at the Mermaid. And while she was fond of it, it was no accident that she’d driven right past it earlier tonight—on her way here.
“No,” she said quietly. “Nowhere to be. My computer’s in my car, though. In my suitcase.”
“Okay, then.” He got to his feet and extended a hand. He helped her up, settled the quilt around her shoulders, and pointed her toward the kitchen. “You make popcorn. I’ll be back soon.”
Chapter Nineteen
Zombies are metaphorical, right?” Nora asked twenty-four hours later.
“You’re asking me?” Jake rolled over to face her as the closing credits of Dawn of the Dead rolled.
“Yeah, I’m asking you.”
“Well, you’re asking the wrong guy.”
“Come on. I mean, Dawn of the Dead—this one and the remake—are clearly about consumer culture.”
“Clearly.” He smiled lazily at her. He was making fun of her.
She rolled her eyes, but she secretly liked it. “And Plan 9 from Outer Space”—which they’d watched earlier in the day—“is clearly about nuclear fear.”
“Clearly.”
She threw a pillow at him.
“Yes. So clearly we can pick out a metaphor for individual movies—they reflect the fears of the era in which they’re made. But what I’m really asking is, is there a super-metaphor? Like, beyond the scope of any individual movie. Is it apocalypse? Or is it not that complicated—is it just fear itself? What do zombies mean?”
“I thought zombies meant overtired med students.”
Right. That was what her grandma had always said.
She swallowed hard. She’d forgotten for a moment. She was rolled up in the coziest cocoon of zombie movies—they’d watched four since last night—and sex, and she’d momentarily forgotten reality.
“Hey,” he whispered, cupping her chin. He’d only referenced her grandma’s interpretation of zombies as a joke, she knew, but thinking about her grandma was like a punch to the solar plexus.
“Hey,” he said again, rolling over so he was on top of her. They hadn’t bothered getting dressed since the last time they’d had sex—before the last movie. He was hard. Not just his penis, but all over. And even though he was propped on his forearms and holding most of his weight off her, he was heavy. Heavy in a good way. It felt like he was mooring her with his body. “You want to cry or you want…”
She smiled. First because this was how the past twenty-four hours had gone. He had let her lead. Which meant sometimes he held her while she stood at his front window and looked at the snow falling steadily over the lake and cried. And sometimes they…did other stuff.
And that was the second reason she was smiling. It seemed like her vocabulary failure of last night had infected him—speaking of zombie metaphors—too. He didn’t know what to call it anymore, either.
And maybe she also smiled a little bit because she was happy. A little bit. Mixed in with all the sadness.
A steady diet of napping, sex, zombie movies, and snacks, it turned out, made her happy.
But she also didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. She was leaning on him pretty hard right now, and she didn’t think he minded, but she didn’t want him to think she had any misconceptions about what was happening. So as a reminder—to both of them—she said, “I want you to get inside me, Jake.” He groaned—he liked that answer—and she wrapped her legs around his waist. “ASAP, actually,” she added, grinding herself on him.
He liked that answer, too, judging by the way a groan shaded into a growl.
He shifted his weight to one arm and grabbed his penis with the other. He met no resistance. She was soft, open. Maybe zombies were foreplay.
Or maybe lying next to Jake watching zombies was foreplay.
Regardless, he slid right in.
She sighed contentedly. She hadn’t had sex without a condom for years. But there was something so delicious, so lazy about just rolling over and going at it.
And this was lazy. Not in an “I can’t be bothered” way, but in an “I’m kind of spent from all the sex we’ve already had, but I still can’t keep my hands off you” way. He ground his hips in slow circles against her, and because he was lying on top of her, pasting his whole body over hers, staying fully sheathed in her as he worked his hips, the angle put pressure on her clit. She moved against him lazily, too, keeping her ankles locked at his back. There was no thrusting, no athletic pumping, just small circles, just friction and want.