Page 39 of Come in with the Rain
“What, baby?” I whisper, reaching beneath her to hike her hips up into a position that presses me hard against her clit.
“Please fuck me, please fuck me, please fuck me.”
This time, I can’t deny her. I reach between us, push aside her lace underwear, and drive deep. The world goes mute for a moment, like dunking my head underwater, and when it all comes back, I hear the sounds she’s making, these quivering little mewls that almost make me come right then and there. I can’t think about anything but thrusting at that point, nothing but the tight feel of her, and from the incoherent noises coming from her, I don’t think she’s fully aware either.
“Stella,” I say bringing my mouth to hers, not kissing exactly, but just pressing there. Her eyes are squeezed shut. “Stella, baby, I need to feel you come. I need it like I need air. Come for me. Please come for me.”
Her thighs tighten around my hips, her mouth opens on a silent scream, and then she starts to pulse around me and the world dissolves into nothing.
When all the color returns and the ringing in my ears has stopped, I go up on my elbows and look down at her. She looks truly ravished, her hair a mess and her make-up all smudged. “So fucking beautiful.”
She stares up at me, this odd expression on her face, and then she says, “I want to know what this is.”
I don’t like the tone of her voice, so uncertain when I’m still inside of her, going soft. I think I know what she means. I’m almost positive. But I need to know for sure. No more avoidance. “Whatwhatis?”
“This,” she says, pressing a hand to the middle of my bare chest. “Tell me what this is between us.”
If she’s ready to talk about it then so am I. “You want to know what this is between us?” I rock my hips, my cock still hard enough inside her that her mouth twitches. “What it is, is that I’ve wanted you since that first day at Mickey’s when I saw you through that crack in the door. You’re all I think about. I wake up thinking about you, and I go to work thinking about you, and I come home thinking about you. You make me feel good, which is something I haven’t felt in a long time. Truly good, like this bone-deep feeling, and I have no intention of playing it cool and saying we can be casual. I want everything with you. But if that’s not what you need then I understand, and I’ll take anything you’ll give me.”
She grabs my face with both hands. “I want everything with you, too.”
And those are all the words we need.
CHAPTER39
STELLA
Two days later, Mickey is standing on my welcome mat. I blink at him, one hand still on the doorknob. “Mickey, what are you doing here?”
“Can I come in?”
I move out of the way and watch as his eyes immediately start to take in things that are different. It’s been a very long time since Mickey was last in this condo. We spent almost no time here before I moved in with him, coming here to have sex just once when Max was out on a job in Philadelphia. I don’t glance over at the spot, the floor right in front of the window, where he held me down and made me scream until I was hoarse.
“Wow,” he says now. “Really spruced the place up.”
I feel like a deer caught in headlights. Does he know about Adam? And if he does know about Adam, how? Like he knows exactly what I’m thinking, he stops at the window, reaching down to press one fingertip to one of the red peonies in its vase sitting on the window ledge. Adam gave them to me yesterday, brought them home with him like some kind of 1950s working man.
“Guy has good taste.”
I sigh. I knew it. “Did you bug the place?”
He laughs. “What do you think this is, a spy thriller? I know everyone, and everyone knows you. And your good friend, Adam? He’s not been subtle. When he launched his website and started putting out feelers for jobs, his old boss — my contractor, if you’ll remember — came and gave me a heads-up.” He plucks a coaster off my bar, flops it back and forth in his hand a few times, and tosses it back down.
“And the fact that the two of you are together? Well, I just guessed on that one. I used to see the way he looked at you. You’d walk through the apartment, and his eyes would follow you.” He uses his first two fingers to illustrate, running them in front of his eyes, trailing from one end of the condo to the other. “He watched you like you were made of stars or something.”
There’s too much going on in my head, too much rattling around in my brain, and then he heaps on one more thing, one more perilous piece of information. “Look, I’m not really here to talk to you about all that. I know it’s not fair of me to be asking around about you. I just worry. Once you’ve worried about someone for three years, it’s hard to stop. But the reason I came here has nothing to do with any of that. I came here to offer you a job.”
It takes me a second to make my limbs move. Or my lungs for that matter. I walk over to the bar, pull out one of my rickety, way-outdated stools, and sit down before I pass out. “What?”
Mickey puts up his hands. “I know I just threw a lot at you, but I have spots to fill and I know you’ve been looking. It’s not a hundred percent up your alley, but—"
“But what?” It feels bizarre to be talking to him right now. It’s bizarre to think that you’ve removed someone entirely from your life only to discover that they’ve still been there all along, like losing an old teddy bear and finding it years later in a box in the attic.
“Ninety grand a year, health insurance including dental and vision, and a 401(k).”
At that, my heart stops. I try to read him the way I can read Adam, the way that everything Adam is thinking or feeling is written across his face in big, bold letters. Mickey isn’t that way. Mickey is a closed door.
“How do you know I’ve been looking?” It seems like the looking is endless. There’s always some reason why I’m not the right fit for every job I interview for. I’ve been on what feels like a hundred interviews since Mickey and I broke up.
