Secret Shared: A S.E.C.R.E.T. Novel (21 page)

“Really good to see you too. Help yourself to anything. I’m just going to … finish getting ready.”

He kept his eyes on me as I pointed to the bathroom, walking backwards towards it.

“Be right back!” I said, and closed the bathroom door behind me.

I was completely breathless.
Holy shit. He’s here
.
Calm down
. I was behaving like a teenager. I turned on the dryer and gave my hair a few minutes of heat before deciding,
Fuck it, this is what I look like, this is who I am
. I stared myself down in the mirror for one last pep talk, remembering Matilda’s words:
He’s just a guy. You’re both just people.

I found him in the middle of setting the table, a tea
towel slung over his shoulder, tattoos peeking out from under his T-shirt sleeves. He was carefully spacing out spoons next to mismatched bowls. A warm current spiraled through my body.

“Soup’s almost ready. I hope you don’t mind that I added a bit more bay leaf powder. But don’t be afraid to buy whole leaves. You just pick ’em out after.”

I forgot he was a chef—a pastry chef, but still he knew his way around any kitchen.

“Thanks. I can take over from here. You’re
my
guest. And you’ve probably had a busy day already with your son. Did you guys do anything fun?”

Breathe.

“Nah, he has some little friends that live nearby. They came over. Played in the backyard while I fixed the lawn mower. Glamorous stuff like that.”

“It actually sounds nice,” I said, cutting up the French loaf and putting it on the table with some sea salt and butter. “I’d love to see some pictures of him.”

“Sure. But first, sit for a bit.”

He could tell I was nervous, flitting around the kitchen, plunking down salt and pepper shakers, wineglasses, pulling out my threadbare linen napkins, wedding gifts from a bygone era. I could barely remember who I was back then.

I lowered myself into the mismatched chair next to him, and my knees skimmed his.

“So. Why’d you bench me?”

“I didn’t … bench you. I put in a request to see you again. Outside of S.E.C.R.E.T. And here you are. You could have turned it down.”

“I’m teasing.” He took a healthy bite out of a slice of bread. “I thought of you from time to time.”

“I thought of
you
from time to time,” I said, then chomped into some bread myself.

“I’m glad you made the request. Been feeling a little hungry for something … a little more substantial.”

“Me too,” I said.
Where was this going?
“But … I mean … I don’t have any expectations. I realize how we met. It’s just that I’ve been thinking, of all the people who I … Well, I felt a connection to you. So I … yeah.”

He took the remaining chunk of bread out of my hand and threw it across the room. Then he put out his hands to me.

“I’m thinking I need to get you in your bed right now, Cassie, ’cause I get the sense you’re gonna start thinking about this all too much. And then we’re gonna get all gummed up in that mental machinery of yours.” He gently tapped the side of my head.

“G-good thing you can’t really overcook bouillabaisse,” I stammered, rising unsteadily to my feet.

“Yeah, you can. But who fucking cares?” He bent down to throw me over his shoulder.

I screamed, thrilled and shocked. The Delmonte sisters downstairs probably had glasses to the ceiling to hear better.
Fuck them
, I thought as he carted me ten feet to my bed and threw me down, causing an eruption of pillows and at least
one of the bed legs to thump hard on the floor that was also the sisters’ living room ceiling. He pulled a condom out of his wallet, tossing it next to me.

Okay then.

“The neighbors,” I whispered, as he slowly crawled up my body until I was flanked by two inked arms on either side of my head.

Jesse’s face, which was so open in the kitchen, now took on a darker focus. Hovering over me, he fished around for my wrists, one then the other, pulling them up over my head, capturing them beneath his hands.

“So?”

“So?”
Jesse is here, on top of me! Holding me down by my wrists on the bed.

“How do you want to play, Cassie Robichaud?”

I had a heady déjà vu from earlier in the afternoon when Angela asked Mark the same question.

