Here We Go Again, page 20
“And my hand,” Rosemary adds. “My imagination and my hand.”
Logan grips the edge of the tub to force herself not to lunge. Slow. Safe. “Will you show me?”
Rosemary freezes. Beads of water drip from her hair down her slender throat, and Logan would give anything to see that perfectly polished hand slip between those pillowy thighs.
“I want you to show me how you pleasure yourself,” she says earnestly. “I want to know how to make you feel good.”
Rosemary’s desert-sky eyes go wide. “You want to watch me masturbate?”
Logan nods and says, “Fucking yes,” and she sounds too eager, too nervous, too everything.
Rosemary brushes her hair out of her face and her mouth crinkles into its familiar puckered shape, that pattern Logan knows by heart, like a road she could drive in the dark, always finding herself safely home again.
“What if I do it with you?” Logan runs a hand across her own breasts, down her stomach, her skin prickling with sensitivity like it hasn’t in years, since those early sexual encounters when she hadn’t yet learned to guard her heart. Logan slides her fingers between her legs, and she has to bite down on an immediate gasp.
Rosemary mirrors her actions, so tentative as her fingers inch closer to her smooth vulva. She touches herself, then cringes in embarrassment. Logan closes her eyes while Rosemary gets more comfortable with herself, and when she opens them again, Rosemary has two fingers moving in slow circles around her clit. She releases the sexiest fucking sound Logan’s ever heard. Before Rosemary can feel embarrassed again, Logan whispers, “I loved that sound. Please, Rosemary. Let me hear you.”
Rosemary gasps again as she begins touching herself more vigorously. She becomes unguarded, uncensored, and completely unafraid.
Logan watches every stroke like it’s a choreography she needs to memorize. She sinks deeper into her own touch. She barks a string of curses, letting every joyful “shit” and “fuck” and “motherfucking clit sucker” fly free, which makes Rosemary laugh wildly. Rosemary loses a little more control, the occasional yes escapes her mouth. Then Rosemary’s free hand clutches her breast. She pebbles her own nipple between her manicured fingers, and Logan is probably going to die.
Rosemary’s head is thrown back, her teeth biting down on her full, bottom lip. The pale column of her wet throat. The tremor in her chest. The absolute glory of watching Rosemary “Binder” Hale come undone. Logan can’t handle it. She looks as open and free as the girl from the summertime woods, and Logan is overwhelmed by how much she wanted Rosemary back then and how much she wants her right now.
Rosemary opens her eyes and catches Logan’s gaze. Blue eyes burning, she holds her stare without losing her rhythm, two feet away, riding her own hand toward climax. “Rosemary,” she pants. “Can I please finish you?”
“Yes,” Rosemary whispers back without hesitation.
Yes, yes, yes.
They shift. More water sloshes out of the tub, and they laugh as Rosemary tucks herself between Logan’s legs, back to chest. Logan kisses that beautiful throat, and Rosemary cranes her head back so she can capture Logan’s mouth. Kisses her deeply, desperately, as Logan slides two fingers back under the water.
Logan touches Rosemary exactly like she touched herself. Two fingers, massaging around her clit. And Rosemary grips Logan’s thighs and clenches her toes against the water spout. Rosemary’s ass is pressed firmly against her, and she feels herself still coiling, too. Tightening and building and almost breaking.
It’s never felt like this. She’s let so many other people into her bed and into her pants. Some she loved when she was young, even if they couldn’t love her back. Some who loved her, even if she had completely closed herself off from caring.
But this. Logan feels like someone threw open all her windows and doors, dragging the furniture into the front yard. There is nothing left to hide behind, no part to play. She cares. She cares so damn much, it might destroy her.
She bites down on Rosemary’s neck and wishes she could consume her.
Rosemary comes apart with her back arched, her toes clinging to the faucet, and her mouth on Logan’s. She comes in a fit of curses and gasps, holds on to Logan ferociously through the tremors Logan teases out of her until she’s boneless in Logan’s arms. Until she feels like hers.
