The Cure

Chapter 27

God, she loved it. Lola touched her reddened lips as she retreated into the safe shadows of her dark bedroom, closing the door with unanticipated force.

There was a small and disbelieving smile on her lips' bruised skin; she wanted to rub it away as her breathing slowed, shaking her head in incredulity.

Never had she felt herself so wildly uninhibited; her body was thrumming, newly aflame, dampening between the legs that she had pressed together while she drank him in.

How good he had looked, the sunny blue of his scrubs against the perfect tea-stained skin, the five o'clock shadow dusting that twitching jaw.

But she hadn't allowed herself to look into those twinkling dark eyes, watch those white teeth clench, the muscles jumping in his jaw as his orgasm approached; no, she knew she couldn't have resisted pushing him back against the parquet and letting him inside her again.

No, she had focussed on the feeling of the soft solidness on her tongue; the taste of his impending release; that way, he could have been anyone.

Lola shuddered. Her bedroom was icy cold.

She took up a cheap bottle of who knew what, and threw it back, her eyes pressed shut, touching her own cheeks, remembering the feeling of his palms against her skin as he had dropped to his knees beside her.

Oh, he emulated it well, that wide-eyed, lovestruck expression gratitude; the same look that any man satisfactorily assumed when getting off, searching for her lips before he came with that stunted cry, over her fingers, into her fist; she closed her eyes as she remembered him streaking the floor with his pleasure, abandoning his dignity at her touch.

Lola sat on the edge of her bed and crossed her legs, trying to ignore the pulsing, aching pleasure that pulled in her stomach and dampened her underwear as she played the images in her mind again and again; God, she loved it.

She knew she only had to open her door and beckon, and he would approach at her mercy, and God, did she need that release.

She stared at the door, listening hard.

Was he still there?

Jared's new distance had been tricky enough in itself to manoeuvre, but he had never worried about making her scream; the only release that mattered was his own. No, it wasn't sex, in itself, that she had been missing.

And it was that which was so frightening, that which had birthed the new fear, sitting heavy on her chest since the moment Doctor Nathaniel Wells had kissed her, drank her in, made love to her – no, fucked her, forcefully, feelingless, against the kitchen counter – and it was this.

That nothing would ever come close, again.

What was she supposed to do, then? When his fervour died down? When he saw past the glinting plated glamour and found the rot beneath?

The heaving black lungs, the heavy stubbornness, the soldierly traipse of the shadowy phrase about her veins that men are made to leave these days, that he wasn't special, that such a slut squeezed her eyes shut for near-nightly smut, for pretty much anyone made the cut.

No.

That glitter washed off easy. She had seen it. It danced daily around the shower drain.

Lola sighed, her feet finally back on earth, or as much as they could be, with last night's chemicals still darting about behind her eyes, and threw herself back onto her pillows, covering her eyelids with trembling fingers until, heart racing and thoughts shivering and electric, she found a listless and unsatisfactory sleep.