Deedee’s Holiday
IV
Our first stop was Barcelona. One short flight and we were in a similar city at a similar hotel, but no longer in separate rooms. I wasn’t sure if our drunken rendezvous had been a one-time deal. I definitely hoped it wasn’t, but just to be safe, I booked a room with two beds. I figured the possibility would still be there, but I wasn’t quite ready to sleep next to a woman I’d met two weeks ago, even if she was a goddess dream girl. With my team in a different time zone, my sleep schedule was already erratic; I knew I’d never get a good night’s sleep with the object of my obsession lying mere inches away. Or even worse, cuddled up against me. Worse slash better.
Even with separate beds, sharing the same space still took some getting used to. We had breakfast in the hotel restaurant on our first Monday in Barcelona, and Delia’s was almost as indulgent as that brunch in Ibiza.
“What’s your plan for the day?” I asked. “Drinks by the pool?”
She gazed wistfully out at the Mediterranean through the hotel’s window-lined South wall. “That’d be amazing, but I should probably get some work done.”
“Another photo shoot?” I was supposed to help my team review a contract proposal, but I was already drafting excuses to get out of it.
Delia shook her head, resting a hand briefly on her stomach. “Not when I’m all bloated like this. I have to do shoots and try-ons before I eat, especially when I’m on vacation.”
She’d come so close to saying the quiet part out loud: She ate more when she was on vacation. “Makes sense,” I said, hoping I sounded nonchalant.
“Anyway, my buffer’s getting low, so I should work on my drafts.”
“Your buffer?”
“Yeah, I get more traffic if I make a few posts a day instead of a big spam. It also gives me more stuff to post when I’m home.”
“You don’t make content at home?”
“I do, but the destination stuff does better. Well, try-on hauls do the best. Really, it’s all about mixing things up. I’ve seen girls get a million likes doing the same thing every video… couldn’t be me. I’d get too bored.”
I assumed she meant girls who did “office siren” scenes or soft JOI stuff like countdowns and staring contests. Saying as much would give me away as the pathetic simp I was, so I asked, “Is that why you do some photos and some videos? In different outfits?”
“Basically, yeah. Some lip-syncs, some just music, dances, get ready with me’s…”
“Whatever keeps it fresh and interesting?”
“You get it.”
The meal was charged to our room, so we left the restaurant together. While waiting for the elevator, I said, “I have to do some work, too, but let me know if I can help.”
I’m still not sure what gave me the balls to offer, but I was living in a low-key dream world. “I mean, you know your shit better than me, but if you want a second opinion on drafts or whatever…”
“Don’t gas me up too much; I’m really just guessing and trying to get ahead of trends instead of chasing.”
“I bet it’s lots of trial and error.”
“For real.”
Delia offered to let me use the room’s desk while she sat on her bed with her laptop. I went through my emails and chatted with my team for almost an hour before I had to relocate. The desk had a mirror in front of it, and if seeing my own reflection every time I looked up wasn’t distracting enough, it gave me a direct view behind me: Deedee, reclining on a pile of pillows like a Greek goddess. The glow of her screen highlighted the gentle lines of her face and the soft swell of her breasts, squeezed into a crop top that was definitely tighter than when I’d first seen it. She caught me looking a few times, giving me one of those friendly, knowing smiles I knew so well from her videos.
“I’m gonna go down to the business center,” I said. “I have to make some client calls.”
“Oh. You won’t bother me. Or I can go, if you want to use the room?”
“Nah, you’re good. I’ll probably need to use the printer, anyway.” My business was completely paperless, but I couldn’t tell her the real reason. It was simply too distracting to see femme perfection in the corner of my eye while I tried to get work done.
***
Our first week continued in variations of this pattern. I had busy days and quiet days, so I’d let Delia know in the mornings when I was free to hang out. We shared most meals and went exploring when she didn’t have to work or do photo shoots. She always waited for me to do the shoots, too. I got to see every outfit, pose, and lip-sync in person, raw and unfiltered.
