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The moment you ’re home, I’ll give you everything you want.
There’s a dangerous cast to the sky—dark, heavy, near-splitting at the seams. It’s not a night to have rejected a ride home from the station, not with those words ringing in your ears.
But when the ride was your ex, you’d rather risk getting caught in the downpour.
The pavement is hard and cold beneath your tired feet. Your whole body is sore from the long train ride home, spent stiffly across from Ben as you’d avoided his gaze, but you’d walk twice the distance home to even halve the time you’d spent with him. His sad eyes and kicked-puppy stare had been stuck to you the whole time, as if magnetized, and they weigh on you now as heavy as the suitcase you drag behind you.
This trip was a mistake. You should not have gone anywhere with Ben, professionally or otherwise. Not with how weird the energy has been between you and him, ever since you broke it off.
“Can’t you just try to be happy with me?” he’d asked you then. “I’m a good partner, aren’t I? I just want to make you happy, sweets, and it’s like you won’t even let me.”
Objectively, Ben had been the boyfriend everyone seemed to want when they talked about romance—interested and engaged, excited about a future together, sensitive and willing to talk about his feelings. He even knew where the clitoris was. There was nothing—no red flags, no warning signs—that should have scared you off.
It was just you. There was something wrong with you, because none of that made you happy—not the lunch dates, not the weekly flowers, and not even the sex. All you knew was that when he started wondering when you would introduce him to your parents, ice had run down your spine.
A bad gust of wind slaps you from behind, followed by a crack of thunder, too close for you to make it home dry. Indeed, there isn’t much time after finishing that thought before the deluge unloads, raindrops falling heavy and cold and fat as bullets.
You come to a resigned stop in the middle of the sidewalk, tilting your face up to the sky. There’s no point in rushing now—thick, late-winter clouds spread low across Liverpool, slow-moving. By all appearances intending to linger as long as possible. You’d neglected an umbrella, and your coat is nowhere near waterproof. You think of the warm interior of Ben’s car and shiver.
You want John.
You struggle to understand it. He is nothing like what you’d assign yourself for a match—there is a wide gulf of difference between you and him, too wide for you to ever expect an easy crossing. He and you should feel disjointed, incongruous, as ill-suited as a war horse might be to a hummingbird. There shouldn’t be anything you could offer each other that either would have use for.
And yet, you do. It is easy. Breathable, in a way that feels unearned enough to make you nervous.
How are you supposed to navigate something that shouldn’t be working, but is anyway? How can something feel this good with barely any effort on your part? How can you go through with this, when you’re not even sure what it means?
The rain reaches its fingers down into your collar, pools around your feet. You close your eyes and try to hear John’s voice in your head again. Soft and low over the phone, coaxing. Inviting your fears out into the open to be soothed.
You’re walking again before you realize it—one cold foot in front of the other, heavy suitcase clattering behind you, familiar with the way home even through the sheeting rain. And what feels like mere moments later, you’re walking up the steps to his front door.
The window beside it glows a soft yellow around the edges. You can’t help but stand there, frozen again as this suddenly becomes real. John, and everything he’s offered you, is on the other side of the door. All you have to do is take it. All you have to do is knock.
But John opens the door before you can even lift your hand.
“Jesus, love,” he says, the moment he looks at you.
Time slows. Warmth pours from the open portal. He looks… comfortable. Soft around the edges in blue jeans and a knitted sweater—the same one he’d worn to dinner at the pub. You hadn’t realized how much you missed him, even in the few days you’d been gone, but once your eyes land on his you don’t want to look away. The angle of his brow; the shape of his mouth beneath his old-fashioned mustache. Looking at him is like looking at your bed at the end of a long day.
“Hi, John,” you reply, smiling apologetically.
“Come on, get inside!” he exclaims, hurrying you in as thunder claps behind you.
In his flat, the lights are low. As you stand dripping on his entry, you take in an arrangement of somewhat retro furniture and sparsely decorated walls. It’s utilitarian in a way that probably isn’t meant to be; spare of anything particularly homey because the inhabitant just doesn’t have time to pay attention to it. You’ve never actually been inside before. It’s very much like John himself; tidy but old-fashioned, practical, hiding absolutely nothing.
