The Reluctant Nude (14 page)

“Oh, yes.” He lowered his body, braced a hand on either side of her ribs and gave her what she wanted. Her legs wrapped around his waist and he felt her tighten as gliding turned to pounding. The scent of their bodies, the slap of his hips on the backs of her soft thighs—it was a drug invading his bloodstream. Eight years since he’d last been like this with anyone yet he couldn’t imagine being any other way, now.

Fallon gasped. The fingers not touching her clit raked at his skin, frantic. She unraveled before him.

“Good…”

“More.”

He increased the length of his thrusts, leaving her warmth only to plunge deep, right to the base, again and again. As Max’s pleasure grew, reality slipped further and further away. He heard his own moans as if they belonged to some other man, some beast.

When Fallon came her body held him, tight and possessive, and a voice like an angel ascending unfurled from her lungs. If it hadn’t been for the rubber dulling the sensation, Max would have joined her—would have beaten her to the punch. As her body stilled and her cry died away he leaned back again, thrusting hard. His cock hurt, desperate for release, frustrated by the condom. He pulled out, stripped it off and stroked himself with a tight fist, frenetic with need.

Fallon whispered his name again and he saw through half-lidded eyes the hungry way she watched him. He came undone.

Lost in the sounds of his pleasure and the waves of ecstasy ripping through him, he released in hot slashes across her soft belly. He saw her fingers touch his come, rubbing it against her skin in a small circle as he gave her more. When the spasms finally subsided, Max felt close to fainting.

He collapsed beside her, wrapping them together into a tangle of limp limbs. For a long time he was aware of nothing apart from their two hearts beating.

As the moments became minutes, he reclaimed his sanity. Above them the sky had grown dark. Between them the atmosphere was warm and moist and deeply, achingly familiar.

“I have to tell you something,” Fallon said at length in a dreamy voice, lips moving against his temple.

“Oh yes?” He traced her spine with his fingertips.

“I looked through your sketchbook a couple weeks ago. At those drawings. The ones I didn’t pose for,” she said pointedly.

He smiled, hoping she was about to turn disapproving on him again. “Oh?”

“They’re…they’re quite beautiful.”

“Indeed? I wondered if perhaps you were about to call me a pervert.”

“Nah. Not now. You’ve grown on me.”

“Then I shall refrain from calling
you
a snoop.” He cleared his throat, trying to coax himself back to lucidity. “Dear God.”

“Good?”

He grinned, blinking up at the evening’s first stars. “I can’t tell you how good.”

“Welcome back.”

“Back among the common fornicators,” he said in an unctuous voice and pulled her closer. “I so often call you an angel, but really you are a temptress. Delilah.”

She smirked. “No one’s ever accused me of corrupting them before.”

He grinned and made a luxurious, happy sound before burying his face against her neck.

Fallon pulled away a few minutes later, extracting herself from his sweaty arms and legs and the comforter, the octopus of sexual conquest. “I need a glass of water,” she said quietly and let him flop over in satisfied delirium. Max fell asleep immediately.

Fallon found a mug in the near-dark of the kitchen and filled it. She wandered to the rear windows and stared out over the back lawn, tall grass bathed in the weak, early moonlight. The broken statues in the garden glowed like opal, eerie if not for their familiarity. It was so quiet she could hear Max’s deep breathing above her, the padding of the cat’s feet as it made its evening rounds, doing whatever it was it did when the humans were preoccupied.

She refilled the cup and crept back up the steps. For a long time she stood beside the bed, gazing down at Max’s body beneath the skylight, curled into an S.
S for satisfied.
His ribs expanded and released in lazy intervals. Fallon’s eyes took in all this evidence—proof, finally, that she was a part of this club. The Society of the Sexually Successful. It bothered her that it had taken her so long to find her membership card.

What was the definition of a fetish, she wondered? An object—a
something
—that made sexual excitement or gratification possible. Something like that. She swallowed, anxious Max might be her
something
. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe she was fixed, now. Maybe she could go back home in another month and join the rest of the world in its glorious orgasmic pursuits. Or could this man be her elusive, singular
something
?