Rosemary doesn’t give herself time to fully recover before she’s sloshing around again, angling herself so she can get a hand between Logan’s legs. She’s too eager, too far to the right, but it doesn’t matter. Logan uncoils completely from nothing more than a single finger on Rosemary Hale’s right hand.
ROSEMARY
She can’t just go to sleep. She maybe won’t sleep ever again. She has the entire infinite sky in her chest and the taste of Logan on her tongue.
When Logan falls asleep in a damp pile of sheets, Rosemary slinks over to the small hotel desk. She moves the pizza and sits in the chair, still completely naked, and starts writing on the hotel stationery.
Chapter Twenty-Three
ROSEMARY
“Are you really going to eat a shrimp po’boy at ten in the morning?”
Both Joe and Logan look at her from across the table like that question is the most ridiculous part of this little tableau. Logan has her po’boy suspended midair in front of her unhinged jaw, and Odie is halfway in her lap, ready to catch any falling shrimp. “Why wouldn’t I?” Logan asks before cramming the monstrosity into her mouth, remoulade sauce dripping down her chin. And for some inexplicable reason, Rosemary finds the whole thing very attractive.
She imagines Logan’s mouth wrapped around a moan of pleasure, her fingers grazing her own skin across the bathtub…
Maybe it’s not so inexplicable.
Rosemary banishes all sexy shrimp thoughts and turns to Joe. “Really, Joe. For breakfast?”
“Rosemary, I’m dying,” Joe snaps. “I’m not sure how many times I have to tell you this. And if I’m going to be dead tomorrow, then I absolutely need to eat this shrimp po’boy.”
“You aren’t going to die tomorrow.” She rolls her eyes, and then she hands him an extra napkin. Joe chomps down on his po’boy with slightly less vigor than Logan, but his eyes still go wide in his wrinkled face.
“Best po’boy ever, right?” Logan asks through a full mouth.
Joe swallows. “Better than any po’boy I’ve had in New Orleans. The perfect last meal.” Then they’re both stuffing their faces again.
Joe got them up early this morning and said nothing about the state of their damp, rumpled king bed. Rosemary was too tired to be subtle. She didn’t sleep at all—she’d been too wired, too awake, too filled up with Logan to know what to do with herself. So, she wrote while Logan snored. She wrote until her eyes became too sore and too heavy to keep staring at the white paper in the dark hotel room. And even when she finally got into bed, she still couldn’t sleep. She lay there beside Logan, counting her own heartbeats and Logan’s exhalations.
They left Dallas before six in the morning. Texas sunrise is almost as beautiful as New Mexico sunset: pinks, blues, and yellows stretched out across a never-ending sky as they drove east. Rosemary took the first shift, and as she drove through the quiet of the morning, she couldn’t wrap her mind around how the outside world appeared relatively unchanged while her world had been flipped upside down.
She’d had sex. With Logan Maletis.
Sex had never felt like a goalpost or a major life event she needed to reach. It was never an item on her to-do list. It didn’t matter to her the way it seemed to for everyone else, and until she kissed Logan in the rain, she wasn’t sure she would ever have it.
But then Logan gave her total control, made her feel safe, made her feel sexy. She gave all her trust to Logan, and Logan showed her a version of sex that felt like emotional connection. Like a really good conversation on the front porch watching the stars.
And now. Now, she doesn’t entirely know how to be. She doesn’t know what any of it means to Logan. Or what it means to her. They were best friends, and then they were high school enemies; they spent ten years apart and four years hating each other. The friendship truce and feelings.
Where do they even stand now? What are they to each other? And where do they go from here?
She might be spiraling a bit.
Joe insisted they stop in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he directed them to a restaurant in what appeared to be an old auto repair shop. A man in a fedora greeted them and introduced himself as the owner. Then, when he saw the Gay Mobile parked outside, he smacked his thigh and loudly declared in front of all the Shreveport locals—“I’m queer too! Queers get the special discount!”
Rosemary nervously glanced around the restaurant, but none of the locals batted an eye at the owner’s antics. They got fifteen percent off their order, and Rosemary felt some kind of way about this gay man in the Deep South who owned a popular small business and was unapologetically himself.
