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This is not a good idea in the slightest. In fact, it’s probably certifiably insane, and it will definitely break her heart.
But Miranda’s agreed to it because she’s always been very stupid and impulsive where Andrea is concerned, and she misses her desperately, and maybe, just maybe, a memory will spark, so she opens the door. She can’t leave Andrea to languish on her front porch, after all.
Andrea drags her eyes over her.
It reminds her of the first time they made love.
Well. That’s rather a romantic way to put it. It’d probably be more accurately described as the first time they fucked.
Andrea had looked at her almost exactly like this when she’d approached her at the Elias-Clarke Labor Day barbecue, knowing her only as “some hot woman not having a good time who ought to be given an orgasm or two in the shadowy corner behind the sno-cone truck.”
And Miranda had let her.
Miranda would submit to just about anything when those eyes were on her like that.
“You gonna let me in, baby?” Andrea says.
“Yes. Against my better judgment,” Miranda says, opening the door wider.
Andrea slips in and then places her hands on Miranda’s hips, spins them, pushes her against the door, closing it. She even thoughtfully reaches around to lock it before replacing her hand on her hip.
“By fuck, you’re hot,” Andrea says, that same look of awe and desire in her eyes.
Miranda closes her own eyes. She can’t stand to see that.
This is for Andrea’s benefit. To ease her loneliness, to perhaps help her remember. This isn’t about her own need for her wife. This isn’t about her own memories.
Andrea cups her face and skims her thumb across her bottom lip, says,
“I’m gonna kiss you now.”
It’s been sixty seven days since they last kissed with any kind of intent behind it, and the thought of never doing so again had been one of the first of many agonizing what ifs that had flooded her mind when the doctor had told her the prognosis.
And heavens how Andrea can kiss.
Miranda fists Andrea’s flannel and pulls her in closer, and Andrea deepens the kiss, her tongue exploratory and sensual in her mouth, her hand now in her hair instead of cupping her face. She’s going to let Andrea direct the encounter, let her take what she needs from it. This may be easier thought than done. Andrea squeezes her hip and switches to a different angle, kissing her harder, tongue palpating more slowly, and she moans and unclenches her fists and snakes her arms out to wrap around her, bringing them flush together. She’s already aching between her legs feeling her body against her fully clothed, both of them almost vibrating with want.
Andrea retracts her tongue and kisses her open mouthed a few times, then closed at just the corner of her lips. She says,
“You sure don’t kiss me like you want a divorce.”
Andrea’s said it as a joke, but it’s a stab in her chest.
“I never said I did. And we’re not supposed to be talking about it,” Miranda says.
“Oh right. Dr. Hot Lips Houlihan would be very displeased,” Andrea says, mock thoughtfully. “Guess I better get to getting fucking you, then.”
Andrea kisses her again and starts unbuttoning her blouse. Once it’s fully untucked and open, she splays her hand out against the hot skin of her stomach and pulls back to look her in the eyes.
“You are so fucking sexy. I—”
She appears to rethink whatever she had been about to say and instead buries her face in Miranda’s neck, alternately kissing, biting, sucking, then licking across her collarbone to give the other side the same treatment. Both of her hands are now on Miranda’s lace-clad breasts, squeezing lightly and stroking over her nipples with her thumbs, and one of Miranda’s hands is draped over her shoulder, the other in her hair.
It feels so good to be touched so enthusiastically again. That’s when she’d known something was deeply wrong—when Andrea had stopped being delighted by and completely immersed in touching her, when it had started feeling perfunctory.
And of course before that, there had been the strange case of Andrea’s birthday sex. Andrea had barely glanced at the merry widow Miranda had bought for the occasion, fucked her roughly with the largest cock they owned with precious little dirty talk except for a few comments about Miranda’s sluttiness—which is usually a turn on for both of them for its irony but this time had almost sounded like genuine complaints—and had come inside her and then rubbed Miranda to climax as quickly as possible, pulled out, and didn’t even take off the harness before falling asleep.
Very odd and off-putting, especially for birthday sex, for which they both usually put in maximum effort.
But the current situation is not about any of that. The current situation is allowing the accordion-induced factory reset version of Andrea to have her way with her, which is disconcertingly so familiar and so, so arousing.
Andrea’s hands have slid into her bra cups and are manipulating her breasts skin to skin, pinching and pulling at her nipples as they kiss sloppily. Miranda keens into her mouth. Andrea nips at her bottom lip and kisses down the front column of her throat to her breast bone. Her right hand abandons her breast and slithers behind her to unclasp her bra, and it immediately loosens enough for her to nose in and take her nipple into her blazing mouth.
