"Will you?" he asks, mouth at my neck.
I run my hands down his broad back. Weights, I've learned, and swimming. I've seen him lift now.
This is important for him, just like telling my parents about him was important for me. My entire body feels like it's a live wire. I think I love him .
"I'd love to meet her."
His mouth trails across my chest and toward the hard peak of my nipple. We have breakfast prepared in his kitchen. Orange juice, coffee, bagels. And I couldn't care less. The wonder of him, I've found, is that he does exactly what he wants, when he wants, and always expects me to do the same.
It's liberating.
"You drive me insane," he whispers against the lace edge of my panties. His hands have already hooked around the fabric, and his golden eyes are locked on the skin he's slowly unveiling.
I know what he's planning… and he's gotten dangerously good at it. Perhaps it's knowing how much he enjoys it that lets me give in entirely.
"Carter," I murmur.
He grins up at me and bends his auburn head to the spot between my thighs. It's a long time later, and one slow, trembling orgasm, when he finally eases inside of me. He's hard and thick and when he's fully seated, I can feel him throbbing inside.
He mutters against my neck. "Christ," he says, and I can feel him shaking.
"You don't have to go slow."
He groans and speeds up, hips thrusting in deep strokes that send the padded headboard of his bed against the wall in rhythmic beats. I brace a hand against it and keep the other on his broad back.
Nothing is like this. Feeling him inside me, on top of me, holding me. Breathless kisses and heady pleasure, feeling his heart beat and knowing there is no way, never could be, to be closer to another person than this.
I love you, I think with every roll of his hips. I love you I love you I love you.
I wrap my hands around his biceps, hard as stone from holding up his body weight, and find the curve of his ear with my lips. "I'm so happy I met you," I whisper. "You're everything I wanted, and so much more I didn't know I did."
He groans. It's a low and hoarse sound, deep from his chest. I feel the spasms inside as he orgasms and I clasp him close to me the entire time. Legs and arms and heart, all holding him.
"Fuck," he says weakly and buries his head against my neck. "I don't know what I'd do if you ever left me."
I smile, too dazed and tired to think, and run my nails up his back. "Luckily I have no plans to do that."
I expect his laughter to rumble through his chest and into me. He loves joking in bed. Once, he said having sex with me felt even better while I was laughing, because of the tremors. But that might have been a joke, too. It had definitely made me laugh, at any rate.
Carter doesn't, though. He kisses me instead, languid and lazy. He's still moving gently inside me, and I can feel him in every cell of my body. "Promise me you never will," he murmurs.
That's easy. "Never," I say.
"He thought he could talk his way out of anything," Susan says fondly. She's searching through a drawer in a closet, tucked into the corner of the room that was once Carter's. It's a guest room and sewing room now, for when her sister visits or-as she tells me-when the muse strikes.
I smile at the back of her head. In some ways she's much like Carter, but she's different, too. Quieter, but with a strength that's clear in her eyes. She keeps working as a teacher because she loves it. 'Not," as she'd said, 'because my son is too stingy to help me retire early.'
"Mom," he'd protested. Seeing them together was fascinating. Watching him interact with someone who saw right through the bluster and the jokes.
"I don't want Audrey to think you don't take care of me," she'd fired right back. "Because he does."
Now she's searching for old photo albums, and the son and boyfriend in question is downstairs hunting for the super. The water pressure is off, apparently.
It looked okay to me. Weak, perhaps, but normal. But Carter had been decisive. Susan had agreed, in the tone of someone who'll cede the battle to win the war, and had sent me a little wink.
He's overprotective of her too, it seems.
"He was too clever for his own good," she continues, head inside the closet. "There were times, in school, where my colleagues asked me if I'd given him the answers in advance for tests. He didn't like to study, you know, but he'd get it right anyway."
"That sounds like him. Irritatingly good at a lot of things."
Susan laughs. "Yes, that's the best way to describe it. Oh, here we are. I have to show you… he was the cutest kid."
"I'd love to see," I say honestly. Because I can't imagine Carter ever as a kid, without the air of supreme confidence he carries around him like a shield now.
She carries a heavy, bound album to the guest bed and gestures for me to join her. The first page she opens to has pictures of the Bronx Zoo… and Carter as an eight-year-old.
"He wanted pictures in front of all the animal exhibits," she says. "That's him and the chimps, him and the meerkats, him and the tigers. They wouldn't show themselves, so I had to take a picture of him next to the sign."
I smile down at the image of my boyfriend, so much younger, with a wide grin at the camera. It looks entirely unguarded. A thick mop of hair, a lighter shade of auburn than it is now, hangs down over his eyes. He looks gangly, legs just starting to shoot up.
"He loved animals?"
"Back then, yeah, he sure did." She flips a few pages forward. "There's one where he's fallen asleep in front of Animal Planet… let me find it. Oh, no. Look at this one. His tenth birthday."
I look down at a picture of a group of people, all watching Carter on the ground. He's sitting behind a mountain of gifts in bright colors. I spot a younger Susan standing behind him. Other adults mill around, and a group of children run in the background, their forms blurry.
But it's the man in the corner my eyes land on.
He's wearing a well-pressed suit. Thick, dark hair is swept back over heavy brows. The charming smile is familiar. Too familiar. He looks down at Carter with a proud expression. Even in the picture, he frightens me.
There's something too clean about him.
It's a younger image of Will C. Jenner. The man I've been looking for over a decade for.
Susan has noticed my zeroed-in attention. "Ah," she says softly. "That's Carter's dad. Has he told you about him?"
I can't find my voice, so I nod instead. It's a tiny movement.
The man who ruined my father's life is my boyfriend's dad. It would be funny, if this was a sitcom, a farce, a romantic comedy. Now it just makes me want to cry and scream at the same time.
Susan sighs. "It's not a pretty story. But it is our story, and I'm not afraid to tell it anymore. He was a complicated man. Brilliant, in some ways, and he gave me my son. But I can't say that he was good."
"No," I say quietly. "Carter told me about him."
"He's always been harsher on his father than I have been. Not that I wasn't angry too," she says. "But it's faded. I don't think Carter's has. He's reached out now, and I've told him it might be a good idea to meet him… just to clear the air, you know? To have the chance to say his piece." The smile she gives me is soft. A bit shy, perhaps, and encouraging. "My son told me you'd said the same thing."
I feel sick. "Yeah, I did."