“I-I’ve changed my mind,” Joe suddenly announces over breakfast. “I don’t think I can go to Ocean Springs.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
Joe blots his mouth with a napkin. “I-I don’t want him to… to see me like this.”
Rosemary reaches for him across the table. “You’re beautiful, Joe.”
“Oh, fuck you! I look like a man who is actively dying. I have liver spots, girls. Liver spots! At sixty-four!”
“You look like a man who has lived,” Rosemary insists. “And Remy will have aged, too.”
Under the table, Logan reaches for her. It’s just a hand brushing against her leg, then settling itself on her knee.
“Yes, but he probably aged like a Black Harrison Ford. I want him to remember the version of me that was young and lithe and wrinkle-free, with a fully functioning cock.”
Rosemary coughs and reaches for her coffee. Logan squeezes her knee. The pressure of her fingers makes Rosemary feel safe, and she’s struck by an old impulse. She wishes she could undo the last eighteen years, stitch her and Logan back together, until they become one person with two heartbeats like they were as girls.
“What if he doesn’t remember me?”
“You were together for fifteen years,” Logan says plainly.
“And everyone who has ever met you remembers you, Joe.”
“But… but what if he’s married?”
Rosemary keeps her voice gentle. “Then you’ll be so happy for him and you can say your final goodbye knowing he lived a full life.”
“And then, when we’re alone again, we’ll reassure you that you’re so much prettier than his ugly-ass husband,” Logan adds.
Joe is unconvinced. “You don’t know his husband is ugly-ass.”
“I don’t know his husband exists.”
Joe stares down at his shrimp po’boy, his expression one of absolute agony. “I don’t want Remy to know about the diapers.”
“The good news is you don’t have to lead with that.”
“Gay men aren’t supposed to get old,” Joe mutters.
Under the table, Rosemary puts her hand over Logan’s, lets their fingers loosely thread. “Then how lucky is it that both you and Remy did?”
Joe exhales dramatically. “Fine,” he relents. “Onward to Ocean Springs.”
LOGAN
She fucked up.
As a rule, she’s usually fucking up something most of the time. But on the Logan Maletis fuckery scale, this is an eleven. Out of ten. This is kissing-your-best-friend-at-a-pool-party level of fucked.
This is having sex with Rosemary Hale in a hotel bathtub fuckboy behavior.
Logan grips the steering wheel and tries to come to terms with the fuckedupness she’s created.
She’s had sex with people she shouldn’t have in the past. Monogamous married women who were still in the closet; a few of her friends’ ex-girlfriends; once, the parent of a student. Logan doesn’t feel any shame about those hookups, though. As long as sex is between two consenting adults and all boundaries are respected, Logan doesn’t let shame anywhere near her sex life, even if the sex is reckless or impulsive or borderline self-destructive. She likes sex, and she isn’t ashamed of that.
But sex with Rosemary is a whole new level of bad behavior. It was Rosemary’s first time. And there were feelings involved. And now Logan cares.
She closes her eyes and tries not to think about Rosemary writhing in the water, about her hesitance and the way she eventually unfurled. About her blush and her willingness and the way she felt in Logan’s arms.
Sex with Rosemary hadn’t felt like fuckery. It felt like having the bud of a prickly pear flower without the barbs. All beauty, no pain.
“Are your eyes closed?” Rosemary screeches. Logan’s eyes fly open in time to see Rosemary grab the wheel and yank it toward her, pulling the Gay Mobile out of the neighboring lane. “You can’t close your eyes! You’re driving!”
“Shit! Sorry! Sorry!” Reality slams into her right before they slam into a semitruck. She takes back the wheel and forces herself to focus on the road, on Van Morrison singing “Crazy Love,” on Odie barking frantically from the back.
This—this is why sex with Rosemary Hale is fuckity fucked, no matter how good it felt in the moment. Because Logan is going to hurt her. She will close her eyes when it matters and sideswipe a semitruck. Metaphorically speaking.
Logan can’t be trusted with someone else’s feelings.
