Deeper

Chapter

05

Now

The sheet beneath her cheek was smooth and cool. The skin beneath her hand, warm. Nick’s chest didn’t rise or fall. He wasn’t breathing. Was he? Could he? She spread her fingers over his nipple, but nothing pulsed beneath it. No heartbeat.

Yet he was alive. There. Solid and real, not transparent. She could touch him. God, she tasted him.

“Tell me what happened,” Bess whispered. She kissed him just above his ribs and let her mouth linger on skin still tasting so much of salt.

He said nothing for so long she became certain he wasn’t going to speak. His hand stroked down her hair over and over, hypnotizing her, and then stayed still. Bess pushed her fingers through the line of curls just below his belly button. The hairs tickled her palm. His body beneath her hand tensed.

“I don’t think I know.” He shifted and his hand took up its stroke, stroke, stroke again.

There were a hundred questions roaming in her brain, but not one to which she could put voice. If he didn’t breathe, if his heart didn’t beat, how could he be warm? If he was a spirit, how could he touch her? How could he fuck her?

Her own heartbeat pounded in her ears and her breath caught in her throat. A chill swept her and she turned to him, pushing closer, grateful for the warmth she couldn’t seem to explain.

And really, how important was it for her to know the details of this magnificent thing, this miracle? Would the knowing of it somehow change it? Make it better?

Or make it worse?

“You don’t have to tell me,” Bess said.

She curled her fingers over his hip bone to press the solid curve beneath warm flesh. She’d memorized every detail of his body with her mouth and fingertips, and had forgotten nothing, but touching him now was as new as if it were the first time. Everything about him was new and old at once, and overlaid with memory.

“I was gone,” he said simply. Three small words with such complication in their meaning. “But now I’m back.”

Bess nuzzled his side, then pushed up on her elbow to look at him. Nick’s fingers tangled in her hair before he let go. She leaned close enough to kiss his mouth, but didn’t. She waited for the puff of his breath on her face, and of course it didn’t come.

“I don’t want to know,” Bess told him. “It doesn’t matter. Does it? You’re here now.”

He put his hand on the back of her neck and pulled her down for the kiss. Mouth to mouth, lip to lip, tongue to tongue. Their teeth clattered briefly, and Bess pulled away to look again into his eyes. They were the same. She traced the line of his brows with her fingertip and buried her face into the solace of his shoulder.

“No,” he said after a few seconds. “I guess not.”

He held her for a minute while her shoulders shook with the sobs she tried without success to bite back. “Why are you crying?”

She held him tighter, her laughter mingled with tears. “Because…I just found out you were gone and I didn’t even know, and now you’re back. You’re here and I’m here, and it’s like…”

“It feels different, too,” Nick said. “It feels…deeper.”

Bess laughed and looked into his face. She touched it. Solid and real. “I’m going crazy.”

“You’re not. I’m real.” He put her hand on his crotch. His penis stirred beneath her touch. “Does that feel like you’re crazy?”

Bess rolled her eyes a little, but didn’t pull her hand away. “Same old Nick—”

“Thinking with my dick,” he finished for her. “Yeah. Some things don’t change.”

“And some things do,” she told him. Still in her shortie nightgown, Bess got up from the bed and went to the window. Her thighs felt a little chafed and she ached between her legs from the unaccustomed rough treatment, but though they hadn’t used a condom, nothing trickled down her thighs.

Apparently, just as he didn’t breathe, Nick didn’t ejaculate, either. There was heat, and she smelled him on her body, but no…evidence. This thought strangled her with the half laugh stuck in her throat. Bess rested her head against the cool window glass and closed her eyes, listening for the sound of the ocean she couldn’t see.

His bare feet whispered on the carpet and his heat reached her before his hand did. She didn’t shrink from his touch, but neither did she go to him. When she opened her eyes, he was looking out the window, too. He turned to her. He ran a hand down her hair.

“It’s longer,” he said.

He was the same, but many things about her had changed. “Yes.”

“I like it.” He tugged the ends and slipped his hand up to cup the back of her neck. “It’s pretty.”

She didn’t think he’d ever said she was pretty. The compliment nearly overwhelmed her with emotion, and she chewed the inside of her cheek until she got herself under control. “Thanks.”

“I mean it.”

Her laugh tasted bitter. “Right. Two kids and a lot of years later, I’m still the same.”

“You are to me.” His voice gained a hard edge that made her look at him.

Bess lifted her chin, then pulled off the nightgown and dropped it to the floor. In the bright and unforgiving early afternoon sunshine, she wanted to cringe and hide behind her hands, but she straightened her back and let him see her. All of her. The scars, the marks, the places where her body had changed. She’d kept in shape and actually weighed less now than she had then, but…she didn’t look the same.

She gestured at her body. “I’m not a girl anymore, Nick.”

His gaze traveled over her from head to toe, so slowly she wanted to squirm, but Bess kept herself still. When at last he raised his eyes again to her face, she braced herself for the look of disgust, or worse, mockery.

This time when he reached for her hand, she let him take it. He pulled her two small steps into his arms. Their bodies still fit as perfectly as they always had. Against her belly, his penis thickened, not quite erect. His hands found the curve of her ass and pulled her closer.

“I don’t know what you’re worried about,” Nick said. “To me you look the same as you always did.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to flatter me.”

He pursed his lips. “Yeah, ’cuz that’s really my thing. Flattery.”

“I have gray in my hair. And…” She didn’t want to catalog all her flaws for him when he could so easily see them for himself, but at his still-curious gaze, Bess couldn’t stop herself. “And crow’s-feet and laugh lines…you don’t see any of that?”

He shook his head. Andy had often claimed the same thing, but Andy was also the first to remind her that if she ate too many cream puffs her ass would spread. Bess let her head rest against Nick’s chest for a moment before looking at his face again.

“Tell me what you see.”

“You’re beautiful,” Nick said.

He’d never told her that, either. She wouldn’t have believed he meant it then, anyway, if he had. She believed him now.

Chapter

06