Chalk

22

I let Alice dress me up for my date with Edward and regretted it the moment I pulled her selection over my head. She called it a bandage dress which was not a lie because the thing was so tight I felt sucked in to a mere inch of my life. I’d never seen that sort of curve come out in my body, the dress hugging every inch of skin and exposing a whole lot more of it. The color was decent, a deep blue that made my skin look pale despite my sort-of tan, but the neckline was not decent at all. Scooped low and scalloped just enough to hide my nipples. At the very least.

“Alice, I can’t wear this.” I shuffled out of her bathroom, trying to figure out how to walk normally in something this tight. I knew it was possible, I’d seen it done by other girls a number of times, but I was waddling along like I had my knees tied together, clutching my boobs to keep them in the dress.

“Yes, you can. And you can also wear these.” She held up a pair of silvery heels that were at least five inches tall and looked dangerous.

“No. I can’t. And I definitely can’t wear shoes like that.”

“You wear those horrid rubber things every day!” She barked at me, reminding me of my climbing shoes. She kind of had a point.

“Fine,” I huffed, and she plopped the shoes into my waiting hands.

“Edward is going to shit when he sees you,” she twittered as I balanced on her shoulder and pulled on the shoes, tottering to the mirror, wondering just who the fuck it was staring back at me through the glass. Certainly not me.

“Let’s hope not.”

---

Edward didn’t shit himself, thank god, but I think I knocked him silly because he barely said a word until we were safely in the car. It took nearly twenty minutes to escape Alice who bustled around the living room snapping photos like we were going to prom rather than on a date.

Edward showed up in a tuxedo, so I blamed it on him.

Bow ties were not meant to look that sexy.

“You look unreal.” He settled in the front seat after helping me into my own and came at me, lips and stubble and callused hands everywhere. I let him kiss me for a while until I noticed Alice standing out on the front lawn with a smile on her face and her camera in her hands. I pulled myself regretfully off Edward and he peeled away in a cloud of smoke.

He ushered me to a seat high up in a balcony, rather isolated from the rest of the theater and pressed a kiss to my mouth before disappearing. I lounged back in my chair, glad to be off my feet and admired the elaborately painted ceiling and molded sconces as the hall began to fill. The noise escalated, shrill happy voices wafting up toward me and I peered over the banister to find that almost every seat was filled with children. They were chirping amongst themselves, patting each other’s faces and squealing with laughter. Many of them were wearing dark glasses and I wondered if this was some sort of 3D experience that Edward forgot to give me the proper equipment for.

When the room darkened and the noise from the crowd died down, a single spotlight flooded down on a far corner of the stage. Edward, in his tuxedo with his shining copper hair, was seated in front a piano below it. When his fingers pealed out a single echoing note, a flurry of bright lights lit up the blackened backdrop of the stage in response.

A soft, summery green for a light, tripping sound.

The children below me started responding, many of them pointing to the light show on the stage, bright smiles miming the sound in color. Edward started out soft and sweet, the stage lit up in greens and blues and purples. Starburst splotches of pink and sunbursts of yellow hinting at his highest notes. Twenty minutes in and he was pounding away on the keys, the flashes of color bursting into agitated reds and boiling orange. I thought about his fingers hammering against the piano and my own fingers tingled at the thought, remembering his admission that the difficult pieces were painful.

He got a standing ovation, a giant shield of laughter rising up to press against that painted ceiling.

I joined in, clapping as hard as my hands would let me.

Edward showed up to collect me when all the children had drained from the theater, holding hands in pairs, some holding walking sticks and others speaking to each other with their hands. I picked myself up out of my seat and rushed toward him, catching him around the waist and choking on my newfound admiration.

“That was beautiful, Edward.”

“Thank you. But I think the noise of the piano is second best to the noise those kids make,” he chuckled and held my head to his chest.

“They’re deaf?”

“Many of them. Some are blind. The seats on the floor level have acoustic sensors in the cushions so they can feel the vibrations. Interactive music. Just because you can’t see or hear doesn’t mean you can’t experience it.”

---

We intended to go to dinner, but didn’t make it farther than the car. I only persuaded him to drive us home when a security guard paused a little too long to eye the license plate on the tiny silver car we were steaming up the windows of. We tumbled through my front door in a tangle of feet, Edward’s fingers already under the hem of my dress.

“Take this wretched thing off,” he mumbled, tugging it up my thighs and together we struggled to pull me out of it, reminding me a lot of when my feet would get stuck in my climbing shoes way back in the beginning. It slid stubbornly over my head and my lungs expanded for the first time all night, my breasts suddenly freed. I stood in the hallway, naked, kicking off my shoes as Edward shrugged out of his jacket and ripped off his bow tie. He flung it carelessly to the side, the string caught and dangling from a picture frame further down the hall.

