Back Where We Belong (A Second Chances New Adult Romance) (4 page)

I feel Madison shivering a bit
against me. I'm such a dumbass not think of it before. She's just eighteen, but
eighteen like innocent eighteen, not like the jail bait hanging out around the
Shack, old before their time and best avoided. Women a few years older than me
who have been around the block a bit are safer. They know the score too. They
taught me all I know.

“You haven't done this before,
have you?” I say.

She shakes her head.

Shit! What have I gotten myself
into? Course she hasn't done it before.

“I'll be gentle,” I say. Fuck!
I'm a bona fide fucking cliché here. Shut up Luke. I should just let her go
now, but I can't. We're naked for Christ's sake, and I want her. But this is
going to be one helluva thing to get out of. She's not just some stupid girl
who only wants to fuck a guy she’s met on vacation, any guy who looks okay. I'm
her first.

But even telling myself I hate
that she's a virgin, I know it's not true. I don't feel like that. I'm pleased
she is all mine and that no one has been there before me.

She looks up at me but her
eyelids close a moment as I enter her. I feel her flinch and hear her sharp little
breath of pain just as I push through into her warm, wet center. I ease gently
further into her. So tight! And she opens her eyes again and smiles at me.
She's okay. I think I've been holding my breath until then.

I smile back at her.

“Okay?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “Okay, now.”

I don't pummel and pound her,
ramming my cock into her like there's no tomorrow as I usually would, not
caring whether they like it rough and hard or not. Most of them do. I go deep
and slow, allowing her to get used to the sensation. She seems to like it if
the sounds coming out of her mouth are anything to go by.

Who knew deep and slow could be
this good? It's as if I'm feeling every inch of her inside instead of just
getting off.

It only hurts for a moment, and
he is inside me. Luke is inside me, filling me, stretching me, and that feels
like the best thing ever, lying on that picnic rug under the leaves and the
clear blue sky with him sliding in and out of me. My hips rise to meet his as
if they had a will of their own, wanting to feel all of him deep, deep inside,
every thrust.

He speeds up then, answering my
hips, and plunges into me harder and my body responds and meets him every time
until he is going so hard and fast, everything is a blur. The clearing, the
sky, the leaves. Everything. I am a mass of nothing but sensation and need and
wanting. I can't control anything, my body, my breathing, and I come again just
as he does and we groan out our pleasure.

Who knew it could ever be like
that? I guess everyone else, just not me. This is something special we have.
It's not just sex.

But what do I know? Maybe it is
just sex to Luke. Maybe he's like that all the time with other women. Maybe
he's been like that with that woman in the Shack—Sam—and that's why she put her
hands around his neck. And stupid naïve Madison, what do I really know?

He withdraws from me and takes
off the condom, tying up the end, and then lies back beside me on the rug,
pulling me to his chest as he recovers. I feel his heart hammering and then
calming as we lie there, our limbs entwined. He kisses my hair, my cheek. He
seems lost in thought.

He looks down at me. There's a
bit of blood on the inside of my thighs, drying now.

“Better clean you up a bit,” he
says, smiling, and he takes his white t-shirt from where he pulled it off
earlier and pours water over it from one of the bottles in the cool box. Then
he uses it to gently clean the blood off my thighs, the cool water acting as a
balm. He holds me again, and I feel as cared for as a newborn baby. In a family
where they care about babies.

“You hungry?” he asks.

And then I realize for the first
time since we got into that clearing that I am. I'm hungry for food. Not just
for Luke.

“Yes.” I smile at him. “But I
think I'll dress for dinner.”

He laughs. I put on my dress and
panties, and he puts on his jeans.

“Oh! Your t-shirt,” I say.

“I'll wash it out in the stream
later.”

“Give it here.” While he gets the
food out I take it to the water and wash out the smudges of blood, wringing it
out as best I can. I hang it over a branch.

Luke has brought simple food from
the restaurant but it tastes like food fit for kings out in the fresh air under
the trees—fresh bread, mozzarella, tomatoes sprinkled with pungent basil
leaves, cold meats that we roll around crunchy sticks of bread and nibble, and
fresh peaches. We drink the water, and he even has good coffee in a flask.

Mom and Dad take me to fancy
restaurants sometimes but this is the best meal I’ve ever had. It's only a
little to do with the food and everything to do with Luke and how I feel about
him and what we just did.

“I can't remember the last time I
went on a picnic,” I say.

“Me neither,” he says.

For some reason, that makes me
happy. Maybe because it seems like I'm not just being treated to a standard
Luke seduction technique.

I'm not sure why I've never
wanted to bring anyone else here, but I'm glad I saved it for Madison. She
likes the picnic Mom packed for me too.

