“Oh, fuck, Alice, you feel so good.” He kissed her, hard and bruising, and she didn’t mind the pain.
“Harder,” she whispered.
He moved. Faster. Harder. Her top came undone, and he buried his face between her breasts as one hand went beneath her ass to tip her closer against him.
So close. So. Fucking. Close.
She was coming, then, every nerve exploding in the pleasure of him hitting her just right, over and over. Her nails raked his back. Mick groaned and shook. In the next moment, his heat splattered on her belly and breasts; the sensation of it sent her over into another round of climax that left her spent and shuddering.
Mick propped himself on his hands, thrusting a last few times, this time in the slickness on her bare belly. His cock, so thick and hard and hot, fit perfectly against her, and she slipped a hand between them to cup him for a moment as he collapsed on her.
In the silence that followed, he nuzzled her neck. Then he rolled off her. Beneath her still-cupped palm, Alice felt the sticky sweetness he’d left behind, but she could not rouse herself to move.
She didn’t have to. Without a word Mick got out of bed and went into the bathroom. The water ran in the sink. In another minute he was back with a warm wet cloth that he used to swipe along her skin. Carefully cleaning her up, then running his hands over her body to make sure he’d done the job right.
Mick’s hand fit between her legs, the heel of it pressing her still swollen clit. “I think I made a mess of your bathing suit.”
She rolled to face him, pushing a leg between his and fitting her face to the hollow of his neck and shoulder. “It can be washed.”
Mick pulled the covers up over both of them, then settled back against her. His hand stroked her hair, over and over. He kissed the top of her head. She was going to fall asleep here, and that would be awkward.
“The others will be back soon,” Mick said in a low voice.
“Yeah.”
“We should get up. Shower or something. Maybe open a couple bottles of wine for dinner.”
She tilted her head to look up at him, though she still could see nothing more than shadows. “You don’t want them to know.”
“Do you?”
“No. Yes. I don’t care. No,” she said again. “It might make them feel weird, you know?”
“To see us back together?”
She propped herself up on her elbow at that. She’d had no trouble picturing him before, but was unable to imagine his expression now. “We’re …”
Not back together, she meant to say, but the sound of voices and laughter and footsteps on the deck overhead cut her off. She sat up. Both of them moved at the same time, and even in their rush to hide what they’d been doing, Alice couldn’t help noticing how in sync they were. She went left, he went right, both got out of bed. She gathered her flip-flops and towel, wrapping it around her waist.
“Back stairs,” Mick told her. “They’re all going into the kitchen.”
It was like the first time they’d been together, as furtive and giddy, and she bit back laughter as she started out the door. He grabbed her wrist to hold her still. Kissed her, licking at the corner of her mouth before swatting her ass lightly and opening the bedroom door for her.
Alice took the back steps two at a time, reaching the hallway just as she heard the lilt of Dayna calling her name. She jumped through the bedroom door, tossed her towel to the floor, and hurtled into the bathroom, where she leaped into the shower and turned on the water as she stripped out of her suit, all just as Dayna rapped on the door connecting the bathroom to her bedroom.
“Alice?”
“Hey.” The water had not warmed up, and Alice bit her tongue to keep her teeth from chattering. “I’ll be out in a few.”
Dayna, who’d never had much of a problem with personal boundaries, peeked around the door. “No rush. How was your nap?”
“Very … refreshing.” Alice scrubbed at her skin, washing away the last evidence of Mick’s touch, and prayed he hadn’t left any marks that couldn’t be swirled down the drain.
Or maybe hoping he had, she thought as Dayna chattered away and Alice let her hands roam over all the places he’d so recently touched. She ducked her head beneath the spray, letting the frigid water pebble her skin into gooseflesh. She cupped her breasts briefly, then slid a hand between her legs. He was all over her. Everywhere.
Mick McManus was never going to be washed away.
