“I think,” he said, holding up one finger and then resting it in the hollow of her throat, “that the idea is that I would do it in some kind of very hot way; I would do it with a lot of oomph.”
“Well, yes,” she said, putting her arms around him and feeling the fabric of his shirt on her belly. “But I already have my shirt off, so how much more oomph do you want?” And when she kissed him now, it felt different, and she almost saw herself from the outside as a half-naked woman crawling up his body. “The trick is not to fall behind.”
He crisscrossed his arms to grab the bottom of his shirt, and as he tried to pull it off, it got briefly hung up getting over his head.
“Boo,” she booed, cupping her hands in front of her mouth.
He laughed through the shirt, which still clung to his neck. “Don’t boo me when I’m vulnerable.” The shirt came free, and he tossed it on top of hers.
When Laurie was a teenager, she didn’t like having a bigger chest than her friends, and then in her twenties she got to like it, but now that she was about to turn forty, she again wasn’t quite sure. Nick seemed to have no such reservations, and he put one finger under the bra strap on her shoulder and said, “Can I take this off?”
She narrowed her eyes, fluttery just from his finger on the skin of her shoulder. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you?”
He kissed her as he reached behind her back and undid the hooks; she typically tried at this moment not to think about whether men would notice, positively or negatively, that they had perhaps taken off a lot of two-hookers, and she had a four-hooker. But Nick moved to the corner of her mouth when he did the second hook, the other corner when he did the third, and back to the center when he opened the last hook and pulled the bra free. He held it up, pointing at the tiny bow between the cups. “Cute,” he said.
She pulled him close and he threw it over her shoulder, and where it might have landed, she wasn’t quite sure. He tasted like beer, and despite what Ginger had said about beer drinkers, she sort of liked it. But that might have been because it was him, or because it was them, or because it was the beer that he brought over to celebrate their victory. This was the real thing, the big time, the whole shebang about to shebang all over the guest room, and when she stepped back from him for a minute, she put her finger on a round birthmark on his shoulder. “I forgot all about the lucky penny,” she said.
Nick moved his hand down her side, from under her arm toward her hip, and it triggered a memory, rather mortifyingly, of Chris. He would press one finger deeply into the soft side of her until he created a well in her flesh, and then he would smile and say, “I like this,” as if it were the alternative to “I hate this,” or “I can’t believe this.” Nick didn’t say anything. He just trailed his hand around to the front of her waistband, where her jeans buttoned. Into her ear, very softly, he said, “Is helping out a little bit allowed?”
She breathed that it was, and he opened the button, and everything started to melt. She reciprocated by popping open the button over his belly, and then she stepped back again. “Meet me over there,” she said, practically out of breath, pointing to the bed. He nodded. She pushed her jeans and her underwear down, felt that brief moment of fresh air and nerves, balled her clothes up and put them on the chair, wishing she’d thought to match all her underthings. But he didn’t seem too concerned about it, given that by the time she got into bed and pulled the sheet up loosely over her legs, he was only a couple of steps behind her, and then there was nothing between them at all.
He smiled. “I forgot you pull the sheet up.”
“I am who I am,” she said, propping herself up on her elbow. “Speaking of which, I’m not on the pill. I went off it after Chris. I never liked it. And I probably wouldn’t get pregnant anyway at this point, but that’s probably not a ‘probably’ we should rely on.”
“I got you,” he said. He sat up a little and spotted his wallet where he’d left it on the nightstand. He leaned over so far to get it that half of his bare ass came out from under the sheet. “I’m sure this is very alluring,” he said as he grabbed a clutch of three condoms from his wallet.
“When did you put those in there?” she asked warily. “Tell me it wasn’t, like, 1998.”
“It was today, smart-ass,” he told her as he turned back to her.
She laughed. “Okay, I apologize for impugning your extremely fresh condoms. And I admire your optimism.”