Singe Read online

  Eli comes eagerly, hands running up her sides to cup her breasts again. Addie arches her back, swallowing as he tweaks her nipples. Already she’s aching. She’s furious and exhausted and aching, and she’s not sure she knows how to have sex standing up in a shower.

  “I’ll make you like me,” Eli whispers, nosing down toward her ear. He bites her there, in the soft, good spot right before her hairline starts. Addie shivers. “I’ll wear you down. I’m a likable guy.”

  “Who told you that?” Addie mutters, but the tone doesn’t really get across because he’s reaching down between her legs with one hand and opening her up and God she’s so slippery, she wants him so insanely much. She’s never wanted somebody like this before, she can’t control it. It doesn’t feel like a smart thing.

  Eli, unsurprisingly, isn’t worried about what’s smart and what isn’t. “Addie,” he mutters into her jawline, sliding a curious finger deep inside and curling it. Addie squirms impatiently for more. “Jesus, princess. I missed you.”

  “Okay.” That’s enough of that. The last thing she needs is for him to get all fake feelings-y with her, Eli with his million girlfriends and his let me take you on a date. “How do we—” She breaks off, motioning nervously between them. He’s a whole lot taller than she is. “I mean, how do you want to—?” They need a condom, she realizes belatedly. Shower or not, she’s going to insist—

  “You clean?” Eli asks, like he’s reading her mind. Addie blinks at him, taken aback and a little offended until she realizes he means, like, soap-and-shampoo-wise, reaching around her to shut the shower off. He offers her a steadying hand as she climbs out of the tub. After a second’s hesitation, Addie takes it.

  She lets him dry them both off too, with his purple man-cave towels that don’t show stains. When Eli rubs the terry cloth over her face, it smells like soap and dirty cotton. “There,” he says, stooping to do her legs. “All done, princess.”

  “Gonna do the fireman’s carry again?” Addie asks when he keeps kneeling, fluffing through his damp hair. His shoulders are shiny and scarred, the discoloration extending down his back. The more Addie looks at his burns, the more she’s convinced he wasn’t wearing turnout gear when he got them. “Or is that more of a one-and-done kind of thing?”

  Eli noses across her belly, mouthing over the hair between her legs. His tongue presses in and Addie’s hips jump, an involuntary squeak. Eli laughs.

  “Dunno,” he says, standing up in a rush and grabbing her under her ass, all rough, uncareful hands. “Let’s try it this way, see how we do.”

  Addie winds her legs around him automatically. “Hey now,” she says, but she’s smiling. He’s such a bro. Dumb, firefighter bro. She reaches down between them as they’re walking, gives him a squeeze. Eli grins back.

  His bedroom is more of the same, mattress and box spring with no headboard and a blue-and-green plaid duvet that looks like it belongs in a freshman dorm. There’s a small flat screen TV on the bureau, a couple of books, not a single photo to be found. For the first time it occurs to Addie to wonder about Eli’s family, if he’s got one. For some reason she doesn’t think he’s from around here.

  She’s not about to ask him now though, as he’s dumping her naked onto his bed and just looking, the same way he did the first time on her futon. His gaze flickers everywhere at once. At first it makes Addie kind of self-conscious—how her stomach’s not as flat as it could be, nothing blonde or bird-like about her at all—but then she opens her legs to show him everything, arms sliding up underneath the pillows above her head. Eli growls.

  He gets his knees up on the bed and hovers over her, handsome scarred-up body still shower-damp. “You are so fucking pretty, Manzella,” he tells her, ducking his head to suck at the side of her breast. “You wanna get on top, let me keep looking at you?”

  Addie shakes her head. It’s not the looking she minds—she’s rounded the corner into liking it, is the truth—but she’s just, she’s thought about this, and she wants to see if she can—if he’s—

  “Stay up there,” she says bossily. She butterflies her legs out even farther, rocking her hips. “And hurry up.”

  Eli whistles, tweaking a nipple. “Yes, ma’am.” He kisses her knee, then leans over to root around in the bureau, holding up the box of condoms like a prize. Addie snorts.

  “Slow, right?” he asks eagerly when he’s on top of her again, one hand cupping her ass. “I’ll go real slow.”