* * *
I know I disappointed you. I know I let you down. I guess most guys are a little used to that feeling—we want to make you happy, but we don’t know how to do it, and sometimes we’re too stubborn to ask you exactly what you need from us. And sometimes, you have to admit it, you don’t or won’t tell us, or maybe you can’t, so it’s this clusterfuck of misinterpreted emotions and desires, and nobody ever wins. Someone’s always angry or hurt. I knew it, at the time, that what I was doing couldn’t end well. I couldn’t seem to stop myself from hurting you. It doesn’t make it right. I know that. All I can say is that when I look back on what happened, how it all ended, there were things I blamed you for, but never for telling me to fuck off.
—Mick to Alice, unsent
* * *
“No, no, no.” Dayna, laughing, shook her head and got up to demonstrate what she was talking about. She jerked one way, then the other. “It was like this. I mean, he danced like he’d been pithed.”
Paul got up to join her, grabbing her by the hips to do a bump and grind. Moments after that, everyone was on their feet, gyrating. Booze helped, Mick thought as he took Dayna’s outstretched hand and twirled her. Then Cookie’s. And then, eventually, inevitably, Alice’s.
She fit so right against him that though the time came almost at once for him to let her go so she could dance with another partner, he didn’t do it. He couldn’t stop himself from pulling her closer. Gripping her a little harder. It had only been a few hours since they’d been dry humping like a pair of teenagers, but smelling her now, soap and water and that subtle scent of Alice, his cock twitched all over again.
She must’ve seen something in his expression, because with a smirk and a toss of her hair Alice pushed him away to dance with Bernie, then Jay. Dayna moved into Mick’s arms. For a moment she looked over at Alice and gave him a knowing smirk, but Mick pretended he didn’t see it.
The dancing went on until Cookie collapsed onto the couch and with a breathless command said, “I need a break! This old lady is going to expire!”
More drinks, more food. Bernie ushered them all into the basement theater area to watch old home movies from back in the days “before cell phones and selfies.” He’d transferred a bunch of footage from old VCR tapes and digital video to DVDs, and the group settled in to the plush leather recliners with popcorn and candy from the authentic movie theater display case Cookie had picked up at an auction. This was the life, Mick thought, only a little envious at the luxuries his friends had managed to accumulate. He ended up in the back row of the tiered seating, next to Cookie, who was controlling the light dimmer.
“Look how young I was,” she murmured as Bernie hit play on a series of videos taken during what looked like an epic Fourth of July party.
Mick hadn’t been at that party, which had happened before he met Jay, who’d been the one to start bringing him around. But Alice had. Her hair had been worn to her chin in a blunt bob when he’d met her, but in this video she wore it buzzed short around her ears, with some longer bangs on the top. Streaks of blond, some black tips.
“Oh, God,” Alice said. “You caught me in my punk rock phase!”
She looked, Mick thought, gorgeous. He looked at her now, sitting two rows up from him. Silhouetted in the light from the screen. Laughing. Happy, he realized. He was seeing how she looked when she was happy. There in the movie, and there in front of him.
Had she ever looked like that when she was with him? Maybe in the very beginning, before it had all gone to shit. But even then
, her happiness had been overshadowed by the drama of their relationship. Whatever joy Mick had given her had been fleeting and probably eclipsed by the grief he’d caused her.
He’d spent a lot of years regretting the way things had ended with Alice, but until just now Mick had never truly realized how much he must have hurt her to take the light from her eyes in almost every memory he had of her. In the way they were still dark when she looked at him now, even when they were fucking around. Watching the Alice in that video, he saw her as she’d been before she met him. Vibrant. Alive. Free. A little wild, a little wacky, nothing close to the shuttered, chilly woman he’d once left sitting and waiting for him so long that she’d given up on him.