The only thing we didn’t do that week was have a repeat of that night in Ibiza. In truth, I remembered very little of it. I remembered dancing at the club, I remembered getting drunk, I remembered kissing Delia, and I remembered waking up in her bed. Everything between the club and the morning after was a foggy blur. After Delia and I had brunch, I went back to my room, checked in with my team, and tried to recover from one of the worst hangovers of my life. Bits and pieces of the night before came to me in flashes, short scenes like the “previously on” at the beginning of a TV episode. Kissing Delia, my hands on her body, her hands on mine, gripping her thighs as she ground herself on my leg, her squeezing my ass as I lay on top of her…
I could remember the sensation of my face buried between those glorious tits, but I couldn’t remember what they looked like naked. My lack of memories frustrated me almost as much as my burning need to experience those sensations again. All of them. The holding, the touching, the grinding, the loving. The burning, the wanting, the needing, the taking, the giving, the sharing…
As hazy as my memories were, I felt certain it had been better than any “first time” I’d ever had. Sure, it couldn’t compete with the best of the best times. Deep in a loving relationship, the icy fire of mid-argument hate fucking, the hungry aching ecstasy of make-up sex, or the gentle harmony of two people who knew each other inside and out. Mind, body, and soul knowing the other even better than she knew herself. Of all my random hookups and all the times a relationship finally got to that next level, that night had been far better than any “first time.” Far better than my first “first time” and far, far better than the handful of times I’d tried men.
That night with Delia had been exceptional, one of a kind. And maybe that’s why it took so long for it to happen again. How could a sequel ever live up to the original? The literal pussy on a pedestal that lived rent-free in the blacked-out snippets of my memory?
Delia didn’t bring it up again after that next morning, and being too self-conscious to do so myself, I was left to fill in those blanks with my own traitorous imagination. Had she regretted it? Did she think it was a mistake? Had she been even drunker than I was and forgotten how good it was? Was it even good for her? Were my gaps repressed memories of gaffs and blunders, leaving me deluded that it’d been better than it was?
Terrified of those answers, terrified of the worst-case scenario—or really, any scenario that didn’t measure up to the ecstatic bliss I remembered—I stayed silent. We didn’t meet up again the night before we left Ibiza. Delia said she didn’t want to fly hungover, no matter how short the flight, and I couldn’t argue with that logic. So, I consoled myself with an extra-long shower, replaying the image of Delia packing away Eggs Benedict with sides of croissants and churros, imagining just where all those excess carbs and sugar would go.
Delia’s spoon tinkled against her glass bowl as she scraped the last bit of cream from her Arroz con leche.
“This was such a good idea. I was not ready to go home yet. It’s still barely ten degrees back there.”
“Ten? In April?” Before she had a chance to clarify, I realized she obviously meant Celsius, which would make it about 50º. Three weeks in Spain were not enough to make me fluent in metric.
“Never mind, I’m an idiot,” I said. “Yeah, I think it’s a little warmer down in Indiana, but not much.”
Delia leaned back on both arms, her palms sinking into her mattress. She was obviously still in “vacation eating mode.” It was Saturday, and although she’d had a very light breakfast before we went out for a photo shoot on the veranda overlooking the Mediterranean, she’d had a massive order of croquetas for lunch and a steady stream of tapas while we lounged by the pool. We had dinner delivered to our room; another paella for her, and a salad for me. And, of course, the dessert.
Delia’s white-and-navy-striped onesie pajamas clung like a second skin to the taut dome of her middle. Her incredible boobs bulged out of the top while her increasingly decadent thighs oozed from the bottom. She looked more delicious than the desserts she’d just devoured.
Despite our afternoon of lazy indolence, we were not drunk. We weren’t sober, either, but the bottle of wine we’d ordered with dinner still held nearly a third of its maroon contents. Delia pushed back the covers from her bed, beginning what had become our nightly ritual of watching whatever movie was on the hotel TV. The activity was passive enough to let me check in with my team if I needed to. But it was the weekend, so my laptop was closed and my phone face down on the nightstand. I stood and pulled the sheets back on my own bed when a pair of hands lightly brushed my sides. I stiffened at the touch.
“Just because we have two beds… doesn’t mean we have to use them both,” she whispered, the warmth of her breath tickling my ear.
I couldn’t help myself. “You sound like a rom-com character.”
Her gentle touch became rough as she spun me around. Her tits were inches from my face, but I was staring into her eyes like the characters I’d just mocked. Delia said, “Shut up and kiss me, you fuckin’ nerd.”
I was more than happy to comply.