Jayson: A New Adult / Coming of Age Romance (24 page)

I climb out of the tub and walk into the bedroom with fantasies swimming in my head. I know I’m a hopeless romantic, but this could work. Why was I ever afraid of committing to him? “I’m ready, Mr. Zephyr,” I announce seductively.

I unwrap the towel from my body and let it drop to the floor with a whisper of terry cloth. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed with his shoulders slumped, as if he’s deep in thought, but the minute he sees me his troubled eyes darken with lust. Before we discuss whatever’s bothering him, I want to show him all the ways he’s made me a woman.

I step confidently up to him. My nudity doesn’t shame me. The moonlight illuminates the bedroom and casts a shadow of my naked silhouette, and I can see what he sees. My slender body is ripe with curves at the hips, the buttocks. My breasts are small but shapely, handfuls of sensitivity. I’m beautiful, and this is the way he sees me. It’s never been something I saw in myself before. Sure, I knew I was pretty, but beautiful? I was always more concerned with my intellect and ambition. But I see it now. I see the way he looks at me.

I stand before him like a sacrifice on the altar of lust. “I love you, Jayson Zephyr,” I say clearly.

He swallows. I see his Adam’s apple bob up and down. I think he won’t answer. He replies, “I love you too, Kitrina Schneider.”

His hand comes up to hold mine in a desperate grip that clings too tightly. I tuck a finger under his chin and lift his gaze to mine. “What is it, love?” I ask softly. He shakes his head and escapes my grasp. I lean down and kiss his lips. My tongue darts across the space separating us, and I taste his mouth. He is hot and spicy, like cinnamon. His breath exhales and sends butterflies flitting through me. “Whatever’s bothering you…it’ll be okay,” I promise.

I climb into his lap, and he scoots back on the bed so I can straddle him completely. His clothes are in the way, but I have no problem unbuttoning his black shirt until his tanned chest is exposed. I run fingers down the ridges of his taut stomach to his belt buckle and unfasten his pants. I ease back enough to bring his member free. The same wonder as before, when I was untried and unfamiliar with the mechanics of sex, persists. It doesn’t matter how many times we do it; it feels new every time.

“You’re so beautiful,” I murmur.

“Don’t you mean handsome?” he asks with a tired smile.

I shake my head. I squeeze his girth and run my hands up and down his shaft. “
This
is beautiful.” His swollen erection pulsates in my palm. I smooth my thumb over the tip of his hard-on. I trace the veins that run up and down its length. He exhales, sighs softly. He leans back and looks at me while I masturbate him, but he makes no move to take things further. I ease down to a kneeling position at the edge of the bed, and my mouth waters at the prospect of tasting him. “You’re the one who’s beautiful,” he says with a gasp.

I guide him to my lips. My mouth descends over him. Silky tongue laving down his shaft, I lick up and down. He shivers with each flick of my tongue, and I know I have him right where I want him. Using my hands and my mouth, I bring him to the brink of culmination over and over. His silence is unable to be sustained. He freely moans my name as I continue. His hands tangle in my hair. He gently guides my head up and down, and his heaviness fills my mouth. His salty flavor spills on my tongue, pearls of pleasure. I never thought I’d like the taste. I don’t know if it’s just him—if he tastes better than other men. I’ll be happy if I never find out. This is my Jayson, my love.

I groan as he passionately clasps the back of my neck and stops the oral sex. He brings me to my feet and throws me on the bed. I’m used to his unbridled lust. It turns me on. I eagerly roll onto my stomach in anticipation, rising up on hands and knees, ready for him to enter me. I look back, and Jayson’s stroking his thick, hard cock. When he finally pushes inside, I let out a wail of ecstasy. He slides a hand around my throat and lightly squeezes my neck as he roughly pumps in and out of me with a primal growl of enjoyment.

