Right Now, I'm Anyone's

I thought it was definitely best that we walked back to my flat, rather than getting a taxi – I was starting to owe Dean money that I just didn’t have. Walking through the cold November night cleared my head a lot more than it had been back in the restaurant, but the entire way home, we weren’t able to keep our hands away from each other – similar to how we were after the Krazyhouse a couple of days before, but with less animosity. It made climbing a couple of flights of stairs almost impossible, since the entire way up them he walked behind me with his arms curled tight around my waist while he kissed my neck. Plus he kept stopping us in our tracks and spinning me around to push his mouth against mine again – it made me giggle in a way that I would normally be mortified by.

When we reached the front door of my flat, he turned me around again and started kissing me, pressing me back into the wood of the door – it took most of my willpower to refrain from kissing him back and wrapping my fingers through his hair again. I did another one of those sickening giggles and pushed him back partially, placing my index finger against his swollen lips, as a signal to keep quiet while I opened the door. He let go of my waist and leaned against the wall beside the door, watching me while I unlocked it and popped my head around it. My home was submerged in complete darkness, which was a good sign – it meant that there was probably nobody home. Even if there were, they’d be asleep.

Quietly, I pushed the door open the rest of the way and ushered Dean inside, hissing at him to go straight to my bedroom and wait there quietly. He did as he was told – not without sneaking a feel of my backside first as he walked past – and disappeared silently into my bedroom. I tip toed along the hallway trying to stop the heels of my shoes from tapping against the floor – god knows why I didn’t just take them off – and cracked Georgia’s bedroom door open. It was empty. I moved back along the hall and checked Dimitri’s too – empty.

Elation rushed through my body and I near galloped back to my room.

“Nobody’s home,” I announced as I walked through the door, not bothering to keep my voice down. Dean was lounging comfortably on my bed with his shoes lying at the side of it. He had his legs crossed at the ankles – his torn jeans revealing patches of the hair on his legs – and his arms folded behind his head where it rested against my pillow. He smirked at me from where he laid, his eyes roaming up and down my body as I unbuttoned my coat and flung it onto the open wardrobe door.

“So, we can make as much noise as we want to?”

I narrowed my eyes at him and kicked my shoes off of my feet, letting them bang against the frame of my bed loudly. “You’re dead funny.”

“I’m not kidding,” he stated bluntly, bringing his hands around to fold together on his flat stomach. “I want to hear what I do to you this time, and actually remember it.”

My face heated up and I was glad the lights were off – I can’t have been a very attractive colour for a human at that moment. I reached my hands around to the nape of my neck and unclasped the borrowed necklace, laying it carefully on top of my desk – Georgia wouldn’t be happy if I returned it broken or tangled. I heard the sound of things clunking around in my bag, and turned around to see Dean rummaging through it carelessly. I was a moment away from scolding him about it before he pulled my iPod out and yanked the earphones out. He got off of my bed and plugged it into the crappy little speakers I had on my desk, fiddling with it for a moment before Always Love by Nada Surf started playing softly.

“Come here,” he said softly, his voice hardly making a sound over the flow of music playing quietly from my desk. I did as he told me to and walked over to him – just managing to stop myself from running – with the sound of my feet padding against the carpet muffled. I thought everything would’ve been a hell of a lot scarier when there was no alcohol in the equation, when I had a clear state of mind. But that wasn’t the case; when it came to it, everything was a lot more appealing and exciting to me. I saw a lot of things I wouldn’t notice after I’d been drinking; the way his eyes managed to radiate the smallest amount of light shining through my bedroom window, the way he looked at me like I was the only thing he was thinking of, the way his body reacted to mine. The best part of it was that I’d definitely be able to remember all of those details.

Finally, I reached him after what felt like an hour and he placed his hands very gently onto my waist. He pulled me down onto the bed to lie half on top of him, before pushing my hair away from my face and sliding the other hand around to my lower back. It stroked a path up and down, keeping s steady rhythm and that made my heart thump in time with it. Our kisses matched the way he was touching me; gentle. The change in pace was definitely significant – it meant we knew that we had the whole night to get carried away, to get lost in each other again. Or at least a couple of hours alone.

