Fade into Always (8 page)

Max kissed my check. “How are you feeling?”

“You mean since the last time you asked me two hours ago?”

He kissed my neck, and I felt him getting hard beneath my thigh. Max had been strict about my recovery, not letting me do anything strenuous, which included sex. So we’d been on a two-week run of celibacy. It kind of amazed me that we pulled it off.

“In fact,” I continued as he kept nuzzling my neck, “you’ve asked me every couple of hours for two weeks.”

“I’m just playing doctor.”

I moaned. “Now, that sounds like fun.” And then something occurred to me. “Are you asking purely for medical reasons, or are you just waiting for me to say I’m feeling well enough for you to make love to me?”

“Am I that transparent?”

I laughed.

He said, “Both, actually. You got me.”

I turned my head to face him, and pressed my lips to his. We had kissed during the two weeks, but this was different. Deeper. Passionate. Wanting. Needing.

“Switch places with me,” he said.

He remembered I had said that, for whatever reason, I felt better and more comfortable when I was sitting up.

He lifted me gently and stood, then placed me back down on the chair. He tugged on my panties, and I wiggled as best I could to help him get them down my legs.

“I’ve missed this, Liv,” he said, lowering his head between my legs and licking me. I was already wet from sitting on his lap and feeling his erection growing under me.

I looked down and watched him caressing my cleft with his tongue. “I’ve missed it, too.”

Max wasn’t in the mood to put this off any longer. He brought his head up, and stayed kneeling on the floor. I was sitting on the edge of the chair—we were lined up perfectly for what both of us had been longing for.

Max pulled down the front of his shorts, exposing his beautiful cock. I reached down, needing to touch him. He was fully hard, and warm, and I could almost swear I felt his pulse in the veins of his length.

He pushed forward a little, and I guided him to me.

“I’ll go slow,” he said.

“Do whatever you want.”

“Maybe later, when you’re really ready. But I admire your enthusiasm.”

“Max?” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“Yeah.”

“Stop talking.”

He pushed the head of his cock into me. But only that far. He moved his hips back and forth, sliding into me a little more each time. Shallow, slow thrusts.

What had been two weeks felt more like two years without him inside me.

I put my hand on his chest. He had a hand on each of my hips.

Max leaned forward and our lips met. My tongue darted into his mouth, and he sucked on it, the way that turned me on so much. Then I took his tongue between my lips, turning my head from side to side as my mouth slid back and forth on his tongue as if I were giving him a blowjob.

Our eyes were open the whole time. Locked in a deep stare. It didn’t even seem like we were blinking.

When I freed his tongue, he said, “I almost forgot how tight you are.”

“It’s been too long.”

“Much too long.”

Max looked down and my gaze followed his. Together we watched him disappear inside me. He was deep now, almost too deep—but only because it made my breath hitch and little stabs of dull pain shot through my healing bones.

I winced.

Max stopped. “You okay?”

“Don’t stop. Don’t stop.”

Max pushed in again—not deep strokes, and not as fast as he’d started doing it just before the pain…slow, even thrusts.

“I’m gonna come,” he said.

“Do it.”

“Come with me, Liv.”

I started to climax, feeling the surge building quickly. It had been so long. Too long for Max, too. I felt the hot, thick spurts flooding me, and it made his slow thrusts even slicker.

He held my hips tight. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my face into his shoulder, biting him gently as I came with him.

EPILOGUE

It’s been two years since that happened.

I ended up not having to testify in Chris’s trial. He took a plea bargain and got a nineteen year sentence. I’d always liked his parents and they’d always liked me, but there was still something strange about receiving a letter from them, apologizing for their son’s actions. They didn’t have my address, but they’d given it to Grace and she’d sent it to me.

The last I heard, Kevin’s agency died a slow death. After shooting Max’s last movie, Jacqueline Mathers moved to another agency. Word got out that Kevin got drunk one night and tried to pressure her into sex, so he was pretty much finished. I have no idea what he’s doing now.

Krystal completed her rehab and is now living back in our hometown in Ohio. Grace recently told me that Krystal is pregnant and there’s a hastily planned wedding in the works. I’m sure we’ll go, and I’m fairly sure I’ll be in her wedding. After all, she was in mine just over a year ago.

I’m not sure when Max and I will have another child, but we’ve talked about it. Having a one-year-old is enough work for one person, let alone two people who work from home all the time.

After his last movie, Max stopped producing and directing. He’s now writing full-time, and I’ve never seen him happier. We go to his mother’s house once a month for Sunday dinner. She does it just like back home—there’s nothing like a traditional meal cooked by mom—and she can’t get enough of her little grandson.

Max has sold two scripts and is working on a new one now. I haven’t told him yet, but I don’t like it as much as the last two. But I’ll tell him. I’m brutally honest with him, and he always accepts my suggestions.

I love reading his work. The characters and stories that come out of his mind always amaze me.

I often think how all of this started one day when I was a sophomore in college and decided I wanted to work in Hollywood in some capacity.

That girl—the young me—made a fateful decision back then, bucking her parents’ objections, and going against all their advice for years to come. I couldn’t have imagined in a thousand years that it would work out this way.

I also think a lot about what Max said after I read that script he left me when he made an effort to open up to me after the tabloid scandal. I remember his words verbatim:

“I’ve never believed in fate,” he said. “But honestly, when I was writing that—specifically her character—it was different from all the other things I’d ever written before. Or since, actually. I’ve always had to work on characters for a long time, getting them right, changing things about them. But she was different. She just…came to me…out of nowhere, already perfect. Just like you.”

His words back then made my heart melt. I knew he meant them.

But in the time since, we’ve both learned that neither of us is perfect. What we are, though, is perfect for each other.

One day recently I asked him if he still doesn’t believe in fate.

“I don’t know anymore. But I do think almost anything’s possible. Things are just waiting out there and if you have a moment of courage, you put your fear aside and go for it.”

That’s exactly what we’ve been doing all this time.

I had come halfway across the country to find the love of my life, and I didn’t even know I was doing it. It wasn’t an easy path, but then nothing worth having is easy. I’d have gone through even more difficult and dangerous things to find Max, and I know he would have done the same for me.

“Things are better when they’re not scripted, anyway,” he said. “Fate would mean it’s scripted.”

“Strange thing for a writer to say.”

He pondered that for a moment. “Yeah, but that’s fiction.” He paused. “This is real.”

And so it is.

~~~

In October 2012, this three-part series will be available in one paperback volume

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COMING SOON

A collection of three stand-alone erotic romance novellas