Tempted (19 page)

Alex’s skin was warm when I put my hands on his chest. His heart thumped steadily beneath my palm. He wasn’t burnished by the sun, like James. His abs and pecs weren’t hard with muscle from physical labor, but from reps on a machine in some expensive gym. He had a body suited for designer suits and worshiping hands. He tilted his head and slid a hand into the hair at the base of my neck.

We paused like that for a heartbeat. No going back, not now. James’s hand on my hip, his fingers loosely curled, urged me to move. I slid my hands down Alex’s chest to his hips. My mouth followed the path my hands had made. I knelt in front of him and hooked my fingers into his jeans, pulling them down slowly to savor the anticipation.

At first I couldn’t look at his penis, and I closed my eyes to nuzzle his thighs as I pushed his jeans to the floor where he stepped out of them. His erection brushed my hair, then my cheek, and I ran my hands along the backs of his calves and knees.

I straightened, still on my knees, and opened my eyes. I looked up at both of them, my two kings, waiting for me.

And I fell in love.

With James it was all over again at the look of pride and adoration on his face. With Alex it was with the glimpse of vulnerability and the tenderness with which he pushed my hair off my face.

My doubts, of which I’d had many even though I’d been ignoring them, fled. Whatever this was, it really was okay. For them. For me. For us.

I took Alex first, easing his unaccustomed length into my mouth with my hand gripping the base to control the pace. His fingers twisted in my hair. His moan was the sexiest noise I’d ever heard. He pushed his hips forward and I took in the rest of him. His cock was longer but not as thick as James’s. It was beautiful. I worked my lips and tongue over the head and down again, caressing with my hand on the upward stroke.

James waited patiently, but I was impatient to taste him, too. I opened for him, my mouth adjusting without effort to his proportions. I moved faster on him, sucked harder. He jerked a little, and laughed. I love the sound of James’s laughter when his cock is down my throat.

It was sloppy, this making love to two at once. It was wet and uncoordinated, and more than once I got an eyeful of erection meant for the more welcoming orifice of my mouth, or my hands slipped when they meant to slide. Their laughter broke with sighs and moans. Their cocks stayed stiff in my grasp. Their tastes mingled on my tongue and sent bolts of electric excitement through me.

I didn’t know who stopped me first, whose hands urged me to stand, because when I did, both were holding me. They pushed me gently onto the bed, where it was my turn to be worshipped.

They were better coordinated than I’d been. Without having to say anything, they moved along my body with their mouths and hands. I didn’t have to do anything but give up to them.

Time melted for a while as we wriggled and writhed, twisting and tangling. I laughed under my breath, listening to them.

“Touch her here.”

“See if she likes…yes. Like that.”

“Move over, man. Let me…”

“Do that again.”

And they did it again. And again. They did everything, separately and together. The pleasure built until it became almost pain, until I thought I might break from it. Until I wanted to break from it, if only to find release.

Until I drowned in it.

As if on cue, with no more than a look at each other, they withdrew. The sound of our breathing was very loud. Sweat gleamed on all three of us, and the air was heavy with the scent of sex.

“Jamie, sit up. Anne, move here.” Alex’s voice was rough, but not hesitant.

How many times had he done this? Enough to feel confident in choreographing us. We did as he said, James pulling me against the front of him. His cock throbbed against my back as I settled between his legs. When he lay back, I went with him. My back arched. His mouth found my cheek as my hands gripped our headboard.

I was so wet, so ready that it took only half a minute of careful maneuvering to slide onto him. We had made love this way before, though never prone. I’d always been sitting on his lap, facing away from him. Reverse Cowgirl was what the positions book my friends had given me as a bachelorette present called it. It worked this way, too.

James gripped my hips, thrusting slowly. The angle was different. His cock stroked my cunt in places I wasn’t used to. I arched, taking him deeper.

I wanted to come so much my muscles leaped and jerked, but doing it this way didn’t give me the stimulation my clitoris craved. I shifted. James bit into the back of my shoulder. The sweet pain made me yelp.

I cried out louder at the flick of wetness on my clit. My eyes flew open, and I looked down. Alex knelt next to me, his prick in his fist. He pumped it slowly as he bent again to flick his tongue against my cunt.

