Deep End

IT’S A NICE SATURDAY—BECAUSE I HAVE NO PLANS.

After lunch with Pen, I go home, shower until I fool my skin and hair into believing that I wasn’t spawned inside a puddle of chlorine, and then catch up with laundry and assignments. Herr Karl-Heinz, may both sides of his pillow always be cold and his favorite fanfiction update every night, shed some light on German’s obscure sentence structure. I walked out of his office last week feeling . . . in deep shit, but less alone.

Look at me. Acknowledging my deficiencies. Accepting help.

It’s difficult even for native speakers, he told me. You’re a STEM major, right? Try to see the rules as basic laws of biology. Sometimes you just have to accept them. And I can help you.

I managed not to burst into tears at the far-reaching, existential implications of his words, but decided to make a mental note for future me. Highly susceptible to inspirational messaging. Must NOT join cult.

I do my readings for Dr. Carlsen’s class. Finish an English composition essay, expanding my opinion that teachers should be paid more from because yes, duh, to a semi-cogent, multi-paragraph argument. Slog through my visualization exercises. By late afternoon, I decide to reward myself with some work on the bio project.

It sounds deeply uncool, but there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. It’d be nice if Lukas texted, but he’s obviously been putting out fires for the past week, and anyway, I haven’t had much of a sex life in the last year and a half. I can wait a few more days for . . . whatever comes next.

Zach kept his promises, and my student ID grants me access to Dr. Smith’s deserted lab. It makes me like her more, that none of her grad students seem to feel like they should be hard-core pipetting on a Saturday afternoon. I move through the benches, remembering the feeling of being in a lab—my favorite part of organic chemistry. Working with compounds. Chromatography. Synthesizing aspirin. Follow experiment protocols, see what happened. I cannot wait to become a capable, badass, life-changing physician like Barb, but I hope I’ll get to do some research on the side. Watching things explode and crystallize will never not be fun.

At the back of the lab, I find the computer Zach pointed me to. Before I can power it up, I hear a noise behind me and whirl around.

Lukas sits on a stool at the end of a bench, for once looking like he’s not coming from, going to, or currently at practice. Hair chlorine lightened, but not tousled. No goggles marks around his eyes. Jeans and a dark Henley with no Stanford logo in sight.

It’s . . . disrupting. He’s an athlete, and most of our interactions have in some shape revolved around that. But he’s also a person with interests and hobbies and a life, and I know so little about that Lukas.

And yet, I feel myself smile. “Hi?”

“Hi.”

“Where did you—did you come in behind me?”

He shakes his head.

“Um, okay. I’m here to . . .” I point at the computer behind me.

“Get the pictures for the input dataset?”

I nod.

He lifts his left hand, showing me the USB lodged between his thumb and pointer finger.

“Ah. Great. We’re going to need to—”

“Reorient the pics.”

“And—”

“Resize them.”

He completes my sentences unhurriedly, like finishing my thoughts is a natural thing for him. We assess each other for a silent beat. It feels like a contest, and when my lips curl first, I realize that he won.

“Maybe Pen has a point,” I muse.

“I’m sure she has many,” Lukas says. “What’s this specific one about?”

“You are a bit overwhelming.”

He laughs, low, amused. “Just a bit?”

“She may have been downplaying it. So I wouldn’t run.”

“She’s a great wingwoman, then.”

“Seems like it.” Why does she think you’re distant? Why can’t I reconcile the Lukas she talks about with the one I know? I ask none of this. Instead I idly step toward him, slowly glancing around the lab. It’s so wide. And we’re so alone. “What were you going to do with the flash drive?”

“Check your phone.”

I take it out of my pocket and find a text from him, delivered a few minutes ago.

LUKAS: Free?

I smile. “Is it over? Emotional support duties, I mean.”

“I hope so. Kyle and Nate took a couple of meetings today.”

Right. His cocaptains. I move closer, stopping when I notice a photo, pinned with a magnet on the upper edge of the bench. “Is that you?”

He follows my gaze to the boy with the windblown hair. There are three other men in the picture, all tall and strong-limbed, wrapping long arms around each other’s shoulders. “Yeah.”

“And the others?”

“My brothers.”