Watching her now, Mick saw not the woman she’d become, but the woman she must’ve always been … when she wasn’t with him. It didn’t sit well in his gut, seeing this. That somehow everything they’d been to each other had bruised and dimmed her. He’d known all this time that he’d been an asshole, that he’d been the reason for their breakup, that if he’d been a little less selfish and scared or a little more willing to take a risk, he and Alice might’ve had a longer run. Or at the very least, managed to part as friends instead of shattering so violently there’d been no way of ever putting anything back together. But what he hadn’t known, or maybe just refused to admit, was that no matter how much he told himself that time healed all wounds, what he’d done to Alice had changed her intrinsically. Irrevocably.
Unforgettably.
* * *
There are levels to the experience of making love. There’s the act itself. Being caught up in the moment. Pleasure. Comfort. Moving together, mouth to mouth, breathing in and breathing out. The language of moans and sighs tell the story of every touch and tease.
Then there’s what happens after. The next day, when you stop in the middle of a task, distracted by that faint bruise pressed into your flesh by your lover’s touch. When you lose track of what you were thinking because all you can remember is how it felt to be naked, skin on skin. The sound of his voice when he said your name, and how he arched and writhed when you stroked him. How you tried to leave but had to go back to bed to kiss him good-bye once, twice, three times, and how he gathered your hair in his fist to tug you closer so that another hour passed before you could finally tear yourself away. How you can still smell him all over you.
The memories last longer than the time it took to make them.
—Alice to Mick
* * *
Alice ought to have been embarrassed by those old videos. Her hair, her clothes, the extra bit of pudge around her middle she’d spent the last ten years working hard to take and keep off. Yet Alice didn’t feel ashamed of any of it. The moments captured in these mini movies had, for the most part, been the highlights. It would’ve been easy to let herself pretend those happy moments had been the only ones.
For a second, she risked a glance back at Mick.
He wasn’t looking at her, thank God. That would’ve been embarrassing, to be caught like that. Never mind that they’d spent the afternoon getting each other off, or that last night she’d gone down on him on the tree swing. Heaven forbid she meet his gaze, Alice chided herself. She made herself look at him again, this time letting her eyes linger. Hoping he would look at her.
He didn’t. He kept his focus on the screen, or on Cookie beside him. He laughed at something the older woman said, leaning closer. Alice looked away, and after that, she didn’t try again to catch his eye.
“Oh, the wedding,” Cookie said from the back of the room. “Whoever told me that dress was a good idea, you ought to be kicked someplace soft!”
She’d worn a mermaid style gown with lots of flounces. Her blond hair in a sleek French twist. She was thinner now than she’d been back then, Bernie a little heavier, but the love they shared was obvious in every glance. The video clip wasn’t long. Three, maybe five minutes, tops. No dialogue, just some faintly cheesy dubbed music that nevertheless had Alice’s throat closing with emotion. Twenty years was a long time to love someone that much. She couldn’t keep up an interest in a television series that lasted longer than about three seasons. Loving someone for a couple of decades seemed impossible.
At least that’s what she told herself, not believing herself in that moment, not with knowing Mick was sitting in the back of the room. She’d fallen for him hard and fast, and the relationship itself hadn’t lasted very long … but the feelings … oh, those had lasted, hadn’t they? All these years later, and the mere sight of him had sent everything inside her swirling and tangling all over again. It wasn’t love, Alice reminded herself as the wedding video ended. It might’ve tasted a little bit like it, but in the end, it was only desire.
The lights came up briefly while Bernie got up to switch the DVD. Cookie brought a fresh round of drinks and more snacks, and some people used the bathroom, but Alice kept to her seat. For the first time that weekend, she wished she had her phone in her pocket so she could pretend to be busy with something on it so she wouldn’t have to talk.
“You want a refill, Alice?” Jay held out the cocktail pitcher.
She shook her head. Gave him a smile. Jay had been one of her closest friends since college; he’d been the one to introduce her to Bernie. Jay had introduced Mick to their group, too, much later, because he and Mick sometimes worked on projects together. Everything was a chain, she thought. One link to another.
“You sure?” Jay gave her a smile and a nudge as Cookie flicked the lights and a new DVD menu appeared on the screen.