I always thought rich girls were
hard to please, like that bitch who decided it would be fun to slum it with a
waiter last summer. I don't know why she bothered. We went for a drink at the
Bay Water Hotel but she was never going to be happy with anything—the service
wasn't quick enough, there wasn't enough ice in her martini, the décor wasn't
to her liking. I took her home after I fucked her on the sand. I half expected
her to complain about how she hadn't come fast enough or something. I didn't
care. I never called her again. And I never wanted anything to do with rich
girls again. Until Madison.

Our fingers are sticky with peach
juice after the picnic. We wash them in the stream. The water is cool and clear
and Madison wants to get right into the water. I roll up my jeans and sit on
the bank watching her as she wades into the stream up to her knees, her dress
tucked into her panties. She looks fucking sexy like that.

I hold out my hand and pull her
to me and kiss her as she stands between my legs, my cock springing to
attention in my jeans. She tastes like ripe peaches, the sun warming us while
our feet are cooled by the stream.

“Take off your dress,” I say. “So
you don't get it wet.”

And she looks me in the eye as if
accepting a challenge and undoes the buttons and takes it off, putting it on
the grass beside me, then she's standing between my legs again. I bury my face
between her breasts. I could stay there forever, but her hands are working the
button on my jeans again. My cock lurches beneath her fingers. I pull her out
of the water. I want to take her there on the soft grass beside the stream, but
she pulls open my jeans and suddenly her hot mouth is on me, her tongue
swirling around, and I want to explode right there.

I know I am shameless. I wanted
to get naked for Luke. I wanted to see his face when I took off my dress. I
wanted to take him in my mouth and pleasure him. I wanted to make him moan, and
now that I have, I like it. It feels so right.

He pulls me off him then. Wasn't
I doing it right?

But he reassures me. “I'm going
to come, and I want to be deep inside you when I do.”

He pulls another condom out of
his pocket and tears the wrapper. He hands it to me as he pulls off his jeans.

“You do it,” he says.

I take it and do my best with it,
rolling it onto the hard thick column of him, enjoying the power of him in my
hands.

“That's it.”  His face is a
picture of concentration. “A day for firsts.”

“What's wrong?” I know there's
something.

He laughs. “Just thinking of
something to take my mind off the...er...situation here.”

“What?”

“Drinks orders. I’m trying to
remember what a table of ten ordered last night.”

“Did you remember it right?”

“No idea,” he says, laughing.
“But it did the trick.”

Then he looks at me with that
intense way of his. “Ride me. I want you to ride me.”

And I kneel over him as he sits
on the bank of the stream, his legs stretched out on the grass, and position
him where I think he needs to go, and he pushes into me. I gasp. This feels
different. Doing the work with my body, raising myself up and down shamelessly
on his cock, my breasts on display for him, bouncing a little.

He's helping, thrusting his hips
in time with mine, but he's letting me set the pace. At least, he does for a
while and then we roll over and I feel the cool soft grass against my back and
my bottom as he powers into me hard, and he takes control again as if he can't
help himself wanting to have the upper hand.

“Come for me,” he says as I get
near. “Come for me Madison.” And I do, exploding around him at his words as he
releases into me, groaning.

This girl is so...unexpected. I
didn't think she would be so uninhibited so soon. Not in a million years. It's
as if she has been in some kind of cocoon just waiting to break out. And I like
it. I like that a lot. I like that I'm showing her who she can be.

I know I can have fun with
Madison, but should I? Is it fair on her?

Why the fuck am I asking if it's
fair? Why do I care?

But I can't help it. It matters.
It's starting to matter a lot.

Fuck that! I can't have some girl
pinning me down, stopping me going places.

Then again, I can't help thinking
that I want this summer with Madison first. One fucking glorious summer or one
summer of glorious fucking. Amounts to the same thing.

***

I take her home that day and kiss
her gently, like she's precious or something, before she gets out of the car,
and I arrange to see her again the next day. I can't help it. I know I have a
stupid grin on my face all the way back to Silver Point. I'm like the cat that
got the whole fucking dairy.

I wave Luke off at the door and I
almost skip inside. I'm a little bit sore from what we just did, but it's a
happy soreness, a reminder of how good we were together. I just want to go to
my room and relive the whole day from beginning to end.

But talk about throwing cold
water on everything! My mother has it down to a fine art when something's not
to her liking. It doesn't matter who upset her—me, my dad or a woman at the
grocery store. When she isn't happy for any reason, we all know about it, and she
isn't happy now.

But it's worse than that. I look
at her, ready to escape after I put up with some kind of tirade. Shit! She's
drunk.

