Starlight (Peaches Monroe) (Volume 2) Paperback – September 2, 2013 (29 page)

The funniest thing about that night was that the two of them couldn’t stop smiling. I honestly thought they were going to be furious with me as soon as we all left the safety of the hospital, but they weren’t.

It’s hard to be anything but calm when a newborn is sleeping in a laundry basket next to you, his tiny hands curled up like rosebuds.

All babies should be so lucky, to be as wanted as Kyle. I hadn’t known this at the time, but my mother had tried for years after my birth—tried to have a younger brother or sister for me. She says she would have had four kids, if it had been possible. She had an abnormality in her uterus that they didn’t discover until she was in the hospital having me, by emergency caesarian. The abnormality didn’t show up on the ultrasound, but the doctors said she would have difficulty bringing another baby to term.

She chose not to believe them. But medical problems don’t care what you believe.

They tried and tried in secret, and it wasn’t until after Kyle came along, and we sat together at the table with him slumbering in the laundry basket, that she told me all the details about the miscarriage heartbreaks she’d suffered.

At last, I finally understood why she’d cried for two weeks, all during Christmas break, when I was twelve. I’d gone onto the internet that holiday and thanks to Dr. Google, diagnosed her with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I printed out some information about special lights you can get to combat the dark, rainy Washington winters.

She’d lost a baby on Christmas Eve. A boy. They named him Kyler and held a small memorial in January. I thought they were going to the funeral of a distant uncle.

And then, three years later, there was a healthy little blue-eyed surprise who needed a lot of care, and a name. Their hearts were so full. Their prayers had been answered, and, unlike the doctors, they believed me that I hadn’t known. My parents were concerned, but they weren’t angry. They were overjoyed.

“I love the name Kyler,” I told them, glancing over at his little red face. He just looked like a baby, not a person, so what did I know? “I would name the baby that, but isn’t that a girl’s name?”

My mother started crying, the tears falling into her smile. “Sweetie, it’s a boy’s name.”

We talked some more that night, and over the next few days, about responsibilities and care of the baby, now named Kyler—Kyle for short.

I’m not going to lie and say my parents were saints about the whole thing. We had
moments
. When my father was bleary-eyed from baby duty all night, he said a few cross things to me about certain clothes I was wearing and accused me of being “prone to whimsy.”

I took his comments in the worst possible way; I heard him say I was a fat slut. Those weren’t the words, but guilt has a way of twisting and balling things up to torture you.

My parents are smart people, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out my friend Toby, who lived down the block, was the other half of the surprise baby equation. Toby was uninvited from “homework sessions” behind closed doors, and after a few tense meetings with Toby’s family, he agreed to the terms of the adoption.

Toby’s family claimed that there had been a job offer across the country in the works before all of this “baby daddy drama” had started, but none of us believed it. They moved away before Kyle’s first birthday. Toby came over once (supervised) and held Kyle. The whole time, he looked like he was about to vomit.*

*Coincidentally, that’s not dissimilar to how he looked the first time we had sex.

And now I will answer the questions I’m sure you have:

1. Yes, I knew how babies were made. I was fourteen and went to public school, people. But I looked up a monthly ovulation chart, and it made perfect sense to me, so naturally I felt I could outsmart the main force that has altered women’s destinies since the beginning of time.

2. I continued to get what I thought was an irregular period. I don’t have the same abnormality my mother did, but there’s a little uterine weirdness going on, for sure.

3. There’s no such thing as a food craving that I would find unusual in any way.

4. Any body changes, I attributed to puberty, given I was going through puberty at the time.

5. My parents absolutely didn’t know or suspect, not consciously. They wouldn’t have gone on a three-day trip to Arizona and left me to go into labor at home alone if they had.

6. Except for the part where I nearly died, the delivery wasn’t too bad.

“Thank you for an amazing birthday,” Keith said as we ate our cake and ice cream at a neighborhood cafe near his apartment.

It was nearly midnight, and I felt twitchy with nerves, as if I had bug bites all over me instead of just one on my shoulder. Being outdoors in the sun all day makes my skin sensitive, even if I don’t get sunburned.

My commercial shoot started the next day, Monday, and finished on Tuesday. I’d gotten myself through the print photos the week before, barely, but now I had movement and my voice to mess things up.

I’d been assured that the horrible, rude model, Sven, wasn’t a part of the commercial, but I couldn’t shake the idea he’d be there anyway, and they’d say “too fucking bad” if I didn’t like it. They had a lot of money riding on the new product line, and they had to pay me my modeling fee no matter what. Deep down, I worried the whole thing would be a colossal failure, and everyone would think I jinxed it with my jiggly ass.

“Stop it,” Keith said.

I looked up from my cake and ice cream, confused by his words. Stop eating cake? But there was still cake on my plate. What kind of cruelty was this?

“Stop worrying about the shoot,” he said. “Everyone on set tomorrow is there to make you look good. Think of them as
your
people,
your
team. If you’re not sure about something, ask. And take your time. They’ve scheduled two days to shoot a thirty-second commercial.”

“It’s actually splitting into a couple different commercials.”

He used his fork to separate his chocolate cake from the ganache. “A couple? In that case, you should definitely freak out. You’re toast.”

