"Call her Aunt." That was how my ex-fiancé found out I married his uncle. novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Towel
Dessa takes Ford upstairs and they sleep together in the hotel bathroom and bed; at dawn his phone lights with calls from his brother, and he asks her to marry him on Saturday.
"You're the boat bum," I said.
"That's what the family calls me." Ford turned his glass a quarter turn on the bar. "I build them. I don't live on one."
"Preston says you live on one."
"Preston says a lot."
I laughed, and it came out wrong, and I put the heel of my hand against my eyes.
He didn't tell me it would be fine.
He pushed the bourbon an inch toward me and waited.
So I told him.
I said it fast and flat, and when I got to Kendra's name my voice cracked, and I kept going anyway.
When I finished he was quiet for a long moment.
"Thirty-eight thousand dollars," he said.
"The lodge deposit."
"Is that what you're angry about?"
"No," I said. "That's what I can collect."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth and was gone.
"You said you'd marry the next man through the door."
"I said it to be loud."
"Did you mean it?"
I looked at his hands.
They were big and scarred across the knuckles, and there was a thin line of dark paint under two of his nails.
I thought about Preston's face on Saturday.
"I want to do something," I said, "that he can't take back and can't talk his way around."
"That's not the same as meaning it."
"Take me upstairs, Ford."
He did not move for the length of one breath.
"I'm his uncle," he said.
"I know who you are."
He stood and put money on the bar anyway, though no one had asked him for it.
The elevator was empty.
He stood on one side of it and I stood on the other, and neither of us spoke until the doors opened on seven.
His room was at the end of the hall.
I dropped my bag inside the door and said I wanted a shower first.
I could still smell the gardenias in my hair.
He nodded once and sat down on the edge of the bed with his back to the bathroom.
The water was hot enough to hurt.
I stood under it until my shoulders stopped shaking.
I did not cry, and I want that on the record.
I wrapped a hotel towel around myself and tucked the corner in over my breast.
I came out into the steam with my hair dripping down my back.
He was in the bathroom doorway.
He had taken his shirt off.
I had seen the sleeve at the bar, but not the rest of him.
He had a wide hard chest and ribs I could count.
A line of dark hair ran down his stomach into the waistband of his jeans.
He had both hands on his belt.
"Come here," I said.
I crossed the tile in three steps and put my palm flat on his chest.
His skin was hot and his heart was going hard under my hand.
He pulled the towel loose and let it fall.
He looked at me for a long time, all of me, and his jaw worked.
"Christ, Dessa," he said, rough, and then his mouth was on mine.
He kissed me hard, with his hand fisted in my wet hair.
I got my fingers into his belt and undid it, and the button, and the zipper, and shoved the jeans down over his hips.
His cock came out of them thick and hard, already wet at the tip, and I wrapped my hand around it.
He groaned into my mouth.
"Get on the counter," he said.
He lifted me by the backs of my thighs and sat me on the cold marble, and my knees came apart around his hips.
He pushed two fingers into my pussy and I made a sound I had never made for Preston.
"You're soaked," he said against my neck.
"Then fuck me."
"Not yet."
He went down on his knees on the tile.
He put his mouth on my clit and licked it, slow and flat, then fast.
I gripped the edge of the counter and my head hit the mirror.
He sucked, and worked his fingers in and curled them, and I came inside a minute with his name in my throat.
He didn't stop.
He held my hips down and kept going until I was shaking and begging, and I came a second time, harder, on his tongue.
When he stood up his chin was wet.
"Now," I said. "Please."
He lined himself up and pushed his cock into me in one hard thrust.
I cried out.
He was thick, and I was so wet and so tight around him that for a moment neither of us moved.
"God, you feel good," he said.
Then he fucked me.
He gripped my hips and drove into me against the mirror until the glass fogged and rattled in its frame.
I wrapped my legs around his back and met every stroke.
"Harder," I said.
He gave it to me harder.
He lifted me off the counter without pulling out, carried me three steps, and put my back against the wall.
I held his shoulders, and my nails dug in, and his cock hit so deep inside me that I saw white.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked.
"Come on my cock, Dessa."
I did.
It broke over me in long pulses, and I clenched around him and heard myself cry out.
He swore under his breath, thrust three more times, buried himself to the base, and came hard inside me with his forehead pressed to mine.
We stood against the wall, breathing.
He carried me to the bed afterward, and we did it again, slowly, with the lights off, and once more near dawn.
I fell asleep with his arm across my waist.
When I woke, the window was gray.
His side of the bed was empty, and he was standing at the window with his phone lit in his hand.
It had been ringing.
The screen showed a long column of missed calls from Lowell.
He turned it face down on the sill.
"Dessa," he said, without looking around. "Marry me. Saturday."
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