So you can imagine why I jolted when his approach changed sharply. His arm locked itself tight around my middle, stopping the steady gliding of his hand up and down my back, and his lips became harder, more forceful against my own – of course, not in a way that I didn’t enjoy. His shoulders braced against my own and he pushed me back, rolling us over so that he was the one lying on me. He sat up straight, putting his legs on either side of my hips to straddle me as he looked down at me with a sad-looking smile playing around his lips. I had a miniature flashback of the time we walked home in the rain, and he was sat in a similar position while I watched his face change; it meant he was getting a bit intimidated, I think.

Each of his thumbs absently stroked against my wrists, tracing the veins and the tendons in them. He just kept sitting there, staring at me and it started making me feel nervous. I bit my lip and tugged my hands away from his, before hitching myself up onto my elbows to get a better look at his face.

“Are you okay?” I asked in a small voice.

“I think I should be the one asking you that.”

“Why?”

He found my hand on the duvet without taking his eyes from mine and curled his fingers through mine. “I know you feel worse about what we’re doing than I do, Leila.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes,” he argued. “I do. You feel guilty about your boyfriend, that’s one. You feel guilty about Zara, that’s two. And you feel guilty about lying to people you care about, that’s three. I don’t feel guilty.”

I could see the whole ‘I can read you like a book’ thing being a problem if this was going to carry on – I need to practice my poker face, it seems. I bit my lip and didn’t speak, my eyes dropping from his to look at the shadow of our hands in the darkness. Until he mentioned guilt, I hadn’t felt guilty because he was doing a good job at taking my mind off of it. My hand went limp in his as I fought a battle with myself and I could feel his tension building with my silence.

This was purely physical; that much he had made clear after the first time. It was sex with no attachments and I thought I was up for that. The fact that I had a boyfriend and he had a girlfriend was just a footnote in my arguments when I was with him, but when I was on my own it was a different story. There just seemed to be this unexplainable, yet unmistakable, force that pulled me right back to Dean, even when I knew I didn’t want to be around him. There was no such thing as detachment with us – well, on my part I suppose.

“Maybe we just shouldn’t do this,” he said, lifting his weight off of me to make it easier to slide away. I acted impulsively, making my mind up on the spot and deciding that I’d deal with the pain of it later. I put my hand flat onto his thigh and stopped him during his move. Even though I knew I’d feel disgusting in the morning, I didn’t care; I knew what I wanted, and what I wanted happened to be him.

“We definitely shouldn’t”-his face faltered slightly before he arranged it into a blank mask again-“but, I want it to.”

“But-”

I just silenced his arguments by cupping his cheeks in my hands and kissing him hard. It seemed that was all I had to do to get my own way. He locked both of his arms back around my waist and started kissing me back fiercely, making me feel those old sparks again. My head reeled from the force of his kiss and he knocked me back onto the bed, keeping his lips against mine. His hands moved slowly, one coming to my waist while the other was braced on the bed to take his weight. I slunk my own gracefully around his neck and pulled his face closer to me.

He pulled back from me, slowly placing light kisses against my jaw, making a trail to my neck. I felt him fumble slightly at the side of my dress, and then heard the sound of the zipper coming down. He used both hands to slip it off of my shoulders, leaving it bunched around my chest, as he bit lightly on my earlobe. After a moment, I brought my hands to his chest and carefully unbuttoned his pale green checked shirt, my hands shaking. The fingertips of his right hand grazed lightly over my hipbone as he pushed my dress out of his way – I kicked it off when it got to my ankles – and shivered all over for about ten minutes, making it even harder to unbutton his shirt.

I let out a tiny, breathy gasp when his teeth scraped against my collarbone and then felt his lips curl against my skin. A second later, his lips were back on mine again, his tongue tracing over my lower lip lightly as I pushed his shirt eagerly off of his shoulders and he flung his arms around to get it off – not too graceful, obviously. Things got a bit faster after that – he fumbled awkwardly with the buttons on my chiffon shirt, trying his hardest not to tear the delicate fabric and I yanked at his belt until it finally came loose. Within the next thirty seconds we were both in our underwear and his body was pressed tightly against mine – I was holding on to him like he was a lifeline, I swear.