  Addie nods, remembering the stretch. Her whole body feels nervous and heavy and coiled, like it’s waiting for the starter’s gun. The tip of the latex drags against her thigh as they get situated, leaving behind a slippery trail.

  Eli isn’t waiting. Instead he’s lining himself up, sliding two fingers in to rub for a brief second, and then there’s the push, thick and sudden. He goes faster than Addie would have, enough that it hurts a little. But she doesn’t stop him and then he’s in, all the way deep with pressure everywhere. Addie’s so wet she’s making a mess of herself.

  “Good?” Eli asks, leaning in and kissing her neck. He remembered to pause, holding himself still. Already it feels nice, the angle, maybe. Addie remembers liking it like this with Big Y Anthony too. That’s why she thought she might be able to—

  “Yeah,” she tells Eli, wiggling. She should have snuck her hand down between them before he got on top and pressed their bellies tight together. She could brazen her way through it, she guesses, just push at his shoulders until he gets the message and gives her room, but Big Y Anthony was kind of weird about it when she did that, like possibly he was offended that she’d want to. And like, yes, who cares about Big Y Anthony, Addie gets that, but—

  “Touch yourself.” That’s Eli, one hand in her hair and completely not emasculated by the idea, apparently—the opposite, if Addie had to guess. He lifts himself up just a little, taking a detour to nip at the thin skin of her upper arm. “Come on, princess, wanna see how you do it when you’re alone.”

  Well. Addie grins at him, she can’t help it—and sure, probably you can afford to be easy and casual about sex if you have it with every woman in a thirty-mile radius, but. Just like that her whole body relaxes for real. She fits her fingers down where she wants them and lets out a sharp, quiet noise when Eli starts to move, slowly to start. He’s a lot bigger than Big Y Anthony, that is a fact.

  “When we have more time, I wanna watch you,” he tells her, dark eyes and all the frat-boy joking totally gone from his voice. “What do you think, would you let me do that?” His voice makes it sound like the best thing in the world.

  Addie inhales. She thinks about spreading her legs on the bed a few minutes ago so he could look, imagines taking it a step further. Reaching down, pulling herself open, showing herself off. Rubbing how she likes, as fast as she likes, maybe bending both legs all the way back so he could see—

  “That’s it, baby,” Eli hums as she clenches on him. “Like that, just like that.”

  Addie takes a breath and realizes how close she is, closer than she’s ever been in this position. It’s so shocking that it actually cools her down some, the sheer surprise. She’s never—

  “Might let me, huh?” Eli continues obliviously, biting at her jaw. “Like being watched?” His hips are going now for real, the hand on her ass encouraging her to rock.

  “No,” Addie gasps, weirdly unnerved by herself. “I wouldn’t, I don’t—” She could rub hard now and that would be it, that easily. She pushes at Eli with her knees, feeling wriggly and trapped. “I don’t like being watched?” It comes out sounding like a question, her fingers stalled out between them.

  “Are you sure?” Eli twists his hips, slides his hand up behind her calf, rubbing at the muscle there. “Could make you like me, could make you like it.” He puts his forehead down on the mattress beside Addie’s shoulder, turns to whisper in her ear. “You gonna come for me, baby? I want you to. I want you to come.”

  And God, it’s so tacky that that’s what does it but it
does, her body falling all over itself to obey him and this wicked, delicious orgasm that radiates from her middle down to very the tips of her toes. Her fingers don’t even move. Her fingers don’t even move. All it takes is the drag and pressure of Eli inside her and his low rumbly voice in her ear and that’s it, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Addie keens. She tries not to. Even as it’s happening it feels like admitting to something she’s not entirely sure she wants to admit.

  “That’s it,” Eli tells her as she finishes, sounding pleased and a little bit desperate. He kept moving all the way through it, these long sure strokes Addie feels absolutely everywhere. He smells like cheap soap and like skin. “You’re beautiful, Addie. Jesus, I could watch you do that all day.”

  Addie rolls her eyes but she thinks Eli doesn’t see her and anyway she doesn’t get all the way there with the gesture, quitting halfway through as he presses his face in the crook of her shoulder and comes. She wraps her legs around his and pulls him deep enough to hurt.

  “Shit,” Eli gasps. “Oh, Addie, shit.”

