Southern Gothic

Rowan, Ten Minute Rewind

Our bedroom is awash in candles. My eyes are closed, but I can see the warm red flicker through my lids. I sit between Riley's legs on the bed. His breath is hot on the back of my neck while he massages my shoulders.

"Oh fuck, baby, yes," I whisper.

He pulls the silk robe from my shoulders and presses a little deeper with his thumbs at the back of my neck. The pressure feels so good. My neck and shoulders are killing me from constant playing.

I whimper as his lips skim the cap of my shoulder. I hear him breathe in slowly as he scents me. His lips climb past my bra strap to the base of my neck. He tugs my braid, and I yield the side of my throat. There's a momentary thrill because I don't know if he will suck tenderly or bite swiftly.

I hiss in anticipation. I feel him grin against my neck as he does neither. He keeps skating my skin—up, up, up my neck to my ear.

"There's no hurry is there, darling?" he murmurs.

I whimper in response.

One of his hands leaves its massage and finds its way to my bare stomach, trailing lazily around my belly button just as his mouth teases my earlobe.

I reach back to fist his messy black hair, but he grabs my left wrist tightly.

"That could be a mess."

I swallow. "Right. I forgot."

He crosses my captured hand across my chest. His lips leave my ear to blow on my fingertips, because he's employed a rather dubious guitarist's trick of supergluing the bleeding cracks. They are in terrible shape. I've been playing for hours on end, days upon days, but my out-of-practice finger tips can't take it.

He tests the dried glue tentatively against his lips. "Hmmm. Actually they're dry, but one more coat, I think."

"Okay," I whisper. I twist from my position to face him, offering my fingers up for doctoring.

Just like every night for the last two weeks, my heart begins to race as I drink him in. Riley is barechested, in soft black sleeppants. About a month ago, he was overdue for a haircut. Now for the first time since I've known him, he's sporting a sexy, longish mop that's curling against all the fine bones of his face. He's not wearing his glasses right now. And he's halfway to drunk. The heavy lidded, relaxed look he wears at night is now my new favorite Riley expression.For once, his face and lean, taught torso have bit of color. We've been spending lazy afternoons by the pool. Resting up for this.

Our guitar boudoir nights.

Every night after dinner, I light the candles and Riley brings the booze with the help of a basket we sit on his walker. I take my clothes off and put on a robe while he tunes the guitars. He adjusts his bed for back support. He plays sitting there, and I play all over the room. Sometimes crosslegged from him on the bed, or walking, or perched on the dresser. Sometimes I sit between his legs and play. Best of all, we do this thing where we both play one guitar—my left hand changing cords, my right hand on his knee as he strums or picks. I love that the most.

We play everything.

Alt rock. Blues. Country. Folk. Top 40. Classic rock.

We don't just play it. We reinterpret it. We comb through it, separate the elements, and reconstruct it. Both of us completely ethralled by the process. Both of us learning more as we go. Riley about music theory and his natural style, me about the new limits of my hand, the versatility of my musical training and my musical preferences.

Because my preference is this slow sexy collaberation we are working our way to. I've never had a musical partner like Riley. I've never felt so in sync with anyone as we take song after song and shape it into this thing that is arising between us.

When we play together, it's pleasure like none I've ever had. When we sing together while we play?

I'm not sure what it is, but I think it's building to something that might even catch my super strategic man unawares. Then again, maybe the flood of love I feel is driving all my instincts to believe this is bigger than both of us.

There's also something as equally hot as the music going on, but unlike the music, it's a subtle weaving in and out of our nights.

This bed has become our sexy, sensual, lust drenched universe, though we're moving slow. We're so drunk on wine and the words and the rhythms and the harmonies and exhausted by the emotion we are pouring into this...this...unbelievable musical experience...that we haven't risked another rushed experience.

"No hurry" has become our motto.

Riley is certainly in no hurry. Not even to recoat my fingertips. He leans back against the upright bed, pulls the bottle of wine off the bedside table and drinks as he regards me lazily.

"I never told you enough how beautiful you are."

I feel the skin of my chest and neck flush. It's not that he never told me in a heated moment of passion, but it was never his nature to pay sweet compliments. Then again, it was never my nature to receive them, either. I was a tough girl who scoffed at sentimentality.

I crawl closer to him. He has one leg bent at the knee, but I straddle the other one. My robe falls around us as I trace his face with my right hand. "I'm not sure I ever felt beautiful until now."

"You always were," he assures me. "But there is something to be said for coming into one's own, yes?"

I look him up and down. How ironic that he has no idea that he's going through some kind of similar transformation. Polished by pain and reprioritization.

He draws my chin to the side and presses a hand to the small of my back, beneath my open robe.

"Come closer," he encourages. I walk my knees closer by inches.

"Closer," he encourages.

My thigh is pressing into his crotch now. I can feel his swollen package. Swollen, but not quite hard. I let my hand slide down brushing him lightly.

"Closer," he encourages as he plants delicate kisses along my breast just above my bra.

I lean forward, as close as I can possibly be. He's holding me tight, drawing me down to devour my neck as rub lightly along his sleep pants. I've given up being preoccupied with trying to figure out whether the significant bulge in his pants is hardening by degrees or what it means. Sometimes his cock is more full and firm than other times. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason. Clearly he's hot for this, even if he's not fully hard.

