Tear You Apart

I know why Will didn’t take my picture. Because I’m bland and gray and beige, and he makes art. I put the shirt back on the rack, but in front, where I can see it the next time I have to get dressed.

I scream when I come out of the closet, and Ross laughs. My heart pounds and I press my fingers to it. I feel the throb of it in my chest, my wrists, the base of my throat. Between my legs.

“You’re home!”

“Yeah. Decided to swing by here, take a shower, before I hit the office.” He studies me. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

His hands fit on my hips when he kisses me. Open mouth. Tongue working. No surprises; we’ve danced this dance many times. When I cup his crotch, though, he pulls away to give me a look.

“Well, well.” His brows raise. He’s making a joke.

I’m not.

It’s easy enough to walk him back a few steps to the bed. He sits. I push. I straddle him, already pulling at his tie and the buttons beneath. His body is tan and firm because he exercises even when he travels. He spends time outside in the yard, on the golf course, biking.

I’m not thinking of Will when I work my way down my husband’s body with my mouth and teeth and tongue. There aren’t any surprises. I know the dip and curve of every part of him. I know where he likes to be touched, and how. For how long. He’s hard in my fist in a minute or so. Then in my mouth. His hands tangle in my hair.

I want to be surprised. I want to find something new. I want this to feel different.

I use my hand in tandem with my mouth. Up. Down. I want to hear him groan in pleasure, but Ross doesn’t make much noise when we have sex. He never has. I’m the one who moans and sighs, even if the habit has been lost because of so many years when we had to muffle ourselves so the girls wouldn’t overhear. There’s nobody to hear us now, and I want him to shout from what I’m doing to him. I want him to shudder and writhe and clutch at the comforter while I mouth-fuck him until he can’t stand it anymore. I want him to come saying my name.

There is a surprise when he tugs my hair to lift my mouth from his cock. When he pulls me upward, over his body, to nuzzle and nudge at me through my clothes. Fingers work. We shift, we roll. I’m naked somehow, while he’s still mostly clothed. He pushes me onto my knees and slides beneath me to get at my clit with his tongue, his hands gripping my ass. My hands find the wall above the headboard, my fingers curling against the wallpaper I’ve never liked but have always been too lazy to change.

Oh, this, this, this. Spread wide, thighs trembling, all I can do is ride his face and let the pleasure take me over. He knows how and where and how long. How many times and in what direction. I come, hard, without making a sound.

I slip down his body and find his mouth with mine. The first time Ross ever went down on me, he was shocked when I kissed him, after. But if I can’t stand the taste of myself, how could I expect anyone else to? Anyway, it’s erotic, tasting myself on his mouth.

I slide one hand beneath his head, fingers in his hair. The other goes between us to grip the base of his cock and hold him steady as I slide my body onto his. Our mouths seal for just a moment before the kiss breaks on my sigh.

Twenty-two years. That’s how long we’ve been doing this. The first time was in a cheap hotel room after his fraternity’s spring formal. He told me he loved me first, and I didn’t believe him, but I let him kiss and touch me, anyway.

Ross doesn’t say he loves me now. He pushes up inside me. His fingers grip me a little too hard. His eyes are closed. His mouth is open.

He might always look this way when we make love, but it’s been a very long time since we did it in the light. I put my hands on his face and trace the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth with my fingertips until he turns his head to capture my fingers with his mouth. He bites gently. Pleasure surges, and I lose myself in it.

This is comfort. This is compatibility. This is familiarity, and it works. We both tip over into climax within moments of each other, and Ross gives me what I wanted. A hoarse shout. It sounds a little, just a little, like my name.

“What’re you up to today?” Ross asks a few minutes later, when I’ve fallen onto my own pillow.

I’d been teasing into sleep, but this wakes me. I scrub at my face before I look at him. “Work. What are you up to today?”

“Gotta put out a bunch of fires. That jackass Bingham can’t do any damn thing right when I’m gone.” He yawns.

I contemplate crawling under the covers and going back to sleep for a few hours, but it would be impossible with him in the house. He will turn on the television or bang the dresser drawers. Run the coffee grinder. He will shake me gently to ask me where to find his socks, his keys. “No, don’t get up,” he’ll say. “I can make my own breakfast.” But I know he wants me to do it, because I’m here and because he’d much rather not do it himself.