I gasped. The sight of it, that dark head bent over my pussy while hands held me from behind and a cock filled me, sent a surge of pure pleasure rocketing through me.

James pushed my hips, supporting my weight and shifting the angle so he could thrust even deeper. I let go of the headboard with one hand. I licked my palm and took Alex in my fist. He groaned, hot breath puffing over my equally heated flesh. I jerked him slowly, then faster, making a cunt of my fist for him to fuck.

Everything rippled like a silk banner in a gentle breeze. We moved. We fucked. We came, the three of us together, one man inside me, the other in my hand.

In the silence, after, sweat cooled on our bodies in the night air from the windows. Sleep beckoned, though there was no temptation of dreams we’d already lived. The bed was big enough for three, but sometime in the night when I awoke, only one body lay beside me.

I should’ve been able to tell who it was, should have known even with a blindfold of darkness it was James. I should have known it without question, but caught between oblivion and consciousness, even running a hand along his body didn’t assure me.

I wasn’t sure who’d stayed and who’d gone, only that one of them had…and it didn’t matter to me at that moment which one it was.

I understood sex and pleasure. I understood desire. Love. I loved my husband. He gave me pleasure, and I tried to do the same for him. But last night had not been about love. It had been about lust and passion. It had been about yearning.

I knew about that, too.

At seventeen I’d fallen in love for the first time. Michael Bailey, never Mike. He played baseball and football. He was homecoming king. He was beautiful and good-natured, and I wasn’t the only girl who had a crush on him.

Algebra brought us together. We had first period study hall our senior year, and we sat next to each other. Math wasn’t my strong suit, nor his, but by working together we found we could usually struggle through the homework. Our first date was at his kitchen table, where we studied for a big test and ate cookies his mother served warm from the oven.

He wasn’t supposed to like me, quiet, studious Anne Byrne who wore glasses and never got in trouble. Jocks dated the popular girls, just like in the movies. Except life isn’t a movie, and somehow it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to hold my hand as he walked me home. To bend and kiss me goodnight as he dropped me on my front porch and turned to stride away, a boy who’d shot up into manhood almost overnight.

I never invited Michael inside my house. Compared to Michael’s, mine was a lunatic asylum, where my sisters yelled and stole my clothes and we fought like cowboys and Indians. Nothing ever stayed clean, it all smelled of smoke, and meals could be embarrassingly boisterous or excruciatingly silent as we all tiptoed around my dad’s moods.

I fell in love with Michael’s family almost as much as I did with him. Mrs. Bailey was the perfect mom, always home, always freshly coiffed and made-up, even when she was mopping the floor. His dad was pleasant and bespectacled, and tended toward puns that made Michael groan but I adored. He had an older brother off in college who I never saw but whose photo looked like a slightly older version of Michael. Nobody swore. Nobody smoked. Nobody drank.

The Baileys took me in easily, seamlessly, as if I was no different than any of the other dozen of girlfriends Michael’d had. I guess, to them, I wasn’t. But I wanted to be. I wanted them to like me more. I wanted him to like me more than he had any of those other girls. Love me more.

I was Catherine. He was my Heathcliff. If all else perished and he remained, I’d have continued to be. Michael was the sun, the moon, the stars, my alpha and omega. He was the ocean and I tossed myself into him, not caring if I drowned.

There was no question I wouldn’t go to college. I’d been looking forward to it since ninth grade when we took our first set of aptitude tests. I’d applied to several schools but had settled on Ohio State because it offered the best financial aid options for me. The spring of my senior year I turned eighteen, got accepted to Ohio State and started counting the days until I could leave home. The only thing holding me back from complete anticipation was knowing I’d have to leave Michael, but since he’d applied to Ohio State, too, I harbored the hope we’d still be able to be together.

Sex was something everyone wanted to do and some people did, what all the boys bragged about and no girl would admit to. I did everything he wanted me to do. He came in my hands, my mouth, between my breasts. Between my thighs. I gave up my virginity to him without a second thought, without even a pretense of putting him off. I’d have given it to him sooner, had he asked, but I guess he assumed I’d say no.