Fuck, she thinks. She felt that in her clit. Andrea releases her nipple from between her teeth, looks up at her under her coquettishly fluttering eyelashes,
“Oh? Is that right, baby?”
Miranda blinks a few times. Apparently she had said fuck rather than just thinking it. No use denying it. Miranda says,
“Yes.”
“Ditch your blouse,” Andy says, standing up straight.
Miranda does so, and Andy pushes her bra straps down her arms what might be described as reverently, fingertips ghosting over her shoulders and triceps. The bra finally joins Miranda’s blouse in a heap on the parquet. Andrea drinks in her nude torso and grins, and then her mouth and hands are all over her.
She’s having trouble tracking which sensations are which. Tongue in her navel, fingers at her nipples, tongue at top of left breast, fingers at ribs, teeth on a nipple, hands at obliques. It’s all inflaming her. She hasn’t been this organically wet since several months before the last time they’d been intimate sixty seven days ago.
She’s moaning at intervals and panting consistently, and now Andrea’s unzipping her skirt.
They make eye contact. Andrea pauses, says,
“This is ok, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Please,” Miranda says.
Andrea winks and then sets to work removing her skirt, unhooking her stockings from her garter belt—the tickle of those deft fingers against her thighs has her trembling—pulling her panties down her legs. She maneuvers them past her Louboutins and deposits them in the pile of clothing, and then dives in.
The visual alone of Andrea on her knees clutching at her hamstrings with her gorgeous face pressed into her cunt is hot enough…
But it feels so much better. Andrea is ravenous and impatient to be fed. She’s consuming her as though it’s a competition and she desperately needs to win. A cobbler gobbling contest, perhaps, where the prize is more cobbler. Or just the ruthless mundanity of being a member of a large family who must satiate herself before anyone else can pilfer her rations.
Regardless, Andrea is devouring her, tongue and lips and just the right grazing of teeth at all the right places at all the right angles in exactly the right rhythms, and Miranda braces herself with one hand on the doorknob and the other clutching at Andrea’s hair as she comes in Andrea’s mouth.
Andrea licks her leisurely through her aftershocks and then stands up, says,
“Not done with you yet.”
She places her right hand on Miranda’s hip and then lifts her right leg and guides it to encircle her waist. She says,
“Clean your mess off my face while I fuck you.”
Oh lands. Andrea had said almost exactly that the first time she’d gone down on her.
Don’t think about the past, just now now now, she tells herself as she swipes her tongue against Andrea’s chin and Andrea penetrates her with two fingers.
She’s still laving Andrea’s face when Andrea pulls at her other hamstring and takes all her weight and then turns and lowers her to the floor.
Andrea’s inside her with three fingers now, pumping fast and hard. Andrea kisses her with aggressive tongue, adds a fourth finger, pounds her palm against her clit, juts her own hips down onto Miranda’s thigh, and Miranda climaxes with a full body shudder and stars behind her eyelids.
When Miranda is lucid again, Andrea’s propped on an elbow next to her saying,
“You should consider moving that table closer to the door.” She cuts her eyes to the table onto which The Book is delivered. “So I could fuck you on it instead of having to throw you on the floor.”
Miranda laughs so she doesn’t cry.
Andrea scrunches her brow, says,
“What?”
She hadn’t meant it to, but it bubbles out,
“You say that every time we have sex in the foyer.”
Andrea’s brow remains scrunched and maybe even scrunches further:
“Do we often have sex in the foyer?”
“Mea culpa. I don’t think Dr. Suzanne Somers would approve of this conversation.”
Andrea hums and stands and stretches. Then she extends her hand to help Miranda up, sings,
“Come and knock on my door. I been waitin’ for you…”
Miranda rolls her eyes but lets herself be pulled into the den and shoved onto her back on the divan.
xxx
Miranda had suspected from the address Andrea had texted her that her living situation would be tacky in the particularly nostalgic way she often gravitated toward. But the Grac land—the e is burnt out—Inn and Suites Hourly and Long Term Rates Available is… beyond. It’s downright depressing rather than charmingly outdated. Whom had Andrea been trying to punish when she took up residence here?
The manager has already spotted her and is looking at her very curiously through the check in window. She gets out of her car and double checks that it’s locked and parked within viewing range of number four, squares her shoulders, and strides in.
