Callie, Unwrapped Read online

  The best presents are the ones you unwrap early…

  Callie isn’t sure just how kinky anyone can get on a Tuesday before Christmas, but she’s willing to find out. That is, assuming this first drink at a pool hall with her ex, Gabe, and his girl, Kate, doesn’t send anyone screaming from the bar. Newly divorced after years of sleep-walking through occasional sex, she’s hoping to find her way back to the fiery confidence of her youth, when she saw what, or who, she wanted and grabbed it with both hands. It’s a Callie she barely remembers and that Gabe is convinced is buried somewhere deep inside her still. But when bystanders speculate about the trio, and Gabe and Kate make surprising demands that she be an active participant in this threesome, and not simply their plaything, Callie discovers that letting herself be sexually confident again is harder than she imagined. She’ll need to bare both her body and her heart to find out if she can still reach fearlessly for adventure.

  Callie, Unwrapped

  A Play It Again Novella

  Amy Jo Cousins

  To Christine, for giving me permission when I couldn’t give it to myself and for being the best friend a girl could have for thirty years and counting. Love you always.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Thank You!

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Off Campus

  Other Books by Amy Jo

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  ‡

  This is like being on a blind date. Except there are two of them.

  And I’ve already fucked one.

  “The Rack Room,” Callie instructed the cabbie as she slid across the cracked vinyl seat, digging in her black bag to find the lip gloss she knew was buried somewhere beneath her netbook.

  Shit. What a day to get stuck presenting the PowerPoint slideshow from hell. But it wasn’t as if she could have stopped in the middle of the monthly performance review session and announced to the room, Excuse me, but I’ve arranged a potential threesome with my ex and a woman I’ve never met, so can we wrap this up by five, please?

  The long rectangular tube materialized beneath her fingertips and she dragged it out, realizing at the same time that she’d forgotten to buckle up. As she shoved the metal tongue into the buckle, she unscrewed the lip gloss cap one-handed. Running behind always left her jittery with stress. She cursed her lateness, the backed-up traffic on Clark Street, the ridiculous fact that the only evening all three of them had been available at the same time was the Tuesday before Christmas.

  How kinky can anyone get on a Tuesday?

  She pictured what they planned on doing that night. The three of them—assuming this introductory drink at the pool hall didn’t send anyone screaming out of the bar.

  Pretty fucking kinky.

  The low-level tension that had hovered in the background of her body all day roared to the fore at the thought of Gabe and his friend and what she hoped to find waiting for her at the bar tonight. Her stomach dipped as if the cab had just driven over a small rollercoaster hill at speed. Heat swept from her face to her chest, to the hot, wet space between her legs, where it flared in a moment of interest that had her crossing her thighs and bouncing her leg as the storefronts passed by so, so slowly.

  Day after day of teasing and explicit emails had passed between her and Gabe, leading up to this night. She’d never been so frigging glad to have kept in contact with an old boyfriend, despite John’s disapproval over the years of their marriage. Although Gabe had been more than just another boyfriend, of course.

  Fuck John. Fuck John. Or rather, fuck Gabe. And Kate. Let’s definitely not forget about fucking Kate.

  The cab stopped short and she braced herself with a stiff arm to the plexiglass panel in front of her. Taking advantage of the brief halt in their forward motion, she slicked a little burgundy shine on her mouth and then licked her lips to see what it tasted like. She wondered what Kate’s mouth—the mouth of this woman she had never met but might soon be naked in bed with—would taste like.

  She squeezed her inner thigh muscles together, pulsing pressure on her crotch, and knew she was getting wetter.

  Wet. She’d been wet when she woke up this morning, swollen and hot from the dreams she’d been sinking into at night for a week.

  Wetter. The hours had ticked by with agonizing slowness. She’d swallowed cool water from the short, round glass that fit so pleasingly into the palm of her hand. Swallowed and felt it trickle down her throat, and kept thinking about what might happen tonight.

  Her underwear was slick against the sensitive skin of her inner thighs.

  She’d opted against her usual black tights this morning, even though the cold autumn air was sharp on her bare legs when she’d stepped outside the office for lunch, the wind pouring off the icy grayness of the river. In her mind she’d pictured someone running light fingertips up the soft inside of her thigh, a hand sliding beneath her black wrap skirt, a wrist pushing the overlapping edges of jersey fabric insistently apart as the hand pushed higher.

  Whose hand? Whose voice whispering in her ear, “I can feel how wet you are,” as a thumb flicked against the crotch of her underwear?

  Picturing this, teasing herself by scraping a fingernail against the crease of her pussy under plain black cotton bikinis, she’d stuffed the tights back in the dresser drawer and pulled out deep red knee socks instead, zipping up her black boots over them so just a thin band of red showed at the top. Something about that combo felt ultra-sexy. She was pretty sure it was a mash-up of flappers rolling their stockings and the Scarlet Letter. A sort of literary cocktail of risk-taking and sluttiness.

