When One Night Isn't Enough

Ali pushed Gramps from her mind.

She needed this. Had to have it. Now.

In a quick move she’d perfected long ago, Ali lifted her skirt to her hips and straddled Jared’s lap, the sensitive skin of her inner thighs brushing his jeans, effectively pinning him in place. Of course he could move if he wanted to, but in her experience no man wanted to escape their present position. “You were right about me, Dr. Padget,” she said, whispering in his ear, forcing her breath out hot and steamy as she rocked her hips, moving rhythmically over the denim covering his growing erection. “I’m a tramp who doesn’t deserve a good man.”

He stiffened beneath her. “Ali, I never said that.”

She ignored his statement. He may not have said the words, but his actions had implied them. “If you’re cold, I’ll warm you up.” She kissed down the side of his neck. “I’m real hot inside.” She opened the sides of her jacket and rubbed her body against his. “You want to feel me on the inside, Doc?”

“Call me Jared.” He reached under her skirt, beneath her panties, and gripped the bare skin of her butt with his large hands, pushing her down while lifting his hips, grinding his erection where she needed him most. God, it felt good.

He rocked against her again and again. She reveled in his strength, the intensity of his desire. In his masculine scent, the feel of his firm body beneath her, around her.

“Please, Ali. Call me by my name.”

Nope. Too personal. She sucked on his neck, tasting a mixture of salt and soap. The thing about controlling a situation was not to get too personal. “Not in a truck or in the muck or for a buck.” She giggled.

“You’re drunk.”

Buzzed—definitely. Giddy—oh, yeah. She was on the verge of acting out a fantasy. But drunk? No. “How did you expect I’d be after a girls’ night out? Isn’t that why you came looking for me?” She reached between them to unbutton his jeans, lowered his zipper and released him, took his hard length into her hand. Even though her back blocked the moonlight, making it too dark to see, he looked down, tried to watch.

She cupped her hand around his thick, hard shaft and began a leisurely slide along his hot, silky skin. “Didn’t you figure you’d have more luck getting some skin-on-skin action after I’d had a few drinks?”

He let out a frustrated breath. “I can’t do this.” He palmed her ribs like he planned to lift her off of him. Didn’t make any attempt to remove her hands, she noticed. “Let me take you home.”

So she would have to live with the memory of them together in her bed? Absolutely not. Right here. Right now. Or not at all. “Don’t worry about me.” Her knees resting on the bench at either side of his hips, she lifted up, slid her panties to the side, and lowered onto his impressive length. They were not leaving this bench until she got what she came for. “We experienced girls can get off anywhere.”

He sucked in a deep breath.

Slowly Ali sank down, moved up a bit then down, again and again, as her body stretched to make room for him, until she took him all. Aaaahhhh. Exactly what she needed.

Jared sat perfectly still, his head back, moonlight illuminating his handsome face, a face she wouldn’t mind waking up to, morning after morning, year after year, if he were anyone else. His eyes closed, his features relaxed, there was no sign of the dimples that seemed to wink at her every time he smiled. His hands dropped to her waist, held her loosely.

Physically, he was everything that attracted her in the opposite sex. Tall. Firm. A commanding presence. And he filled her like no man had before, touched something so deep, so unexpected and thrilling she didn’t want to move for fear she’d never feel such a perfect union again. Like he’d been made for her and her alone. Sublime.

She’d waited her entire life to feel this connection with a man. Why did she have to find it with him?

She started to move.

He groaned. “This is so wrong. You’re Michael’s …”

Suddenly he’d developed a conscience? “Not anymore.” Thanks to him. “Right now I’m yours. Now show me what you’ve got.”

With a growl he did just that, holding her tight, plunging into her like a man who had gone too long without intimate contact. “I knew you’d feel this good.” One hand found her breast, teased her nipple. A flare of arousal exploded inside her, her jaw went tingly, her eyes fluttered closed.

His words echoed in her thoughts. I knew you’d feel this good. Pleasure. The letters floated through her brain, the sensation traveled to every part of her body. Jared Padget, a strong, confident, uninhibited man; a caring, competent doctor who made her body sing like a soloist belting out a sustained high C.

She flopped onto his chest, matched each of his thrusts, moved her hips harder, faster, driving painful memories of her mother’s suicide from her brain, seeking release, sweet oblivion. Salvation.

“I’ve dreamed about this. About us,” Jared said between panting breaths, his hands roaming the bare skin of her back.

Me, too.

“It’s so much better than I ever imagined.” Oh, yeah.

“You’re so beautiful.”

So are you.

“But I have to stop.”

