“That you like anything I do.”
I pull out before I go soft inside her. Violet leans against the table for a moment, looks around, and then sits on her kitchen floor and leans back against a table leg.
“Just this one thing,” she teases. Her shoes are off, her skirt hiked up, her shirt unbuttoned, her bra unhooked and loosely shoved over her tits so her pink nipples are on display, her hair disheveled.
It’s the hottest, most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life. I just look at her, my mouth going dry.
I join her on the floor, leaning back on my hands, the scarred linoleum cool beneath my palms, my leg nuzzled against hers.
“I’ll take it,” I say. “And here I thought you were impossible to please.”
“I’m perfectly reasonable, Eli,” she says, her eyes laughing. “You’ve just got a difficult personality.”
“You know what’s not difficult?” I say.
There’s a strand of hair strung across her face, and without thinking, I tuck it behind her ear, her skin soft and flushed under my fingers.
“What?”
I just point to my dick, which is still out. Violet laughs, running a hand through her hair.
“For once, you’re right,” she says, then sits up straight. “I’m gonna go put on pajamas. You staying over?”
She says it so casually, like it’s a natural part of our four-day-old non-relationship. Sure, I slept here once, but it was an accident.
“I don’t have clothes here,” I say, watching her stand.
“You wear the same thing every day,” she says, shrugging out of her blouse. “No one will notice.”
“If I didn’t know any better I’d swear you were trying to talk me into it,” I say.
She pulls her bra off, unzips her skirt, lets it puddle on the kitchen floor and she’s suddenly, gloriously naked in her kitchen.
“I like it when you make me breakfast,” she says, winks at me, and disappears into her bedroom.* * *That night stretches into two, then three. A few days becomes a week, ten days, a fortnight, and before I know it, Violet and I have been friends with benefits for a month.
Well, “friends.” It’ll have to do as a moniker, because I don’t know another word for “person who irritates the living daylights out of me until she takes her clothes off, at which point she becomes my own personal sex goddess, custom-built to satiate my physical desires.”
“Friends” is at least shorter.
I spend about five nights a week at her house. She gets me a toothbrush. I start leaving clothes over there. It’s all purely for convenience, because it would be stupid to carry shirts and a toothbrush with me every day.
We fuck in nearly every room in her house, on nearly every surface. I learn her inside and out: that she likes watching me fuck her from behind in the mirror. That there’s a spot deep inside her pussy that makes her legs shake. That we both like fucking in the shower, her detachable shower head aimed at her clit.
It’s an informative month, is what I’m saying.
I don’t tell anyone besides Daniel, even though I’m clearly no longer spending much time at my mom’s house, other than our weekly Sunday dinners. My mom has to know that something is up, but she hasn’t said anything to me. Maybe Daniel’s covering for me.
At any rate, she seems to stop worrying.* * *“Tell me one more time what sliding rocks are,” Violet says. She’s sitting in the passenger seat of my Bronco, her feet on the dashboard, her legs stretched all the way out. I’m studiously ignoring them, as well as the fact that all she’s wearing is cutoff shorts and a bikini top.
If, at any point in the last ten years, you’d told me that one, Violet Tulane would go anywhere in just shorts and a bikini top, and two, that I’d be impossibly distracted by it, I’d have laughed. Except here we are: she’s doing it, and it’s driving me a little crazy.
“They’re rocks,” I explain, very slowly. “And you slide down them.”
Violet doesn’t even look at me as she flips me off, and I laugh.
“There’s moss so you don’t get too scraped up,” I say. “It’s fun. My father used to take us here sometimes when we started driving Mom a little too crazy.”
Then I stop. There’s a silence like I’ve dropped something over top of us, and I keep my eyes on the road.
It’s the first time I’ve mentioned my father to Violet. She knows the story, of course. Everyone here knows the story, but it’s something that’s always existed between us unspoken.
We’re just fuckbuddies, two people scratching each other’s itches, and that’s all. We don’t get too personal, and discussing our respective dead parents seems pretty personal.
“He take all five of you?” she asks, like it’s nothing at all.
“A couple times?”
“And none of you ever died or drowned?”