Roomies by Christina Lauren

twenty-one

The plan is to go out for a celebratory lunch, but Calvin wants to stop at the apartment first. This morning I was too nervous to contemplate eating; now I’m too excited. We are both behaving like goofballs—racing from the subway station to the corner, play-wrestling outside the building, running up the stairs with enormous grins. I am aware, in this sharp sweep of clarity, how much fun I have with him.

In the time since we got married, I’ve discovered that I don’t only appreciate his awesome face and hot body, but I genuinely adore being around him. We have fun because he is fun, and there’s a little ache that chases that realization because I wonder where this can actually go.

Yes, he seems to enjoy being around me, but it’s not like he has a choice—and Calvin seems like the kind of guy who can make the best out of any circumstance.

I fumble with my keys outside the door, and he leans into me, breathless from the race upstairs, resting his chin near my temple.

“Are you starving?” he asks.

I shake my head, shoving the key into the lock. “I’m still too excited to be hungry.”

The feel of him against me—his chest against my arm, his breath on my neck—would completely annihilate my appetite anyway.

“You were so good,” he says, and kisses my hair. There’s a little growl at the end of the word good that feels like fingers running up and down my spine, and I hear the echo of his words from two nights ago:

I can feel the heat of you. Is it the drink, or is it me?

I don’t want to misread this situation because it could be devastating to think he’s into me when he’s really just being sweet and grateful, still high on adrenaline. But my pulse is rioting; the low ache in my belly is intensifying with every second. “You needed to grab something?”

He follows me in and closes the door behind us, saying, “I don’t need to get anything.”

Did I misunderstand him? “But I thought—” I move to put down my keys, but he reaches for my arm, turning me, gently guiding until I’m pressed with my back against the door.

“I didn’t need to get anything from the apartment.”

What?

Calvin bends, and his mouth hovers just below my ear. “I just wanted to come home before lunch.”

Oh.

The ache explodes.

My body is pretty sure it understands his meaning clearly—my hands move up his chest and around his neck. But my brain—my brain is always the problem: “Why?”

He laughs, scraping my jaw with his teeth, and then kisses my cheek, my ear. “Do you realize you’ve been avoiding any casual physical contact since we woke up in bed together?”

“I have?” I pull back. It’s surreal to be looking into his eyes when they’re so close to mine.

This makes him laugh again. “I think I’ve made it pretty clear you can have me if you want me. I practically refuse to put on clothes when we’re in the apartment.”

“Oh. That’s true.”

He smiles, kissing my nose. “But if you aren’t interested, I’ll leave you alone and not ask again.”

I hurl my words out like I’m bidding at an auction: “I’m interested.”

“I’ve wanted this since the first time we had lunch.”

What?

His smile moves up my neck, pressing parentheses into my skin. “I remember how nervous and sweet you were.” More kisses. “I wondered whether you liked me that way. But you kept so calm with me in your house . . . and I’m out here on the couch thinking about you.”

I don’t even know what to say to this. I want to repeat the way he says tinking about you. He was out here feeling what I was feeling? My charade was too convincing; apparently I could have been getting Calvin Sex for the past month. I want to both celebrate and scream.

“And then we fell into your bed,” he says, and his mouth moves across my throat to the other ear. He sucks just below, pressing into me. Something hard digs into my hip, and I gasp.

It makes him hiss. “I like your sounds. I remember how many of them you made.” His mouth moves closer to mine. “What do you remember?”

“Earlier,” I say, and he kisses me once, “in the elevator, when you were close to me, I was thinking about . . .”

He pulls back, waiting. “Thinking about . . . ?”

“When we were in my bed.”

“What were we doing?”

I push back the self-conscious doubt in my throat. “You were on top of me. We were already . . .”

Moving together, I don’t say.

Calvin groans, sliding his hands under my shirt to grip my waist. “You were thinking about fucking me in the elevator?”

And just like that, I am hot everywhere. He’s making this so easy. “I was remembering that feeling of skin on skin, where you can’t get enough?”

His mouth comes over mine, and I remember this, too. It’s not a new kiss, it’s a kiss we’ve done before—teasing only at first and then sucking, and deeper, and hungry.

He slides his hands farther up my shirt, and around so he’s unfastening my bra with a tiny pinch. My shirt and bra are pulled off together, and his mouth moves down, dragging words over my skin. I stare down at his shoulders, reaching for his shirt, wanting to see the way the muscles move as he grabs me and holds me, as he works his mouth down my belly to the clasp of my skirt.