Lying before her could be the key that unlocked all that missing pleasure. Her own body tightened and warmed, remembering the visual—watching Max getting hotter, watching his face transform as he drove closer and closer toward release. She’d feasted on his strong body, those muscles clenched, voice a harsh rasp, uttering exotic words she didn’t understand but thrilled to hear.

Max tensed and then relaxed atop the bedclothes, adrift in some dream or other. She studied his shoulder and back, his tattoos. She wished she could stamp him with some permanent brand of ownership. She wished she could turn him over and find the diagrammatical outline of his heart etched across his chest, with her name in the center as its tiny caption.

She wished she’d stop thinking things like this.

“I’m going to knit you a scarf,” Fallon announced from her seat in the bay window the next morning as Max came downstairs, freshly bathed and dressed. She took him in again—hers, somehow.

“Are you?” He put the kettle on to boil.

“Yup. I just found an ad in the paper. There’s a woman in town who sells yarn and needles out of her home. It’ll be cold soon. And it’ll give me something to do all day aside from crosswords.”

He nodded. “I would very much like you to knit me a scarf. I will make sure the cat does not destroy it, like it did my old one. My
mémère—
my grandmother—made that one. I was very sad when it was ruined. You will make me one just as good, I’m sure.”

“Well, I don’t know if I can compete with anybody’s grandma. But what colors would you like? I can only do solid or stripes—no patterns.”

He thought for a moment, filling the French press. “Yellow and black. Like a bee.
Une écharpe abeille
.
Very good.” He made a zuzzing noise with his lips and planted a kiss on her cheek as he passed by.

Fallon smiled, delighted and surprised by this playfulness. “You got it. I’ll start tomorrow.”

As the conversation died away, she noticed there was something different about Max this morning. He was smiling but there was a strange energy to him, an underlying baseline of strain and anxiety. Fallon worried it was because of the sex. She suddenly wished she hadn’t brought up the scarf, wondering for a moment if she was being too familiar, too much of an infatuated schoolgirl. She wondered for the first time what
The Rules
might make of her.

Max wheeled the marble to the center of the floor and gathered his tools. Then, as if reading her troublesome thoughts, he came over and sat beside her.

“I am having a very hard time concentrating,” he said, resting his chin on her shoulder.

“Oh?”

She felt him nod.

“Because of the sex?”

Another nod.

She bit her lip for a moment, nervous. “Was it a mistake, do you think?”

“How do you define ‘mistake’?”

“Do you wish we hadn’t done it?”

He laughed, sitting up straight. “That is the best thing I’ve done in years. But I think we need to establish some ground rules, yes? Otherwise, I won’t be able to think about anything else.”

Fallon glowed a little inside, released the fear and tension knotting her stomach. “What kind of ground rules?”

“We need rules so that I don’t forsake this commission in favor of attacking you every hour of every day.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad,” Fallon said.

“Here is what I think. I think that from the time we finish coffee in the morning until four o’clock each afternoon, we cannot touch. No flirting, no kissing. Less wine and more dry, political discussions over lunch. Very sad discussions about genocide and climate change. Very unsexy things like that.”

“Okay. I can do that.”

He nodded. “Good.”

Max stood and she asked, “What happens after four o’clock?”

He turned to fix her with a disapproving glare. “You are clouding up my mind,” he said, hands gesturing to illustrate their exasperation.

“We haven’t even
started
drinking our coffees yet.”

He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “You are right, that’s true.” He pulled her to her feet and turned her by the shoulders, pushing her back against the front door. A strong hand locked her thigh against his hip and he pressed tight against her, already hard. He caught her bottom lip between his and suckled it for a few moments. “We will do lots of things at four o’clock,” he said finally.

“Like what?”

He glanced away for a few seconds, thinking. “We will sit face to face on my bed with our legs wrapped around each other, and I will rock you in my lap until you come on my cock,” he said casually. He released her thigh and stepped away from her.

Fallon swallowed as she watched him walk back to the stove. Four o’clock couldn’t come fast enough.

