by L. D. Davis
While holding Adri in one arm, Leo rubbed my belly again and leaned in for another kiss.
“Go sit down, dolcezza,” he gently commanded.
As I waddled away to go sit, he smacked my ass.
“You’re teaching your daughter it’s okay for a man to smack her ass,” I said over my shoulder.
“Only if that man is her outstanding, incredibly handsome husband,” Leo argued.
My friends, my family, and I ate dinner outside under the stars with the sea at our backs. Ten years earlier, I would have never pictured myself there, married to Leo Pesciano with two beautiful children and one more on the way. I would have never imagined having the relationship I had with my parents, loving and kind and peaceful. I definitely never thought that my brother would have beaten his addiction and found happiness with his own family. I also never thought that I would have a life without Leslie…
We talked and laughed until the children began to grow weary. San and Rob took their kids back to their hotel. Christina and her husband went home. My parents helped me get the kids into bed while Leo cleaned up outside. After he had kissed the kids goodnight, he had to run to the restaurant for a little bit. I wandered into our new en-suite bathroom for a shower.
When we found out I was pregnant a third time, Leo and I knew we would need a bigger space, but I loved the house and the location. I didn’t want to move, and Leo was happy about that, because as I had once suspected, he bought that house with me in mind, years before we reunited. He never knew for sure whether or not he would even see me again, let alone win me over and marry me, but he bought the house because he thought it was something I would have liked. So, we didn’t move, obviously, but we did add on two more bedrooms, one and a half more baths, and an office for me with the beautiful views of the ocean that I loved.
Another thing I later discovered was when Leo planned the party that brought us together again, he did that all with the hopes that I would come. The whole thing was devised to get me to Miami!
“What would you have done if I didn’t come?” I had asked him.
“I would have done what I always do,” he had said and kissed my nose. “I would have turned the world upside down to come find you.”
When I came out of the shower, Leo was home and lying in bed in just his boxer briefs. I took a quick look at his body. His muscles were a little thicker than they were five years earlier. He looked more like a Roman god then more than ever, and sometimes, I just couldn’t get over the fact that this breathtaking man loved me, but he never gave me the opportunity to feel insecure about my changing body. He kissed each extra baby pound when we made love, and he touched me and looked at me with reverence.
“There’s my beautiful wife,” Leo said with a tired smile.
I smiled at him before disappearing into our closet. I pulled on a T-shirt that said “I’m A Total Nerd, But My Jock Husband Thinks I’m Hot.” Leo had that shirt custom made for me, another T-shirt to add to my nerdy T-shirt collection.
I pulled on a pair of panties but didn’t bother with any shorts or other bottoms. Trying to sleep while eight months pregnant was uncomfortable enough without adding in constricting clothes. If it wasn’t for the fact that we had small children, I would have probably slept in the nude—in which case I’d never sleep, because my husband would be all over me all of the time.
“How are you feeling?” Leo asked me when I came out.
“Sleepy and a little achy,” I said as I climbed into the massive bed.
Leo immediately sat up and scooted over close to me. “Tell me where you hurt,” he demanded.
There would be no shooing him away. He couldn’t stand to see me in any kind of pain.
“My lower back, as usual,” I answered.
I groaned softly when his hand made contact with my back, rubbing it in firm circular motions.
“Did you do it?” I asked him quietly after a few minutes.
“Yes,” he said. “I sent it out this morning, but I didn’t get a chance to tell you.”
“Do you think she’ll use it?”
Leo sighed. “I hope so. I don’t know how she’s going to take it, though.”
I looked over my shoulder at him. “Did we do the right thing? It’s been years since we’ve talked to her. Maybe we overstepped?”
“No, we didn’t overstep, Tabitha,” Leo said soothingly. “We did the right thing. We have no control over her reaction, we only have control over what we can do.”
We fell into silence.
Two years into our marriage, we found out through the grapevine that Leslie got pregnant again, but that time, she carried her baby to term and had a little boy. She married the father and had another little boy last year. We didn’t contact her; we left her alone. She seemed to be happy, and we were happy, so why shake things up, but two weeks earlier we found out that Leslie’s husband was killed by a hit and run driver on his way home from work one evening a couple of months before. Apparently, they had just moved to Cincinnati not long before the accident. So, Leslie was left on her own in a city where she hardly knew anyone, with two small children, a house with a mortgage, a car payment, and all of the other basics that came with having a family. Since her husband had just started his new job, there was no health insurance, no entitlements to any kind of assistance, or money from that employer. From what Sandy said, the employer did donate money to help pay for funeral expenses, but Leslie, who had become a stay at home mom, was scrambling to keep everything together.
We could have sent a sympathy card and kept moving on with our lives. Leslie was part of our past, but as I have mentioned before, my husband is a giver, and past or not, Leslie was once my closest friend. We could not ignore the fact that she needed us, even if she didn’t reach out to us and ask for help. Leo and I made more than enough money to share. So we took it upon ourselves to help Leslie out. We wrote her a check and sent it with a note telling her that we were there, that we would always be there if she needed us. We didn’t know how she would react. We didn’t know if she would tear the check up and burn the pieces. We didn’t know if she’d contact us or what she’d say if she did. My hopes were that even if Leslie hated us, that she would still use the money to help herself and her kids, but you never knew about some people, even people you used to know inside and out.