“Don’t stop,” I gasp. I moan as my womanhood swallows and releases his thick member over and over. My legs tremble and my bare bottom slaps against his bare upper thighs as his jeans slip lower and lower until they hang around his ankles. As he plows into me, Jayson takes off his shirt. He grasps my hips and leans over my back, and I feel his sweat drip like raindrops. It’s nothing compared to the storm where our bodies join. He stretches me and makes me whole. I cry out his name in abandonment and ecstasy. Expletives explode past my lips that I’d never say under normal circumstances.

It’s the way he makes me feel—like I’m out of control, like I’m a few minutes from dying of pleasure. The glorious thrusts rock me back and forth as I invite and accept him into my body. “I need you,” he says brokenly. His fingertips dig into my skin. He gasps as if in pain. He pulls my hair and turns my face for a kiss while his hard strokes push me to the edge. I barely hear the music now. It’s like the room, the world, doesn’t exist. It’s only me and him.

“I’m sorry,” he whimpers into my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

His erection surges into me again, and the pleasure is too much to bear. My body shatters into a million tiny pieces. My hands clutch at the comforter. “Oh, Jayson!” I come undone. Fire rushes through me. Copious wetness gushes from my womanhood and I clamp down tight around Jayson’s shaft, shaking from the intense waves of pleasure rolling through me. With a tortured sob, he yanks out and jerks off against my ass. His hot, creamy ejaculation douses my skin and it’s like the thick fluid is a secret language, communicating the depth of his orgasm. This is the part of sex I never expected—to feel so much of, to care so much about, another person’s pleasure. I reach behind me to milk him of every drop. Jayson pants as he tries to catch his breath.

“You’re amazing,” he murmurs. “Absolutely amazing.”

With a breathless, tired laugh, I turn onto my back to look up at him. Jayson plops down on the bed next to me. He kicks off his pants, lays back. “Kitrina.” He says my name solemnly, too seriously. But, before I can respond, I hear his phone ring. Jayson swears and sits up to dig it out of his jeans. He answers tersely, “Hello?”

“
W
here are you
? Momma told me everything. Jayson, you can’t let that batty old hag, Candace Schneider, run you away like this,” Castiel shouts through the phone.

“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” I hint. I glance back at Kit, who’s all ears. “Hang on a second.”

Collecting my shirt and pants, I get dressed while listening to my younger brother try to tell me it’s a big mistake to break up with Kitrina. I let Cast talk. It’s the only way to shut him up. When he finally says his piece, I walk out onto the balcony for a little privacy. I don’t need Kitrina to hear this conversation.

“Cast, you and Momma don’t understand what’s at stake here. I’ve gotta do what I have to do. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how I feel about Kit or how she feels about me. If the woman wants me to break up with Kitrina, then that’s what has to happen. Besides, I can’t keep living a lie. Sooner or later Kit’s going to find out anyway, and that will be the end of that.”

“If what woman wants you to break up with me?”

I spin around. Kit’s standing in the doorway, arms crossed. “What woman, Jayson? And, what lie are you living? Is there someone else?”

I hang up the phone, mouth dry. “Kit, no, it’s not what you think.”

“Don’t lie to me!” she yells. “Is there someone else?”

Impotent rage powers through me. The thought of Jayson with another woman makes me physically ill, and it takes everything in me not to throw up. I step back, shaking my head. “I cannot believe this,” I say in shock. Not Jayson. How could he do this to me?

“Kit, just let me explain. Look, I know how you feel about keeping secrets. I wanted to tell you from the very beginning, but I held out. Then, it was too late. I need you to understand that I never wanted to hurt you.” Jayson comes at me with hands outstretched to hold me.

I snatch away from him. “Don’t touch me!” I yell.

“Kitrina,” he pleads.

“Get the hell out of my house!”

I turn away from him because I can’t bear to look at him. Was this the reason I got treated to a candlelit bath and hot, kinky sex? So he could break up with me to be with someone else? “I trusted you,” I sob in horror. “I trusted you! How could you do this to me?!”

