Tres Días y Dos Noches en el Dos Mil 16
Nsfw 18+
(Somewhat) one sided, angst, college au, x (fem)reader adjacent, cunnilingus, vaginal sex, drug/alcohol use
(Sorry for the long wait you guysss as it turns out grad school is really harddd)
una noche
(part 2/5, word count: 9,906)
part 1
He arrives to pick me up around 10:30, it’s Saturday night. He shows up with his disposition in a full one-eighty from when he dropped me off last night. He’d then gone full silent-treatment on me from the moment we’d gotten in his car again until he’d pull up outside my apartment—a shared, studio-sized, but three bedroom apartment above a Chinese restaurant in the middle of Santurce.
He’d only tell me to have a good night and grab my bag for me out of the back seat before looking right back down at his phone to ignore me while I got out and headed inside. I’d shoved down the sick feeling in my throat and locked myself in my room for the rest of the night, telling my roommate not to bother with dinner for me and making up an excuse about an early morning. I spent several hours trying not to cry every time I thought of the cold shoulder he was giving me, staring at our messages; my last sent text from the afternoon still on read.
Nothing has been resolved since, we haven’t talked it over, haven’t texted. In the morning I woke up, showered, and left on a walk before the sun even came up just to clear my head. I listened to music and ignored the nausea in my stomach. I thought about school instead, about what I’ll do for a small upcoming project for my creative writing elective.
I laughed to myself as the headlights of a car passed and I thought about writing a short story about a girl who was in love with a boy from one of her classes. Just vomiting all my feelings up in a Word document, changing the names to those of my favorite characters from TV, selling it like it’s not just my current lived experience. It’d be an easy A.
The typical time he’d wake up in the morning came and went with no usual good morning text, and I didn’t send one myself. I got no apology or explanation for the awkward situation at his parents’ place. And in return, I didn’t reach out either. Never told him what the problem really was. Not because I don’t care, obviously I care… but because I don’t want to push if it’s just going to topple everything. Deep inside I know it’s pathetic…
I was cleaning up in my kitchenette from where I’d gotten Subway after being hunched over a word document, writing a research paper all morning, when my phone buzzed on the tile counter. First text back from him since and he’d simply asked if I’d go out with him and some friends tonight. No acknowledgment of how I may feel or what happened. No sorry.
But I agreed. For some reason, I agreed. Told him it sounded good when he said he’d come get me later tonight.
Maybe it was the way I always have to try to fix things before breaking them off. Maybe it’s that I swear if I just keep coming back he’ll admit there’s something deep there. Maybe it’s just the fact that he asked and I have my own desperation to feel. A need to chase any affection I’m shown. Find that feeling that surely felt like love the first few times we hooked up.
Now here he is, holding a bouquet of flowers out towards me on the stoop like that’s all it takes to get my forgiveness. Long, white strappy petals of zephyr lilies and watercolored pink magnolia flowers with baby’s breath tucked between every long, green stem. He’s dressed in all black; button up shirt undone to his sternum, tight jeans, chains on his neck. Sunglasses low on the bridge of his nose, messy eyeliner, dripping in diamond encrusted jewelry. Rings on every finger. He even smells of something herbal and vanilla, some expensive cologne.
He looks like someone you’d see amongst backup dancers in an old, kinda bad reggaeton music video on MTV or TCV—meanwhile I stand on my front steps in sweatpants, half ready, hair still damp from an earlier shower. He’s shown up a few hours sooner than I’d expected of him.
He smiles warmly when I finally take his bunch of flowers, but my expression doesn’t change from the blatant confusion that first crossed my face when I opened the door. I invite him in while I get ready, despite the fact that all my roommates are asleep. We hardly speak aside from me telling him to be quiet as I palm the doorknob at the top of the steps. When I fill a vase from the kitchen sink and put his flowers in the middle of the counter to rest, he sits on my couch and stares at his phone with his sunglasses pushed up on top of his head. One arm draped over the back of the couch, legs spread out wide.
I later catch a glimpse of him texting when I come out from putting on makeup, dressed with my shoes in my hand. Long blue and grey text bubbles take up sections of his screen. He’s messaging in paragraphs; something out of character for how I know him.
He thumbs the home button when he feels me beside him, and presses his knuckles into his lips like he’s too focused on staring at the nothing on his home screen to look up at me. I make a point to look away. At this point, it’s none of my business.
I was considering washing my hands of him. Letting this fizzle out the way it should. But when he texted me, I couldn’t leave him on sent like my instincts told me to. Like I tried to for thirty whole minutes after his message appeared on my lockscreen.
Instead of doing what’s right—what’s good for me—I picked up my phone and I responded. I told him to come over.
That’s probably my second mistake.
Anyway— I haven’t dressed up. Not extensively. I have on nice, black jeans with purposeful holes blown into the knees and tears up the thighs. A cute cropped tank with some dainty gold jewelry. My fit doesn’t taint his, nor does it show off. It’s just my average, street clothes. I sit to tie my shoes beside him on the couch. I can feel his body heat up my side as he shifts to the side to pocket his phone.
“Huele’ bien rico,” he says. Quietly, so that maybe the rest of the house won’t overhear.
His hand finds the gap of exposed skin on my curved back, the cold metal of his rings imprinting there. I prickle with goosebumps as I wrap my laces around my fingers and cinch the knot. He doesn’t move his hand, just keeps it resting there like it’s some kind of reassurance for him. Probably not for me.
“Gracia,” I reply, mostly just breath into my knee.
As I lock the door and turn to walk down the steps beside him, I realize I have no idea where we’re going, who we’re meeting, or why he decided to invite me along. I think about asking aloud but when we reach the last step I feel his hand snake into mine, fingers lock around mine, warmth of him seeping into me.
