Page 64 of The Holiday Whoopie
I let my hands memorize—again—the map I’ve only just started to learn. The dip at her waist. The heat where her shirt leaves skin. The tiny shiver when I thumb the notch above her hipbone. She gives me every permission in the way she moves, in the way she presses her body to mine and chases the friction she wants.
Still, a thought sits up in the back row and raises its hand. The silence. The customer-service expressions. The way she didn’t turn on our Christmas tree when we first came in like she usually does. The?—
She shifts her weight, lining our centers and bringing my mouth and mind back to her. Her tongue strips self-importance down to the studs. Whatever I thought I needed to ask can wait until an hour from now.
I flip us gently, a careful roll so she’s on her back and I’m braced over her, one hand finding the cushion beside her head, the other palming the warm weight of her thigh. She hooks that leg at my hip, encouraging, mouth tipping into a smile I feel more than see. When I drag my teeth along her lower lip, she makes a sound that unthreads something in my chest.
“Tell me if you’re too tired. We don’t have?—”
“Jack.” My name is thick with heat as her fingers curl into the back of my neck. The sound steals the floor right out from under my second thoughts.
We undress in the piecemeal way you do when urgency outruns grace. Her sweater lifts; I chase it with my mouth over the new skin. She finds the hem of my shirt; my shoulder gets stuck; we both laugh into the fabric and thenwe’re quiet again, focusing on the tasks at hand: buttons, zippers, the rasp of denim loosening. The thud of my belt against the rug. The sigh she can’t swallow when I settle between her thighs.
I slow us on purpose, and she lets me—for a heartbeat. Then her palm slides down my chest with intent, and I am back to being a man built of yes.
“Are you sure?” I ask, one last responsible flare.
Her answer is the arch of her hips and the way she guides me in, tight and hot and so welcoming it’s almost painful. Her eyes go heavy; mine roll back. I brace and breathe and sink deep inside until I’ve got everything I’d been pretending I didn’t need.
The first stroke is reverent. The second, less so. She meets me without hesitation, body pulling and pushing, pulling and pushing, an elegant rhythmlike the tide finding shore—sure, then hungry.
I try to keep a hand on the wheel of my brain and fail gladly when her mouth finds that weak spot below my ear.
She drags her nails across my back in a line that unspools every careful argument I brought upstairs. She is doing all the right things. Saying them, too—soft YESes and my name like a secret, gratitude and greed braided together so tightly there’s no telling which is which.
Maybe I read the walk home wrong. Maybe she was just cold. Maybe she’s tired from a day that started before mine and hasn’t ended yet. Maybe the carols were loud, and she just needed a minute of quiet to recalibrate. Maybe the only thing that’s changed is I want more, and while I know how to negotiate a future on paper, I’m totally untried in asking for the kind that lives off-paper.
I put my forehead to hers and let that last thought go. She pushes my hair back with one hand, then slips her fingers into it and pulls in a way that makes me say something unholy. Snow continues to tap the window. The radiator pings once and gives up. The couch creaks a protest, and we move to the rug without breaking, her amusement caught in my mouth when I lift and she wraps around me tighter, the kind of wrap that says don’t you dare stop.
We don’t. We couldn’t if we wanted to. She rolls us again and rides me, hands on my chest for balance, head tipped back. The reflection of moonlight off the tree’s ornaments throws a few stray points of light over her—collarbone, shoulder, the soft plane of her stomach as she moves over me. I put my hands on her hips, not to steer, just to feel her power as she takes exactly what she wants. When I drag my thumbs in slow circles, her breath stutters and then evens into a deeper, more dangerous rhythm.
“Audrey.” My voice is a ragged prayer.
She leans forward and kisses me. It feels like a promise and a goodbye all at once. The last thought snags; I pretend it doesn’t.
I flip us again, desperate for the leverage that keeps me from coming apart too soon, and she lifts her leg higher and gives me a quiet, wrecked sound that pulls the plug on my restraint anyway.
The finish is heat and light and the kind of relief that fogs the room. She goes with me, not because I pull her there but because we built the road together, and afterward we lie there in the slow fall of our breathing, messing up the rug, my face buried where her neck meets her shoulder, her fingertips drawing lazy shapes at the base of my spine.
I remember—to my credit, however briefly—that I meant to check in. That I meant to tell her about my Los Angeles decision, about the library tomorrow, or about how I turned down three calls during caroling because the only thing I wanted to handle tonight was her. I open my mouth to start any of that, but she slides her hand into my hair and hums, a small, pleased sound that feels like permission to be happy for one unexamined minute.
I take the minute. I take another. I tell myself I’ll ask in the morning, when she’s not this warm and I’m not this stupid.
She shifts, and I settle deeper into the curve of her. The radiator tries again, optimistically, while below us, the bakery sleeps, saving itself for tomorrow.
“Stay,” she says finally, bare and simple, drowsy at the edges.
“Yeah.” I breathe the answer into her skin, into the place that smells like sweetness and soap and her, and let the rest of my doubts sit out in the hall with our coats.
BURNT EDGES
Audrey
Dawn slides under my curtains like a nosy neighbor peeking through blinds, soft and pale and way too early for a Sunday that technically opens late. My body doesn’t care. Bakers are Pavlov’s dogs—first hint of light, and I’m upright, already tasting cinnamon in a future that hasn’t started yet.
And of course, it doesn’t help that my first thought is of the bundle of heat lying heavy and comforting against my back like a weighted blanket with his arm slung over my waist, last night still warm on my skin.
Jack’s breath tickles the spot where my shoulder meets my neck. I don’t move. Not because I’m savoring the moment—okay, also because I’m savoring the moment—but because I promised myself I wouldn’t read into it. Last night was…God. Better than great. The kind of great that ruinsyou for mediocre. The kind that makes you grateful your bed is sturdy and your downstairs neighbor is an empty kitchen.