He looks at me in silence, starts to speak, then shakes his head as if to get rid of a crazy idea. “I’m sorry,” he finally says dejectedly. I guess he realizes I’m not stupid enough to accept a lie. I start flinging anything that might possibly belong to him out of my closet. I grab the snow globe he brought me for Christmas and dash it to the floor where the glitters spreads out in a pool of limpid wetness. I think about everything I gave up. My family. The schoolwork I put on the hold. The nights I was bone weary from working and going to school but still stayed up to entertain him.

After everything that’s happened between us, this? I choke down the wild sobs and work desperately to control myself. Covering my face, I breathe. In and out. In and out. Slowly.

“I do love you, Kitrina,” he says. I shudder at the part of me that longs to ask why, to say please, to fight this other woman and win, take him back whatever his flaws.

I shake my head and keep breathing. When I finally drop my hands and look at him again, I know there’s nothing he can say or do to dissuade me. I look at him, eyes sparkling with all the agony he’s caused. “I gave you the best of me,” I say in a whisper. “I can’t take it back. But I refuse to be your fool, Jayson Zephyr. It’s over. Get the hell out of my house. I never want to see you again.”

He drops his head. My chest rises and falls in laborious inhales and exhales. I realize I’m naked, and it’s not beautiful anymore. I feel exposed, vulnerable, ashamed. The very person who told me he loved me has hurt me more than I ever imagined possible. Those words. He should never have said them if he didn’t mean them…much less said them again…and if there’s someone else, then he couldn’t have meant them, not the way I did.

I watch Jayson trudge out of my bedroom with his belongings in his arms. I don’t move. I listen for the door to close downstairs to signal his exit. When I know he’s gone, I slowly sink to the floor and let the tears fall freely. Us against the world, we said. Now it’s only me.

T
he night he leaves
, I cry myself to sleep, the shock of his betrayal vibrating throughout my body. I feel hot and cold at once, alternately numb and exquisitely sensitive. Yet in many ways it’s the easiest night, with the wounds so fresh. Rage anchors me to the mattress as surely as an anvil.

But every night for the week after that, I restlessly shift and turn in the big, empty bed, the luxury of not having to sleep on a pallet on the floor lost to me without Jayson there to enjoy it too. Come the weekend, when he’d definitely be at my place if we hadn’t split, I spend Saturday going through the motions of work and school assignments, dreading the sinking sun. As soon as it slips beneath the horizon comes the fever. I should’ve known it would come, but the lust rises up unexpectedly. I am not prepared. I don’t know how to combat it. I find myself burning for him with a heat cold showers can’t break.

“This too shall pass,” I intone as I punch my pillow and flop into a new position. I try to ignore the desire that moves through me, the need. But it’s as if my body pretends not to know what happened, why he’s not here, why he won’t be coming back. My breasts, my hips, my thighs remember him and shiver with anticipation—as if he’s just about to touch me.

Insomnia gives me hours to replay the tragic breakup a million different ways, as if by dissecting exactly what happened I’ll come closer to understanding why it has to hurt. I wish I could harden my heart and take back the love I now know he never deserved, but I can’t hate him. I don’t know how. No matter how I spin it, I can’t find the loose thread that unraveled us. I can’t remember a single moment he treated me badly or gave me reason to doubt him.

That’s the rub. The thing about real deception is, it doesn’t give the victim time to build up immunity. Had he been a douchebag from day one, I’d be able to drop him with no reservations. The attraction would dry up under the unrelenting beam of logic and rationality. Considering the time we had together gave me something better than I ever could’ve dreamt up, my feverish mind has trouble finding fault. Jayson Zephyr taught me passion. And he left me with it like an illness I can’t shake.

I reach beneath the covers to tug at the waistband of my pajamas, and the silk slides against my legs in a way that makes my sensitive body tingle. The wicked combination of arousal and sadness demands that I call him—that I take back what I have lost— but I promise myself I won’t do it. There has to be another way. My hands slip down to my most intimate anatomy to touch myself as Jayson would touch me. I close my eyes and hiss out an exhale, tightening my thighs around my slender wrist to hold my hand in place against the throbbing ache.

