We reached a stoplight and I could finally give her all my attention. I guided her up and down with both hands, racing my own release to see how much longer I could keep her going.
“You want it?” I asked, voice stilted.
“Yes,” she breathed, briefly pausing before taking me right down to the back of her throat.
That did it. I slammed both hands into the steering wheel and rode out the ropes of my orgasm, grunting through clenched teeth. Years’ worth of pent-up release emptied itself, filling her mouth. My pulse didn’t even out, though; it remained in my ears like a hammer all the way to the very last drop.
Thirty-five years old and I had never come so hard in my life.
Ophelia finally lifted, dragging her bottom lip along the underside of me on the way, sending shivers down my spine. She planted a kiss on the sensitive head and made sure I watched as she swiped her thumb across her lips, then sucked the excess off of it.
I forgot where I was when the car behind us laid on the horn and Ophelia startled, smacking the back of her head on the steering wheel.
“Shit,” I panicked, hitting the gas and rubbing her head at the same time. In the rearview a woman in a minivan was flipping me off and I gave her one back. “Are you okay?”
O started giggling, crawling backward out of my lap and shimmying her dress down her legs as I tucked myself away. Her laugh made me laugh, and we were both hysterical when I pulled back into Tally’s complex.
“You talk a lot when you’re about to come,” she said. “You get real filthy.”
My cheeks heated. What I wasn’t going to say was that I had never spoken to a sexual partner the way I was letting every salacious thought fly with her. Ophelia was getting a different, hungry edge of me that we were both meeting at the same time.
“I’ll tone it down,” I assured her.
“No,” she objected. “It’s hot.”
Tally’s car was in the driveway, so Mateo must have been at home waiting for me to fill him in on all the dirty details. Which I wasn’t going to do, because the last ten minutes of my life were reserved for me and only me—and the girl I shared them with.
“Are you hungry?” I asked, attempting to keep her with me longer.
“I have dinner plans with Nat.”
I wanted to know what was going through her head. She’d just gotten me off; she must have been at least a little bit turned on. I walked my fingers across the bench seat and tugged at the hem of her dress. “Give me a couple minutes with her?”
“Did you just refer to my vagina as her?
“Them?”
“Goodnight, Frankie.” Taking her bag, she pushed out of the passenger side door.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
“I’m taking your advice.” She walked backward toward the door. “Not sleeping with a guy on the first date.”
That was suddenly the worst advice I’d ever given.
I sighed, watched her wave and disappear through the threshold, and then dropped my head to the steering wheel as I turned the ignition to drive back home.
21
“Are we spending the night?”
Steam billowed toward the light above the shower and an indie rock playlist filtered out of Natalia’s phone on the bathroom sink. I aggressively filed my nails from my perch on the lid of the toilet seat as the room turned into a sauna.
“It’s not like we both don’t have a bed to sleep in,” she answered.
She couldn’t see me roll my eyes, but I did. “Staying the night kind of crosses the friends-with-benefits line, don’t you think?”
“Your situation is crooked as fuck. The lines are already blurred.”
My situation was both the most convenient and inconvenient thing I’d ever experienced at the same time. Frankie scratched an itch I didn’t know I had when it came to men. Which was exactly what was so inconvenient about the whole thing. I already knew I would be struggling to find a guy back in Pine Ridge that fit his mold. He was somehow the perfect gentleman and the perfect scoundrel.
Attractive, smart, vulnerable, begrudgingly funny.
The convenience was that thing he was working with below the belt. Christ. I wasn’t a girl easily impressed after having had my fair share of hook-ups. A dick is a dick, right?
Wrong. So very, very wrong.
So what I first categorized as a convenience was actually the number one glaring inconvenience, really. I thought it’d be hard to find a man to match his first date habits, but in reality, I was putting myself on the fast track to being completely unsatisfied sexually for the remainder of my life.
And he hadn’t even been inside me yet.
“Do you think I’m being stupid?” I groaned.
“I think you’re being a single twenty-six-year-old woman on vacation with a vetted, clean, unattached, attractive man.”
I tapped my cheek with the nail file. “You’re right. I’m just paranoid.”
There was the click of a bottle top opening and closing behind the curtain. “You’re both in the same situation, Phee. I’m sure Frankie has the same concerns as you do about it. Which is good, because it’s been addressed already.”
I nodded to myself. A question I’d thought about briefly but hadn’t entertained crossed my mind. “Do you think he’ll take that job in Colorado?”
After a short pause the shower curtain whipped back and a soapy Natalia peeked her shampooed head out. “What an interesting question.”
“Is it?” I stood and turned toward the mirror, avoiding her eyes but finding them anyway in the reflection.
“One might ask that if they were interested in someone beyond a physical relationship. Which is definitely not the case with you.” She raised a dark eyebrow. “Right?”
“No, right, exactly,” I rushed out. “Just curious, in general. He seemed on the fence about it.”
She closed the curtain and I let out a trapped breath.
“It’d be a miracle to get that man to move that far away from his family.”
“But he was gone for years,” I argued.
“Temporarily,” she countered. “Florida was still his home.”
Add family man to Frankie’s disarming list of generous qualities.
“Think about it though, he’s barely had a chance to sit down since he was a teenager. Now he’s deciding whether or not he wants to settle in a place he’s the most comfortable, with the people he loves, versus a completely new state on the other side of the country with nothing familiar.”
“It’s a big decision,” I agreed. “I would never leave the Springs. As much as I love this sunshine, my family is there, my job, my mailman.”
“How would you ever survive without your mailman?” she asked sarcastically.
“Doug knows not to leave the packages on my front porch because they are constantly stolen. He walks them around the back. We have a system.”
“Of course you do.”
“The point is that I couldn’t abandon my routine either. And if I ever find a man on this sordid fucking plane of existence, I’d want him to get to know my family, and take my brothers out to go fishing, and feel comfortable spending time with my mom if I wasn’t around. So relocating my life away from them would never be an option.”