The furious kiss we were locked in was broken, and he smirked against my jawbone. He sat back onto his haunches and wiggled his hips so that he could slip in between my legs. I took the time to admire him properly. Definitely different from what I remembered – at sixteen, he had been skinny and paler than he was then; not unpleasant to look at, but he was definitely better now. His stomach looked firm and his hipbones weren’t as prominent anymore.

When I came back to reality and caught his eye, he smirked at me cockily, before touching his hands to my shoulders. He ran them slowly down my body – and what a coincidence, he managed to get the straps of my bra off in that movement – so lightly that I gave another involuntary shudder. I felt the waistband of my tights expand when he slipped his fingers under it and I watched his face while he tried to take them off without ripping them to shreds. Dean worked his way back up just as slowly; bending at his waist to trail his lips and his fingertips back up my legs and then biting down sharply on my hipbone and making me jolt again – much to his amusement, needless to say. He removed my underwear when he got back to my face, flinging both articles of it over his shoulder carelessly, and I did the same back as he locked his arms back around me securely.

“Are you on the pill?” he whispered into my ear after biting down on the lobe again, his breathing heavy due to his slight – ahem – arousal.

I shook my head and answered in an equally breathless – and slightly incoherent – voice. “Condoms in the top drawer.”

His lips came back down onto mine and one of his arms disappeared from around my body, then I heard the sound of the drawer on my bedside cabinet opening and him rifling impatiently through it. Dean lifted his face away from mine so that he could see what he was doing – I smirked to myself and took another opportunity. I caught him by surprise and pushed him onto his back, then leaned down and attached my lips to his throat. He gave a small, surprised groan and I heard the drawer slam shut again. I nibbled on the curve where his neck met his shoulder and felt his body quiver in ecstasy. His hands came onto my hips and he pushed me away for a moment – the sound of metallic packaging being torn open ripping through the silence. After that, everything sped up again. I never remembered feeling as good as he made me feel that night; that much I’m definitely certain of.

When it was over – the both of us covered in sweat and panting from the exertion – I fell asleep, curled to fit in his arms with a smile on my face.

*****

I woke up two hours before Dean did that next morning. I lay there for the most part of those two hours, just watching him sleep peacefully beside me – the thought of somebody coming home and catching us didn’t cross my mind, not once. I ran through the night we had spent together, trying to relive as much of it as I could possibly remember – my way to stop the guilt from making an early appearance and ripping me apart. I remember that it felt a lot different from the first time, back in Liverpool – not bad, but different – which I put down to the alcohol induced stupor.

Yes, I was definitely happy that I didn’t get drunk enough to forget it.

I thought about how he looked even more beautiful in his sleep; calm. The grey light that had just started coming in through the drawn curtains sharpened his cheekbones and revealed the shadow on his chin that had grown overnight. I started to think of all the shit he and I went through together – which, I won’t lie, eased the guilt a little bit more. I didn’t bother telling myself that it was reasonable, since we had been in love, simply because when somebody says ‘had been’ it means that it wasn’t there anymore – so even my most twisted reasoning didn’t work there.

I cringed away from the one memory we both shared – the one that still hurt somewhere in my chest until I felt the need to try and hold myself together. I only had to think about it to start feeling unhappy; the time Dean tried to stop me from leaving him after he betrayed me. The very last memory I had of him telling me that he loved me. And then I felt like an idiot, because he had betrayed me all those years ago, and now I was going back to him. I felt stupid for believing that he ever loved me – I mean, even then I was nothing more than casual sex to him.

But nature called, and I had to stop watching him and return to the real world outside of my bedroom. I got out of bed and tutted at the mess of clothes and coats and shoes just slung all over the floor. I searched around the room for close to ten minutes before I spotted the black lace of my underwear, hanging off of the corner of my desk where Dean had thrown them the night before. I found Dean’s checked shirt halfway underneath my bed and pulled it on. After buttoning it up and rolling the sleeves to my elbows so that they didn’t hang off of my hands as much. I traipsed out of my room and hoped to God that nobody had arrived home yet. I suppose if they were, I’d have to think on my feet.

After my business was done and my hands were thoroughly washed, I padded through my home into the kitchen, where I made two steaming cups of tea. The guilt hadn’t managed to edge its way in just yet, which meant that it would probably be about a hundred times worse later on, when it did. I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and saw that it was just after seven in the morning – I found it odd that I wasn’t tired.

