by Gabi Moore
“Sure, but you’ve got it sorted,” said Tamara quietly.
I looked up to see Adam smiling at me, a faint film of stage-sweat on his brow.
I smiled back.
It felt gloriously naughty to smile at him, after all the things he had done to me that night. Done to this same body, that I had cleaned and dressed and brought out into the world as though nothing had happened at all. One look into his face and I felt a wild little thrill: we would do it again. Wordlessly, I could see it in his eyes. Sense it, as though his body was communicating directly with mine. I wanted to fuck him. Again.
“Some water, my Lord?” I asked wryly and held out a bottle of water for him. Without breaking eye contact, he took it from me, threw back a long swig and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
God, he was handsome.
I managed to tear my eyes away and saw Belinda packing her backpack and putting on her coat. It was late. We’d have to pick up everything tomorrow morning.
“Nyx, you haven’t forgotten about this Friday?” Tamara asked.
“Nope, I’ll be there.”
She was having laser eye surgery on Thursday and needed me to drive her to Cambridge on Friday to chat to our lighting guy and pick up a few things. Tamara was a total hard arse. A total slave driver. But to my astonishment, I was somehow in her inner circle now. I wasn’t going to argue with her. In this industry, it’s all about relationships, and if she wanted to single me out and give me a chance for extra responsibility, I sure as hell wasn’t going to argue with her.
“Great,” she said and snapped closed her script.
Out the corner of my eye I saw Adam putting on his coat as well. I waved goodbye to some staff that were already heading out the main door. Maybe he would bend me over the couch and fuck me from behind. I packed the script into my satchel and stood to leave. It had been a good rehearsal. Maybe he’d yank back my head back with one hand and hold closed my mouth with his other hand, making me scream in pleasure and then laughing and whispering shhhhh in my ear as I couldn’t handle what he was doing to me anymore…
“Cheers, Nyx” Belinda said.
I said goodbye to everyone and watched them float off, one by one, the stage lights shutting off and the set going to sleep for the night. I said nothing to him. He folded up his collar against the cold and we walked out together in silence. We walked slowly towards his room, nothing but the sound of our feet on the tarmac and the roaring of the thoughts whirring in my head.
“I’m going to put you on the kitchen table,” he said at last, voice hushed.
“Oh?”
“Yes. And I’m going to spread your pretty little legs, and put my tongue inside you, and you’re going to come in my mouth.”
The night was quiet and strangely cool, for this time of year. I looked up at the curling arms of the trees above us. The leaves were green-black, eerie in the lamplight. I felt a delicious kick in my stomach.
“OK,” I said, and we walked on.
Chapter Eleven
I closed the door behind us and he disappeared off to the bathroom.
I checked my phone. Three missed calls from aunt Lila. I searched my mind. Having decided there was nothing that she could legitimately be calling me about – especially not three times one after the other – I turned the sound off and stuffed my phone back in my handbag. It could wait. I was nearly 21 years old, an adult and busy living my life. Just because she was paying for college, it didn’t mean she could nag me outside of college, did it?
I hung up my coat and flopped down onto Adam’s couch, trying to arrange my nervous limbs so I’d look perfectly casual when he came back from the bathroom. I tried to find that normal, nothing-to-see-here-folks-just-a-perfectly-ordinary-almost-21-year-old pose. I crossed my legs and spread my arms out. That would have to do the trick.
He came out and smiled down at me.
“You look like you need a drink,” he said.
I laughed as he went into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of gin and some flat soda water in a plastic 2-liter bottle, then poured us some hasty drinks in mismatched glasses. I was charmed. Sure, things were moving fast, but he was right …so what if they were? Adam had a sneaky way of just smiling, lifting his eyebrows and saying nothing …and somehow you always found yourself agreeing with whatever naughty thing he proposed. It’s not that he was pushy, probably. Just that he had an uncanny knack for knowing when people wanted to be convinced…
I took a sip of my drink. He pulled a thin white joint from his pocket and held it up to me.
“What, now?” I asked, giggling.
“No, I’m just showing it to you, doofus. I just like having things like this around so we can, you know, look at them” he said, laughing. I playfully punched his knee, and he lit it up. I took a sip of my drink.
“I don’t know, Adam…” I said. He raised his eyebrows at me and said nothing.
In a way, it’s easy for a goodie-two-shoes kind of person to turn down some ill-advised indulgence. After all, it makes sense, for them. But I wasn’t a goodie-two-shoes. I was a lost lamb, a recovering bad girl, a slag. I had made enough poor decisions to last me a lifetime. It’s not that I said no because I thought these things were bad. It was hard to explain to people… I actually turned them down because I thought they were so, so good.
“OK, just a little,” I said, my smile fading.
He frowned.
“Nyx, you don’t have to. Really,” he said. One look at my expression and he set the joint aside. “Hey, what’s up? Are you OK?”
“It’s just …it’s hard to explain. I think I’m almost …I’m almost scared to let go, you know? To enjoy myself. If I do, it’s like something bad will happen. Does that make any sense?” I said, hating how vulnerable I must have sounded to him.
