This is why I called. Exactly why I called. I can’t chicken out now.
I got up from the settee and walked to my bedroom. My fingers opened the fly of my shorts and when they fell to my ankles, I stepped out of them and kept walking. I took off my tank top. I hadn’t bothered with a bra because of the heat, and I didn’t have much up top anyway.
The underwear stayed on. I was still Annie McKay after all.
The windows were open, the breeze making the little beige curtains wave.
In my threadbare pink bikini underwear, I lay down on my made bed.
The wind danced across my stomach. Over my nipples, turning them into hard beads. I almost touched one. Almost.
It was like when I cut my hair and felt the wind against my neck for the first time. I felt exposed and raw.
Brand new.
“How’s it feel?” he asked, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a murmur.
“It feels good.” I was lost for a moment in the cold and heat of it. The strange vulnerable thrill of it.
“Yeah? Tell me.”
I swallowed. Oh God. I didn’t have the guts for this one.
“It’s been hot for days, hasn’t it?” he asked, as if he knew I’d hit a limit. “And that breeze just cools down all that sweat. Makes you almost cold in places.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Good girl.”
I shouldn’t like those words. I wasn’t his good girl. I wasn’t anyone’s. But my eyes fluttered shut and I lifted my fingers to my nipple. For just a second. It was hot and hard. Burning, nearly. And then I put my hand down on the quilt beside my hip.
But I couldn’t quite stop the hitch in my breath.
He made a sound—that sound—again. Something had turned him on.
“What else do you want to be brave about?” he asked.
“I’d like to eat dessert for breakfast one day.”
His laughter was dark and rich like brownie batter and I wanted to eat a bowl of it. Of him.
“That’s an easy one,” he said.
Not if you’re me. Not if you were raised by my mom.
“I want to give a man a blow job.”
The silence on the other end pounded.
“You haven’t done that?” he asked.
“No.”
“Jesus, how old are you?”
“Twenty-four. How old are you?” God, I hadn’t thought to ask.
“Twenty-nine.”
“We could be lying,” I said. “Both of us.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’ll never lie to you.”
I couldn’t make him the same promises—I had, after all, lied about my name, about staying away from Ben. About being totally naked. I wasn’t ready to tell him the truth.
Or willing to.
“I’m not lying about my age,” I said.
“Are you a virgin?”
“No.” Those memories, cold and uncomfortable, terrifying and sad, were in my brain’s front hall closet too. “Just…not experienced.”
“Has a man ever gone down on you?”
I shook my head, my mouth dry, words gone, but then I realized he couldn’t see me.
“No,” I said.
“Did that happen in your dirty book?”
“Yes.”
“It turned you on.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you called me?”
Oh my God. “Yes,” I breathed, and he groaned.
Sex with Hoyt had been awful on a bunch of levels and the memories spilled, uncontrolled, out from where I’d tried to hide them. At the beginning, before I knew better, I’d asked him once if he’d like that…like me to put his penis in my mouth.
He smacked me right off the bed.
Whores talk like that, he’d said.
I closed my eyes, my arms lifting to cover my breasts, an old awful embarrassment filling me right to the top, pushing away all my excitement. Tears burned behind my eyes.
I can’t do this. This isn’t me. This isn’t for me.
I opened my mouth to tell him I’d made a mistake. I never should have tried this, no matter how bad I wanted it.
“You’re missing out on one of life’s great pleasures, Layla,” he said.
My eyes sprang open at the fake name.
My cousin’s name.