It will get better, I remind myself.The doctor said it can take a year or more, even though Riley is recovering so well in other ways. Or medication could help, the doctor said.

If he needs it, if he wants it. When he's ready, the doctor said.

But we're still taking it slow.

Especially right now. He twists me back around to lay against his chest. He retrieves his glasses, the super glue, and a toothpick and attends meticulously to coating my left fingertips with another thin layer, while I pout that he stopped our messing around.

We finish the bottle of wine while we wait for them to dry.

"Are you reading to play another song?" he asks running a finger along the top of my bra, his other hand skimming down my side, then a little ways down my hip, hooking a thumb on the celery colored panties that match my bra and coordinate with my green, cream and blue robe adorned in...I don't know...mandalas or something.

I've always been big on bras as part of my ensemble, but lingerie in the bedroom not so much. Now I like wearing it, while we play. It feels heady and decadent and...old-school, somehow. I look around the room at the candles and the discarded wine bottles and the guitars and the notebooks and the pens and the picks scattered on the bed and I feel like I'm in some fantasy where Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin got together and made a gorgeous dark music.

My own personal front man is singing an old song we've been reworking in my ear. We've taken something outdated and given it new life . Stripped it of the accordian and supper club tempo, sweetened the licks and darkened the melody.

I didn't actually know I could sing sexy, until Riley and I started pumping our desire into our harmonies.

Now it's all I want to do.

I open my mouth and float a breathy, rhythmic harmony over his mild, velvet voice. I'm literally dying for the way we sound together. I let the shivers of how good it is travel me like his touch.

I stretch luxuriously against him. He stops singing and starts lavishing my throat with his lips.

I stretch out my leg, pull my guitar close with my foot and arch back against Riley. He reclines slightly, giving me room to fit the guitar in my laps. I test my hardened tips on the strings.

"So much better. Thank you." I murmur, turning to give him a kiss. His hand slides to my jaw, deepening the kiss as I begin to play.

It's not easy to play and make out at once, but it's a new skill I'm loving learning.

I play the intro about five times, but finally break the kiss and begin to sing. His hands slither over the curve of my hips, patting the rhythm of the song as he takes the second verse and I harmonize. The third verse we split lines, begging each other with every word. Our version ends with lazy, softly harmonized la-la-la-la's.

As the la's rolls away from us, Riley slips his hand beneath the guitar and into my panties.

"Lovely," he murmurs. "My lovely sexy songbird...will you chirp another song for me?"

It's not like last time, weeks ago. This time it's going down for real. I can tell already. There's no way I can play and sing. Not while he's touching me like this. I want to focus all my attention on the feels.

"I can't," I whisper. "But I might scream for you..."

Riley chuckles and pulls the guitar away with one hand as he continues to deepen his explorations.

"Here I thought you were a professional that could play through any catastrophe," he murmurs in my ear.

I can't make the witty comeback like usual. I writhe as he holds me about the waist and pushes chilly fingers into my heat. The contrast feels like perfection.

"Oh god," I grip his knees as his fingers begin a rhythm of plunging and rubbing and plunging and rubbing. "Riley—"

He cuts me off by tugging my braid so that my head lays back over his shoulder. He devours my mouth as his hand claims the even more needy part of me.

I can't believe how fast this is going to happen. I'm moaning around his tongue, my hips moving with his hands when I hear the swoosh of the bedroom door open and close just as quickly.

Everything stops. Riley's hand and my quiet moan and our passion and my heart.

In the beat of silence, I hear a very familiar, muttered. "Fuck," then, "Sorry."

And boots that I didn't hear coming quickly retreating, then, returning, "We...uhhh...we need to talk. I'll...I'll wait by the pool."

I am...I am....

Dammit, there's a fucking word for what I am and it means utterly silenced by my rage, but I can't think of it.

Riley is not silenced. He's full of things to say.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me. Jesus Christ. Your father is the most obnoxious, most inconvenient wanker ever to walk the face of the earth and hell as well," he growls, then, "Dammit, Row," he says with bleak frustration, adjusting himself unhappily, "I think maybe this time I was even getting hard enough to get inside you, too."

I whip around on my knees, rubbing his chest. "Really? That's so good, baby."

He's staring at the ceiling now. He shrugs. "Possibly. I dunno. Maybe that's desire talking, more than my actual cock. Presently...it's a moot point," He flaps a hand toward the pool and my ridiculous, insane, obnoxious, stupid father.

I wince. "Okay, but maybe we can revisit that in just a minute? I'll get rid of him."

"Rowan, when have you ever been able to dismiss him?"

"Dismiss him?" I laugh, feeling a whole lot frustrated and more than a little crazy. "I'm going to kill him," I hiss, scrambling awkwardly off the bed, tying my robe around me. "Straight up motherfucking destroy him. Who does that? Just walks into someone else's house? Into their bedroom? At ten o'clock at night?"

"Matt bloody del Marco, that's who."

His exasperation fades as looks me over. He gives me a fond smile. "Go on, then. I'll be along as soon as I put a shirt on. I can't wait to hear how this goes down."