One Date, One Man, Never Twice: My Rule After the Divorce novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Lamp Stays On

In Nick's apartment above the bike shop she has her first orgasm with another person since the marriage and leaves at four, and he texts that she does not have to answer.

His apartment was one room at the top of an outside staircase, over a shop with six bikes hanging in the window.

Nick unlocked the door and didn't turn on the ceiling light.

The window over the bed was open, and the whole Strip District lay below it in orange and white, with the river dark behind.

A bike frame hung on one wall and a milk crate of paperbacks stood by the bed.

The room smelled like clean sheets and chain oil.

"It's a mess," he said.

"It's one room, Nick. It's four things."

"Then it's a four-thing mess."

I laughed, and he heard me do it, and his mouth moved at one corner.

He stood in front of me with his hands at his sides and didn't touch me.

I understood that he was waiting for me to start, because I was the one with the rule.

So I took his wrist and put his hand on the top button of my blouse.

"Okay," he said, low.

He undid it with fingers that were not quite steady, and then the next, and the next, and I watched his face.

He had a face that gave away everything he was trying not to give away.

My blouse came open and he looked at my plain black bra and at the mole under my left collarbone.

He put his thumb on the mole and held it there.

"I wanted to see where that went," he said. "You've had a hand on it since the bar."

I hadn't known I did that.

I pushed the blouse off my shoulders and let it drop, and I felt every inch of thirty-six years under that window.

"I have stretch marks," I said. "And a stomach. And I haven't done this with a person in almost two years."

"Okay."

"Stop saying okay."

"I like all of that," he said. "Is that better?"

It was.

He kissed me then.

His mouth was slow and a little rough from the cold, and he tasted of beer and mint.

I pulled him in by his jacket and he made a low sound against my teeth that went straight down my body.

His hands found my back and unhooked the bra with an ease that told me he was twenty-four and had done it before.

I dragged his shirt over his head.

He was lean, with a bike mechanic's forearms, and a long scar on his ribs, and black hair down the center of his stomach.

I put my palms flat on his chest and felt his heart going fast under them.

"Take your pants off," I said.

He did, and I did, and we stood there with the orange light on us.

He reached for the lamp on the crate by the bed and clicked it off.

The room went dark except for the window.

I stood in it with nothing on, and my stomach dropped.

That was how Rich had liked it for the last two years, with the lights out and me quiet, and I felt the old shame come straight back up my throat.

"Nick," I said.

"Yeah."

"Turn it back on."

He clicked it on at once and looked at me, and the lamp made a small yellow circle on the bed and the wall and his face.

I made myself stand still.

He looked at me from my hair down to my feet and back, and he didn't say a word.

Then he nodded once, and his cock lifted against his stomach on its own, thick and flushed.

That was the answer to everything I had been afraid of.

"Lie down," he said.

I lay back across the bed with my feet on the floor.

He knelt on the boards between my knees.

"Is this okay?"

"If you ask me one more time, I'll put my shoes back on."

"Right," he said, and he put his hands under my thighs and pulled me to the edge.

He kissed the inside of my knee.

Then the inside of my thigh, a little higher, and then a little higher than that, and I clutched at the blanket.

He took his time.

I could feel his breath on me before his mouth, and I heard myself say, "Nick, please."

"Soon."

He put his mouth on me, and it was slow and flat and wet, the whole of his tongue from bottom to top.

My hips came up off the mattress.

"There," I said. "Right there. Don't move."

He didn't.

He stayed exactly where I told him and made small circles around my clit, and when I pushed up against his mouth he held me down with one forearm across my hips.

I couldn't remember the last time I had been held still on purpose.

I put my hand into his curling hair and held on.

"Slower," I said. "Yes. Like that."

He slowed down, and I swore at him, and I felt him smile against me.

He slid one finger into me, then two, curled them up toward my stomach, and pressed.

The sound I made filled the room.

"Again?" he said against my skin.

"Do that again and I'll marry you."

"Wow," he said, and did it again.

I felt it building low in my belly and in my thighs, tightening, and I tried to say his name and it came out as a gasp.

He sucked my clit between his lips, lightly, and rubbed the flat of his tongue over it, and his fingers kept pressing into that place.

"I'm going to," I said. "Nick, I'm going to, don't you dare stop."

He didn't.

It hit me all at once.

My back arched off the blanket, and my thighs clamped around his head, and I came with a cry that I didn't recognize as mine.

It went on and on.

He kept his mouth on me, softer, and let me ride it out, and when I finally pushed at his head he lifted his face.

His chin was wet and he was breathing hard.

"Hi," he said.

I was laughing and I was shaking and I wanted to cry.

"Come here," I said. "Come up here."

He climbed up my body and settled between my legs on his forearms, with his weight on me.

I put my hands on his face.

I looked at his flat nose, his blue eyes and the lamp shining in them.

"I want you inside me," I said. "With the light on."

He closed his eyes when I reached down and took hold of him.

"Look at me," I said.

He opened them.

He pushed into me slowly.

It was a stretch that went on and on, because it had been so long, and I felt every inch of it and breathed through the last.

He stopped when he was all the way in and stayed there, shaking a little, with his forehead against mine.

"You feel so good," he said. "Dee. Hold on."

He had kept my name from the bar, and he said it carefully.

"Move," I said.

"Keep the light on," I said.

He moved, long and slow, and the lamp stayed on.

I watched his face above me, his jaw working and his lashes dark on his cheeks, and every time he pulled back I wanted him back in me.

I wrapped my legs around his waist and tilted my hips up so he went deeper.

"Oh," he said. "God. Like that?"

"Like that. Just like that."

His hand slid down to my ass and lifted me against him, and every stroke reached the place his fingers had found.

I held onto his shoulders and said whatever came into my head, which was mostly his name and yes.

"You're so tight," he said into my neck. "You're so wet. I can't."

"You can. Look at me."

He lifted his head.

I saw his face go slack and urgent, and I felt him swell inside me, and it pushed me up to the edge again.

"Come with me," I said. "Now. Please."

I came around him, hard and sudden, with my nails in his back and a sound that cracked in my throat.

He groaned, a long ragged one, and drove in three times more, and then he stopped and shuddered all over and pushed his face into my hair.

I felt him pulse deep inside me.

We stayed like that for a while, with the window air cold on my wet skin and the lamp still on.

Then something broke loose in my chest.

I turned my head into the pillow, and tears ran sideways out of my eyes and into my hair.

I made no sound.

I held my breath so he wouldn't feel me shake, and I thought I had gotten away with it.

He lifted himself off me carefully, and lay beside me, and put his arm under my head.

He didn't ask what was wrong.

He wiped my face once with the corner of the sheet, and looked up at the ceiling.

I lay there for a long time and listened to him breathe.

"I have to tell you something," I said finally.

"Okay."

"It's a rule. One date, one man, never twice. And nobody stays till morning."

He turned his head and looked at me.

"You said you had a rule. At the bar."

"I did."

"Okay," he said.

He picked up my phone from the crate, where it had slid when I undressed, and held it out.

"In case you leave something here," he said. "I won't use it for anything else."

I typed my number into his phone and gave it back.

He didn't argue, and he didn't ask me to stay, and he didn't look hurt.

I would have known what to do with any of those.

At four, I dressed in the dark while he slept, or pretended to.

I left the lamp on.

I was parked in front of my own rowhouse, with the engine off, when my phone buzzed on the seat.

It was the number I had watched him save.

Got home ok? You don't have to answer.

I read it twice.

I did not answer.

I drove home with the radio off, and for the first time in two years I couldn't hear my own pipes.

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