Skylar to take control of the situation. I loved it when he did that, when he was the one who told me what he liked, what he wanted to do, because it had introduced to me a whole new world of sensual sensations that were unrivaled by anything else in my life.

Usually, Skylar would tease me, make me practically beg for his dick while making corny puns and jokes at his expense, but he had no time for that. He didn’t even have time to fully take off his pants, just slipping them down with the designer boxers I’d bought him (Designer: my choice. Plain black: his condition.), before I could finger the label: Calvin Klein? Armani?

Didn’t matter. Only one man’s name mattered to me now.

Skylar
.

“Do you want to get on top or-,” I started but he interrupted me.

“Shorts off. Get this dick inside of you, and fast, Emma.”

“Or else what?” I teased, taking off my shorts anyway and revealing a pair of plain pink and white striped panties that could have been mistaken for a bikini bottom.

Skylar was in no mood for this and so he shot me a glare as he held his dick ready as if it was a stick shift and he was picking me up and I was late. “Emma, I need you. I need this release. I need to be inside of you. Please, let’s not play this game.”

“Or else what?”

“Fine,” he said, and he started to redo his pants, but not before I could get on top of him and get his dick inside of me.

“Just kidding,” I said, trying to be cool and collected by giving him a kiss on the cheek and whispering that taunt as I took his cock inside of me, but its heft made me gasp and Skylar smirked.

“On second thought...”

“Don’t. Don’t you dare, Skylar, ever. There’s some things we don’t joke about,” I said, pumping up and down on his cock, practically #twerking my hips and ass as I took him inside of me, inch by inch, even though I wanted his entire shaft inside of me, regardless of the pain it could cause if I did that. I knew that I had to savor this, that I had to take his cock gently so that I could please him, that Skylar didn’t always want the sort of rough, hard fucking we’d had before, that sometimes, he wanted something more tender.

Skylar reached up and grabbed my exposed breasts, cupping them in each hand and flicking them with the pads of his fingertips gently until they stiffened, standing ready for command. He ordered me to lean down, and I did, but he pulled me up and over him so that he could take one nipple at a time in his mouth, so it was like I was lying on top of him, supporting myself with my elbows and hands in the green grass staining our clothes, trying my hardest not to suffocate him.

Of course, I slipped.

Of course, he was able to lift me up with ease without missing a beat, without my nipple even leaving his mouth, and without crushing my beloved.

“Oh, Skylar,” I moaned in a raspy voice. It was not my sexiest voice, in my opinion, but I knew it drove Skylar wild. It was the voice I couldn’t fake convincingly if I was paid, because only Skylar could make me sound that way. Skylar, Skylar, Skylar, inside of me, underneath me, even outside of me and on top of me, was the only man that could give me the perfect mix of feelings and emotions and sensations to elicit such an illicit response from my body and my breath.