“Can I help you?” the man says.
“The tenant in room four has arranged for you to provide me a key.”
He looks skeptical, and she feels very dirty. She can’t fathom what he must be thinking about what will be occurring in room four, but it’s probably illicit and not too far from the truth. The only difference is that she’s not here as a cheating spouse for a tawdry roll in the hay.
Technically. Although she does increasingly feel that way.
She’d waited a few days after their evening together at the townhouse before probing for any memory reclamation updates. Andrea had been very contrite when she’d given her negative report. But then she’d said brightly,
“But we had fun, didn’t we?”
Miranda had conceded they had but made no commitment to continue. It had been too jarring to wake up sore and satiated the next day without Andrea in bed beside her. It had felt like Andrea was away on business and she’d fucked a stranger while she was gone.
Albeit a stranger with her exact face and body and sense of humor and devotion to pleasuring her multiple times and then making sure she used the bathroom and ate something afterward.
It had been happenstance that they’d both been having a working lunch at Del Frisco’s the next week. She couldn’t be sure that Andrea had followed her into the bathroom for the express purpose of seducing her, but they had ended up having sex regardless. All it had taken was Andrea’s walking up behind her while she was washing her hands. She hadn’t even touched her, just made eye contact in the mirror and winked and cocked her head toward the handicap stall. Before Miranda could voice a half-hearted objection, Andrea’s tongue was in her mouth, her blouse was unbuttoned and Andrea was palming her breasts, and her own hand was down Andrea’s slacks. Andrea had gone off like a rocket almost as soon as she’d touched her, said groggily into her ear,
“Sorry to be a one-pump chump. Been thinking about you all week.”
And then she’d pushed up her skirt, shoved aside the gusset of her panties, and fucked her through two successive orgasms.
She’d overheard Andrea explaining what had taken so long in the bathroom to her table mates:
“Ran into somebody I used to know. Pre-amnesia. Takes a lot of reacquainting, you know?”
No one at her table had inquired, and she hadn’t volunteered any excuse. Nigel had looked a little more smugly knowing than she would have preferred, though. It wasn’t until an hour later back at her desk that she had discovered her blouse had been buttoned wrong.
That should’ve been it. Miranda had certainly not meant for this to keep happening. But then Andrea had invited her to accompany her to a brain scan consultation.
Dr. Amanda Seyfried had spouted a bunch of medical jargon and pronounced that Andrea was unlikely to recover her memories and the best outcome might be to start afresh.
She’d had Roy drive them back to work at the Elias-Clarke building, her mind reeling and her heart heavy, but thirty seconds into the journey, Andrea had put up the privacy screen, pulled Miranda into her lap, said,
“Bad news is almost always ameliorated by good sex. Maybe I could start afresh by making you come. Heaven knows I wasn’t doing you right when we split.”
“What makes you say that?” Miranda had said, already rocking against the palm at her sex.
“The way you need it from me every time we get together. I used to do you right, and you got acclimated to it and then I failed to deliver for some reason. So now that I’m willing and able you’ve got to have it.”
Factory Reset Andrea had been shockingly accurate. She hadn’t wanted to think about it, had merely said,
“Correct. Now fuck me.”
And Andrea had.
The manager is still staring at her.
“Do I need to show you identification? Andréa said this was taken care of.”
“I’m trying to work out where I know you from.”
“That’s none of my concern. The key?”
He makes no move to retrieve a key.
“You sure you ain’t been in here before? You look awfully familiar.”
She rolls her eyes, which are of course concealed behind her sunglasses. She says flatly,
“I used to be a backup singer for Barry Manilow.”
He cocks his head thoughtfully, strokes his scraggly beard, says,
“Huh. That must be it.”
He finally turns around and takes a key off a hook on the back wall. He turns back around but does not relinquish the key.
“I know you’re probably just here for quick cash, but Andy’s more fragile than she lets on. Poor kid’s been through a lot. First her bitch wife kicks her out. Then some nutjob on the six train brains her with an accordion of all things. Don’t know why she thinks she needs to pay for it—especially somebody as pricey as you. She could land any broad she wanted. But maybe she doesn’t have the juice since she got her bell rung. Keep that in mind for your session, will you?”
Miranda blinks a few times.
“She told you her ‘bitch wife kicked her out,’ she recently suffered a traumatic brain injury, and that I am a prostitute she’s hiring to… service her?”
