He starts, turns toward me, his skin glistening with perspiration, his chest rising and falling heavily. “Once only?” he questions.
I nod and then, uncertainly, “Isn’t it?”
“Why would it be?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” I counter.
His brow furrows. “You don’t want sex like that, with me, ever again?” He is genuinely confused.
“I…I don’t know. I just thought: this is obviously a holiday thing.”
He puts his elbow on the bed, props his head up, traces a line up and down my inner thigh with his finger, turning me back on immediately. “Why don’t we see how we go?” he says. “Take it one day at a time?” He leans toward me, his fingers roaming gently, teasing as they move up and down my inner thigh, higher and then lower and then even higher again, until I groan in anticipation as his fingers nearly, nearly reach where I want them to.
“OK,” I breathe, but I’ve forgotten what the question was.
His mouth touches mine and he kisses me again, his hands still brushing my skin. I can feel the hardness of him pressing against me again and he whispers, “Shall I get another condom?”
“Yes,” I breathe.
—
We sleep, basking in the glow of fantastic sex, and then later, when thirst and hunger drive us as crazy as we were a few hours ago, we head into his walk-in shower together. George has had the foresight to bring another condom with him and it’s definitely the holiday mood we’re in, because sex like this doesn’t happen in real life, but he lifts me up, my legs hooking around his waist and, with the warm water raining down around us, we have sex against the tiled shower wall. I can barely walk as we head down to take in a late lunch, but George holds my hand as we stand, waiting to be seated, his thumb rubbing my hand.
“Are you on the pill?” he asks before the waiter approaches to seat us for lunch. “Because if you are, we don’t have to use condoms. I’m not sleeping with anyone else. Are you?”
“What? No.” I whisper in shock as we’re seated and are told the kitchen closes in ten minutes. We both order club sandwiches and mango smoothies. When the waiter disappears I say, “I’m not on the pill, no.”
He nods. “Do you think you might want to go on it at some point?”
“Um,” I say, glancing around to check no one’s listening, but there’s hardly anyone else left in the restaurant. “I’ve never really found one that didn’t either make me ravenous and fat or kill my libido entirely. But I could try and find another one, if this continues when we get home.”
He smiles. “Why do you keep insinuating that it won’t?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Playing it safe, I guess.” Davey made me really like him and then dumped me. It’s not happening again.
“Hannah, I’m not here to hurt you.”
“I know,” I say, thinking that’s a strange conclusion to jump to.
“I do, however, need to buy more condoms if we’re going to carry on like this for the rest of the week.”
I must look like a rabbit caught in headlights. “I can’t have sex three times a day for a week, George. I’ll be dead by the end of it.”
The waiter appears behind me, placing our mango smoothies down and giving George a knowing look before departing.
George explodes with laughter, sits back and smiles. “Shame.”
We spend the rest of the afternoon blissfully sleeping in the sun. This time I feel the sun lotion land on my skin and George begins rubbing it in. I am very aware that if I open my eyes, I’ll sit up, kiss him, and we’ll be right back where we were earlier. I am determined to ignore it, mutter, “Thanks” and leave it there, but I whisper, “Sexual assault” and then pretend to sleep again as I hear him chuckle in the background.
We skip dinner, still feeling full from the late-afternoon club sandwiches, but we sit in the beach bar, surrounded by otherlike-minded souls who have decamped from the beach the few paces it takes to find a bar stool.
“I am really glad I came. I’m really glad you burst through my door and dragged me to Thailand.”
“Kicking and screaming,” he says as we sip the sweetest cocktails on the menu. George winces, then drinks it like a champion.
“Yeah, I’m having a terrible time,” I tell him. “It’s really shit.”
He leans forward, kisses me, brushes sandy hair from my face and it’s not sexual at all. It’s something else. He looks away, smiling. “I think this is the most perfect day I’ve ever had,” he says as we watch the large orange sun dip so slowly into the horizon.