I leave my husband in the bed. In the bathroom, I run the water and splash my face. It’s cold, and I swallow it greedily, feeling the chill slip down my throat and hit my too-empty stomach. I fill a paper cup from the dispenser and take it to him.

Ross looks at me as if I’m crazy. “What’s this?”

“I thought you might want a drink.”

“No,” he says with a shake of his head. “I’m not thirsty.”

He pats me on the ass when he passes. I hear the shower running, and I sit on the bed with my paper cup of water still in my hands, and I close my eyes against a sudden sting of tears.

From behind me, cradled in its dock, my phone buzzes with an email message. It will be Naveen, I think, emailing me to remind me about the shipments due to the Philly gallery later today. Or it could be my brother’s wife following up on summer vacation plans. Or it could be junk mail that has slipped through my carefully constructed set of spam filters and is now clogging my in-box. But the message pinging so cheerfully isn’t any of those.

It’s from Will.

Chapter Four

Will takes pictures of buildings.

I’m here to carry things or hold them while he points and shoots. Skyline shots, he tells me, are really popular for stock photography. At home, he’ll manipulate some of them in Photoshop.

“Post apocalyptic scenes,” he tells me with a grin. “Make the city look deserted. Ready for zombies, that sort of thing.”

I’m holding his tote bag over one shoulder, an extra-large cup of coffee in one hand. “Uh-huh.”

“You don’t like zombies.” It’s not a question. He says it as if he already knows me. He points his camera. Takes a picture. Doesn’t even look to see how it came out, just takes another. And another.

“Not really.”

He gives me another grin, his eyes narrowing in sunshine that’s too bright for this time of year. “Vampires that sparkle?”

“No.” I laugh. Shake my head. “Not a horror fan.”

“What do you like, Elisabeth? Chick flicks? Rom-com?” Point. Shoot. He aims the camera in my direction and clicks before I can look away.

Sneaky.

“I like action movies. Lots of shooting and muscle cars. Science fiction, too.” I’d put a hand in front of my face, but that would be too obvious. I hate it when women protest with squeals and cooing about getting their pictures taken, as if the world will end. Or their souls will be stolen. It’s worse than the ones who pose and pout and primp anytime a camera’s within range.

I don’t want him to take my picture because then there will be proof I’m here with him. Not that I have any reason to deny it. I’m in the city on business. I had breakfast with Naveen. Stopped by the gallery to handle some things. I met with Will for coffee, that’s all. And now to follow him through the city as he takes pictures for his stock work. There’s nothing wrong in what I’m doing.

He takes me to a park. We stare together at the giant Easter Island–looking head in the middle of it, neither of us saying much. Just beyond it, a line of people waiting for milk shakes from a stand stretches nearly all the way around the park.

“Those must be some pretty fucking amazing milk shakes,” Will says after a minute or so.

I burst into laughter. It’s loud. Raucous. Unfettered, that’s a good way to describe it, and I stifle it with my hand when he smiles at me.

The weather’s so much nicer today than it was the night we met. The air light and clear and warm enough for me to understand why someone might wait half an hour for a milk shake. I want to stretch out on a blanket in the grass and stare up at the sky.

Will takes a picture of the statue, then looks at the digital image on his view screen. “...Art,” he mutters. “Jesus.”

“You don’t like it?” I follow him along the path toward the street again, but spy something that stops me. I bend to pick it up, already grinning. “Oh!”

“I’m just jealous. What’s that?” Will says, leaning over me.

The shiny piece of gravel’s been broken into a misshapen heart. I lay it flat on my palm to show him. I trace the outline. “See?”

“Cool.” He sounds as if he means it.

“I collect them.” I study this one for a second or so, then look at him. “Silly, I know.”

“It’s not silly.” Will takes a picture of the rock on my palm. “It means you have a creative eye. Most people would’ve passed right by that. Never looked twice. I wouldn’t have.”

His praise warms me. My fingers close over the rock. I feel the press of it against my flesh. Impulsively, I hold it out to him. “Here.”

He looks surprised. “What? No. It’s yours, for your collection.”

“I have a lot and I always find more. You have it.” I hold it out again. “Now that you’ve seen this one, I bet you find them all over, too.”