“Perfect sense,” he said immediately. “Let’s leave it, then.”
“No I want to, but…”
He gave me a long look.
“Nothing bad’s going to happen to me, right? I’m not asking for trouble? I don’t even know what’s normal anymore. Is this normal? Am I going to get punished somehow for any of this?”
His frown deepened.
“Nyx, woah… what are you talking about? Nothing bad’s going to happen to you, of course not. Do you wanna talk about something?”
His hand was on my knee. No, I didn’t want to talk about anything. I wanted him to put me on the kitchen counter, like he had said he would, and do dirty things to me. I leaned forward quickly and gave him a long, deep kiss. Before he could say anything, I reached over his shoulder and grabbed the joint again, lit it up and took one long, slow drag on it, then held it out to him as I exhaled a white plume to the side.
“Every time I enjoy myself,” I said, feeling the smoke push into the tissues of my lungs, relaxing me, soothing out the jagged edges of my thoughts, “every time I do something I really want to … I get punished for it. Something bad happens to me.”
I had never ever told anyone this. Not aunt Lila. Not even my therapist. But as the hot smoke rushed out of my lips I realized how simple and perfectly true it was. I was superstitious, I guess. I couldn’t be 100% sure that life wasn’t punishing me somehow for my indiscretions, but why risk it, right? Why even tempt fate and ‘misbehave’ again?
He took the joint from me, took a puff himself and passed his sexy, warm gaze all over my body.
God, I loved the way he looked at me. Like I was something delicious. Something juicy. Instantly my clit throbbed at the thought of what he had told me on the way here. Something changed in the way his hand rested on my knee. He stroked the skin there, just a little, still holding my gaze. I loved how easy it was to slip into a trance like this with him.
“See?” he said and took another hit. “God’s not going to smite you from heaven just because you’re having a bit of fun.”
With shaking hands, I took the joint from him and did the same. The smoke rose up around us. I wanted him. Now. Every la
st inch of him.
“Are you sure, Adam?”
I smiled naughtily at him.
Suddenly, his phone rang.
Almost by instinct, I stubbed out the glowing tip and hastily blew out the smoke in my mouth. I shot him a panicked look, but he only laughed at me.
“Hey, will you just relax?” he said, and reached over to his jacket pocket to pull out his phone.
“Hello?”
I watched his facial expression change and move, like wind chopping over the surface of a still lake. His eyes wandered around the flat, mouth twisting a little.
“Uh huh. Yeah OK. Uh huh…” he said.
My blood froze as I shot pleading eyes at him.
“Yeah she’s with me. I’ll let her know. Are you sure there’s nothing we can do? We could always get the train and come over, be there in 20 minutes?”
He shook his head, hung up and then looked at me.
“Oh my God, Adam, what?” I said. My head was whirling.
I couldn’t read his expression.
“It’s Belinda. She’s had an accident,” he said simply, then watched my reaction.
“An accident? What kind of …is she OK?”
“Yes, she’s fine. That was Tamara. Hey have you left your phone at home or something? She said she couldn’t get hold of you.”
“I um… I think it’s on silent,” I said meekly. I could feel the blood disappearing from my face.
“What happened?” I asked.
A dark thought was forming in my mind. He looked at me as though he was weighing up his next words.
“She had a little accident in her car…” he said slowly.
The world went quiet. I felt dizzy.
“Is she… is she OK though?” I squeaked. I didn’t want him to see me upset. He came forward quickly and gathered me up in his arms, kissing my neck.
“Hey, don’t feel weird about it, OK? It was just an accident.”
A wave of paranoia fluttered through me. I wondered if I was going to be sick. I pulled back and shot a pleading look at him.
“She’s gone to the ER and they want to keep an eye on her for a few days. She’s hit her head. She’ll be fine but I said to Tamara we’ll visit her in the morning.”
I burst into tears. I didn’t know what to say, except, ‘see?’
He hugged me again.
“Hey, don’t be silly, come on. You don’t really think that you sitting here smoking a joint with me somehow made Belinda get into a car accident, do you? Come on now, that’s crazy. That can’t possibly be true.”
Actually, it was precisely what I was thinking. Before I knew it, his soft lips had closed over mine and he was kissing me gently, tenderly. My eyes fluttered closed and I let our lips hover there on each other. I tried to still my buzzing mind. He was right, of course. It was crazy. Or I was crazy. I sighed and kissed back, feeling at home for a moment in his kiss.
“So what then? Nothing means anything? People get in car accidents for no reason…” I said, my lips felt cold without his warm breath against them.
“It means whatever we say it means. Belinda got in a car accident. So what? I don’t know what it means. But maybe you can stop beating yourself up about it. Maybe you smoke a joint here with me and you change the universe forever in some weird ways we can’t even understand yet.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not. I mean it. But maybe it’s not all doom and gloom, have you thought of that? Maybe this is the part in the play where things get interesting, you know? Maybe this is a turning point, a blessing in disguise.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, think about it. If you want to get all mystical and tell me that you caused Belinda’s accident, well, maybe that was a good thing.”
