“Nothing? You have no requests?” His motion has slowed again, the fierceness in his face lessening, which means he’s not as tuned into this moment.

A fierce yearning grips me. I want him to come. I feel ownership over his orgasm, as if I watch this then I can own him, and in that moment, I’d do anything to stoke his fire. There’s an honesty in his voice, the clear way he looks at me with need that I have never seen before, that loosens my lips and words that I have never spoken spill out of me.

“I know what I’d like to do to you,” I begin.

A small smile appears at the corners of his mouth. “That’s good. Tell me.”

“I’m not sure if I could take much in. You’re…big.” That’s an understatement, like saying he’s good at football. “I’d have to use my hands. I hear the tip is very sensitive.”

He nods. “Yeah. Right under here.”

His finger flicks that spot under the ruddy head of his dick. It’s so red it almost looks painful. His body quakes as he roughly jerks his hand up and down his shaft. I want to rush over and push his hands aside. Let me. I can do this really well.

Some vestige of self-protection exists, because my feet are nailed to the floor. I’m not leaving, but I can’t get closer either.

“I’d lay my tongue there then,” I say, shocking myself at the brazen words falling out of my mouth. I blame this on Masters too. His eyes gleam with approval.

“There isn’t a spot on your sweet body, Ellie, which I wouldn’t want to lay my tongue on.” His hand goes down. “I’m standing here wondering what you taste like.” Up again. “What the skin behind your ear feels like against my tongue.” Down. I feel dizzy. His tongue creeps out to rub against the middle of his lower lip. “Whether you are honey or mint or—” He breaks off with a deep guttural moan as if the idea feels too much for him. “I suspect I’ll be addicted.”

I’ll be addicted. As if it’s foregone conclusion for him, and those words, full of want and need and determination, are their own kind of aphrodisiac.

“I’d like to taste you, too. You look…weighty. Like, you on my tongue would be substantial.”

“That a good thing, baby?” His eyes are almost closed—just mere slits as he stares at me.

“Yeah,” I croak. I clear my throat and try again. “Yes. It’d feel like you made a mark.”

His eyes flutter shut and he swallows hard. I watch mesmerized as his Adam’s apple bobs up and down his throat. “Fuck, yes. I’d like to mark you.” He speeds up, his hand moving faster, squeezing harder. “I’d like to mark you with my mouth and with my come until everyone and anyone who came into contact with you would know you were mine.”

I gasp in shock at the same moment that he begins to come. He throws his head back as the long, ropey seed jets from his body into his waiting hand. He looks amazing, and I’ve never wanted anything so badly in my short life.

My body trembles from the aftershock of his orgasm. His eyes drop to mine—a laser beam holding me as captive as any rope.

“How was it?” I manage to eke out, despite having witnessed the most erotic scene of my entire life. The hoarseness of my voice, the genuine interest, takes away any flippancy I try to inject.

“Better than I’ve ever felt before,” he says again with his disarming honesty. “But not as good as it will be with you.”

12 Ellie

I'd like to say that I stand there boldly and have a rational discussion with Masters about what happened. I don’t. Oh, I stand there and gawk while he flushes some tissue down the toilet and washes his hands. I get a little lightheaded when he reaches down, calmly tucks his still sizeable shaft inside his shorts, and zips up. But the moment he takes a step in my direction, my hypnosis breaks and I flee like a chicken chased by a whole den of foxes. I hear him call my name, but I ignore it and sprint out of the bedroom. At the bottom of the stairs, I swell with relief when I see Jack leaning against the wall outside the room where he’d been playing the video game.

I grab his arm. “I’m ready to go.”

I don’t look behind me, afraid that I might see Masters and I’ll be caught up in his tractor beam of a personality. Jack, the prize brother that he is, doesn’t ask me a single question, but slips his phone into his front pocket and follows me out of the house.

“You didn't even want to see where I'm living?”

It’s not a sincere question. He wants to know why the hell I’m trotting down Carpenter Avenue like the house behind us caught on fire.

“Yes, tomorrow. Or the day after.” Or whenever Masters isn’t around.

It's as if he reads my mind, because he asks, “What’s going on with you and Masters?”

“Me and Masters? There’s nothing going on between the two of us. I barely know him,” I squeak. Truth is, I actually know a lot about him. He’s a good—no great—college football player. He’s got a sly sense of humor. He’s a good sport. He claims to be a virgin. He told me the hottest sexual experience of his life was me watching him masturbate. That lightheaded feeling comes over me again and I trip.

Jack catches me and sets me upright. With his hands around my shoulders like iron, I can’t do anything but stand there while he looks at me searchingly. “It didn't seem like nothing when he whispered in your ear before dinner. He made half the table move so he could sit across from you. You disappeared for a very long time and Ahmed said he saw Masters practically lose his virginity on the dance floor to a brunette.”

“Why does that brunette have to be me?” I pretend to be hurt by the accusation, but it doesn’t play with Jack.

“Ellie,” he says in gentle consternation, “I may be a terrible writer, and it might take me a couple hours to get through thirty pages in a textbook, but I can still add two and two together. I’m not dumb.”

“I know you’re not dumb.”

Jack hates it when his intelligence gets insulted. In middle school, he got flagged as slow, which infuriated our dad. He threw a fit, both at school and at home, which embarrassed and humiliated Jack. I started helping Jack then, slowly and silently. Anything to keep him from getting yelled at by Dad, anything to keep that destroyed look off Jack’s face.

It started innocently by proofing a paper, inserting commas, correcting homonyms, stuff like that. My mother caught me, and I thought I would get into big trouble. Instead she came in later and told me that I needed to do it for every paper. Then every open book test. Thank goodness I didn’t have to take the SAT for him. I’m not sure how we would have pulled that one off.

Jack doesn’t know. When I finished “proofing,” I’d put all the papers in a pretty binding and Jack would turn those in.

If he found out, he would kill me. He would absolutely murder me and leave my body out for the crows.  I hate my parents, and worse, I hate myself for agreeing to the masquerade. Please let him have a breakout season. 

“You know I don’t care. I want to know. I’d prefer to hear it from you than from someone in the locker room.”

“I thought you guys had a no girlfriends, wives, or sisters rule in the locker room.”

Jack scoffs. “That rule is fucked constantly. Back at Wyoming, one girl dated three of the players. If the players go there, then they have to chill out about the repercussions, and they did. It’s not ideal, but shit like that happens. If you were interested in Masters, I’d be okay.”

“How can you be?” I explode. “Don’t you remember what happened?”

“I remember that Travis Farrington was an asshole who threw away a chance at a state championship because he couldn’t get in your pants. That’s on him, not you.”