by R. K. Lilley
“Yeah,” he said into the phone, his free arm moving to drape over my shoulder. “I’ll take a large pie, thin crust with jalapeños, chicken, and sausage. Extra sauce.”
When he hung up I pushed play on the movie again.
We sat stiffly like that for a few minutes before I felt him put pressure on my shoulders, pulling me back more firmly against him.
“Relax,” he said into my hair. “I won’t bite. Just lay on me.”
I tried, but it was impossible to relax like that. He wasn’t relaxed either though, to be fair. I could feel the tension coiled in him like a spring about to bust.
I wiggled my hips, pushing closer to him. He jerked like I’d hurt him, and I stopped. And that’s when I felt it, that hardness poking into me from behind, through our clothes.
I swallowed and spoke, my voice like a croak, “Is this comfortable? Should I move?”
He didn’t answer, but he was breathing hard into my ear.
I laid back, putting the weight of my shoulders more firmly to his chest. I wasn’t any more relaxed, but I didn’t really care. This felt better than relaxed, like something important was happening, and I didn’t want it to stop.
His arm around me moved suddenly, went up, gripping the top of the sofa above us, his knuckles white with the pressure of it.
I started to sit up to look at him, but he stopped me with a touch from his free hand to my belly.
I stilled, my eyes glued to that hand and the way it kept moving, stroking my stomach, pushing me harder into him.
I didn’t stop him, and he just kept rubbing. I started to move my hips, rubbing against that foreign hardness at my back. He didn’t stop me.
This went on for some time. Not progressing, but not stopping, which seemed like enough for a while.
Until it wasn’t. Eventually I craved more contact. I wasn’t sure what. It was a tangible desire for something intangible.
Feeling drugged, my body heavy and aching, I started to turn.
I pushed my chest to his. His eyes were on mine as we breathed each other’s air, our lips less than an inch away.
I don’t even know how it happened, but he was suddenly sitting up and I was straddling him, my fingers in his hair, his hands on my hips.
He was panting into my mouth, and I didn’t know what to do with myself I loved it so much.
He’s finally going to kiss me, I thought in wonder.
I’d been waiting for this for what felt like my whole life. And, at last, it was going to happen.
I didn’t move to him. I wanted him to make the move. I held perfectly still as he leaned that last inch toward me.
The doorbell rang, breaking the spell.
I scrambled off him, cursing in my head. My first kiss ruined by the fucking pizza man.
I was sullen as I grabbed the two cleanest plates I could find and laid them out on the coffee table.
We ate in silence, the movie playing on. I had two slices, Dante the rest. There wasn’t so much as a crumb left by the time he was done. He always ate like that, and it was no surprise with the way he was growing.
He got up, threw the box away, and joined me again on the couch, throwing his arm over my shoulder.
I shrugged it off. I felt my temper suddenly brewing. It felt separate from me at times like this, a storm out of my control. I couldn’t have calmed it if I’d wanted to. I only seemed to know how to fuel it. Every bitter pill I’d ever swallowed was lodged somewhere inside of me, just waiting for these moments.
“So that girl you’re going to marry,” I ground out, voice tight and angry. “Is she nice?” I turned my head to watch his reaction.
He shot me a genuinely baffled look. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Tiffany. Fanny. Your mom told me all about her.”
“What? Who?”
“Tiffany Vanderkamp. Ring a bell?”
He looked no less confused as he said, “That’s the daughter of my mom’s best friend. I barely know her. What on earth does she have to do with anything?”
My eyes narrowed on him, looking for any signs of deceit. “Your mom told me you were going to marry her after you graduate from college.”
His mouth twisted, and he glared back at me, his own temper coming out to play.
It seemed to instantly quiet my own. I acknowledged to myself that some perverse part of me loved to rile him.
“You know my mom is crazy. She was fucking with your head. It’s what she does. I can’t believe you let her get to you. You’re smarter than that.”
My head cleared like I’d been lost in a fog and I was suddenly out of it. He was right. His mother was nuts, and this was just the kind of thing she’d pull whether there was truth to it or not.
“So you know this means she’s going to try to get you to marry that girl,” I pointed out to him.
He rolled his eyes. “Good fucking luck to her. She tries every day to get me to do things. Ask me how often she succeeds.”
I didn’t have to ask. I knew. Seldom, and only when he wanted to go along with whatever it was.
“You really thought I was planning to marry that girl?” he asked. There was a world of reproach in his voice.
I shrugged. “It’s not my business.” I turned my face away.
With a hand on my chin he turned it back. “It is your business.”
I shook my head.
“It is your business, but you of all people know that I don’t want to marry some random girl my mother chose. There’s only one girl I want.”
My heart was pounding so hard I thought both of us could hear it.
Without a word he lifted me onto his lap, turning me sideways, bringing our faces close.
“When are you finally going to let me kiss you, Scarlett?” he whispered to me, both hands cupping my face.
“Now,” I whispered back.
With a smile he gave me my first kiss.