  Those thin slashes of red were the only color on her, besides the slick of cherry wine gloss on her lips. Black boots, black wrap skirt, and the long-sleeved skinny black top with the stand-up collar that cradled the back of her neck. The deep, thin vee of her shirt plunged narrowly between her breasts, framing a delicate silver chain with one smoky quartz teardrop that rested on her sternum. Even her hair was dark at the moment, changeable though it was based on her whims in any given week. A dark chocolate brown that slid past her shoulders in easy waves and highlighted her eyes with blunt cut bangs.

  She’d chosen the rich color the week before, and wondered if they would like it.

  Almost there. The taxi jerked forward a few feet and then halted again, the driver cursing at someone and eyeing Callie in the rearview mirror between bursts of profanity.

  The mirror in the compact she dug out next showed a flush in her cheeks that looked almost unnatural. Her eyes, a blue-gray that a pretentiously poetic lover had once referred to as ‘stormy,’ were fever bright, crinkling up at the corners as she pressed her lips together and tried not to grin like a lunatic.

  The carved wooden sign marking the pool hall was visible up ahead. She held her wallet in her hand, ready to pay, and suddenly found herself almost sick with nerves.

  What am I doing? It’s a Tuesday, for Christ’s sake. This is going to be the most awkward, cringe-inducing bad date ever. I’m not this person any more.

  Her mouth was dry and her pulse accelerating. She tried to breathe slowly, deeply, from her belly, to remember the delicious curl of heat and anticipation that had been building in her these last few weeks.

  She remembered Gabe, held a picture of him in her mind. Dark hair, loosely curly and a little too long. Wide, high cheekbones under serious eyes, the corners of his mouth always threatening to turn up as if he were hiding a grin. He had a face that looked like it should always be leaning against something, slightly tilted and res
ting on his hand or a wall.

  Gabe, who wouldn’t let anyone belong to him and him alone. Whom she had eventually gotten drunk enough to get his story. Why he held on to friends forever but wouldn’t hold any one person too close. She’d ended up crying herself because she could relate; everyone knew a betrayal that broke their heart. Most people healed. Gabe never had.

  Her eyes focused on the present again. The cab driver was staring at her, eyebrows raised expectantly. She realized he’d asked her a question, and guessed at the answer.

  “No, I can pay cash.” She folded a twenty into fourths and dropped it in the little spring-loaded drawer that snapped closed when she let go. “Keep the change.”

  People walked by on the sidewalk outside her backseat window, clumping up in a small crowd at the edge of the sidewalk as they waited for the light to change. This was a busy neighborhood. The cab had pulled over past the Rack Room in the empty space of the bus stop in order to avoid blocking traffic, a politeness during rush hour that meant no one was honking at them to move, move, c’mon, get out of the goddamn way.

  She rested her fingers on the handle of the door and took a deep breath.

  She’d been wandering through rooms that echoed now that half the furniture was missing after her divorce. Gabe had answered her “What’ve you been up to?” email without even knowing that she was talking to herself in her empty rooms with the late November sunlight streaming across the honey-yellow floors. He answered and she curled her ankles around the wooden legs of the dining room chair and pressed her ass into the hard seat beneath her, staring at the small screen of her netbook. Gabe’s words sat blunt on a white screen.

  I remember when you used to kiss anyone in the bar who caught your eye, male or female. We all watched you and wanted to be next.

  Eleven years. Eleven years of reining herself in, of stopping first to think, “Is this too slutty?” Of avoiding touching anywhere on John’s body that wasn’t societally sanctioned, and never looking at anyone else and wondering what it would be like to touch them. She’d censored her own thoughts, her own imagination, to avoid the pain of realizing that she’d made a bad, bad choice.

  Now she couldn’t remember how to be natural anymore.

  She pictured those last black words on a white screen.

  I have a friend. I think you should come meet us, come meet her, and we’ll see what we all like.

  Of course they weren’t the last words. Weren’t the last words at all, when three people with lives and jobs and previous engagements attempted to overlap their free time in a Venn Diagram whose center triangle was meant to hold a bar and a bed.

  But they were the last words that mattered.

  She pulled on the door handle with her left hand. Pushed on the padded vinyl of the armrest with her right. Swung the door open and slid her butt to the edge of the seat, wondering if she could actually go through with this.

  She watched the toe of her boot as she stepped one foot onto the curb. She looked back into the cab. The cabbie was peering over his shoulder at the street behind him, already looking for a gap in traffic that would let him pull away from the curb.

  Another deep breath. Her rib cage expanded, pressing her breasts against her tightly buttoned wool coat. Black, of course.

  They were waiting.

  * * *

  She was carded just inside the door by a caramel-skinned bouncer so tall that his thick arms rested at her eye level where they crossed on his chest. She wanted to put her hand on his bare wrist and see if her skin looked warmer against his.

  Familiar warmth flooded her face. This was what it had been like. Looking at the world and seeing potential connections everywhere.

  What do they like? Will I like that?

  She handed him her ID and looked up to catch him grinning at her.

  “Thank you, Callie. Come on in.”

  She took her ID back. Tucked it in the little elasticized pocket in the inside corner of her black bag. Smiled at him and knew her eyes were bright again. Butterflies tumbled in her belly as she scanned the long oak bar that stretched down the far side of the narrow room.