You don’t think the candles, though, sitting on a few end tables and shelves and glowing soft gold, are his standard decor. Nor is the crystal bottle of liquor languishing in an ice bucket at the center of a small coffee table, attended by two whiskey glasses off to the side.
“When you said you were on your way I didn’t think you’d be walking,” he says, taking your luggage and setting it aside. “Why didn’t you ask me to come get you? I have a car, would’ve been happy to drive you.”
“I—” and you laugh a little nervously, magnetized to the concerned slant of his brow, “I didn’t know you had a car.”
You’re not sure you would’ve asked him for a lift even if you had known.
He draws close, so close his warmth cuts through the chill of your wet clothes, his gaze moving across you like he’s drinking you in. He cups your face lightly with one hand, thumb tracing a gentle line across your cheek. The expression on his face is almost too tender for you to bear.
“You’re here now,” he murmurs.
There’s a tremble working its way through your chest. You feel desperately seen again, recognized in a way no one ever has before. “I’m a mess, I—maybe I should go and change, come back…”
“No,” he purrs, taking your chin between thumb and forefinger. “You’re stayin’ right here.” And quite easily, John kisses you for the first time.
His mouth is warm along yours. His free hand hooks your waist, pulls you closer as he moves to cup the back of your neck. You’re so surprised you don’t react for a moment, but that doesn’t deter him; he just coaxes you into responding, sipping at your lips, teasing at the seam with the tip of his tongue.
It throws you off balance. He kisses you as if he’s known all along how to do it; as if he’s studied you, all of those mornings, noting the way your lips touch the rim of your coffee mug and the way you look up at him when he talks to you. Calculating the angles, the ways your mouths could fit together.
He shifts, angling to kiss you deeper. A wave of vertigo threatens to overtake you—your hands fly to his chest, which is broad beneath your fingers. You dig them into the cable of his sweater, a little whine escaping you, and John huffs a laugh against your mouth before greeting your tongue with his.
You have never felt as small as you do now in John Price’s hands, at the mercy of the way he holds you—like he’s planning to keep you in place until he’s finished with you.
When he finally pulls away, you have the opportunity to take a deep gasp as he chuckles again. He thumbs your bottom lip, almost playfully.
“Mm,” he murmurs. “Wanted to do that the minute you walked into the pub that night.” You don’t have time to reckon with this confession—if you can even call it that, because once he says it you realize you’ve known the whole time—before he continues. “Come on, you must be freezing. Let’s get you warmed up.”
John helps you out of your coat, unwrapping you like peeling away a chrysalis. It exposes the thin, damp fabric of your dress to the warm air—and to his gaze—and you can’t help but feel suddenly naked in front of him. He’s revealed nothing that he hasn’t seen before, but irrationally, you want to cover your chest, or cross your arms over your stomach. Shield the most vulnerable parts of you from consumption.
John takes your hands in his and pulls you to an armchair—a comfortable, plush thing with a low back. He backs you into it so that your knees buckle, and you sit, looking up at him as he stands over you.
“First order of business,” he says.
He turns away from you to lift the decanter from the bucket, and pours a finger of liquor into a glass. You try to pretend your heart isn’t thrumming, like a bird’s beating wings behind your ribcage, as he turns back and holds out the drink, long fingers dwarfing the rim.
“As promised,” he purrs, “Balvenie.”
You accept it the glass; the scotch sparkles, amber-rich and glittering gold where the low candlelight catches it.
“It looks good,” you say, looking up at him.
There’s a pleased look on his face. “Give us a taste, then.”
Heat blooms across your face, spreads down your chest. You bring the rim of the glass to your lips immediately, still held by his gaze—
Smoke blooms across your tongue, heavy and soft, pricked with notes of honey and vanilla. You roll the scotch in your mouth, close your eyes as its warmth slides along your tongue, pressing it up into your soft palate, citrus appearing in a sudden, tangy splash. You let the drink flow into your throat and feel the smoke fill your head as you swallow.
You open your eyes and look up at John. “That’s really good.”
It shouldn’t surprise you, really, but it does: John bends over you, takes your chin in his hand, and kisses you again, dipping his tongue into your mouth as if searching for leftover drops of liquor. Your head swims; warmth suffuses you, waking up the nerves along the back of your neck. The hair on your arms stands on end as the world narrows to John’s mouth on yours and nothing else, the wet heat of his tongue, the prickle of his beard against your skin. It’s slow and molasses-sweet, rich and decadent. Thunder rumbles, far away.
