Well, no agreed-upon good.
“I still can’t believe he banged his student,” I say, looking at the bookshelves. They’re very nice bookshelves.
“Is banging,” Seth points out. “Present tense. It seems like a terrible idea, but they’re happy.”
“There’s no accounting for taste.”
“Says the woman with the octopus tattoo.”
I glance down at where Seth is tracing along the bottom of my ocean tattoo: a sailing ship, pulled under the waves by tentacles. Above it’s there’s another, birds in its rigging, flying it away.
“It’s a Kraken and it’s very scary,” I say.
“I like it.”
“I broke up with someone over it once.”
Seth’s eyes meet mine, and for a moment I regret saying anything. I know the past officially doesn’t exist but that’s our past, not my past and his past.
“Sounds like his loss,” he says. “He call it an octopus too many times?”
Just like that, I smile and relax and Seth closes his hand around my arm, covering a sailing ship.
“It was years ago, I didn’t even have it yet,” I say. “But when I was planning it and doing all the sketches and stuff, I was dating this guy who never said that he hated the tattoos I already had but who obviously did.”
Seth doesn’t ask why I was dating him, which is good, because I don’t have an answer. I spent most of my twenties ensconced in serial monogamy, trading one mediocre boyfriend for another without ever asking whether I wanted a boyfriend at all.
“Long story short, he really hated that I was going to get this one, and after I made my first appointment for it, he told me that if I got this tattoo I wouldn’t be attractive to him anymore, so I needed to call and cancel.”
In my lap, Seth laughs. He laughs and I can’t believe he’s laughing over someone else I dated. I half-wonder if there were drugs in the cocoa powder.
“Anyway, now I’ve got even more tattoos and a different boyfriend,” I say, dryly.
“Your different boyfriend likes them,” he says, simply. “Always has.”
The thought flickers across my mind: Property of Seth Loveless, but I push it away.
“Thanks. I like my different boyfriend,” I tell him.
He’s still tracing my seafaring sleeve: fingers on a red-orange tentacle, thumb brushing over the waving stained-glass waves. With his other hand he pushes the wide sleeve of my borrowed t-shirt over my shoulder to where the waves fade but the Kraken goes on, no longer sea-bound, reaching out over the left half of my body.
Seth’s finger disappears under the sleeve of the shirt, onto my shoulder, and even though he can’t see them he’s still tracing the tentacles to where they curve, just shy of my collarbone, where they bend onto my shoulder blades. If he’s surprised not to find my bra strap, he doesn’t show it, but then again I’m sure he knows.
Then his hand leaves my shoulder, the shirt falls back, and his other hand is sliding up my neck, into my hair, and he pulls me down for a kiss. He tastes like cocoa and a little like cinnamon as he opens his mouth and slides his tongue into mine, fingers tightening in my hair, my hand pressing against his chest.
I try to focus on the minutiae of this moment: his soft lips and the slight scratch of his day-old stubble, the strange angle of our mouths’ meeting, his heartbeat under my palm counting away the moments. Anything to ignore the persistent ache, the gathering heat, the automatic flash-forward in my brain to a future where I’m riding him on this couch like I said I wouldn’t.
Seth moves without breaking the kiss, pushing up on his other elbow. He lets my hair go and pushes me back and I laugh softly as our lips tangle and our noses bump, and he laughs too and bites my lower lip. Sits upright, sideways on the couch. Grabs my thigh and pulls me until my leg is draped over his and I’m leaning forward, mouths together, one arm around his shoulders and the other hand steadying myself on his hard thigh, the muscles tensing under my fingers.
We pull back a moment, as if we’re considering, taking stock of this moment and how to proceed. I know he’s already hard as fuck, his erection inches from my fingers, but I don’t move away. I know the hows and whys of this agreement, the theory that if we restrain desire for long enough we can temper it so that when it comes screaming back, maybe it won’t break us apart.
Instead he strokes my side, over my shirt, his thumb whispering past the curve of my breast, the material moving ever so slightly across my nipple and I close my eyes and lean in again, always hungry for more.
We’re not touching, not really, I tell myself. I’m still doing it right.
His hand brushes down my ribcage one more time. Tongues on tongues, lips on teeth, and now his plaid pants are twisted between my fingers and there’s a tug on my shirt, steady and insistent.
The material slides right over my nipple and this time, I make a noise.
“Fuck,” Seth hisses.
Half a second later I’m in his lap. Straddling him, his big hands locked around my upper thighs, pulling me in hard.
I’ve got both hands in his hair and I’m kissing him desperately, hungrily, like he’s air and I’ve been underground for months. My hips roll against his, nothing but flannel between us as I swear I can feel every ridge and bump of his cock against my clit, his thick head pressing against my entrance.
It’s torture. Pure, beautiful torture, and I hear Seth groan even as I think technically we’re not touching, there’s clothing, technically this is okay —
“I’m sorry,” I gasp, even as I roll my hips again and press my clit against him, the ache in my core fuzzing out into pleasure.
“Me too,” he growls into my mouth, kissing me again. He grabs my hips, lifts his against mine, grinding me down his entire length. Eyes closed, a noise coming from somewhere deep in his chest. “God I’m sorry.”
We don’t stop. I don’t know how to stop. Somewhere, buried deep in my brain is a sequence of events that goes stand up, walk away, take the world’s coldest shower but those thoughts flit by like clouds on a sunny day: interesting but unreachable.
Instead we make out hard enough to bruise lips. Instead we dry-hump like teenagers seeking any kind of release at all even as I force my hands to stay outside his shirt, letting myself touch him but not all the way. Not quite.
He grabs my shirt again, the same way, pulls it so it whispers over my nipples. They’re hard as diamonds, so sensitive it hurts, and he does it again until at last his hands are on my ribcage and Seth pushes me up, back, until I’m sitting upright and we’re staring at each other, panting for breath.
I clear my throat, nod. His hands slide until his they’re on my back, his thumbs on my sides, the black t-shirt stretched tight right across my tits, my nipples out and proud as a rainbow flag.
“Okay,” I whisper, my voice still husky. “Okay. Well.”
Seth’s just staring at me, chest rising and falling, every curve and dip and ripple of every muscle on nearly-full display under his sorry excuse for a shirt. His eyes fall from my face to my tits, my belly, my hips, my thighs spread over his.
No one’s ever looked at me the way Seth does. Not once. I was married, for fuck’s sake, and my ex didn’t look at me this way.