What? Ali sat up. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she insisted, leaning back to place her hands on his knees, swiveling her hips, driving him into her. “You have tormented me for weeks, teased me, flirted with me. We are not stopping. Not yet.” She was so close. “I don’t have a condom.”

Usually those words would have ground the action to a halt. Ali didn’t take chances. Yet here she was, already at risk, so intent on keeping Jared close, on taking the sexual and emotional release she so desperately needed, she hadn’t even considered birth control. The higher her blood alcohol concentration climbed, the lower her capacity for rational decision-making plunged into the abyss of irrationality.

“I don’t care.” She arched her back, took him deep, then relaxed. “You said you’re a real man. Don’t real men have control?” Arch. Relax.

He expelled a huge breath as if trying to muster some of that “real man” control.

She leaned forward, rubbed her lips over his. “Please,” she whispered then kissed him, thrust her tongue into the warm confines of his mouth.

He turned his head. “Ali, I’m … We shouldn’t …” He tried to push her away.

“No,” Ali cried out, throwing both arms around his neck, holding him tight. “Don’t leave me,” she begged, willing to do anything to keep him there, to not be alone. She squeezed her inner muscles, trying to hold him inside her. “Stay with me,” she whispered in his ear, slowly tipping her pelvis forward then back. “Love me. Make me forget.”

Jared moaned in surrender and began to move beneath her, gradually increased his pace until he rocked into her with a power that matched her own.

Ali’s head started to spin, scattering her thoughts as effectively as a centrifuge. All but one. Perfection. The ultimate satisfaction was within reach. “Do. Not. Stop.”

“I won’t, Ali. I want to make you feel so good.” His hand slipped between her legs.

“I do. Oh …” With a few flicks of his talented fingers a surge of ecstasy flooded her system. It was different, intense, freeing. It wiped her mind clear, and a blissful contentment spread through her. A dark, satiated calm engulfed her, until the chime of the big clock at the top of the town hall echoed through the thick haze of her mind.

Ali counted. Twelve.

Approximate time of death—midnight, November 23rd.

Her tequila-soaked defenses failed, allowing the memory of that fateful day to seep into cognition.

Sophomore year of high school.

Ali’s mother and her married high-school principal caught doing the nasty on his desk, the act broadcast on the wall-sized movie screen in the auditorium during a full school assembly. In surround sound.

Girls looked at her with more disdain than usual that day. The boys kept their distance. Even her teachers turned away rather than look her in the eye.

Storming into the house after school, Ali had one purpose—to find her mother and make her feel as bad as she was feeling. How much was a fifteen-year-old girl expected to take? This time her mom had gone too far.

Ali pounded up the stairs, down the hallways, craving confrontation, in desperate need of an outlet for the anger and frustration raging inside her. She found her mom in the last place she looked, on the back porch. She must have heard Ali calling out, slamming doors, yet she hadn’t moved from her sprawl on the cushioned wicker couch. She just stared off into the backyard, seeming oblivious to Ali’s arrival.

“Mom,” Ali yelled.

With awkward, sluggish movements, her mom repositioned herself, slowly turning toward Ali, getting tangled in the multicolored afghan covering her. An empty wine bottle slid off her lap, crashed onto the wood decking and rolled under the coffee table. In hindsight, Ali should have taken pity on her mom, drunk in the afternoon, her eyes droopy, her face devoid of makeup and emotion, her hair an unwashed, blond, scraggly mess in need of a dye touch-up.

But Ali’s anger had overtaken rational thought, her adolescent angst-ridden brain focused solely on her pain and anger, and how her mother’s actions had caused both. “You have ruined my life,” she screamed at her mother. “I hate you.”

Ali had been poised for battle. She’d needed it.

But her mother seemed unaffected by her outburst. Calm as could be, she said, “Right back atcha, kiddo.”

Ali stood immobile, her urge to fight replaced by a cold, empty feeling.

“If I had to do it all again,” her mother went on, staring off into the distance, her slurred speech doing nothing to conceal the malice in her tone, “I would have given you up instead of giving up my dreams to keep you.”

Her mother’s last words to the daughter she’d blamed for every bad thing that had happened in her life, the daughter she had never wanted or loved.

Jared’s lungs were heaving, his skin tingling, his mind clogged by post-orgasmic fluff, following the best, albeit the only, sexual encounter he’d allowed himself in years, as he fought to make sense of what he’d just done.

He’d had sex with Ali. Without removing a single piece of clothing. Without a condom. He felt sick. He’d pulled out just in case she wasn’t on birth control but still … He’d driven into her like an animal. On a park bench, for God’s sake. According to Bobby, who had refused to shut up about his history with Ali, Jared had treated her no better than the jerks from her high school.