I grin and push on my toes to study it. Lukas’s siblings seem to be very similar to him in height, size, and bone structure, with occasional exceptions. Dark, long hair. A blond beard. A rounder face and fuller upper lip. Lines carved deep around a strong nose.

He is, undoubtedly, the most handsome.

I am, undoubtedly, biased.

“You have three?”

“Yup.”

“All older?”

“Quite a bit.”

“How much?”

“The second youngest is Jan, born eleven years before me. I was a surprise baby.”

“Do you get along? Do you miss them?” I don’t know why I want to gobble up crumbs of Lukas-related information. He seems willing to oblige, though.

“They’re great. And annoying, although there’s a range. Jan and I are closest—he’s the one who got me into swimming. We travel together often. Oskar, the eldest, thinks that I’m still a minor. Gives me a bedtime when I stay at his house. His kids are cute, though, so I forgive him. And Leif . . . Leif once convinced me that I had Dutch elm disease.” He shakes his head when I laugh. “I do miss them, but when I’m with them, I sometimes contemplate violence.”

“Isn’t that what being siblings is about?” Not that I would know. “How come you get your own bench as an undergrad?”

“I’ve been working with Olive for a while. Plus, she recently started out her lab, so she doesn’t have many grads.”

“Are you planning on working with her past graduation?” A thought hits me. “Did you apply for Stanford Med?”

He nods. “It’s where I hope to end up.”

“Interview?”

Another nod, but an Olympic medalist with a high MCAT score and computational biology experience? It’s a given. Thank god I don’t know his GPA, or I’d have to chug down a bottle of mercury.

“When?”

“Back in August.”

“Did you wear a suit?”

“And a fucking tie.” I laugh, and he seems to enjoy that. “Figuring out what to wear was more labor-intensive than putting on a tech suit.”

“Aww. Did you get a coach to help you?”

He fights a smile. “That’s a lot of cackling from someone who’ll go through the same process—in heels.”

“First of all, not cackling. More like gentle chortling. Second . . . how did it go?”

“I don’t know.” He notices my skeptical gaze and shrugs. “Worrying is pointless. I’ll either get in, or I won’t.”

I wish I could be as at peace as he about . . . anything, really. “And if you stay, you’ll want to keep on working with Dr. Smith?”

“If she’ll have me. I like her style. She’s hands-off, but involved. Trusts us to get shit done.”

“And I bet you hate being micromanaged.”

“You have no idea.” He cocks his head and studies me. “I bet you would, too. In the lab.”

The subtext—but not everywhere else—is loud, but it leads us into a warm patch of silence. And after that . . .

I’m not sure how it happens. Maybe he’s the one pulling me between his thighs. Maybe I step into him. All I know is that I’m in his arms, my face buried in him, his hand splayed wide on my lower back, a soothing caress above my shirt.

He inhales deeply, purposefully—looking for something he’s already familiar with, revisiting a beaten path. His skin is sandalwood. Sun. Grass. The faintest trace of chlorine. Where were you today? What did you do?

“You read the list?” he asks against the shell of my ear.

I nod into his chest. His palm slides up, to the top of my spine, a slab of heat and touch, until his thumb finds the pulse at the base of my neck, wipes back and forth over it. “Good girl.”

I close my eyes. Dissolve into the gratification of knowing that I’ve done something right. The simple pleasure of pleasing someone.

Maybe I’m fucked up. A victim of the sexist power structures that society has imposed on me. If being praised by some guy I barely know gets me going this fast, I must have internalized the same patriarchal shit that I despise outside of the bedroom. Or maybe I just am, and should stop beating myself up about this.

“Anything you want to say about that?”

I think about it in earnest, but it’s like Lukas said: there is nothing he wants that I don’t want more.

“Can you just . . .” I free my arms from between our bodies and loop them around his waist. It might be the most intimate hug I’ve ever been part of.

“Just what?”

I swallow. “I just want to be told what to do. For once.”

His fingers slide through the hair at my temple. He pulls back my head. Catches my eyes. “Will you do what I ask, then?”

I nod eagerly, feeling the slight remodeling of the energy in the lab, an empty heat inside me. A new us. This—it’s not who we are when he tells me about his med school applications, when we discuss deep learning, when we wave at each other from across the pool. This is him and me, yes, but a variation on our theme.

Outside, very little stitches us together. Here, we couldn’t be more perfect for each other.