It flips my stomach so bad I almost freeze in place. Beni looks over at me, a smirk slow-rising like he knows just what the small gesture’s done to my insides.
“You know, tú siempre te ves muy linda,” he tells me, voice low as he leads me to where he parked across the street, “pero esta noche…”
He trails off, pulling me closer until our feet stop moving and he’s no longer just beside me and suddenly we’re pressed chest to chest and stalled in the middle of the street. His lips fall open as we make this, sort of, deep eye contact like he’ll continue the thought, but instead he cups my face and drags me in for a kiss.
I can taste whatever chapstick he has on, something sweet like coconut. It mixes with the waxy, sugared film of my lipstick and the subtle touch of smoke and vape in the back of his throat. He grips around my waist and leans down into my height, I rise onto my toes and cup his face. He pushes against me, pulls me in tight.
He, in fact, breathes me in through his open mouth like I’m the first breath of fresh air he’s had in all his life. Holds me like I’m the last bit of the shore in his claw as he’s being cast out to sea. His teeth bite and pull at my lower lip, dragging us apart. I catch the thin slits of his pupils behind half shuttered lids and curtains of his eyelashes for just a moment before he goes back in. His fingers tangle in my hair and I grip onto the sides of his shirt under his arms; he huffs a sigh out against me so heavy it’s vocalized in his throat and vibrates in my weakened knees.
When we get to his car, he watches me walk around and get in from where he settles into the driver’s seat. Before I have even found my seatbelt he’s lit a joint, put his sunglasses back on, and is pulling away from the curb so fast his tires squeal against the weathered, city asphalt. The car shucks as he straightens the wheel and the tape in deck sputters and I can’t help but laugh a little to myself at the lunacy. The ease grows back slowly as he seems to act like his same old self.
Instead of Yandel, now it’s Rasta y Gringo. The song cuts out with every boquete he hits on my old, never repaired road—bass buzzing out of his overused, tinny sound system.
He clicks his tongue at the way I put the seatbelt on all fast at his reckless driving and passes me the joint. He only glances my direction under his glasses, I hardly catch it as I pinch the crutch and draw smoke in from the glowing orange ember. I take a hit or two before passing it back, I breathe the smoke out of my nose. And this time his eyes stay on the road.
The incoming wind blows my hair like crazy through the cabin, the weed in my system makes the cold, saline air feel like gentle care caressing my face. His hand finds my knee every now and then, warming something within me.
I watch passing dark waves beyond the highway sparkle in the moonlight, and suddenly, I can hear the bass of the music before I can even spot where the party he’s taking me to is.
The sound is low and constant through the car doors, thrumming against all else. Like a scene from a movie as it comes into view around the corner. Misty LED lights from atop this building, strayed and lonely along the coast. There’s people spilling out onto the sidewalk, leaning against cars, perched on stoops with red cups and loose limbs as we roll up. He slides into a tight spot on the curb like the space between a large, lifted truck and the honda civic behind him was kept just for him.
No hesitation nor circling back, just kills the engine and cranks up his window. He sits there for a second with his hand on the wheel as I follow. When I turn he’s looking at me, but before I even have a chance to ask him what’s up, he’s pushing out the door.
He comes around the car before I have even touched the doorhandle. Already, he’s there, opening it for me, reaching out to help me step up onto the cracked, abandoned sidewalk. Instinct, his hand fits into mine, warm and careful with attention. His fingers slot between mine when he shuts the car, like they’ve been waiting all day. Like him pushing me away yesterday was some weird fever dream.
Building’s nothing special. I presume an old few apartments, since left to rot like the rest of the concrete shells around here that mend with the sand and sink into the ocean. Degrading concrete cracked and broken, old rusty metal door he holds open for me, stairwell lit in an old, flickering yellow light that makes things feel a little sickly.
Voices chatter inside—I can see people sat on a couch and stood around in the nearly dark, smoke-filled room as we walk through—a few phones lit up on faces I don’t recognize. As we climb the stairs, our footsteps echo in the tiled hall. The strong scent of cheap perfume gets stronger; juuls and weed, spilled drinks, maybe fried food from somewhere nearby. But when we open the rooftop door, it hits me full force.
Lights strung overhead over clothes lines and electrical posts in lazy lines. The biggest speaker I have ever seen set up on a plastic table with a mess of cups and bottles and plates of food around it blasting trap music so loud the vocals distort. People everywhere—dancing, talking, pressed together in little clusters that break and reform like waves. People in the back in a (surprisingly, filled) in-ground pool, ground lights on, people scattered along the concrete patio, down on a decaying wooden deck, all the way down creepy looking stairs and around a fire on the beach.
I drag my heels as he pulls me with him into the clustered crowd of intoxicated bodies. My own vibrating like a live wire with the weed high peaking. This is a whole different world than I am used to and I have no idea what the fuck I’m suddenly doing in the middle of it. I can see myself here very soon just tucked away in a corner trying to distract myself with my insta feed and twitter and wishing I could be at home finishing my homework.
But his hand tightens around mine and he glances back over his shoulder—eyes lidded, glasses on his head, lips parted with that lazy confusion. And he smiles, just a little. And he reaches around my waist and our hips meet and suddenly I am pressed very close to his chest.
His body heat bleeds from the unbuttoned top of his shirt as he tugs me forward, “ven,” he reassures, “te tengo, mai,” like there’s no version of tonight where I don’t remain attached to him.
