Sweet and Sexy Erotica
"Stopover," a Vanilla Sex Story by Francesca Meade
Ruby takes the Amtrak to New York with the express purpose of sleeping with Ian, though she doesn't admit it until New Rochelle, when she pulls out her cell phone and dials.
"I'm in town," she says, when he picks up. She can hear the rustle and hum of his office in the background, the quick sterile chatter of Midtown. "Can I see you?"
"Um, yeah," Ian says quickly. He sounds surprised: Ruby is never the one who calls.
"When?"
"Tonight?"
Ian hesitates. "I have a thing tonight."
"I broke up with Matt."
"Oh." It hangs there for a moment, heavy and pendulous, the new information clicking into place like the times on the arrival board at Penn Station. Ruby is patient. She imagines him swallowing, the movement of his Adam's apple beneath the vellum skin of his throat. Lately he's been sending her things: a book of matches from the Ritz Carlton, a small gray stone from Peru. Ruby waits. "Okay," he says. "Let me—I can probably cancel it."
"Yeah?"
"Ruby," he says after a moment, and there's a timbre in his voice like he thinks she's going to destroy him. "Yeah."
*
Ruby and Ian met close to ten years ago at a summer camp in the Berkshires, just outside the arty tourist town where she grew up. He coached soccer and voice—an intriguing combination, Ruby always thought—and was twenty-two then, thin and vaguely ropy beneath his fraying t-shirt. Ruby was sixteen. She babysat the camp director's infant and spent her afternoons bored and restless, sitting on a bench at the edge of the athletics field. She rocked the stroller back and forth with one bare foot while she read.
"Hey," he said finally, one humid morning in July, digging his water bottle from beneath the jumble of backpacks and tennis racquets after practice with the eight-year-olds. He was sweaty and handsome, the hair on his arms bleached honey in the light. He'd been looking at Ruby for the better part of a week, quick little glances out of the corner of his eye. She'd watched him.
"Hey," she said.
And that was that.
He muttered jokes in her ear during morning ceremony, brought her ice cream sandwiches from the mess after lunch; during his free period he'd tag along while she walked the baby down to the docks, perspiration glistening on the back of his neck. They didn't touch. They talked about books and their families, the bitchy girl counselors and Van Morrison and the politics of Capture the Flag, and when the camp director took her aside to make sure all it was was talking, the talk took on a secret quality that made it feel urgent and grave.
"She thinks I'm a little in love with you," Ruby reported back that evening (storm coming in, his campers were watching a movie at the rec), and for a second Ian looked so panicked she laughed. "Relax," she told him. There was something about Ian that seemed young to Ruby, some part of him that was easy to tease. "Obviously, I told her it was the other way around."
"What? You didn't—"
"No. I didn't," she said, but his eyes were still so wide and his hair was falling out of that stubby little tail he wore it in and it suddenly occurred to her to put the word powerful to the feeling she had when he was around. "Should I have?"
"Ruby," he said, and she kissed him in the middle of the gravel path just to see what it would feel like, standing on her tiptoes in her Birks. He tasted like groundwater and grass. Ian blinked like he'd just seen an oncoming train, too late to do anything but brace for the impact. He pulled her around the side of the barn. "Shit," he said softly, her back thudding against the shingles. His long fingers cupped her skull like a bird's nest. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah." She smiled a little. The sky was the blue-black of bruises, clouds about to break. The air was always slightly damp here, like the dew never dried in the morning: moisture seeped up through the soil, settled slick and heavy on her skin. "I'm good."
"Okay. Okay." He kissed further into her mouth, his tongue wet and slippery and eager. His breath came fast. She was wearing one of those peasant skirts she thought were such a good idea back then and his fingers made fists in the gauzy fabric, knuckles scraping over the curve of her ass. His hands opened and closed. Ruby reached inside his t-shirt, felt his heart skitter quick like a squirrel inside his ribs.
"Ruby," he said again, swallowing audibly. His voice sounded ragged, a little afraid. He pushed his hips at her, restless, like he couldn't help it. He was warm and hard against her belly. "Fuck. I'm sorry, I—fuck."
She wasn't a virgin. She wondered if he thought she was. "Hey." She reached down and slipped two fingers in his waistband, rasping over the dark trail of hair below his navel. Ian jumped. Ruby kissed him. "Easy."
"Yeah." Ian nodded, breathed. His palms mapped the rising of her rib cage, creeping higher, tracing the underwire of her bra beneath her tank top and glancing over her nipples with the pads of his thumbs. Ruby gasped. She stood on her tiptoes for a moment, grinding herself against him, and she was sliding her back down the wall of the barn with her hand on the bulge in his shorts when he stopped her.