The perception is that the first time is always awful, but it wasn’t for me. We’d spent an hour making out and touching each other. There’s no foreplay quite like youthful exploration, when each undone button is cause for exaltation. I’d spent more time going down on him than he’d done for me, but that night he’d put his mouth on me for quite a while. I tasted myself on his lips when he kissed me. We were naked by then, his penis hot and hard on my belly.

We didn’t talk about doing it. It just happened. We kissed. We moved. Somehow, a shift of hips and thighs, and his erection slid against me. I arched. He pushed. I was wet and slick and open. It all happened so slowly and naturally, I don’t think either of us really noticed until he thrust inside me all the way. It didn’t hurt, and when he started moving, I was already so close to coming I couldn’t hold back from gripping his ass and forcing him harder against me. He moaned my name into my ear as he bucked and shuddered, and hearing it sent me over the edge. We came within moments of one another that first time, the only time it happened. We had plenty of sex after that, but it was never like the first time.

In the aftermath of the rise of AIDS, the use of condoms had been pounded into our heads, and we always used them. Except that first time. But, as they say, it only takes once, and we were caught.

I think I knew I was pregnant the first time I woke up and had to run to the toilet to dry heave. Because my periods had always been irregular and painful, I convinced myself that my tender breasts and the nausea and light-headedness were just signs of PMS. I couldn’t be pregnant. God wouldn’t do that to me.

Except, of course, it hadn’t been God but my own stupidity.

We were three days away from graduation when I told Michael. As seniors, finished with our finals, we’d been released from attending regular classes. We’d taken advantage of his house, empty while his parents were at work, to make love with wild abandon in his single bed with the wagon-wheel headboard. The sex was good the way it is when you’re desperately in love and everything your partner does is like Christmas and the Fourth of July. I came more from luck than any skill either of us had, but orgasms can’t really be quantified.

He lay on top of me, his hand on my belly that hadn’t yet begun to grow. He smelled like sunscreen. We’d been out by the pool. I loved him so much my heart wanted to burst with it.

I’d struggled to find the perfect moment and the perfect words, but what came out was, “I’m pregnant.” Flat. Simple. I could have been telling him I was hungry or tired.

I couldn’t see his face, but his body, so relaxed on top of me, strung suddenly as tight as a guitar string. He didn’t ask me if I was sure. He didn’t say anything. He pushed himself off me and went into the bathroom next door, where he closed the door with a sharp, final click.

Minutes passed as I waited for him to come back. Through the wall I heard the deep, strangled sound of him vomiting. I got up and dressed and left the house without waiting anymore.

He didn’t call me. My heart broke like a glass someone drops onto brick, too many pieces to find, and I cut myself trying to pick them up. I saw him at graduation. In photos we are standing on the same riser, but we are both staring straight ahead.

I was two months gone, with three months before I left for college. I had a summer job, waitressing to help pay for school. I had my life stretching out in front of me, escape in sight without even Michael to hold me back now, and it was all slipping away from me.

Suicide was too melodramatic to consider. I didn’t have the money for an abortion, not to mention what it would have cost my immortal soul, had I believed I had one. I got as far as looking up Adoption in the phone book before my palms started to sweat and I had to put the phone away before I passed out.

It was a nightmare worse than the ones I had about drowning. Anxiety stabbed me, over and over, every time I ran my hands over my stomach, or the phone rang and it wasn’t Michael. It never let up, either, the way terror eventually always does.

I knew it was wrong, but I drank the first shot, anyway. It burned my throat. I stood in the kitchen with my dad’s bottle in my hand, and I waited to feel what he did. What he must, in order to keep doing it. I waited for oblivion or something, anything, to take off the edge of hysteria that built day by day.

I felt nothing.

So I took another shot, straight up, coughing and choking but keeping it down. It settled into my gut like an old friend. I drank another. By the third, life didn’t seem so bad, and I began to understand the allure. Later, on my knees in front of the toilet, vomiting so hard I burst a blood vessel, I would think I’ll never drink again.

Two weeks later, while I lifted a particularly heavy tray of steaks, a twisting stab of pain erupted inside me. Another followed. They passed long enough for me to serve the food, but an hour later they started again. I went to the employee restroom and found a dark clot of blood the size of my thumb in my underwear. I stifled my burst of tears with both hands, scrambled for a thick sanitary napkin, and went back to work.