“You’re not helping.”

“Wait ’til we get home. I’ll undress you and take your mind off your worries.”

I smiled and took another bite of my treat, which was a lemon cake with white buttercream frosting and raspberry sauce. I’d opted to not get the ice cream, but only because I wanted to enjoy the flavors on their own, and not because I thought skipping ice cream would magically make me shed ten pounds before an underwear shoot the next day. I may be “prone to whimsy,” but not straight-up insanity.

Back at Keith’s place, we did something I’d never done with a guy before. Something intimate.

We sorted out our clothes into lights and darks and did laundry together. Hot!

My jeans mixed around in the washing machine with his jeans, inside the stacking washer and dryer units that had been retro-fitted into a storage closet.

When the clothes were dry, we took them out of the dryer, dumped them all on the bed, and folded them. I’ve never lived with a guy, so this was all incredibly novel to me, and made me feel like a sexy housewife—the way cooking for Keith made me feel.

He slayed me when he experimented with folding my panties, forming them into tidy squares or triangles. He was so serious about folding, and I couldn’t stop laughing at him.

We got everything put away, and then it was just us and a freshly-made bed.

I said, “If only I had something to
give
you for your birthday present, this would be the perfect time for me to
give
it to you.”

He grinned and started unbuttoning my frilly pink blouse, both of us standing at the foot of the bed.

“I could order you something online,” I said. “It would take a few days to arrive, but you could print out the picture in the meantime.”

He pulled the blouse away and let it fall, tickling my arms on the way to the floor. He leaned down and kissed the tops of my breasts, held up high and proud in the pretty pink bra. Nodding down, I smelled the top of his head, taking in the scent of his scalp, which always smelled so good. His hands moved up and down my back, and then he was kissing my neck, his hands in my hair.

I reached down for his T-shirt and tugged it up and off so I could put my hands all over his hot skin. He kissed my shoulder as we closed the distance between us and rocked from side to side to…

“We should have music,” I murmured.

“Really?” He pulled away and turned the stereo on.

“Isn’t this your meditation music?”

“You don’t like it.”

“No, no. This music is nice. Is that a sitar? I feel like a snake charmer.” I moved my neck from side to side in a bad parody of a white girl doing a scene from Disney’s
Aladdin
.

“You’ve already charmed my snake, so whatever you’re doing, it’s working.”

I laughed and grabbed him so I could unfasten his pants and get him ready for the
real
snake charming event.

I pushed him, naked, onto the bed, and slipped out of my cargo shorts before climbing on alongside him, still wearing my nice underwear.

“You’re not naked,” he said.

“Think of me as a birthday present you unwrap a little at a time.”

He lay back and closed his eyes.

Instead of starting at the top, kissing his lips, I began at the bottom of his body, giving both of his feet a light, invigorating rub. He had nice toes. Men always have good feet, without bunions, because they don’t wear ridiculous shoes like we do. I rubbed his arches, then pulled his legs apart from each other so I could kneel in between them as I squeezed his calves.

I moved my hands up along the inside edges of his legs, making him laugh and squirm. He peered down at me. “I feel so vulnerable with my legs apart like this.”

“Now you know how girls feel.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what you girls see in big, hairy men.”

He was naked, so I leaned forward and kissed the tip of his cock. “You’re big, but you’re not that hairy.”

I moved back down a few inches with my body, and went back to rubbing his legs again. Keith grew very quiet and still, his eyes closed.

As I rubbed his legs and then moved my fingers up gradually to gently rub his sack and shaft, I watched him, thinking about how many girls would be looking at photos of him and imagining themselves doing what I was doing.

I glanced down at my body, and at all the natural creases forming from the position I was in, and for the first time since I’d gotten the underwear modeling offer, I imagined men looking at photos of me while they jerked off.

I may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for a certain segment of men, I’m the bee’s knees.

As I took Keith’s cock into my mouth, I thought about all those sexually frustrated men who couldn’t have me, and I got even more turned on. I threw one leg over his leg and rubbed up against his shin as I sucked his beautiful cock.

He was big and hard, like a tower that couldn’t be knocked down. I got excited, moaning and breathing hard—so much so, that he tapped me on the shoulder to check I was okay.

Embarrassed, I wiped my mouth and took a break, saying, “Just wanted you to have a good birthday.”

He sat up and put his arms around me. “I do have a request. Remember the first time? With our legs wrapped around each other?”

“That was fun.”

“Lay back and let me kiss you before we get started.”

I rolled onto my back and held my arms out for him, but instead of joining me for kissing on the mouth, he moved down and pulled my panties off. Oh. That kind of kissing. Well. Happy birthday to me, too!

He put a pillow under my hips, and then another pillow under his chest as he wriggled into place. “Perfect,” he said, bending my knees up and making his way down between my thighs. “Now just relax your legs open a little more.”

I giggled, because these sorts of instructions are funny at the doctor’s office and even funnier in bed.

He dove in, his tongue pushing down, and I sucked in a deep breath, no longer feeling the giggles. I grasped handfuls of the bedcovers as he bore down on my clit as eagerly as I’d enjoyed his cock a moment earlier.