I’m not me. This isn’t me, having this conversation.
I’m Layla. And Layla isn’t embarrassed. Layla doesn’t give a shit what some asshole like Hoyt thinks about her. Layla’s probably had phone sex half a million times.
Recommitted, I cleared my throat. “I’ve never been skinny-dipping.”
“Well, now you’re killing me.”
“There’s a swimming pond here. Maybe I’ll try it.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“What about you?” I asked. “What—”
“Hold on now, we’re not done with you.”
“Oh.” I flushed at the attention, the focus this man put on me. It was uncomfortable, but I forced myself to take it. Absorb it. So different from Hoyt’s mercurial, violent focus.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.
“It would be weird if I said no after all this, wouldn’t it?”
“Are you touching yourself?”
“What, like…masturbating?” I shrieked. Actually shrieked. So impossibly not cool, Annie.
“Not necessarily.”
“Then…what are you talking about?” I asked.
“Just touching. Just feeling your skin. Your body.”
“No. I’m not doing that.” I’d never done that.
“Put your hand over your belly, spread out your fingers as wide as you can.”
I did what he asked, the tips of my fingers touching the edge of my panties. My thumb and pinky brushed the small indentions next to my hips that were somehow ticklish and directly attached to the ache between my legs. The skin there was so soft. The hair on my stomach white-blond and fine. I’d never noticed that before.
I ran my palm over my skin and then the back of my hand, from hip bone to hip bone.
I couldn’t stop my gasp at the electric sensation.
“You doing it?”
“Yes.”
“Now take that hand and slide it up your stomach, your chest, to your throat. Trace your collarbone.”
“I don’t…” My collarbone? Really?
“This is why you called me, baby. Let me do my job.”
I was panting—which I’m sure he could hear, but I didn’t care. I did what he asked, tracing the top and bottom edges of the delicate fluted bone.
“Touch your lips. Go real slow with your thumb. How does that feel?”
“Good. All of it…feels so good.” My lips were chapped, and somehow even that skin was attached to the ache between my legs because I was dying. Restless and achy and hurting.
“Lick the tips of your fingers. Feel your tongue.”
It was surreal, these parts of my body that seemed so pedestrian, so bland and normal every other moment of my life, but right now…they were electric. The air I breathed, the skin on my body—my entire self—was electric.
“Do it, baby.”
“Do what?”
“Slip your fingers between your legs.”
“I don’t…” I closed my eyes and moaned. There was too much happening inside of me—too many things. Desire and embarrassment. A terrible, sharp sense of my own ridiculousness.
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t…I just…I’ve never—” How could I explain my life to this man? The extreme temperatures I’d endured that left nothing…nothing for me. There was not a moment of my day spent on anything but appeasing first my mother and then my husband.
“You’ve never…?” he asked.
Once, I thought, but the memory was a bad one. Sour and awful. Terrible and unfinished; I couldn’t even count it.
“Never.”
“Oh, fuck, baby, I don’t even care if this is some kind of game you’re playing. I’m in. Whatever it is, I’m so fucking in.”
“It’s not a game.”
“Okay,” he said, and I could tell he still didn’t believe me. And God, wasn’t that easier? Wasn’t it easier if he thought I was worldly and experienced enough to think of this dirty little phone sex game to play with a stranger?
“Are you?” I asked.
“What?”
“Touching yourself?”
His low chuckle sizzled from my ear over my body. “No, this one is about you.”
About me. Oh God, why did that even turn me on?
Nothing good had been about me. Ever.