I made it through my shift. At home, I stood in the shower watching the blood run down my legs and swirl into the drain. My laughter sounded like sobs. I didn’t know what to do, only that God had answered prayers I hadn’t even sent.

In August Michael came into the place where I worked. He ordered a soda, which I brought him in a glass with a slice of lemon in it. I gave him a straw without his having to ask, the paper still covering the end out of which he’d drink, like my fingers touching it could ever have in any way contaminated him.

“How are you doing?” he asked with shifty eyes, though it was in an off hour and the only other patrons were seated in another section.

“Fine.” I tried to remember what it was like to love him.

“How’s…?” His eyes finished the question with a look at my abdomen.

“It’s gone,” I said, like our baby had been a pesky rash cleared up by ample applications of medicated ointment.

I didn’t begrudge him the relief on his face. I’d felt the same thing. But it hadn’t been him watching the blood, or dealing with the cramps, just like it hadn’t been him who’d dealt with the situation at all. Perhaps it wasn’t fair of me to judge him like that. We were young, and I’d have run if I could, if the problem hadn’t been inside me.

“Oh. Well. That’s…” He trailed off. His soda sat untouched. He cleared his throat and made as if to reach for my hand but didn’t. “Was it expensive?”

I wanted to be angry with him, but since my love for him had burned to ash, I couldn’t find anything to mold into fury. When I didn’t answer, he seemed to think I meant yes. He nodded, shifty eyed again.

“I’ll give you the money for it. And, Anne…I’m sorry.”

I was sorry, too, but not too sorry to tell him the truth. Not too sorry to give him back the money. I needed it for school. Five hundred dollars paid for my books that first year.

Steam parted like a curtain as I stepped from the shower and reached for a towel. All of that had been a long time ago. It had left a scar, but so had a lot of other things. Except sometimes I wondered what might have happened if I hadn’t wished so hard to lose that child. I’d been diagnosed with endometriosis, which can cause infertility. One had nothing to do with the other, yet in my mind they’d linked. Useless to ponder.

I dried myself and stood at the bathroom door wrapped in a towel. I listened to two male voices, rising and falling in conversation that included a lot of laughter.

I knew why I’d thought of Michael today. It was the yearning. I loved James, but I’d never burned for him. Not like I had for Michael.

Not like I was for Alex.

They both looked up when I opened the door. Two gorgeous men with smiles trying hard to be identical. I smelled coffee. Alex reached out a hand.

“Anne,” he said, “come back to bed.”

And I did.

I was locking my car in the diner parking lot when I saw Claire leaping out of a black car two spots away. She slammed the door with all her might and added a flip of the bird as the car pealed away. She turned, spotting me.

“Men suck!” she cried. “Fucking suck donkey cocks!”

I wasn’t inclined to disagree with her just then. “Who was that?”

“Nobody,” she told me. “And I mean nobody as in loser, white-trash, moron fucktard.”

“I thought you said you didn’t have a boyfriend.” I was trying to make her laugh, but Claire only glowered.

“I don’t.” She looked in the direction the car had gone. “And if I did, it wouldn’t be him.”

An unfamiliar car pulled into the spot next to mine, and Patricia got out. She locked the door and slung the keys into her purse. Seeing us looking, she gave her shoulders a little straighten.

“The van got terrible gas mileage. We traded it in for this.”

My sister hadn’t driven a used car in her entire life. I looked at Claire, who wasn’t paying attention. Like in a comedy of errors, Mary pulled up at that moment in my mother’s car.

“Where’s the Beetle?” Claire said.

“It needed new tires.” Mary’s ever-present phone beeped at her through her purse. She reached inside to press a button or something. The bleating stopped. “Are we ready? I’m starving.”

With the party only a few weeks away, the RSVPs had begun rolling in. I handed over a pile of postcards with Yes or No checked on the back.

“God. Everyone’s coming.” Claire looked through a few more cards and put them back in the pile. “Holy shit, you guys. This is, like, two hundred people.”

“We’re going to have to call the caterer.” This from practical Patricia.

“Where are they going to all fit?” I asked, not expecting an answer.