The Imperfections: A Forbidden Romance

by Sam Mariano

  Our shower? “We showered together,” I say flatly, like that’s a thing I remember doing. I must look skeptical, though, because she responds to it like a question anyway.

  Frowning slightly, she nods. “After you took my ass and we talked in bed, we took a shower before we went to sleep.” Her frown deepens, then I see alarm starting to blossom. “Do you… not remember?”

  “No, I—I remember.”

  I search my hollow memory for what she’s telling me happened last night. I believe her, I just don’t know why I can’t recall any of it. I’ve only blacked out once in all my years, but right now I’m searching for missing memories of last night and I can’t find them.

  I took her ass? What did we talk about in bed? We showered afterward? What the fuck happened last night?

  I search my memory and remember driving when I left the bar. I remember now, pulling into Alyssa’s driveway and looking at the damned screen door hanging off her house, but I don’t remember a thing after that.

  Of fucking course I can’t remember the good parts.

  Made myself a big fucking mess and don’t even get to enjoy memories of it.

  When I look at Alyssa, she’s still frowning, clearly not convinced. “You remember?”

  “Well, I don’t remember the shower,” I offer, flicking a glance at the towel.

  “It was a nice shower,” she tells me kinda softly, like she’s bummed I don’t remember it.

  “I’m sure it was.” I reach out and caress her face. “I’m sorry, I remember some of last night, but I have some missing pieces, too.”

  “Of course you do,” she murmurs, sounding so damn disappointed.

  I’m so pissed at myself for allowing this to happen.

  “I’m sorry, Alyssa. I never drink that much, I don’t…” Looking her over, I ask, “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  Alyssa shakes her head, then looks up at me again, but there’s no more sparkle in her eyes. “What do you remember?”

  “I remember I came to your house, but I don’t remember coming inside.”

  “Do you remember kissing me?”

  I don’t, and I feel too bad claiming a memory like that if I wasn’t entirely there for it. She sees the answer on my face without my even having to say it, so I don’t bother verifying. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you remember having sex with me at all?”

  I grimace and shake my head no.

  “And I’m sure you remember none of the stuff we talked about in bed afterward,” she states, sounding morose and a little annoyed.

  “I didn’t realize I had that much to drink,” I tell her. “Maybe if you tell me what was said, it’ll jog my memory.”

  Shaking her head, still seething with annoyance, she whips back the little bit of sheet covering her legs and grabs the towel as she rolls off her side of the bed, then throws it on the floor. “You blocked out every bit of time you spent with me last night. Every bit of it.”

  She’s right, I did. It’s not like I did it on purpose, though.

  “Hey, come here,” I say, sitting up a little as she storms toward my bathroom.

  “Why?” she demands. “I need to get dressed so you can take me home.”

  I know I don’t exactly have the upper hand here, but like I do, I point down firmly on my side of the bed. “Get your pretty little ass over here.”

  She glares at me but stops moving toward the bathroom and walks over to where I summoned her, anyway. “What?”

  “Don’t be mad at me,” I say more coaxingly, grabbing her and pulling her down on top of me on the bed.

  “You erased me,” she states resentfully, like I did it on purpose.

  “I didn’t do it, the whiskey did,” I explain.

  “And who held a gun to your head and made you drink all that whiskey?” she demands, cocking an expectant eyebrow at me.

  “Well, no one. But, in fairness, if I hadn’t consumed all that whiskey, there’d be nothing to remember in the first place. I would’ve driven my ass home and gone to bed alone like I should have. The whiskey was a friend and a foe last night, apparently.”

  “Some friend,” she mutters, still looking dejected.

  “It won’t happen again,” I tell her. “I’m sorry it did last night. I intended to leave you alone.”

  Her eyes narrow. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  I lock my arms around her so she can’t roll off me since it looks like she’s about one more wrong comment away from it. “I’m only trying to do right by you, Alyssa.”

