size, and slowly, to draw out the joy of him sliding out of me and back in, I move my hips forward and back.
He blinks slowly, and his long lashes cast shadows across the highest points of his cheeks. Thick eyebrows furrow, forming creases between his dark and deep stare. Talent presses his lips together before they part and don’t really close again. It makes me want to latch on to the cut I inflicted at the corner of his mouth and revel in his essence, because it’s so fucking pure.
And I’m not surprised to realize I don’t want this to end. Instead of the practiced lines that scroll through my head when I’m with a client, my mind is wholly and only concentrated on the way Talent lights me up from the inside out, and the outside back in. He palms my breasts, my wrists, my hips.
He whispers, “Fuck.”
And he whispers, “Baby.”
I want to breathe back, “I don’t know what this is, but don’t ever take it away.”
But I wouldn’t dare.
Tie us both to the bed so we can never leave. The world outside this dark bedroom in the fourteenth-floor penthouse in the Grand Opal luxury apartments is unsafe. There’s not a place for a prince and a tramp to live in harmony.
I drop my head back and cry out, puncturing his stomach with my fingernails.
There’s no telling what’s going to happen when we return to our normal lives. We have so much stacked against us, and we might not survive the test of time and the judgment we’ll face from others and ourselves. Do we keep our relationship a secret? Or do we put everything on the line and face the inevitable?
We’re tangled in disaster.
Talent sits up and wraps his arms around me. He kisses from my chest, up my neck, to my mouth. The change in position gives him a farther reach, and I feel like I’m going to tear in half. Gladly.
I don’t know the answers.
I don’t know how to be Lydia Montgomery beyond Cara Smith.
I don’t know how to be someone Talent deserves, and I don’t know why he has chosen me.
But as my body detonates and comes undone in a fiery explosion, obliterating every indecision and fear in its path, I don’t care. I want it.
I want him in the face of uncertainty.
In inevitability.
And most of all, I want him when the lights are out.
Cricket died on a Tuesday.
The last time I saw her alive was two days prior on Sunday afternoon. I wish I could make up a false memory where we spent one last unforgettable day together before her predictable death, but that’s not how it happened. Our last conversation was volatile because I stopped looking up to her blindly and started to resent her for my life. Our relationship never mended after the night I needed money for the dollar movie theater and barged in on her fucking a stranger in the closet.
In the months between that night and when she died, Mom abandoned any semblance of herself and resigned to her addiction, and I navigated life the best I could as a sixteen-year-old girl with an uninvolved, half-dead mother. I grew apart from Cricket, and it was clear she and I were unalike. I attended school regularly for the first time, so I didn’t have to spend my days at the club or at the house avoiding Marty, but also because I enjoyed my education. I’d had sex to see what the big deal was, but it didn’t interest me. I considered drugs, but I lived with a real-life after-school special. Watching her deteriorate scared me straight.
As far as I was concerned, if I survived long enough, I’d bide my time until my eighteenth birthday. Once I was a legal adult, I’d make decisions for myself and take control of my life. Graduating from high school was my first priority. As long as I completed my education, a world of opportunities would open up for me. Earning a diploma and making it out of high school without a baby would put me strides ahead of Cricket. I didn’t have to follow her path because she didn’t care to set me up for a better life.
“Can I have money for the field trip?”
Mom and Marty sat in mismatching recliners in front of the television. He was fat where she was skin and bones. His recliner reclined back, but Cricket’s leaned too far right.
“Where are you going, baby? Somewhere fun?” Mom had