"Ruby," he said, and she thought of the baseball game she'd watched the kids play this morning: three strikes and you're out. "I can't—you need to find somebody your own age."
She looked up at him for a minute, his chest moving violently, his pupils blown out in the dark. She knew she could convince him. She thought he probably wanted her to. His cock twitched against her palm, heavy. Ruby considered.
"Look who's talking," was all she said.
They pulled themselves together. Ruby drove home. In the end, it didn't rain.
*
A decade later and it's August again, hot, the whole city gone slightly rancid. Ruby's dress sticks to the backs of her thighs. He's standing outside his office when she gets there, expensive tie loosened and shirtsleeves rolled up. He is thirty-one years old. "Hey, stranger," she says cheerfully, heels clicking on the sidewalk. It's been six months since she's seen him. He took her to lunch last time he was in Boston: lobsters in February, butter greasy on their fingers, lips closed tight to kiss goodbye.
"Hey yourself." He nods at her sunglasses, which are plastic and huge. "Can you take those off?"
"Why?"
"Just take them off for a second," and she does, and he grins. "Hi."
"Hi."
They walk all the way down Broadway, sun glaring mirror-bright off the skyscrapers. Their pinkies brush. "Do you want to talk about it?" he asks, somewhere in the west thirties, and Ruby shakes her head. She dated Matt for seven years, a high-school sweetheart with uncommon staying power. She doesn't want for this to be about Matt.
They go to a bar in the meatpacking district, glossy dark hightops and exposed brick, aggressively air-conditioned. Goosebumps bloom up and down her thighs. Ian looks at her frankly, shakes his head, laughs a little. There are creases near his eyes she's never seen before. "What?" she asks, and smiles.
"What," he repeats. "You."
"What about me?"
Ian just shrugs. He tells her about work, a couple of lighthearted stories from his office—he's in PR, which is not the career she would have picked for him, but she thinks he must be good at it. Ruby is a photographer, art and some weddings, though she's got a meeting downtown tomorrow about some magazine work. "Don't you usually figure that stuff out by e-mail?" Ian asks, but the waitress cuts him off with their cocktails, and he doesn't bring it up again.
They order a couple of burgers and drink vodka with soda and limes, Ruby's lips stinging pleasantly, swollen and red. "You ready?" she asks, once he's signed the credit card slip. Ian raises his eyebrows. As they weave through the crowd toward the exit, her fingertips graze against his.
Outside, the night stretches in front of them, black and neon, vaguely dangerous. It smells like cigarettes and heat. “Well,” she says, when they get to the subway. A cab honks. The sidewalk glitters like something has detonated, a millions shards of glass.
Ian shrugs his messenger bag to his other shoulder, shifts his weight. "Ruby," he says. He's a lot taller than she is and he bends close enough that she can feel his breath on her bare neck, damp and warm. "What are you actually doing here?"
Ruby straightens, raises her chin. "You tell me," she says.
*
In the back of her mind, she's always known she could have him, were she willing to log the miles.
Well. Here she is.
*
His place is in Chelsea, a third-story walkup, walls a dark rusty color and a Modigliani print above the couch. His window overlooks a Chinese restaurant winking yellow light across the floor. It seems bizarre she's never been here, like there are still some parts of Ian that are secret after all these years, and it occurs to her for the first time that he might have a girlfriend. Ruby doesn't ask.
"You thirsty?"
She nods and watches, leaning cross-ankled against the counter as he reaches for ice in the freezer, the muscles in his back shifting inside his shirt. He hasn’t turned the overhead light on, and the fluorescents glow blue beneath the cabinets. He hands her the glass and doesn't let go right away when she takes it, lets her pull. At last he plants his hands on the counter, one on either side of her, leans in until they're nose to nose. Ian looks at her expectantly. Ruby smiles.
"Are you really going to make me do this?" he asks. She can see the pulse point ticking in his neck.
"Sweetheart," she says finally. "I never made you do a single thing in your life."
So he kisses her first and it feels the same as it did but also not, tongue and teeth and a decade's worth of practice. She wants him, not like something new. He cups her face with two big hands but she turns her head and slips his first two fingers into her mouth, sucking, scraping lightly with her incisors. He tastes like salt and like citrus. Ian groans. "You are such a brat," he tells her, not entirely teasing. Ruby grins.
