We stare, then he sighs and holds the door open for me, putting his body in such a way that I have to brush past him to leave. The contact burns me. His eyes watch me all the way to my room. They burn me.
At night, I lay awake, in another master bedroom of another presidential suite, with Diane resting in the other bedroom, and I’m still in flames. I’m in bed with the door open, my ears alert for any noise, in case Remy has an extra key to this suite, and he might come get me.
His t-shirt large and wonderful on my much smaller frame, and it smells of him. It feels soft against my skin, and here I am, shivering with need, wishing he’d break down and come get me and tell me he’s ready for me. I am so ready for him. Just come make love to me, I think helplessly.
At 2 a.m. he still hasn’t, and I’m still awake.
I can’t see how a man who really wants a woman can hold back like this. Remy is disciplined and the strongest man I’ve known, but I watch the door and remember his touch, the way I came for him, and don’t think it’s even possible that he could hold back if he wanted me the way I do. My sex aches like never before. It is so swollen remembering the powerful strokes of his tongue and the way his thigh grazed me. My hunger has not only not been appeased, it has done the impossible and tripled until I feel rabid. He just opened up an unquenchable thirst and I don’t feel satisfied, but feel empty and anxious. My entire existence tonight is focused in watching that door.
Does he feel anything for me even remotely as strong as I do?
There’s this mean little part of me, the girl who broke her ACL and who failed to accomplish her dream, the girl who doesn’t believe I can really have anything wonderful, makes me wonder if he really wants me at all.
Or he just wants to play with me.
Then I wonder if this is the sort of feeling that got my sister Nora in trouble in the first place.
Austin
In Austin we’re staying in a six-bedroom home with a barn included, and that fabulously crafted old-fashioned red barn is where Remington trains. He’s been pushing tractor tires all day. Running up the outside stairs with cement bags atop both his shoulders. He’s climbed ropes slung up from the barn rafters, swung from the rafters and then ran with me around the property. He’s training like a beast, and moody as a mad gorilla, as well. Although he seems to be especially moody with the other members of his team and I seem to be the only one who calms him, so Riley and Coach keep begging me to go stretch him when he starts getting upset about something like the fit of his “damned-for-shit gloves nobody can fight with.”
It’s been torture for me, these frequent stretches. Sliding my hands along his sweaty chest. Austin is hot in July, and he takes off his shirt and the skin-to-skin contact unsettles every little and big part of me, flashing me back to every sensation of being na**d in bed with him.
Every night since the egg incident a week ago, I’ve lain in bed staring at my door. I know I should touch myself just to find some relief, but what I want from him is so far beyond sex now, I don’t even want to put a name to it. Though I know perfectly well what it is.
On our flight here, we exchanged music, and I find I’m always breathless waiting to see the song he will play for me. I tried to keep my selection unromantic for him, and actually got a private thrill when he scowled at all the girl power songs I handed over.
He, on the other hand, played me the most romantic song I’d ever heard in my growing-up years, which was featured in a chick flick in the end, where a guy plays the song to the love of his life on his boom box. The movie is called Say Anything, but the song is called “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel.
I wanted, seriously, to melt into the leather of the plane bench when it started playing for me, with his somber blue eyes intently watching me as I soaked up the lyrics about finding the light in her eyes…
Damn.
Him.
He hasn’t touched me since the night we showered together. But the things he said … the way he kissed me … I want him so bad, sometimes I just want to hit him in the head and haul him into my woman’s cave, where nobody’s opinion matters but mine. And I say we go at it all night long and that’s that.
Today I’m inside the house, retrieving some elastic bands from my suitcase which I might use to stretch him in the end of the afternoon session. This is just a tactic so I don’t have to touch him skin to skin anymore, and spare myself another sleepless night of arousal. I pass through the front door with the band dangling from between my fingers, and I spot Pete there, holding it partly closed as he speaks to someone on the other side.
As I pass through, I see a silver-haired man and a woman through the corner of my eye, and suddenly they call me.
“Young girl! Please, won’t you let us talk to him?”
The feminine voice stops me in my tracks, since I’m the only young girl in the house, unless someone started cross-dressing here, and I don’t think Coach is into that.
When I step forward, the tall, slender, frail-looking woman rushes to tell me, her face pale and her sullen eyes a dark chocolate, “We didn’t know what to do. He felt abandoned but he was too strong and nobody could control him, least of all me.”
My brain processes her words in silence, and while it does, I stare at them and remain standing behind Pete.
“Again, I’m really sorry,” Pete formally replies. “But even if he weren’t busy, there’s no way I can get him to see you. But please rest assured I will make contact if that ever changes.”
He slams the door shut a little harder than called for, and releases a long, pent-up sigh.