by Gabi Moore
So many afternoons like this would go the same way for us: he’d come over, we’d both pretend to be wildly interested in making coffee or chit-chatting about some unimportant thing, all the while both of us were just waiting for the first moment we could drop the pretense and just fuck. We’d tumble into the bedroom or, if we were feeling really naughty, just collapse wherever we were and strip one another there and then. It was always the best game, to find out what new ways I could pleasure him. On the very spot he was standing right now, I had only a few days before knelt before him and slid that juicy cock of his into my mouth and sucked him until every last drop of his hot cum had disappeared down my throat. On this very sofa I was now sitting on, I had kissed him so hard I thought I would lose my breath, sure I’d melt into a hot puddle with the way his body seemed to perfectly close around mine… the whole house was booby-trapped with memories, and now that I needed to talk to him about something serious, all my body could do was remember all the decidedly non-serious things we’d done with one another here. And in the kitchen. Oh, and in the shower, too.
“To talk? Sure, OK,” he said and awkwardly sat on the stool opposite me, trying to find something to do with his hands.
“I was just on the phone with my mom, actually,” I said. Might as well start there. He gave a little hesitant smile.
“She sticking her nose in things again, huh…?”
“Well, yes. Except, I don’t know, she might be onto something this time.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
I sighed and tried to choose my next words. It was so much harder speaking to him in person like this than it had been when I practiced in the mirror this morning. What with his abs right there. And his lips.
“Well, she thinks I need to start settling down a little, you know? Start being a bit more serious about my future.”
It wasn’t my imagination – his eyes really did grow wide when I said that.
“You know, it’s so funny you mention that, Kate, because I’ve been having exactly the same thoughts myself. I’ve been thinking about us, about the gym, about the future, and I couldn’t agree more, your mom’s definitely right about all that…”
“She is. Which is why I think I should go back home.”
His face fell.
“Wait, what?”
I dug my toes into the carpet and tried to think. Spending time with Max had been the most fun I’d had in… well, maybe ever. And now disappointing him felt even worse than I imagined it would.
“I just …I have to start thinking with my head a little, Max,” I said quietly.
“I don’t understand.”
I could feel him trying to catch my eye.
“My mother’s been trying to persuade me to come home for a long time now. Heading out here didn’t quite pan out the way I thought it would. And since my little thing with you is going to end soon, I have to admit she has a point. I could stay with my folks, get back on my feet a little…”
“But Kate, you can get a job here.”
“Haven’t I tried? You know, Derek did a lot of damage before they threw him in prison. I think I’ll throw up if I have to go through another interview process. Maybe I was never meant to be working out here anyway. I only left to get away from him, and now he’s out of the picture…”
“So what? You’re saying there’s nothing keeping you here?”
He came out and said it. Just blurted out immediately the point I was hoping we could skirt. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was hurt the one man who didn’t seem hell bent on screwing me over.
“I didn’t say that, Max. But we both knew that this was always a temporary thing.”
“Are you talking about the job now, or us?” he snapped.
Here I couldn’t avoid his eyes any longer. They were still the same glassy green, but now there was something in them that I hated seeing there.
“Please don’t get angry, I’m just trying to think carefully about my next step. I don’t have a good history of making the best choices for myself, you know? Maybe my mom is right and that I need to make the smart decision for once and not necessarily the one that feels the best.”
We sat for the longest time in the silence. I didn’t know how to do any of this – fights with Derek were, in their own sick way, so much easier. I just had to put up my guard and hope for the best. But with Max… he wasn’t trying to hurt me and I wasn’t trying to hurt him. So why did it all feel so awful anyway?
“Look, Kate, I won’t stop you doing what you need to, but does this mean you’re breaking up with me?”
“Well, we were never really together in the first place…”
The second I said those words I felt a pang of regret. I searched his face and found all the shock and hurt you’d expect.
“Max, shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I’ve been out of the game for so long I guess… that was mean, I don’t know why I said it. I’m not saying we should break up, I’m just saying I should go back home.”
“And you want to keep seeing each other? It’s a 13-hour drive, Kate.”
“I know,” I whispered.
I hated the frown on his face. I hated this horrible sense of doom over everything. Hated now that one more memory, one I didn’t want, was being added to the mix.
“I’m not going to argue with you, Kate. But I don’t see how your situation improves by going home. You don’t have a job there either,” he said at last, but his voice was cold.
“Actually, I might. Mom says she has some contacts there who liked the work I did before I left and they say they’d be happy to take me on. I promised myself I would make smarter choices Max, surely you can understand promises like that, can’t you?”
But this made him frown again.
“What I told you was told in confidence. And my pact has nothing to do with what you’re talking about,” he hissed.
Silence.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I could think of to say.
His face softened again.
“No, I’m sorry. I just …Kate, I can pay you more, if money’s the issue. Come and stay at my place for a while till you get another job, I’ll help you. There has to be a way…”
I felt the faint sting of tears beginning in the corner of each eye.