I didn’t know what to do, but it was still good. I didn’t know how to be passive, so I imitated him, opening my mouth, and when I felt his tongue I mashed my own against it.
So good, even with our unpracticed mouths and unsteady hands. It wasn’t long before he shifted me, bringing me to straddle him, our bodies making heavy contact.
Even more than my own pleasure in the kiss, I enjoyed what I was doing to him.
He was moaning into my mouth, his hands all over me, touching my neck, my shoulders, my ribs, all along my sides, then down to grab my hips.
It was wonderful.
It escalated too quickly, I later reflected.
I was so drunk on my first taste of him that I let it get out of hand.
He tentatively touched the side of a breast with his palm, the other still on my hip, moving me, urging me to rock against him, and I did, the core of me discovering the hardness of him and exploring it through our clothes. I felt empty, aching, and hot all at once. And I wanted more.
The hand at my chest stayed there for a while, and eventually I realized he was asking for permission.
With a little suck on his tongue, I took my fingers out of his hair and gripped his wrist, pulling his hand over and onto the center of my full breast, right at my nipple.
I gasped and he moaned as he palmed the aching globe. It was quickly not enough, and I found myself lifting my shirt, pulling aside my bra so he could touch skin.
We both groaned.
And that was when my grandma came home, hours and hours earlier than she usually did.
She went into such a rage, and I got into so much trouble that I avoided Dante for a solid week after that, which was not easy. I had to skip a lot of school to do it.
He finally cornered me at my house, climbing into an unlocked window to get to me where I cowered in my bedroom.
“Listen,” he said, looming over me where I huddled on my bed, “if we went too far, just say so. I’ll back off. Whatever we do, all of that sort of stuff, it’s all on you what pace we go, okay? We won’t do anything you aren’t ready for, not
even kissing if you don’t want.”
“I’m okay with the kissing,” I told his feet. “But the rest was going too fast for me, okay?” Grandma’s hours of chewing me out had ingrained in me one important fact: I could not give a boy too much or he’d lose interest in me.
He grinned from ear to ear and perched himself on my bed. “But you liked the kissing, right?
I smiled back. “Yeah. But what does it—I mean—are we . . . “ I couldn’t even finish I was so embarrassed.
His entire gorgeous face was flushing in pleasure. “Yes, Scarlett. Of course. We’re together. We’ve always been together.”
I was bright red and I couldn’t look at him anymore, but I needed more assurances, something concrete. “S-s-s-so you’re my . . .”
“Ah, Scarlett,” he said softly and fondly. “I’m your boyfriend. You’re my girlfriend. Yes. Is that what you were getting at?”
I shot him a look. “Isn’t that something you’re supposed to ask a girl, not tell her?”
He got a real kick out of that, in fact I didn’t think I’d ever seen him happier. He leaned close, touching our foreheads together. “Not this. Not us. Neither of us have a choice in this. You and I being together is not a question, Scarlett, it’s a fact of life.”
And he kissed me. And kissed me.
After that we were making out every day. Every chance we could get. We kissed goodbye, we kissed hello, we kissed in the woods on the way home from school. Anywhere we went where we thought no one was watching, but he was true to his word. He didn’t take it any further until I was ready.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
“Go to Heaven for the climate. Hell for the company.”
~Mark Twain
PRESENT
Dante ripped his lips from mine so abruptly that it felt like a Band-Aid coming off.
He was panting into my face. “Tell me you don’t miss this,” he said emotionally.
This was what made him such a bastard. We were over, had been for years, but it didn’t matter. If he had his way, he’d keep me tied to him in so many ways I could never break loose. He was cruel like that.
I subjugated every pathetic thing inside of me that jumped to do his bidding. I would not feel what he was trying to make me feel.
“I don’t miss this,” I managed to get out through my constricted throat.
“Liar,” he breathed at me, madness in his eyes.
I shuddered, my own madness coming out to play. “No. No. No. I’m not the liar. You know why I don’t miss this? Because it’s a lie.”
It was his turn to shudder.
“Because it’s a lie,” I repeated.
He flinched.
“It was always a lie.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It was always a lie,” I repeated. “Want to know how I know?”
“Stop.”
“I won’t stop. I’m not finished. Want to know how I know?”
“Enough. Stop it. You’ll say any horrible thing when you’re in a temper.”
“I will, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the truth. What we had was always a lie. I know because if it was real it wouldn’t have ended. It felt like forever, and forever was a lie.”
I’d won the round, I noted numbly as his shaking body withdrew back to his side of the car.
He gripped the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, shoulders hunched.
After a few drawn out minutes of silence he started driving again.
“You’re terrible at truces,” I said. It was an effort to keep my voice from trembling.
He nodded jerkily. “Ditto, tiger. Peace was never your strength. You were born for battle.”
“Look who’s talking?”
His mouth twisted. “A match made in hell.”
Wasn’t that the truth.
The problem with us was that he and I had become deeply attached in our formative years. Young me had become essential to young him and vice versa.
