The One In My Heart

I supposed we might as well talk about whatever it was he wanted to talk about over dinner. “Sure.”


He went to the kitchen and came back a minute later. “The soup needs to warm up in the oven for half an hour. Want to see the view?”

“It’s just the skyline, right?” I said, setting down my drink.

“It is. But I’ve been away long enough that I still get excited about it.”

He flicked a switch; the lights turned off. Another switch and the curtains rose on the Manhattan skyline. I gazed at the silhouette of my great city, a blaze of luminosity against a pitch-black night. Bennett’s footsteps, soft and sure, came up behind me. His fingers were gentle as they brushed against my jaw. Then he lifted my hair and kissed me underneath my ear.

Our first encounter had been incredibly hot, but it had also been one of those things that happened largely because of a random intersection of circumstances. This time I was not a rain-soaked woman at her most vulnerable in years; this time I was put-together and poised; this time I would know how to handle myself.

The ferocity of the sensation that hurtled through me dwarfed anything I’d ever experienced, a pleasure so sharp and vivid…it was as if months of simmering, unspoken desires had become a magnifier that turned the slightest touch to chaos and upheaval.

I clenched my fingers so I wouldn’t gasp out loud.

He kissed a different spot. I shivered.

This was coming to resemble my fantasy too closely. In real life I was supposed to slip out of reach, and maybe laugh a little while wagging a finger with playful reproach. In real life I wasn’t supposed to be swept away by raging needs, like a canoe dragged over the edge of a powerful cataract.

“I thought…I thought you were going to discuss something that had nothing to do with this.”

“We’ll discuss it over dinner, which isn’t for at least another twenty-five minutes.” He punctuated his answer with a nip at my shoulder.

I swallowed a whimper. “I told you, I’m saving myself for marriage.”

“Then why do you keep leading me astray?” He kissed me on my earlobe. “I think about you every time I masturbate.”

Did my knees buckle? I wouldn’t know, because he picked me up at that exact moment.

“You see this?” he asked as he laid me down on the chaise. “When I come back from thirty hours in the hospital, I don’t even bother going up to the bedroom. I just sleep right here. But before I go to sleep I masturbate, and I think about you—under me, over me, and maybe bent over the armrest. Every time, without fail.”

I was unbelievably turned on.

He yanked off my boots. Reaching under my skirt, he peeled away my tights and my underwear. Now he undressed, smoothed on a condom, and pushed my skirt up around my waist. Then, in one motion, he was all the way inside me.

How did this happen? How did I lose control so quickly? Was it because in my heart I had never wanted any result but this?

I shut my eyes tight and wrapped my legs around him. God, he was strong. When he drove into me, it felt as if I were making love to a race car. I had a death grip on the back of the chaise, so that he wouldn’t propel me clear off it.

“Do you know why I think of you?” He spoke directly into my ear. “You make me come instantly. I put my hand on myself, picture you naked, and I come like a fourteen-year-old.”

The pleasure of his body was volcanic. The pleasure of his words was a conflagration. I was already on the verge when he said, “I come so fast that sometimes I have to masturbate one more time. And when I do that, I imagine fucking you all night long.”

My orgasm was a bullet to the head, a shocking starburst. His was similarly thorough and ferocious. But he didn’t stop. He kept going, kissing my face, my throat, my breasts, until I was trembling again.

Until together we fell over the edge again.


MY BREATH WAS IN TATTERS. So was something far more important: my composure. Fortunately the dazzle of nighttime Manhattan was only a shimmer on the walls, the room dark enough that I didn’t need to worry that he’d see my confusion—and the beginning of my distress.

Bennett kissed me on the shoulder and asked, as if it were an afterthought, “When was the last time you got lucky?”

Should I lie? It would be a good idea here. “You should know,” I said. “You were an eyewitness.”

He kissed my cheek. “I’m busy. What’s your excuse?”

I have closed myself off—and I prefer it that way. Who are you and how did you manage to strip me naked? “I’m incredibly incompetent at getting laid. I could stand in the middle of Times Square on a Saturday night, waving a ‘Free Pussy’ sign, and get no takers.”

“Liar. I’ll bet I ruined you for other men.”

I would have laughed if I could. “So says the man who can’t put his hand on himself without thinking of me.”