“I spent weeks fantasizing about what you looked like underneath all that clothing,” he panted.

“It’s not like I was ever wearing much.” I shuffled my feet, trying not to feel nervous but it was impossible. He was unbuttoning his dress shirt slowly, eyeing me as though I was a complex climbing project he’d been working on for a very long time and intended to solve. Tonight.

“Always more than I hoped.”

We didn’t make it farther than the living room, getting distracted just like we had done in the car. Our feet, which we usually placed with such precision, tripped us up and we landed heavy on the carpet near the couch. Edward rose up on his arms above me, hair in his eyes and chest heaving. I’d bitten his lips red and plump and in the dark, he looked like he had gemstones buried behind his eyelids.

“I’ve wanted to do this since the day I fucking met you.” He pressed down on top of me, rough carpet under my ass and tiny metal zipper-teeth digging into my thigh. His lips were everywhere and I wondered why it had taken us so long to do this, it felt so fucking good. We’d spent months dancing around each other, dangling off rocks and then circling from a safe distance when we were forced back in the real world, but for some reason we’d never gotten here.

Here being my floral patterned rug, drenched in silver moonlight and loving every painful rug-burned moment of it.

I fumbled for the waist of his dress pants, full length this time, and pushed them down over his hips. He groaned heavily into my neck, arms trembling for a split second of weakness before wrenching himself away to shimmy them off and kick them free. I sunk my fingernails into the soft skin at his hips and he paused, eyeing me carefully before he pulled a condom from his pocket.

“Is it fair to say that I hoped for this?” he questioned me, holding the foil up in the air between us and I couldn’t help but smirk at him. Of course it was fucking fair. I didn’t wear that damn dress for nothing.

“You wouldn’t have been the only one.” I clenched my fingers tighter into his skin, his hips jerking toward me reflexively. He rolled the condom on and pulled my hips toward him, kneecaps to my ass cheeks and my thighs on top of his. He gazed down at me, licking his bottom lip languidly and I squirmed, desperate for some friction.

My pussy was aching just as bad as my hand.

Edward placed his giant hand over my stomach, fingers on my rib cage and the heel of his palm so fucking close to where I needed it. His calluses scraped against me as he shifted and suddenly his thumb was sinking between my folds, searching for my clit and pressing insistently against it once it had been located. I gasped and tried to remember how you’re supposed to inhale and exhale properly, reduced back to the basics in a single, split second.

“Oh, my . . .” I fumbled with my words, his thumb tracing a heavy fingered pattern around me and my skin broke out in a wash of acid flame.

He got me off once using nothing but his thumb and I think he did it just to watch. I writhed and moaned my way through an orgasm that put stars behind my eyes and came-to in a rush of blinding light, Edward smiling and falling to his hands above me when I finally opened my eyes. He echoed almost the exact same words I’d said to him following his piano performance, full of awe and wonder as though he’d seen something mythical and earth-moving.

“That was beautiful, Bella. I want to make you do it again.”

He pressed forward and sunk into me, so slow and not nearly slow enough, the moment over before it had even begun. He drew a heavy breath up against my neck, pressing himself deeper and exhaling, hot enough to make me break out in a dew of sweat. Pushed into me in shallow bursts, rocking his hips and I squirmed until I found that spot where his bones met up with my clit.

Holy.

“Shit,” I gasped and arched my back, trying to get closer even though it barely seemed possible and Edward made a sound low in his chest, rock-bitten fingers deep in my skin. I planted my feet and ground down on to him, locking my arms against the couch for leverage and enjoying myself thoroughly until I felt his fingers feather between us.

Devastating any amount of self control I was still in possession of.

He pulled me open as if to get a good look and thrust hard up into me the moment cool air hit my clit, more sounds rumbling up his throat. I rubbed myself on top of him, the look on his face full of astonished certainty, as though he was surprised he’d known the truth all along.

“Goddamn, Bella. That’s gotta be the sexiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

I didn’t know if he was talking about me, or him in me, but I didn’t really care either way. His words washed a blistering wave of heat through every single one of my cells, leaving me singed and teetering on the edge of something monumentally high and leaning precariously to the side. Another deep thrust and his fingers were back on my clit, rough and almost jagged against my sensitive skin, bordering on a delicious sort of pain.

I toppled over like a penny off the Eiffel tower.

Hit the ground at warp speed and left an imprint of my face in the concrete.

A few more heavy thrusts and he was done, collapsing on top of me in a rush of air and weight, damp and warm and fucking gigantic.

“That was amazing. Painful, but amazing.” Edward flopped down on the floor beside me, throwing off heat like a nuclear bomb and panting heavily. I snuggled up beside him, fingering the bruise on his hip. It looked terrible, so bad that I wondered if he maybe hadn’t chipped the bone deep down in there.

I bet all that fantastic thrusting wasn’t exactly pleasant.

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