The Theory of Attraction (10 page)

He could feel it, or maybe I was more vocal than I thought, because even as the pleasure crested and started to suck me under, I heard him laugh. “We’ll need to work on that, then.”

And then I was drowning, swamped with delight from my head to my toes, thrilled to the core of my soul by the possessive thrumming of this man’s cock inside my body and his skilled hand against my clit. Ivan cursed again and sped up, finally giving up his words in favor of a sweet, inarticulate cry of triumph as he lost himself in me for the first time.

Chapter Six

When I felt fully conscious again, I opened my eyes to see Ivan lying on his side watching me. I was flat on my stomach, head still pillowed on my arms, body still pleasantly humming with delight.

He didn’t say anything at first but reached out a hand very slowly as though he thought I might pull away. He brushed a few hairs out of my face, tucking them carefully behind my ear, and then ran his fingertips down the contour of my cheek to my chin. Proving my shape to all of his senses, perhaps, finding a new way to see me. With his hesitance came a vulnerability, and I could read more than I usually did in his expression. The boy he had once been, the man he had become, the one still shaping the other day by day whether he acknowledged it or not.

“I’ve never done this,” he whispered, seeming concerned.

“Done what?”

“Post-coital demonstrations of affection.”

Turning my head a little, I caught one of his fingertips between my teeth for a second, then let it slide free from my lips with a pop. “You’re doing fine.”

I resisted the impulse to tell him to do what came naturally. I wasn’t sure that any part of human interaction came naturally to Ivan. Instead, I enjoyed the attention for a few moments before taking the conversation in a different direction.

“How did you start this? Not tonight, I mean this whole thing. Kinkiness or whatever you call it.”

Ivan’s hand stilled for a moment, then continued its exploration of my chin and throat. “My college roommate, a random assignment. He was very into the leather scene. He was convinced I was gay too, since I hadn’t ever done anything with a girl, so he was always trying to introduce me to single guys. One of them was somebody he knew from a BDSM club. A Dominant, Marco. He wasn’t thrilled with Kevin’s attempt to set him up by luring him to a bar and then pretending to casually run into me there. Kevin got embarrassed and fled the scene, but Marco stayed to talk. I found him strangely easy to talk to.”

“That would be strange.” I didn’t know that Ivan ever talked to
anybody
easily. “He didn’t try to pick you up?”

“No, we just talked. In his day job he’s a therapist. I wound up telling him some things about myself I hadn’t ever articulated before. About why I hadn’t dated, or done anything else. He suggested I try a venue where people were more open-minded and communicative about sex, and the roles might be a little easier to understand. I tried it, because I was desperate. And it turned out to be right for me.”

He had dragged his fingers down to my shoulder, and now he gently pressed me up and over until I was lying on my back.

“Because you get to be the one in control?”

“That’s part of it. But the expectations are also clearer to me. People at the club usually negotiate what they want and don’t want in plain language. There’s rarely a hidden agenda. Sometimes people even flag their preferences with different colors so you know what they’re into before you even talk to them. And the science of it also appeals to me, like I said.”

To punctuate that point, he gave my nipple a sharp unexpected tweak and then, before my squeak of surprise could fade, leaned in and swiped his tongue gently over and around the offended area. The pain faded but the sensitized nerve endings soaked in that contact and translated the wet heat to pure ecstasy, a thrill that traveled down my torso to nudge at my clit. More sex magic. He was right, it was appealing. Fascinating, in fact, to see what my own body could do given the right stimulus.

“Do you like having that stuff done to you, too?”

“I’ve tried it, but no,” he said flatly. “Not at all.”

“Good, because I don’t think I could be a Dominatrix. That’s the word, right?”

He shrugged. “Or just Domme. And no, I can’t really see you in that role either. Cami, what are we supposed to do now? Do we go to sleep? Do you go home?”

I would have preferred a passionate insistence that I stay, but I couldn’t help smiling at Ivan’s cluelessness. “Do you want me to go home?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I want you here. And it would be more convenient if we wanted to have sex again later. But I don’t know if I can sleep with another person in the bed.”