Will takes the rock and keeps it in his hand for a second or so before tucking it into his pocket. We stare at each other the way we’d both looked at the giant white statue of a head. Pondering.

“What else?” I ask him when I can’t look at his face any longer.

“I have a commission for some underground stuff. You up for it?”

I can take the train into and out of the city, and I can find my way around once I’m there, but I always take cabs. I’ve never mastered the subway. I have a secret, not-unfounded fear of getting on the wrong train and ending up lost, and the smells can be overpowering. The sound of the subway, the clatter-clatter, echoing, hurts my teeth and coats my tongue with the taste of gray.

“Of course.”

It’s easy for me to imagine H.G. Wells’s Morlocks down here under the city, creeping along the tunnels and snacking on innocent tourists in I Love NY T-shirts and fanny packs. Will is serious as he takes shot after shot of the escalators, the curving tile walls, the dirty concrete.

Watching him, I say nothing. I hand him his bag when he asks for it, and hold it when he doesn’t. Every so often, he shoots me a grin, and every time he does I’m surprised again that I’m here.

“I’m all done for today,” he says at last. “C’mon. Let’s go back to my place, see what I got. I’ll make you dinner.”

“Oh...I...” My mouth tries to make the noises that mean no, but it’s useless. I’m already following him. I knew when he asked me to meet him today I’d be going back to his place. “Sure. Great.”

Will leads and I follow.

He does make me dinner. Pasta, bread, salad. Wine. I eat but taste nothing. We talk, and I hear the sound of my own voice in answer to his, but if you asked me what it was I said, I’m not sure I could tell you. I watch his hands, fingers on the fork twirling spaghetti. The sleek fringes of hair in front of his ears, against his cheeks. When he gets up to refill my wineglass, I breathe him in and keep myself from touching him by keeping my hands on the table, instead.

Time for me to leave. I stand in Will’s foyer, and I look at the door I know I should go through. But first, of course, there’s got to be a goodbye.

How do I say it? What do I do? I offer my hand, because what else is there to do for a man who is not my friend, and still mostly a stranger? Will, with a small, strange smile, takes my hand, and I think that’s the hand he uses to jerk off with.

It happens all at once, so smoothly, how he pulls me close to him. He is going to kiss me. I am going to let him.

At the last second, I turn my face. I can’t do it. To feel his mouth on mine would be too much. It’s already all too much. Will smiles and everything inside me melts, liquid, running hot. He pulls me closer. He doesn’t kiss my mouth.

He kisses my neck, not softly or accidentally, but entirely on purpose. I don’t cringe and I don’t pull away. I offer myself to him as if I was waiting for this all along, and maybe I was and didn’t know it. But the first moment I feel the scratching brush of his stubble on my skin, all I can do is give up to it.

I give up to him.

My fingers thread through the back of his hair, holding his mouth closer to the sensitive skin of my neck as my own lips part on a sigh I cannot contain within the jail of my throat. Then my back is against the wall and Will presses against me, but he didn’t push me. I went there on my own. I pulled him against me. His leg eases between mine, his thigh pressing. My heel hooks over his calf. His kiss slides along my throat and jaw, but again, when he tries to kiss my mouth, I turn my head. My hands find the hem of his shirt. Don’t do it, I tell myself. Don’t. But I do it, anyway; I lift his shirt and let my fingertips find his smooth, hot skin underneath. His back. His stomach. The flat of my hand slides across him, and it’s not enough. It will never be enough.

“I have to go. I really should go.” Murmured between kisses against his throat, the words are insincere. No matter what I should do, what I have to do, I’m not leaving.

Will pauses, his breath hot on my cheek. He doesn’t move away, and oh, God, I can feel his cock, hard through his jeans, the thick ridge of it against my belly. I am undone.

We stay that way for the in-and-out of three or four breaths. My hands are still under his shirt. I blink rapidly, a puddle of silk ribbons in my brain for a couple seconds when my fingertips skid along the small indents of his spine. Crimson silk ribbons, that’s what his skin feels like.

“You should go,” he whispers. “You really should go.”

