Entry-Level Mistress - By Sabrina Darby Page 0,18

that pleased me most and discovered the rhythm that turned pleasant into astonishing. I threw my head back on the bed and gave in to the rising tide, focused on that build, on the swirling colors of it, on—

I bucked against his mouth and hands uncontrollably, felt him move, hold onto my hips even as I shook and trembled. And then he was sliding over me, inside me, and I gasped at the sharp fullness of my highly sensitized body.

I watched his expression as he slowly moved his body over mine—his eyes closed and lips pressed together in intense focus. This man, this stranger I was sleeping with, was Daniel.

Daniel Hartmann.

Terrified and aroused I wrapped myself tightly around him, around the warmth of his body—a long, hard, lean body, which was far more real than any imagined concept of him I’d ever had before.

• • •

While he ordered delivery from the restaurant on the corner, I peered at the closest stack of books. All nonfiction, history, biographies, politics and economic forecasting. I shifted a bit, looked at the next smaller pile. Hemingway, Schulberg, Fitzgerald, Huxley. Were his stacks all grouped similarly, or had he merely been in an early twentieth-century phase when he’d created this one?

He hung up the phone, and then crawled over to me, wrapped himself around me.

“I was revisiting,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “People often set up this false dichotomy, as if you have to like either Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Or you need to abandon them both entirely.”

I knew exactly what he meant. It was one of those strange conceits of English classes to set up Fitzgerald and Hemingway in opposition. The same way people felt they had to be faithful to either Toyota or Honda.

“What I find interesting about that whole circle,” I began, shifting to my side. “Is that there was this atmosphere, this creative energy around them. And their success, their success at celebrating themselves even, has ruined so much for artists like myself. We grow up with this romanticism of the ex-patriots, or of Greenwich Village in the twenties and thirties. So we can’t just live within the climate of art we naturally exist in. Instead we feel like we need to live up to some mythic ideal.”

He was staring at me and suddenly I felt self-conscious, aware of our nakedness, aware of the whole situation. Of the fact that I’d just had sex with Daniel Hartmann. Had his mouth …

“I’m rambling, sorry.”

“No, I understand,” he said, reaching out to take my hand, to stroke my fingers. But now his hands were both strange and known. His fingers had been inside of me. “I remember the first time they put my photograph on the cover of a magazine. Just like you, I’d been in family shots before, black and white, tucked down in the corner of a page, but that time the spotlight was on me.” I tried to imagine that, what it must have been like to lose any modicum of anonymity overnight. “Not only was that magazine like a mirror, but the face of every person who looked at that and then looked at me? It gets a little bit confusing separating out who you are and who people make you out to be.”

In the silence after, he continued to stroke my hand. I studied where we joined, intertwined. His skin was smooth and rough at the same time, the friction of it against mine exquisite but also comforting. Again, I had that feeling that I’d had in the car three days earlier, as if I could delve within him, know him deeply.

“I’ve seen nearly all your magazine covers. Read the articles,” I admitted. “I would be living my life but then, I’d be at a bookstore or at the airport or something, and there would be this reminder. You were this mystery to me. Lucifer as Adonis.” I ended on a laugh. He wasn’t laughing but he was listening and I couldn’t begin to guess what he thought of what I was saying. “Daniel, who are you?”

I didn’t expect him to answer. I mean, really, we were learning about each other here in his bedroom. At least … learning about each other physically. I moved closer, put one hand on his chest, stroked the ridges of muscle, studied his face.

I looked from his eyes, to his mouth, to his eyes and then stayed there, longer than comfortable, beyond the moment that we both blinked. Then he shifted, pulled