48
After he got rid of the condom, we lay next to each other for the longest time, talking and softly touching each other’s bodies. His fingers trailed down my arm, always returning to my breasts, softly brushing my nipples with the tips of his fingers.
I
was fascinated with the pronounced edges of his lower abs. I kept tracing up them to his lean stomach, then back down, detouring to stroke the damp thatch of curls at the base of his cock.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I knew what he was asking.
He was asking about me and Derek.
“Yeah… I am,” I said, and it was true. I felt no remorse, no guilt, no shame… just a calm peacefulness.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for four years,” he said.
I smiled at him. “I’m glad we finally got to.”
“Me, too.”
He kissed me softly.
When he pulled away, I looked at him. “It’s been a long time for you, hasn’t it?”
“Four years is pretty long, yeah.”
“No, I meant… the last person you were with was your ex… and then you broke up a month before I showed up… and then it was over two more months until now…”
No wonder he was acting like he’d seen the face of God when I was going down on him.
“Well, I had a few dates here and there.”
My whole body stiffened, and I felt myself recoil. “…what?”
He held up his hands. “With Betty and Veronica.”
I started grinning, totally relieved. “Okay… well, I hope they appreciate your, uh, Archie.”
We both burst out laughing at that.
“Oh, please, God, don’t call it that,” he groaned.
“…Jughead?”
In response, he started tickling me. But as I shrieked with laughter, I kept calling out names: “Reggie?… Mr. Weatherby?… Miss Grundy?… ”
Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and gasped, “Okay, okay, okay! No more Archie names!”
He stopped.
But I couldn’t help myself.
“…Richie Rich?”
The tickling started again, with me alternately shrieking and screaming out cartoon character names – “Mr. Magoo! Yogi Bear! Boo Boo! Huckleberry Hound!” – until I was a crying, laughing mess.
“Stop, stop!” I screamed, and he stopped immediately.
I wiped the tears from my eyes.
And, I swear to God, I couldn’t stop.
“…Woody Woodpecker?”
The tickling started all over again, as did the screaming and laughing.
49
After I finally agreed not to name his package after any cartoon characters, I got to thinking again. “If you were always on tour, did Kristin go along with you?”
“You sure are interested about women from my past,” he teased.
“I’m just curious. How often did you see each other?”
“Not much.”
“Huh. So when you got together, it must have been Sex-a-palooza, huh?”
He frowned slightly. “Why are you asking me this?”
I didn’t know at the time. I thought I was just being curious. But in retrospect, I think that I was somehow distancing myself from him. From the emotional aspects of having sex with him. If I talked about him sleeping with his ex, that meant whatever was going on between us wasn’t that serious. It was easy, casual, no big deal.
I think I wanted it to be that way because I knew that for Ryan, it was a
very
big deal.
And I was scared of that.
I had just come out of a situation where Derek hurt me worse than I thought I could ever be hurt. I had no desire to put myself in that position again.
Also, to be truthful, I wasn’t over him yet. Not entirely.
So I was being light and breezy and asking all sorts of questions I might not want to hear if I were head-over-heels in love with a guy. Especially if he started asking while we were naked in bed for the first time.
But, as I said, I didn’t figure any of that out until later.
“I’m just curious, that’s all,” I said. “You’re all ‘Mr. Rock Star’ who could be sleeping with women left and right, and you chose a girlfriend you didn’t see very often. So I figured you must have slept with her a lot when you
did
see her.”
His frown lessened, but not by much. He shrugged and said absentmindedly, “I don’t know. I guess. We spent a lot of time OMing, actually.”
Now it was my turn to frown. “What?”
“Oh… it’s this thing Kristin was into. She taught me, and… well… we did it a lot.”
“What did you call it?”
“OMing.” It sounded like Oh-ming. “It’s short for ‘orgasmic meditation,’ but they pronounce it like the mantra in yoga classes. OM… meditation… get it?”
I imagined a bunch of naked people sitting cross-legged and chanting. “So is it some sort of Tantric thing? Like Sting having sex with his wife for six hours?”
“No, although it did originally come from a Buddhist meditative practice. It’s basically this thing where the guy strokes the woman’s clitoris in a specific spot and gives her a fifteen-minute orgasm.”
Okay, HELLO.