I slowly swirl my fingertips around…again—something innocent, an exploration that wasn’t intended—around in circles above the dewy pearl nestled between my labia. Clueless about the mechanics of masturbation, I traverse my body like an untried explorer. Some of it, I get right instinctively, and my body becomes moist with pent-up frustration as my hips shift forward to more fully accept my untutored caress.

But, with each zing of serendipitous pleasure, the longing grows and I get angrier. He should be here. He should never have left me to do this on my own, any of it. A broken sob trembles into a moan. I bite my lower lip, inhale.

I tentatively ease my middle finger to the hot, humid entrance to my sex. Inner muscles quiver like a skittish fawn. He has deprived me of him. I miss him all under my skin. My very veins cry his name as I slide the questing digit a little deeper. Rubbing and stroking, I find the erogenous zones he used to make hum. I am hollow without him.

“Jayson,” I moan.

Arching my spine, I push my bottom into the mattress as if trying to escape the alluring temptation to complete the wanton act. However, my body refuses to be stilled. My hips thrust forward to take my finger deeper. A needy sound escapes from my mouth. I picture him kissing me. I remember his taste. I lick my lips and pretend his lips are against mine, his tongue tracing the recesses of my mouth. I touch my mouth with my free hand. I reach my fingers, wet with my own nectar, to my breasts and find a nipple to squeeze and tantalize, tugging as if my hands were his.

It makes me squirm. It makes me throw my head back and sink into the fantasy. He surges between my legs like a mighty wave. The clothes become too much as the heat gets more intense. I find myself stripping out of my pajamas, and the shirt and top get lost beneath the covers. Once I am nude, my hands run along the perspiration-slick planes of my torso, down to the flare of my hips and curve of my thighs. I think to myself,
This is what he feels when he makes love to me.

Satiny skin, soft curly pubic hair in a thin strip, this flat stomach, the hills of my breasts—does he miss me?

I miss his hardness. His muscles, the flat planes of his chest and stomach, his rigid cock. I remember him in so much detail I almost feel him in the room, his chiseled masculinity the perfect foil to all my softness, wetness, curviness, neediness.

I cream as I get more invested in the exploration that takes my hands back to the fountain between my legs to fondle and caress myself to the edge of satisfaction. In and out, my finger drags until it’s not enough and I add another. I feel my tightness stretch to accommodate, hips rising eagerly to accept. Sensually rising and falling, I throb into my palm as I stroke the inner ridge that sings loudest. By some magic, I discover my thumb can still access my clit, and I add this manipulation to the activity.

I begin to feel buoyant with pleasure, gasping with desire. I can feel the tension building to a snapping point. Irrationally, I begin to think somewhere, somehow, Jayson must hear my body calling out to him.

“Come back to me,” I pant. “Ah, yes!”

Even as another voice tells me he’s in bed with someone else—the stabbing agony of that—my hand moves more rapidly between my legs. Creamy, slick wetness coats my fingers and dribbles into my hand. I continue to thrust deeper and deeper. It’s no match for the way he makes me feel, but in my frenzy to find release, I don’t care.

“Jayson, I need you!” I sob.

A sensation like freefalling begins in my pelvis. A shriek of ecstasy erupts. My body begins to quake. Staccato beats of rapture pound through me as I climax almost as hard as I would when I was with him, and I feel my womanhood spill silver rain like a storm cloud finally letting go. When I come back down to earth from the high of the orgasm…

…I’m still alone in my bed…

“
W
ell
, at least I still have my dignity. I’ll take that as a consolation prize, but I refuse to play his fool.”

“Kit, you really, really need to give Jayson a chance to explain himself. Castiel and I talk about everything, and I know he would have mentioned if his brother had someone else on the side. None of this sounds right.” My best friend’s dark brown eyebrows come together in a frown of confusion, and her voice wavers uncertainly. I know she’s trying to convince me, but she doesn’t even sound convinced herself.