When the clock in the kitchen struck ten past seven, I padded back across my flat to my bedroom, pushing the door open with my foot so that I wouldn’t spill any tea. I placed one of the cups down on the cabinet on Dean’s side of the bed for when he woke up, before I wandered over to the window. Music was still playing softly from my iPod and the sun was starting to rise properly, lighting up the clouds and setting a bright, grey glow to the view outside of my window. I took a sip of my tea before I placed it down on the windowsill, hearing the song change from something by The Killers to If It Means A Lot To You. I felt my eyes prick slightly and blinked the tears back, trying to endure the song. I wrapped my arms tight around myself and started thinking.

Today’s the day, kept running circles in my head as I stared blankly out of the window. By the time the song had reached Sierra’s verse, I had given up trying to blink back my tears. I managed to keep them under wraps when I was saying goodbye to Johnny the previous day, but now, I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t see the point, really. Even if he was awake to see it, there wasn’t any point in trying to lie to him about what was bothering me. I just had to hear my own voice crack when I answered him to start crying. I felt stupid again – it was supposed to be friends with benefits, and I couldn’t deny that I was getting attached.

I didn’t know that Dean was awake until I felt him; I was too deep inside of my own mind to realise. I only realised he was there when I felt his hands prying my own – set into painful claws around my own arms – away from my body. He wrapped both of his arms around my chest and I touched my hands lightly against his toffee skin. I could feel the warmth of his breath against my neck and his legs pressed against my own, tickling them slightly. He pressed his mouth gently against my shoulder for a moment, before he lifted his head again.

“What’s the matter?” he whispered into my ear, making me shiver again.

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

I lifted a hand to scrub as inconspicuously as I could underneath my eyes. “You’re leaving today, right?”

I heard him sigh and felt his arms move away from my body. I swivelled on my heel to look at him; he was scratching his head awkwardly, standing closer to the bed than he was to me in his boxers. He said, “That’s why you’re upset?”

“Well, what other reason would there be?”

“I don’t know, really,” he muttered, shrugging his shoulders. “I didn’t expect you to get so upset that you’re crying over it.”

Because I’m childish, I seriously pouted, scrubbed my eyes again and said, “I’m not crying.”

“Leila,” he chuckled, moving to stand in front of me and put his hands against my cheeks, forcing me to look at him. “I thought we were just friends with benefits. I wasn’t expecting the tears is all – I didn’t know you felt...more.”

“Oh, don’t be so bigheaded,” I said, managing to arrange my face into a smirk. “I’m not attached. You know the whole ‘friend’ part of friends with benefits? That’s why I’m upset.”

He chuckled, smirking at me again. “I didn’t think of that one”-he paused and wrapped his arms around my waist again, before speaking softly-“I’ll miss you too, y’know.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a lie or not, to spare my feelings. I wondered whether, as soon as he got home back to his Zara, he would just forget all about what happened between us, or bury it in the sand, never to be spoken of again. I hoped that it wouldn’t, of course. I kept lying to myself about the whole attachment thing until I believed it just a bit less than he seemed to – it was surprising that he believed it too, considering he’s so perceptive.

Since it was still really early in the morning, we went back to bed for a while – i.e. be basically forced me to take his shirt off and flung my underwear back across the room. We messed around some more, using another of the condoms in the cabinet drawer. I hoped that Levi hadn’t been keeping count of them, and realised that there were less there than after the last time we had sex.

An hour or more later – who was counting, honestly? – I was totally exhausted again. I lay my head lightly against Dean’s chest while we tried to get our breath back. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and I nuzzled into him more, tracing the lines of his tattoo with my fingertip, making him squirm out of my way. I tilted my head up to look at him and chuckled. He rolled his eyes at me and leaned down to peck me on the lips again. With a smile, I rested my head back down – he kissed the top of my head – and my eyes drooped heavily. Every single one of my muscles and the aching pain in my hips screamed at me to go back to sleep.

His other arm came down to join the first and he held me tight, speaking quietly to me. “Don’t worry about missing me. We’re going to see each other again.”

I didn’t say anything in response; I was just too tired. I just kept the side of my face pressed against his warm chest, listening to the sound of his laboured breathing and his steadying heartbeat – it was as good as a lullaby to me, and I fell back to sleep listening to it.