“Mm. It is,” he says when he pulls away. Another brief kiss—like he can’t get enough of it, like he’s been saving up every moment he hasn’t kissed you, and is spending all of his chances now. “Promise me you’ll never drink Walker again.”
“Uh-huh,” you mumble, taking an unsteady breath.
The ends of his beard move against your face in a smile. “Enjoy that. I’ll be right back.”
He straightens, and steps away. The tug of his gravity is so strong that you list forward, toward him, until he leaves your orbit.
You look around his apartment again, helpless, as if to find some sort of anchor that isn’t John Price—he’s going to get you drunk on his presence alone faster than the liquor ever could. You catch sight of a bookshelf, sparsely populated with a short line of books; as you stare at them, trying to figure out what they are, you realize with a start that they’re all brand-new copies of what you’ve lent him.
Actium. Nafisi. Da Vinci. McMurtry. They’re all here. The textual foundation of your relationship aligned in a tidy, even row. Living here, in the center of his home.
You take another nervous sip of scotch.
John returns with a stack of clean towels, unfurls one, and drapes it over your head. But before you can tend to your hair yourself, he lays his big hands overtop of the terrycloth, pressing down into your scalp.
Your breath leaves you in a rush, depressurizing your lungs. Pure sensation dances up your spinal cord, suffusing the space between your ears, as he kneads with an even, firm pressure, massaging the water from your hair. Your eyes slide shut of their own accord. Your mouth drops open as he digs his fingers into the tense nerves down the back of your head.
The little sound that escapes the pit of your throat is utterly involuntary.
John huffs a chuckle. “That good, then?”
“Uh-huh,” you hear yourself mumble again. Somewhere in the back of your mind, obscured by smoke, you think you should feel embarrassed, ashamed of how naked your pleasure must be. But John gives you no time to ruminate.
He tilts your face upward and presses his lips to your forehead, down the bridge of your nose, gentle, soft, to your mouth. Your mouth, over and over again, as calloused thumbs caress your temples.
It’s a gentle way of taking control. You have no need to reach out with unsure hands, or stumble your way through half-desires with no time to think about them. John has seen into you, divined your quietest, sincerest needs, and feeds them back to you now like he’s only been waiting for your go-ahead to do so.
The bird in your ribcage flutters nervously. Is this really alright? Should you be letting it happen like this? Shouldn’t you be…participating, somehow, in this, other than to take what he gives you?
“John,” you start, but you have no idea what you want to say to him. “Shouldn’t I…shouldn’t—”
“Shh,” he says. “You should let me take care of you.”
John squeezes your hair one more time, then sets the damp towel aside. With an expression you can only describe as beatific, he smooths errant strands of hair away from your face, and then lowers to his knees in front of you. He touches your ankles; nods toward the glass of scotch encircled by your nervous hands. “Don’t stop on my account.”
You hold his gaze, and take a sip. The satisfaction on his face is almost too much to bear.
“Good girl,” he says. He lifts the heel of your shoe onto his thigh, smoothing his hand up and down your shin. “You’re doing such a good job, letting me do this.”
He takes your shoes off as tenderly as he’d removed your jacket, tucking away the laces and setting them off to the side. With warm hands, he rolls your wet knee-high socks down your legs, exposing your chilled calves to his palms. After he folds them and places them by your shoes, his mouth and the warm scratch of his beard meet the top of one foot…move up your instep, and to the inside of your ankle, then to your shin…up your calf…to your knee—
“Is this—” you begin, and have to swallow the trembles in your voice, “what you talked about on the phone?”
“Mm-hm,” he hums, kneading your other calf as he urges your legs to open for him.
Your breath is shallow in your lungs—as if any one too deep might startle John away from his quarry, convince him you’re not aching for this. John kisses inward along the inside of one thigh, keeping the other open with his kneading hand. The flesh molds like clay to his touch, extruding between the gaps of his fingers. He makes an appreciative sound, a hum, as he slides his hands further upward and under the damp hem of your dress, cresting the angles of your hips. Inexplicably, you go tight, anticipatory, like the skin of a grape exposed to a knife.