“Can I trust you to say stop if you want me to stop?” he asks.

I nod again.

“Scarlett.”

I know exactly what he’s asking for. “You can trust me to say stop, if I want you to stop.” I swallow. My body is a vague haze of arousal, longing, of hot, liquid eagerness. “Otherwise . . .”

His eyes crease with a smile. “That’s lovely of you.” His kiss is light, sweet on my mouth. “In that case, I want you to get on your knees and go down on me.”

A scattered thought occurs to me, that Lukas might be testing me. Does she really mean it? How far is she willing to go? But it’s fleeting and immediately discarded, because in this moment only one thing matters.

He asked me to do something. And I cannot imagine anything better than to follow his instructions.

So I lower myself between the spread of his legs, letting my bare knees prop against the footrest until I’m at the perfect height. I reach for the opening of his jeans, but he stops me, one of his hands closing around both of mine as they work on a button. I freeze—I’m already messing up—but he lifts my chin and pushes back my hair to study my face at his leisure, and after a handful of seconds murmurs, “You are beautiful, Scarlett.”

They don’t sound like empty words. More like something he wanted me to know. I smile, and when he frees my hands, I get back to work, one button after the other after the other, the snapping loud in the silent lab, the fabric rustling as I reach inside his boxer briefs.

I couldn’t be less surprised by the size of him. He’s already fully hard, smells like soap and shower and skin, and I’m more turned on than I remember ever being. The seam of my shorts digs against my clit, and it feels nice—it feels good, really—but it doesn’t matter.

This is the one thing in my life that’s not about me.

Lukas’s hand cups my face, thumb pressing against the corner of my mouth. “Still okay with this?”

Another eager nod. Truth is, I don’t want him to check in on me. I want to be free of it. I want him to—

“You just want to be told exactly what to do, don’t you?” he says quietly, with a small smile. Because he truly understands. “Right now, you just want to be a mouth, huh?”

I push past the lump in my throat. “I think I do.”

His thumb slips past my lips, large, testing. He leans forward for a kiss that’s just tongue—his meeting mine over the place where his finger holds my mouth open, filthy and mind-wipingly good.

“We can make that happen, Scarlett.” He straightens back up. When he looks down at me, I think of Nordic deities and sky-sent mandates. “Open up.”

Lukas wants to be in control, and I get to do very little about it. He takes the base of his straining cock, flattens the underside against my mouth, brushes the head across my lips. He grunts as he starts feeding me the first inch, and the second, and—

“Oh, fuck.” His palm is around my jaw, controlling every movement. All I can do is keep myself open and soft for him. “I need a minute to . . .” He pulls out. Another groan. A deep inhale. He caresses my cheek gently, sweetly, like his cock is not dripping precome on the side of my mouth. “I’m going to teach you the way I like it. You want to learn, don’t you?”

It’s my purpose in life. It won’t be one hour from now, and I had no clue I cared twenty minutes ago, but now—I want nothing as intensely as this. Fuck diving, fuck med school, fuck being a productive member of society. “Please.”

He lets out a half-cursed, hushed word. I’m ready to do whatever he asks of me, but he hesitates. Takes a moment to push back the dark locks falling on my cheek, his touch kind and almost reverential. “You’re so fucking . . .”

“What?” I ask. My lips brush against his foreskin. He exhales.

“I don’t even know.” His eyes are amused, but his voice is hoarse and hungry, and then his fingers are knotting in my hair and I’m sucking around his length, an easy rhythm completely guided by him, the speed and depth his choice alone. A brief moment of adjustment as I get used to his size, to the way his hands give directions, to how easy it would be to choke on him.

“Eyes up here, Scarlett.”

My mind is a buoyant, soft space. My underwear so sticky, it’ll have to be peeled off. It’s everything I asked for. Maybe not out loud, but I doubt I could ever fully explain how much I enjoy discovering what he likes.

Lukas gets it, though. His gaze flicks between my lips and my eyes, and he understands everything about what’s happening here. “You’re doing so well.” His accent is thicker, as hefty as the wet slide of his cock on my tongue. “I thought about this a lot, and it was a great mental image, but Christ.” One finger traces my cheek, the imprint he creates from within my mouth. He mutters something in Swedish, raspy and furious and definitely filthy, desperate enough to annihilate the language barrier. “You love this, don’t you?”