But I’m not leaving, I’m following a few stumbling steps toward the small alcove beneath the loft, and the couch there. Leather, overstuffed... I think it’s black but it might be brown; I can’t focus on the color or the pattern of the pillows. My hands are flat on his chest, and Will lets me push him back onto the couch. Then I’m on top of him, straddling, my dress hiked up around my thighs, and his hands are skimming the edge of the fabric the same way mine did with the bottom of his shirt, and all I can think about is how much I want him to touch me.

Everything is hands and mouth and teeth and lips and tongue. We fumble, and it doesn’t matter. Laughter stutters out of me like rocks skipping on a lake. I bend over him, yank at his belt, freeing him. My hair falls in my face, and he pushes it back so he can get at my neck again. My throat. I can not get enough of him.

I push up his shirt, then pull it off over his head. Smooth, smooth skin. Hot. My fingers curl against his ribs. He has a tattoo, a stylized bird over his heart. My thighs grip his. His erection nudges me, thick and hard, and all I can think about is touching him. My hand strokes. His hips push upward. A groan slips from his throat.

I did that.

I did that to him.

I want him bare in my fist. I want him in my mouth. I want Will’s cock inside me, but when he sits up with me still on his lap and his hands move beneath my dress, when he once more leans to take my mouth, everything slams to a halt. I tense and freeze, muscles going stiff.

“Not on the mouth,” I whisper, feeling instantly stupid. What is this, Pretty Woman?

Will doesn’t seem to mind. He mouths my jaw instead. His fingers slide along my skin, under my dress, between my legs, just a quick and almost surreptitious swipe against me. It feels so fucking good I want to writhe.

What am I doing, what am I doing, what the fuck am I doing? The thought is like a train, rushing, no end to it that I can see. I curl my fingers over his and push them inside my panties. Against my clit.

“Oh...yes.” The words slip out unbidden, but completely sincere. I shift a little so he can push his fingers inside me.

“Oh, shit,” Will mutters. “Goddamn.”

I wriggle out of my panties as he pushes down his briefs and jeans. Straddling him again, I take his cock at the base and rub the head of him against my slick, wet opening. Over my clit in small, tight circles.

We both groan. I rub myself on his cock, or rub his cock on me, I can’t tell the difference anymore. All I feel is his hard flesh on mine and the spiraling, tightening coil of pleasure. I’m going to come before I even put him inside me.

I move up, just a little, one hand on his shoulder, the other still gripping his cock to hold him steady while I fit myself over him. Slowly, so slowly, I ease myself down until he’s inside me all the way. I can’t move. I can’t think. My fingers have left red marks on his skin, but I can’t even make myself let go.

Will puts his hands on my hips, under my dress. On my bare skin. He moves. He shifts. He pushes inside me, just a little deeper than I thought he could go. Then out.

We move together, then, perfectly in sync. We find a rhythm, set a pace. Everything is slip and slide, no bad friction. My clit hits his pelvis every time I move, but that’s not quite enough, so I use my hand. I know how my body works. My fingers tweak at my clit, small circles. Then I’m up, up, up and over. Everything tenses. Releases.

Will cries out, low, a murmur of blue and green and gold. The syllables of my name float between us. I have never seen my name that way, in those colors, not from any other voice. I feel him throb inside me. That’s never happened, either. It might be my imagination. I don’t care. I watch his mouth open.

Everything slows. The beat of our hearts. Our breathing. I lean to press my forehead to his shoulder. I trace the bird with my fingertip and taste salt when I kiss him there.

I get off him. Find my panties and pull them on. I turn to give him privacy as he pulls up his briefs and jeans, but he’s still shirtless when he touches my shoulder to turn me. I’m not sure what to say or where to look.

“I really should go,” I tell him.

He walks me to the door, where we do not kiss. We don’t even hug. I offer him my hand to shake, and he takes it with a low laugh and a quirk of one brow, but he doesn’t question it. His hand is strong and warm. It squeezes mine.

Then he lets me go.

Chapter Five

I didn’t like Naveen the first time I met him. He was charming and full of himself, a shameless flirt. I guess you could say his sin was that he came on to my roommate before he hit on me, even though I had a boyfriend at the time. That relationship wasn’t working out so well, but even so I wasn’t supposed to care if other boys tried to make me laugh or not.