Alice lifted her glass, still three-quarters full. Though typically these weekends with Bernie and Cookie had always included a lot more drinking than she usually indulged in, tonight Alice wasn’t feeling it. Maybe she’d had too much to drink last night. Or maybe what had made her feel so drunk and now a little hungover hadn’t been the booze at all. She caught herself looking for Mick again, but stopped herself.
Jay didn’t miss her glance. He looked, too, then back at her. He leaned close to squeeze her. “You okay?”
“Fine. Hey, the movie’s starting.” She moved over so he could squeeze into the chair beside her. “Sit with me.”
Jay, expression solemn, linked his arm through hers and then tangled their fingers. Such a simple contact. Such a comfort. It was too much, though, because it made her want to burst into horrible, wrenching sobs that Alice held back only by the fiercest force of her will.
The universe, of course, had other plans for her. Bernie had been showing the movies in random order, and the one he’d chosen now opened with a familiar scene, similar to many of the other clips. The group of them in the kitchen, glasses and plates full. Lots of laughter. Music, dancing. Close-ups of funny faces.
But in this one, there was Mick.
His hair had been longer, and Alice had forgotten that he’d had a scruffy sort of beard the first time she’d met him. How could she have forgotten? Her breath caught as the camera tightened on his face.
“And here’s our new best friend,” Bernie said in the movie. “Michael McManus …”
“Mick,” he said. “You can call me Mick.”
There in the background, an open door, and Alice coming through it. She wore that green dress, the one she’d loved and worn so much it had finally fallen, literally, to pieces in the wash. Watching this now, Alice could not remember this moment, even as it unwound in front of her. She came through the door calling for a drink and succumbed to hugs and kisses from Jay and Cookie’s niece Tanya. Alice waved at Bernie’s camera. She looked at Mick and gave him a small, hesitant smile, and just as quickly looked away to focus on hugging Cookie.
There it was. The first moment she had ever met him. So quick it had been almost nonexistent. And ultimately nothing, right? A barely there greeting, the passing of her gaze over him, a stranger. Scarcely an acknowledgment at all.
Yet so much had come from it, that first glance. Meeting Mick had changed everything for her. And how many people had the
moment of their first meeting captured that way? Alice wanted to ask Bernie to rewind it, replay. She wanted to be greedy with it, gorge herself on it.
That first moment when everything between them had yet to happen.
There was more to that movie. Glimpses of the party, Mick brooding in the background. Alice accepting a glass of wine and lifting it in a toast. And one heart-thudding shot of the two of them through the French doors. She’d gone outside to the deck, she remembered that. Tipsy on wine and laughter, she’d found Mick standing with a beer.
“I’m Alice,” she’d said, and he’d tipped his bottle toward her.
“I know.”
The movie didn’t show that, of course. Just the shadow of them outside and Jay’s voice asking, “Where did Mick and Alice get off to?” Bernie’s answer in the swing of the camera, a few seconds’ glimpse before the scene cut to a group shot of them playing a drinking game involving shot glasses and ping pong balls. Then it was over and the DVD returned to the menu screen. The lights came on. Jay squeezed her hand and used his other one to discreetly wipe away the tear Alice was mortified to discover had escaped the prison of her eye to slide down her cheek.
There were no more movies after that.
“I’m getting old,” Bernie said as they all gathered up their plates and glasses to clean up the theater. “I want to stay up and party with all of you, but I think I’m going to head off to bed with my beautiful wife.”
“That has nothing to do with being old,” called out Paul. “That’s just called being smart!”
Cookie laughed as Bernie hugged and kissed her. “I’d say it’s called being lucky.”
Bernie bowed at the collective awww that went around the room. “See you all in the morning.”
Upstairs, Paul and Jay went onto the deck to smoke cigarettes of a dubious nature while Dayna mixed another pitcher of cocktails. She poured herself one and offered a glass to Alice, who accepted though she knew she didn’t really want to drink it this late. Dayna pulled out a cheesecake from the fridge.