We step into the heavy traffic together, my hip stitched to his, hand gripping his bicep. He finds the edge of the table and parks. I keep my eyes down as he pours up a weird concoction of whatever liquor is there into a solo cup, and passes it to me. I take a sip and wince at the sharpness on my tongue, the bitter burn of whiskey and rum and maybe tequila or something all just poured on top of each other. No mixer. No chaser. No lime or salt rim cocktail glamour. Just shocking, straight alcohol.
He’s nearly poured a second one for himself when across the way someone shouts in our direction.
“¡Ay, Benito!”
A man with medium-brown skin, scruff on his chin to match his fluffy hair, and bright white teeth. A look in his eye like he might be high on something harder than anything I’d ever touch. The sweat practically drips off of him and soaks into a tight, red T-shirt. He weaves his way through a group of women beside us and settles beside Benito, giving him a hearty bump to the shoulder with his own. So much so the liquid in Beni’s cup sloshes and he almost spills what he’s pouring.
“¿Qué es la que hay?” He returns, not even looking up yet. And as he begins talking to this guy—when he cranes his neck, pushes his glasses up back on top of his head—this is where his demeanor changes.
But now, unlike times in the past when I have been somewhere with him and his friends, he doesn’t grow distant or cold. In fact, as soon as his hand has parted with the bottle of johnnie walker, it’s clasped over mine on his arm and pulling me into their conversation.
He’s warm, open, and alive in a way that feels almost generous as he smiles and laughs at whatever they’re talking about.
“Esa es mi jeva,” he introduces me, and my heart grows full. Mi jeva—my girl—like it’s so obviously the right choice of words. It sounds established, like we share something deeper than just sex. Something greater.
I slip my hand out from under Beni’s arm to switch which one I hold my red little plastic cup of death in and reach out to shake his friend’s hand. He grins at me with those bright white teeth and calls himself Micheal. Benito mentions he was one of the guys he worked with on this song he showed me last week, a song with the working title of Polaroid. It wasn’t my favorite, but I listened to it in full off the file he E-mailed me and later sent him a paragraph on everything I liked, nonetheless.
He tells his friend, Micheal, all about how I’m into film, sort of running off at the mouth. How I have a Sony camera of my own and have produced several passion projects for school and as a hobby. His friend doesn’t look too interested, but nods along and keep smiling at me, jokes that maybe I could film a music video for them. I kinda laugh along, but deep down my stomach is still turning from Benito calling me his jeva and my heartbeat is loud in my ears. Every thought I dwelled on last night has left me. And I can’t decide whether any of it’s the fault of the weed or the anxiety or the implication that I mean more to him than I do and the kind way he’s acting towards me.
We follow him over to a group sitting in a semi-circle in a conglomerate of plastic lawn and metal folding chairs. I recognize a few faces, maybe from class or in photos Beni has shown me, but I know none on a personal level. Just a bunch of guys around our age who, presumably, all know each other. I watch Benito make rounds of side-hugging and fist-bumping most of them, simply waving to a few others; Micheal hands me a chair and then he pulls his own up beside a guy with his face buried in his phone and the brim of a baseball cap. He reclines back in the metal chair and pulls a hefty-looking blunt from a pack of Swishers.
Benito slumps into the spot next to me, our knees brush, and he raises his cup like a salute to the next smoke.
“Yo,” he drags out, like he’s already wasted out of his mind—and he might be, “pásame eso ahí…”
Mike lights the end and takes a few puffs before leaning forward and they exchange the blunt through two fingers.
“Acho…” he croaks, long, while turning it over like a prized jewel, “esto está cabrón…”
Mike nods and lifts just his fingers up off where his palms are planted on his knees. Like saying a humble thank you. Benito takes a drag from it, thick smoke trailing from his lips, then passes it my way, to the left as they begin talking about… whatever.
I take one hit off it, still feeling the joint from the car, holding the hit down without even meaning to. As I cough out smoke, Benito flicks his thumb at me like telling me to keep passing it. So I pass it to the guy sitting next to me who’s already leaning in with his arms on his knees and pull my phone out quick to distract me from the fact I’m out of place.
I scroll through my twitter feed, not even really paying attention to the videos I click on and like. Just thinking, trying not to feel like I’m intruding on his social life. I can feel the weed soaking into my skin, a deeply seated warmth within me. That slow dragging feeling turning into something flowery and floating. I take another sip of my drink, one that might be too long, and tap to expand some silly cat video.
I zone out most of the conversation; just a circle of guys I have never met chatting on about music, video games, girls, the new Star Wars movie coming out this year, how they think it’s going to taint their fond childhood nostalgia. Something deep suddenly in my ribs settles with the weed—anxiety dissolving into the air with the smoke, melting into something that almost makes me feel sixteen years old again. Not quite comfort or contentment. Just something familiar.
For a few moments, the years between then and now collapse like a house of cards. Folding into one another. The sticky feeling on my fingertips and the residue on my nailbeds, a sour aftertaste on my tongue. The strange phenomenon of being young enough to believe ever night might become a story worth telling later.
The warmth almost aches. And when I glance down, I realize why.
Benito’s hand rests upon my knee as he speaks, takes turns, nods along. Palm warm over a frayed slit in my denim. Thumb idly stroking back and forth, fingers lifting as he talks. And maybe he’s nudged his chair in closer, or maybe he set it like that initially, but his thigh radiates heat into the side of mine with how close he’s sitting.
It mixes as another intoxicant in my bloodstream. And I can’t help but smile at the fuzzy feeling circling in my belly. Welling in my chest. But deep down I know the comfort is not him. No, he’s the splinter. He’s the ripple that disturbs my soft blanket of ease.
