Deep End(96)

He presses it closed with a thumb under my chin. “I said no,” he reminds me, mild, almost bored, but tilts my face upward, like it’s something beautiful he wants to memorize, and continues stroking, his rhythm sustained.

“This is nice,” he says, voice raspy and focused. Cheeks flushed, a dull red. Hair dark, haloed by the ceiling lamp. The shift of muscles and veins and ink on his strong forearm. “It’s like when I’m home, masturbating, thinking about you. Isn’t it?” His thumb sweeps over my cheekbone. “Which is every time. ”

His hand slows down, like he wants to pace himself, but speeds again when I wet my lips.

“That okay with you? The filthy stuff I think about doing to you while I make myself come?”

I nod. The movement has my mouth brush against the underside of his cock, and his breath hitches sharply.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind. Being my precious toy. My girl. Mine to use. Mine to fuck. Mine to destroy and to fix.”

Another eager, wholehearted nod. It’s all I want. For him to tell me what to do, and to take care of me.

“Christ. I can’t believe you fucking exist, Scarlett.” His thumb slides into the corner of my mouth, prying it open, and I offer no resistance. When the head of his cock shoves inside, heavy on my tongue, he’s already coming. His eyes stay open, even as his entire body shudders and a deep grunt explodes out of his chest.

I swallow what I can. What’s left, I lick off his fingers. “Perfect,” he repeats over and over, kissing my face, eyelids, mouth. The praise feels as good as the orgasms did.





CHAPTER 50


IN MID-DECEMBER, THE SWIM TEAM LEAVES FOR A SWANKY ALL-expenses-paid training trip to Hawaii. Diving stays behind, and recriminating words like second-class citizens, and redheaded step-child are thrown about.

“Less bitching at me, and more taking it up with the athletics department, okay?” Coach Sima mumbles. “And Ross?”

“Yeah?”

“You are, in fact, redheaded.”

By the time Lukas returns, I’m already in St. Louis.

Hope you manage to get to Stockholm all right, I type—then delete it, because . . . I don’t know why. But the following day, I see three dots next to his name, and it occurs to me that maybe I’m not alone, in all this not knowing.

“Are you crying?” Barb asks when she picks me up at the airport, watching me roll on the floor as Pipsqueak licks my face. Being reunited with her heals my wonky shoulder, my congenital inability to eat spaghetti without a spoon, my fifth-grade cystic acne.

“Shut up,” I tell Barb. “It’s just . . .”

“What? ”

I shake my head, burying my nose in Pip’s fur. She badly needs a bath. “She’s so beautiful.”

“Can’t deny that. I would, however, like to point out that I did not receive a hug, or even a half-assed hand wave.”

I lift my eyes to hers, and my chest squeezes a little bit tighter. It’s good to be home. “I dunno, Barb. You’re just not as cute.”

“What every woman wants to hear from her adult daughter.” She hands me the leash and points at the exit. “Let’s go. Gotta hit Schnucks before the carnivorous amoeboid alien gets there in all its cosmic horror.”

“The what?”

“Holiday grocery crowd, Scar.”

Christmas is quiet and lazy, good food and movies and naps, just the three of us, just the way I like it. Barb is, miraculously, not on call. Pip snores softly and farts loudly. I’m full and happy and maybe a little reckless, because I snap a picture of the holiday spread and send it to Lukas with the caption Fika?

The reply is, as usual, instantaneous. That’s a meal.

SCARLETT: How do you even know that?

LUKAS: No coffee in sight.

I add a Pac-12 mug to the side. Better?

LUKAS: Still a meal. With an empty mug next to it.

SCARLETT: Are you the fika police?

LUKAS: Unlike you, I speak Swedish.

SCARLETT: I’m tired of this gatekeeping.

Two minutes later, my email pings with a message. Someone gifted me a yearly premium subscription to Duolingo. Lukas must not know my middle name, because he went with Scarlett Troll Vandermeer.

Most likely, he’s perfectly aware that it’s Ann.

SCARLETT: The passive aggression!!!

LUKAS: Nothing passive about it .

I want to ask him how he’s doing. If he’s freezing his ass off. How many hours—minutes, milliseconds—of sunlight he gets. But my bravery runneth dry, and the not knowing is back with a vengeance, so I download the damn app and begin my Swedish journey.

In the following days, though, Lukas starts sending me pictures.

Jan, cross-country skiing, smiling broadly at the camera.

His niece and nephews, baking with a striking blond woman.

A tree branch crystallized in ice.

The most beautiful lake I’ve ever seen, surrounded by snow-covered trees that remind me of the ink on Lukas’s arm.

I reply with snippets of my own time at home—the Arch in downtown St. Louis; the diving well where I used to train; Pip rolling over, tongue out; the mischievous grin on the face of Cynthia, our elderly neighbor who came over for tea and slipped an inch of whiskey into our mugs.

With anyone else, I’d feel self-conscious about the small banality of my life, afraid of letting slip how uninteresting I am. But my sexual relationship with Lukas is so fundamentally based on brutal honesty about our wants and needs, it bleeds into every aspect of our interactions. Second-guessing my worth hardly ever occurs to me.