Page 41 of Double Dared
I grabbed a bottle of the same wine we’d had the first time I’d come here and carried it together with two glasses and a corkscrew to Harrison’s mid-century modern living room, where a pothos hung from a basket in the corner, its green leaves streaked with white. I walked over to the record player and searched through Harrison’s collection.
There were several vinyl records from Pink Floyd, one being a white brick wall with the album title printed over it like graffiti, and the other being an iconic beam of white light refracting through a pyramid, then shooting on the other side as a rainbow. I returned the wall one back and carefully tookThe Dark Side of the Moonfrom the cover. I placed the vinyl in its spot and tinkered with the buttons until the record began to spin, and the needle moved automatically to the starting position. A faint crackling came from the speaker, soon transitioning into the unforgettable progressive and psychedelic rock snippets, starting with an unsettling heartbeat, on the opening “Speak to Me” track.
Soft footsteps pattered against the floor behind me, skin on the parquet. They stopped, and I looked over my shoulder to see Harrison leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed on his chest, head leaning gently against the frame, as well. He wore a pair of pants and nothing else. He watched me as the next track started. “Good choice,” he said. “My favorite album.”
“I had a feeling it might be,” I said. “The cover’s so worn-out.”
“I don’t keep the things I love in mint condition,” Harrison said, his gaze never leaving my eyes. He cracked a smile. “I wear them out and spend all they’ve got.”
“And they love every second of it,” I teased.
Harrison’s eyes glimmered with something like amusement. “There’s a total solar eclipse coming in a couple of months. I was planning to go.”
Was planning. With Emma? I didn’t let that distract me. Time and space existed outside of our little bubble tonight. They went on just fine without us, and I was determined to savor our brief emancipation for reality for all that it was.
As if by instinct, I glanced at the corkboard on his wall and found Emma looking at us, laughing, in the picture. He’d moved it to the corner.
Harrison pushed himself off the doorframe and stepped into the living room, where only the dim lights of his lamps cast the deepest of the shadows away. He walked over to where I stood by the record player, then cast his gaze down my entire body, lifting my T-shirt a few inches above my waist and seeing the unmistakable orange waistband of his own underwear. “How’d you like my stuff?” he asked with a wicked smile touching the corners of his lips.
“Stuff? I didn’t see any stuff,” I said. “Surely, nothing unseemly.”
He chuckled deep in his throat and closedhis fist around my T-shirt, pulling me in for a kiss. It was a slow, deliberate one, lingering and sending ripples of confusing, heated feelings through my body. When he let go, I leaned toward him, my legs turning to jelly.Kiss me more, I wanted to say, but Harrison’s amused expression promised that he would torment me a while longer. He sidestepped me and picked up the bottle and the corkscrew, then got busy with opening it and pouring us a glass of wine each.
He handed me a glass as the next track began. “‘On the Run,’” I said, recalling the name of the song.
“You know your music,” Harrison said.
“Dad was relentless in handing down the obsession with Pink Floyd. It’s my inheritance, basically.” It was difficult to make the words follow one another in the right order. It was difficult to think in the right order, too. He stood there, shirtless, hair wet from the shower, skin still damp, pants hanging low around his waist, and Apollo’s belt so prominently framing his abdomen. “You’re not drinking your wine,” I said as I watched him hold it, his gaze never leaving me.
“Not thirsty,” he said and placed his glass next to the record player. “Actually, I’m struggling to believe that this is real. Am I even awake? It looks too much like a dream, Taylor.”
“You’ve dreamed about me?” I asked.
He smiled, gaze falling to my lips for one long moment before he lifted it again. “Maybe.”
“Well,” I said. “It’s real.”
He put a hand on my arm and dragged it all theway down to my wrist, then pulled my hand closer to him until my palm was flat on the side of his waist.
I wasn’t thirsty either. I placed my glass next to his and put the other hand on his chest. Short hair peppered across his torso felt oddly exciting under my skin. It was a wholly new sensation, and it only made me want to feel more of him.
He held me by the hips, pulling me in and bringing his lips a fraction of an inch away from mine. He let his mouth hover there, building up this unbearable tension, like the time between lightning and thunder. You knew it was coming. You braced yourself. But you could never be entirely ready for it. The rolling sensation of the sheer force of nature came over me when Harrison closed the distance between us and kissed me anew. It felt like the first kiss of my life again, like the first time someone really kissed me and wanted it.
So I leaned into him and kissed him back, battling for dominance as much as I was savoring the fact that he was bigger and stronger and could pick me up in an instant, throw me on his sofa, and have his way with me if I so much as winked my agreement at him.
By the time “The Great Gig in the Sky” came on, Harrison’s hands had traveled under my T-shirt and began to lift it all the way to my chest, his fingers passing up and down my body, feeling me, touching me, exploring me like we hadn’t just stood naked together in his shower.
I surrendered myself to him, holding on to his waist while he tugged my T-shirt higher up, while hepushed his tongue into my mouth, while he turned us around and pinned me against the floor-to-ceiling bookcase.
I exhaled in a huff upon impact, and Harrison pulled away just enough to glance down at my half-naked torso. “Lift your arms,” he said.
He didn’t need to ask me twice. I wanted to feel the heat of his flesh on mine more than I wanted air to breathe. The T-shirt moved over my head and up my arms until Harrison let it fall behind him. He took a step toward me, colliding his body and mine, and I slammed my mouth against his, kissing him with tongue in his mouth, and my heated breaths making my chest rise and fall quickly.
My hands moved down the straining biceps of his arms, following their curves and enjoying their strength as Harrison’s hands went to the small of my back.
When he leaned harder into me, I felt just how hard he was. It did something feral to me. It unlocked some deeply rooted instinct within me that had been dormant all my life, but that knew exactly what it wanted, knew how to get it, and knew where to take Harrison next.
I put my hands on his hips and tugged him closer, making him sigh into my mouth.