Fortunately I knew Ivan well enough not to be hurt by this. “Let’s think of it this way. Because really, I could go either way. If you were over at my place right now, would you go home at this point?”

A little smile played around the corners of his mouth. “If I were at your place right now and trying to do this, I’d probably be in the middle of a panic attack.”

Ouch
. “Ivan, it’s not really the done thing to tell a woman you’ve just slept with that sex with her would bring on a panic attack.”

“Oh. Sorry. I meant because the setting would be so strange for me, to be doing that activity. I think I’d feel too uneasy. Here at least I’ve fantasized about those things, and all my equipment is here. So it’s not quite so hard to equate this setting with sex.”

“There’s equipment?”

He chuckled. “Out of all that weirdness I said,
that
was what you ask about?”

“Honestly, I’m mostly only staring at your mouth while you talk. I’m too blissed out to really comprehend much of anything right now.” I rolled to face him and patted his cheek softly, then ran my fingers into his hair. It was thick and silky, and slightly wavy from the humidity. Good hair for running fingers through. The dark brown looked almost black in the filtered streetlight glow. “That was a joke, by the way. Not the bliss part, the comprehension part. I was paying attention, but I wasn’t sure what to say.”

“I got that one. But thanks.”

“Do you want to do this again sometime?”

He nodded solemnly. “I want to do this again all the time. We should quit our jobs and stay home and do this until we can’t move.”

“Tempting. For now I think I’ll head back to my place so you can sleep, and I can take a shower. We can see each other tomorrow, because, you know, we’re next-door neighbors. Plus we’ll both be in the backyard at nine, gardening.”

He walked me to my door and kissed me goodnight, like a regular date. Only the kiss went on for a lot longer than that, and involved some naughty suggestions murmured in my ear, many of them including fancy Latin terms.

* * *

I’d turned the ringer off on my cell phone during the car ride home the previous evening, because I knew Athena would be calling to hound me for details about why Ivan had been so affectionate at dinner. When I looked at my phone in the morning, I decided I’d been smart to do so. She’d called twice and texted about five times since then, although the last few looked like drunk texts so those really didn’t count. I called her back once I’d poured myself a cup of coffee.

“Details,” was all she said when she picked up the phone.

“Do you want gory particulars or do you want a sketch?”

“You have gory particulars? Oh congratulations, sweetie! You broke the dry spell!”

“Oh, yes.” I blew over the surface of my coffee, but it was still too hot to drink.

“So did the dress from the other night have a delayed reaction?”

I could hear her banging around the kitchen, or at least it sounded like the clatter of pots and pans. “Actually, yeah, it kind of did. Apparently he found it very distracting indeed.”

“So? How was it? I can’t believe you did it with Ivan. I mean I know you’ve wanted to jump him for months, but still. Eh, different strokes, I guess. I shouldn’t judge.”

“It was…” How to even begin to describe last night? I had more lurid details than I would ever share with Athena. I couldn’t even imagine her reaction if I gave her the full story of what had happened. For all her talk, she was basically a wholesome sort. Not that I thought of what Ivan and I had done as
un
wholesome. But it was certainly… “Interesting. It was interesting.”

“Oooh. Oh, Cami. I’m so sorry. Ugh, and you have him right next door, too. Are you—”

“No, no, not interesting like code word for
bad.
Actually interesting. It was very good. Very. Very, very good. Let’s be clear on that. Did I mention good? Because you have no idea.”

Athena took a few seconds to digest that. “Okay. So interesting how, exactly?”

She sounded as dubious about asking as I did about telling. “Well, you know how I was assuming he had no experience with sex?”

“Yyyyesss…” Dubiouser and dubiouser.

“I could not have been more wrong about that. And last night I learned a thing or two. Or five. Dozen. Because he schooled me. He schooled me
good.
And any more detailed than that would be way too much information. Sorry.”

“Holy shit.”

I sipped my beverage, imagining I could feel the caffeine going to work in my system. “Athena, I could not agree more.”