We were too precisely built together, each too profoundly shaped by the other. Every part of us had been assembled as one piece. Of course we did not function well after the construct had been ripped violently apart.
And of course I would despise the one who had done the ripping.
The car was silent as a tomb until we were nearly at the house, both of us trying to regain some composure, trying to reconcile ourselves to the past and come back to the present.
“Is my dress really too tight?” I asked him as he pulled down the long winding road that led to the house.
Grandma always got her digs in, and they always found a place to fester. I’d known the dress was flattering, provocative even. But was it trashy?
Dante cursed. “God, she always could get to you with her venom. No, it’s not too tight. You look amazing. Perfect. Gram would be proud.”
“Thank you,” I said simply.
“Damn,” I cursed as I took in the transformation of Gram’s large driveway. Parking attendants had apparently been hired to manage the large influx of vehicles for the reception. They were trying their best to valet each one, using the front lawn to fit in as many cars as possible. “Gram would have hated this. She loved to keep her lawn pristine.”
Dante cursed. “What in the actual fuck? Goddamn my mother. This has her stamp all over it. Keeping up appearances when the fact is these people can walk a few fucking feet instead of ruining Gram’s lawn.”
He was right. There was a paved road a mile long leading up to the house with plenty of shoulder room, i.e. ample parking.
But Adelaide had always hated Gram and it surprised me not one bit that she was messing with the property that had once been hopelessly out of her reach.
Dante refused to use the valet, parking on the shoulder just shy of the chaos.
“I’m going in the back entrance,” I told him as I opened my door. “I need to freshen up,” I added, feeling awkward. “Um, see you around.”
I took off.
I carefully redid my makeup and then lingered in my room for a cowardly amount of time.
It was just so unpleasant, the sounds of a large gathering in Gram’s house with the woman herself absent. It felt wrong and I didn’t want any part of it.
But then I thought about all of the vultures down there circling, all of the blood-sucking opportunists that had come, not for Gram, but to eye up the property she’d left behind, to speculate about who she’d left it to.
I had to go down, had to be there to thicken the ranks of those who were genuinely mourning her loss.
It didn’t start out well for me. In fact, it couldn’t have started worse.
I took the back stairs down to the kitchen, because I knew the place well. I went straight for the liquor in the butler’s pantry, pouring myself a liberal tumbler of scotch that I was sure was up to even Dante’s standards.
I downed it, then poured another.
Only when I was in two deep and holding a third did I move to venture out into the melee.
Unfortunately I didn’t get that far.
This place, these people rattled me and so I was uncharacteristically clumsy.
I’m sure the liquor didn’t help make me more coordinated, to be fair.
I moved to open the door that swung out from the kitchen into the formal dining room, but I mistimed it, and one of the many servers that were taking trays around frantically came in right as I was going out.
Half of my glass ended up on my chest.
The server, a young nervous guy, apologized profusely and brought me a stack of napkins.
I set down my glass, took the napkins, and waved him off. I started patting at myself, wondering if I should change.
At least I was wearing black.
The liquid came up easily, but the napkins left little white fuzzies all over my bust.
Fumbling with it, I opened my little clutch, taking out a moist towelette that I kept in it because I was one of those girls that knew the proper purpose of a handb
ag, which was to be prepared for anything.
It took forever, but I slowly got the front of my dress looking normal again.
I tossed the towelette and napkins into the trash, but somehow ended up bouncing a tube of lipstick out of my open clutch.
It landed right on top of the pile.
I would spend my last twenty dollars on a tube of M.A.C. lipstick. I took that shit seriously, and so I went in after it.
With a curse I bent down, grasping at it, trying to get a hold before it slipped in deeper.
To no avail, it kept falling deeper, through layers of leftover food and used napkins.
I almost left it, in fact had resigned myself to, when I felt the smooth edge of it touch my finger. I grabbed it and straightened, but not before the damage had been done.
That was how they found me. Elbow deep in the garbage.
Fucking typical.
“Trashcan girl is back, and I see that not much has changed,” a laughing female voice told my bent back.
The old nickname was familiar and despised, and epitomized everything I hated about this place.
I straightened with my lipstick in hand to face a small group of snickering women. There were three of them, all girls from high school that I recognized instantly as being part of the mean girl pack that had done their best to terrorize me back when I’d been a stuttering mess.
I was not a stuttering mess now.
“I see the bitches still travel in packs around here. And by the way, guests aren’t even supposed to come into this part of the house.” I told their leader, Mandy, my voice steady, eyes flashing. That had been a strict rule of Gram’s. No guests in the kitchen, ever.
Also, I was extra defensive and hostile with the way they had caught me, the sore spot they had rubbed right off the bat.
“Oh, guests aren’t welcome, but charity cases are?”
She had a point. Mandy was a bratty little bitch, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Just because Gram had treated me like family didn’t make me any less of a charity case. I’d just been too stupid to see it myself back then.
No, I shook off the thought. No. Just because Dante had thrown me away didn’t mean Gram had.
Gram had really loved me. I was as sure of it as I was of anything.