There's something really wrong.
I've never seen my mother drunk. Maybe tipsy a couple of times when she's had
an extra glass of wine at Christmas but never slurring her words or anything.
She's got a bottle of gin or something in one hand, and she’s grasping the edge
of the kitchen counter with the other. It seems like it's the only thing
holding her up.

“Mom,” I say, reaching out to
her. She's really scaring me. She has a wild look on her face.

But she just kind of collapses
down slowly onto the kitchen floor in a flood of tears, and I take the bottle
from her hand. She lets it go.

“What happened?” I ask.

This has to be something more
than me not tidying my room or the woman at the store being too slow bagging
the groceries. Maybe someone at the tennis club snubbed her or something. I'm
hoping it's something like that. We've had those kinds of dramas before. I can
handle that. But she never got drunk then either.

“Your father,” she says. “That's
what happened. Your father has been fucking his secretary. He's been fucking
her for months. And I never knew.”

“What?” My blood runs cold.
“Dad?”

Even though I'm questioning it, I
believe it. He spends so little time at home. He runs off to the office all the
time. He works late. And the arguments. It's not as if he's happy at home.

“Yes, your father spends so long
at work not because he likes his job, not because he wants to make life better
for us all. It's so he can spend time with her, so he can fuck her, his fucking
secretary.” And she starts weeping again.

I lift her up. I can hardly take
in the news, but I have to deal with my mother. I always have to deal with my
mother first, no matter how I feel about anything.

“You should lie down,” I say.
“You'll feel better once you've had a chance to rest.”

“What do you know?” she says.
“You're as useless as him.”

But she lets me lead her up the
stairs. She's unsteady on her feet. I fear she'll fall and pull me down the
stairs with her. I hang onto her with one hand and the handrail with the other,
and get her to bed eventually. I'm sweating with the effort. I feel sick trying
to take everything in. I put a blanket over her and draw the curtains against
the early evening sunlight.

“He repulses me,” she says from
the bed. “For years, he's made my skin crawl wanting to paw me all the time
with his “needs”, but to see him with her, at our house, in our bed.”

“What do you mean? Did you go
back home?”

“I followed him,” she says,
through her tears. “I've had my suspicions since that charity ball in May. His
secretary couldn't keep her eyes off him. Silly bitch. She can have him. Men
are such losers, Madison. I went to his office. The one where he had an urgent
problem to sort out. So he said. He wasn't there. They said his secretary had
the day off when I asked to speak to her. He didn't even bother with a hotel.
Why bother when he knew we were here the whole summer? He couldn't even last a
couple of weeks without having his beastly little way with her. The rest of the
summer wasn't enough. He had to go back there and have her when he was supposed
to be here.”

I sit there beside the bed. I
don't know what else to do, so I pass her a paper tissue. I don't know what to
say. I know she only has herself to blame with her temper and her moods but I
feel sorry for her right then. I feel pretty sorry for myself. I thought they
might end up divorced. It's a pretty sure thing now. That's not going to be pretty.
I can imagine how vengeful and vindictive my mother is going to be. A
nightmare. And she'll hate how this will make her lose face with her friends.

Eventually, she stops crying.

“Do you need anything?” I ask.

“No, nothing from you. Maybe if
you'd been the kind of daughter he wanted, he'd never have run off.”

“What do you mean?” She's always
criticizing me, but Dad never has. He's not exactly there for me, but he's
never gone on at me like she does.

“You know, someone prettier or
talented. If you had anything to recommend you at all, things might have been
different. You're such a disappointment to him. No wonder he never wants to
come home.”

I run from her room and into mine
in tears. Dad doesn't think that, does he? She's only lashing out as hard as she
can because she's upset. She always takes everything that goes wrong out on me.
But even as I doubt her words, I start thinking what she says is true. What's
special about me? I'm sure Dad didn't run off because I'm not the kind of
daughter he wants, but he never has time for me. Is that why? Because he
doesn't think much of me?

And worse, it makes me see
everything that I did with Luke in a new light. What does he really think about
me?

Maybe he was happy to spend the
day with me because he knew I would give him what he wanted. I looked like an
easy target because of the way I acted like a slut at the beach. He made me
feel like I was special, but that's what guys like him do, don't they? They
know exactly how to seduce girls like me and I fell for it. Hook, line and
sinker.

I feel ashamed of all the things I
did now. What was I thinking? Stupid, naïve Madison. I feel sore and dirty like
I've been used and thrown away. I take a shower but the hot water is not enough
to soothe away my distress. Only two thing are crystal clear. My parents are
splitting up, and I'm not going anywhere near Luke Baroncini again.