* * *

Often in a new relationship there was that “Lost Weekend” period, the time when you first started having sex and couldn’t get enough of one another. Time seemed to disappear when you were rolling around in bed, and there was a lot of falling asleep on the job after too many late nights of not being able to say goodbye without hopping right back in the sack. Or at least that was what had happened to me with the only two semi-serious long-term relationships I’d had.

I wasn’t expecting that sort of a weekend with Ivan. In truth, I wasn’t sure what the hell to expect. I only knew I was in trouble because I’d found his awkward attempts at afterglow cuddling to be very sweet and endearing. Either he was genuinely lost in the woods or he had the best clueless-guy con in the world going on. So I approached the backyard at gardening time with a little trepidation.

What I got was a reprieve. Dinesh and Julia were down there too, trying to assemble a new barbecue grill. A few of us had the small, cheap kind of grill you tend to have when you live in apartments. This was the real thing, a big black monster of a barbecue. It had a lot of pieces.

“We’re planning to cook for anyone who wants it tonight,” Dinesh informed me cheerfully, “if we can just figure out how to put the damn thing together.”

Julia gave me a wave, then frowned back down at the parts strewn in front of them, wiping her forearm over her face. It was already heating up. Her dark auburn hair, skimmed back into a pony tail, was frizzing a little around her face where a few wisps had stolen free. I resented the fact that she looked no less beautiful with the frizz. “I still need to go to the grocery store.”

“I can get this,” her husband assured her. “Go. It’ll be done when you get back, babe.”

They kissed, a light brush of the lips as she bent down for a moment. “Text me if you think of anything else we need, okay?” I felt a pang of envy at the casual exchange. Ivan, tending his tomatoes, seemed oblivious to the whole thing. And, aside from a nod when I’d first stepped outside, oblivious to me as well.

Once Julia was gone, Dinesh growled and shook a socket wrench at the sky. “Why do I get myself into these things? Why, why?”

“I did wonder.” I took the wrench from him, before Dinesh could damage anything with it. He had his strengths, but it was generally conceded that being handy was not one of them. He could have rendered a beautiful three-dimensional model of the grill on his computer in no time, but the odds were slim he could assemble the real thing well enough for it to be useable for cooking. Neither of us was all that surprised when Ivan, brushing soil off his hands, reached out calmly for the tool and scooped up the instruction sheet.

Without saying a word he spent a few seconds perusing the instructions, a few more seconds scanning all the tools and parts, and then set to work. Within ten or fifteen minutes, the completed grill stood before us, ready for its debut that evening. After the initial glance, he’d set the instructions aside and never looked at them again.

“Country boy skill set,” he said by way of explanation, when he had tightened the final bolt and put the last tool back in the box Dinesh had brought out.

Dinesh nodded and shrugged philosophically. “You’ll get the first burger. Thanks, man.”

“You’re welcome,” Ivan said gravely, then smiled just a bit. “If you need any tomatoes, let me know. I have a few ripe ones.” He made a stiff gesture over his shoulder at his plants, each of which sported at least a couple of fat, gorgeous fruits that practically begged to be picked.

“Yeah, what are you doing with all of the tomatoes, anyway?” Dinesh asked. “Julia said you don’t eat them.”

“It’s an experiment. I’m gathering empirical data to demonstrate that my father’s method of growing tomatoes is less effective than it could be.”

I hadn’t heard the actual nature of the experiment before. “But why? I mean, if you don’t like them, why do you care?”

Ivan looked at me like he didn’t quite understand the question. “Because I think his reasoning is flawed. Or clouded, more accurately, by his insistence on adhering to traditional methods when the upside-down method is demonstrably superior on several key indicators including water usage, insect management, fertilizer requirements and—”

“Hey, thanks for the help, bro, but I need to get upstairs and start working on this shindig. See you later!” Dinesh vacated the patio like a man running from a burning building, leaving me and Ivan alone between the barbecue and the tomato plants.

“I thought he’d never leave,” Ivan said, and took my face in his hands. I was expecting him to kiss me but he didn’t. Instead, he stood and stared at my face like he was drinking me in. His eyes had golden flecks in the iris near his pupils, I noticed for the first time. His nostrils were flaring. He traced my cheekbones with his thumbs, seeming fascinated by the texture. “Camilla.”