“Do you regret losing your best friend?” Leo asked me as his hand slipped under my shirt. All of these years later, his skin on my skin still burned delightfully.
“I regret losing my best friend,” I admitted. “But if I had to choose to lose her all over again, is it wrong that I would?”
“I don’t think there is a right or a wrong,” Leo said. “Had you chosen to continue to uphold the code and to hang on to your friendship, you may have ended up friendless and single, and all three of us would be unhappy because no matter what, Leslie wasn’t for me. It would have never worked out. At the same time, if you would have chosen that path, maybe you wouldn’t carry the guilt around of hurting your friend, and maybe you would have felt better about your loyalty to her.”
“I am sorry that I hurt her, but I don’t feel…guilty. How can I feel guilty? Look at the beautiful family we have. Feeling guilty would be like wishing I didn’t have any of this, and I’m sure Leslie would do everything all over again if it meant having her kids. I hope that she and her husband were really happy before he died. I hope he loved her even half as much as you love me.”
“I do love you,” he confirmed and kissed my neck. “I love you so much that I’m going to do you a favor and take you out of this shirt.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that a favor for me or you?”
“For you, dolcezza,” he cooed in my ear as he slowly pulled my shirt up my body. “I’m a generous husband, you know. I’m going to do you this favor and I’m going to do you the favor of removing these pesky underwear.”
“Well, gosh,” I said as he pulled the shirt over my head. “You really are generous.”
&n
bsp; “Mmm hmm,” he murmured as his lips touched my bare back. He moved off of the bed and had me stand up and step out of my panties. “I’ll do two more things for you,” Leo said as he gently pulled me to the other side of the room.
“What’s that?” I asked, pretending to be in suspense.
“I will take off my boxers and I will make love to you, but please,” he held up a hand. “Don’t take advantage of my generosity, Mrs. Pesciano.”
“Oh, Mr. Pesciano, I would never!”
Leo snickered as he slipped out of his boxer briefs, freeing his thick erection. He sat down in a chair, put his hands on my hips, and turned me around. He carefully pulled me back and guided me down until he was sliding inside of me. I let out a breathy moan as I slowly took him in inch by inch. Leo gently pulled me back so that I lay on his shoulder. He kissed me deeply and began to slowly move inside of me. One hand curled possessively around my throat and the other lay softly on my pregnant belly.
My body was so sensitive that every stroke drove me crazy. Every time his tongue moved against mine, I wanted him deeper inside of me. The way his hand curved around my throat made me feel possessed in the most delicious way. His hand rubbing my belly made my love for him boil over. All of this time later and I could not get enough of this man. Ever. He still made my heart flutter. He still made me blush. He still set me on fire.
That electrical heat between us would never be extinguished. It burned too bright and too hot.
I fell over the edge, crying out his name, and in those seconds, nothing else mattered, nothing else existed but us. I sat in his arms, trembling and panting, and wanting more.
“I’ll always want you,” I whisper to him. “I’ll never get enough of you.”
“You will always have me,” he promised. “amore mio, la mia vita.”
My love, my life.
The End
Things Remembered
An Accidentally On Purpose Companion Novel
Memory is a fickle thing. How do you know if what you remember is true or false? Must someone validate every thought of the past to make it real? What if our recollections differ? Then who is to say what is truth and what is fiction? What if there is no validation? What if you are haunted by memories without knowing how solid they truly are? The truth is not always what we think we know. Sometimes, the truth is not always the things we remember.
Chapter One
I was not a creature of habit. I could barely remember what I did ten minutes before, let alone what I did the day before and the day before that, and the day before that. I only had a few routines and became rather cranky when I was forced to deviate from them. I wanted to stab someone in the ear hole, steal candy from babies, and punt little dogs when my few little customs were disrupted.
Typically, only foul weather and sickness were reasons for interference. I could usually cope with that because it wasn’t like I could control the damn weather, but when it was a person that got in the way, I turned into a monster. Scratch that. I reverted to a monster.
I had just exited the coffee shop I went to every morning when someone on the street called my name. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, pissing off some commuters in the process, and did a complete three-sixty in search of the person who had called me. I didn’t see one face I recognized, other than the same faces of strangers I saw every day on my way to work.
“Mayson Grayne,” the masculine voice said without any doubt about who I was.
I looked to my right just as a man stepped out of the crowd and stopped a foot away from me. He stared at me as if I had just fallen out of the sky. I stared back with an open mouth as familiarity clicked into place.
Some people don’t age well, but some look better with age. The man that stood in front of me was an example of the latter. In most respects, he looked very much the same. His skin still looked like smooth, deep chocolate. His brown eyes seemed to carry the weight of life in them, but they were still basically the same eyes I had peered into millions of times.