  He goes dead-weight after he finishes, heavy across Addie’s hips and chest. All four of her limbs are wrapped around him now, and for a second Addie lets herself give in to the impulse to cling. The back of his head is soft against her palm as she pets him, springy dark curls. Most firefighters have military-style buzz cuts—hair may not touch the ear, eyebrows, or collar; length and bulk of the hair must not interfere with or protrude from headgear—but Eli’s always seems to be at least three weeks grown out. Brooks has written him up for it more than once. Eli claims his hair just grows fast.

  “So good,” he’s muttering, sucking wetly at the vulnerable skin under her jaw. “So good, baby, you’re so pretty. Feels so good with you.”

  Addie swallows. “We really have to go back now,” she says. Her own hair is still wet from the shower, soaking the pillowcase under her head. She’s going to have to rebraid it, hope nobody back at the station pauses to consider how she got clean. Already her mind is racing over all the ways they could get caught, if Eleven called the hospital, if the hospital called Eleven. When she touches her throat, she realizes she forgot to take off her cross.

  “Yeah.” Eli sighs, reaching behind himself to unhook her legs. “Guess we do.” He smacks a casual kiss off Addie’s cheek before standing, pulling himself and the condom out with a practiced hand. “Next time though, we go slow, okay?”

  Addie rolls her eyes again, but her heart isn’t in it.

  “Oh, and—” Eli pauses inside the bedroom door, turning to face her. His expression is unreadable. “I really am sorry. I just, I lost my head, okay? There was a kid.”

  “There was a kid,” Addie repeats, not a hundred percent sure what that has to do with anything. Her body and brain are sluggish, sleepy and sex-slow. Her gaze flicks to his ravaged chest one more time, back up at his handsome face. It feels like there’s an obvious question here, but Addie can’t quite make herself ask it.

  “Go put clothes on, cowboy,” is all she says in the end, taking a deep breath and swinging her noodley legs over the side of his mattress. “We gotta look alive.”

  Eli’s wrong that the next time they’ll go slower. The next time is two nights later in the passenger seat of the Outback, him asleep in the bunks at two in the morning and Addie shoving her knee into his side until he wakes up, them sneaking out to the parking lot as quietly as they can. The time after that he shows up at her apartment with coffee and a two-dollar cat toy before shift, truly intending to be gentlemanly; they end up doing it on the beanbag chair, Addie nearly falling onto the floor halfway through and the bright, delighted sound of her laughter.

  Hester gets out of the animal hospital. Eli ignores calls from Karen the lab tech and a municipal HR rep named Suzanne. Addie still won’t let him take her out on a date. Other forbidden activities involve opening doors for her, sitting too close in Eleven’s rec room, and calling her “Addie” in front of Jill Buono. Once, Eli tries to surreptitiously buy her a beer when they’re out with everyone from Eleven and nearly gets kneecapped under the table for his trouble. The one thing she’ll let him pay for is takeout, so Eli starts ordering it all the time, trying to lure her over to his sad apartment with sesame chicken and pepper steak, oyster pails full of rice. It doesn’t go bad as quickly as standard grocery fare, at least.

  The end of June drags on, long and hot. The Fire Marshal’s Office determines the arson that killed Drew Beecher and the one with the little girl were linked, same accelerant, same MO, the perpetrator of both still at large. Eli keeps his head down when Brooks makes the announcement during eight a.m. lineup, when the county papers start speculating about a serial arsonist. The anniversary of Will’s death creeps closer. On nights when he isn’t with Addie, Eli re-reads the first three chapters of A Hundred Years of Solitude over and over and tries to ignore the beer in his fridge.

  “Wait,” he asks Addie one day at her apartment, both of them sacked out on the futon. “Is this thing the same time every year?”

  He means her T-shirt, Saint Bonaventure’s 18th Annual Italian Festival, July 7-14, 2005. In addition to rejecting his attempts at chivalry, Addie still prefers to put her clothes back on after they finish—panties, sleep shirt, jewelry, in that order. She also has Festival tees from 2008 and 2009, plus an old St. Pius volleyball polo. Eli’s favorite is 2005 because he can see her nipples through the worn cotton.

