Alice Close Your Eyes by Averil Dean Read Free Book Online Page A

outstretched toward me. He
pulls me into his arms.
    My home feels very far away now, across the water and another
divide I have not yet measured. Jack’s heartbeat is more than idea or even a
sound—it’s a vibration under my cheek, a relentless drumbeat driven by something
I don’t understand. More than sex, darker than seduction. This is pure male
impulse.
    On the last thread of music, he begins to undress me, his
fingers cool and rough as stone against my skin. He unbuttons my sweater, slips
it over my shoulders and drops it to the deck. He pushes me before him, a step
at a time, down the narrow staircase to the tiny bedroom. I feel the mattress
behind my knees, and he puts a hand behind my head to keep me from bumping it as
he lowers me to the bed. This small kindness blooms at the base of my throat and
burns my eyelids and the bridge of my nose.
    Silence closes around us, broken only by the hollow sound of
the waves lapping against the side of the boat, and the eerie flow of the music
around us.
    He reaches under the hem of my skirt and runs his hand up my
thigh until it comes to rest on my hip. With his other hand, he takes off his
glasses and sets them on the bedside table.
    You wish you had that knife now. Don’t
you...
    What would happen if I asked him to stop? Would he take me
home? Apologize? Get angry and call me names? Would he stop at all? I’ve told no
one about him, or where I would be tonight, and he knows it. He could hurt me,
kill me, carry my body out to sea and no one would ever know what happened to
me. I would be the face on the milk carton.
    My train of thought stops there.
    No. I could never be the face on the milk carton. Those missing
people have families to search for them. No one would look for me.
    I would be gone. Gone.
    He strokes me, down my thigh and up, sliding his palm along my
waist. He tugs at the strap of my underwear and winds it twice around his thumb,
pulls it tight until the fabric nips and pinches between my legs.
    I close my fist around the front of his sweater. He leans over
this obstruction to kiss me again, one hand cupped around the back of my head,
one between my legs, slipping along the edge of my underwear. His kiss is firm
and insistent, slanting to stroke the inside of my mouth with his tongue. He
tastes like burned marshmallow on a young stick, toasty and green.
    His teeth close over my lower lip as he traces me through my
underwear. I twist and clutch at his shoulder, trying to catch my breath. But
his mouth is demanding, and he has found, with his thumb, the bump of my
clitoris. I choke back a moan of anxious greed, and raise my hips to meet him,
sinking my fingers into the damp fringe of hair at the nape of his neck. I trace
his stubbled jaw and the edge of his lip, feel the muscles below his ear bunch
and release as he kisses me, the steady strength of his pulse against my
thumb.
    He tugs my underwear aside. My thighs tighten reflexively, but
he’s already kneeling between them; he’s got his foot in the door. His back
stiffens, two fingers slipping through my folds. His tongue moves past my teeth,
deeper, seeking, and I know he’s worried, the way all men worry when they get
this close to the prize.
    Don’t stop me. Don’t pull back, don’t take
what I need. Don’t get in my way.
    He eases my panties down to my ankles and slips them off. Sits
back on his heels and looks at me, with my skirt around my waist and my
underwear crumpled in his fist, pressed to his nose. His gaze never leaves
me.
    “Take off your shirt.” His voice is quiet and direct.
    I peel off my T-shirt, trembling from the blast of adrenaline
and the force of him. The room swims around me. The bobbing floor beneath us
feels insubstantial and unsafe, as though we might suddenly sink beneath the
water and never realize it had happened. I want him to hold me and give me
something solid to keep me in place.
    But he wants to look at me.
    “And your bra,” he says. “Take it off.”
    The