Chapter 3: The Morning After
The first thing he registered was the scent. Jasmine and vanilla, but underneath it now, the salt-sweet musk of their own spent bodies. Raj opened his eyes to the unfamiliar ceiling, the soft golden light of late afternoon painting the room in a drowsy, intimate hue. His body felt heavy, liquified, a foreign and glorious exhaustion in his limbs.
A warm weight was pressed along his side. Bree.
She was asleep, her blonde hair fanned across his shoulder, one hand splayed possessively on his chest. He watched the slow rise and fall of her breath, the way her lips, swollen from kissing, parted slightly. The crass, screaming urgency from the couch, and then later, here in her bed, had dissolved into this fragile quiet. He felt a lurch in his stomach that wasn’t desire. It was fear. The fear of a man who has stepped out of a gray, predictable life and into a Technicolor storm, unsure if he’s allowed to stay.
He shifted minutely, and she stirred. Her eyes, that vibrant blue, fluttered open. For a second, she looked just as disoriented as he felt. Then she smiled, a slow, cat-like curl of her lips that reached her eyes.
“Hey you,” she murmured, her voice raspy from screaming his name.
“Hey.”
“You’re thinking too loud.” She traced a finger down his sternum. “I can hear the gears grinding from here.”
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Is that what that sound is?”
“Mmmhmm. Post-coital existential crisis. Standard model.” She propped herself up on an elbow, looking down at him. The sheet slipped, revealing the generous curve of her breast, the peak rosy and peaked in the cool air. He forced his eyes to stay on hers. “Let me guess. You’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here, with this loud, messy, inappropriate divorcée who fucked your brains out on her living room floor and then again in her bed.”
He blinked. Her bluntness was a bucket of cold water, shocking and bracing. “That… covers some of it.”
“The rest is you wondering if you’re just a convenient dick for me.” Her gaze didn’t waver. It was unnerving, this uncompromising clarity.
His throat tightened. He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
Bree sighed, not with annoyance, but with a kind of weary understanding. She leaned down and kissed him, a soft, closed-mouth press of lips that felt more profound than any of the frenzied ones that had come before. “Raj. Look at me.” He did. “You are. Right now, you are a fantastic, glorious, convenient dick. But you’re also the man who held my gaze while you were buried inside me like you were trying to find a home. You’re the man whose hands shook when you touched my face afterward. Convenient cocks don’t do that.”
She rolled away from him, the sheets whispering, and stood up. Naked, unselfconscious, she padded to the window, her body a lush silhouette against the cityscape. He drank in the sight—the swell of her hips, the dimples at the base of her spine, the ripe fullness of her ass, still faintly marked from his grip. The memories flooded back, visceral and raw: her cries, the obscene, wet sounds of their coupling, the way her body had clenched around him like a fist.
“Come here,” she said, not turning around.
He got up, feeling exposed and vulnerable in the open space of her room. He stood behind her, not touching.
“See all that?” she said, gesturing vaguely at the glittering grid of windows and lights. “It’s full of convenient everything. Convenient conversations, convenient relationships, convenient lies.” She turned, her eyes blazing. “I’m so fucking bored of convenient. What happened on that couch? That wasn’t convenient. That was necessary. I needed to devour you. I needed to feel you lose that quiet control and fucking ruin me. And you did.”
Her words were a match tossed into the dry tinder of his own repressed hunger. The gentle man receded; the man who had pinned her down and taken what he wanted surged forward. He saw the challenge in her eyes, the renewed spark of that adventurous spirit.
He grabbed her waist, his fingers digging into her soft flesh, and spun her back towards the window, her front pressed against the cool glass. A small, shocked gasp escaped her.
“Show me,” he growled, his mouth against her ear, his own voice sounding foreign and dark. “Show me what isn’t convenient.”
“Fuck yes,” she breathed, already pushing her ass back against him. He was hard, his cock pressing against the cleft of her buttocks. He reached around, his hand sliding over the smooth plane of her stomach and down, through the coarse blonde curls, finding her wet and swollen. She was drenched, her cunt slick and hot against his probing fingers.
“You’re still so fucking wet,” he muttered, working two fingers inside her, curling them. She moaned, her forehead thumping softly against the glass. “Is this from before? Or is this for now?”
“For you,” she panted. “It’s always for you right now. God, just fuck me. Don’t be gentle.”
He withdrew his fingers, slick with her, and guided himself to her entrance. With one brutal, upward thrust, he sheathed himself fully inside her. The impact drew a ragged cry from both of them. He held there, buried to the hilt, feeling her inner muscles flutter wildly around his shaft.
Then he began to move.
It was nothing like the frantic pace of earlier. This was deliberate, punishing, deep. Each withdrawal was slow, almost torturous, each thrust a hard, driving piston that slapped their flesh together with a wet, rhythmic crack. He watched himself disappear into her, her body yielding to him completely.
“You like this?” he grunted, one hand fisting in her hair, not pulling, just holding. “You like being used like this?”
“Yes! God, yes, Raj! I love it! I love your fucking cock!” Her words were muffled against the glass, fogging it with her breath. “Harder! Own it! Own me!”
He obliged, his hips snapping faster, his balls tightening. The world narrowed to this: the sweat-slick join of their bodies, her choked pleas, the building pressure in his groin. He slid a hand around her hip, his thumb finding her clit, rough and insistent circles that made her shriek.
“I’m gonna come,” she warned, her voice strangled. “I’m gonna come all over your fucking dick!”
Her climax hit her like a seizure. Her body locked, her cunt clamping down on him in rhythmic, milking pulses so intense he saw stars. Her screams were raw, uninhibited, echoing in the sunlit room. The ferocity of her release tore his own control to shreds.
With a final, brutal drive, he plunged as deep as he could go and let go. His orgasm ripped through him, silent but devastating, a white-hot torrent flooding her depths. He stayed lodged inside her, pulsing, as the tremors slowly subsided, his forehead dropped between her shoulder blades.
For a long time, they stood there, leaning against the window, joined, breathing in ragged unison. The city lights began to wink on below, indifferent.
Finally, softening, he slipped out of her. She turned, her face flushed, eyes glassy, and leaned into him, her body boneless. He held her up.
“See?” she whispered into his chest. “Not convenient.”
He kissed the top of her head, the taste of her shampoo and sex on his lips. The fear was still there, a cold stone in his gut. But layered over it was something else, something terrifying and electric. Possibility.
She took his hand and led him, silently, back to the rumpled bed. They didn’t speak. They lay tangled in the gathering dusk, listening to each other breathe, the specter of the outside world waiting just beyond the scent of jasmine and the warm, sticky evidence of what they had done.