The short-trimmed beard was a new addition since he was almost always clean shaven when I used to know him. His hair was also a little different, cut neat and close to his head. He was nearly a foot taller than me. I used to have to stand on my toes just for my lips to graze his jaw.
The biggest difference, I couldn’t help but notice, was his body. He had always been in good shape, but the body in front of me was in better than “good” shape. It was the body of a man, not of a young guy still growing into his.
He looked at me appraisingly head to toe and then back again. “You look amazing.”
I blinked away my astonishment as a sudden surge of anger made me squeeze my coffee cup so hard it was in danger of being crushed in my hand.
The bitterness rolled off my tongue easily. “Not bad for a girl that you expected to be dead by now.”
“I am very glad to see that you aren’t dead,” he said solemnly.
“If you actually gave a damn about me not dying, you would have checked in every once in a while to confirm that I was still alive.” I began to turn away but stopped suddenly and gestured angrily at him with the hand holding my bagged pastry. “You were right about one thing, though. I didn’t need you. I didn’t need you then and I don’t need you now.”
I turned my back to him and continued on my way to work as I felt his eyes burning into my back. I ignored the trembling of my hands and my erratic heartbeat.
I made it to work a few minutes later than my usual, which made a world of difference. The elevators were more crowded, so it took me a few minutes longer to get to my floor with all the stops along the way.
One of the reasons I made concerted efforts to get into my office early was so that I didn’t have to encounter the group I called The Mommies. It was a group of about six women who clustered together to discuss their dried up breast milk and clumsy toddlers and such. They loved to catch me and force cell phone pictures of their stupid kids in my face. Since I was the Personnel Manager, I very well couldn’t tell The Mommies to fuck off. Not at all. I had to indulge them and comment on how well their kids were growing and make them feel good about themselves by telling them that their ugly-as-sin children were beautiful.
I didn’t have anything against kids, not really. My cousins’ kids were like my nieces and nephews and I loved them dearly, but I didn’t care much for other peoples’ children. I thought they were weird, that they smelled funny, and were life suckers. They sucked the life and fun out of everything around them with their sticky hands, whiny crying, and their constant need for attention. Kids weren’t for me, and The Mommies didn’t get that. They always wanted to know when I was going to settle down and have a few offspring of my own.
I wanted to tell them that I’d settle down in my grave when I was dead, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t have gone over well. So, I smiled and did all I turned my back to him and continued on my way to work as I felt his eyes burning into my back. I ignored the trembling of my hands and my erratic heartbeat.
the formalities and always just barely escaped with my life.
After getting stuck with The Mommies, I was nearly twenty minutes later than my usual time by the time I made it to my office. When I finally settled down in my chair and turned on the small radio, I realized that I had missed my favorite segment of the morning radio show I listened to every morning. Not that I would have heard a damn thing they said with his voice still echoing in my head.
When I took my first sip of coffee, I was extremely dissatisfied to find it lukewarm at best, instead of the steamy hot temperature I enjoyed. I couldn’t reheat it because it just didn’t taste the same afterward, and I couldn’t eat my pastry because the pastry and the coffee went hand in hand.
I was ready to flip my desk over and trash my office. That damn man threw off my whole day. It was scarcely eight-thirty in the morning and my entire day was already misaligned. Nothing would go right for the rest of the day. Life was going to be that much harder becau
se I couldn’t enjoy a few minutes with my coffee and chocolate croissant.
Most people that had a rough day got over it with a drink or a chat with a loved one, or just slept it off. It meant something entirely different for me. Even after years of being clean, my first inclination when my day was shoddy was to get high. Yes, I realize how ridiculous it may seem to you that a lukewarm coffee and an unappetizing donut could cause such strife, but it wasn’t so much about me being a picky eater as it was about control. Having a modicum of control over something that may seem so insignificant to you was a huge deal for me. Look at how fast my morning spun out of control, how quickly my personal time was taken away from me.
Regardless of how disgruntled I was, however, I had to swallow it down and pretend that all was well in my world. There were meetings to attend, decisions to be made, paperwork to be done, and a plethora of people depending on me. I had to smile and pretend that everything was all right, even though I felt a loss of control inside.
I made it through most of my day without snapping, but that man kept bobbing around my mind like a man-buoy.
There were many holes and fog in my memory from years of doing drugs. Over the years, I had managed to nudge him from my everyday thoughts until he was almost as good as those missing and abridged memories. However, he’d played a part in one of the memories I could not eradicate.
The dead girl. Lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling with sightless eyes. As paramedics repeatedly ask me questions, I only see the dead girl and the young man weeping over her body. He looks up at me then. He meets my eyes just before I am carried away.
They were his eyes, the eyes of the man I saw on the street outside the coffee shop.
The eyes of one Grant Alexander.
Chapter Two
“Excuse me. Pardon me. Watch your toes. Excuse me.”
I awkwardly scooted past the four people occupying the flimsy folding chairs to my own crappy chair. I sat down and handed one of two cups to the man next to me who had most likely reserved my seat with only a discouraging glare from his cold brown eyes.