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She melts into a trembling, silent mess, every breath a ragged sound. For a few seconds, I lay there in the aftermath, the relief like a frequency vibrating through me.
The haze of the room gradually grows sharp and clear.
Contessa is frozen in the moment, those soft sides rising with her breaths, hands still pinned above her head. I run my hand down her back, trying to gauge the state of her. She hums softly. I take her hands down from the headboard, throwing the panties aside and rubbing the feeling back into her arms.
“There you go,” I mumble, as she comes back into her headspace. “You did so good, baby. And only your second time.”
She curls against me on instinct.
The heat in the room dissipates slowly, bringing a clarity to the haze of raw instincts fading from my bloodstream. It feels like I waking up from a bizarre wet dream.
Contessa rolls over onto her side. I realize, with a jolt, she is also checking on me as much as I am checking on her.
Why?
I try to shove it down, ignore it, reaching for the next purposeful thing to focus on. Once our breathing is calm and synched, the room cool, I get a tissue to clean her up.
“Sal,” she calls out to me.
I know that tone.
“Is this the part where you start asking questions again?” I ask, deflecting her gentlehearted concern with the same urgency I avoided Nate’s attempt to cover me in lipstick.
She looks at me like I’ve read her mind, guilt flashing across her expression like a news ticker. Local woman makes predictable post-sex small talk. Textbook. I throw the tissue away.
“I’m going to have to start fucking you more thoroughly if you still have the energy to ask bullshit questions. If I’d still kidnap you if you were a worm.”
“Would you, though?”
“No.”
She slings a pillow at me and misses. Her smile betrays her, its softness hitting me somewhere low in my stomach. A sucker punch.
“Fine,” she teases playfully. “Fuck and run, then, if that’s all you can do.”
“You want me to lay there and coddle you?”
“Yes,” she pouts sweetly.
I didn’t expect her to agree, and it shows. I’m frozen in the moment, some deep-seated desire to appease her running up against my own uncertainty. I linger a second too long.
“You don’t really have to, Sal,” she adds softly, fingers still stroking faintly over her belly, as if tracing the path the pleasure carved through her, kindling the fantasy neither one of us can talk about when not in the heat of the moment.
And when did she start calling me that? It doesn’t feel like the first time, but somehow, I didn’t notice before. “I just wanted to know if it worked. If you feel better.”
“Can’t ask a man that right after sex, Contessa. The answer’s always the same.”
“I’m taking that as a victory anyway.”
…Why does the girl care how I feel? Stressed or miserable, the worse off I am, the better it should be for her. It brings back the same relentless question that has plagued me all day.
“My turn,” I say. She perks up, all too eager for the quid pro quo. “What do you want?” I asked her earlier, but she answered me in the moment. The immediate, carnal need.
She rolls those big eyes at me, laughing. “Sal, we just went shopping—”
“No,” I cut her off, take her face in my hand. She freezes under my touch. “What do you want from me, Contessa? You’re not fighting me anymore. You aren’t asking about your father or hatching escape plans. Twice now, you’ve let me finish in you. Maybe it just gets you off, gets you over the edge. Sooner or later, it won’t just be bedroom talk. It’ll be the real thing.”
Her neck flushes with heat, cheeks turning pink as her hand jolts away from her belly. She always looks guilty when she feels something she thinks she shouldn’t. Like life is ever that simple.