His hold slackens just enough to allow a verbal response. “I do.” His thighs tense under my hands, as though he wanted to hear it as badly as I wanted to say it.

My jaw is a little sore, but I can barely feel it when he says, “That’s good. Because you look fantastic with my cock in your mouth.” He pulls me back to it, and maybe it’s my one true calling, because he’s rougher now, the strokes deeper and not as restrained. He’s too big to do anything pornographic with, but he’s willing to try, and to let me do the same. The head of his cock bumps against the inside of my cheek, then moves farther inside, a nudge, just the edge of it trying to make its way down my throat.

“Don’t worry, we’re going to—fuck—work on this. You’re doing great. So good to me,” he reassures me when I don’t have enough experience to make myself lax, like this is precisely what he wanted.

Me, trying.

And I do try. A slight push, like I can fit him inside just by will, and it must catch him off guard. There are more Swedish words, and an unsteady quality to his grip on my nape, and then he’s on the edge of coming.

“Fuck, Scarlett—”

For a second, I’m sure he’ll hold my gaze throughout. Then, just before his orgasm tears through him, his eyes close, his head tips back, and his lost expression has me moaning around his flesh. His grip strengthens around both sides of my face, and I’m convinced that there is a universe in which I could come just from this—from how much he’s enjoying it, from knowing that I did this for him, the lightness of being in my body, and not in my head.

I do my best to swallow, work convulsively, but there’s too much, the positioning’s wrong, and Lukas has to use his thumb to press what’s left of his come in my mouth. He’s slow and patient and thorough, glassy eyes and flushed freckles, and every time I suck on the pad of his finger, he lets out silent groans and something foreign that could be perfect.

I’m high-strung. Floating. Burning up. He lifts me like I weigh less than a feather, settles me on the edge of the bench. I’m almost—almost—aware of my surroundings: The pungent, chemical smells of the lab. Lukas’s biceps, steel around me. The loud tempo of his breathing.

I once learned that the fastest sprinters don’t bother taking a single breath across the entire pool. Something about the head rotations being inefficient, and the oxygen not having enough time to reach the muscles. They go totally anaerobic for twenty seconds, which means that their lung capacity must be a work of art.

And Lukas Blomqvist, the fastest person to ever swim fifty meters, is panting against the curve of my throat like there isn’t enough air in the universe to fill him up. And it takes him a while to recover, before he’s able to cup the back of my head again, his tongue in my mouth almost obscenely deep.

He’s still hard against my stomach. My arms are wedged between our torsos, as though he wants to burrow me into him. “You did really well, Scarlett.” He sounds shaken but steady. Slowly regaining control. His fingers slide down my flanks, travel down to my thighs, and . . . the hem of my shorts comes up so high, it’s easy for him to slide one hand underneath and meet the elastic of my cotton panties.

I gasp.

He smiles.

“And you know what girls who did good get?”

His thumb, the same that was in my mouth moments ago, taps faintly against my clit through my soaked underwear. I’m so swollen, so oversensitive, my whine echoes throughout the lab.

“You’re really wet, Scarlett. Aren’t you?”

I hide my moan in his neck, but he pulls me back, forcing me to meet his gaze. I know that my face is red and blotchy. I felt the tears sliding down the corners of my eyes as he came. I am mortified. Also, trembling with want.

And he knows it.

“You did so well. You deserve to come. I would love to make you come. I would pay a not insignificant amount of money to go down on you. Though you could probably come just from this.” Another slow stroke, this time against the drenched seam of my underwear. I lean in, whimper, sink my teeth into the hard muscles of his lats, but he doesn’t mind. His palm cradles the back of my head, gathering me into his skin. “The problem is, I’m not sure you want it enough yet.”

I shut my eyes and barely, barely stop myself from begging. I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to do that yet.

“Come on.”

He pulls me down from the bench. Adjusts my shorts. Straightens my tank top, pausing to swipe a finger over my hard nipple, where it sticks out against the ribbed cotton. When my breath hitches, he presses a kiss to my cheek. “So sweet,” he murmurs, and then, “let’s go.”

“Where—” I have to clear my throat. “Where are we going?”

He smiles and takes the USB out of his pocket.

“Did you forget? We have a project to work on.”