Perhaps Andrea’s circumstances are more dire than she’d initially thought. It had been Andrea’s decision to move out: she’d begged her to stay, in fact, offered to relocate to the guest room herself. As for the paying for sex—is Andrea delusional as well as amnesiac?
He chuckles, says,
“She told me about the accordion. The bitch wife and the hooker… well, I’ve been in this business for a while. I could smell it on her.”
Miranda hums,
“I see.”
She extends her hand, and he drops the key into it.
“Oh, and friendly warning: she’s still way hung up on the bitch wife. Probably the type to cry about it mid-hump.”
“I appreciate your candor,” Miranda says as she exits.
The interior of number four is even worse than the exterior. It’s clean and tidy, at least, although everything is tragically old and frayed.
She paces around and surveys Andrea’s personal items she’d described to her when she’d floated this mad plan. The laptop is not present. The clothes hung neatly in the closet are all business casual and utilitarian and neutral enough to be interchanged into many iterations of outfits. The mixtapes on the desk are all ones she’d made in the ‘90s, each themed to an issue of Runway she’d been working on and needed inspiration for—Black and White, Southwestern, Glitz and Glam, and Grunge. She doesn’t peruse them further. Instead, she flips through the paperback of I Still Dream about You. It appears that Andrea is about halfway through, if the makeshift bookmark that is a cardstock advertisement from the casino in Atlantic City where they’d spent their last anniversary is any indication.
The bust of Warren G. Harding is next to the 8x10 of her and her children on the nightstand.
Miranda buys whatever trinkets she stumbles upon in her travels that have to do with one-term presidents to give to Andrea, who is always so tickled by them. This one is her favorite. She’d said upon receipt of it:
“It’s just so bonkers. You were just in an airport gift shop and found this? Who would make this? Who would buy this? Who but you would recognize the genius of this and bring it home to me?”
They’d made love for four straight hours afterward.
She’s in the bathroom splashing water on her flushed face, contemplating getting naked and waiting in bed for her—Andrea had said she’d try to be there no later than seven but work was hectic—when she hears the door open.
“Miranda?” Andrea’s voice echoes through the small space.
Is this room considered part of the inn or the suites?
“There’s a real fancy car in the parking lot. I’m assuming that’s you?”
Miranda emerges from the bathroom, says,
“Yes. I’m here.”
“Thank heavens. I’ve had a day of it. Get over here so I can kiss you.”
“You don’t want to retire to your boudoir?”
Andrea snorts, says,
“The mattress is awful. Worse than the linoleum.”
Miranda stalks over to her.
“And how would you know that, exactly? Am I not the only woman with whom you’re sharing your spare key?”
Andrea brushes her hair behind her ear with gentle fingers, cups her jaw, says,
“Oh, baby, it’s nothing like that. Woke up spooning the range surprisingly refreshed after an accidental double bourbons night a couple times.”
They kiss then, and it’s just as hedonistically lovely as ever, and Miranda feels even more like a cheating wife when Andrea unzips her dress and pants into her ear,
“The juxtaposition of your classy chassis in this sad-sack shack is really doing it for me.”
Miranda’s hands are in Andrea’s hair, and she pulls her closer, kisses her wantonly. Andrea’s hands are roaming her torso just as wantonly, and her tongue is so insistent and claiming in her mouth. Miranda moans despite herself, and Andrea’s removing her dress entirely, tossing it onto the counter, and then unhooking her bra, drawing her panties down her legs.
Miranda braces herself against the counter, and Andrea swipes her tongue against her cunt briefly, kisses just below her navel, licks a long line from her belly button to her chin and then kisses her deeply.
And then in a flash, Miranda is on all fours on the linoleum, and Andrea’s fucking her from behind with three fingers.
Andrea’s other hand reaches around to circle her clit. She licks up her spine and mouths at a shoulder blade, bites gently at her trapezius.
“I like the idea of fucking you in places we haven’t fucked before.”
“Me, too,” Miranda grunts. “But I would like to take your cock in our bed at some point.”
She doesn’t know why she’s said this. It must’ve been an excited utterance. If it occurs it will surely be too much for her to handle.
She’s barely keeping it together as it is.
This stranger with her wife’s face physically satisfies her, but she wants her real wife.
Andrea flicks her clit and rotates her fingers inside her, and she comes hard, pressing her cheek against the linoleum and shouting her release as Andrea goes rigid against her and bites harder at her trapezius and breathes out,
“Fuck, baby.”
xxx
Miranda doesn’t cry every time they have sex.
In fact, this is the first time she’s cried.