  Rolling her eyes, she says, “Yeah, well, I like your idea of doing right by me a whole lot better when you’ve consumed too much whiskey. Sober Brant’s idea of doing right by me is decidedly less impressive, now that I have a comparison.”

  Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good. “What did drunk Brant say to you last night?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she mutters, starting to roll off me, but I don’t let go, so she’s trapped. “Let me up.”

  “Not until you tell me what I said.”

  “No,” she says, more adamantly than I expect from her. “It was hard enough talking to you about this the first time—I’m not doing it again. Clearly the offer only stood while you were drunk, anyway, so there’s no point. Now, let me up or I’m not making you breakfast.”

  My lips curve up faintly. “You’re mad at me and you’re still gonna make me breakfast?”

  “Not if you get all arrogant about it,” she tells me, lifting her eyebrows, full of attitude.

  Rather than let her go, I lock my arms around her tighter. “Now, hang on just a minute.” I keep one arm around her, but I let the other one slide down the curve of her back until I can cup her butt in my hand. “If you don’t want to tell me anything else, you’ve at least gotta tell me about when I took this. It’s not fair that I don’t get to remember that.”

  “You’ll get no sympathy from me,” she states stubbornly. “And you should be bummed you missed out, because it was really good.” Apparently deciding she would rather torture me than pout, she leans in close to my ear. She grabs my earlobe between her teeth, then releases it and drops a few kisses against my neck. “When we were in my bed at home, you snuck into my room, climbed on top of me, and told me how badly you needed my pussy.”

  I swallow, pleasure following in the wake of her words. “Oh, did I?”

  “Mm-hmm. You kissed me and touched me, and being the nice girl I am, of course I spread my legs and let you fuck me. Once wasn’t enough, though. You wanted more.”

  “That sounds right,” I murmur as my eyes drift shut. Then they pop open again, because she said I fucked her in her bedroom, but we’re in mine now. Fear travels down my spine, replacing the pleasure. “Jesus Christ, you didn’t get in the truck with me like that, did you?”

  “Of course I got in the truck with you,” she says, pulling back to frown down at me.

  “Alyssa,” I say, wide-eyed. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

  Her scowl deepens then clears. “I drove,” she explains.

  I sink back into the bed, some of the tension easing out of my shoulders. “Oh, thank fuck. Don’t ever get in a car when a drunk person is driving.”

  “You’re fathering me again,” she states.

  “I am not fathering you—that’s common sense. You scared the shit out of me. I thought I drove you here and I was ready to kick my own ass.”

  Her lips curve up a bit. “No. You were too drunk to drive home, so I insisted on driving your big-ass truck. Anyway, Scout was happy to see me, but someone else was even happier.” Reaching down between our bodies, she rubs her hand against my hardening cock, in case I wasn’t sure who she meant.

  Her soft touch brings even more blood rushing to my groin than already was. “Hey now, you’re gonna get him all excited.”

  “He got pretty excited last night,” she tells me as she continues to rub me.

  “I bet he did.”

  “You took my pussy.” S
he kisses my neck again to punctuate the statement. “You took my ass. You were all worked up because Theo—”

  My grip on her tightens at the sound of that little bastard’s name, and she brings her gaze to mine, watching me warily.

  “Because Theo had me,” she finishes, holding my gaze. “You were jealous.”

  I lock my jaw, irritated that she’s bringing that up, but she offers me an unexpected, almost playful smile.

  “You were better,” she tells me, rubbing my cock again.

  That shouldn’t soothe my damned soul so much, but it does. “Oh, was I?”

  Alyssa nods, curling her hand around my now entirely hard cock and stroking it. “More loving. More passionate. Less selfish. Just better in every way.”

  All of that sounds right. Goddamned Theo.

  “You made me come three times, then again in the shower,” she offers rather casually. Then she releases my cock and shifts, reaching over onto the bedside table on my side.

  “What are you… doing?” I ask, turning my head to look. She grabs a bottle of lube that’s sitting there.

