Page 13 of Play Dirty

She is spent.

And he never even put his cock inside her.

Their foreplay was so well… choreographed I suddenly feel like an unwelcome outsider. Like… a voyeur of the worst kind.

The kind who invades someone’s privacy.

The kind who steals little secrets and moments to use for himself later when he… when he has no more fantasies of his own and needs something to make him feel…

Jesus, Jordan. Get a fucking grip.

Alexander lets out a laugh and then climbs up onto the couch, pulling her close to him as he closes her legs and holds her tight.

She melts. Melds her body into his, and they become one.

It occurs to me then how much of them I’ve missed these past several years. How well they know each other. How she kept the little things that made her… her. And he kept the little things that made him… him. And then they rearranged them. Scattered them all around and scrambled them all up like a game of memory, waiting to be matched back up again in a new way.

Yeah, they grew apart, but they’ve grown together too.

And I missed it.

They take a shower after that and I go back outside and sit by the river. Reliving their sex over and over again in my head. Unsure how I feel about it. Unsure what it was, actually. Which is dumb. Because it’s just… just two people who’ve been together for a very long time doing things they’ve done a million times before.

It just bothers me though. How well they know each other. How each one knows just what to do. How to do it. When to do it.

Why the fuck do they need me? I mean, shit, if I had that on film like the old days…

I shake that thought away by shaking my head.

That’s not how I remember sex with Augustine and Alexander. And we’ve fucked her together plenty of times back in the day.

I remember it as… just… I dunno. Blind lust. Hard, thumping heart beats and sweaty bodies all twisted up in sheets. It was intimate, but not like this. More desperation and less devotion. It was urgent and reckless.

Nothing they did in there was anything less than careful.

So again… why am I here?

I am no closer to that answer than I was before I watched them.

A little while later Augustine comes outside, the screen door of the cabin smacking against the door frame as the spring swings it closed. She’s wearing a loose turquoise tank top and a pair of cut-off shorts, looking like the girl I left behind and not the one who brought me here today.

She sits down next to me, smelling of soap, leans back, propped up with palms flat on the rock, and says, “So… what’d we do wrong?”

I laugh. “What the fuck are you talking about? I felt like I was watching porn.”

I look at her and find her looking at me with squinted eyes. “You didn’t even notice?”

“Notice what? That he didn’t fuck you? Didn’t look like you needed it, Augustine.”

“He didn’t come.”

“Oh,” I say, thinking about that. “I guess I didn’t notice. I was too busy looking at you.”

“Right? I mean, that’s why it took me so long to notice too! But he doesn’t come, Jordan.”

“What do you mean? Like ever?”

“Well, he comes when he masturbates. But I haven’t been able to make him come in almost a year.”