* * *
The rest of the way to Ocean Springs, Joe practices what he’s going to say to the long-lost love of his life, and Rosemary and Logan take turns helping. They’re on the freeway that cuts right through the middle of Louisiana. The landscape changes from brown fields and sagebrush to thick, green swamp along the side of the freeway. Giant live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, magnolias and fan-pines and kudzu, everything drooping like a Dalí painting. Rosemary is the one who teaches her the names for all these new trees, her polished finger pointing out the front window excitedly.
They stop again in Baton Rouge to switch drivers and end up getting lunch at a place called Coffee Call. It’s in a strip mall, but the café has clean white walls with blue accents, and they apparently have the best beignets in town. They serve their powdered sugar out of a huge trash can, which is all Logan has ever wanted in life.
“Po’boys for breakfast, beignets for lunch… I think we did this backward,” Rosemary says with powdered sugar all over her face.
“You look like you just performed oral sex on a Belgian waffle.”
Rosemary blushes. She delicately tongues the corner of her mouth. “Is that better?”
“Come here, Hale.” Logan grabs a napkin and swipes the sugar off Rosemary’s chin, the tip of her nose, her cheek. “Can’t take you anywhere, I swear…”
Rosemary licks her lips and blinks those long, pale lashes. “Did you get it all?” Rosemary asks.
“Hard to tell when your skin is the same color as the powdered sugar.”
Joe, who’s been quiet on his side of the table, suddenly looks at Rosemary and Logan. “Dammit, you girls had sex, didn’t you?”
* * *
As she pulls the Gay Mobile into Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Logan realizes she has no idea what day of the week it is. She asks Rosemary, who looks equally befuddled. “Tuesday?”
“The day of my humiliation!” Joe languishes.
“Oh, it’s Monday.” Rosemary sounds pleasantly surprised as he checks her phone. Everything has been a blur since the Grand Canyon, excitement and exhaustion converging to smear the trip into an indistinguishable series of events. Have they been on the road a week? A month? And in the name of Shay Mitchell’s triceps, how the hell did they end up in the Deep South?
“It’s five o’clock,” Rosemary announces.
“In what time zone?”
Rosemary squints. “Eastern? Central? One of those two. Anyway, the gallery closes at six, so we should hurry.”
As they drive through the streets of Ocean Springs, she notices how different the Gulf Coast feels from everywhere else they’ve been so far. The whole town is flat and low to the ground. It isn’t only the lack of mountains or hills or literally any incline that makes it feel this way; the buildings themselves are hunkered down, as if the entire town is always braced for an incoming storm.
Downtown Ocean Springs is quiet and quaint on first impression, and Logan parallel parks the van a block from the gallery. She turns around in her seat, and Joe touches his jowly chin. “How do I look, girls?”
“Like a man with a fully functioning cock,” Logan answers.
“Are you ready, Joe?”
“Absolutely not.” Joe sighs. “But are we ever ready to face our greatest mistakes?”
Logan climbs out of the van, and holy shit. It’s like stepping into a dishwasher at the end of the heated dry cycle. Her sunglasses immediately fog, and she pushes them into her hair. She yanks the back door of the van open. “It’s as humid as Joe’s sweaty underpants out here.”
“And why does it feel like the sun is punching me in the face?” Rosemary demands as she pries the collar of her dress away from her throat.
In the five minutes it takes to get Joe out of the car, Logan sweats through her T-shirt. Rosemary has beads of sweat along her hairline, and her cheeks are bright pink. “How do I already have swamp ass?” she curses, and Logan smiles at the knowledge that she got prim Rosemary Hale to say swamp ass.
Logan pushes Joe’s wheelchair over the uneven, inaccessible sidewalk while Rosemary keeps a firm grip on Odie’s leash. The dog finds it critical to pee on the trunk of every Magnolia tree between the van and the gallery. The Heather on the Hill is sandwiched between an antique store and a brewery, the brick facade painted white with purple flower accents. Heather.
“No dogs.” Rosemary points to a sign in the window. “I’ll go sit on that bench in the shade with Odie.”
“No, wait!” Joe reaches for her. “I want the nice one!”
“Hale is the nice one?” Logan screeches.