My clothes are peeled off in front of the door again, but this time I notice everything. I notice how his skin looks in the dim light coming in the living room window, and I notice how he smiles even when he’s kissing me.

I notice the feel of his skin on my fingertips and how it’s even smoother against my lips.

I notice he likes being licked on his chest, he likes being bitten near his hip, and his hands shake when he slides them into my hair as I move lower, taking him in my mouth.

But the things I learn about Calvin right now won’t ever be shared in an interview; finally we have something that is just for us. I don’t need to know that he’s quiet while he watches, his breaths initially cut off and then gasping. I don’t need to know that he begs sweetly when he’s close, or that he warns me, trying to slow his body down before he comes—but I learn these things anyway. And I don’t need to know for anyone but myself that he’s a tease when he puts his mouth on me, or that he’ll touch me with the same fingers he uses to strum his guitar and it’s that knowledge that will send me over the edge on my living room floor.

We get a drink of water, we move to my bed, and his mouth is all over me again, along my thighs, over my stomach, sucking, sucking at my chest. I’m sure we’ll talk later, but for now we’re only sounds and breathing. It feels like all we’ve done is talk—in this instructional, memorizing way, knowing that everything we say needs to be filed away for a later date—but right now the only thing I want is to reconstruct that choppy memory of how it feels to have his weight on me and his skin all over mine.

The strange thing is that all of this feels so easy and familiar, but when he’s there—above me and then pushing inside—that’s where the familiarity ends. I know now that that night we were nearly numb with intoxication, and I can say with certainty that he didn’t watch as he inched into me; he didn’t go this slowly. I can say with certainty that my eyes were probably closed and it was all wilder and rougher because we could barely process a thing.

And I know for sure it didn’t feel like this. I’m so sensitive that he’s only started to move and I’m clawing at him, pressing into him to get closer, and closer, and we find a rhythm for so long where everything feels so good we can’t stop marveling over it, and it blows over me, unexpected—

I’m coming and he’s watching,

moving faster he’s so focused—

his hips stutter against mine and he’s there, following just after me; his deep groan of relief vibrates against my throat. I have one hand in his hair and the other on his neck; my legs are wound around him, hooked together at his lower back: like this, we go still.

It’s raining outside, I didn’t even realize. Heavy sheets of water sluice over the eaves and down onto the sidewalk.

“Was it good?” he whispers, quietly reverent.

“Yeah.” I swallow, catching my breath. “You?”

He pulls back a little and stares down at me. “Yeah.” He bends, kissing me. “I’m reeling.”

Calvin’s breath is warm on my neck, his back still slick beneath my palms. The other night seems like drunken fumbling compared to what just happened between us, and I’m left momentarily out of words.

He pushes up onto an elbow and reaches down between us with his other hand, anchoring the condom as he pulls out. When he shifts away to throw it in the bin, the entire front of my body goes cold, and I urge him back, pulling the covers over us.

“I don’t think you’ll ever be able to fake an orgasm with me.” His voice is muffled by my shoulder.

This makes me laugh. “What? I mean—I wouldn’t fake an orgasm—but what makes you say that?”

“You get this flush, up your neck and across your face. I thought I could go a bit more but then you started to come, and I was done for.”

I curl into him. The feel of his arms around me is so insane. I want to look at him again and again, to make sure I’m not imagining this.

“What time is it?” I ask.

He stretches to see my alarm clock on the other nightstand. “Two.”

We have twenty-seven blissful hours before we have to be anywhere. I nestle closer.

“Holland?”

“Yeah?”

“How did you know that my parents couldn’t afford to come to the wedding?”

I pull back so I can see him. “I just made that up. I assume Molly’s medical care is really expensive.”

“It is.” He leans in, kissing my nose. “It’s been this enormous stress, her whole life.”

This pushes a little ache into my chest.

“I’ve tried so hard to keep them from worrying about me,” he says. I stare up at his face, watching his jaw tense as he swallows. “Didn’t want them spending the money to come out to see me living in Mark’s flat, paying fuck-all in rent. Little lies turned into big lies and—” He stops and looks down at me, searching back and forth between my eyes. “I’ll tell it all to you someday but not now. It just felt good when you said that.” He slides a hand up, over my breast and coming to rest on my sternum. “Feels like I don’t always have to explain myself so much with you.”