I scroll to the next video, take another sip, try to ignore the sick feeling in my gut which I know stems from last night, then he’s turning to me. Leaning in close, talking low when there’s a gap in his conversation. He’s in my personal space now, looking to me with those big, brown, doey eyes…
“Todo bien, mi amor?” he asks, tone gentle. Warm and softly, he speaks, like a hoodie he’s pulled off his body and placed onto mine to warm me in the cool breeze that brushes the palms. To pacify the chill in those ripples he vitalizes through my bones.
I blink at him, feeling slow and dumb. The words take a second to hit me through the haze. His hand reaches my thigh. The weed’s made everything syrupy; colors blur at the edges and he’s so close to me now I can see flecks of amber in his deeply brown eyes. Feel his breath as his chest falls. I think about kissing him, feeling the softness of his lips like pillows between my teeth. “¿Ah?”
“Yeah,” I force out, voice coming scratchy with the taste of smoke lingering in my dry mouth, “sí, todo bien.”
He smiles at me, leaning in to press a quick kiss to my temple. His thumb drags a slow circle on my leg. Just once, like he’s assuring he’d linger longer if we were anywhere else. Then he’s pulling back, turning away, rejoining the conversation as if nothing happened. But his hand stays. Seeping warmth: buzzing, but solid. In its right place.
And that’s the thing about Benito. When he wants to, he makes you feel like the only person in the room. Even in a room full of people he knows. People trying to talk at him, get his attention. Even when you’re trying to sink into social media, trying to disappear. He can grab you and anchor you right back… if he wants.
I stop pretending to be busy on my phone and just watch the way his mouth moves. Watch the way he laughs at whatever Micheal is laughing at, too. The way he leans into the conversation with ease and confidence, but his thumb passes an occasional rhythm on my leg.
Mine, I think, yearning. My weed-brained stupor supplies it. He’s doing it just for me.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I know I should be smarter about this. I should remember how cold it felt when he pulled away from me yesterday, how he hardly looked at me when he dropped me back at mine. That this is casual and doesn’t mean what I want it to. He doesn’t love me. That it’s just convenient. Him and I are just fleeting pleasure, nothing else.
But I’m high. I’m buzzed. And he’s being so fucking affectionate. I can’t help but fall into it, I don’t think anyone else could, either. Not with how tectonic this sudden tenderness feels.
And when he catches me watching him, he doesn’t call me out like he might usually. Teasing and poking fun, or even just acknowledging aloud. Instead he holds my gaze a little longer than is probably necessary, lips tilting into a slight smile. A shy grin. Like a secret shared between just the two of us.
Eventually the group slowly disperses as the blunt goes out—maybe an hour, maybe two, maybe only ten minutes later—and we’re as alone as we can be once again, by the old rusted handrail near where the roof overlooks the pool. I have started to feel the mixture of liquor spinning in my temples and my cup contains maybe a mouthful at the bottom.
We have been talking about nonsense for quite some time. He’s been rambling about some TV show from The States I have never seen, telling me the plot and all he dislikes about it. Seemingly just go fill the air. Honestly, I have been zoning most of it out in favor of the debilitating thoughts that keep coming to mind.
Now, he lights a cigarette, something he seldom does, as I lean onto the railing and watch a couple in the corner of the pool eat the lips off each other. A broad shouldered man with sleeve tattoos and a backwards Cangrejeros de Santurce cap, skinny, french-tipped fingers cupping his face. The edge of a sleek bikini lifted by the imprint of hands, every now and then being obscured by the water.
Something in it has my thighs tightening together and I try to ignore the way the orange glow of the lighter off Benito’s face in my peripheral adds fuel to the fire. The way he pinches the cigarette between his lips, cups a hand around the flame, with his glasses up on his head again, eyes narrowed, head ducked into his shoulders just enough to tip the end into the lighter. I swirl the off-colored liquor in my cup. Try to look anywhere but the public display in the pool that’s giving me flashbacks to the backseat of Benito’s car in the rain, to my bed when my roommates have been gone, to the university bathrooms.
Soon my eyes have drifted to leave me wholly staring at him. The orange light falls dark again and he stuffs the lighter back into his pocket. When he catches me looking his way, he offers his cigarette, smoke bellowing out of his nostrils. I go to put a hand up to deny the offer, but instead he takes my wrist, thumb pressing into my pulse. He places the cigarette between my lips for me, eyes locked on mine.
My stomach twists and I take a drag, I breathe out slowly as he pulls the cigarette away slowly. His eyes stutter around my face and he shifts closer. And, here I think I should say something to let the silence between us dissipate, even just a little, but then he dips forward and meets me halfway to catch my bottom lip between his tongue and his teeth.
His hand holds at my waist, cold rings meeting my skin again. He tugs me into his body, his leg almost presses between my legs but hesitates and instead he grips a hand on my ass through my jeans. I open my mouth to him and the kiss gets messy, his tongue against mine, my hand in his hair. It feels like the rest of the world obscures then and there into nothing. Like everything else goes black behind my eyelids as I grab him like a lifeline, tangle fingers in him, drag him in. It's a push and pull. Breathing each other in and out. His hands on my body as much as they can be in public, with a lit smoke between his fingers.
He pulls back slow, lips wet and eyes hazy. A little sexy darkness to his expression as he takes another hit off his cigarette, close. Hand still wrapping my body. Close.
The world slow-fades back in from a flash of light. The loud laughter, splashing in the pool, ocean far away. Ginza by JBalvin. The shifting hue of string lights above Benito’s head swaying with the commotion of the crowd. The smoke shrouding his silhouette.