“How could it possibly –”
“Because now you can have that role,” he said.
I looked into his eyes, a warm haze developing somewhere close behind my own eyes.
“Just kiss me,” I said. And he did. I didn’t know if I wanted him to keep talking or to shut up. But even with his sweet lips in mine, the thought burrowed down into my brain.
I had never considered it before. Not really. But why not act? Why not now? Why not this play? It was crazy. It was a stupid, pompous idea and I had no right to be glad that Belinda was hurt, and I was awful for feeling excited that maybe, on some crazy, flimsy off-chance, maybe just maybe I could take her place. It was too ludicrous to even think about. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
His hands squeezed at the swell of my hipbone as we kissed, and I tilted my hips towards him and moaned. I suddenly felt on fire for him. I nibbled his ear and whispered fiercely to him, “didn’t I hear something about a kitchen table earlier on…?”
He grinned, squeezed me tightly and pulled me to my feet.
I was already wet.
Chapter Twelve
The air was always very still in this room. A cozy woven throw on the chair, a lamp, dimmed down almost to nothing, an African carving on the side table that I would sometimes pick up and hold while I talked. And my therapist, who was an extension of the room: a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.
She was a middle-aged, middle-height woman with moderate views, mid-length brown hair and an annoying habit of pushing you about precisely the things you desperately wanted to avoid thinking about. I had been seeing her once a week, every week, since that fateful night when my father and mother took a quick drive and never returned. Psychotherapist Melissa P. Estes had a string of letters after her name and a long waiting list. Yet another thing my sainted aunt had paid for.
“So, you’ve told me all the things you’ve done to keep yourself safe this week, to solidify, to nourish yourself. But that wasn’t the only thing you wanted to practice doing this week,” she said, in a perfectly measured, middling sort of way.
I sighed and sunk deeper into the seat. Now that my actual parents were gone, there seemed to be an awful lot of people ready to step in and take their place. I had poor boundaries. I needed to learn to moderate. Have good clean fun. Like all the other normal people.
“I wanted to learn …balance,” I said.
She nodded.
“I was trying to learn to have fun again, but healthy fun.” I looked at her face to see if I had said the right thing. She looked back at me. I sighed and sunk deeper.
“But I haven’t …I don’t really know how to do the things I really want to do without it jeopardizing everything.”
“So you’ve been getting enough sleep. You’ve been following a good eating routine every day. You’ve been going into school when you should and doing your work.”
“Yup. Doing all of that.”
“And what are you doing for fun?”
I sighed.
“And what have you been doing to put yourself out there?” she asked.
We always got to this point in the conversation. Every damn session. She would talk about ‘putting myself out there’, like I was some kind of cake in a shop window. And I would tell her no, not yet. I can’t right now. Maybe later. And what about aunt Lila. And there’s too much work to do. And I haven’t earned it yet.
“Well …there’s that guy I mentioned to you,” I said quietly.
I probably shouldn’t be telling her any of this. When she asked me about what I was doing to feed my soul, to enjoy life again, I think she expected me to tell her that I had signed up for a pottery class or joined the church choir or something.
But in truth? My new hobby was Adam’s cock. Really, I was doing an advanced course in pleasing him. In lying back and opening myself to him and letting him make me come again and again and again. If I was healing, it was only in his arms, in our secret ‘sessions’ where I would head to that strange flat almost every day after class and kiss him till he made me feel funny inside, and then let his body do things to mine. If I was ‘putting myself out there’ …it was only in front of him. With him.
“Well, we’re hanging out a lot.”
She looked at me.
“We’re …well, it’s a very sexual relationship,” I said. Her face stayed motionless. “The thing is… we smoke together too and …” I shot her a look.
“And that makes you nervous?”
“Of course it does! Because what’s next, you know?” I looked at her again, waiting for the lecture to come. I knew she couldn’t tattle tale on me to aunt Lila, but I don’t think I could have handled her judgment anyway. Her judgment, surprisingly, didn’t come.
“Well, I don’t know, what do you want to come next?” she asked.
I chewed my lip. Good question.
“I want to keep seeing him. To keep going. I think I really like him.”
“Do you remember what we discussed earlier on? About ‘the question’?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And what was the question you wanted to keep asking yourself?”
“I wanted to keep asking …is this good for me?” I said.
She smiled.
“Well …he inspires me, you know? Like, I feel so creative around him,” I said. “And he believes in me, too. He’s very exciting. I feel so alive with him, like he just fires me up, and I get this buzz from him, truly, like he’s, he’s…”
“Some sort of drug?”
I nodded. Exactly. Like some sort of drug.
“So how am I supposed to fall in love? What’s the difference between falling in love and just going on a huge bender?”
She laughed. “Nyx, do you already know the answer to that?”
I laughed with her.
“Is he good for me?” I said, and the question made me blush. “Yes, I think so.”
She clapped her hands on her thighs and glanced at the wall clock that one of her old clients had brought back from Peru. We had ten minutes left.
“OK, I think I’m ready to try another assignment,” I said.
“Fantastic.”