It isn’t like you haven’t been here before. Your sex life with Ben had been—while not particularly active—not nonexistent. And yet this feels new anyway; as if John is sweeping dust off a body long left unused. Your thighs are taut and sensitive as a yearling’s flank, ready to twitch at the barest whisper of breath.
But isn’t this new, after all? No one, not Ben or anyone else who’s ever touched you, has made you feel this way.
“Lift your hips, darlin’,” John rumbles, and for the first time you catch a hint of scouse in his accent—low, slung around his words and leaving off the hard edges. Like a vein of gold unearthed. “Bring ‘er closer to me.”
Heat blazes across your face. There’s a small end table beside the armchair; you take one more pull from your scotch glass and set your drink aside. Then you shift, edging your hips forward, tilting your pelvis—angling your pussy toward John’s face.
He kisses the crease of your thigh and groin. “That’s a girl,” he purrs, and then presses the bottom half of his face directly into your underwear, opening his mouth over the wet fabric and inhaling deeply. The panties are nothing fancy, simple cotton with a floral pattern, but his eyes slide shut in what you can only describe as ecstasy.
“It’s like you’re getting as much out of this as I am,” you say, trying to laugh, to make this feel like less than it is if only for the sake of your nerves.
“I am,” he says, rough around the edges, and pulls at the gusset of your underwear with his teeth. “I’ve thought about this every morning—” he runs the flat of his tongue along the outer seam, touching bare skin “—and every evening—” edging his fingertips into the leg hole at the top of your hip “—since I met you.”
“You barely knew me,” you whisper, trembling.
“I knew enough,” he says, lifting his face to meet your eyes—his pupils are blown wide, encased in a thin rind of blue. Delicately he takes the waistband of your panties between his fingers, eases it down. “Knew you were a good girl, who wouldn’t even fuss at mean old bastard for waking her up. Wanted to eat your cunt to apologize.”
Something flushed and hot radiates from your core, molten and liquid. “Every time you call me that I—I don’t know what to do, John, I feel…”
“Good,” he says. “Lift your hips again.”
You obey. You think you’d do practically anything, if he told you to in that voice, rough and commanding like far-away thunder. John peels your underwear from your hips, dragging it down over the swell of your bottom, closing your legs to pull them down and—you swallow—shoving them in his pocket when they’re off. Then, like opening the shutters of a window, he parts your legs again, and slots his face between them.
The first thing that strikes you is how hot his mouth. He eases a molten tongue into your folds and you watch his eyes slide shut, feel the soft groan he gives vibrate against your flesh. Your body heat blooms, sight going liquid around the edges—or maybe your temperature is just rising to meet John’s own, thermoregulating to avoid meltdown as he stokes a fire between your legs. Hot breath meets you as he opens his mouth, gets as much tender flesh between his lips as he can.
He’s slow. Exploratory. He tongues your pussy luxuriantly, indulgently, as he loops his arms under your legs to hook them over his broad shoulders, thick forearms dark with hair snaking overtop of your thighs. Holding you in place as he eats— savors . He maps your topography, delving and cresting the landscape like trying to discover every significant landmark, and finds a spot on your clitoris that makes your thighs seize up and your hips jerk under his mouth. He chuckles low against you, playfully flits his tongue across it at what you’d swear is the same rapid pulse of your heartbeat.
You look at him between your legs. The curls of his dark lashes are pretty against the pale hue of his skin, freckled with sun exposure. Fever pink spreads across his cheeks as his brow furrows in the middle, creasing as he laps at the beads of moisture pearling up from your entrance. You watch him, mouth hanging open to allow your shallow breaths to flow free—and he opens his eyes, sharp blue, meeting your gaze.
A sound escapes you, raw, rough in the back of your throat. He smiles, drags the flat of his tongue up your folds as if to show off, and strokes along the sensitive border of your mons and lower stomach with the rough callus of his thumb.
“That’s it,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you, love.” He kisses your mound and then takes your pussy, soft and slow, back into his mouth.
There’s a trembling behind your sternum. Something in you breaks open—seeps cloying and honey-gold—into your bloodstream. Your head lolls back as his tongue slips deeper into you, stoking pleasure, your old friend, your old enemy, like turning embers out of ashes. Your thighs relax over the ballast of his shoulders. They’re broad enough that even as your legs fall further open, they don’t slip off.