I watch his eyes search my face. The pad of his palm passes over my back, fingers dragging longer than they should for something so casual. I don’t know what comes over me, maybe I see it replay in his eyes— but I feel an urge hit me like a tsunami and I feel the words come from my chest, to my throat, to my tongue, and out my mouth.
“You know, you were kinda an asshole to me yesterday,” I say, feeling the liquor in my cheeks. Right as I say it, I do wish I could shove it back down. But I watch his brow furrow, his eyes squint, that confused little grin crinkle up on his face. And I decide maybe it’s better to talk.
It’s instant, so he replies, “ay, ¿otra vez con eso?”
I feel that white hot feeling in my arms the second he says it. That welling up anxiety and heart break he’s been seeming to flick on inside me a lot lately. I try to hold back the emotion in my voice:
“¿Con qué? Como qué otra vez?”
The confusion drops from his face into something flatter, something almost bored. Like he can’t believe I don’t know what he’s talking about, like he does when he thinks I’m trying to start something. He shifts, pulls his body from mine, turns his away, leaning on the railing, taking another puff off his cigarette, staring out towards the sea.
“Tú sabes.”
I stand there, cup in my hand. Feeling stunned.
“¿Sabes qué?” I push anyway.
He looks back at me. His eyebrows raise and he glances towards the floor breathing in a sigh. His shoulders shrug and drop and he looks away again and shakes his head.
“Es… no fue na’, pichea.”
“No es nada…” I shrink, he drags long on the cigarette and his eyelids fall heavy.
“Bueno, fue ayer… no quiero hablar de esto aquí.”
“What?” I blink.
“It was yesterday. Just move on, please.” He says, like he needs to translate for me or something, then shrugs again, flicking ash over the ledge. I stare at him for another moment. Another long, painfully long moment. Just waiting, like maybe he’ll say something else. Maybe something will click and he’ll realize how he hurt my feelings. Maybe he’ll get it.
But he doesn’t, he just stands there, slumped over, staring at nothing. So I laugh, just lightly. A sharp little sound.
“So that’s your answer?” I try not to sound bitter as he fucks my train of thought, feeling my chest hollow.
“Answer to what?” Benito glances back again. Eyes never staying fully trained on me. “What answer?”
“To what happened…” I say, fidgeting. “No sé… me hubiera gustado un poco más de compasión. Aunque fuera un mensajito de buenos días. Por lo menos. Me ignoraste.”
“Y sobreviviste, ¿verdad?” He says it like it’s almost a joke, but it falls flat. “Tengo una vida también, tú sabes?”
Cold. As cold as his response yesterday—maybe colder. I feel my face fall just as flat as his attempt at lighthearted sarcasm. I feel it ache inside me, just as it did with his disbelief yesterday. When I said I didn’t want to fuck him anymore.
“Deja de hacer un show por eso, okay,” he mumbles.
I feel the sting bubble up to my throat and to my eyes. That sharp feeling in my hands and in my chest like I’m about to cry as his splinter grows. As he rips away that softly lined hoodie and tugs away the blanket. As his voice echoes that ‘fine, I’ll drive you home’ in my head. The same tone that had me choking back my emotions in his car, hiding my face as I walked in the door, dropping everything to the floor in my room and burying my head in my soft pillows. Pretending nothing was real but my bed.
And his eyes flick back to mine and instantly I see the recognition in them. I see it in the way they widen, just enough to even notice. And instantly I feel insecure and self-conscious.
It’s an instinct of mine to want to hide, but my mind scrambles like a feral animal and I can’t think of any way out, so when his arms come around me and his hand pushes my head into his chest, I just take it. I let him do it, let him comfort me.
I stifle back tears, I try not to let my breath stutter or my hands shake against his body or the liquid in my cup. I try not to let my face scrunch up as I feel it threaten to tear out of me anyway.
He presses lips to my hair, my forehead against his shoulder. His arm around my waist again, where it usually fits.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he mutters into me, hand stroking my hair. I feel overwhelmingly little and in my head I try to picture that he loves me, not that he’s just trying to soothe wounds he picked in me.
When he pulls back, I don’t want to go. But he takes my face in both his hands, smoke from the cigarette dangling in his fingers stinging my eyes further. I try to contain my sad look but the seemingly genuine concern brings the tears forward until they’re glimmering under my lashes as he wipes them away with his thumbs.
“Bebé,” he hums, voice dropping lower. I look away, try to turn my head but he doesn’t let me. I’m embarrassed now, the high amplifies it for sure. I’m embarrassed I let myself get emotional, embarrassed I showed him this is a big deal to me. “Miramé, mama.”
So I do, reluctantly.
And for a moment he just looks back. We don’t say anything to each other, neither of us able to find the right words. I’m feeling humiliated— and he probably is too, if anyone looks this way they’ll see this guy with this flossy gangster persona having to comfort this high maintenance, distressed girl.
“You’re really upset, aren’t you?” His tone has softened, he’s genuinely trying to comfort me. To smooth over these wrinkles and mend things.
“No shit,” I let a laugh slip me in place of a whimper. Defeated. I’m unsure what I’m feeling, undecided what I really want right now. I want to melt into him and forget all these negative feelings. But, concurrently, I want to push him away. Find my own way home just so I don’t have to face him with this heavy bullshit. Make my way back to my front stoop, climb the stairs, lock all this outside. Go to bed and dream of better things, wake up with temporary amnesia for why last night was a drag.
“Eso no era lo que quería.” he smiles gently, but winces, shakes his head. “De verdad, no quise hacerte llorar.”
“No estoy llorando,” I insist, bringing a knuckle up to wipe my nose. He lets me go then he takes half a step back.