The thrill that blooms inside me when he says this feels like a kite pushing up into the sky, expanding beneath my ribs. “Well, for what it’s worth, I can absolutely see how you stayed here for so long, and also why you wouldn’t want them to worry about how you were doing, or who’s taking care of you.”

“Mam is really glad we’re married,” he says. “I haven’t been so good about keeping her up to date, but I’m trying to do better. I told her how good it all is with you. But my father is a tougher sell. I imagine that’s why Brigid texted you.”

I wince, remembering. “I need to reply.”

“You were a bit busy today.”

“I haven’t told my parents yet,” I admit.

I can tell he’s only mildly surprised by this. “Yeah?”

Up close, his green eyes seem so much more complicated—green, yellow, brown, bronze. It makes it hard to be flippant, or lie. “They barely trust me to run my own life, they’d automatically assume th—”

“That you’re being used?”

In truth there are a dozen reasons; this is definitely one of them. “I don’t think that,” I quickly add.

“I was taking advantage at first, I suppose.” Licking his lips, he seems to think on this for a few more seconds. “But I knew that I liked you, knew I’d be happy to score with you”—he laughs, kissing me—“I thought there could be more. I just put the marriage before the feelings.”

“Arranged marriages do that all the time.”

“They do.” He looks down at me. “And you said a year, after all. It seemed to be what you wanted, but what an enormous thing to do for Robert, for me. I wondered whether there might be more you wanted, too.”

I don’t know how to interpret this; I hate my brain sometimes. Does this mean sex is the equivalent of him fulfilling his end of the bargain? Was he pretending to not believe me about my six-month crush, and decided this is the way to repay the favor? Or do I take him at his word, that he wanted this from the beginning?

My logical head wants to wait and see how I feel when I’m alone tomorrow, to not read too much into this. My heart and my heated blood want me to ask for more.

“My father thinks I should have stayed in Ireland,” he says after a few ticking beats of silence, “gotten a proper job.”

I glance up to him. “In manufacturing?”

He nods. “He reminds me I’m the oldest, that it’s my responsibility to care for Molly when he and Mam are gone. I assume I’ll go back, someday. Always have.”

“Are you ever homesick?”

I miss Des Moines in these unexpected bursts. Like when the sirens wail past, over and over outside my window, and I just want quiet. Or on trash days, when all I can hear is the crashing and creaking and jostling of metal and refuse. Or when I leave my apartment and feel like everyone wants to stay in their bubble and not interact with another human on the planet.

“Yeah.” Calvin rolls to his back, pulling me so I’m half on top of him. “It feels easier there in some ways, and harder in others. The world feels smaller there—which is good and bad. I suppose we choose our hardships. I thought it’d be easier to find work in New York, but I was wrong.”

“I can see how the years just went by, though.”

“Yeah.” He inhales slowly, and my head moves with the expanding of his ribs. “It’s so much less lonely now that I’m with you. Before, I felt rather untethered. Everything here feels so aware, if you know what I mean. Everyone pays so much attention to themselves.”

“Well, it is the theater district.”

He laughs like I’d hoped he would. “I mean more than all that. I mean how it feels like we’re all always posing for a selfie, even when we’re just talking.”

“You’re not like that.”

He pulls back, looking down at me. “No?”

“No. You’re this huge, larger-than-life presence and you don’t even realize it.” I run my hand over his chest. “You’re a genius with that guitar, but you’re also so . . .”

“Silly?”

“No, simple,” I say, quickly adding, “and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I want to think that, with you, what you see is what you get.”

“I’d hope so.”

“Everyone likes to think they’re that way, but so few people are.”

In my words, I can hear the small question, Can I trust this moment right here? I am suddenly so aware that we’re naked. That we’ve just made love, and that I think he wants to again.

“You’re just saying that because you like me.” He smiles, rolling slightly to kiss me.

I think he means it to be a small touch, lips to lips, like punctuation at the end of the sentence, but I press for more, climbing over him. He’s right, I do like him. In fact, I worry in this moment right here that I’m falling too hard and too fast.

“Well, yeah.” I reach down, wrapping my fingers around the part of him that is hard again, so soon. “Haven’t I heard you say you like me?”

He watches me lift my hips and lower them back down over him before his eyes roll closed. “Mo stóirín, I fear I’ll like you too much.”

“What does that nickname mean?” The question comes out tight, already out of breath.

His hands slide up my waist, cupping my breasts. “It’s strange. I haven’t ever used it before.” My skin heats beneath his palms. “My granddad used to say it to my granny. It means ‘my little darling.’ ”