“Are you kidding me? Grace, when I confronted him, he looked me in the face and he couldn’t deny it. He was making plans to break up with me so he could be with someone else. And the crazy thing is, I get the impression he’s been with her for a while and she knows about me, but I’m just now finding out about her!” I lower my voice when I realize I’m getting louder and louder. Our shift is minutes away from starting, and the breakroom is full of people enjoying the fireworks.

I finish in a fierce hiss with a thumb jabbed at my chest, “Who am I to get between true love, right? Jayson can have his side piece. I am so over him!” I wipe my hands like I can dust him out of my life. I wish. I get a smattering of applause from a couple of the girls shamelessly playing audience. They have no idea how hard it is to say those words, much less follow through with them.

Grace just shakes her head at me and puts her hands on her hips. My chest heaves as I stare her down. I’m angry, so angry that it doesn’t even seem to register with me that I shouldn’t be taking it out on her, my best friend, but I can’t stand that she insists on defending the creep.

“Well, I think you’re being unnecessarily hard on him, but it’s none of my business. So, you don’t have to jump down my throat about it. Look, I know you’re upset. My only advice is to consider talking things out with him once you get out of your feelings.” Grace resolutely sighs, done with the issue, but her parting statement ticks me off even more.

“Get out of my feelings? Stop it, Grace!” I all but shout. I snatch my work name badge from the breakroom table where we were siting having a pleasant conversation before all this kicked off. Grace casts an incredulous look in my direction. I’m on a roll, I guess. A train barreling ahead, ready to derail. “I am
not
the bad guy here for being genuinely hurt! I am the wronged party. You’re my best friend! You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“This isn’t about sides!” she exclaims. “It’s about right and wrong! You’re wrong to throw away that beautiful relationship all because of a misunderstanding, and I’m telling you that you don’t have the whole story. If we’re such great friends, then why won’t you listen to me?”

The tense conversation screeches to a halt when the doors to the breakroom of Devil in the Details bang open and Hank, our manager, bursts in. He takes one look at us and squints his eyes at me. The lurking coworkers trying to get the scoop suddenly have better things to do and scurry out of the room altogether. That leaves just Hank, Grace and me.

Hank stares us down like he’d much rather see me leave than watch me walk over to that clock and clock in. If it were up to me, I’d leave, too. Only, I’ve got bills on top of bills to pay. I don’t have time for an off day. “Is there a problem, ladies?” he asks.

Under his intense scrutiny, I swallow thickly, overwhelmed. It’s been two weeks since I put Jayson out of my house, out of my life, and I feel more lost than ever. They do say home is where the heart is, which means I’m homeless. No wonder I feel out of sorts.

I look from Hank to Grace with tear-filled eyes, and all I see in my bestie’s face is sympathy and affection, making me feel like more of a bitch for spazzing out on her. I have
got
to get some control of myself before things get any more out of hand. Fighting with my best friend, on the job? This is completely unlike me. “Grace,” I murmur with an apologetic step in her direction.

“We’re cool,” Grace mutters to Hank. She reaches a conciliatory hand over to me and squeezes my shoulder supportively. I don’t mean to be argumentative. Just like I had no intention of going into the first semester in such a depressed daze that I can’t focus on any of my classes. Since Jayson exited my world, everything is falling apart.

Hank lingers by the break room door eyeing us both. “Yeah, uh huh. You’re cool now, but it didn’t sound like that a second ago. Whatever problem you girls are having, have it on your own time. You both know I can’t allow bickering in here. I heard you all the way out on the floor, where we happen to have customers. If corporate hears about this…Grace, I’m surprised at you in particular. And, Kit, I hate to say it, but you’re kind of already in hot water as it is.”

“I’m sorry, Hank. It won’t happen again,” I murmur. I meekly carry my badge over to the clock and swipe in. Hank trudges out of the room.