“Si tú lo dices…” He flicks the ash off the end of his cigarette in a way that might read angrily if it weren’t for the fact I know him. I know he’s not easy to anger or frustration. He takes another drag before speaking so quietly I’m not sure if I even hear him correctly.
“We can leave, you know,” he tells me through a plume of grey bellowing from his nostrils. It blows out of his face in the wind, ribbons of silk dissipating into thin air, “if it’s too much.”
And I do think about leaving, but I bite my cheek instead of opening my mouth. I try never to be so selfish, even if all I really want right now is to go back to bed for the evening.
“But your friends are here.”
The wind blows harder, cuts out the music. A bottle breaks against concrete, like the breeze rolls it off a table and onto the ground or something, I don’t know. A group somewhere laughs all at once, a game of beer pong is destroying friendships on the patio in the opposite direction. There’s a brief silence between us before he answers.
“I honestly just came so I’d have an excuse to invite you and to see you.”
…So we make our way out of the party. Slowly, albeit. He drags me around to a few people. People he’d told he’d see, I guess. I down my drink, pour some more whiskey in the bottom as we pass the table of booze, down that too. I let him hold my hand or put an arm around me when he feels like it. It all feels against my better judgement, but anything to numb that underlying festering blister. Something like every step I take threatens to burst it.
I don’t feel the tension leave my shoulders until we’re long down the highway and he pulls his last joint out of his cigarette box and hands it to me to light. That first hit of weed feels like with the air out my lungs it takes all my upfront worry. I pass it back to him after just the first hit and he doesn’t pass it back.
Though, it’s not long after that he pulls into the parking lot of a strip mall. He passes through the large lot, through stacks of cars, cranks the wheel with one hand into a stall at the far end of the parking where we’re isolated. I watch the stream of smoke drawing into the air from the joint pinched in his fingers as it lights up in the rising and falling light of streetlamps.
He kills the engine of the car under a stretch of tall palm trees, takes another hit off the joint before finally passing it back to me. The music dies with the rumble and he’s already reaching around his seat into the back for his bluetooth speaker.
He really can’t sit in a single moment of silence. It’s almost a bad joke.
I take a hit, french inhale. The weed tingles in my nose and in the back of my throat but I’m so high now it doesn’t burn and I don’t cough. He sets the speaker on the dash as it connects, scrolling through whatever music app he uses to find what he wants to listen to. I don’t think I pass the joint back but it ends up in his hand, smoke illuminated in the white light of his phone screen as it passes out his nostrils.
He puts on some light indie bedroom rock, tossing his phone and his glasses and all the rings on his fingers up with the speaker. He takes one more hit off the joint before ashing it out on the dash and tossing it to the cupholder once it’s stopped smoking. In an instant after, he climbs over the seat—shoes on the upholstery—then flops himself down backwards into the back. I watch as he slides his body to fit against the door: one leg stretched out on the seat, the other on the floor. It leaves not a solid moment for anything in between the driving and getting physical in the back seat.
I follow his lead, more dazed and crossfaded than I’d like to admit, slipping between the front seats into the back. His hands reach to guide me, fingers brushing my waist as he pulls me into him. My knees sink into the bruised leather, my hips aligning overtop of his. He tugs me forward, harsh into his chest, my palms place flat to the curve of the door behind him.
As I sink into him, his mouth is on me quick. Teeth dragging over the exposed part of my stomach, tongue brushing my skin. His fingers slide under the bottom hem of my cropped shirt and glide the fabric upwards until he’s pulled it up and over my chest, exposing my lacy bralette for him to put his hands on.
He thumbs my nipples through the lace, the effects of the weed make the warm embrace of his hands cupping each breast feel like warm honey, like he’s slowly engulfing my body in tender heat.
I shift my hips forward to plant myself over his hard-on, I grind denim against denim and he presses his forehead into my collar, lips on my skin. His shallow breath there inspires my body to press into his and he opens his mouth to me.
“Mami, te voy a chingar,” he huffs against my skin, mouth never actually leaving. His lips speak the syllables into me. “Déjame hacerte sentir tan bien, make up for last time ¿sí?”
I suck in a sharp breath through my nose, lips parted, fingers already at work unbuttoning his shirt. Once I have untucked the black silk shirt and opened it fully, I let my fingers skim over his chest. Over the ridges of his pectorals, the motion of his breathing, down to his navel.
He just watches up at me, waiting. Eager, waiting.
“¿Te gusta eso?” Beni mutters, eyes full through his lashes and his brow, hands still on my breasts. Softly stroking, encouraging. Willing.
He truly looks beautiful like this. When he’s begging and pleading without saying much. When he lets me take what he’s offering. I bring my hand up and cup his face, his jaw, just beside his chin. When I am his focus, he’s looking at me. Not over my shoulder, at his phone, the road. Not when his mind is elsewhere. But when his pupils are thick, glazed with something like desire, and his attention is wholly on me. When he’s deep in my eyes, when things shift and he’s getting what he really wants out of me.
Something that we can both agree on. Us alone, our bodies conferring with one another.
And, personally, it’s not that his hair’s a sexy mess, that his hot breath is urgent on my skin, that his shirt is exposing every part of him I’d like to caress and nibble and kiss. Not even the hard ridge pressing just right between my legs in a way that warms my lower belly or his thumbs working my nipples to slick me up.
No, it’s the need. The want. The desire for me and only me. Even if just a moment in time, on a clock that never stops counting down the seconds left. It doesn’t matter how fleeting.
It’s the way that if I do everything right—if I give him all he wants, all his body craves of mine—he may feel that little twinge of something in him that says I want her. I was wrong. I’m lying to myself. This is where I want to be.