The dress is a black jersey number, a halter, the fabric slippery on her skin as he presses her harder against the counter. The edge of it digs into her spine. Ian pulls his fingers back, dragging them over her lower lip and down across the v of her neckline, leaving a cool, damp trail over the top of her breast. He skims down her stomach, rubs between her legs.
(She knows that they're never going to do this again.)
Ruby pulls his shirttails out of his khakis, slides her hands against his stomach. There's a lot more muscle in him than she remembers. Somewhere along the line he became the kind of person who wears undershirts, a serious adult, his hair cropped short at the back of his head. She finds his small nipple and pinches. Ian gasps. "Say you're mine," she tells him, hooking her thumb in his collar and running her tongue over the hard ridge of bone. "Say it."
Ian bucks his hips ever so slightly, mindless. His fingers push further into the dip between her thighs. "Ruby," he says, and he sounds almost tranquil. "You know exactly whose I am."
*
His bed is unmade but his sheets are expensive. Ruby's nails scrape against the heavy cotton as his tongue works over her breasts, starting with the red mark left by the wire of her strapless bra and flattening over the rosy knot of her nipple. He bites, not gently, and Ruby arches further into his mouth. "Now who's a brat?" she asks, hauling him over and straddling his narrow hips. Her dress pools around her waist. He reaches for her again but she's too quick, is working the zipper on his pants and pulling the elastic on his boxers and she's got his cock in her fist, warm, big like she imagined it might be when she imagined things like that about him, which was occasionally. "Should I leave now?" she asks, swiping her thumb over the liquid at the tip and sucking it clean with an audible smack. "Should I go find somebody my own age?"
"Fuck," he grinds out, and she knows he's apologizing. He's been apologizing for the better part of a decade. "Ruby."
"Shh. It's fine." The head of his cock is smooth under her tongue; her mouth moves. It's late. She can smell him, sweaty but not bad, a thermal human smell. She remembers when they used to meet up after his soccer practice, honey hair wet at the base of his neck, his t-shirt damp and sticky in the back. Ian makes a sound, a groan or a whimper, and she runs a familiar hand over his stomach. Ruby is good at this.
He pulls her back up to face him, hands at her rib cage, rocking hard against her clit with just her underwear between them. She's incredibly wet. "Tell me what you want," he says, pleading, his mouth at her neck, her breasts, her jaw. "Whatever you—Ruby. Just. Tell me."
"I don't," she says, and it sounds more like a challenge than she necessarily means it to, "want to be in charge."
For one second Ian looks like she's wrecked him, like she's some kind of siren hell bent on ruin. Then he flips her—enough force that the mattress whines, her head rebounding off the pillow—onto her back. He pulls the dress over the curve of her ass and all the way off down, hooking his fingers in her thong and sliding it along her legs. His teeth graze the muscles in her calf. He grips the backs of her knees and spreads her open, legs bent wide. He looks. His gaze is hungry. Ian runs two slow fingers down the entire length of her, from her clit all the way down to her ass, does it again, dips the tip of his thumb inside where she's wettest. Ruby likes being naked in his bed. "I'm probably salty," she warns him, sitting up the slightest bit as he bends down to trace the same curving path with his tongue, and Ian gets this expression like he really, really doesn't care.
She comes once against his mouth, hard, surprising, her own hands fisting in her curly blond hair. Of course he would know how she works. His fingertips dig into her thighs with enough force to bruise and he thinks he's probably left a mark, wonders if he meant to (say you're mine). "Get up here," she tells him, feels him smile against her stomach. No one in her life has ever looked at her like Ian. "Get inside me."
Coffee Morning by Lee Jones (prints available at ObsessionArt.com).
He slides home fast, no preamble—no condom, either, though this is Ian and the idea of protecting herself from him of all people seems a little beside the point. Ruby shifts her hips to accommodate him. She feels very, very full. He moves with a singularity of purpose, green eyes open and watchful, her heels digging into the muscles of his ass. She wants him deeper. When he leans down to kiss her she can taste herself in his mouth.
She listens to his sounds change, grow ragged; she comes and thinks of campfires, sparks flying in the air. "Ruby," he says again, low, and just as she's starting to go raw she feels him pulsing inside her, scalding, something being wrenched from them both. He says something (he says so many things); she catches "wanted" and "love you," and kisses him to make him stop. They shudder. They breathe. Every time she scrapes her nails over his back his whole body spasms, so she keeps doing it.
No one in her life has ever looked at her like Ian does.
She knows that they're never going to do this again.
He rolls off her and they lie there for a while, her cheek in the hollow of his rib cage, his heart beating flush against her face. Ruby watches the window. Streetlight spills onto the floor.
Originally published April 2011