He felt like the lowest form of life, a maggot living on a rotting corpse at the bottom of a filthy dumpster.

Jared thought about Bobby and couldn’t help but wonder how often Ali had to fend off the unwanted sexual advances of men she’d known as a teenager. If last night had been the first time one of them had used force? If the reason she’d been willing to settle for a man like Michael was for the protection being married might offer?

Something balled up at the back of his throat, making it difficult to swallow.

Bobby had taken pleasure in sharing his high-school nickname for Ali. And in explaining why. But Jared didn’t care about her past. Ten years ago he’d been a different person, too. Present-day Ali, the smart, sassy, thoughtful woman, the kind, compassionate, skilled practitioner, was all that mattered. And she deserved so much more than the man he’d become. Jaded. Distrustful. Unwilling to love.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair.

She didn’t respond.

Back before he’d gotten married, before Typhoon Cici had blown through, nearly destroying his life, when Jared had dated, he’d enjoyed making women feel special. Flowers. Candy. Dinner at fancy restaurants. He’d complimented their outfits and hair, acted the perfect gentleman, waited for them to invite him in. He’d never, ever, had unprotected sex in the middle of the woods. Never, ever felt guilty after a sexual encounter. Until now.

And yet he couldn’t bring himself to regret one minute of it.

Ali lay slumped against his chest, her head wedged in the nook between his neck and shoulder, the only indication she was alive the puffs of warm air on his skin when she exhaled. She’d fallen asleep. He appreciated the quiet disturbed only by the movement of water from the stream, the rustle of dried leaves, an occasional car pulling into or out of the bar parking lot.

He had no desire to talk, or move. So he sat, with her still straddling his lap, in no hurry to leave, enjoying the feel of her in his arms, which he tightened around her, slipping his hands under the bottom of her sweater to warm them. They fit together like two distinct halves purposely manufactured to become one seamless whole, a feeling he wouldn’t soon forget.

What a mess. He hadn’t intended to take things this far, hence the lack of condoms. He never should have shown up at the bar where he’d known Ali and her friends would be.

But he’d been at odds with himself. After a few hours of sleep, he’d packed his life into his rolling duffel then prowled around his apartment with nothing to do but think. Of Ali, and how he wanted to see her one last time. A smiling Ali, not the angry one who’d scowled at him when the police officer had shown up at the E.R. Or the one who, when her shift ended, had left the hospital without so much as a glance in his direction.

Break them up before Michael proposed. That had been the plan. One glimpse of the fire in Ali’s eyes the first time they’d touched, of her temper when she’d joined a young mother’s fight against Child Protective Services, and Jared had known she’d never achieve Stepford wife status, no matter how hard she tried. Yet, in Michael’s presence, she’d transformed herself into the soft-spoken, malleable woman Michael wanted in a bride.

The ultimate deception, a relationship based on pretense.

Having suffered through one, Jared had every intention of sparing his friend the heartache, and legal problems, he’d experienced.

Jared’s plan:

Stage One: flirt. Reveal what he sensed was Ali’s true nature. Evoke her passion, a passion Michael wasn’t man enough to satisfy. A passion she’d tamped down with rigid control. Until tonight.

Stage Two: tease, taunt and prod. Point out Michael’s shortcomings. Joke about them. Give Ali a chance to vent her frustration with Michael’s routine tendencies, to realize what a mistake it would be to marry him. Instead she had praised and defended Michael, never saying an unkind word. Deep down, Jared longed for the day a woman spoke with such conviction in support of him.

When Ali had proved too strong to manipulate, Jared had implemented Stage Three, turning his energy to Michael. A few carefully chosen words, a “chance” encounter at a bar with a woman Michael thought highly of, and the deed was done with remarkable ease. It turned out Michael had harbored a growing concern about Ali’s malleable nature when she’d tried to change up their bedroom routine.

Now Michael, one of the few friends who’d stood by him during the DEA investigation, was genuinely happy with his equally boring new girlfriend. While Ali, a woman he barely knew, a woman who had tried to con his friend, was anything but happy. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did.

So he had amended the plan, adding a Stage Four: make Ali forget about Michael by turning her focus onto him. Who’d have known he’d enjoy her so much? Their banter over the past month the most fun he’d had in years.

Since the day he’d said, “I do.”

Jared stretched out his legs. His feet were cold. He reached down to touch Ali’s bare thighs. He couldn’t believe she wasn’t shivering. He shifted her weight. “Come on, honey. It’s time to go.”

She didn’t budge.

“Ali.” He kissed the top of her head, her soft hair tickling his chin. Nothing.

He took her by the shoulders and pushed her off his chest. Her head hung down between them. Great. Now what the heck was he supposed to do?

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