“Yeah.” She nods, her upper lip glistening in the warm room and maybe also under the strain of this shared tension, this need to move and dig deeper and feel. I’m just terrified if I pull back even once, I’m coming.
Harlow writhes beneath me, rubbing and fucking up into me and I’m holding still, trying to keep my shit together but it’s a losing battle. It’s not going to take long for either of us. I’m so hard I’m nearly busting in her. She’s swollen, hot and so fucking wet and I can tell by the flush of her chest that she could get off in under a minute rubbing on me like this.
She plants her heels into the bed and arches as I slide my hands beneath her shoulders, digging my hands into her hair, pressing my face into the damp strands. And then, under me, covered by me and filled full of me, Harlow fucks me like nothing I’ve ever had in my life. With her nails digging into my ass to hold me still, she circles and rocks up and grips me so tight—her body sucking all around me so wet, so good, holy fuck—gasping into my neck as she moves and growls and rubs herself right where she needs it, squeezing and tugging my cock while she gets herself off on me. She’s grinding, I’m shoved in deep, and her mouth is pressed right to my ear like she’s pushing every word in there, giving them only to me.
“So good,” she gasps. “God, it’s so good.”
I’m barely hanging on; just waiting to hear the sound of her quick breaths and hungry little gasps that will tell me she’s coming. “Get there,” I manage.
She hiccups, and moans, nails digging into my skin, and with a relieved exhale, she comes so hard she shakes in my arms, pulling me over the edge with her. I can’t be still anymore. I pull back and stab back in, fucking her hard now in long, urgent strokes as I start to come and she cries out into my neck.
I don’t want it to be over. I don’t want to move off her but for as long as her legs are, she easily weighs eighty pounds less than I do and so I roll to the side, falling beside her on the mattress.
“You know how gross hotel comforters are, right?” she says, breathless.
I close my eyes, still feeling warm and liquid beneath my skin. “What?”
“People who have sex in hotels—”
I reach over; press my palm over her mouth. “Shh.”
She giggles under my cupped hand and licks me and fuck, I’m over her again, tickling and pulling her arms over her head and sucking at her jaw and her neck and her breasts. The relief hits me in a burst, like the wind has knocked open the window and blown across the bed: I’m here with her. The business may not have been saved in the way I wanted, but we won’t lose our boats. My life is moving forward and I have the love of my life naked beneath me and everything will be okay.
But then I halt my mental uncoiling, because there’s one thing we haven’t discussed at all. “How’s your mom?”
She stills under me, giving me a look that tells me the best time to ask this was maybe not when I was nuzzling my face between her breasts.
“Sorry, I swear I wasn’t thinking about your mom’s chest. I was thinking about how relieved I am and how everything seems to be sorting out, and then I thought about what you’re going through. We haven’t talked about it yet.”
Harlow pulls my face up to hers and kisses me so thoroughly I have to pull away to get some air.
“Thanks for asking me that.”
“Well?”
“Let’s get dressed,” she says. “We can talk about it over beers.”
She stands, and I follow her into the bathroom, sitting on the lowered toilet seat and running my hands up her legs, resting my head on her navel while she rubs some lotion on her face, ties her hair up in a messy bun. Now she smells like she did before, but also like the clean smell of her sweat and sex.
“You’re thinking about how much you love me right now, aren’t you?” she asks.
“Yep.” I run my palm over her hip and between her legs. She shivers when I slip my middle finger into her, stroking slowly. Kissing her stomach, I mumble, “Fuck. Fuck that’s hot.”
“What?”
I look up at her. “I can feel my come in you.”
This makes her laugh. “You’re a dirty, dirty man.” But she doesn’t step away. And she can’t hide the way her chest flushes and nipples grow tight.
“I like it,” I admit. I want to see it. I don’t admit that yet, though I don’t know why. Maybe because if I give voice to the thought, I know we’ll never leave this room tonight.
Her hands slide into my hair. “I like it, too. I like a lot of things I didn’t know before.”