“Sí,” I affirm, slowly nodding, “please, no me hagas esperar más…”
His mouth opens like he wants to reply but ultimately, instead, he cranes his neck to reach me, kissing me again. His body pushes against mine, moving his arms around me to gently put himself on top of me. My back hits the leather seats, his arm tilting my spine up into him. His thigh presses between my legs as our tongues meet and I wrap my arms around his neck.
He huffs a breath against me and tugs my tits out of each respectable lacy cup, touching me bare now.
“Fuck,” a smacking break in the kiss, “eres jodamente sexy,” he whispers like he has to keep his voice lower than the music, “you don’t know what you do to me.”
I give him my best seductive, into-it giggle as I lend my lips to him again, our teeth scraping as he moves on, trying to unbutton my jeans without upsetting our rhythm. Benito makes a sturdy one handed tug to my jeans, other hand planted firmly on my breast with no plan to let go. I shift to help, and he still struggles, but eventually I’m bare assed on the seats. My jeans and panties around my ankles with my shoes, him shifting to move out of the way as the clothes come off.
“No he podido dejar de pensar en este totito perfecto desde ayer,” he continues, moving down my body as he thumbs my folds, “no puedo creer que no me dejaras terminar. No había terminado de sentirte, tan calientita… tan apretadita.”
He bites at my navel, skin in his teeth as he pulls. My head falls back into the door, a huffy moan leaving me as he palms my thighs open.
“Me dejaste arrebatao. No podido quitarte las manos de encima en toda la noche.”
He’s all breath and saliva and sharp teeth all the way down to where his lips then meet his thumbs, spreading me open.
“No podía dejar de pensar en esto… exactamente esto… cada ves que me mirabas… fuck...”
He licks me with a flat tongue, goosebumps raising on my skin. I reach for a handful of his hair with one hand and let him lace his fingers through mine on the other. One thing I have always really liked about him is the way he eats me out. The way he’s gentle and soft, building pressure, kissing, sucking, nipping, then works up over time.
My stomach twists but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the way his tongue moves now; not with how he sucks my clit into his mouth, laps his tongue over me in soft circles. Nah. It’s because of his words.
“Qué mojada,” he mumbles into skin. I shift my hips into him, ball my fist tight.
It’s because every moment I let myself feel less and less used—let myself feel reassured by him… when we were at the party and he put his hand on my thigh, when he tucked my head under his chin, every time he put his hand around my waist—he was actually just circling me. A shark in the water, sniffing out where the blood was coming from. Me, a wounded baby seal. Uncoddled by my environment. Unknowing of my searching predator.
He was guiding the night to this moment. To having me in the back of his car again. To getting to fuck me again. When he sensed I was pulling away he pulled me back in and I fell for it.
“Fuck, please, papi,” I groan, letting our laced fingers tug apart as I brace the door above my head, “¡ay, sigue, así! Fuck!”
He slips a finger in, almost like he just wants to feel the way I throb. His head bobs as his tongue works me, grip under my knee with the awkward position the small car provides.
I want it so bad but part of me begins to feel mentally detached. As good as his mouth feels, sucking me off, I’m unsure if I can finish like this—with all that’s buzzing in my mind.
Nevertheless, I grip his hair until he hums against me and tense my muscles like if maybe I can just force it, something will click. I close my eyes and again I envision being in another situation. Something different where he’s on me and it doesn’t feel like this does.
Where he’s touching me with love and care and not like he just can’t wait to fill me up with himself. He adds a second finger, they only slightly pump in and out of me, for the most part they curl upwards inside and try to press my orgasm to the forefront of my mind. Try to urge it out of me. His grip on my knee subsides to find itself reached and outstretched back up at my breast, doing anything to will me to cum for him. Around his fingers and in his mouth.
I take a long breath, something like a sigh falling back out. Arch my back against the leather seats, let my hips sway every time he jolts something in me, gets me closer.
I envision myself and him, back at my apartment, where I have the control. It’s my space, my bed, my body. He’s not just asking for sex, he’s not wanting to get off, to fuck me hard, fill me up or pull out and spill across my lower back, then kiss me once before moving on to whatever he has to do next.
We’re in my bed after he’d taken his time to hold and undress me. The soft mattress gives way to our weight, everything is tidy and organized how I like it to be. We’re alone, invisible to the rest of the world. Even the pictures of friends and family on my dresser are turned over.
He’s making love to me. Clinging to me with everything he has as he makes me feel this good. Kissing down my belly and inside my thigh with grace, not urgency. Building the heat in my belly just off his affection alone. With his attention all over my body and his skin close to mine, not with oral sex and his fingers fucking my cunt and pinching and tugging on my tits. His words poetic in nature by the emotion they hold, something devotional he couldn’t hold back if he tried because he does love me. He wants me. I am capable of being loved and wanted.
When he fucks me he fucks me slow, kisses and talks me through it. Mutters his praise against me, and not just about how good I feel. His hands touch my body, not to force the high but to savor the feeling of my skin. To drink up the moment. And when it’s over he stays present beside me. Holds me, continues to talk to me, tell me he cares for me. He cleans me up with something that isn’t a dirty T-shirt and we cuddle. I get to keep kissing him, naked and close under my soft silk comforter and in a bed that doesn’t sometimes feel like plywood. There’s more than one pillow and the sheets are clean. I don’t dissolve back into that girl he has classes with, who he met at a party, who he has nothing in common with, who he keeps around because her self-worth is so low that the sex comes easy.
“¿Ya casi, mi amor?”
His voice pulls me out of my head. Out of my bedroom, out of my unrealistic fantasy and back into a parking lot in the back of his beat-up, unclean Honda filled with weed smoke and the stench of cigarettes, after a night I tried to let myself leave him.