“No, Max. I need to find my own way. I can’t do bit jobs and freelance and waste time forever. And you know as well as I do that there’s nothing more for me to do at your gym anyway.”
His eyes were just as green as they always were. That gorgeous rock hard chest of his was still as inviting and those forearms still as distracting as ever.
“Well, I guess there’s nothing more to say then, is there?” he said, and it seemed like an invitation to change my mind, to jump in and say that I was being stupid, that I would stay, and the look he gave me then damn near had me nearly doing just that.
“Please don’t be angry Max. Will you stay here for a while with me?”
He was already on his feet.
“Why?”
That single word cut me deep. Why? Because I was beginning to think that I was in love with him? Because I was afraid of how much I trusted him? Because I didn’t trust myself whenever he kissed me, whenever he touched me or spoke my name? The last time I had felt this way about someone they used it to hurt me in more ways than I cared to remember. Why stay? Because I needed it. I needed his touch again, even if I had nothing to offer him in return.
I said nothing. He shrugged angrily and in a second he had left, slamming the door behind him. My eyes went to the flowers he’d left on the counter. I tried to imagine that they weren’t just a stupid ‘thank you’ for a job well done, but something more. With tears in my eyes, I tried to imagine that they were a sign of something more, flowers to say he cared about me, flowers for our first anniversary…
I smeared the tears from my eyes and tried to think clearly. I had poor boundaries. I had a history of abuse. I was the last girl anyone thought of when
they imagined a stable, healthy romantic partner, and goddammit I needed to change that. What good was I to Max anyway, without my shit together? In the past I had been so happy to throw myself into danger simply because I thought that I had the faintest chance of getting someone to love me. I didn’t want to be that woman anymore. Was leaving your hometown to get away from one man that much different from staying in a new town for a different man?
Then, as I always did, I thought of his kisses. The memory of how it felt to have his strong body all around me, under me, inside me, was like delicious torture now. Max was the first man who it felt safe to lust after. Before him, Derek had been my only sexual partner. But Max was the first to make me realize how tiny my concept of “sexual partner” had actually been. Like him, I had my own promise: I needed to create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.
I slumped onto the couch and thought, but if Max was the man, would it really be so bad?
Chapter 17 - Max
We hadn’t spoken in days. For all I knew, she had already packed up and left in the night, leaving behind all those damned IKEA shelves I put together for her. Among other things. I couldn’t push. How could I risk her seeing me in the same way she saw her fool ex, stalking her well after she made her wishes clear?
It was a fucking mess.
The strange thing was, I understood where she was coming from. I knew why she was doing all of it, right down to being slightly snippy with me when she didn’t need to. I’d recognize that tactic anywhere: in the face of fear, go slightly on the offensive and don’t budge an inch from your mission. I once negotiated a stolen AK47 out of the hands of a scared boy who had precisely the same attitude – he was sick and afraid and when he got a faint taste of power, he decided he’d run with it. I wanted to go over there and just hold her. Just take her in my arms and kiss her forehead and tell her to stay with me. But I didn’t know what dangerous emotional weapons she had tucked away. I was still smarting from her saying that we weren’t ‘really dating’ at all that the idea of going back for more was out of the question.
So I dragged myself to gym and back each day, avoided the topic with Hugo and tried to stop listening for her footsteps on the gravel. I kept the living room curtains closed. Jack O’Conner, an ex-green beret and one of the finest SEALs I’d ever met, had just finished the whiskey I’d given him and was examining the bottom of the glass like he was about to come out with some profound philosophical insight.
Jack was the quintessential quiet man carrying a big stick, and though I hated to ask for his advice, I knew without doubt that he’d shed some light on my problem. He clinked the glass down onto the side table and cracked his neck both sides before looking at me. He was my peer, not a friend exactly, but something more. He had the same posture, the same calm but alert look in his eyes as I did. A fellow brother from the five-man pact, made in blood, binding us to one another forever since September.
“You got some nerve inviting me over and feeding me Protestant whiskey,” he said and gave me a sly smile.
“You bastard, you drank it up easy enough,” I laughed.
“Let’s get this fixed up, though. You want my opinion? Go for it. There are only two questions you have to ask yourself. Best case scenario, it all pans out, and it’s five years down the line. Question one: is it still what you want? And if it isn’t, question two: can you honestly say you’ll be able to forgive yourself for making that decision? If you answer yes to both, then go for it.”
My jaw tightened. It seemed like the most words he’d ever spoken to me at one time. Jack was older than the rest of the team, and left behind a loyal wife who passed away shortly after he returned. He had planned a whole speech about it being his last deployment, but she was already half-gone to cancer by then and I don’t think he ever forgave himself. We tiptoed around his grief like it was a landmine.
“Hell is truth seen too late, Max. If the regret of not doing it is going to be more painful than risking it in the first place, then you have your answer.”
I poured us both another drink, and he downed his instantly. He was gone again within the next ten minutes, but his words lingered and I chewed over them for a few moments.