  “What?” Addie murmurs, huffing against his neck. It was good for her this time, he thinks. He can’t get a clear read on her, how she always looks vaguely shocked when he manages to get her off. He thinks maybe he ought to be offended, that she expects so little of him. Instead it just makes him want to get her off more. “The fair? Yeah, it’s next week, I’ll probably take my little cousins.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Eli nods, rubbing at the muscley olive curve of her calf, her foot pressed flat against his rib cage. The insides of her thighs are winter-pale. “Could take me too.”

  Addie laughs. “Just dying to hang out with my family in the parking lot of my church, are you?” she asks, reaching for the can of Diet Coke on her coffee table. When he kissed her earlier, her mouth tasted syrupy-sweet. “And the priest who baptized me, can’t forget him.”

  “I’m serious,” Eli says mildly. “I like carnivals. I’m great at that one game where you shoot the water into the clown’s mouth.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, smirking in that way she does when the conversation’s closed. “I’m sure you are.”

  Eli frowns. He’s not exactly sure what her deal is, Addie Manzella, what it is about him in particular that completely rules him out as useful to her for anything other than sex. It’s been almost a month, that they’ve been doing this. He wasn’t expecting to want more as much as he does. “You’re missing out,” he tells her. “I could have won you a giant stuffed bear.”

  Addie huffs, getting up to put the pizza box away. “Please, you can’t even aim the hoses.” It’s a Saturday night, both of them a third of the way into their forty-eight hours off. They were out of sync for a while, but Eli worked a couple of doubles and now their schedules line up perfectly. Addie was annoyed until he pointed out Sharpie and Parker’s did too, and no one ever thought they were screwing.

  “I can so,” Eli protests, shoving up on his elbows. “I have great aim. Wanna bet?”

  “Bet what, you can hit fires?” Addie piles the leftover slices into a mishmash of Tupperware containers. Downstairs in the club, the music is just starting to pick up, a poppy, syncopated beat Eli knows from experience will last until three a.m. The AC unit drowns it out for the most part, but it gets extra-loud in the bathroom, something to do with the vents. “Pretty broad target, buddy.”

  “Shut up, I do okay at the firefighter barbecues.” The county’s main fundraiser is really more of a muster: engine parades and a beer tasting, water demonstrations from the antique pumper that’s housed over by Fifteen. But the biggest part is inter-company competit
ions, hose lays and ladder climbs, that sort of thing. Eleven hasn’t had a winner since David Manzella was captain. “Plus, a hose definitely isn’t the same thing as a carnival gun.”

  Addie sighs, hands on her hips. “Uh-huh.” Eli tries to get a read on her face, figure out how his night is going to swing. Sometimes she lets him crash here and sometimes she doesn’t, but Eli especially likes it when she does on Saturdays because it means he can watch her get ready for Mass in the morning. He likes how she looks in her stockings. He likes to watch her pull them up her legs. If he didn’t have a Catholic schoolgirl fantasy before, well.

  Now he follows her into the kitchen with their beer bottles and the paper towels they were using as napkins, plants a kiss on the back of her smooth, warm neck. When he turns his head Eli spies a sleeve of plastic cups above the refrigerator, the cheap red kind you use for parties. That’s when he gets an idea.

  “Okay,” he says, straightening up and reaching for them. “Check it out.” He stacks three cups in a pyramid on her kitchen counter, then sticks a dented bottle cap on top of that and pulls the sprayer nozzle out of the kitchen sink. “How’s that for a small target?” he asks her, grinning. “I hit it, you take me with you to your thing, how about?”

  Addie stares at him, still holding her Tupperware. “That is…the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” she says.

  Eli grins. “Sounds like somebody who’s worried she’s gonna lose.” He aims the nozzle in her direction, feinting like he’s gonna spray her.

  Addie doesn’t flinch. “You’re an idiot,” she declares, tapping the Tupperware bottom against her open palm. Then, “What do I get when you miss?”

  “Oh, when I miss, I see how it is.” Eli raises his eyebrows. “What do you want?”

  Addie shrugs. “Will let you know when I want it, how about?”

  “Carte blanche, huh?” Eli whistles. “Pretty steep for a bottlecap contest.”

  “So’s asking to meet my family,” she replies.