There’s a moment where I wonder if she’s talking about the sex, or the rope, or something else, something bigger. Stepping away, she reaches for a washcloth and holds it under the faucet. “But don’t get any ideas. You’re taking me out.”
IT’S A HALF-HOUR drive from her hotel to my neighborhood bar but the trip seems to fly by in only a matter of minutes. What Harlow is going through with her mother is nearly identical to what I went through twenty years ago. Except she has the emotional maturity to deal with it far better than I did, and treatment is better now. Mom was diagnosed when I was ten, and I was alternately terrified of losing my mother and irritated by the responsibility I was left with because of her illness: Levi was only four, and when Mom died two years later, I was left to run the household for the two years it took my father to get his words back, to stop burying himself in sixteen-hour shifts on the boats.
If I could go back and do it all over again, I would do exactly what Harlow does, and I can tell by the doubt in her voice—Is she going over there enough or too much? What will her mother need when this second round of chemo starts? How long can her dad be the sole caregiver before he burns out?— that she needs to hear me say it out loud.
“You’re doing it just right, Snap. If I could do it all over, I’d want to handle it just like you.”
Her head whips to me. “Really?” she whispers.
“Really.”
“I’m scared it’s going to get worse.”
I pull into the small parking lot behind Dockside and shut off the engine. “It probably will for a while. But you don’t have to navigate this all on your own,” I say, repeating her words back to her. “I know I screwed up with you when I left town, but do you trust me?”
Harlow leans over and kisses me once, full on the mouth. “I do.”
For a Tuesday night, the bar is pretty busy, and I know it’s because the weather has been unbelievable. Nothing makes for a thirstier town than warm weather in October, no rain, and a day of big fish.
We enter Dockside to a burst of cheers and shouts, congratulating me on the show. Fuck, I really hadn’t considered this. I’d been so wrapped up in Harlow, I’d forgotten for a second that no one here would ever look at me the same. Leading her to the bar, I pretend I don’t see every fucking head turn as she walks by.
The questions everyone wants to ask come from the bartender, Nick, who graduated a year before me in high school, went to Harvard, and returned here because he couldn’t find a more beautiful place in the world to live. “Finn, who’s the guest?”
“I’m Harlow,” she answers before I get the chance.
“You Finn’s long-lost sister?” says Kenyon at the end of the bar. “Please say yes.”
Harlow winces with a playful apology. “I’m the mail-order bride. He told me he has a castle. Does he have a castle?”
“Sorry, kid,” Kenyon says, laughing. “Just a fancy television show and a lot of groupies.”
“Groupies?” Harlow asks, looking at me.
I order two beers and a basket of peanuts. “Come on.” I guide her to two empty seats at the quieter end of the bar.
She sits down and turns to face me. “You have groupies already?”
“Kenyon is a shit stirrer.”
“Because there were groupies?”
Laughing, I tell her, “There were some girls down at the docks today when the announcement came out.”
“You mean the girls who are over there playing darts and staring at you?” She lifts her chin and looks across the bar.
I tilt my beer to my lips, surreptitiously looking at where she’s indicating. There are a half dozen college-aged girls staring directly at us. “Yeah. That’s them.”
“Pretty sure they read between the lines on that Variety article.” She lifts her beer and drains half of it. “Bet this bar is about to get a lot more business. Bet every place in this town is about to get more business. And I bet those girls are all over Twitter talking about you being here.”
I hadn’t considered any of this, that by doing the show we might be helping more than just ourselves. But I can’t really focus on any of that with the way she’s looking at me. I take another sip of beer, studying her. “You jealous?”
She laughs. “Nope. You just blew your wad inside me in under two minutes, about an hour ago. I think I have you locked down pretty tight.”
“Gross. I fucking love you.”
Harlow leans on the bar, gazing up at me. “Let’s go get matching tattoos.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Mermaids or skulls. Your choice.”
“Mermaids?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Think of all the great conversation starters about your huge trident.”
I rub my jaw, staring at her perfect fucking lips. The only marks on her skin will be from me. “I don’t think so.”
“You could get a hook.”