  She recognized the back of his head, the bulk of his shoulders, two thirds of the way down the row of stools.

  Gabe.

  A surge of want flooded her veins. Edges sharpened in her vision, details of wood grain and the smell of yeast and hops leaping to her senses.

  She turned back to the giant of a man who stood quietly behind her. Laid her hand on the bare warm skin of his arm.

  Yes. Look.

  Opening her hand a little wider against his skin, she admired the patches of darker color that showed between the pale lengths of her fingers.

  Yes. That was what she wanted to see.

  She’d taken a moment longer than would have been normal if she’d only wanted to catch someone’s attention, and the look in the man’s eyes told her that he’d noticed. His eyelids lowered and his brows were poised to lift.

  “Should I have reserved a table if we want to shoot a game tonight?” She cocked her head and held his gaze. His skin grew warmer beneath her hand.

  After a moment the bouncer shook his head, breaking away from her eyes, and chuckled.

  “No worries. You’ll be just fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  Yes. She liked that. And he liked it, too.

  She walked over to Gabe.

  He was the first guy she’d ever gone down on, almost twenty years ago now. He hadn’t been able to talk for a minute after he’d come, but had run his hand lightly over her then-short pixie cut, a gentle touch as her head rested on his thigh. She’d been awkward and unsure, wondering if she’d remembered to move her tongue while trying to figure out how to get more of his cock in her mouth, or if she’d drooled too much on him.

  His praise, when it came—Holy shit. That’s the first time you’ve done that?—flipped a switch in her. Heat raced through her, connecting her mouth to her pussy to her ass to her breasts, every nerve lighting up, every muscle down to her toes aching in a sudden clench of anticipation. She’d slid her head up his thigh and taken his soft cock in her mouth again, just holding the tip of it on her tongue, wanting her body to tell his, I like this.

  She’d thought of everything she wanted to try on his body, every inch of skin she wanted to lick or suck or scrape with her fingernails to see what happened… And then she’d crawled her way up his body to his mouth and started there.

  She hadn’t stopped until she’d learned him, learned herself, memorized every freckle and twitch of nerves and sensation. Nothing was forbidden and everything was interesting. Even the things she didn’t like were interesting.

  Later, days or weeks or months later, when she’d sighed in satisfaction and began again from the top, covering his skin with her hands like a familiar landscape she was pleased in her bones to visit again, Gabe had encouraged her to lift her gaze and had shown her the rest of the world.

  And when her gaze had snagged on the tiny Latina woman resting her hips against the edge of a glossy wood table across from the bar where she sat with Gabe one night—a woman with bleached blond hair tangled down to her ass, with waist, wrists, neck, all so tiny and delicate, her eyes heavily lined and her lashes thick and dark as they rested on her cheeks when she dropped her gaze—it was Gabe who had leaned his temple against hers and said into the shell of her ear, “Why don’t you find out what she likes?”

  Gabe, whose love held her lightly when it held her at all.

  He’d sent her off with a kiss and a whispered promise to listen to her stories when she returned, and she’d wondered why he wasn’t coming with her, vulnerability seeping in around the edges of her confidence.

  And now, here they were. All these years later, in another bar.

  With another woman.

  But Gabe wasn’t sending her off to explore on her own tonight.

  He turned his head when she was still five steps away. Had he felt her approach?

  A sl
ow smile spread over his face. The lines around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes were deeper, but that grin still moved slow like molasses through her blood, until she ran sweet and thick with want.

  “Hey, lady.”

  He spun on his seat to face her, legs and arms spreading wide so she could walk right into him and hang on in a tight hug. The shape of his bones called up echoes in her memory. She pressed her face against the side of his neck and felt his hand slide up her back to tangle in the hair at her nape. He still smelled the same. Vanilla and leather and something clean that always made her want to breathe deeply.

  She smiled against his skin, inhaled one last time, and opened her eyes.

  This must be Kate.

  Kate’s eyes were dark over the curved glass of the pint she’d lifted to her lips. Darker than Callie’s own gray-blue eyes, or even Gabe’s rich brown irises.

  Callie stood up and away from Gabe, leaving him with a smacking kiss on the cheek.

  “Hey, Gabe.”

  His right hand slid down to rest on her hips, his left tangling fingers with hers as he pulled her arm away from her body and leaned back to look her up and down. The grin widened.

  “Looking good, Callie.”

  “You too, my friend.”

  She started unbuttoning her coat as Gabe turned back to include the woman sitting next to him at the bar.

  “This is my friend, Kate.”

  Dark hair pieced in shaggy layers that stopped well short of a strong jaw. Curved brows and a nose whose bridge almost merged into broad cheekbones, above a mouth with full lips that looked bare of anything except Chapstick. She looked young and like a punked-out Kpop girl, smiling now as she held out a hand with dark gray polish on short nails.

  With one arm free and one arm still encased in a tight sleeve, Callie froze awkwardly for a moment. Then she laughed and stuck her left arm straight out at Gabe, coat hanging from it to brush the floor, and reached for Kate with her right. Gabe, with a hand on the shoulder seam and another on the cuff, worked the sleeve down her arm.