“How do
you
want to play?” I was feeling out of my league all of a sudden. My heart thumped against my chest. I felt nausea rise. He lowered his groin until he had me fully pinned, his erection hard against my inner thigh. It was unmistakably clear what this was doing to him,
for
him.

“I’m happy to do anything with you, Jesse. But … I wasn’t looking for some kind of fantasy scenario with you.”

“I know it,” he said, collapsing on his elbow, his eyes now searching and warm, his hands smoothing back my hair. “We don’t have to do anything weird … I’m happy to just … neck.”

It was the way he said it—
neck
—that caused me to erupt into a fit of giggles. And that made him laugh too.

“Y’all wanna just
neck
with me?” I said, mimicking his Cajun accent. “Okay, let’s just neck.”

Oh,
this
was the mouth I remembered, the hungry, searching mouth. He bent to kiss me, to shut me up, really, his palm cradling my head, his fingers entwined in my hair. The other hand slowly unbuttoned my blouse, landing warmly between my breasts, then made its agonizing way down, undoing the buttons of my jeans, sliding them off along with my panties.

“All gone,” he said, slipping a hand underneath me to unclasp my bra, flinging it across the room.

He stood up next to the bed to remove his jeans, then his boxers, making it immediately apparent how much this was turning him on. He took my hand and guided me to him.

“Touch my cock, Cassie,” he whispered. “Say it.”

It was so hard, so smooth.

“Say what?” I said, running my hand up and down his
cock.

“Say you want my cock inside of your beautiful pussy,” he murmured, his eyes flashing under my inexpert touch.

I’d never seen him totally naked before, but here he stood over me, all muscles and sinew, tattoos and desire, and he knew he had me, this shameless, potent man.

“What do you want, baby?” he asked.

“I want you inside of me, now,” I begged.

“You want me to fuck you, Cassie?”

“Yes, Jesse.”

“Say it.”

“Fuck me,” I muttered.

“Say,
I want you to fuck me hard, Jesse
.”

I closed my eyes, my whole body feeling an incredible want, as he pressed my knees apart into the mattress.

“Mmm, look at you and your pretty little pussy,” he drawled. “What’s a guy gotta do to make that his?”

“You know,” I said, wishing sexier words came to me more easily. That was something I could do with Jesse, learn to let go more, be freer …

“Say it, Cassie.”

“Fuck me, Jesse. I want you to fuck me hard …” I said, almost delirious with want.

He bent over the foot of the bed, his mouth moving up my leg to the curve of my inner thigh, his tongue tickling the smooth groove where my tender skin met the line of soft down.
God
he was teasing me. He was driving me crazy.

“Jesse, fuck me,” I demanded, as his hand caressed my thigh, his thumb slicking down my folds, merely fluttering over my clitoris. The ache becoming too much to bear, my hips began to rock to make him touch where I needed touching, to fuck where I needed fucking. But he merely let a lazy finger grace the opening, finding me so wet I gasped, and I arched fiercely now towards him, never hungrier.

I writhed beneath him as he gathered one of my breasts, my nipple tightening in his cool mouth. He did the same to my other one as I moaned in response, now desperate. And
oh,
the ache
. My knees began to nudge the side of his torso, to maneuver him between my thighs.

“More?”

“
Yesss
.”

He sat up between my legs to roll on the condom, his taut forearms flinching, his eyes savoring me. I realized why I wanted this man, why I had ached for him, because it was an ache that
could
be soothed. With Will it was all hunger, one we could never satisfy. I needed Jesse
because
I wanted Will, and Jesse was the only man to quell that want. In fact, I was going to let him fuck it right out of me.

And he did, entering me sharply, fiercely, sinking into me inch by agonizing inch, his thrusts insistent and growing fiercer as my hips bucked against his. He took my wrists again and pinned them down next to my head.

“You like this?” he said, filling me up, his voice a low growl.

