“Dessert pizza?” he got up the nerve to ask me.
I wacked a frozen dark chocolate bar on his fancy countertop to break it into pieces which I then sprinkled all over the crust. Lawson watched me on edge, steam practically escaping from his ears as he witnessed my disaster in the making.
“Do we cook this?”
“What?” I asked feigning offense. I put a hand on my hip and inadvertently got some butterscotch on my white peasant style dress.
“Nothing, never mind, continue your masterpiece,” he said, his whole hand now covering his mouth, his pale wrist pointing toward me.
I flounced back to the fridge and found the Hershey’s syrup in the door. Trying not to smile, I turned around and headed back to my crust with one mission in mind.
“Oh hell no, I’m not eating that,” Emery shouted. Both his hands were up signaling me to stop. I stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor and tipped the chocolate syrup bottle to my lips, with my other hand, I reached around and pulled down the long lone zipper that held my dress up. It slid to the floor in a somewhat dainty escape. I stood naked in his million dollar kitchen and stopped the syrup drip with my tongue. Then I slowly moved the bottle out from my mouth so that it fell, in a lazy line that dripped down my collarbone and onto my breasts.
I think I tremored in my sandals, and not from the cold, but from letting his eyes see all of my story that was yet to be told. I was pale, I was virginal, and covered in freckles, denser on my shoulders and chest, anywhere the sun touched me. My arms were those of a boxer, over-developed, almost sinewy, but my thighs and ass were fat, there wasn’t any better way to put it. My belly was soft and round and the area just below it was puffy and never wanted to lay flat no matter how many sit ups I tortured it with. I had a nasty bright pink scar from appendicitis from when my parents almost let me die rather than take me to an out-of-sect doctor who could actually perform the surgery. The scar was angry because we’d never returned to the hospital to have it cleaned and dressed and some lady who’d been a former school lunch cafeteria monitor clipped my stitches with her scissors from her sewing basket.
Lawson walked to me and took the syrup bottle from my hands as if he as disarming me.
“So this is me,” I said, slapping my thighs. I knew Lawson looked a GQ model under his clothes. “I’ve never been anywhere, seen anything remarkable, accomplished anything near what you have. I know I’ve got a good heart and I know that I’m brave,” I announced like I was the first to go at a PTA ice-breaker.
“Tabula rasa,” Lawson said.
“What?” I asked him.
“Keep going, Celia. This is the best performance I’ve ever witnessed.”
“Christ,” I said with exasperation. “That’s really all I got. I can fight you, and I can probably fuck you. What else do you want? My jabs are strong. My uppercut is decent. I can ruin a good pizza and if he’d let me, maybe I could also seduce a teacher.”
The last part wasn’t really true. I had no idea how to seduce anyone, obviously. But Emery said he wanted to know me and this was as exposed as I could get. I was putting it all on the table in front of him.
He took my hand and lifted it to his sexy stern mouth, kissed the back again where the freckles lay and brushed his lips back and forth along the length of my fingers. With his strong unrelenting hands, he yanked me to him and my chocolate drops slammed into his shirt like a Pollock. My body pressed against his was the most real I’d ever felt, like my childhood, my life inside Joplin, even Lou’s gym had been pure Pinocchio. This in contrast, was every molecule at attention, every cell breathing, every tiny hair on every plane of my body leaning into him. Reaching. Yearning. Seeking validation and deliverance. This was the four fundamental laws of physics happening.
He sucked my two fingers into his wide mouth and the sensation made my breath catch in my throat. I thought I was supposed to seduce, I thought I would do the sucking, but I gasped instead, closed my eyes and savored the suction, the feel of his tongue sliding over the nerve endings of my fingertips. When he pulled my hand from his mouth, he brought it between my legs and my eyes popped back open. I stared into his gorgeous face.
I was brave, I was fearless, I reminded myself internally.
He used my hand, like a puppet hand to caress me between the legs—something I’d done plenty of times, but which felt entirely different with him controlling me.