Deep End

by Ali Hazelwood

wake up early the following morning, ravenous, to an email delivered a little after midnight. The subject line just reads What you need. The body: If you decide to go for it, I think it should be me.

Scarlett: Do you really want to be reminded of my computational superiority that often? Unknown: I do. I have a thing for women who are smarter than me.

“Come on, Scarlett.” His mouth twitches. “You know who I want to have sex with.”

“Look at you.” His expression softens to something almost tender. “Is it so hard to believe that I saw you, and thought that you needed touching?”

“I’m going to teach you the way I like it. You want to learn, don’t you?” It’s my purpose in life. It won’t be one hour from now, and I had no clue I cared twenty minutes ago, but now—I want nothing as intensely as this. Fuck diving, fuck med school, fuck being a productive member of society. “Please.”

Then, just before his orgasm tears through him, his eyes close, his head tips back, and his lost expression has me moaning around his flesh. His grip strengthens around both sides of my face, and I’m convinced that there is a universe in which I could come just from this—from how much he’s enjoying it, from knowing that I did this for him,

“You’re not cold, Scarlett,” he says. “You’re…soft.” “I’m not soft.” “You are with me.” His eyes meet mine. A dark, unflinching look that sands layer upon layer off me. “Maybe I make you soft.”

“Did you consider that I might be the type to hold a grudge? Or self-respecting enough to pick up the phone on the fifteenth day and say, ‘Fuck off’?” He nods, like I’m being nothing but reasonable. The quiet, impersonal civility of this conversation is…devastating, actually. “I think part of me hoped you would.” “Why?” It takes him a while to answer. When he does, he’s not looking at me. “Because sometimes I can’t breathe when you’re around.”

“Even if it’s just sex, it’s not a good idea for me to be with someone who resents wanting me.”

“Scarlett.” He waits until I’m looking him in the eye. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t immediately process what happened. I felt out of control, and panicked. I acted like an asshole. I put my own fear before your feelings, and that’s…the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever done, without a doubt.”

“I owe you respect, I owe you care, and I owe you the truth. You, on the other hand, do not owe me forgiveness. But if you ever enter this kind of relationship with someone else…” His jaw grinds, tense. I don’t think he likes the idea. “These are the things you should demand.”

“We’re gonna have to train you to come a bit more silently, Scarlett. In the meantime.” His hand wraps around my mouth like last time, and my brain swims. Yes. Yes. Is it sick that I like it this much, knowing he controls my ability to breathe and scream? “I’m going to fuck you for real now, okay? All the way?”

“Scarlett, if I want you showered after we fuck, I’ll do it myself. Okay?”

“Oh, sweetheart.” My belly swoops at the endearment. His tone lives somewhere between sympathy and amusement. “If you don’t think that I’m very aware of your presence, always, you have no idea what’s going on.”

“Do you want to have sex?” His smile is quiet. “With you. Yes. But that’s my default setting, so don’t read too much into it.”

“It’ll be okay, baby. No matter what happens, you will still be you. No matter what happens, you will be okay.” “But what do I do in the meantime?” “In the meantime…just cry it out.”

“You and I have an agreement, don’t we? And the agreement says that until you say stop, I can do what I want with you. Even if it breaks you into pieces. Even if it makes you cry.”

“I love that you opened up to me,” he says, pressing his mouth into the side of my head. I feel his inhale, and something sweet and thick drips inside me, warms me in my very core. “But they’re sides of the same coin. I get to take you apart and split you open—but if anything else, anyone else makes you feel sad, upset, cracked, I also get to be the one who puts you back together. Until you say stop. You get it?”

“I’m not sure that you get it, Scarlett,” he says in my ear, and it happens so quickly—one second I straddle him, the next I’m kneeling on the floor, his clothes between my knees and the linoleum. My elbows brace on the low bench, and only one person can control where and how I move. Lukas. Behind me. “Actually, I know you don’t.” “I—” “I’m starting to suspect that you don’t understand a single fucking thing, Scarlett.”

“Look at you. Soaked. I fucking love it.”

“I fuck you—” He pushes deeper. “Because—” Deeper. “It’s all I want to do—” Deeper. “From the moment I wake up.” He hits a spot, and…I hope he’s halfway inside, I really do, because I’m already coming, clutching around the too-big, hard width of him, flutters I cannot help. It’s so intense and shuddering and good, I’m lost to everything but my pleasure, and I almost don’t hear the rest of what Lukas whispers in my ear. “I fuck you because you’re the most perfect thing I’ve ever felt, Scarlett.”

“Mostly, I’m afraid of attempting something and not being perfect at it.”

“I swear, Scarlett. I think about the ways I’ve fucked you all the time. Replay them in my head so much, I’m afraid they’ll wear off.”

“You’re fucking adorable, Scarlett.” He tilts my chin up. Another kiss, this time on the tip of my nose. “It makes me want to wreck you.”

“I don’t know why it’s such a turn-on that you’re so much smarter than me, but every time we have a project meeting, I have to go home and jerk off until my dick is raw.” “I’m not that smart—” “Shut the fuck up, you brilliant, beautiful genius.”

“That okay with you? The filthy stuff I think about doing to you while I make myself come?”

“I knew you wouldn’t mind. Being my precious toy. My girl. Mine to use. Mine to fuck. Mine to destroy and to fix.”

“Christ. I can’t believe you fucking exist, Scarlett.”

I feel like an object, created for him. By him. Did I exist before the first time he fucked me? I have no memory of it. Do I exist when we’re not together? I’m just a toy. His favorite. Irreplaceable.

he doesn’t want us to be apart for as long as we have been in the last couple of months, because it feels “cruel, Scarlett, to know that you exist, but I can’t touch you and fuck you and be with you. You get it, right?”

“Sometimes I’m afraid that this is the best thing I’ll ever have. For the rest of my life.”

Lukas: Just come over to spend the night. I sleep better when you’re around. Scarlett: Why? Lukas: Because I know you’re safe. Lukas: And you smell good. Lukas: And you’re soft.

“Oh. What about the rumored yearning glances at the pool?” “I don’t know. Were you in it?”

“I wanted to be righteously angry at you. I told myself I wouldn’t be with you until you were ready to be honest.” I don’t ask about what. It would be supremely dishonest. “But I’m just so fucking happy to see you, Scarlett. I can’t be mad at you, when every time I think about you I am reminded that you exist.”

It feels good. Him and me. Like something else altogether. Not less or more—just unexplored, but suddenly accessible. “I want to do this with you every day and night for the rest of my life.”

“I have been in love with you for so long. And I won’t stop. I know it.”

“Remember back in the fall? When I was being a total asshole, trying to prove to myself that I could exist without you? I can’t, Scarlett. I can’t be without you. And for the first time in my life, I don’t care. I think of you all the time, and I want to make plans with you, I want to talk about the future, and I’m fucking happy about it—”

“In the palm of your hand, Scarlett. From the very start.”

“Lukas, no. You can’t waste a year just for…” “Scarlett.” His fingers come up to my chin. Grab it gently, but tight. “The only time wasted is time we are apart.”

“Did you lie to me?” “By omission.” “What did you not tell me?” “How early I fell for you. How soon I realized it. The enormity of it.”

I know you think that I’m not capable of jealousy, and maybe I thought that, too. But if you were to ask me for any of those things…it would gut me, Scarlett. It would absolutely end me. And if it were nonnegotiable, if it were a condition to be with you, I’m still not sure I’d be able to say no.”