  Wordlessly, she pops it open and squeezes some onto her fingers, then she lifts her hips, slides her hand down between us, and spreads lube inside her pussy. My cock jerks, then her lubed-up hand curls around it.

  A moment later, she’s sliding down over my cock, and I’m throwing my head back against the pillow, helpless as I push through her wet heat.

  “Fuck, Alyssa.”

  She reaches over and puts the lube down then grabs my shoulder. “You only came three times last night. I owe you one.”

  “Three times?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she murmurs back as she moves up and down on my cock, her pretty little tits bouncing with the effort. “Once in my bedroom when you fucked my pussy and came inside me. Once in my ass, after you fucked my pussy for a second time, but not until you came. Then after you fingered me in the shower, I couldn’t leave you uncomfortable, so when we came back to bed, I sucked your cock.”

  Goddamn, it sounds like I had a hell of a night. “Pretty pissed off I can’t remember any of that.”

  “Last night I would have said it doesn’t matter, you could experience it all again tonight if you felt like it, but now…it seems like you’re not going to get a repeat performance.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask with some effort as her tight little pussy clenches around me and steals some of my ability to think rationally.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says instead of explaining.

  Since Alyssa’s fucking me, I can’t focus on the conversation anyway. She rides me until I come, then relaxes on top of me and lets me hold her for a little while.

  Once I’ve recovered my strength, she climbs off and heads wordlessly to the bathroom to get dressed. I leave her to it, pulling on some clean clothes and heading downstairs to start a pot of coffee.

  When she comes down, she’s wearing a pretty little sundress, lavender with dainty white flowers, the neckline cut to show off her cleavage. It has tiny buttons down the chest, and when she turns around, I see the material is cut out so most of her back is showing.

  I can see from the backless part she’s not wearing a bra, and I’m sorely tempted to walk over and take those tits in my hands. Before I can convince myself that’s a good idea, she starts moving around my kitchen, making us both breakfast.

  I let her do her thing in peace, ’cause I like watching her and I don’t like making her mad, and reminding her I don’t recall anything that happened last night seems like a sure way to do that. I wait until she puts my plate down in front of me, then goes to the other side of the table and sits down with her own plate before I bring it back up.

  “So, uh, what was said during this talk we had in my bed last night?”

  “I told you, I don’t want to talk about it again.”

  “Well, I know you did, but that doesn’t seem fair to you. Seems like I must’ve said some things that made you happy to wake up to me this morning, and I’d like a chance to…”

  She gives me a minute, but when I’m not sure how to finish that sentence, she offers her own suggestion. “What? You’d like a chance to backpedal and tell me I should’ve known by the things you were saying it was just the whiskey talking? Maybe I should have, but you were damn convincing…or maybe I just wanted you to be, I don’t know,” she mutters, stabbing some scrambled eggs with the tines of her fork and popping them in her mouth.

  “I was gonna say, I’d like a chance to explain myself,” I tell her evenly.

  Shaking her head and looking at her plate, she says, “Trust me, you don’t.”

  “Why don’t we let me decide that?”

  “Fine,” she says, stabbing another piece of egg more violently. She puts it in her mouth and chews like she needs a minute to gather enough gumption, then she looks up at me a little rebelliously and says, “We decided to date. We were going to sneak around for a while since the stakes are so high for you, to make sure we worked before we made any kind of commitment. Then, if things didn’t go the way we thought they would and we didn’t think we’d work out, we’d go our separate ways, both of us knowing it didn’t work out for the right reasons.”

  I put my fork down and look at her across the table. If it didn’t work out was never the problem; that’s easy. If I only wanted to fuck around with her for a while, I know I could. She’s made that clear enough. The problem is, I can’t use her that way knowing she wants more and I’ll never find myself in a position to give it to her.

  Since she doesn’t seem to be freely offering the magical plan she and whiskey-soaked Brantley cooked up to solve this problem I can’t solve sober, I go ahead and ask. “And was there a plan for if it did work out? ’Cause so far, I’m not hearing anything I haven’t already thought of, but it’s just an excuse to lead you on for a little longer, not a solution to our problem.”

