Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(57)

Like I’m touching myself, now?

I’m not, yet, but just clicking the SEND button makes me want to.

I don’t know. How are you touching yourself?

It’s not fair if I don’t really do it.

Softly. With autocorrect on.

It’s more the idea of it.

The idea that this man, somewhere in the city, imagines touching me—like I’m touching myself, my fingers slow and just now slippery.

More this idea than it is anything he might write to me.

After all, this is awkward.

But when I touch myself in the dark room, I don’t feel awkward.

It makes me all achy, until I skid over my hard and swollen clit with my thumb and then it’s more than aching.

The biggest surprise is how much you make me laugh.

I can’t touch myself how I want to, thinking about you. I’ll take care of myself later, under the covers. Can I take care of you, now?

I reach to tap the keyboard, I only need one letter.

Y

Sometimes, like I told you, I think about kissing. But that’s not what I’m thinking about tonight. Tonight I’m thinking about your legs against my shoulders and my hands pushing against your inner thighs and my tongue tasting you, until you reach down and grab one of my hands so that I touch you and taste you and let you ride my fingers nice and slow while my mouth works you.

Oh. He’s never quite gone this far, and it’s far enough that I have to grip an edge of the laptop to keep from bucking it off while I buck into the heel of my hand, my middle finger deep.

I don’t get off like this often, getting my fingers inside of myself is sort of special-occasion-style masturbation, but his words—his daring to go there—make me so wet and horny I need something to fuck against.

I come sooner than I want to, I try to hold off, forcing my hips to slow and resist how everything is tightening up, but I peek at his sentences again, see a mix-up of letters that spell grab and pushing and tongue and the heel of my hand presses so good against my clit and it’s over. The best come I’ve had in forever. My back and hip muscles are shaking.

When I drag my hand from my panties it makes me sort of jump and I almost go for it again.

?

I take a breath and kind of cough. I have to pull a tissue out of my pocket to clean up so I can type and that’s kind of embarrassing and also kind of fantastic.

I’m not sure what to say. Except, I came all over myself. I didn’t even know what to imagine, exactly, except your words.

Lincoln, baby. God.

Lincoln. Baby. God. This is such a strange hobby I’ve got here. I’m kind of—flailing. I want this, but I’m not asking for anything, it’s just something that’s happening to me.

C asks, as much as I will let him.

I don’t know how to answer him. I close my eyes and think about how worked up he might be. Hard. Maybe, waiting for me to respond, his hands free, he’s already squeezing and gripping and rubbing.

Are you?

His answer is instant.

I will.

I feel tired and, as my orgasm fades, kind of jangly and sad. Thinking of him turned on, how he’ll help himself to sleep, makes me impatient with these encounters between us but not brave enough to change the terms.

Then, intrusive, like remembering something a little too revealing you’ve said at a party, I think of Evan. I think of how he stared across the courtyard while he figured out what to say to me, how he hugged me back so tightly I felt the sadness drawn from my body.

This, thing, with C—I should be breathless, from coming, from the stakes between us getting a little higher. I should be worried about him and his arousal, worried like a lover is, as desperate to play as he is to get off.

I’m not worried about him. He’s words under glass. He’s close-up pictures of random parts of the world that can’t be fit together into anything whole.

We’ve cut up little parts of our lives, mounted them on slides, and looked so closely at them, under so much magnification, they don’t make sense. Like his dog nose that doesn’t even look like a dog nose, for fuck’s sake.

He didn’t even make me come. Not really. It was my hand over and inside me, it was me making sense of a handful of words he felt brave enough to give me, generous enough to give me.

From a distance, it is just me in this room, fucking my hand in the dark.

Good night, C.

Then I shut my laptop. I don’t want to see how he responds. Without the light from the computer the room seems almost pitch-black.

It’s not fair.

The more I see, the more I can’t make sense of anything. I begin the long stumble to bed.

It must be snowing, because everything’s quiet and still.





Chapter Five


Comfort and Joy


I sit in the therapy room by myself until it is five minutes past the time we are supposed to start, and then I give up and decide to leave.