Page 30 of When He Calls

I come thirty seconds after him. The orgasm starts in my spine and rips through me, my hips slamming forward, burying myself in him, my hands gripping his hips hard enough to leave marks that he'll find tomorrow. I fill him and hold there, my body pressed against his, as my cock twitches, making sure his ass takes every damn drop I have to offer.

The aftershock takes a full minute. I stay inside him. I breathe shakily, trying to regain control of my wildly beating heart. I don’t want to pull out. I want to stay buried in his perfect ass until I get hard again. I want to turn him over and fuck him so deeply that he forgets his name.

But I can’t.

This is all I have for now.

I pull out slowly, watching my cock reappear inch after inch, his ass gaping ever so slightly as my cum drips out before it closes. Without thinking, I back up and bend down, licking his hole, tasting what he tastes like when I’m on his skin. It’s perfect. It’s so fucking perfect, I want to eat his ass out, but I restrain myself before my cock gets hard again. I don’t have the time to do what I truly want to do, so I stop and lean back on my haunches, just staring at his delicious little hole. Finally, with a sigh, I clean him up with the edge of the sheet. I wipe the lube, the come, the evidence of what I did with the fabric. His sweats are at his ankles. I pull them up. Over his knees, his thighs, his hips. His waistband settles where it was. His t-shirt is still ridden up. I pull it down and then pull the blanket over him, covering him to the waist the way it was when I walked in.

His breathing is evening out. The faster rhythm is slowing, the body cycling back down from the orgasm and back to baseline. His face is slack. His hands have released the sheets. If he remembers anything it'll be a dream, a sensation, a physical memory without a narrative, the feeling of being full and then empty without the context that would make it real.

The bruises on his hips will become a question he has no answers to.

I zip up and dress. For all intents and purposes, it’ll be as if no one was ever here. Except for one detail… I need to leave something behind. A token of our first time. The lube doesn't go back in my pocket. I open the nightstand drawer and set it inside, behind a paperback, angled so it looks like something he bought himself and forgot. Satisfied, I walk out and move through the living room. Bean lifts her head. Her tail wags twice. I crouch beside the couch and scratch behind her ear, and she pushes into my hand, the small body pressing against my fingers.

"Good girl," I whisper. The words are barely air.

I let myself out. I lock the deadbolt from the outside, the pick set faster now, the pins setting in sequence. Handle, deadbolt. His ritual, but done from the other side.

The alley is empty. The dumpster shadows are where I left them. My car is where I left it. The night is where I left it, dark and cold and ordinary, the kind of night that keeps the secret of what happened inside his apartment.

I drive home and shower, standing under the water until the heat runs out at eleven minutes. The water takes the evidence off my skin. The evidence inside him will absorb, disperse, become biological noise by the time he wakes. There will be nothing obviously wrong. Nothing to suggest that the best sleep of his October happened because a man obsessed decided that tonight was the night to stop watching through the window and start being in the room.

I towel off and go to bed. The sheets are cold. My body is still heated. His is too, twelve blocks away, asleep in a bed that still smells like what we did, covered by a sheet full of our cum, wearing sweats I pulled back up, trusting a deadbolt I locked from the hallway.

Five days until Halloween.

The notebook gets its entry in the morning.

Chapter Eleven: Milo

The soreness is what wakes me.

It isn't the expired-medication fog in my head. It's lower. A dull ache in my hips, my lower back, the muscles in my inner thighs… my ass.

Bean is on the pillow next to mine. Her nose is two inches from my face. Her eyes are open. She's been watching me sleep, which she does sometimes, the small face turned toward mine, eyes wide and trusting.

My phone says 10:47 a.m.

The trazodone hit and the last thing I remember is Bean circling at my shins, the ceiling going soft, his voice in my head. Come for me. Then nothing. Just a gap, a seam in the night where time folded in half and sealed itself shut.

My body feels used. That's the word for it. The deepest sleep I've had since September, and I woke up feeling like it clocked a night shift I don't remember working. My hips ache when I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The insides of my thighs feel stretched, the way they feel after long walks on steep trails. My ass feels tender.

Bean jumps off the bed. Her collar jingles and she trots to the door and waits.

The bathroom. My face in the mirror looks different. The circles under my eyes are lighter. My jaw is less rigid. The sleep did something to the architecture of my face, loosened the scaffolding that October puts up, and underneath it I look younger.

Less guarded.

My t-shirt is pulled down over my hips. The sweats are where they should be. Everything is where it should be and yet there’s this ache, not just in my body, but in my being that says something happened, the problem is that I have no idea what that something is. Maybe I slept walked… sometimes I do that when I’m stressed. Usually I eat, small stuff like crackers and cheese, and I find the mess in the morning, but there’s no trace of me ever leaving my bed.

Nothing is wrong. Nothing is out of place.

I shower. The hot water hits my lower back, and I lean into it, the relief immediate, the ache unwinding under the heat. My hips are tender. When I soap my thighs the soreness flares and retreats, a bruise-level sensitivity that shouldn't be there. My hands move over my body, and everything is intact, everything is mine, and the soreness is probably the way I slept. The trazodone knocked me flat. The muscles stayed in whatever position the pill put them in for ten hours. That's all.

Bean gets her morning walk and it’s the same old, same old. I rush, as fast as I fucking can.

Sorry, Bean, but I don’t have the damn spoons today.