  She takes a drink of her orange juice, then another bite of egg. At first I think she’s just stalling while she musters the courage to say it, but after a couple more bites, I start to think she’s not going to answer me at all.

  “Alyssa?”

  Her cheeks are pink and she shakes her head. “Forget it. I can’t say it now. It sounded crazy last night, but it sounds crazier today and I just… I’m not going to do that to myself. You’re not going to go for it now, anyway.”

  “Did I think it was crazy last night, or did I agree with you?”

  “You agreed with it and built upon it. I only suggested one crazy thing. You took it and ran with it.”

  Fantastic. I take a sip of my coffee. Then, as I’m putting it back on the table, I tell her, “Well, go on and tell me.”

  “I can’t. You’ll laugh or ridicule me or do something awful to hurt my feelings, and then I’ll stab you with this fork.”

  “Alyssa,” I say firmly, keeping my gaze locked on her. “I won’t do any of that. Tell me what we said.”

  She’s quiet for so long I don’t think she’s going to speak again, but then she suddenly bursts out with, “You basically said it’s not the fact that I was with Theo that’s the unsurpassable problem, it was more because I’m pregnant. You said Bri might start to get suspicious once she finds out, since she knew I didn’t have a boyfriend or anyone in the picture who could have feasibly impregnated me. Since I was babysitting for her when it happened, you thought in that scenario, she might eventually figure out about me and Theo.”

  She pauses to breathe, so I nod for her to continue.

  “And then I told you, if you were to introduce me to Bri and the rest of your family as yours, they would see someone in the picture who could have impregnated me. No one else would cross Bri’s mind, because…she would think my baby is yours.”

  It’s a damn good thing I’m not taking a drink when she says that, because I think I’d probably choke. I’m aware of her watching me like a hawk, waiting for me to react the way she said I would so she can jump all over my ass and tell me this is wh
y she didn’t want to say anything. So, even though it surprises the hell out of me that she’d even suggest that, I keep my expression schooled and nod my head again.

  “All right,” I say slowly. “And what did I say to that?”

  Sighing with regret, she throws her napkin down on the table. “A lot of stupid sexy things, but… mainly you said everyone in your family knows if you knocked a woman up, stranger or not, you’d marry her.” She darts another look in my direction. “And then you started talking about how if we decided to rewrite history that way, we would have to really be committed to it, how we would be committed to each other, and…how the next baby I had would be yours.”

  I do pretty well keeping my face impassive until she drops that last bomb, then my jaw drops open a couple inches and my eyebrows rise.

  I close my mouth as fast as I can, but I’m trying to mull over what she’s telling me. “Are you saying I essentially offered to be the father of your baby, lie to my sister about it, and marry you?”

  “If it worked out between us, yes.” Still defensive, she refuses to look at me as she stabs more pieces of scrambled egg. “I warned you that you were going to think it was crazy.”

  “Why didn’t you think it was crazy?” I ask without giving it proper thought.

  Her eyes widen. “I did! But then you said all these things I liked, and before I knew it…it started to sound really good. You didn’t agree to all that irrevocably. All we settled on was being together right now and not telling anyone about it while we test the waters. The marriage and babies stuff was only if it worked out and we wanted to be together, because you keep saying there’s no way. There is a way, it’s just…”

  “Crazy,” I finish for her.

  She looks at her plate instead of me, but she frowns. “I know we haven’t known each other for very long and I know the circumstances make it a little crazier, but the idea of you marrying me if you liked me enough isn’t that crazy. You said yourself, it’s not like women are lined up on your 30-mile-long driveway waiting to marry you. You keep to yourself and you get lonely,” she states, her tone a little harsher since I’ve pissed her off. “You like me, your dog likes me, I’d make a damn good wife—you’d be lucky to have me.”