My hands were shaking a bit, which made it hard to turn the key. My heart pounded, and I could even see my pulse thumping on the insides of my wrists. I tried a calming breath, but I knew there was nothing panicky about how I was feeling—I was just as excited as Mayra was.
“Let’s do the rest!” Mayra beamed at me as she held up a pile of envelopes full of cash.
We stopped at the local animal shelter, the community center, the homeless shelter, and the VA. At each stop, we left the envelopes quickly and quietly before rushing out again. Once we’d hit all the charities in Oxford, we placed envelopes of cash in the mailboxes of all our friends and teachers.
We found ourselves smiling a lot when we glanced at each other on the way back to my house. As soon as I parked the car in the driveway, we both leapt out and ran for the house. I fumbled with my key while my heart pounded, and Mayra shoved past me as soon as the door was opened. She ran straight into the living room and threw herself on the couch, laughing.
“Oh my God, that was awesome!” she cried out.
Caught up in her enthusiasm, I flung myself through the air and landed on top of her. She continued to laugh as I kissed her neck and her shoulder and then quickly moved her shirt up so I could kiss and poke the birthmark next to the strap of her bra. She coiled her hands into the hair on the sides of my head and brought my face to hers for a long, deep kiss.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you and your ideas,” I told her. “I never would have thought to give half of it to Aimee and Scott for the baby. They were both so worried.”
“And now they don’t have to be.”
“Aimee is almost as lucky to have you in her life as I am,” I said, and I leaned back down to kiss her again.
“Feels good to do something like that, doesn’t it?” Mayra said with a nod. “And they’ll never know where it came from, thanks to Dr. Harris.”
“That works for me,” I replied with a smile.
I couldn’t deny how happy the day of altruism made me feel, so I pulled the feelings close to me, turned them around inside of myself, and gave them back to Mayra a thousand times over.
~oOo~
I was deliriously happy.
Still psyched from sneaking around Aimee’s house and running off without getting caught, I finally got to use two of the three condoms tucked into the little drawer of the end table in the living room. When Mayra saw I had them stashed there, it led her to ask where else I had them hidden, which led to a weeklong “Where shall we have sex now?” marathon.
Today, we were in the overstuffed blue chair in the living room—the last piece of furniture in the living room we hadn’t christened. Mayra was on top of me with her hands pressed against the arm of the chair above my head, while I had my legs dangling over the opposite arm. It gave me great leverage, and I met every movement as she bounced on top of me.
In the background, I could just barely hear the television. It was tuned to the local news, which was continuing its story about the anonymous donations that had been showing up all over town, speculating about the donor’s ties to the lottery ticket winner, and hypothesizing where money was going to show up next.
“Do you know how much I love that?” I asked as I pulled her by her shoulders until her ear was near my mouth. “How it drives me nuts when your tits bounce around?”
Once I figured out how much she liked it when I talked like that, the words just kind of started to flow naturally.
Mayra smiled slyly and leaned back a little, giving me a better view. Moving my hands down to grip her hips, I started increasing the pace as she rode me.
“Oh, fuck! Matthew!”
“You like that, dontcha?” I growled as I pushed against her. She buried her face in my shoulder and moaned. “Dirty…little…ugh!”
She collapsed on me as I collapsed in the chair. I reached my hand around her head and entwined my fingers in her hair, pulling her head back enough to kiss her softly.
That’s when the doorbell rang.
“Shit, shit, shit!” I scrambled around in the chair, almost dumping Mayra on the floor in the process. She moved a lot more gracefully, jumping up and off of me and grabbing her jeans in one fluid motion while I struggled with the condom. My sweats were on the floor nearby, and I hauled them up over my hips while Mayra pulled my T-shirt on over her head.
“What am I going to wear?”
“You can go shirtless!
” she hissed. “It’ll take forever to button up mine!”
She rolled my boxers and her shirt up in a ball and then tossed them, along with the condom, back behind the chair, which made me cringe. She quickly tried to straighten her hair with her fingers as she motioned for me to answer the door. I rubbed my hands over my face a couple of times and then walked to the foyer as calmly as I could. I opened the door slowly and peered around the edge. Who I saw there had me so flabbergasted, I couldn’t move or talk.