Chapter 6: The Cartographer of Desire
The shower had been running long enough to fog the mirror and turn the motel room damp. Jason sat on the edge of the mattress in his boxers, laptop open on his knees, scrolling the comments under Ava's post about landing in Texas.
Thirty-one of them used the word thickness. Two asked if she was competing in the fall. One asked what she ate, and Ava had already replied with a string of heart emojis.
He read it all twice, then shut the laptop. The room went quiet except for the hiss of water on tile.
His backpack leaned against the wall by the door. He unzipped the front pocket and dug under a hoodie until his knuckles knocked wood. The pencil came out warm from the fabric, yellow paint worn pale along the flat edge.
Four edits. That was the whole tally so far. Her training history, her bulk, her waist, her tits, plus the condom that had rebuilt his entire body from the crotch up. Every stroke had rewritten the outside of her.
His thumb found the flat of the lead. Nothing underneath was his yet. Nobody had touched her wiring.
He got up and crossed to her suitcase.
Ava packed like a woman planning to move in. Jeans, four pairs of leggings, a plastic bag of protein bars, a zipped pouch of Pokemon plushies that he'd already seen spill out on the floor. In the inner pocket of the lid, flat against the lining, was a folded card, creased soft along both seams.
He knew what it was before he opened it. The memory sat in his head like furniture, planted there three days ago by the pen itself. She'd told him about it on a call, embarrassed, laughing at herself. First love. A lad she'd dated at nineteen who'd moved to Manchester and stopped texting back. She'd kept the note in her suitcase for six years.
The handwriting sloped forward, small and round. Blue ink, the kind that faded at the edges.
I still think about your hands. I still think about the way you'd say my name like it was something you had to earn. You used to look at me when I was on the leg press and I'd have to load the bar again just to stop shaking. I want to be the one you think about when you touch yourself, even now, even after everything. I'm scared I'll never be somebody's whole world. I'm scared I'm too much and not enough at the same time, and I'm scared, most of all, that I'll spend my life being half-loved and calling it fine.
Jason read it twice. The paper smelled faintly of the suitcase, dust and old deodorant.
The pencil came down on the second sentence. He found the word he wanted in the fourth line, the one that made the whole thing an open door. He drew a single line through it. Six strokes of lead and the word was gone, leaving a clean white gap in the middle of the sentence.
Reality did not fill it with nothing. It filled it with him.
The sentence rearranged itself on the page before his eyes, the surviving words sliding over the gap like water closing over a stone, and the new shape read: I want to be the one Jason thinks about when he touches himself, even now, even after everything.
He exhaled through his nose. Something moved in his chest, deep and satisfying, the feeling of a key turning in a lock he'd built himself.
The last paragraph was longer than what he needed. He turned the card over, uncapped nothing and simply wrote across the final three lines, and where his pencil touched, the old ink thinned and lifted off the paper like steam off glass. The original ending, all its fear and arithmetic, came away in one piece.
What he wrote underneath was shorter by a hair. The pencil always balanced its books.
and I will always be yours completely, no matter how many others I have to share you with.
He capped it with the flat of his thumb and stood there a second, listening.
Nothing clapped. No thunder. Just the shower running in the other room and the fridge unit under the window kicking on with a rattle, and somewhere behind his sternum the world quietly rearranging six years of a woman's private wiring to point at him.
He tucked the pencil back into the front pocket, then stripped his boxers off and walked into the bathroom.
Steam rolled out through the gap in the door. The shower curtain was cheap white vinyl, drawn halfway, and water had pooled an inch deep on the tile around the drain. Ava stood with her back to him, blond hair dark and heavy with water, running down her spine in ropes.
Her arse took up most of the curtain's opening. Two hard globes of it, slick and flushed, dimpled where the water ran off. He watched a bead track down the crease and lose itself between her thighs.
"Room for two?" he said.
She turned her head and grinned over her shoulder, cheeks pink from the heat. "Room for you anywhere, babe. Get in."
He stepped over the lip and crowded her against the tile. The soap was the motel's, hard and citrus-smelling, and he worked it into a lather across her shoulders, down the long furrow of her spine, out along the shelf of her hips.
She hummed and leaned back into him, and his half-hard cock slid up between the cheeks of her arse like it belonged there.
"Your legs," he said. He got both hands on her left thigh and soaped it from hip to knee, dragging his palms over muscle that finally had the size to match what she did to it in the gym. The whole thing was thick as a fence post and soft on top, and when he squeezed, the fat under the muscle gave and rolled.
Ava let her head fall back on his shoulder. "You love them."
"I love them." He got his hands between her thighs and pulled them apart. Water ran down her belly and over the mound of her cunt, dark blond hair flattened to a small strip by the heat.
He soaped her tits next, both of them, heavy enough to fill his hands and spill over, nipples hard even in the steam.
"So," he said, easy, into the side of her neck. "How would you feel about another woman joining us sometime?"
Her whole body went still under his hands for about a second. Then she shifted her weight and pressed back against his cock.
"You mean in here?" she said. "Tonight?"
"Eventually. Whenever."
"Well, that's the trouble, isn't it." She reached back and got a wet hand on his hip. "Where's she going to sleep. There's one bed."
He laughed into her shoulder. "That's your first question?"
"It's a legitimate question." Ava turned her head, and the water caught her mouth, and she licked it off. "You'd want that, though. You'd want to watch."
"I want to watch you do it."
She made a low noise and took his wrist. She didn't say anything while she dragged his hand down her belly, past her navel, into the soaked hair, and held it there, flat against her pussy, so he could feel how wet she was when the water was already running over both of them.
"Feel that," she said. "That's what your idea did to me."
He slid two fingers through the folds, slow at first, spreading her open. She was slick and swollen and hotter than the shower, her clit fat and poking out of its hood when he dragged the pad of his middle finger up over it.
"Fuck," she said, and caught the tile with her other palm. "Yeah. Right there. Don't stop."
He didn't. He worked her clit in tight little circles and pushed his ring finger down into her cunt, where she was soft and clinging and wet enough that he could hear it over the water.
"I'd get on my knees for her," Ava said, breathing hard against the tile. Her hips were moving now, fucking herself down onto his hand. "You'd want that, wouldn't you. You'd want to watch me eat her out while you're behind me. She could hold my hair. I'd hold hers."
"Go on."
She moaned and ground harder onto his fingers. "Or I'd let her sit on my face while you fuck my mouth, and you could watch her come on my tongue, and she'd want it, I'd make her want it. God. Or she could hold me open while you push that fat fucking cock in, and I'd be so full, Jason, I'd be that full and still want more."
He pushed his ring finger deeper and curled it, and pressed his thumb flat on her clit, and she came apart against the tile with a shout that bounced off the cheap walls. Her whole arse jolted back into him, wet and shaking.
He held her through it, fingers buried, mouth on the wet curve of her shoulder.
When she finally caught her breath she turned around, water in her lashes, and looked up at him with her hand flat on his chest.
"Tomorrow," she said. "We’re gonna find her. And I’ve got just the girl in mind."