Chapter Ten

Sex. Sex sex sex.

That was all Fallon could focus on or remember in the following two weeks. Somewhere in her periphery a statue was taking shape, meals were being cooked and eaten, a yellow and black scarf was growing longer and longer between her fingers. Sun was shining or wind was howling or the moon was rising or falling. Beach grass and birch trees were changing color, she suspected, but the only thing she was aware of was Max: sitting beside her, standing across the studio from her, lying beneath her back in a bathtub by the fire, buried deep inside her body in his bed once the sun went down.

Addict,
she thought to herself accusingly, watching him from across a display of pumpkins in the co-op market one afternoon, three days before Halloween. She ran her hand over a particularly perfect one and caught his eye.

“Yes?” he asked.

“I bet you’re very good at carving jack-o-lanterns.” She held it up to show him.

He raised his eyebrows. “It’s not my usual medium. But I can give it a try.”

Fallon smiled and hugged it to her chest.

How many nights since she’d slept in her own cottage? Twenty, perhaps. She was basically paying thirty bucks a day for a very big closet and washer-dryer access. Somewhere in her little rented fridge a carton of cream had probably long since curdled.

“I’m almost done,” Max said, tossing a net bag of garlic into his basket.

How dangerously easy it had become to pretend all this house they were playing was real. Fallon paid for her pumpkin and preceded Max out the door of the market, welcomed by the cool autumn air.

“What’s for dinner?” she asked as the door jingled shut behind her. When Max didn’t reply, she turned to find him standing stock-still, a paper bag in each hand, eyes glued across the street on a curvy woman leaning into her car, rummaging for something.

“Max?” Fallon felt a fluttering of familiar, hateful emotion. “Max.”

His eyes broke away. “Sorry.”

Fallon frowned against her better judgment and hugged the pumpkin against her middle. “See something you like?”

“Hmm?” Max looked at her, then back to the curvy woman and her car. The woman finished her arrangements and slammed the door. She turned to cross the road and she was easily eight months pregnant. She smiled politely as she passed Max and Fallon and disappeared into the co-op.

“Oh,” Fallon said stupidly.

Max smiled, understanding. “Did you just think what I think you did?”

“I didn’t think anything.”

“You thought I was panting over some other woman, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t realize you were only ogling her insides,” she admitted. “Do you have some kind of pregnancy obsession too?”

“Obsession? No.” He smiled sideways at her, still looking triumphant. He set the bags of groceries on the grass and stepped behind her to wrap his arms around her waist. He fanned his fingers and placed his hands over hers on either side of the pumpkin. Her heart beat fast, and she felt both embarrassed and proud at this open display of affection. She hoped no one could see. She hoped the entire
world
could see.

“What are you thinking?” she murmured, turning her face to his.

“I’m thinking about how you might feel,” he said simply. He released her after a couple of seconds, picked the bags back up and began the walk to the studio.

Fallon followed, shocked. She had no clue whether to take his strange proclamation personally or chalk it up to his anatomical fixations. It sobered her.

She caught up and flanked him. “You’re so weird.” This time the observation was largely a fond one.

“Probably. I have learned not to ask strangers if I may touch their bellies.”

“Is it the baby or the biology?”

“It’s the miracle of it, I think. And the miracle of something so normal.”

Fallon thought about it—childbirth—as something simultaneously miraculous and mundane. “I guess it
is
normal.”

“You’re always telling me I am weird,” Max said, staring off into the distance. “And you’re right. Something as normal as a family… Sometimes I wonder if I am too weird to ever have such a thing.” He looked over at her, and his eyes transmitted the most intimate warmth and vulnerability and sincerity she thought she’d ever felt.

She tried to picture Max with a toddler and was surprised to find she could. The idea made her feel oddly and acutely immature.

“I’m sure you could,” she said. “Even if you
are
weird, I mean, plenty of people weirder than you have marriages and kids. You’re as qualified as anyone else.”