I’d just met my roommate, Wendi, that day. We’d spoken on the phone once or twice and exchanged a letter, our conversations limited to what we’d each be bringing to the dorm room. Wendi had a fridge. I had a small TV with rabbit ears. We both liked Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls and the color purple, though she was way more interested in coordinating our bedding than I was. We’d already agreed to bunk our beds and switch off who got the top bunk by semester. Wendi was a big girl, buxom and curvy, with lots of red hair and black eyeliner. So far I liked her, even though all the guys at this freshman mixer kept checking her out and ignoring me.

“Hey, ladies. I’m Naveen.” He leaned over the registration table, both hands flat on it. Instead of the T-shirt and jeans most of the other guys were wearing, he wore a pale pink dress shirt, open so far at the throat I could glimpse a hint of his nipples. “Have you signed up yet?”

“For what?” Wendi tossed her hair and put a hand on her hip. Bada-bing, bada-boom.

Naveen’s eyes tracked her cleavage. “If you sign up for this mailing list, you can get one of these welcome bags.”

“What’s in it?” Wendi gave the overstuffed plastic bags, adorned with pictures of deodorant and laundry detergent, a suspicious look.

“I’ll take one.” I scrawled my name and mailbox number on the sheet and took a bag. “It’s free stuff.”

“Laundry soap, mouthwash, stuff like that. Samples.” Naveen looked at what I’d written, then gave me a more assessing look than he’d given Wendi. “Did you put your phone number down?”

“No.” I paused. “Why would they need my number?”

“They don’t,” he said. “But maybe I want it.”

In those days before cell phones, each dorm room had a landline with both long distance and cross-campus service, so you could dial a prefix for the building and then the room number to connect. All he had to do was look at the mailbox number I’d put down on the paper, and he could figure it out. That’s why I discounted his flirting, why it annoyed me. Because I didn’t believe he meant it.

“And maybe I don’t want you to have it,” I told him with a lift of my chin, toss of my hair.

Wendi hadn’t moved, but she was no longer there. Nobody else was, either. Naveen leaned a little closer across the table, his smile never fading, his eyes not leaving mine.

“If you say so.”

“I’ll take a bag.” Wendi wiggled in front of me, distracting him for a second as she bent over to show him her tits—that is, to fill out the form.

The moment had passed, but it had made an impression. The common room filled with new students mingling and taking advantage of the free food the residence staff had put out. Some kids danced in one corner, others played pool or Ping-Pong, a few gathered at the even-for-then ancient Pacman and Donkey Kong video games. Naveen and I didn’t speak, but our eyes met a dozen times over the course of the night. When Wendi left me to go after a guy with spiky blond hair and a pair of round glasses, I went upstairs to finish unpacking.

She stumbled home around two in the morning, turning on the overhead light and knocking into the stack of plastic milk crates we’d set up near the wall mirror to hold our hair dryers and curling irons. I sat straight up in my bottom bunk and whacked my head so hard I saw stars. She wasn’t alone. The blond guy was with her, apologizing to me while my new roommate rifled through her suitcase for condoms. With blood trickling down my eyebrow, I assured him I’d be fine, I just needed a Band-Aid. I told Wendi I’d be gone at least an hour. I took a book, the knitted afghan my grandma had given me as a graduation gift, my room key, and tried to find a place to hang out.

The study lounge was no good. The lights were out, but I could still see the shadows of a couple on the couch inside, their slow coupling reflected in the windows. Disgruntled, exhausted and my head aching, I took the elevator to the ground floor and sought the social lounge. It was locked.

I muttered a string of obscenities under my breath—creative ones; my younger brother, Davis, was a marine. I didn’t notice the figure sitting behind the front desk in the lobby, and he wasn’t yet familiar enough that I should’ve immediately recognized his voice...but I did. The scent of it gave him away. Cotton candy and sawdust. Naveen sounds to me like a carnival smells. I hadn’t noticed upon first meeting him, because of the rest of the noise around us, but in the quiet of 2:00 a.m. it was as if I’d stepped right onto the midway.

“What happened to your head?” He twirled a little on an office chair, his feet propped on the battered desk.

“I hit it.”

He made a face. “No shit.”

I touched the wound with gentle fingers, wincing at the tenderness. It had stopped bleeding but still oozed a little. “My roommate came home with a friend I wasn’t expecting.”