“Show off,” I whisper, nudging him playfully in the ribs before we begin the walk back to my apartment.
An hour later, Charlie is packed and ready to go. He and Davis head out together, both of them confirming the time and place where we’ll meet for brunch to close out the weekend.
Once they’re both gone, I’m able to finally take stock of the day. While I pry off my heels and the dress I bought to wear under my robes, I think about the gravity of the moment: that I graduated. Sure, I have a mountain of debt to pay off, but I have a job and a signing bonus that will get me more than halfway there. Really, for the first time in my life, the perpetual concern of money and all its friends doesn’t gnaw at my stomach like an ulcer.
Deep in the recesses of my memories, there’s a girl in a trailer listening to the sound of a beer bottle shattering against the dingy linoleum floor in the minuscule kitchen area. She has one hand on her sleeping four-year-old brother’s back and the other holds the doorknob to the bedroom, which she can’t release because the lock is broken from when her stepfather kicked it in. She’s crying, but she doesn’t have enough hands to wipe away the tear traveling down her cheek. Vaguely, she thinks of the Mall of America, and how she could buy them both bus tickets to get there if only she could find a few thousand more cans to trade in for nickels.
More than anything, I wish I could hug that girl and tell her that one day, she would graduate from one of the best business schools in the world and would make enough money to spend a week at the Mall of America if she wanted.
I’m brushing my teeth in front of the mirror and thinking that I look the same as I did last night, when I was just a regular woman. I feel different though, like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. I spit, rinse, and smile at myself just before I hear a knock on my door.
I don’t know how I’m so dense as to be surprised when I find Davis standing outside of my apartment, but I am. He’s still wearing the tailored blazer and dress pants that he wore to the graduation ceremony and to dinner, and he naturally looks devastating. I—because I clearly had a brain aneurism and didn’t recognize that he had every intention of coming here tonight—am wearing an oversized t-shirt and a pair of sleep shorts.
“Hey,” he says in this surprisingly casual tone, even though so little about Davis is casual.
“Hey,” I reply as I continue to drink in the sight of him.
Reuniting with Davis after ten months without seeing him is like taking a trip to Niagara Falls once as a kid, and then returning twenty years later and being pleasantly surprised to discover that yeah, that shit is still mind-bogglingly impressive.
“You busy?” He knows that I’m not, but this is what we do. We play. We push and we pull and we needle each other in these sly little ways.
I force a shrug to annoy him. “Just doing my nighttime routine. Can you give me, like, two minutes?”
“I don’t mind waiting,” he responds, and I know that his words hold so much more weight than this conversation suggests. All either of us has done is wait.
I move out of the doorway to let him in, and leave him in my living room. In my bedroom, I pull open my top drawer and begin to sort through lingerie sets, trying to find the one most likely to make Davis go absolutely feral for me.
Once I’ve narrowed down the options to a sheer, aubergine bra and thong set and a lacy black corset bra, I’m at an impasse. They’re both beautiful, both gifts from Davis, and both do mind-bogglingly impressive things to my tits.
I pick the purple one and strip down to nothing. I’ve got the thong halfway up my thighs when I realize that this is genuinely the first time that Davis and I will ever sleep together without it being a paid transaction, or a taboo, or a secret that we have to keep. It’s also the first time that we won’t be in a decadent, luxurious penthouse or hotel, or corner office on the executive floor. For some reason, those realizations strike me.
This isn’t a twisted game of revenge. This isn’t a fairytale either. For once, for the very first time, this is our real lives. Davis, me, and nothing else.
I put the lingerie back into my drawer before I crack open the bedroom door and peer around the frame. “Davis, can you come here?” I request.
He strolls over, looking serious. When he’s close, I open the door more to show him that I’m completely naked from head to toe, wearing nothing but the piercing on my hood.
Surprised, Davis stops in his tracks and lets his gaze travel over my body. He starts at my lips and slowly surveys my breasts, my stomach, my mound, my thighs, legs, and all the way down to my feet. Silently, he draws his eyes back up to mine and a smile spreads easily across his face. It’s a big, beaming smile—one of those that he tries so hard to suppress. Tonight, he makes no effort to hide it.
“You’re the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen,” he tells me.
“I want to say the same thing every time I see you.”
He closes the gap between us and steps into my bedroom as he brings me into his arms. “Can I kiss you?”
I answer by rising on my toes to kiss him, enjoying the sweet sensation of his lips. I thought that eight years of pent-up lust for Davis Ridgeway was a lot—but ten months’ worth is more than I can rein in. Mere seconds after sharing that tender kiss, I’ve practically forced myself up into his arms and scaled his enormous body. The way I try to take off his clothes while still trusting him to hold me is borderline reckless, but I don’t care. I need to feel him. To taste him. To get him inside of me as fast as humanly possible.
“I’ve missed you,” he manages to get out between my frantic, unceasing kisses.
Same, baby boy. Same.
“Over there,” I instruct, tilting my head to the side where I want Davis to bring us.
He breaks the kiss to look where I’m gesturing. “The window?”
My apartment is a classic, twentieth century type with the original molding and floorboards and antique touches throughout. It’s old Philadelphia, a refurbished remnant of the city’s early heyday; needless to say, it’s gorgeous. In fact, the reason why I signed the lease was because of the elegant built-in window seat in the bedroom, where a bay window overlooks the streets below. Through most of business school, I sat with my legs pulled up on that cushioned window seat, poring over my lecture notes and working on problem sets. For the past ten months, I haven’t been able to shake the idea that this window seat could be used for so much more.
“As in—”
“As in, I want you to take me right there in the window, Davis,” I confirm, saying what I know he’s too sweet to actually believe is happening. “Right there, where the rest of the world can see that I’m so excited to be with you.”
That gets him. That tickles his misplaced insecurity that I’m ashamed to be with him. One day, he’ll snap out of it, but we have plenty of time to work on that. Right now, we’re wasting sweet seconds that I’m not willing to spare.
Davis shifts his hands on my bare ass, pulling me closer to his body and forcing my straddle wider. “You don’t mind being in a window where everyone can see you?”
“The women in Amsterdam do it all the time,” I remind him before I kiss his neck. “They stand in their windows under red lights, like good little whores.” As I say that, I move up to draw his earlobe between my teeth. “Don’t you want to fuck your good little whore in her window?”
“I thought we were past that,” he counters, but the way his heartbeat has picked up suggests otherwise.
Lovingly, I place my hands on his cheeks. “Whenever you called me those things, I was so ashamed. Not because they were degrading, and not because they somehow turned me on despite how degrading and humiliating they were. I was afraid of becoming my mother. But since last summer, I think I’ve realized that I’ll never be her. I’ll always have a career and my education and my dignity and the courage to step away from a man if the relationship isn’t what I need. My mom never had that. I’ll never be in her shoes.”
He breathes out heavily, like he always does when he’s reminded of the parts of my life that I work so hard to hide.
“So if it turns me on to hear the man that I love say vile, filthy things to me—then fuck it. I know you love me. Adore me. That you would do anything to make me happy. We can have it all if we want. The good and the bad. The humiliating and the doting. That works for us. So fuck it.”
“Fuck it,” he repeats as he walks us over to the window.
When he reaches the built-in bench, he lowers me onto it so that I’m seated with my back to the street. We’re five floors up, so it’s not exactly a peep show, but if someone were to focus on us long enough there would be no mistaking what we’re doing.