Homecoming, by Ella Dawson (OMG, guest post special!)

They say good things come in threes…where guest posts by Ella Dawson are concerned that could not be more true*. After Slush in August 2014 and Camille in January this year, Homecoming is yet another mini-masterpiece, and I slightly hate-love her for it. I could pick out any one of a dozen – a hundred – exquisite lines from this story, but actually it’s far better if you just go check them out for yourself.

Instead I’ll say this: Homecoming is a story I couldn’t have dreamed of writing at 23, and even at 34 I’d be really proud to have my name attached to it. This girl is going to go far – hell, she already has – and erotica is lucky to have her. Enjoy!

*Or do they come in fours? (Hint hint…)

—

She didn’t miss college. Honestly, she didn’t. The outrage, the noise, the up-jumped rich kids letting loose on the weekend as if their lives were so hard. Being a college student made everything feel so urgent, and the slow burn of adulthood suited her better. Every so often she still wound up with her head in the toilet, but at least it was her toilet and there was no term paper to write through her hangover. Her friendships were based on mutual interest instead of proximity and the collection of drunk memories. Plus, if she wanted to spend her Saturday night watching the newest Netflix original series, there was no one to judge her for it. There were perks to graduating.

But the sex… She missed college sex. She missed frantic, reckless, relatively anonymous sex: meeting someone at 11pm and knowing his body by 2am. Every weekend was a different sweaty culinary palate. Sex in the real world was structured; it wasn’t safe to go home with strangers when that meant Uber rides to unfamiliar neighborhoods, missing keys and fingers too tight on her wrist. Sex post-college was a geographical puzzle because good sex meant traveling. Good sex meant train tickets to a guaranteed enjoyable time with someone she could trust. It didn’t necessarily mean new. But with him, it meant exceptional.

He, of course, was still part of college. So that helped. There was some Peter Pan syndrome to explain why she was here, lurking in the back of the library at just after midnight. Her skirt was too tight—her thighs were a little thicker than they had been senior year, the last time she’d had an occasion to slink around wearing a pleather miniskirt. That was the real college anyway: messy, uncomfortable, and goddamn desperate to fuck. It had been a while. She checked her phone again. No new texts, but Theo had said he was on his way over. It couldn’t take more than eight minutes to get across the—

“This is a terrible idea.” She looked up from the screen and while she didn’t exactly lose her breath, it quickened more than she’d expected it to. They’d been having sex for years so the sight of him wasn’t a striking revelation, but she hadn’t seen him dressed up to go out since she graduated. Since then it had been comfy clothes in their hometowns, tank tops and shorts and the occasional button-down if they grabbed dinner. She’d forgotten how he was on campus: everything about him was intentional here, right down to the tight black shirt under his jacket. He looked like that when they met each other.

Theo swatted at a dark lock of hair that had swept across his forehead and politely ignored the awed look on her face. He leaned over her shoulder to open the bathroom door, heat radiating from his body. God, he smelled like sweat and cigarettes and laundry detergent from the school store—familiar and very much home. “This is a high traffic area. Drunk freshmen love the vending machines over there.”

“I don’t care,” she said, studying a cord of muscle in his neck. She followed him into the small bathroom as the automatic lights winked on. Theo studied the two stalls before picking the one on the left. “Bucket lists are important. This is the only item I have left.”

He raised his eyebrows but smiled and extended a hand to her like a driver helping her into a limousine instead of a college senior pulling her into a dirty bathroom stall. The stall was darker than outside and they blurred into each other, her hand still in his, his warm breath spilling across her face. “Anything I can do to help,” he offered as her back pressed gently against the stall. “I always aim to please.”

And then he was kissing her, slow and firm, and the snarky comeback she’d had to his cliché fell away. It never failed to amaze her how much she loved kissing him. When you kiss someone for years, you learn every trick and brush and moan, but it had always been like this with him, even at the beginning. Their kisses were both urgent and luxurious, a mixture of what took you so long and this feels like just yesterday. His body melded to hers and her stupid skirt twisted up her waist in the crush to get him closer. One of her legs hooked around his calf and he groaned as her hips jerked. She smirked against his mouth—he was usually the quiet one.

“Are you laughing at me?” he murmured, lowering his lips to her neck in retribution.

She huffed, one of her hands tangling in his soft hair. “Maybe.” He nipped at her collarbone and she yelped.

“You would be a terrible spy,” he said. One of his hands slipped between her legs and his fingers found her wet. She’d forgone underwear, having thought ahead; she had imagined every twist and turn of the fantasy on that long train ride upstate. He recovered from that surprise remarkably well. “You’re going to get us caught.”

His belt was clunky and he helped her shaking fingers unhook it and push his jeans and boxers down. “I’m not the one who won’t stop talking,” she said, watching him idly stroke the length of his cock. Her voice was a joke at this point, ragged and low. For once he listened to her, and then his mouth was crashing against hers even as he gently picked her up and let her wrap her legs around his waist. She reached one arm up to grab onto the top of the stall, but she was mostly relying on his strength to keep her upright. “Oh god Theo please—”

Fucking Theo was like kissing Theo: years of trust and precious seconds of desperate electricity. It was always new somehow. This time he was nervous; she could feel it in his tense spine, in the way he buried his face in her shoulder. But she trusted him, and her own judgment, and this bullshit fucking campus, and every time he thrust into her he pressed up against nerves they’d only discovered after she graduated. You get to fuck like an adult after college. You learn to demand what you want, which was: “More.”

His grip was tight on her ass to keep her up and she knew there would be a huge red mark once they finished. This would be all over her, bruises at her neck, sweat glistening in her hair, their eventual climax dripping down her thighs. He was so polished but she never wanted to be like that again; she had learned the fun was in the destruction of who you were supposed to be. What she wanted was this, a brutal fuck from someone she loved, new memories staining the place she became herself, or a version of herself, once. Her hand found its way under his shirt and she scratched evidence down his back. More frantic, muffled gasps against her neck—her head knocked against the stall and she couldn’t feel it. Didn’t care, more like. Not about that or the fabric of her skirt squeaking against the plaster or how she was slipping just a little now, but she trusted him, she trusted this disaster of a feeling. It was breaking and changing and falling all at once, it was home and white and hard and his hand covering her mouth because she is close now yes there please there now she just and… and…

His orgasm was more graceful than hers, mostly because he was trying to keep them both upright and maintain some semblance of control. But he crushed her against the wall in an uncomfortable, surprisingly pleasant embrace and she wasn’t thinking, just noticing the little fragments of words escaping from his lips. Her name, mostly. He always said it differently from everyone else, like it was a gift. Like some sort of stupid dorm room miracle.

And then he was pressing a wad of tissue paper into her hand, and she wiped herself off as he buckled his belt. She remembered where they were and saw all that green-grey tile and flickering, murky light. It was a Saturday, and it was just after midnight, and now she knew what it was like to fuck Theo in the bathroom of their college library. Bucket list complete. Except—

“I think I prefer beds,” he said, and he reached out and carefully tugged her skirt back down. “Specifically mine.”

Her grin tasted twenty-one years old.