“Thank you. That compliment means a lot to me. I began to worry a few years ago, after all the chaos subsided, if I had forfeited my chances at ever having a regular kind of life. Sometimes now I think maybe not.”

“Nah. You can have as boring and normal a life as you want.”

“Thank you.”

“You’d probably have to cut back on your art, though,” Fallon offered.

“Yes, I would imagine so. But I have a suspicion that if I ever found myself creating and cultivating some new life with some remarkable woman one day, I would feel quite fulfilled indeed. I do not think I would miss all of my selfish freedom very much.”

“No, maybe not.”

“But it is all beside the point. Finding the remarkable woman is the problem.” He gave Fallon a look so poignant that she chose to write it off as sarcasm. “I would have to find a woman who could put up with all of my weirdness.”

She nodded. “Yeah. That’s a liability, I suppose.”

“And we are having chicken
fricot
for dinner, since you asked.”

There was a twisting in her chest, as if unseen hands were wringing her heart. Not a good feeling. As unlikely a conclusion as it seemed, Fallon decided then that Max would make as good a parent as she would make a lousy one. Bingo, the comedown. The inevitable tree that snagged her kite from its thoughtless, happy drifting.

Fallon fixed her eyes on the long stretch of gravel as they turned off the main road. Max stopped at his mailbox and pulled out a few envelopes and circulars. So utterly normal, for an instant.

As they returned to the studio and Max flipped on the lights, the unfinished statue greeted him like a resounding accusation. He set the mail and groceries on the counter while Fallon arranged her pumpkin in the bay window. He wondered if she had any clue how far he’d fallen behind their schedule.

Next week it would be November. Soon after, December, and at this glacial rate that statue would still be weeks from completion, even then. He glanced fearfully from Fallon to the marble and back again. She smiled at him from across the studio. She wouldn’t be smiling like that if she knew how extravagantly he was failing her.

Each chip, bringing them closer to the end of this affair. Each sliver ticking away the moments until this statue was delivered into the hands of some horrible man that neither of them could stand to speak of. Each knock of a hammer against a chisel bringing closer to fruition some terrible, mysterious compromise Fallon was making for some unknown reward. All those little chips, grains of sand in an hourglass, draining slower and slower as Max stretched out these moments before the inevitable end arrived. He didn’t mean to. He didn’t
want
to. He didn’t want to fail her but neither did he want to succeed.

“Can I help with anything?” Fallon asked, approaching the counter. Max looked down to find he’d been standing motionless before the grocery bags for over a minute.

“No, thank you. I’m just trying to remember this recipe.”

She passed him and uncorked a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. There was a strain in her too. Fainter than his but there, nevertheless. Wine and sex—medication to help them forget these unspoken worries until the sun rose again.

Fallon sat on the counter and watched Max’s hands work as he prepared dinner. She fixated on them. Such wondrous things, strong and scarred and so talented it was unnerving. Those hands could render flesh so real it boggled the mind. They could make Fallon feel things her own hands were only just beginning to master. And they could save her childhood home. So goddamned powerful.

“You should get your hands insured by Lloyd’s of London.”

Max glanced up from the cutting board. “Like Keith Richards?”

“Ha—I hadn’t heard that. Yeah. Like Fred Astaire’s legs, I was thinking.” She sipped her wine.

Max shook his head and went back to chopping onions. “No amount of money would make life worth living if I could not use my hands.”

“That’s a bit melodramatic.”

“Well, it’s quite true. Maybe that’s why I have these thoughts about a family, sometimes. To fix my troublesome priorities.”

“A baby never fixed anybody.” A second too late, Fallon realized how callous her tone was.

Max held her eyes for a moment then began peeling garlic, seeming deflated.

“Sorry. I don’t mean you shouldn’t want those things.” Although she wished he didn’t.

“I know what you meant. I’m sorry I brought it up. We’re trying to have an illicit affair, and I’m ruining it with all this talk about families… I miss my family. Having you here these last few weeks is the closest I’ve been to anything resembling that in a long, long time. Nothing personal,” he added to the cat, perched on the fridge. “It makes me sentimental.”

Fallon nodded.