I nodded, feeling like he was actually fucking pleasure
into
the very end of me. The more he thrust, the more his stomach muscles clenched and contracted, turning his whole body into an oiled piston. My knees bent high to clutch his torso, now coated in a sheen of sweat. Then it happened: my whole core squeezed around him and he could feel it too, his face registering a shock, taking it as a cue to ride me higher still, pump me harder, my clit now pinned between his pelvis and mine, his keening hips kneading it perfectly, beautifully, rolling into a hot build. I wanted to scream as the whole of me surrendered. I was calling
“Oh god”
as I came, setting him off, his beautiful lips curling as he came hard into me too,
saying, “
Oh, Cassie … yeah
,” neither of us caring about the neighbors or the noise as we finally collapsed, gasping into a heaving pile of limbs.

“I think my heart … stopped. Shh … I need to listen for it,” he mumbled into my hair. “Am I … dead? Can you hear anything?”

“I think you’re gonna be okay,” I said, as he eased out and off me. I shifted to face him, coated in his sweat, and sleepily traced the outlines of the tattoos on his shoulders. I spotted a scar there. He grabbed my fingers.

“How’d you get that?”

“Dirt bike stunt. Fourteen years old,” he said, between kissing my fingertips.

He sat up so I could see his full body paint and turned around to give me a better look at his back.

“Is that an oak tree?”

Almost like adolescents at show and tell, we slid from hot sex to sweet stories as he began to tell me what was behind the more prominent tattoos—the tree whose branches twisted into a skull cradling his shoulder, the other shoulder covered by a cluster of birds.

“Yeah. It’s the oak from my grandma’s property in Kenner. I grew up there after my parents died. This one hurt,” he said, pointing out a beautifully rendered face of a handsome young man on the left side of his rib cage. “My older brother. He taught me how to read when I was ten. Late bloomer. He died in the first Gulf War.” So much tragedy on his body— dead family, old memories. “And
that’s my ‘tramp stamp,’” he said, bending to show me his lower back, where indeed the word
Tramp
was stamped on his sacrum.

“Ha!”

“Were you expecting a butterfly?” he asked.

“I think with you expectations might be a bad idea,” I said. Was I fishing? Was this me seeking assurances that I could have expectations of this man? I wasn’t sure. He stretched out next to me to cuddle.

“That’s probably wise, Cassie,” he said, sounding sincere and serious, throwing his thigh over me. “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

Me?
I almost did that female thing, that thing where I reassure him and tell him,
Oh no, no, no, I’m here; you can expect things from me. I’m all in.
But I knew better. Just because a man has his entire life story drawn out on his skin for all to see, that doesn’t make him an open book. And just because I had sex with him, that didn’t make me his. We were both still carrying shadows from our past into whatever our future held. But for the first time in my life, I was okay with that. I was beautifully, perfectly okay with it.

I HAD NEVER
been a traveler, so I wasn’t expecting to feel such a rush of pure joy upon returning from Buenos Aires and seeing my porch, my potted marigolds and heavy mums wilting in the late summer heat. Upstairs, I dropped the last of my luggage, sighing in gratitude at my dusty, sunlit apartment. My trip, which had begun as transformative and restorative, had turned dark and frightening after my interlude with Pierre Castille. Being home felt grounding, safe. And I now discovered it was true what they said about homesick Southerners: there’s no sorrier lot.

After I hosed down my plants, I drew a bath and soaked off the stress of the return flight (the turbulence was a little meaner and no Captain Nathan to offer “comfort”), and the Customs officers were a little nosier, poking through my purchases with the help of a beagle I wasn’t allowed to pet. The officers were looking for sausage and ivory, probably the
only
two things I didn’t bring back with me from Argentina. I had bought two extra suitcases for the costume jewelry, linens,
housedresses and four vintage tango dresses I bought to sell at the Funky Monkey. Such is the life of an “international buyer.” But while the beagle was nosing through my belongings, I was heartened to realize that I
had
intended to sell all this stuff. I didn’t want to insulate anymore, which was really the purpose of keeping that treasure trove to myself. All those imaginary futures where I’d have just the right thing to round it out, that future was happening now.