“God, Kenny.” He boils the words into my ear as his body launches into a series of convulsions. Cruise lets out a guttural roar and arches his neck back, his eyes closed to heaven. I want to remember him this way—nothing but Cruise and sky—the pinnacle of lust with a backdrop of cinder.
My insides sail me past passion and reason, and I flex into him hard and fast. Cruise doesn’t let up. He thrusts in deeper until all of the breath leaves my body. I clutch onto his back, pulling him in with violent intention.
A dark laugh rumbles from him as his skin blisters against mine.
“I love you, Kenny.” His heart knocks against my chest as if demanding to come inside.
“I love you, too, Cruise.” I pull a wet kiss off his lips, trying to catch my breath.
Cruise always leaves me breathless.
I tried to convince Cruise we should go home and continue the prequel to our honeymoon, but he insists I go to my afternoon sessions, poor hygiene and all.
In art, Ally, of all people, surprises the hell out of me by being the next student hungry for two hundred solid. She lends her body to the class as a landscape with a smile, and every guy in the class is perked to attention. The male model never showed, so she’s a one-woman show. I can tell she’s uncomfortable because she keeps trying to cover her girl parts by crossing her arms and legs, and Professor Webber keeps barking at her to knock it off.
A little warning would have been nice on Ally’s part, but, then again, she probably doesn’t know I’m in this class.
I trace her out in charcoal—thin and wispy, making her limbs look as though they’ve run through a pasta machine. I want to make her face as beautiful as possible because I know she’s going to want to see this. Anyway, Ally is gorgeous, so I don’t have to worry about trying to make her look good—more like trying to make her look human. Needless to say, my aptitude for sketching people leaves a lot to be desired. Speaking of Ally—that totally reminds me of Lauren’s ludicrous plan to sick a faux tramp on her boyfriend. That’s so twisted I don’t even know how to classify it.
“Say, Blair?” I take her in as she wistfully sketches Ally, giving her ballooning hips fit for birthing an elephant. “Would you mind trying to seduce someone’s boyfriend to prove he’s not a cheat?”
Her tiny mouth opens. Blair looks at me with wonder as if a backhanded miracle just took place.
“You want me to seduce your boyfriend?” She stammers, flustered at the idea of hitting on Cruise, and suddenly I’m sorry I ever brought it up.
“No, not my boyfriend. He would never cheat. It’s for a friend.”
“Nope, wouldn’t do it.” She whips her pencil across the oversized sheet of paper. Funny how her enthusiasm waned once “my” boyfriend disappeared from the scene.
“Is that a ring on your finger?” Blair’s eyes magnify and retract at the sight of the shiny band of platinum.
“His grandmother’s.” I hold it out for her to inspect and her face turns a strange ashen shade. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Her lips pinch tight. “So how’d he do it? It’s the boy with the penis, right?”
I don’t like her reducing Cruise to such indelicate body parts, but I let it slide since she’s bitter. Nothing like a broken heart to turn you off to men forever, or so my mother says. Although with Mom, forever is the span of time between her divorce finalizing and her next visit to the local bar.
“He took me out on horseback,” I whisper. “It was this place that looked like heaven on earth, and he dropped to his knees—made love to me in the snow after, right there in the field like we were the only two people in world,” I say it low, mostly to myself as I relive the memory. A thread of heat rises through me, and suddenly it’s too warm inside the jacket, inside the boots he bought for me with his careful attention to my needs. “He’s perfect.”
She huffs into my admission. “I bet his last fiancée thought so, too.” She shrugs as if I should already know this. “Does he ever talk about her?”
The ground beneath me sways for a moment. I knew Cruise had a girlfriend, but he’s never brought her up. For sure he never mentioned an engagement.
“No, he doesn’t say much.”
“Funny.” She smirks, continuing on with the distorted picture in front of her. Blair’s pencil glides across the page in a series of spastic strokes as she disfigures Ally’s forehead to make it look twice its natural size. “For a couple that’s supposedly so in love, you don’t seem to know a lot about him. Then again, he probably doesn’t want you to find out why they broke it off.”