“And it makes you uneasy,” he said.

Fallon hopped off the counter before he could begin to question her. She gathered utensils and napkins and set the table, leaving Max to his sentimentality and vegetables.

She started a fire and drew a bath while dinner cooked, and Max joined her. As she melted into him in the warm water, her back against his chest and her wet hair draped over his shoulder, she wondered if this—if
they
—could ever work. That way. The two least qualified people she knew in some woeful attempt at domestic functionality. She looked into the window at their reflection, tricked for a moment by the firelight that it wasn’t the worst idea in the world.

Beneath her, Max grew hard. Whatever melancholy had been visiting him faded, replaced by lust. She reached down to stroke his erection where it stood between her legs. He made seductive noises behind her ear and his hips tensed against her backside.

“You’re taking away my sanity,” he moaned into her temple. Before she could reply he slipped her hand from him and bade her to stand. “Dinner will burn.”

“Let it.”

“Up with you, temptress.”

She complied, smiling to herself as she toweled her hair.

“You never smiled like that when we first met,” Max said, studying her.

“No, probably not.”

“I like the person that you’ve become. And I liked you before, back when you still hated me.”

“I never
hated
you,” she corrected. “You just take a lot of getting used to.”

“And you take a lot of work, to break through all that crust.” He squinted an eye at her and mimed a hammer and chisel motion with his hands. “Chink, chink, chink. And just look what’s underneath.”

She surveyed his dripping body for a moment before handing him the towel.

As he dried himself he asked, “Is it true…when you said you’ve never loved anyone?”

She nodded. “That’s true. Not romantically, at least.”

“Me neither.” He secured the towel around his waist. “Does that make us discerning or pitiful, do you think?”

“I always thought of myself as allergic.” Fallon smiled at him before turning away to dress.

They ate in near-silence and as Fallon washed the dishes Max stoked the fire. Above them, beyond all the glass, the night was clear and inky-black and pulsing with stars.

She felt strong arms wrap around her waist as she stared skyward.

“There’s a better view from the bed,” he whispered and kissed her neck.

“I’ll bet there is.”

He took her hand and led her up the steps, fourteen of them. She’d learned each by heart, a countdown to her favorite moment of these recent days.

Max tugged her down onto the covers and into his arms. His kisses were deep and slow and romantic but deliciously obscene. Sometimes his kissing felt as explicit to her as penetration. She yanked his T-shirt up as he unzipped her jeans, patience overpowered by excitement. She kicked her pants off her ankles and he pulled her down to him.

“I want to know your fantasies,” he said between kisses.

She tensed. “My fantasies?”

“I want to make them real with you. I want to please you.”

That unrelenting dream flashed across Fallon’s consciousness. “You already please me. Obviously. I’m quite happy.”

He moved to straddle her. The way he braced his arms made his shoulder blades jut up sharply, an animal about to pounce. “Tell me what’s in there,” he breathed, brushing his lips against her forehead.

“You go first.” She touched her fingertips to his ribs, nervous for what he might say.

“You will shush me because it will be too sincere for you to hear. You’ll think I’m being too familiar. And it will make you uncomfortable.”

“Tell me anyway,” she said, sick to death of her own predictable worries.

He closed his eyes, looking thoughtful. “I fantasize that you stay here, after the sculpture is done.”

She shifted. “You’re right. That does make me uncomfortable.”

His dark eyes opened. “There’s more, though. There are dirtier parts, if you want to hear those.”

“Yes, tell me those.”

“I fantasize that you stay,” he said, tucking his forearms tighter against her. “And every night after it’s dark, I climb those stairs with you and crawl into this bed and I make you moan for me. Right here. And when it’s summer, we walk to the beach at dusk with a blanket and I lay you down, and make you come against my tongue. Until the only things I can smell are you and the ocean.” He smiled down at her.

“That’s pretty good,” she admitted. “Can I ask you something?”

“Always.”

“How can you tell so much about me? Like how you know what’ll make me uncomfortable. All the little things you just
know
? Sometimes it feels like you’re reading my mind.”