The Breakaway(3)

Sebastian rolled his eyes a little. “If I kill you and cut you into pieces I’m not going to keep the evidence in my apartment.”

“You might,” Abby said, shrugging. “Some serial killers take souvenirs.”

He stared at her for a moment. Abby waited to see if she’d freaked him out, but all he did was grin and shake his head.

“I can tell you’re a romantic.”

“Safety first,” said Abby. She put her hands on his shoulders, pulling him close, standing on her tiptoes to kiss him.

They kissed on the street while they waited, then they continued kissing in the backseat of the Uber, and they barely stopped kissing after the car pulled up to the address he’d given and he took her hand again and led her down three steps and into his apartment. Abby had a blurred impression of a small kitchen, a short hallway with a high-end-looking bicycle hanging on the wall. At the end of the hallway, there was a bedroom so small that the queen-size bed filled every inch of the space. There was a thin-looking comforter on the bed—black on one side, gray on the other—and four pillows in white pillowcases, piled at its head.

Abby flung herself onto the bed, giggling, still barely believing that this was happening, that she was doing this. Sebastian lit a few candles on the ledge of his windowsill and lay down on his side, facing her. He slipped his hands up the back of her tee shirt, and Abby’s brain went quiet. He pressed her back against the pillows and kissed her for long, dizzying moments, licking her lips and sucking her tongue and nibbling at her neck as he stroked his thumbs against her cheeks and ran his fingers through her hair. He smelled incredible. His hair was so soft as Abby touched it, then tugged it. His deep voice sounded as lovely as she’d thought it would as he groaned and murmured compliments against her skin, and his body felt so good, so unbelievably, outrageously good, pressed against her.

When she couldn’t wait any longer, she helped him pull off his shirt. She rubbed her hands over his shoulders, his chest, admiring him in the candlelight. She asked, “Can I?” and waited for his nod before unbuttoning his pants and helping him work them off, until he was just in a pair of stretchy gray boxer briefs, and Abby was just in her panties. She thought he’d take off his underpants, or maybe hers. Instead, he pressed the length of his body against hers, and took both of her wrists in his hand, pinning them over her head, making a noise that was almost a growl against her neck.

“Oh, God,” Abby breathed, flushed and trembling all over, so aroused that the throbbing between her legs was almost an ache. She lifted her hips, trying to press herself into him, but every time she tried to move things along, to reach down and touch him, to try to take off her underpants, or his, he would hold her wrists down again. Gently but firmly, leaving no doubt as to who was in charge. “Please,” Abby moaned, thrusting her hips, pressing herself against him shamelessly. “Oh, God, please, please, please…”

She hadn’t been to bed with too many guys, and usually, during sex, it was hard to get out of her own head. Abby was curvy. Rubenesque if you liked your euphemisms, obese if you were a doctor, fat, which was what Abby called herself; a word she’d forced herself to use, over and over and over, until all the sting had been leached away and it no longer felt like a slap. She was soft and warm and yielding. She was strong and she was healthy, no matter what the bullshit BMI charts said. And, the world being what it was, she knew that there were more important things to change than her body. But even so.

In college, there’d been a guy named Chris, who had definitely not been her boyfriend, nor even a friend with benefits. He’d been no kind of friend at all—just a guy who’d been willing to sleep with her. Chris would call her after midnight and invite her over, or show up at her room at two in the morning and creep out of her dorm before the sun came up, so that no one would ever see them together. It had left a mark. In the post-Chris era, when Abby went to bed with someone new she would keep her clothes on for as long as she could. She’d keep blankets or, better, if there was one handy, a pillow over her midsection, and she preferred to make love in the dark. She worried about how she smelled, how she sounded, how her body felt, how it looked. It was almost impossible for her to stop thinking about all of that, to be, as her yoga teacher said, present in the moment.

But that night was different. Maybe it was the booze, and maybe it was being in a different city, with a stranger she’d never see again, but Abby felt half out of her mind with desire, her brain a humming white blank. She wasn’t thinking about the curve of her belly or the cellulite on her thighs or how her breasts looked different without the benefit of industrial-strength underwire. All she could think was how badly she needed Sebastian to touch her, and when he’d finally, finally, slipped his thumb under the leg band of her panties and brought it up, unerringly, exactly where she needed to feel it, she’d let out a yelp that was loud enough to be shocking.

“Shh,” he said against her neck, his thumb flicking, teasing, rubbing firmly, then lightly, circling her clitoris, then descending down again to trace her lips. “Pretty thing.”

Abby felt her eyes fill with tears, even as her hips arched off the bed. Pretty thing. She felt like she could count the times a man had made her feel pretty, or dainty, or cared for and small on one hand, and still have fingers left over.

Sebastian pulled off her panties and put one warm hand on each of her legs, easing them apart, and then he rested his head on the inside of her right thigh and breathed on her, warm and steady, one long exhalation. When she felt the first brush of his tongue, Abby forgot that she knew words, and when he slipped his fingers inside of her, she forgot to breathe. “How are you so good at this,” she gasped at one point, and felt, as much as heard, Sebastian’s amused hum in response. Abby forgot to worry about how she tasted or how long she was taking or anything, because he seemed delighted to be right where he was, doing just what he was doing. He made her come that way, and then he produced a condom from somewhere and rolled it on, kneeling in front of her, looking unreal in the candlelight, like he’d been carved instead of born.