It’s like your body and his are dovetail joints cut long ago, yet still now slide easily into place. Your heels rest comfortably on the expanse of his back with plenty of room left over; his big hands, as they spread wide across your stomach, fit along its curves and dips like rain sliding along soft green leaves.
It soaks you to the bone, warm and deep into your marrow, filling your veins and blotting the spaces between your alveoli until John, John, John is on every breath.
You must be saying his name aloud, because John’s grip tightens around you. The flint-strike of his tongue against your clitoris, lightning-sharp, catalyzes the pleasure in your bloodstream into a tight, unfamiliar gnarl. You gasp hard, almost painfully—how long has your body been able to feel like this, somewhere beyond your reach?
Has this pleasure always lived at the end of John’s tongue, along the contours of his hands, draped over his body like a mantle?
(How can something like this be a fair exchange for books and clumsy conversation?)
Your hand flies to John’s hair as it grows—a trembling feeling that touches places inside of you that you’ve always been dimly aware of, but never have given much thought to. It loosens you at the seams, grinds the fault lines inside of you together, dislodges your inhibitions from their foundation.
“John, please,” you whimper, brows drawn together, “please, please—”
He growls against you. Grinds through your center and then sucks your folds into his mouth, grazing the hood of your clit with the edge of his teeth, teasing your entrance with the tip of his tongue—
Suddenly, it overtakes you.
Flying sparks finally catch along aching tinder. A single point of furtive, glowing heat blooms between your legs, unassuming except for that you’ve never felt it before. It only sits briefly in your folds before bursting outward, seizing every nerve ending in the immediate vicinity, blazing bright like fire spreads over paper. Then you tighten around nothing, the inside of you desperately grasping something that isn’t there, body snapping taut as you arch from the backrest, mouth hanging open as a sharp gasp dies in your throat. Sensation consumes everything. Your vision darkens; the air stills in your lungs.
The only thing spared is the heat of John’s mouth, the cords of his arms around your thighs, and the ballast of his shoulders hooked in the bend of your knees—he keeps you anchored, held together as you try to fly apart. The caress of his hands and fingers across your lower belly does not stop as his mouth continues moving over your cunt, moves until your whole body is shaking, moves as you finally gasp for air and cry out in overstimulation.
You collapse back into the chair, pushing now against John’s head even though you’re not sure you want him to stop. He resists—kissing your pussy, once, twice, three times as you come down—and then takes a wrist in one big hand and kisses your palm.
“That,” John rasps, “is a fucking climax, love.”
You swallow, throat dry and smoke-rough. Even in the aftershocks, the pleasure lingers, and you squeeze your inner muscles to hold onto it for as long as you can.
It doesn’t escape his notice. Of course it doesn’t. John’s fingers trek inward, gathering some of the wet slick between your folds and then lazily circling your clitoris.
“Look at you,” he rasps, “my poor girl needs more, doesn’t she?”
Ecstasy grips you again; you whimper as he manipulates your flesh. “John…”
“How long you been aching for it, love? Years? How long’ve you needed me, and I ain’t been there, mm?” He kisses the soft part of your lower belly. “You don’t need to worry anymore. I’m here now.”
You angle your head to look at him, running your dry tongue along your lips. What you see on his face steals the meager oxygen you’ve managed to pull in since your climax abated.
His face is flushed. Lips rosy and swollen from their work. The blue of his eyes has been eclipsed almost completely by black singularity—inescapable, unfathomable, a depth more vast than comprehension. Ready to swallow you whole.
This whole time, you’ve been afraid of John’s touch the way you are afraid of a hot bath on a cold night. There is a comfort beyond the first step into the water, languorous ecstasy waiting only for you to claim it, but the toll separating it and you—the shock of first contact, the split second of violent adjustment, makes you nearly content to remain in uncomfortable but familiar dissatisfaction.
Thunder cracks outside as you reach for him, as he reads your mind and surges forward to kiss you, hand catching the back of your neck to reel your mouth to his. You kiss each other hard and fast, over and over again, eager to end each one only so you can start the next.
Nearly content, in the end, is not content at all.
“John,” you murmur against his lips, as his hand still works your cunt, “I’m still cold.”