Gun Games - Faye Kellerman [81]
They both laughed.
“Well, that was really sexy,” she said.
“I don’t care.” But his cock had retreated. “We can just talk.”
“I feel like crap. I don’t even know how you can stand to be around me.”
“I love you.” He began to kiss her shoulder. “Does this bother you?”
“No.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
“I like it, too.” He kissed her shoulder and her neck and smelled her musky scent and tasted her salt and got hard again. Her stomach was hollow, and she had a dark line running down the middle of her belly. He traced it with his fingertips until he got to the waistband of her pajamas bottoms. His hand rested there for a few seconds. Then his fingers dipped inside, feeling the good thatch of hair.
She pulled out his hand and placed it back on her breast. He went back to kissing her shoulder. She whispered, “Gabe?”
“What?”
“Have you ever done it?” He didn’t answer and she persisted. “C’mon. I wanna know. Have you ever done it?”
He ignored her. “No, I’ve never kissed a shoulder as beautiful as yours.”
She pulled away from him and studied his face. “You have! I know you have!” She sat upright, her eyes wide with interest. “What’s it like?”
“It wasn’t as good as being with you now.” She was still staring at him. “Why do we have to talk about it?”
“Because I’m curious.”
“Why? It’ll only make you feel bad.”
“Please?”
He went soft again. Thinking about the past was the surest way to make him deflated and depressed. In anger, he said, “You really want to know?”
“Yes, I really want to know.”
He was barely controlling his rage. “Okay. Then here goes. The answer is, yes, I’ve done it three times . . . or rather with three girls. The first time was like an initiation to high school. Some upper-class girl takes you in her car and does you. Wham bam thank you ma’am. I was a year ahead in school, so I was thirteen. It was weird. The second time was at a party. I ran with a fast crowd and even though I was younger, my buddies were okay with me because I was tall, I was Chris Donatti’s son, and I played the piano and guitar and all sorts of shit that made me free entertainment and a chick magnet. There were always a lot of parties with a lot of booze, drugs, and sex. Everybody would get drunk or stoned. There was a lot of fooling around. Some screwing, but mostly, the girls gave a lot of head.”
“Head?”
“Oral sex,” he told her and not too nicely. “Blow jobs. That’s what girls do when they want to do something but they still want to be virgins. They’d give blow jobs. I got a ton of blow jobs, okay?”
He was quiet. Yasmine asked softly, “What about the other two times?”
He gave her a dirty look, but she seemed unfettered by his discomfort. “The second time was at a party with my friend’s older sister. She was sixteen and totally blasted—a real hot mess. It was a miracle she didn’t puke on me afterward. The third time was even weirder. It was my friend’s sister-in-law. Her husband—my friend’s brother—was in, like, Iraq or Afghanistan. I was supposed to meet my friend at his brother’s house—why I don’t even remember—but he got hung up and couldn’t make it. It was in the summer and it was really hot outside. His sister-in-law offered me a beer before I left. So I’m sitting on the couch, drinking a beer, when she starts massaging my leg, bending over and showing her cleavage. We wound up doing it on the couch with our clothes on.”
His anger was gone. He was suddenly more dispirited than anything else.
“It was also strange because she wasn’t a girl. She was a woman and she liked it.”
He regarded Yasmine’s face, her red nose, and her inquisitive eyes.
“You know that most girls don’t like it at first. They just do it to please their boyfriends.”
Yasmine was very quiet.
“You asked, so now you know. Happy?”
“You did it with a married woman?”
He shrugged. “I felt bad, but not that bad. It was a weird community. My friends’ moms were always coming on to me. It was a game with them.”
“You did it with your friends’ moms?”
“Count on your fingers, Yasmine! First time was in a car, second at a party, and third with my friend