I look down, his big brown eyes are looking back up, my hand still fisted in his bleached hair. It’s so damaged it feels dry, like straw. And something in all of it cracks through me like a whip. I feel the sharpness of my orgasm, simply from being overworked, rip through my body. My hips press hard into his lips, grip instinctively pushing his head down, spine bowing as it floods out my mouth.
His tongue presses against me, working slow, dragging out and prolonging the way I pulse against his probing fingers. And fuck, he’s so good at that. It feels like hot lava rushing up my legs, through my lumbar, up my chest and into my head. I try to control how hard I grind up into him but I don’t have much ability to control anything, it seems.
“That’s it, nena,” Benito coos as he comes up. When his fingers leave me I feel empty, so empty and almost cold. He sits up straight and climbs over top of me, sucking his fingers clean of my cum. He’s quick to undo his belt, pulling his shirt up to tuck under his chin, exposing the lines of his torso, unbutton and unzip his pants, pull out his stiff and already leaking cock. He pumps it a few times, thick in his hand, foreskin peeling back to expose the perfect curve of his tip.
We meet eyes and I feel my insides ache, yearning to pull him in and hold him around the neck and let him fuck me so hard he breaks my neck against the door. But deep down inside me there’s fear. A sinking feeling somewhat like doom. Like if I let him fuck me, he’s winning and I’m losing.
I almost stop him, I almost put my hands out and push him away despite the guilt that would eat at me for that. He bends over top of me, forehead meeting mine, and he speaks:
“Hablame, mami,” he says, “dime que tú quieres esto.”
And it overrides my good sense because he’s just given me an out. If I truly don’t want it, I can say so.
I believe he’s a good man. I believe his intentions are pure, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. That’s not what stops me from saying no and from telling him that I’m unsure I want to have sex with him. It’s not even that I’m afraid he’ll ignore me again, because at this point if he did maybe I could take that as my true sign that this isn’t worth chasing and I could let this die.
No, it’s the feeling his words invoke that turn me on. The knowledge that he at least cares enough to ask. That pushes the edge just enough that suddenly my muscles clench and my gut tells me I do want this.
“Fuck me,” I tell him, breathless, feeling my eyelids waver with the heaviness, “lo quiero, papi.”
He smiles lightly and breathes out a shaky sound as I feel him kiss his cock to me, ready to slide in. I feel his heartbeat against mine where we connect. The need to pull him down into me and feel his breath and his skin and hear his strained little quiet sounds in my ear as he fucks me is burning me alive. So I put my arms back around his neck and he pushes the tip in, easing slow with the glide I provide.
Before he presses any further he leans his head down, eyes flickering closed, and he presses a gentle kiss to my nose. One that lingers and then pulls away and comes back for a second and a third up the bridge and between my eyebrows. It’s something that, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think would say I cherish you.
I feel dizzy at his sweetness, sickly, almost, in the way it knots my stomach up. Nauseating like a sugar rush. He brushes hair out of my face then leaves his palm on my cheek as he sinks into me. He rests his forehead on mine and laces our fingers together again. His eyes stay closed but I watch his face twist on the first few strokes, feel his fingers twitch in mine and at my face. His shaky breath on my skin, the tiny cursed out sounds that he presses against my lips as his pace quickens.
I slide my free hand up under his shirt and place it flat to the middle of his back, feeling his muscles tense as he thrusts. When I dig my nails in, they flex and he shifts into me with a low groan and I find myself grinning into his mouth.
He’s beautiful, even in this close proximity. With his eyes shut and his face contorted. Like a renaissance painting, waxy brushstrokes blending the color out on his cheeks. All the dramatic, iconic beauty of a romantic masterpiece. Sunny and luminous like a Monet, something almost gothic and brooding underneath like a Caravaggio. The moon, crescent glow in his eyes of Grimshaw, opening into thin slits that catch me staring. Perhaps it’s just a streetlight or the headlights of a car, but the way he’s lit above me is stunning anyway.
His hand wraps the top of my head, pulling me in to kiss my forehead once more. I hadn’t even realized he was slamming me into the door until his fist is suddenly softening the impact.
He pulls back to look at me, barely-there beads of sweat on his face and his chest. We hold eye contact, jaws hung, breathing stuttered and gasping. The windows are fogging at the corners, the car is surely shuddering from the outside, we’re vocal enough to be heard through the doors. I’m feeling him swell inside me, watching it grow through his expression, the way he squeezes my hand tighter. And I can only hope that somewhere deep in this action, this space I’m dangling in between adoration and sexual ecstasy is somehow shared between the both of us.
When he finishes, he finishes inside; throbbing profoundly, with his head snuggling deep between my neck and my shoulder, hands on my body clutched in non-intimate places. He stays nestled inside for a while longer, coming down in me, breathing in me, just huffing it off. Letting me feel the expansion of his lungs with each breath, the race of his heartbeat in the pit of my ribcage, the moist afterglow that soaks him.
And when he pulls away it’s not so cold. Instead, I sit up, I’ve hardly pulled my clothes back on while he’s adjusted himself and grabbed his previously abandoned joint. He pulls me into him, slumped against the door, into his lap.
He smokes his joint, rakes fingers though my hair, hums along to the soft music I had otherwise zoned out. His heart beats against my ear, shirt still open as I lay my head to his chest. He passes me the weed and I pinch it between two fingers, closing my eyes as I draw in smoke. He doesn’t say anything and I don’t either. It just feels like he’s guiding me back into him. Back into reality and into life. Out of my head, whether that’s a good thing… or not.