I placed myself on the sofa facing the closing living room curtains and tried to think. I was a man of principles. Of action and order and effort. I left school early and embarked on a career in the military because it was the single hardest thing I thought I could choose to do as a man. I knew that no challenge in life was insurmountable given a strong enough will and a sharp enough focus. But Kate…
When I thought about Kate all of that seemed like just words. I had made so many promises, but ultimately, who were they for? I had worked so hard to be a defender and protector in my life, but what was I really defending against, and whom was I protecting, in the end? Now here I was, on the brink of throwing myself into a grand romantic gesture that I would scarcely have considered six months ago. Kate made me feel irrational. Wonderfully, dizzyingly, perfectly irrational. I knew how to master the steel of weapons and tools and even gym equipment, but in my hands her body was something else entirely, something mysterious and silky enough to slip clean through all the rules and regulations I’d set up around my life.
I loved the chaos she brought. I loved how simple she made friendliness look, how warm she mad e room just by being in it. I didn’t understand Kate at all. Not her alien grooming rituals and not her dainty and wholly impractical high heels and not her delicate and ever shifting moods. But I wanted to understand her. I wanted to set my whole mind and body and spirit to the task of knowing her to the fullest. Was that love? I don’t know. I’ve never felt it before.
I quickly rose from the sofa, took a deep breath and went to grab the documents on the front table. I squared my shoulders, commanded my nerves to calm down and then set out the front door. I loved Jack O’Connor, but I didn’t want to be like him. I didn’t want that thousand-yard stare you get from looking after a woman who’s left you, one way or another. It was raining slightly outside, so I curled my body round the envelope and hurried over.
I rang the doorbell and waited. She opened carefully and peered out at me, and then, seeing the rain, quickly let me in. he shut the door and then looked at me. She seemed tired. Her eyes fell to the envelope, and then quickly to my face to see if I’d explain myself. But once our eyes met…
“I… I just wanted to talk to you about…”
“Come in,” she said simply, took my hand and led me to the kitchen. We sat on the stools there and I put the envelope and tried to find my words.
“Are you leaving soon?” I said, which wasn’t part of my pre-planned speech at all.
“Leaving, yes. But not soon.”
I could hear the rain picking up outside.
“When we first met, you came over to my place and you made me an offer,” I said. This was part of the speech. She watched me with interest.
“And now, I’d like to do the same. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you Kate. You’re not like anyone I’ve met before. These last few months have been some of the best…”
The pained look on her face gave me pause.
“…the best of my life, actually,” I said. And it was true. “You’ve done an amazing job with the job, you’ve done so much, and I know money is an issue for you, and I know you don’t feel settled here, but I have an offer that’s better than a maybe-job back at home.”
She lifted her eyebrows to me. God, she looked beautiful. Even when she was miserable her face was lovely somehow. She had that kind of quivering freshness you feel in the air just after a good storm. I had never seen her looking so vulnerable. It was as though I could see deeper, more hidden scars now, even worse than the ones I’d seen on her shoulder and neck. I slid the envelope to her along the kitchen counter.
“This is the deed transfer for that new property uptown we were talking about. I bought it.”
Her face was filled with questions.
�
�You want me to… work at the new gym?” she asked, unimpressed.
“No. I want you to have the new gym,” I said, and held my breath.
She visibly recoiled.
“You’re mad. Have it? Like, as in, own it?” she said, then cautiously opened the envelope. I watched as her eyes flicked over the pages. She put everything back on the table and rubbed her eyes.
“I …Max, this is crazy. This is too much.”
Inside, my heart dropped. My speech didn’t go past this moment. In my imagination, this was the part where her eyes went damp and she hugged me and promised never to go anywhere. But instead she was frowning down at the table, looking like I’d offended her.
“I know it’s a lot. But I know what I’m doing. I can afford it. And you have a talent for this, clearly. You can have that place turned around in a few months, I know you can. And whatever you need for renovations, just tell me, I’ll sort it out. You’ll have your own place, you can do whatever you like with it, maybe a Pilates studio, or something else, I don’t know, yoga…”
“Max, stop.”
I looked at her, feeling my own eyes growing damp.
“We barely know each other… and you can’t just give a person a whole property as a gift…”
“It’s not a gift,” I blurted. “It’s just something you need. Please take it Kate. Please say you’ll stay. Tell me what it would take to keep you here, and I’ll figure out a way to make it happen.”
“Max…”
“I’m serious. I don’t understand. Explain to me why you can’t just give us a chance. I know you didn’t want to jump into another relationship after Derek, but—”
“But what? You don’t think I wish it were so easy to just have a little fairy tale ending, to just ride off into the sunset with you? It doesn’t work like that,” she said, raising her voice. I was stunned.
“I don’t understand.”
She sighed and ribbed her face again. The documents lay on the table in disarray.
“Do you know how I landed up in an abusive relationship with Derek? Like this. Exactly like this. He didn’t start out as an asshole, you know. He didn’t beat me from day one. In fact, he was the most romantic person I’d ever met. He bought me gifts all the time. He told me I was perfect, that I was the most beautiful woman in the world… he said I was unlike anyone he’d met before.”